The combination of President Obama's Afghanistan speech, recent congressional votes on Libya, and the tenor of the GOP presidential debate have prompted gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects about the rise of isolationism and the decline of America.  This is good -- a robust debate should be had about balancing America's role abroad with fiscal demands at home, what it means for the United States to have a robust overseas presence, and so forth. 

Please, however, for the love of God, can this debate take place without Niall Ferguson? 

I ask because his latest essay for Newsweek contains the laziest paragraph I will read today.  In this column, Ferguson strains to displace Tom Friedman as The Creator of Inane Metaphors.  He coins "IOU-solationism"  to descibe the instinct to retrench because of domestic difficulties.  There's a pedestrian description of rising sentiment for retrenchment.  Then we get to the lazy paragraph, which happens to be the only one in his column that provides a justification for why defense cuts are a bad idea: 

The United States certainly needs to get its fiscal house in order. But any serious analysis of the benefits of defense cuts needs to consider the potential costs of walking away from countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. If radical Islamism is a declining force around the world, I hadn’t noticed.

A few thoughts: 

1)  Psst... Niall.... just because you haven't noticed does not mean that radical Islamist movements haven't declined.  Last I checked, groups like Al Qaeda were waning in popularity among Muslim populations (to the point where Osama bin Laden mused about renaming Al Qaeda).  Oh, and if you failed to notice, you should know that Osama bin Laden is still dead. 

I understand that not every assertion can be backed up in an 800 word column.  Really, I get that.  It's perfectly fine to assert  "the U.S. economy is weak" or "China is rising"  or "Salma Hayek is hot" without providing any supporting evidence -- these stylized facts represent common knowledge.  The rising power of radical Islam does not fall into this category, however.  Seriously, this might be the worst paragraph I've seen in a published column this year.  It's all casual assertion and no evidence. 

2)  There is a difference between radical Islamist groups that wish to control their own territory and groups like Al Qaeda that want to target the rest of the world.  I'm not the biggest fan of the former groups, but Ferguson presumes that U.S. military force should be directed at them.  This strikes me as a great way to globalize local conflicts, amping up the threats to the United States rather than tamping them down.  I suspect Ferguson disagrees -- but he provides no counterargument. 

3)  Ferguson alludes to recent developments in Yemen as a reason to be concerned about Al Qaeda and its affiliates exploiting the Arab Spring, which is a fair point.  Here's a key question, however -- does having large numbers of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq help or hinder a policy response in other vulnerable countries?  And when is the use of force not the best allocation of resources for this policy conundrum?  

I'm not the only one to notice Ferguson's recent bloviations.  Last month Michael Lind wrote a broadside against Ferguson in Salon.  Lind paints Ferguson as someone who's always been a hack, which is unfair -- he produced some genuinely interesting economic history back in the day.  Still, it's genuinely sad to witness the odd decline of Ferguson from premier economic historian to hack commentator.  Financially, he's much richer from this move, but his writing has become so impoverished over the past decade that he's writing his way out of the foreign policy conversation. 

I've frequently bemoaned the ignorance of economic history and foreign economic policy in debates about international relations.  Because of this, I must mourn the passing of Ferguson's ability to make informed contributions to important policy debates.  The opportunity cost of reading his current hackwork, however, has become way too high.   

In the wake of the GOP debate earlier this week, there's been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and to-ing and fro-ing as to whether Republicans have shifted away from the neoconservatism of George W. Bush and towards offshore balancing or isolationism.  I don't think it's a settled question -- I'd conclude that it's partly a genuine realpolitik backlash to the massive costs of Iraq, partly a reflection of public sentiment, and partly a partisan reaction to the fact that it's a Democratic president who's launching wars kinetic military actions nowadays. 

What's more disturbing, however, and uncommented until now, was the total lack of support for freer trade among the GOP field. 

This came through loud and clear through what was said and what was not said in New Hampshire.  Trade didn't come up all that much during the debate.  Tim Pawlenty provided the only comment of substance, and it wasn't a productive one:

[N]umber one, we've got to have fair trade, and what's going on right now is not fair.

I'm for a fair and open trade but I'm not for being stupid and I'm not for being a chump. And we have individuals and organizations and countries around this world who are not following the rules when it comes to fair trade. We need a stronger president and somebody who's going to take on those issues.

In presidential campaigns, this amounts to "don't expect to see any new trade deals anytime soon."  As for the other dimensions of globalization, well, peruse the section on immigration provided you have a green card if you dare.  No one said anything about the positive economic and demographic benefits America receives from immigration. 

The other thing that was striking was what wasn't said during the debate.  All of the candidates focused like sharks with frikkin' laser beams attached to them on the economy.  The standard GOP litany of solutions for jump-starting the economy were offered:  tax cuts, cutting regulation, tax cuts, cutting government spending, tax cuts, reigning in the Fed, tax cuts, ending Obamacare, tax cuts.  Not one of the candidates, however, mentioned trade liberalization as part of their fornmula for getting America moving again. 

To be fair, this isn't as bad as when Obama and Clinton were debating over who would eviscerate NAFTA faster in 2008 (and funny, isn't it, how that never happened).  And it's not like I was a huge fan of Obama's trade policy.  To be just as fair, howeever, at least the current president completed KORUS negotiations and signaled strong interest in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  I get the sense that no one in the GOP field is going to stick their neck out on international trade or investment.  For the party that claims to be in favor of lower taxes and regulation, this is a travesty. 

My post earlier this week on the role of public opinion in the Big Policy Decisions of the past decade has triggered some interesting responses from the international political economy wing of the blogosphere.  See, in order, Kindred Winecoff,  Henry Farrell, Dan Nexon, Winecoff again, and then Phil Arena. 

Farrell's post in particular connects this contretemps with larger scholarly questions in global political economy and foreign policy decisionmaking:

International political economy scholarship tends to have an extremely stripped down, and bluntly unrealistic account of how policy is made. Typically, modelers in this field either assume that the “median voter” plays an important role in determining national preferences, or that various stylized economic interests (which they try to capture using Stolper-Samuelson, Ricardo-Viner and other approaches borrowed from economic theory) determine policy, perhaps as filtered through a very simple representation of legislative-executive relations.

However, actual work on how policy gets made suggests that this doesn’t work. On many important policy issues, the public has no preferences whatsoever. On others, it has preferences that largely maps onto partisan identifications rather than actual interests, and that reflect claims made by political elites (e.g. global warming). On others yet, the public has a set of contradictory preferences that politicians can pick and choose from. In some broad sense, public opinion does provide a brake on elite policy making – but the boundaries are both relatively loose and weakly defined. Policy elites can get away with a hell of a lot if they want to.

The result is that the relevant literature on policy making (located largely within comparative political economy and a growing debate within American politics) argues that elites play a very strong role in creating policies.

These are fair points -- indeed, Benjamin Page wrote a whole book about the ways in which foreign policy elites in the United States have pursued policies at vatiance with American public opinion. 

So, yes, policy elites matter.  However, I would issue a few qualifiers and questions to Farrell's points. 

1)  Who are we talking about when we talk about "elites"?  The word "elites" can cover an awful lot of individuals.  Many conservatives, for example, snorted at the notion of Krugman scolding elites, since there's no way one can define Krugman as anything but a member of the policy elite.  So... who is part of the elite?  Does it include powerful interest group lobbies, or only policy mandarins? 

In his blog post Farrell seems to imply the latter, which does makes the term more precise.  That said, interest groups are a pretty powerful animal, and they will not get confused by elite policy rhetoric.  Farrell lumps interest group and public opinion stories together in his blog post, and I'm not sure that's right.  When are policy elites simply doing the work of interest groups, and when are they pushing back?  I've seen examples of both, but I haven't seen a generalizable theory explaining when one dynamic trumps the other. 

2)  When does issue salience matter?  Part of the reason I pushed back against Krugman was that two of the three policy choices he stressed (tax cuts, Iraq) were very high-profile, publicly debated issues.  One would assume that public opinion would form a more powerful brake on high-profile issues than low-profile ones.  This is why I didn't push back against Krugman's financial deregulation story. 

Now, Farrell might argue that elites can still manipulate a heck of a lot even on high-profile policies.  This is probably true on some issues, but on others the public can act as an ex ante or ex post brake on policies.  TARP was a bipartisan vote, for example, and a successful policy to boot -- and yet the public backlash against it clearly constrained the Obama administration's policy options in 2009.  Despite Obama's election mandate and majorities in both houses of Congress, the administration scaled back its fiscal policy stimulus below the $1 trillion mark, partly because of fears of how the public would respond. 

3)  When will policy elites split?   The word "elite" tends to assume an undifferentiated group of privileged policymakers, and anyone who has spent time inside the Beltway knows that partisanship matters a wee bit.  When will the foreign policy community (or economic policy community) reach consensus, and when will there be significant opposition? 

Consider Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example.  A commonly-made argument (at least in blog comments) is that the public went along with the war because the Bush administration cranked up its PR machine and shaped mass public attitudes.  OK, but one of the things us political scientists know is that had the Democrats vociferously opposed the invasion of Iraq, public support for it might have dropped.  OK, but now we get to the key questuion -- why didn't Democrats oppose the war with greater vigor?  Part of it might be that a lot of Democratic liberal internationalists agreed with Republican neoconservatives taking out Saddam Hussein.  Part of it, however, is that Democrats feared looking soft on security during the 2002 midterm elections.  Because of that fear, Democratic policymaking elites were not unified -- thereby bolstering public support for the war. 

Now, in this narrative, is public opinion a cause or an effect of the debate that played out among policy elites?  A little of both, I suspect.  I raise this, however, because one of the difficulties with talking about the role of public opinion as a policy constraint (or a policy enabler) is that its role is sometimes buried beneath the more proximate causes.

This is a good blog conversation to have, because it highlights how difficult it is to develop clear and generalizable models of national policy preferences, and the ways in which the fields of international political economy and foreign policy analysis struggle to cope with this complexity. 

In his column today, Nicholas Kristof gives voice to  a sentiment shared by many within the foreign policy community:

In my travels lately, I’ve been trying to explain to Libyans, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Chinese and others the benefits of a democratic system. But if Congressional Republicans actually shut down the government this weekend, they will be making a powerful argument for autocracy. Chinese television will be all over the story.

If a high school student council refused to approve a budget so that student activities had to be canceled — even as student leaders continued to pay themselves stipends — a school board would probably cancel the entire experiment in student democracy. But I can’t imagine high school students acting so immature.

Now, this is the kind of gut-level response that most foreign policy wonks -- myself included -- have when initially confronting the absurdity of a government shutdown.  Surely, such a self-inflicted wound would tarnish the brand image of democracy in general and America in particular across the globe. 

Is this truthiness actually true, however?  I'm beginning to wonder if this hypothesis rests on anything other than sheer assertion.  In terms of direct effects, the U.S. military won't be suddenly lay down their arms or anything.  As I understand it, the U.S. won't default on debt payments until mid-May, so the financial catastrophe is still six weeks away.  So any appreciable effect rests on whether or not American soft power would be dented.   

In a brief survey of the interwebs, I could find no research paper that  researched whether the 1995/96 government shutdowns had any effect on either American foreign policy or U.S. standing abroad.  This jibes with my personal memory of this period, in which very little was written about how the shutdown affected foreign policy.  So maybe this gnashing of foreign policy teeth is a bit much. 

Of course, this was likely because the previous shutdowns didn't last that long, the longest duration (17 days) took place during the Christmas break, and no big foreign policy crisis was going on during the shutdown.  I think it's safe to say that the world is a wee bit closer to the end of days interesting this time around.  That said, no one expects a long stretch of no federal government, so the effect might very well be similar -- which is to say, nonexistent. 

In the end, my more analytical take is that the foreign policy effects of a goverment shutdown will depend on how its resolved.  If there is little in the way of massive protests, it would signal to the rest of the world the remarkable stability of American civil society.  If steps are taken to get a grip on America's mouning debt levels, then the aftermath of the shutdown would not necessarily leave a bad aftertaste. 

That said, there might be one residual effect for democratizing nations -- a preference for parliamentary systems of government over presidential systems.  As Robert Williams and Esther Jubb observed back in the 1990s:  

The world's other advanced industrial democracies, Germany, France, Japan and Britain, manage their budget crises without resorting to the extraordinary shutdown measures which have become a familiar feature of the American budgetary process.

This shutdown thing does seem to be unique to the American presidential system, which might cause newly emerging democracies to embrace other forms of democratic rule.  On the whole, however, this is a pretty marginal effect on American foreign policy. 

So, on second thought, if any government shutdown is over by the end of April, I think the foreign policy effects would be pretty minimal.  But I am very curious to know if there's been any in-depth research on this question. 

Developing....

President Obama is scheduled to address the country this evening on Libya, and the odds are pretty good that Ben Rhodes will be writing the bulk of the speech.  I'm sure the speech will be interesting, full of false choices for the Obama administration to surmount and the like. 

Still, what I'd love to see is Rhodes' first draft -- you know, the one where he just spits out exactly what he thinks Obama is thinking on Libya, warts and all. 

Well, fortunately, due to your humble blogger's vast and imaginary network of sources inside the Beltway, I have secured a copy of that first draft of the speech, reprinted below for your edification:

FIRST NOTES/DRAFT OF POTUS LIBYA SPEECH

By Benjamin Rhodes

I'm addressing you, my fellow Americans, because my administration's message on our war limited humanitarian intervention kinetic military action in Libya has truly and totally sucked.  Seriously, I'm gobsmacked at how f***ing incoherent we've been in communicating our rationale to the foreign policy community and the American public.  The bickering within my administration and within the international coalition has not helped -- sweet Jesus, multilateralism can be a royal pain in the butt sometimes.  No wonder public support has been relatively anemic (although there's also the fact that I'm launching another war when all Americans care about right now is the domestic economy). 

How bad is it?  I'm getting hit by the neocons for moving without Congressional permission less than a week after I was getting hit by them for not moving quickly enough!!  Thank God for Newt Gingrich, or I'd look really bad.  Now I'm getting flak from the left on not being consistent with R2P when, in fact, anyone who knows anything about R2P knows that I'm doing the best I can.  Seriously, I'm supposed to intervene militarily in Bahrain and Syria too?  Sure, right after I send the 82nd Airborne to liberate Tibet.  At least I can ignore the criticism from those who went on junkets to Tripoli last year.  Hypocrisy sure is a bitch, huh? 

What kills me, what absolutely kills me, is that in just ten days, without any boots on the ground, we've accomplished one whole hell of a lot.  First off, if we hadn't intervened, the rebels would have been routed in Benghazi, and Khaddafy would be in control of the entire country again.  OK, so maybe the "100,000 dead" figure was a bit exaggerated, but surely the fall of Benghazi would have created hundreds of thousands of Libya refugees flowing into Egypt, which is exactly what that country doesn't need right now.   Anyone who doesn't realize that the situation in Libya and the situation in Egypt are connected is a f***ing moron (which, since we forgot to mention this fact for an awfully long time, apparently includes my messaging shop). 

Now, the situation on the ground looks pretty much like how things looked during the high tide of the Libyan rebellion.  So long as our air support continues, that's now the worst-case scenario -- and you know what, that's actually pretty tolerable.  It would mean that the rebels would control about 70% of Libya's oil reserves and that the regions of the country most hostile to Khaddafy would be free of his grip.  Over time, sanctions will start to hit Khaddafy's resources, the Libya Transitional Council can get its act together, and we can burden-share with NATO a hell of a lot more.  The Libyans don't want our boots on the ground any more than we want to have them there -- so further escalation is not in the cards. 

All the while -- and remember, this is the worst-case scenario -- the United States will have accomplished two direct deliverables and quite a few positive policy externalities.  Directly, we averted a humanitarian disaster and created a buffer in eastern Libya that eases any economic or humanitarian pressure on Egypt (which is where our strategic interest lies). 

In many ways, the policy externalities are even bigger.  The biggest bonus is that, for once, our hard power is actually augmenting our soft power.  Those images on Al Jazeera of Libyans saying thank you to the United States -- that's pure soft power gold.  When you compare how the U.S. government has handled the Arab Revolutions  to Al Qaeda or Iran, the contrast is pretty stark.  What's happened in Libya has helped to obscure our more realpolitik response in, say Bahrain.  Oh, and we managed to find a purpose for NATO.

Is this messy?  Duh, of course!  Could this intervention distract us from The Big Picture?  Maybe for the past week and this week, sure, but it's not like Iran or China is really exploiting what's going on in the Middle East -- they're too busy trying to pretend it's not happening domestically.  As for North Korea learning that it's a mistake to give up their nukes, I'm pretty sure they'd learned that lesson way back in 2003, thank you very much. 

Look, I'd have loved for the messaging to be clearer, and in retrospect it would have been good if we'd had asked Congress for authorization, but this is what happens when you make foreign policy on the fly in a region wracked by revolution.  It's not perfect, but if you think about the counterfactuals real hard, I'm fully confident that the benefits massively outweigh the costs of this intervention.  So there. 

Yesterday Director of National Intelligence James Clapper provided his sober assessment of the situation on the ground in Libya: 

Responding to questions, Mr. Clapper told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that Colonel Qaddafi had a potentially decisive advantage in arms and equipment that would make itself felt as the conflict wore on.

“This is kind of a stalemate back and forth,” he said, “but I think over the longer term that the regime will prevail.”

Mr. Clapper also offered another scenario, one in which the country is split into two or three ministates, reverting to the way it was before Colonel Qaddafi’s rule. “You could end up with a situation where Qaddafi would have Tripoli and its environs, and then Benghazi and its environs could be under another ministate,” he said.

The White House was clearly taken aback by the assessment that Mr. Qaddafi could prevail.

The White House wasn't the only actor that didn't like what Clapper was saying:

Clapper's prediction of defeat for the Libyan opposition prompted a furious Sen.Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to demand that Clapper resign or be fired.

"The situation in Libya remains tenuous and the director's comments today on Gadhafi's 'staying power' are not helpful to our national security interests,'' Graham said in a statement, using a different spelling of the leader's name. "His comments will make the situation more difficult for those opposing Gadhafi ... and undercut our national efforts to bring about the desired result of Libya moving from dictator to democracy.

Yeah, how dare Clapper say things that jibe with open-source analysis of the situation!! 

I kinda sorta understand the argument that Clapper shouldn't have said this in public, but not really.  To have a quality debate about policy options on Libya, this kind of dispassionate analysis is crucial.  Clapper's job description is to provide an assessment of what's actually  occurring on the ground, regardless of what people want to happen on the ground.  It's then up to policymakers to craft responses to try to alter or reinforce that situation as they see fit.  Calling for Clapper's resignation because he provided what appears to be an accurate assessment of the current state of play seriously politicizes the job of intelligence analysis and assessment.  Doesn't the past decade suggest that politicized intelligence leads to catastrophic foreign policymaking? 

What worries me is not what Clapper said but how the White House responded:

The White House was clearly taken aback by the assessment that Mr. Qaddafi could prevail, and Mr. Donilon, talking to reporters a few hours later, suggested that Mr. Clapper was addressing the question too narrowly.

“If you did a static and one-dimensional assessment of just looking at order of battle and mercenaries,” Mr. Donilon said, one could conclude that the Libyan leader would hang on. But he said that he took a “dynamic” and “multidimensional” view, which he said would lead “to a different conclusion about how this is going to go forward.”

“The lost legitimacy matters,” he said. “Motivation matters. Incentives matter.” He said Colonel Qaddafi’s “resources are being cut off,” and ultimately that would undercut his hold on power.

A senior administration official, driving home the difference in an e-mail on Thursday evening, wrote, “The president does not think that Qaddafi will prevail.”

Hmmm.  Over the past week, the Libyan opposition to Qaddafi has been winning on only one dimension -- garnering international support.  On the ground in Libya, not so much.  And the international support won't affect the situation on the ground anytime soon.  Even the tightest financial sanctions don't matter at this point. Qaddafi possesses far more financial reserves than, say, the Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo -- and yet Gbagbo has managed to stay in power for five months.  Sanctions should eventually work in the Ivory Coast, but they're not going to work anytime soon in Libya. 

Contra Donilon, the only way in which the dynamic changes on the ground in Libya is if international support becomes far more concerted and proactive in support of the Libyan rebels.  Based on Mark Landler and Helene Cooper's analysis in the New York Times, however, the Obama administration won't be spearheading that kind of policy shift.  For Donilon to suggest that, absent U.S. action, the dynamic is working in favor of Libya's anti-Qaddafi movement smacks of utopian thinking. 

Graham and others should criticize the Obama administration's handling of Libya if they want to see a more forceful policy response.  Criticizing the DNI for providing an accurate intelligence assessment, on the other hand, is seriously counterproductive. 

Since I moved to Foreign Policy, the blog post that generated the most feedback was my impressionistic take on the Millennial generation's foreign policy perspectives.  I concluded that post on whether generaional cohorts would have distinct foreign policy attitudes with the following:

As I think about it, here are the Millennials' foundational foreign policy experiences: 

1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties;

2)  The September 11th attacks;

3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq;

4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession;

5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 

From these experiences, I would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism. 

There was a LOT of very thoughtful pushback in the comments and e-mails from Millennials themselves -- enough for me to wonder whether my jaded Gen-Xer eyes were growing too world-weary. 

Now, however, we actually have some data.  The Brookings Institution has released a new report, "D.C.'s New Guard: What Does the Next Generation of American Leaders Think?"  The survey results came from 1,057 respondents (with a average age of 16.4) who attended the National Student Leadership Conference, Americans for Informed Democracy young leaders programs, and other DC internships -- i.e., those young people already predisposed towards a political career.   

The results are veeeeery revealing.  The headline figure is that 73% of respondents think that "The U.S. is no longer globally respected" -- which actually suggests that the respondents haven't been looking at the data, but that's a side note.  No, the really interesting response is as follows:

[A]lmost 58% of the young leaders in this survey agreed with the statement that the U.S. is too involved in global affairs and should do more at home. Alternatively, 32.4% thought the U.S. had "struck the right balance" between issues at home and abroad," while only 10% thought that the United States should be more globally proactive.

This isolationist sentiment among the younger generation stands in stark comparison to the Chicago Council's recent 2010 polling of older Americans, which found that 67% wanted America to have an active role in the world and only 31% thought we should limit our involvement, a near exact reverse. The older generation survey concluded that there was "persisting support for an internationalist foreign policy at levels unchanged from the past," but this perceived persistence is certainly not there among the young leaders (emphasis added).

Now, to be fair, It is possible to reconcile beliefs that the United States is doing too much abroad now while still believing that the U.S. should exert global leadership, but on a more modest scale.  Still, I'm counting this as a clear win over the young people insisting that my impressionistic take on their generation was wrong.  Take that, Bieberheads!!!

[Hey, I just noticed this paragraph by P.W. Singer at the start of the report:

In 2011, a “silver tsunami” will hit the United States: the oldest Baby Boomers will reach the United States’ legal retirement age of 65. As the Boomers leave the scene, a new generation will begin to take over. But while the generation that directly follows the Boomers, Generation X, may be “of age”, there is a good chance that it will not actually shape public life and leadership as much the following generation, the Echo Boomers, also known as the “Millennials." (emphasis added)

Say, could that swipe at your generation explain your attitude in this post?--ed.] 

No!!  Really!!  It has nothing to do with that!  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to lock myself into a dark room and watch Reality Bites on an endless loop for the next 24 hours. 

Congratulations to Reuters' Douglas Hamilton for winning this week's Vizzini Award.  The award, for new readers of the blog, goes to someone who uses a term of phrase that clearly does not mean what they think it means. 

From Hamilton's Jerusalem dispatch:

If Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday.

Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness. (emphasis added)

Now, there is a purely short-sighted short-term geopolitical logic out there to justify a stalwart defense of Hosni Mubarak.  Claiming that support for legitimate Egyptian demands is an example of "political correctness" seems, well, completely and totally wrong-headed.  The most one could say that the United States is now in the semi-awkward position  of honoring its own high-powered rhetoric on democracy in the Middle East.  

Even from a strictly realpolitik perspective, however, I'm not sure exactly what Israeli pundits think could be gained from backing Mubarak to the hilt.  Before his Friday speech, most Obama administration statements were at least mildly supportive, calling the Egyptian government "stable" and denying that Mubarak  was a "dictator."  Mubarak's disastrous Friday address, however, dramatically raised the policy costs of backing a crackdown (not to mention that I'm not sure the Egyptian army could have pulled it off anyway).    As Steve Walt notes on his blog: 

To maximize their own security, states want allies that are strong, stable, and that do not cause major strategic problems for them (i.e., by getting into counterproductive quarrels with others). Other things being equal, states are better off if they don't have to worry about their allies' internal stability, and if an allied government enjoys considerable support among its population. An ally that is internally divided, whose government is corrupt or illegitimate, or that is disliked by lots of other countries is ipso facto less valuable than one whose population is unified, whose government is legitimate, and that enjoys lots of international support. For this reason, even a staunch realist would prefer allies that were neither internally fragile nor international pariahs, while recognizing that sometimes you have to work with what you have.

Or, to quote Michael Clayton, "there's no play here." 

This story is still interesting, however, because it certainly represents a data point against the Israel Lobby argument for American foreign policy.  Scanning this good Washington Post write-up from Karen DeYoung, what's interesing is the dog that isn't barking -- namely, not one mention of Israel.   

I suspect this is partly because the prospect of Arab democracy causes a serioius split between Israeli strategists and neoconservative supporters in the United States.  Or it could be because, you know, the explanatory power of the Israel Lobby thesis has been vastly exaggerated. 

UPDATE:  I see that Geneive Abdo argues over at the Middle East Channel that Egypt 2011 is not like Iran 1978/79.  Meanwhile, for another data point that neoconservatives are splitting from Israeli strategists, consider this Max Boot post:

I am hardly one to romanticize ElBaradei or to underestimate the difficulties of dealing with him. But what do his critics propose we do anyway?

Encourage Mubarak to kill lots of demonstrators to stay in power? Because at this point, that is probably what it would take for Mubarak to remain as president. Yet it is not even clear at this juncture that he could employ violence to save himself, given the fact that the Egyptian army has announced it will not fire on the demonstrators.

So what should the U.S. do? Demand that ElBaradei step down as the leader of the protest movement? Any such demand would be laughed off by the demonstrators, who are certainly not going to let their tune be called by Washington. Whom, at any rate, would we want to replace ElBaradei? There is not exactly a surfeit of well-respected liberal leaders, which is why ElBaradei was able to become the leader of the anti-Mubarak movement after having spent decades away from Egypt.

Perhaps we should demand that ElBaradei disassociate himself from the Muslim Brotherhood? Again, such a demand would be ignored, and probably rightly so. It is hard to see how any figure can claim to represent all the protesters without also speaking on behalf of the Brotherhood, which is the country’s largest and best-organized nongovernmental organization.

As much as I didn't enjoy John Mearsheimer's cover essay in The National Interest, that's how much I've been enjoying his latest book, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics. Mearsheimer basic argument is that governments lie to each other far less frequently that one would expect, but they more commonly lie to their own citizenry. On the whole, however, they do this less for venal but for strategic reasons.

Mearsheimer's book went to press before Wikileaks blew up. As Stuart Reid points out at Slate, however, it's a wonderful testing opportunity for some aspiring dissertation-writer out there. Indeed, it now turns out that the Obama administration exaggerated juuuuust a wee bit about the damage caused by Wikileaks:

Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

"I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said.

But State Department officials have privately told Congress they expect overall damage to U.S. foreign policy to be containable, said the official, one of two congressional aides familiar with the briefings who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

"We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.

Hmmm.... this sounds familiar. Very familiar.

What's interesting is how one reacts to this kind of news. For example, I'm shocked, shocked that Glenn Greenwald has jumped all over this as yet another data point revealing official American perfidy:

And this, of course, has been the point all along: the WikiLeaks disclosures are significant precisely because they expose government deceit, wrongdoing and brutality, but the damage to innocent people has been deliberately and wildly exaggerated -- fabricated -- by the very people whose misconduct has been revealed. There is harm from the WikiLeaks documents, but it's to wrongdoers in power, which is why they are so desperate to malign and then destroy the group.

Contrast this with Kevin Drum:

For the most part, the leaked cables were interesting and in some cases embarrassing, but as a lot of people pointed out in real time, not really all that revelatory. In fact, they mostly showed U.S. diplomacy in a pretty good light. Obviously American diplomats would prefer that private conversations remain private -- and that's perfectly reasonable -- but in the end the WikiLeaks releases didn't cause nearly as much damage as government officials claimed.

It will shock, shock you to know that I agree with Drum more than Greenwald. This is not because of world-weary cynicism -- indeed, there's a very strong argument to be made in favor of a "broken windows" theory of government lying. Do it for small things, and it becomes easier to do it for big things.

The thing is, government honesty and transparency inevitably becomes a comparative exercise, and compared to other governments, the United States does pretty well. Looking at the various lists of Wikileaks revelations, the bulk of the truly embarrassing and/or damaging material affects other governments far more [But what about U.N. spying?--ed. Look up desuetude and get back to me].

My take on Wikileaks really hasn't changed much since my first post on the matter -- the revelations do less to harm U.S. interests than the official overreaction to those revelations.

If the U.S. government stopped exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests and then going all Emily Litlella later, that would be peachy.

Your humble blogger has been negligent remiss in not discussing the developing situation in the Ivory Coast.  As near as I can figure, the state of play is as follows:

1)  There was a presidential election last November

2)  Everyone and their mother recognizes that Alassane Ouattara defeated current ruler Laurent Gbagbo... except for Gbagbo.

3)  Ouattara is now holed up in the Hotel du Golf under the protection of UN peacekeepers and private security forces.  Despite mounting pressure from the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Ecowas, Gbagbo is acting like he ain't going anywhere. 

Now we have this BBC report: 

The UN-recognised president-elect of Ivory Coast has called for a West African special forces operation to remove incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo.

Alassane Ouattara's administration says the time for discussion with Mr Gbagbo, who is refusing to step down following November's election, is over.

The West African regional body Ecowas has threatened to force Mr Gbagbo out, but is trying mediation efforts first....

Mr Ouattara, who has many supporters in northern Ivory Coast, said it was just a question of removing Mr Gbagbo from power and taking control of key buildings like the presidential palace.

"Legitimate force doesn't mean a force against Ivorians," Mr Ouattara told reporters on Thursday, AFP news agency reports.

"It's a force to remove Laurent Gbagbo and that's been done elsewhere, in Africa and in Latin America, there are non-violent special operations which allow simply to take the unwanted person and take him elsewhere."

However, Ecowas does not have the sophisticated equipment and personnel needed for a special forces operation, our reporter says.

This raises a somewhat awkward question -- could this be one of those cases where neoconservatives have a valid point about the use of force?  The past decade of U.S. military misadventures has clearly dulled the appetite for new military missions among the mass public, most of the foreign policy community and, well, me.  That said, this could be one of those cases when unilateral U.S. force might be the best available policy option.   [But what about ECOWAS?--ed.  Sure, if they could gear up, that would be even better.  As the BBC suggests, however, it's not clear that they have the capability to do so.]

Note my stress on the word "could" in that last sentence -- the Ivory Coast has been wracked by civil conflict during this past decade and U.S. action could just make things worse.  But I'm not sure about that assertion either. 

What do you think? 

John Mearsheimer has the lead essay in the latest issue of The National Interest. Entitled "Imperial by Design," the main thesis is not going to shock anyone familiar with Mearsheimer's theoretical and policy writings over the past two decades:

The root cause of America's troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected [grand strategies of offshore balancing or selective engagement], instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

The rest of the article details the flawed strategies pursued by the Clinton and Bush administrations, and then closes with this warning:

The United States needs a new grand strategy. Global dominance is a prescription for endless trouble -- especially in its neoconservative variant. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is populated from top to bottom with liberal imperialists who remain committed to trying to govern the world, albeit with less emphasis on big-stick diplomacy and more emphasis on working with allies and international institutions. In effect, they want to bring back Bill Clinton's grand strategy....

President Obama is making a serious mistake heading down this road. He should instead return to the grand strategy of offshore balancing, which has served this country well for most of its history and offers the best formula for dealing with the threats facing America -- whether it be terrorism, nuclear proliferation or a traditional great-power rival.

Mearsheimer's essay has drawn praise from others at FP, but I confess to finding it conceptually fuzzier than most of his other work.

He's positing that a global dominance strategy doesn't work, and that the post-Cold War era demonstrates that it doesn't work. To demonstrate this, however, he focuses the overwhelming majority of the essay on the Bush administration. Fair enough, except that he's arguing that Obama is copying Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush. Here is the entirety of Mearsheimer's discussion of the Clinton period:

Bill Clinton was the first president to govern exclusively in the post-Cold War world, and his administration pursued global dominance from start to finish. Yet Clinton's foreign-policy team was comprised of liberal imperialists; so, although the president and his lieutenants made clear that they were bent on ruling the world-blatantly reflected in former-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's well-known comment that "if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future"-they employed military force reluctantly and prudently. They may have been gung ho about pushing the unipolar moment onward and upward, but for all their enthusiasm, even these democracy promoters soon saw that nation building was no easy task.

During his first year in office, Clinton carelessly allowed the United States to get involved in nation building in Somalia. But when eighteen American soldiers were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in October 1993 (famously rendered in Black Hawk Down), he immediately pulled U.S. troops out of the country. In fact, the administration was so spooked by the fiasco that it refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, even though the cost of doing so would have been small. Yes, Clinton did commit American forces to Haiti in September 1994 to help remove a brutal military regime, but he had to overcome significant congressional opposition and he went to great lengths to get a U.N. resolution supporting a multinational intervention force. Most of the American troops were out of Haiti by March 1996, and at no time was there a serious attempt at nation building.

Clinton did talk tough during the 1992 presidential campaign about using American power against Serbia to halt the fighting in Bosnia, but after taking office, he dragged his feet and only used airpower in 1995 to end the fighting. He went to war against Serbia for a second time in 1999 -- this time over Kosovo -- and once again would only rely on airpower, despite pressure to deploy ground forces from his NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

By early 1998, the neoconservatives were pressuring Clinton to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein. The president endorsed the long-term goal of ousting the Iraqi leader, but he refused to go to war to make that happen. The United States under Bill Clinton was, as Richard Haass put it, a "reluctant sheriff." (emphasis added)

There are some factual errors in this account (Clinton did not pull out immediately after the Black Hawk Down incident -- in fact, he bolstered U.S. forces and then withdrew six months later). More importantly, however, the policies described in this section suggest that Mearsheimer is going Vizzini on the phrase "global dominance." There's very little in the quoted section that bears resemblance to the bolded statement -- at best, it looks imperial by accident rather than design. That doesn't sound like a global dominance strategy to me -- and nowhere in this section does Mearsheimer describe the strategic costs that came with Clinton's approach.

(Maybe one could argue that Clinton's reluctant successes in Bosnia and Kosovo paradoxically bolstered Americans' faith in the utility of force, and that this faith paved the way for neoconservatism to pursue a more militarized approach. But Mearsheimer doesn't make that argument, and I don't think it holds up terribly well).

Mearsheimer is warning us that Obama is trying to replicate Clinton's grand strategy (though he offers minimal evidence to support this assertion). His implicit argument is that Clinton's strategy was a disaster, but he provides no evidence to support this assertion, and I don't think it's obviously correct either.

Instead, Mearsheimer devotes page after page to chronicling the errors of the Bush administration's grand strategy. Which is fine, but after the 5,476th evisceration of the neoconservative grand strategy, diminishing marginal returns do start to kick in. Bush 43's errors of strategy, management and implementation are pretty sui generis, to the point where it's dangerous to generalize from the Bush administration to the entire post-Cold War era.

Maybe offshore balancing is the right grand strategy to pursue, the Clintonian approach was blinkered, and Obama's approach is flawed. These are good propositions to debate and argue. The tragedy of Mearsheimer's "Imperial By Design" is that all of these points are asserted rather than argued.

Earlier this week I speculated as to why North Korea did not respond to a series of South Korean military drills.  In the list of possibilities I provided, I was somewhat skeptical that Chinese pressure was the answer.

In today's New York Times, however, Mark Landler quotes some Obama administration sources suggesting that Chinese (and Russian) pressure was a determining factor:

after a tense week, when the threat of war hung over the Korean Peninsula, the Obama administration and Beijing seem finally to be on the same page.

Administration officials said the Chinese government had embraced an American plan to press the North to reconcile with the South after its deadly attacks on a South Korean island and a warship. The United States believes the Chinese also worked successfully to curb North Korea’s belligerent behavior.

China’s pressure, several senior officials said this week, might help explain why North Korea did not respond militarily to live-fire drills conducted this week by the South Korean military, when a previous drill drew an artillery barrage from the North that killed two South Korean civilians and two soldiers.

As evidence of the policy shift, officials pointed to recent remarks by China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, in which he urged the North and South “to carry out dialogue and contact.” Previously, Beijing’s response had been to propose an emergency meeting of the six-party group that negotiates with North Korea over its nuclear program, a step the United States opposed as rewarding the North’s aggression....

China swiftly dispatched a senior diplomat to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and officials said he conveyed a strong message about “the unacceptability of attacks and killings of South Koreans,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

“The idea that there could be these one-off provocations without expectation of a military response, as the North had behaved in the past, the Chinese now understand that this is no longer the reality, no longer acceptable,” he said.

John Pomfret hits similar notes in his Washington Post story.  Actually, it's an even more optimistic assessment : 

The United States and China  are closing out the year on a positive note on many fronts - including trade, military ties, climate change and global security - as both sides prepare for their presidents' second summit, set for next month.

After a tense year during which U.S. officials, including President Obama, openly criticized China, and their Chinese counterparts returned the favor, there is a sudden switch in tone from the Commerce Department to the National Security Council. Instead of portraying China as protectionist or as an "enabler" of North Korea's provocations, administration officials are praising China, referring to it again as a responsible partner....

The most remarkable about-face has occurred in the administration's attitude toward China over the Korean Peninsula. Two weeks ago, a senior administration official accused China of creating the conditions that allowed North Korea to start a uranium-enrichment program and launch two deadly attacks on South Korea. The tensions on the peninsula threatened to dominate the summit.

But in recent days, senior administration officials have praised China for pressing North Korea not to react to a South Korean military drill Monday. Officials referred specifically to a visit by China's top diplomat, Dai Bingguo, to North Korea on Dec. 9. After the meeting, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that China and North Korea had reached a "consensus" on the situation on the peninsula - which many analysts interpreted as meaning North Korea had agreed not to provoke South Korea in the short term.

Administration officials also commended China for soft-pedaling a proposal to hold emergency talks between South and North Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the United States as part of a way to calm the situation. Instead, the officials said that China had accepted a U.S. plan that put improving ties between the South and the North ahead of any multilateral talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Administration officials portrayed the United States and China as working in lockstep in dealing with the crisis, which many thought had reached the brink of war last weekend. China continued to urge restraint on North Korea, they said, while the United States worked with Seoul to ensure that its exercises were "firm" but also "non-confrontational and non-escalatory," a senior administration said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Nonetheless, it is not clear whether China's pressure has worked. On Thursday, North Korea threatened to launch a "sacred" nuclear war that would "wipe out" South Korea and the United States if they started a conflict.

Chinese President Hu Jintao is scheduled to make a state visit to Washington on Jan. 19. Obama visited China in November 2009.

China's approach on the Korean peninsula is certainly interesting, but what I find really interesting is the Obama administration's conscious decision to talk about this to the Times and Post.  Part of this might be the warming up of relations that traditionally precedes a great power summit.  Part of it, however, might be the administration's effort to signal to their Chinese counterparts that they understand that Beijing has engaged in a policy shift -- and the Obama administraion genuinely appreciates that shift. 

This point is likely banal obvious to longtime foreign policy hands, but I bring it up in the context of the Wikileaks cables.  The attention paid to these diplomatic cables can lead to the impression that all diplomacy that matters is conducted in secret corridors.  This kind of coordinated official leaking, however, is the bread and butter of 20th and 21st century statecraft -- and it's not going away anytime soon. 

FP's Josh Rogin ably summarizes the State Department's rollout of the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), an exercise that was clearly inspired by the Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Review. This was Anne-Marie Slaughter's signal achievement during her tenure as Director of Policy Planning,* which leads to the obvious question of whether it really matters.

The QDDR is dedicated to Rickard Holbrooke, who passed away earlier this week. In a revealing Financial Times article, Brain Katulis of the Center for American Progress makes a particularly telling point about the arc of Holbrooke's career:

"If you compare Holbrooke's tenure in his job as representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he was able to do in the 1990s on Bosnia, you really see that the balance of power in the interim had shifted from the state department to the Pentagon," said Brian Katulis at the Centre for American Progress in Washington.

Katulis hits upon a theme that has been a source of concern here at this blog for a good long while. For at least a decade, there's been a vicious feedback loop: State loses operational authority and capabilities because of poor funding, which leads to more tasks for Defense, which leads to even more lopsided funding between the two bureaucracies, which leads to an even greater disparity in responsibilities, and so forth.

Will the QDDR change that? That's sorta the point of the whole exercise -- the phrase "civilian power" appears 281 times in the QDDR. I'm dubious -- the only way this works is through greater staffing and greater funding for U.S. foreign aid, and in this Age of Austerity, the first things that get cut are.... diplomats and foreign aid funding.

I'd love to see Hillary Clinton make the case to Congress than an extra $50 billion for State would improve American foreign policy enough to cut, say, $100 billion for DoD. I'd love a free pony too, for all the likelihood that this will happen.

I'm not the only one who's dubious. The Christian Science Monitor's Howard LaFranchi ends his story on the QDDR as follows:

[E]xperts, as well as some military officials, have pointed out that the concept of "civilian power" sounds good, but that the US diplomatic corps is not prepared and doesn't have the numbers to take over many tasks from the military.

Clinton acknowledges that the shift in priorities and organization is "a work in progress," but she also emphasizes that someone will be designated at both the State Department and at USAID to oversee implementation. "I am determined that this report will not merely gather dust, like so many others," she said. And she wants Congress to approve making the QDDR a regular and required State Department policy-review process.

Slaughter echoed those words in a humorous sum-up with reporters. "I'm pretty sure you're thinking, 'I've heard this before,' " she said - a big plan to change the way a government agency works. "But this is different."

The big difference, she insisted, is that Clinton has given the reorganization top priority: "She knows ... we can't afford to continue working in the way we have been."

Reading the QDDR, it's clear that there's a hope that Foggy Bottom will scrape together more resources through wringing greater efficiencies out of the current budget. This is certainly possible -- no one is going to label the State Department a lean, mean fighting bureaucratic machine -- but color me skeptical that there's all that much savings of "government waste" in them thar hills.

To be fair, however, one report is not going to change a dynamic that's been building for more than a decade. It's only a first step. Still first steps are better than no steps. We'll see if this remains Clinton's top priority.

*I have no inside knowledge about this, but am simply assuming that Slaughter will be returning to her academic haunts after the standard two-year leave has expired -- in other words, in early 2011.

I've expressed skepticism about whether WikiLeaks will actually lead to greater foreign-policy transparency. That said, l'affaire WikiLeaks has generated just a smidgen of greater candor from at least one U.S. policy principal. Here's Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the fallout from the cable dump:

Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel." …

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think -- I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

Many governments -- some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

Hat tip: Jack Goldsmith.