Having watched the last national security debate ten days ago, tonight's CNN/Heritage/AEI debate felt at times like a stale rerun.  Michelle Bachmann trotted out her same ACLU line, Mitt Romney made the same bleats about the American Century, Ron Paul was … Ron Paul. 

Having now watched way too many of these suckers, I'm probably far too inebriated jaded to evaluate these candidates in the same way that a newcomer to their positions would.  They still have to appeal to those newcomers, however, so I can't fault them entirely for repeats. 

This is a long-winded way of saying that this debate left me in a very sour mood, primarily because of the following:

1)  CNN decided to -- yet again -- waste 15 minutes with various forms of opening introductions.  That's 15 minutes that could have been devoted to actual questions. 

2)  Many of the AEI and Heritage think-tankers asked excellent questions, but why did David Addington and Marc Thiessen get to ask questions while Derek Scissors or Sadanand Dhume didn't?  The effect was that, after two hours, not one question was asked about China, North Korea, the rest of the Pacific Rim, India, the eurozone, NATO, Egypt, or Russia.  That's just horrible debate management on someone's part. 

3)  All of the leading candidates said something mind-numbingly stupid.  Newt Gingrich claimed that if the United States just unleashed the domestic oil drills, the global price for oil would crash within a year.  That's a crock.  Mitt Romney suggested trying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for genocide.  I'm no fan of Ahmadinejad, but... huh?  Ron Paul claimed that Israel had sacrificed its sovereignty to the United States, which is an... interesting interpretation of events.  He also claimed that all American foreign aid was worthless, which would be news to the Africans not suffering from malaria or tuberculosis. 

So, with those provisos, my quick letter grades:

Newt Gingrich:  A-  Beyond that energy answer, Gingrich was probably the best of the lot, but that was as much due to style as substance.  He gave a lot of "we need to be more strategic than tactical" bromides to start, but to be fair, when pushed he gave cogent answers. 

Jon Hunstman:  A-  Huntsman went hard after Romney on the commander-in-chief question, and for much of the night gave the best answers to myriad questions.  That said, he also had some surprisingly weak answers at times, like on the use of drones in Pakistan. 

Ron Paul:  B+  Consistent as always in his approach, and in some ways he offers the most logically coherent foreign policy of the bunch.  As a debater, however, he's second rate.  Gingrich schooled him on a question regarding homeland security, for example, when I symathize much more with Paul's position. 

Michelle Bachmann:  B  At this point, Michelle Bachmann is a one-trick pony.  On Pakistan -- a particularly tough issue -- she gives thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent responses.  Everything else is Crazytown.  Pakistan took up a large part of the debate, however, so she did well, takin Perry in paticular to task. 

Rick Santorum:  B  He gave a good answer on foreign aid, and cracked a funny joke about agreeing with Ron Paul.  Unfortunately, he also said, "Africa was a country on the brink."  Oops.   

Mitt Romney:  B-  Any time you screw up your own introduction, it's going to be a bad night.  Romney wasn't horrible by any stretch, but he got pushed by Huntsman on civil-military relations and by Gingrich on immigration.  Those guys are no Rick Perry.  He did rally with a very thoughtful and considered answer on Syria, however.... in which he schooled Rick Perry.  

Rick Perry:  D  At this point, Perry serves mostly as a foil to make other candidates (Paul, Bachmann, Romney) look smarter.  Hard to believe this man was the front-runner, ever. 

Herman Cain:  F  The mercy rule is, thankfully, still in effect. 

What did you think? 

Tonight's CBS/National Journal debate was the first to be on broadcast television, and was devoted to national security and foreign policy.  Out of a sense of duty to you, dear readers, your humble blogger downed a lot of vodka watched the whole thing, and is ready to offer my grades. 

Before talking about the individual candidates, I'll say this -- I've been rather harsh on the GOP 2012 field, and, to be honest, most of them did better than I expected in this debate.   I didn't expect much, but still:  kudos to the campaign staffers, because everyone seemed better briefed on foreign policy than in past debates (On the other hand, I note that none of the candidates said a single good thing about Barack Obama's foreign policy.  I wasn't expecting hosannahs or anything, but the man is polling at 60% approval on this front). 

A big fail to CBS and National Journal for having a 90-minute debate that was only aired for 60 minutes on television.  The webcasts were bad, with lots of glitches on both sites.  As for Major Garrett and Scott Pelley, they did OK, but John Harwood and Maria Bartiromo outclassed them this week. 

In alphabetical order: 

Michelle Bachmann:  She kept her crazy pretty contained for much of the night, but it escaped for two big whoppers.  The first was when she said, "The table is being set for a worldwide nuclear war with Israel."  The second was when she expressed a desire for the United States to adopt China's welfare system (or lack thereof).  Grade:  D. 

Herman Cain:  The worst debate performance of the night.  Slow, rambling, evasive, and contradictory.  His answer on torture contradicted itself inside of 30 seconds; his Pakistan response was a total dodge.  His solution on Iran -- energy independence! -- would be like suggesting that the appropriate response to a rising China would be to move all Americans to Mars.  Both activities will take the same length of time.  Grade:  F. 

Newt Gingrich:  He had a pretty good answer on Pakistan, and was consistent -- albeit disturbing -- on the assassination of Americans working for Al Qaeda.  That said, Gingrich's "I'm smarter than everyone else" schtick wears thin fast.  I say this as someone who encounters academics on a daily basis.  Gingrich gives off the same insufferable mien of academics who think they're much smarter and more knowledgable than they actually are.  Grade:  B. 

Jon Hunstman:  Not surprisingly, the former ambassador gave the clearest and most coherent answers of the evening.  He pushed back the others on staying in Afghanistan, and correctly pushed back Romney on taking China to the WTO.  If foreign policy was really important to the GOP, he'd be the frontrunner, and it wouldn't be close.  Grade:  A. 

Ron Paul:  The contrast between Paul and the rest of the field was magnified during this debate.  As someone who thinks that Paul is too dovish at times, I thought he did a very good job, and got quite passionate on questions of torture.  Also -- and I think this is a first -- he got through the entire debate without mentioning the Federal Reserve.  Grade:  A-. 

Rick Perry:  Compared to his other debate performances, it was OK.  Compared to what I'm expecting a commander-in-chief to demonstrate, it was again way below the bar.  Perry proposed zero-based budgeting for foreign aid and a lot of other areas of the government; I wonder if he knows that the first president to embrace that idea was Jimmy Carter.  Then there were odd word choices.  China has to "change their virtues"?  He invented the word "forewithal."  And he was lucky that the end of the telecast cut off his attempt at an answerr on the euro,  because it was not going to go well.  Grade:  C. 

Mitt Romney:  Romney has perfected the art of sounding firm and resolute in his first sentence of any response on foreign policy, and then, with the next sentence, inserting enough hedges and qualifications to give himself tremendous wiggle room.  He demonstrated decent knowledge for the most part, and had another strong debate.  Grade:  B+. 

Rick Santorum:  I can recall quite clearly that Santorum have a decent answer on Pakistan at some point.  Beyond that, all I can remember was his whinging about not getting asked enough questions.  Grade:  C+ 

Offer your own grades/assessments in the comments. 

My FP colleague Steve Walt has responded to my Obama-praising blog post with a long litany of Obama foreign policy failures.  He includes climate change, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the global economy, North Korea, failing to cure cancer.... you get the drift. 

Walt closes with the following observation: 

Where Dan and I agree, however, is the crucial role of domestic politics. For if you look at the failures listed above, what is striking is that most of them are heavily shaped by domestic constraints. Doing something serious about climate change would have real consequences for business and consumers, and that wasn't going to happen when we are teetering on the brink of another recession. Making progress on Israel-Palestine or on Iran would require bringing in a new Middle East team and taking on the Israel lobby (including the Christianist wing of the GOP), and Obama abandoned that course after the Cairo speech in June 2009. His decisions to escalate in Afghanistan and to try to stay in Iraq were clearly shaped by domestic political concerns, and especially the perennial Democratic fear of being perceived as "weak" on national security. Trade liberalization is always a contentious issue here at home, and especially tough to tackle with a weak economy.

In short, Dan's broader point about Obama's foreign policy successes is insightful: the president has done well in those relatively minor areas where domestic politics do not loom large and where he can exercise unilateral authority. But on the more important and more difficult issues where you would have to convince the American people to follow a new path, he's come up mostly empty.

Steve raises some interesting issues, and as I noted in my initial post, I absolutely agree that Obama's foreign policy has had flaws.  That said, I have a few quarrels with Walt's claims. 

First, in some cases, what Walt would consider a "success" might not be what others consider a success.  On Iran, for example, Walt laments that "the administration [has not] managed to think outside the box and try a different approach."  Beyond the Leveretts, however (and Ron Paul), I'm not sure anyone else would agree with Steve in that assessment.  Furthermore, to be fair, I think there's some pretty strong evidence that the administration did think outside the box in handling the nuclear issue.

Second, part of the issue here is how one defines a "success" in foreign policy. For example, Walt says the following on Libya as to why it's a failure:

[D]idn't the "Mission Accomplished" moment in 2003 in Iraq teach us about the dangers of declaring victory prematurely? We can all hope that the Libyan revolution fulfills its idealistic hopes and avoids the various pitfalls that lie ahead, but it is way too early to start bragging about it, or declaring it the model for future interventions. And if Libya does go south, enthusiasm for the "Obama Doctrine" will fade faster than watercolors in the Libyan sun.

Walt's observation is eminently sensible -- there are many ways in which Libya could evolve in a direction unfriendly to American interests. This gets to a deeper issue, which is how one defines "success" in politics vs. political science. Afghanistan looked like a success in 2001; Iraq looked like a success in 2003. Obviously, over time, these situations changed. As political scientists, we need to keep tabs on these developments.

In politics, however, voters tend not to do all that much updating, particularly in terms of foreign policy. It takes high-profile events for new information to filter down to candidates who read one whole page of foreign news almost every day the American public. It will be interesting to see how Libya (and Egypt, and Tunisia, and Syria, etc.) play out over the next few decades. My post was about the next year, however -- and Obama will be able to claim credit if it looks like things are going well, and fall back on "we didn't play that big of a role" if things fall apart. From a policy perspective, that's a very cynical way of looking at things -- but it makes sense from a political perspective.

Third, in many of the cases that Walt cites as failures, the problem isn't necessarily the domestic politics of the United States but the domestic politics of other countries.  On climate change, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, it's impossible to discuss the outcomes without recognizing the domestic political constraints/chaos in these countries.  While each of them possesses elements willing to cooperate with the United States, there are spoilers aplenty in all of these countries. This is a problem that Bush faced when he was in office, Obama has faced now, and will be a bigger problem over time.  It's a sign that the degree of difficulty in conducting American foreign policy has gone up. 

This brings me to my final cavil.  I'd really like the Steve Walt of this blog post to reconcile his arguments with... the Steve Walt who just published "The End of the American Era" in The National Interest. See, that Steve Walt views American decline as both inevitable and structural, which implies that these outcomes aren't a function of Obama's leadership per se but impersonal forces of history. Many of the cases Walt cites as Obama "failures" in his blog post are treated as ineluctable outcomes of relative American decline in his TNI essay.  Which is it?    

Reports are flying around the interwebs that the last Gaddafy holdout of Sirte has fallen, and that Gaddafi has been killed -- Blake Hounshell has the grisly photo here.  A few scattered thoughts on this: 

1)  This  photo comes on top of numerous reports that Gaddafi was captured or wounded or whatnot.   Given past NTC statements and reversals, I'd like to see further confirmaion.  In the meantime, as I stated on Twitter this AM, I think we can clarify it this way:  Gaddafi has been captured, Qaddafi has been killed, and Khadafy is still at large.* 

Readers are invited to suggest the fates of other spellings of the Libyan dictator's name in the comments. 

2)  Assuming that Gaddafi really is dead, Adam Serwer tweets that how this came to pass "makes a huge difference."  Well.... maybe.  I suspect it won't matter all that much in Libya -- and to be cold-blooded about it, there are ways in which the spectacle of a capture and trial might have been more problematic.  I'm not even sure that Gaddafi's fate affects the new Libyan regime's image and reputation overseas. 

The more serious effect might be in how this kind of outcome affects the behavior of other autocrats.  As Giacomo Chiozza and Hein Goemans observe in Leaders and International Conflict, the private incentives of leaders profoundly affect their use of force.  Simply put, when leaders have expectations of a violent demise if they lose power, they have a more powerful incentive to use force to stay in power.  So, congrats to Libya, but this is simply going to harden the hearts of Bashir Assad and others out there determined to stay in power through any means necessary -- including instigating cross-border conflicts. 

3)  At the risk of seeming like a grump, I'd prefer a situation in which the best news in world politics is something other than "[INSERT SCUMBAG'S NAME HERE] is dead!!"  Because for the past six months, these kind of deaths have been the high points. 

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not sorry bin Laden or Al-Awlaki or Gaddafi have departed the scene.  This probably is addition by subtraction.  I'd just like it if there were other sources of addition.

What do you think? 

*I should probably stop tweeting right now and end on a high note. 

So I see Rick Perry gave a quasi-foreign policy speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 112th National Convention.  Here's the gist of the foreign policy section: 

[A]  president should never send our sons and daughters into war without a plan to win, and the resources to make that possible.

In the dangerous world we live in today, our enemies often don't wear a uniform or swear allegiance to a particular flag, but instead to an ideology of hatred.

As the tenth anniversary of the attacks of 9-11 approaches, we must renew our commitment to taking the fight to the enemy, wherever they are, before they strike at home.

I do not believe America should fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism.

We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened.

And we should always look to build coalitions among the nations to protect the mutual interests of freedom-loving people.

It is not in our interests to go it alone. We respect our allies, and must always seek to engage them in military missions.

At the same time, we must be willing to act when it is time to act.

We cannot concede the moral authority of our nation to multi-lateral debating societies.

And when our interests are threatened, American soldiers should be led by American commanders.

I say this because we owe to them, and to their loved ones, to make sure any war we wage is led by the country with the most advanced military technology and the best training.

We have the finest fighting force the world has ever known.

We have a generation of heroes who love their nation, and who willingly sacrifice all that we may always be free.

The men and women of the United States Military are the greatest ambassadors of freedom this nation has ever sent abroad.

That's why, when we send them to war, we must give them every weapon and every resource to help them succeed.

James Lindsay analyzes the content over at CFR, concluding that, "There is something in it for every significant foreign policy constituency in the GOP," although "any mainstream Republican or Democratic presidential candidate could have given Perry’s speech."  This is likely because, "while Perry’s speech was heavy on foreign policy bromides it was short on specifics."

Lindsay is being kind -- this speech is ninety-eight percent concentrated pablum (contra Lindsay, the "multilateral debating society" crack does signal it being a GOP speech).  Seriously, I hereby challenge my friends at Shadow Government who might be Perry-friendly to find something of interest in this speech.  It's the foreign policy equivalent of this scene from The Distinguished Gentleman: 

Now, to be fair to Perry, this San Antonio News-Express news story suggests that he had some constraints on what kind of speech he could deliver.  So, really, I'm not sure that anything of consequence can be divined from this.... er.... assemblage of cliches that maybe, just maybe, passes the Turing Test. 

Still, what Perry said is such pure, unadulterated boilerplate that, as a foreign policy commentator, one must step back and gape in wonder.  Reading it, the absence of anything interesting kept nagging me as hauntingly familiar. 

And then I realized -- Rick Perry had just delivered the Wolf Blitzer of foreign policy speeches!!  It's familiar, yet utterly devoid of interesting content!! 

And for that, Rick Perry is the distinguished inaugural nominee of the Wolf Blitzer Award for Foreign Policy Boilerplate. 

This past week Anne-Marie Slaughter launched a new foreign policy blog over at The Atlantic entitled "Notes from the Foreign Policy Frontier."  This was greeted with general huzzahs across the foreign policy community, as Slaughter is a universally-acknowledged smart person.  She is an exemplar of someone who can effortlessly transition from the scholarly to the policymaking world and back again.  Her facility with new media is so good that her own bio undercounts her Twitter followers by 50%.

Slaughter's first post suggests the themes of her new blog -- let's take a look and see what she's up to, shall we?  Here are the opening paragraphs: 

The frontier of foreign policy in the 21st century is social, developmental, digital, and global. Along this frontier, different groups of actors in society -- corporations, foundations, NGOs, universities, think tanks, churches, civic groups, political activists, Facebook groups, and others -- are mobilizing to address issues that begin as domestic social problems but that have now gone global. It is the world of the Land Mines Treaty and the International Criminal Court; global criminal and terrorist networks; vast flows of remittances that dwarf development assistance; micro-finance and serial entrepreneurship; the Gates Foundation; the Arab spring; climate change; global pandemics; Twitter; mobile technology to monitor elections, fight corruption, and improve maternal health; a new global women's movement; and the demography of a vast youth bulge in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Traditional foreign policy continues to assume the world of World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the first and second Gulf Wars -- an international system in which a limited number of states pursue their largely power-based interests in bargaining situations that are often zero-sum and in which the line between international and domestic politics is still discernible and defensible. Diplomats and statesmen compete with each other in games of global chess, which, during crises, often shift into high-stakes poker. It is the world of high strategy, the world that Henry Kissinger writes about and longs for and that so-called "realist" commentators continually invoke.

Well, this is... this is... I'm sorry, I got lost among the ridiculously tall strawmen populating these paragraphs.   I'll go out on a limb and posit that not even Henry Kissinger thinks of the world the way Slaughter describes it.  Just a quick glance at, say, Hillary Clinton's recent speech in Hong Kong suggests that actual great power foreign policies bear no resemblance whatsoever to that description of "traditional foreign policy." 

Slaughter knows this very well, given that she was Clinton's first director of policy planning.  She also knows this because much of her writing in international relations is about the ways in which traditional governments are becoming more networked and adaptive to emergent foreign policy concerns.  One could quibble about whether this is really a new trend, but Slaughter was correct to point out that states are doing this. 

So, let's get to the main point of her blog post:  what does Slaughter think about this new frontier? 

21st century diplomacy must not only be government to government, but also government to society and society to society, in a process facilitated and legitimated by government. That much broader concept opens the door to a do-it-yourself foreign policy, in which individuals and groups can invent and execute an idea -- for good or ill -- that can affect their own and other countries in ways that once only governments could.

In late June, I spent two days at the Summit Against Violent Extremism (#AVE on Twitter), a conference sponsored by Google Ideas, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Tribeca Film Festival that brought together more than 80 former gang members, violent religious extremists, violent nationalist extremists, and violent white supremacists from 19 countries across six continents. They came together with 120 academics, NGOs, public sector and private sector partners. The conference grew out of a vision developed by Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas, when he served in the U.S. State Department's Office of Policy Planning together with Farah Pandit, who worked on countering violent extremism in the State Department's Bureau of Eurasian Affairs and is the Special Representative to Muslim Communities. But, despite their role, bringing together this range of "formers" is something that Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations can do much more easily than any government could. The range of projects creating networks to help build on effective, early intervention programs already working around the world, such as Singapore's programs to deflect and deprogram Islamic radicals, will also be much easier to develop with a broader range of stakeholders, including some government participation, than they would be through government alone....

Skeptics argue that these kinds of initiatives are doomed to remain perennially peripheral and ineffectual. But, in case anyone hasn't noticed, the traditional tools of fighting, talking, pressuring, and persuading government-to-government really aren't working so well. Thirty years of urging reform produced next to nothing; 6 months of digitally and physically organized social protests and a political earthquake is shaking the broader Middle East. Twenty years of working toward a treaty to govern carbon emissions has barely yielded an informal "accord." Yet measures taken by 40 cities organized by the Bloomberg Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative will have far more impact.

Outing myself as a skeptic, I'd make two points.  First, Slaughter's weakness as an international relations theorist is to uncritically observe phenomena like the Summit Against Violent Extremism and then inductively generalize from them to extrapolate the future of world politics.  AVE is happening, but I'm gonna want to see a lot more evidence that it's making a difference before calling it a success.  There are a lot of issue areas where this kind of initiative will not substantially alter policy outcomes.  Indeed, one could flip this around, look at new trends like sovereign wealth funds, national oil companies and and state-owned enterprises, and reach the exact opposite conclusions from Slaughter.  I don't, but you see my point -- world politics is about a lot more than a Muslim woman setting up a Twitter account thanks to her microfinance loan.     

Second, Slaughter's climate change example is a great one.  I don't doubt that the initiatives she's blogged about likely have accomplished more than the two decades of UN negotiations.  I also don't doubt, however, that those accomplishments are a drop in the bucket compared to what has needs to be done.  Furthermore, I suspect these groups would strongly prefer joint government action to their own initiatives, as the only viable means to mitigate the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions.  In which case, they will function like good old fashioned interest groups, which is not all that new.   

Slaughter believes that these "bottom-up" movements represent the future of world politics -- and she may well be right.  My own inclination is that DIY foreign policy represents a poor and underprovided substitute for effective state action global governance.  We'll see what the future holds. 

Concluding her post, Slaughter says that she'll be, "looking at the world through a very different lens -- highlighting features of the foreign policy landscape that simply disappear if we examine only a world of opaque unitary states negotiating, pressuring, fighting, and ignoring each other."  This is good, and highlights the value-added that such an approach can bring to thinking about world politics.  I'll be looking at Slaughter's musings as well through my own lens -- one that is very wary of overhyped initiatives that do not accomplish nearly as much as suggested by their media hype. 

Am I missing anything? 

Over the past week there's been a lot of foreign policy outputs coming from the gut, particularly with respect to the greater Middle East. Newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been cursing like a PG-rated sailor as of late, saying about the Iraqis, "dammit, make a decision" with respect to a new defense minister. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared that Bashar Assad has "lost legitimacy," which is A) true; and B) not all that helpful a guide for future policy toward Syria. U.S. ambassador to that country Robert Ford took to Facebook to express his ire at the Syrian government. And now we're halting $800 million in military aid to Pakistan, which sounds great but is not necessarily going to make things better.

Do these gestures of frustration accomplish anything? That's hard to say. In terms of concrete outcomes, the likely answer is no -- part of the reason for the venting of frustrations on these issues is that the United States has so little leverage in most of these situations. On the other hand, just the acknowledgment of frustration can be politically useful, a venting of pressure that might otherwise lead to hopelessly misguided or absurdly risky policy options.

For exhibit A, see Reuel Marc Gerecht's latest on Syria in The Weekly Standard, which opens with, "The administration's policy toward Syria is shaping up to be the greatest missed opportunity of Barack Obama's presidency." The essay goes to great length to bash realists detail the myriad policy benefits that would come with regime change in Damascus. This is all well and good (though a bit exaggerated), until we get to what the Obama administration should be doing to foment change:

There are many things that the Obama administration should be doing that it isn’t: using the presidential bully pulpit against the Assad regime, deploying the American ambassador in Damascus as a shield and voice for the opposition (if Ford gets expelled, he gets expelled), organizing the Western diplomatic community in Damascus to do whatever it can to aid the opposition, offering substantial technical support to the Turks to extend a Wi-Fi-ed broadband as far over the Syrian border as possible, and working with Paris to implement energy sanctions that might severely impair the Assad regime. But the most important thing it could do now is encourage Turkey to stand firm against Syria.

Ideally, we should want to see the Turks establish a buffer zone or safe haven on the Syrian side of the border (Ankara sometimes did this in Iraq to counter nefarious Kurdish activity).

Let's be clear: The Obama administration could be doing everything on that list, and it wouldn't make an iota of difference. The only policy that would matter is if the Turks actually wanted to establish a buffer zone -- except in a later paragraph even Gerecht acknowledges that, "neither Erdogan nor Davutoglu would want to do this."

So, to sum up, Gerecht is really enthusiastic about Syrian regime change, and wants the U.S. to beat its breast a little more and ask "pretty pretty please" for the Turks to do something they view as against their self-interest. This will accomplish … nothing.

If you start seeing gut-level foreign policy, it's usually a sign that every other rational option has failed. And although we hope otherwise, frustration alone rarely leads to policy breakthroughs.

I have an essay in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs entitled, "Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?"  

I daresay the title is pretty self-explanatory.  It's subscriber only temporarily accessible to non-subscribers --  but here's the gist: 

Despite what its critics say, the Obama administration has actually had not just one grand strategy so far but two. The first strategy, multilateral retrenchment, was designed to curtail the United States' overseas commitments, restore its standing in the world, and shift burdens onto global partners. This strategy was clearly articulated, but it delivered underwhelming policy results.

The second, emergent grand strategy is focused on counterpunching. More recently, the Obama administration has been willing to assert its influence and ideals across the globe when challenged by other countries, reassuring allies and signaling resolve to rivals. This strategy has performed better but has been poorly articulated. It is this vacuum of interpretation that the administration's critics have rushed to fill. Unless and until the president and his advisers define explicitly the strategy that has been implicit for the past year, the president's foreign policy critics will be eager to define it--badly--for him.

That's the thesis, but to be honest, my favorite passage also happens to be the snarkiest: 

If grand strategies are so overrated, why the furious debate? For two reasons, one petty and one substantive. The petty reason is that everyone in the U.S. foreign policy community secretly hopes to be the next Kennan. When a commentator bewails the failings of the United States' grand strategy, it is usually because he has scribbled down his own set of musings on the topic. Indeed, complaints about grand strategy have plagued every U.S. administration since the end of World War II for precisely this reason. Grand strategies are easy to devise-they are forward-looking, operate in generalities, and make for great book tours. Whenever a foreign policy commentator articulates a new grand strategy, an angel gets its wings.

It's funny because it's true. 

[What's the substantive reason?  Tell me!!  TELL ME!!--ed.  You'll have to read the whole thing to find out.]

Ever since I announced the Trumpies, I've been deluged with tweets and e-mails asking if  this flub or that blunder or the other mistake in New York culinary etiquette  merits a Trumpie nomination.  In keeping with the high quality of the Trumpie brand, however, a nomination cannot be earned for simple malapropisms, pizza-eating faux pas, or errors on non-foreign policy topics ("A Trumpie -- the foreign policy mistakes of royalty"). 

To repeat -- a Trumpie is only earned when the candidate or a kep foreign policy supporter demonstrates willful, assertive ignorance on U.S. foreign policy or world politics.  Which brings me to U.S. House Representative Paul Ryan.

Ryan is starting to act like a presidential candidate.  The chairman of the House Budget Committee delivered a foreign policy speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society last week, leaking the text to The Weekly Standard no less.  After that speech, other commentators have made numerous claims that Ryan deserves multiple Trumpie nominations.  Let's review the charges. 

Jonathan Chait argues that Ryan deserves a nom for making the sly charge that Barack Obama rejected American exceptionalism.  Here's the passage Chait quotes on this point:

There are very good people who are uncomfortable with the idea that America is an “exceptional” nation....

Today, some in this country relish the idea of America’s retreat from our role in the world. They say that it’s about time for other nations to take over; that we should turn inward; that we should reduce ourselves to membership on a long list of mediocre has-beens.

This view applies moral relativism on a global scale. Western civilization and its founding moral principles might be good for the West, but who are we to suggest that other systems are any worse? – or so the thinking goes.

Instead of heeding these calls to surrender, we must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen; a country whose devotion to free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system ever designed; and a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.

Chait argues: 

Ryan is referring to, without explicitly saying so, a widespread conservative claim. In April 2009, a reporter asked Obama if he believed in American exceptionalism. Obama began by citing objections to the concept before endorsing it. 

Chait is correct that the 2009 Obama speech demonstrates quite clearly that the president believes in American exceptionalism, and that numerous conservatives have taken delight in willfully misreading it.  The thing is, the text of Ryan's speech far from clear in asserting this claim.  The insinuation is there, but Ryan just refers to "very good people."  He could be talking about Obama -- but he could very well be talking about my FP colleague Steve Walt for all its specificity.  This is politically savvy, but not a display of assertive ignorance.  So, no, no Trumpie nomination for that. 

But wait -- there's more accusations!!  Eunomia's Daniel Larison thinks Ryan deserves a Trumpie for this section: 

 [O]ur fiscal problems are real, and the need to address them is urgent. But I’m here to tell you that decline is not a certainty for America. Rather, as Charles Krauthammer put it, “decline is a choice.”

It is hard to overstate the importance of this choice. In The Weary Titan, Aaron Friedberg–one of the founders of the Hamilton Society–has shown us what happened when Britain made the wrong choice at the turn of the 20th century.

At that time, Britain’s governing class took the view that it would be better to cede leadership of the Western world to the United States. Unfortunately, the United States was not yet ready to assume the burden of leadership. The result was 40 years of Great Power rivalry and two World Wars.

This recounting of history prompts Larison to write: 

I have not read this book. Despite that, I am fairly confident that Ryan is describing its argument incorrectly. For one thing, the British governing class between 1895 and 1905 did not “take the view” that “it would be better to cede leadership of the Western world” to the United States. This was the time of Salisbury’s government when the British were as overconfident and aggressive in their empire-building as ever.

Well.... I have read parts of The Weary Titan, and both Ryan and Larison make valid points here.  Friedberg does advance the argument in his book that British foreign policy elites voluntaily ceded aspects of their hegemony to other actors during the 1895-1905 decade -- and that's the point Ryan stresses.  That said, Larison is correct to say that Ryan exaggerates Friedberg's thesis.  If Ryan had said "Western  hemisphere" instead of "Western world," however, he'd be spot-on accurate. 

So, closer, but no cigar. 

Others have also lobbed their criticisms of Ryan's speech, but I don't think these rise to the level of assertive ignorance. 

These paragraphs of Ryan's speech, however, are another story: 

We cannot face these challenges alone. To the contrary, we need our allies and friends to increase their capacity and willingness to act in defense of our common interests.

The first step in that process is robust and frank engagement with our closest allies. We all share an interest in the maintenance of the international order with its liberal trading system, general tranquility, and abundant opportunity – and we should all share the burden of maintaining it.

The Obama administration has taken our allies for granted and accepted too willingly the decline of their capacity for international action. Our alliances were vital to our victory in the Cold War and they need to be revitalized to see us through the 21^st century.

Ryan commits an empirical and a logical error here that meets the bar for a Trumpie nomination.  The empirical error is that the notion that the Obama administration has "accepted too willingly" the military decline of key allies.  Indeed, even a cursory glance at the Libya operation suggests the exact opposite of that approach.  A look at the distribution of effort on Libya suggests that while the United States is still exercising leaedership, they've actually managed to get allies to fly a majority of the air sorties.  The attack helicopter gambit is also being led by France and the U.K.  As John Burns reports in today's New York Times:

With the costs of the air campaign mounting, and the stresses growing on air crews, finding a way of breaking the stalemate has become a priority for NATO, and particularly for Britain and France, which are carrying the brunt of the campaign.

Mr. Obama has let NATO allies take the lead in the Libyan operations, an unusual role for them in the history of such operations. The United States’ role has been confined primarily to air refueling, airborne command and control, surveillance and the deployment of missile-carrying drones.

The bigger, logical error, however, is exactly what the "robust and frank engagement with our closest allies" would look like.  Basically, Ryan's definition of U.S. leadership amounts to "exerting pressure on our allies to take on greater defense expenditures."  OK, but how will this conversation take place?  Let's imagine this: 

PRESIDENT RYAN:  Hey, NATO allies -- to be robust and frank about it, you need to goose up your defense expenditures and assist us more vigorously.  

NATO ALLIES:  What's that?  I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the protestors in the streets furious about the latest round of bailouts to Greece and Ireland, combined with the cuts in social services we need to make in a nod towards austerity.  Hey, you're a big fan of that policy, right?  What's that you want us to do again with our increasingly scarce capital in a politically hostile environment? 

PRESIDENT RYAN:  Uh, never mind, let me try our Japanese allies.  Hey, Japan, we've been protecting you for decades, it's time to pony up and contribute your fair share.

JAPAN:  I'm sorry, what was that?  I couldn't hear you because we're selecting which old people will volunteer to help clean up the Fukushima reactor mess.  Gee, this is not going to be cheap, and our debt-to-GDP ratio is already at 200%.  You really harped on the debt problem during your campaign, so you know what we're talking about here.  Now, what did you want us to do with our dwindling and rapidly agining population again? 

PRESIDENT RYAN:  Er... (to foreign policy advisors) are there any rich allies left? 

Ryan's "robust and frank engagement" is really just one step removed from Donald Trump's claims that the right negotiator could get Saudia Arabia to lower oil prices or China to revalue the yuan.  It's the foreign policy of Campaign Fantasyland. 

And for that, I congratulate Representative Ryan for his hard-earned Trumpie nomination. 

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. 

New Year's is a time for resolutions, a time for pledging to shed the bad habits of the previous year.  Goodness knows, the foreign policy community and public commentators who occasionally foray into international relations have accumulated a lot of bad habits over the past year.  Here's a list of nine memes, tropes, rhetorical tics, and baseless arguments that I'd like to see less of in 2011:

1)  [Fill in the blank] is an "existential threat".   This term of art has been on the rise for decades, but it seemed omnipresent this past year.  To be sure, lots of actors face a lot of threats out there in world politics.  The bar has to be pretty high, however, for something to be an "existential threat."   For my money, it means that the country or its modus operandi could be completely extinguished. 

Using this criteria, there are no existential threats to the United States in the international system.  In 2010, this term was increasingly used by Israelis with respect to Iran.  So, let's stipulate that if Iran were ever to acquire/develop, say, a dozen nuclear weapons, then the country would represent an existential threat to Israel.  Commentators who do this, however, would also need to stipulate that Israel, in possessing 60-85 warheads, has represented an existential threat to Iran for decades. 

2)  Iran or North Korea are "irrational" actors in world politics.  Look, it's a lot of blog fun to point out the absurdities of the Kims or Ahmadinejad -- I get that.  Claiming a country's leaders are "irrational" simply because they don't want the same things that you want doesn't make them irrational, however -- it just means that they have a different set of preferences.  The question to ask is whether these governments are pursuing their desired ends in a strategic, utility-maximizing manner.  Based on their behavior in 2010, I'd say the answer for both governments is yes.  So quit saying either Pyongyang or Tehran might be crazy enough to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike for no reason.  Both regimes have really strong self-preservation instincts, however -- the "crazy man launching the bomb" contingency ain't gonna happen. 

Note that this doesn't make it any easier to bargain with these countries -- these might be zero-sum bargaining situations.  Eliminating the "irrationality" dimension, however, might make public debates about what to do a little more grounded. 

3)  Wikileaks is just like a newspaper:  No it isn't.  There's a lot of loose talk about how Wikileaks is really just like Bob Woodward or the New York Times in what it's doing.  And sure, Wikileaks' Israel Shamir bears more than a passing resemblance to the Times' Walter Duranty.  To my knowledge, neither Woodward nor the Times has threatened to publish documents in its possession as a blackmail device, or warn people to get their money out of a financial institution before something damaging is released.   

Wikileaks is an NGO with a quixotic leader who really doesn't like the U.S. government... which makes Wikileaks like a lot of other NGOs.  I think a lot of invective directed against the organization has been misplaced, and I agree with Gideon Rachman that Wikileaks has actually does the U.S. a favor.  That said, tt's not an ethical journalistic entity.

4)  Barack Obama does not really believe in American exceptionalism.  I've heard this from a lot of Republican wonks that should know better.  The meme emerged from an answer that Obama gave at a news conference in April 2009.  John Dickerson at Slate addressed this a few weeks ago:  

In the complete answer of nearly 300 words... it's clear that Obama is saying something more complex."We have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional," he says. What makes this moment notable is not that the president nails it but that, in real time, without a carefully crafted set of talking points to guide him, he is trying to find the balance between singing the song of America and demonstrating before a foreign audience that he understands that America is not the only country in the world. 

5) Everything is the fault of American grand strategy.  I'm too tired to repeat my criticisms of this theme -- just click here, here, and here. 

6) Networks will end hierarchy as we know it.  Arguments like this one tend to underestimate the ability of hierarchical organizations to evolve over time.  More importantly, networks can have plenty of hierarchy embedded within them. 

7)  Sarah Palin's views correspond to either American public opinion or the official policy of the U.S. government.  Um... no.  Palin has perfected the art of using a tweet or Facebook post to capture attention.  She's also perfected the art of declining poll numbers and increasing unfavorability ratings. 

Some commentators have blurred the distinction between Palin and the United States as a whole.  Let's be clear -- Sarah Palin is a private citizen with absolutely no official authority.  Using her as an example of how "America" or the "United States government" feels about an issue is disingenuous in the extreme.  When the Wall Street Journal editorial page sides with Michelle Obama over Sarah Palin, I think it's safe to say that the former Alaska governor has jumped the shark. 

8)  Because some international relations uses numbers, it's useless to foreign policymakers.  Click here and here -- really, there was a surprising amount of crap written about this topic this year, and it would be just peachy if it could stop.  

9)  2011 will be all about zombies.  Oh, wait... that one is true.   

OK, there's a lot of smack talk in this post.  So, in the interest of karma, readers are warily encouraged to suggest what my 2011 reslutions should be for the blog. 

[You meant warmly, right?--ed.  Uh.. sure.]

I see I wasn't the only one to muse about the effect of the midterm elections on American foreign policy. See Bruce Stokes, Richard Haass, James Lindsay, Daniel Larison at various other parts of the interwebs, as well as FP's own Phil Levy, Marc Lynch, Peter Feaver, and Steve Walt.

Reading all of this accumulated wisdom doesn't change my mind all that much. For example, I don't disagree that a more conservative Congress will be even more obstreperous in blocking Obama's foreign affairs appointees than it was previously. To be sure, this has a profound effect on individual lives and careers -- but it doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. The cumulative effect might be problematic, in that a more obstructionist Congress might lead to some policymakers staying in office for a longer-than-optimal period of time.

On the other hand, I find the notion that a resurgent GOP will contribute to a more adventuresome foreign policy in the Middle East to be pretty absurd. First, to repeat, the administration holds almost all of the policy levers. Sure, Congress can sanction Iran -- again -- but it's not like that's going to change anything.

In his post, Lynch implies that Congress can browbeat Obama into supporting regime change in an echo of the Iraq Liberation Act. I'd point out that it's not 1998 anymore -- Obama is unlikely to fall for the same trap that befell Clinton. Oh, and by the way, the American public is really sick of the current wars, ain't looking for a new one, and clearly wants Washington to focus on the economy and job creation. Republicans know that they didn't get elected because of their foreign policy views. If they start making noise about Iran, I'd imagine the administration lambasting them for taking their eye off the economy.

No, the more I think about it, there is one obvious effect and one longer-term effect that the midterm swing will have on American foreign policy.

The obvious effect is that gridlock will make it that much more difficult for Washington to get a grip on long-term policy problems like debt reduction and global warming. There's no way that any climate change legislation will get through, and I'm pessimistic that the deficit commission will trigger a grand bargain on getting America's financial house in order. None of this will matter much over the next two years, but it will start to matter more over the next two decades.

The more subtle, pernicious effect is that paralysis in the elected branches will lead to more populist outrage at the unelected portions of the U.S. government. Consider, for example, the Fed's decision yesterday to engage in $600 billion more of quantitative easing (translated into plain English here). In today's Washington Post op-ed explaining this action, Ben Bernanke had an interesting comment in his closing section:

The Federal Reserve cannot solve all the economy's problems on its own. That will take time and the combined efforts of many parties, including the central bank, Congress, the administration, regulators and the private sector.

He's right, but think about this for a second. If Congress and the administration can't agree on anything, then the only public actors capable of taking concrete action on the economy are the central bank and the regulators. These institutions are already ridiculously unpopular. Being forced to take imperfect actions because of elected branch paralysis won't help matters (compared to fiscal and tax policies, there's only so much that quantitative easing can do to stimulate the economy). If you think hostility to elected elites is high, wait until the focus switches to unelected elites.

Note that all of this is contingent on the economy continuing to stink. Robust economic growth will ease populist anger, which will blunt some of the effects I just discussed.

So, in the short term, I still don't think U.S. foreign policy will change all that much. The long-term effects of gridlock combined with a persistently sour economy, however, could be very worrisome.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a major foreign policy speech today at the Council on Foreign Relations office in DC.  This is interesting, as the Obama administration released its National Security Strategy only a few months ago, so one would think that a major speech by the Secretary of State would be pretty superfluous. 

The guts of Clinton's speech can be excerpted as follows: 

[L]et me say it clearly: The United States can, must, and will lead in this new century....

Architecture is the art and science of designing structures that serve our common purposes, built to last and withstand stress.  That's what we seek to build - a network of alliances and partnerships, regional organizations and global institutions, that is durable and dynamic enough to help us meet today's challenges and adapt to threats that we cannot even conceive of, just as our parents never dreamt of melting glaciers or dirty bombs....

After more than a year and a half, we have begun to see the dividends of our strategy.  We are advancing America's interests and making progress on some of our most pressing challenges.  Today we can say with confidence that this model of American leadership works, and that it offers our best hope in a dangerous world.

I'd like to outline several steps we are taking to implement this strategy....

First, we have turned to our closest allies, the nations that share our most fundamental values and interests -- and our commitment to solving common problems.  From Europe and North America to East Asia and the Pacific, we are renewing and deepening the alliances that are the cornerstone of global security and prosperity....

[T]he second step in our strategy for global leadership is to help build the capacity of developing partners.  To help countries obtain the tools and support they need to solve their own problems and help solve our common problems.  To help people lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, away from extremism, and toward sustainable progress.  The Obama Administration views development as a strategic, economic, and moral imperative - as central to advancing American interests as diplomacy and defense....

We must also take into account those countries that are growing rapidly and already playing more influential roles in their regions and in global affairs, such as China and India, Turkey, Mexico and Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, as well as Russia, as it redefines its own role in the world.

Our third major step has been to deepen engagement with these emerging centers of influence....

[T]he fourth key step in our strategy has been to reinvigorate America's commitment to be an active transatlantic, Pacific and hemispheric leader....

[O]ur fifth step has been to reengage with global institutions and begin modernizing them to meet the evolving challenges of the 21st century.  We need institutions that are flexible, inclusive, and complementary, instead of competing with one another for jurisdiction.  Institutions that encourage nations to play productive roles, that marshal common efforts, and enforce the system of rights and responsibilities that binds us all....

As we strengthen and modernize regional and global institutions, the United States is also working to cement democracy, human rights, and the rule of law into their foundations.  To construct an architecture of values that spans the globe and includes every man, woman and child.  An architecture that can not only counter repression and resist pressure on human rights, but also extend those fundamental freedoms to places where they have been too long denied.

This is our sixth major step.  We are upholding and defending the universal values that are enshrined in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (emphases added). 

So, what do I think of all of this?  Let's divide my reactions into what I think are the good, the bad, and the BS portions of Clinton's speech.

The Good:

1)  The Asia/Pacific.  Clinton shoehorned this into her fourth tactic, but it was an effective articulation of the administration's calibrated approach towards China. 

2)  Russia.  The Obama administration has certainly reversed what had been a badly deteriorating relationship with the Russian Federation.  One quibble:  Clinton said at one point that the relationship in January 2009, "invigorated spy novelists and arm chair strategists."  Gimme a break:  Anna Chapman did a much better job of invigorating spy novelists. 

The Bad: 

1)  The overestimation of shared interests.  Clinton talked about, "international diplomacy aimed at rallying nations to solve common problems and achieve shared aspirations" as a constant of American foreign policy.  That's great -- but what about the areas where values and aspirations are not shared?  There were far too many Pollyannish paragraphs in this speech.

2)  The underemphasis on patience.  Clinton used a good turn of phrase -- "strategic patience" -- to talk about the time required to see some of these foreign policy initiatives bear fruit.  This should have been played up much more.  Indeed, the exemplar Clinton gave of her foreign policy vision -- Iran -- does not really look all that successful right now.  The speechwriter should have also tied in this notion of patience with American determination and resolve. 

The BS:

1)  Europe.  The whole section on strengthening bilateral and multilateral ties to Europe almost caused me to lose my cornflakes.  I mean, c'mon.  Is forcing the Europeans to cut down their number of seats in the IMF an example of strengthening alliances?  I see the intrinsic merit in occasionally dissing the Europeans, but don't tell me that anything transatlantic has been "strengthened" over the past 18 months. 

2)  The entire "global architecture" theme:  You know, it's a funny thing:  the revamped G-20 is, in many ways, at the center of the whole "remaking the global architecture" idea.  Guess how many times it was mentioned in this speech?  Once.  If the State Department thinks the Iran policy is a more successful case than the G-20, then how can I possible have any faith in any new global governance structure? 

Am I missing anything? 

I suspect everyone inside the Beltway will be discussing the first part of the Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series on the intelligence and homeland security apparatus that has mushroomed since the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, the 5,400 word opening salvo by Dana Priest and William Arkin doesn't pull any punches in its lead:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Priest and Arkin are top-notch reporters and analysts, and a lot of the material in this report is pretty damning. It's well worth the read.

I have one small quibble, however, which is with the "redundancy and waste" argument about multiple agencies doing the same work. This is a standard argument in favor of rationalization, and it's not always wrong. It should be noted, however, that some redundancy is actually a good thing, particularly on an issue like counter-terrorism.

Say a single bureaucracy is tasked with intelligence gathering about threat X. Let's say this bureaucracy represents the best of the best of the best -- the A-Team. The A-Team does it's job and catches 95% of the emergent threats from X. That's still 5% that is missed.

Now say you have another independent bureaucracy with a similar remit. This agency is staffed by different people with their own set of blind spots. Let's even stipulate that we're talking about the B-team here, and they'll only catch 80% of the emergent threats from X.

If thesr two bureaucracies are working independently -- and this is an important if -- then the odds that a threat would go unobserved by both bureaucracies is .05*.2 = .01 = 1%. So, by adding another bureaucracy, even a less competent one, the chances of an undetected threat getting through are cut from 5% to 1%. That ain't nothing.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions that need to hold for this effect to hold. Priest and Arkin suggest that some of these assumptions don't hold (many inteligence analysts relying on the same information). They also note the rise of segemented information, however, which leads me to think that some redundancy might be a good thing.

Admittedly, a world of 1,271 agencies tackling this question is probably one of redundancy run amok. I'm just saying that a little redundancy is a very good thing.