I have a shocking confession to make:  it's possible that maybe, just maybe, professors and graduate students don't always finish tasks on time.  Once in a blue moon, a project will sneak up on us that is due the next day, at which point the academic or aspiring academic is faced with the following menu of options: 

1)  Pull an all-nighter, throw every crazy idea onto the page, and pray something sticks;

2)  Email whomever is waiting for your written work and explain that illness/unforseeen circumstances/preparations for the zombie apocalypse mean you need another week or so to finish;

3)  Go dark on all social media, refuse to answer email queries, and hope that everything works out for the best. 

You'd be surprised how many people opt for (3), but there it is. 

I bring this up because of Mali.  Now let me confess that I am about as far from an Africa expert as one can be.  Let me further confess that I haven't paid too much attention to Mali over the past year.  My sum knowledge of the stituation there boils down to "there's some trouble in the north," "the government ain't that stable," and "gosh, people seem to be saying, 'Al Qaeda!!  There's Al Qaeda in them thar hills!!' an awful lot." 

Still, reading this Financial Times story by Xan Rice on the United Nations' latest plan of action for Mali, it doesn't seem like the Security Council knows that much more than I do: 

The UN Security Council has approved the deployment of an African force to retake northern Mali from al-Qaeda-linked insurgents.

The council also authorised the EU and individual countries to help equip and train Mali’s army, which is meant to work alongside the 3,300-strong international force. The proposed military operation is not expected to start before September 2013 to allow for proper planning and political progress in Mali....

The French-drafted text stresses the need for a twin track military and political plan. Deployment of the intervention force, known as the African-led International Support Mission in Mali, or AFISMA, was authorised for an initial one-year period to take “all necessary measures, in compliance with applicable international humanitarian law and human rights law”. Working alongside Mali’s armed forces, the goal is to retake northern Mali from “terrorist, extremist and armed groups”....

The UN resolution did not specify how the international mission will be funded. Nor is it clear how the force will be composed. The west African regional block Ecowas has pledged to supply the 3,300 troops, with Nigeria taking the lead. But US military officials believe that the desert conditions in northern Mali will be more suited to armies from non-Ecowas countries, such as Chad and Mauritania.

There are also questions about how Mali’s army will work with an outside force. Coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo, who retains significant influence in Bamako and forced the prime minister to resignthis month, is wary of allowing in foreign troops, fearing his power will be diminished.

The resolution stressed that more military planning was needed, and the security council asked Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General, to report on the readiness of AFISMA troops before the start of any combat operations.

So, to sum up:  the Security Council has pledged to send peacekeepers on a timetable that makes academic publishing seem speedy, without any idea of how it will be funded, staffed, or operate with indigenous forces, married to vague calls for political action to lay the groundwork for said peacekeepers. 

So in this case, it appears that the Security Council has followed multiple academic routes -- they scrambled to put something together at thre last minute, but still managed to kick the can down the road a great deal. 

Again, let me confess that this could very well be the right thing to do -- I'm no Mali expert.  I do know something about procrastination and last-minute hackwork, however, and man, this reeks of it.

I hereby plead and beg Mali-watchers to correct my misperceptions in the comments.  Cause from the outside, this whole thing seems damn peculiar. 

The latest issue of The Washington Quarterly is just lousy with China essays -- it's like there's a theme or something.  Andrew Scobell and Andrew Nathan tackle China's (apparently overstretched) military, and Guoyou Song and Wen Jin Yuan review China's response to the burgeoning Trans-Pacific Partnership.

James Reilly has an essay on China's use of unilateral economic sanctions that really caught my eye, however.  The overwhelming bulk of economic sanctions that have been threatened and used during the past century have been from the United States.  From a scholarly perspective this is somewhat disturbing, as general theories about economic statecraft become tough to distinguish from theories of U.S. foreign policy.  If another great power starts being profligate with its economic statecraft, there's the promise of a lot of new data. 

China has deplored the use of economic sanctions in the past, but as Reilly notes, "Over the past few years, Chinese experts have begun to clear some of the legal, moral, ideological, and practical hurdles to Beijing’s use of unilateral sanctions."

So... how effective are they?  Well, at best, it's a mixed bag.  Here's Reilly's key paragraph: 

Ultimately, China uses sanctions for the same reasons other countries do: they are a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to signal dissatisfaction, increase the costs to those who take undesired actions, and satisfy domestic demands to respond to those actions. Sanctions can assuage domestic criticism while not undermining broader economic and diplomatic interests. For all these reasons, China has increasingly resorted to unilateral sanctions in recent years on issues like Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, and maritime disputes.

If you read the article, it's pretty clear that any concessions made by other countries have  been pretty modest --more modest than Reilly seems willing to admit (compare Reilly's take on the 2010 Nobel Prize sanctions with, for example, Erik Voeten's). 

But there are three caveats to this observation.  First, if China views the sanctions as mostly symbolic and for domestic consumption, then it wouldn't be surprising that they're ineffective.  Symbolic sanctions aren't supposed to work, they're supposed to be for show.  Second, Reilly notes that China likes threatening sanctions more than using them, and sanctions threats are more likely to work as a form of pre-emptive coercion and deterrence than actually compelling the actor in this particular case. 

Third, as with its economic statecraft more generally, China is just beginning to understand this foreign policy tool.  Indeed, as Reilly observes, the problem with issuing empty threats is that "the credibility of Beijing’s bluffs risk eroding over time."  It will be veeeery interesting to see how China's approach to economic statecraft evolves over time. 

Developing....

The New Republic has assembled a symposium on what the United States should do about Syria.  Among others, contributors will include Larry Diamond, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and... er... me:

The New Republic wouldn’t be soliciting my take if there was an easy solution to this policy conundrum. Indeed, Syria is such a tough nut to crack that I fear the best approach to the problem is to apply a Sherlock Holmes-style logic to it. When all of the impossible policy choices have been eliminated, only the improbable ones—however unpalatable they might be—are left to mull over.

Read the whole thing:  I confess to not being happy with either of my suggested policies (buy off the Russians; arm the Free Syrian Army), but as I conclude, "the sad truth is that there is no good outcome, only different shades of terrible." 

For some other policy suggestions, see Daniel Serwer and Caitlin Fitzgerald on the reverting-to-nonviolence option.  This argument does have some support in the academic literature -- but I also think this option has been overtaken by events. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum.  I'd also recommend reading Dan Trombly's extended realpolitik cost-benefit analysis  of myriad options and policy contingencies for Syria.  His key paragraph: 

The much more unpleasant strategic reality is that, whether foreign forces intervene or not, the U.S. receives little reward from hastening Assad’s downfall. An embattled Assad imposes just the same limitations on Syrian and Iranian threats to U.S. interests. Resources will have to be diverted from the proxies Iran supports through Syria to Syria itself as Iran tries to maintain its host’s viability. The loss of Assad’s regime would mean a rapid retrenchment in Iranian support, for sure, but this would likely be replaced by a proxy campaign against Syria’s new government and its foreign backers, or a redeployment of IRGC/QF assets to other theaters, probably against the U.S (if not both). Given that rapidly overthrowing Assad without major overt military action from a broad coalition of forces is a pipe dream anyway, the United States should consider contingency plans in which it works through, rather than against, the specter of protracted civil war. To be able to bleed Iran in Syria would, relative to the risks involved, be a far more significant strategic opportunity against Iranian power relative to the investment and risk than would be a major overt campaign to overthrow Assad outright. The more blood and treasure Iran loses in Syria – even if Assad stays in power longer – the weaker Iran will be.

This is cold -- but in the absence of rapid regime change, it's also spot-on.  My  only point of disagreement with Trombly is that he thinks supporting/arming/training the FSA is a bad idea, while I think it's a surefire way to achieve his preferred outcome.  This wasn't the logic I used in my TNR essay, and it's one I'm reluctant to voice, but there it is. 

What do you think? 

As I noted previously, compared to his GOP rivals, Mitt Romney has some actual foreign policy thinking going on.  On the other hand, as Dan Trombly points out, doing better than Herman Cain or Rick Perry is a really low bar.  So, looked at objectively, what's my assessment of Romney's foreign policy white paper? 

I could go through it line by line, but James Joyner already did that for The Atlantic.  As it turns out, I'm reaching a course called The Art and Science of Statecraft that will require students to write a grand strategy document.  Sooo.... if Mitt Romney was one of my students, how would I grade him?  See below:

********************************************************************************** 

Mitt,

You and your study team have clearly put a lot of work into "An American Century."  It's cogently written and organized.  Your basic statement of purpose -- "advance an international system that is congenial to the institutions of open markets, representative government, and respect for human rights (p. 7)" -- fits perfectly within the mainstream of American foreign policy thinking. You've done an excellent job of demonstrating an awareness of the complexity of threats that face the United States in the 21st century.  I liked it on p. 6 when you noted that:

In the highly dynamic realm of national security and foreign policy there are seldom easy answers. Discrete circumstances in disparate regions of the world demand different kinds of approaches. There is no silver bullet for the problem of securing the United States and protecting our interests around the world.

You've also demonstrated an appropriate awareness that American power rests on more than a strong military.  When you note that a Romney administration would "apply the full spectrum of hard and soft power to influence events before they erupt into conflict (p. 8)," I caught myself nodding along.  

Some of the details are intriguing as well.  I need to look more into these "Reagan economic zones" that you mention a lot, but applying them to Latin America and the Pacific Rim make a great deal of strategic and economic sense.  I'm not fully persuaded that your notion of creating regional envoys to organize all "soft power resources" is all that different from the foreign policy czars or special envoys of administrations past, but this kind of argument fits well with your management background. 

That said, there are some logical flaws and major gaps in this draft that will have to be corrected if you want to earn a better grade.  The first problem is the style.  I recognize that you've written this as a campaign document, so you're never going to completely eliminate the unadulterated horsheshit allegations about the current president going on an apology tour.  Maybe you could do it a bit more subtly in the future, however? 

Secondly, there's a lack of historical awareness in some parts of the document.  For example, on page 7 the paper says:

[A] Romney foreign policy will proceed with clarity and resolve. The United States will  clearly enunciate its interests and values. Our friends and allies will not have doubts about where we  stand and what we will do to safeguard our interests and theirs; neither will our rivals, competitors, and adversaries.

Now, reading this, I kept thinking back to the Bush administration and its repeated assetions that that there would be no hypocrisy in foreign affairs.  Much like Bush, reality turned out to be trickier.  I suspect you know this, from the other excerpts noted earlier.  So get rid of this fluff:  I'm sure statements like this play well in a management consulting boardroom, but it's not going to cut it in the real world. 

Similarly, for someone who says that, the Obama administration is "undermining one’s allies (p. 3)" in contrast to you, who will "reassure our allies (p. 13)", you don't actually talk about America's treaty allies much at all.  True, you do talk about expanding America's alliance system to include India and Indonesia.  Mexico gets some face time.  Israel gets a lot of face time.  On the other hand, NATO is not mentioned once in this entire document.  Neither is the European Union.  Japan and South Korea get perfunctory treamtment at best.  Turkey is a major treaty ally but you treat it like a pariah state.  For someone who's claiming that the U.S. will reassure its major allies, you didn't seem to give them much attention at all.  This is a really important problem, because Japan and Europe have been crucial allies in a lot of major American initiatives -- and they're getting weaker.  Even in discussing new possible allies, I'm kind of gobsmacked that Brazil is never mentioned. 

Another big problem is that your approach to China is so shot full of contradictions that I don't know where to begin.  Do you seriously believe what you wrote on p. 3: 

The easiest way... to become embroiled in a clash with China over Taiwan, or because of China’s ambitions in the South or East China Seas, will be to leave Beijing in doubt about the depth of our commitment to longstanding allies in the region.

Really?  See, I'd say the easiest way to get embroiled in a clash with China is to write Taiwan a blank check on their defense needs.  The second easiest would be to publicly bluster on about Taiwan to a Chinese leadership that feels increasingly insecure and will be tempted to stoke the fires of Chinese nationalism by creating another Quemoy and Matsu crisis. 

Furthermore, you talk explicitly about supplying Taiwan with "adequate aircraft and other military platforms (p. 18)" in supposed contrast to the Obama administration.  You also talk about strengthening relationships with other countries that neighbor China in an effort to preserve American dominance.  Now, this might be a bit provocative, but I get the rationale.  Here's the thing, though -- you can't simultaneously do this and assert that you will "work to persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament (p. 29)."  Really?  How exactly are you gonna persuade them on this point?   Do you really think that arming Taiwan to the teeth and blasting its human rights record will do the trick? 

If the section on China is contradictory, then your discussion of Pakistan is worse.  You state on p. 31-32:

It is in the interests of all three nations to see that Afghanistan and the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border region are rid of the Taliban and other insurgent groups.... Pakistan should understand that any connection between insurgent forces and Pakistan’s security and intelligence forces must be severed. The United States enjoys significant leverage over both of these nations. We should not be shy about using it. 

There are at least two assertions in the quoted section that are highly dubious -- I'll let you find them on your own.   

One final point, should you choose to revise this draft strategy -- you need to prioritize the threats you discuss in the paper.  You list a whole bunch of them -- rising authoritarian states, transnational violence, failing states, and rogue states.  If you have to prioritize, which threats merit greater attention?  This should actually be pretty easy, since you absurdly overhype the threats posed by some of these countries (Venezuela, Cuba and Russia in particular). 

I look forward to reviewing your later work. 

Grade:  B

Fareed Zakaria thinks that the Libya intervention signals "a new era in U.S. foreign policy": 

The United States decided that it was only going to intervene in Libya if it could establish several conditions:

1)    A local group that was willing to fight and die for change; in other words, "indigenous capacity".

2)    Locally recognized legitimacy in the form of the Arab League's request for intervention.

3)    International legitimacy in the form of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.

4)    Genuine burden sharing with the British and French spelling out precisely how many sorties they would be willing to man and precisely what level of commitment they would be willing to provide.…

The new model does two things:

First, it ensures that there's genuinely a local alliance committed to the same goals as the external coalition.  This way, there is more legitimacy on the ground. And if there is anything Afghanistan and Iraq have taught us, it is that local legitimacy is key.

Second, this model ensures that there is genuine burden sharing so that the United States is not left owning the country as has happened so often in the past.…

In the future, we will again have to follow this limited model of intervention.

This sounds great, except that the set of criteria that Zakaria lists is so stringent that I seriously doubt that they will be satisfied again in my lifetime. Russia and China regretted the U.N. support the minute after it passed, and the president of the Arab League had buyer's remorse almost immediately after NATO started bombing. Even if the Libya operation looks like a success from here on out, there's no way that list of criteria will be satisfied. Ever. 

Now, for those readers worried about the creeping militarization of American foreign policy, this might sound like a great idea, as it creates a ridiculously high barrier for military intervention. And, indeed, so long as these criteria are only used to satisfy humanitarian military interventions, it sounds good. Except that most military interventions aren't strictly humanitarian. The moment core national interests kick in, these criteria get downgraded from prerequisites to luxuries. 

So Zakaria is wildly inflating the importance of the sui generis nature of the Libya intervention. But that's OK; he's a pundit, not an actual policymaker. There's no way anyone working in the White House, say, would make such a simplistic, facile -- hey, what's in this Josh Rogin FP interview with Ben Rhodes? 

This week's toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya shows that the Obama administration's multilateral and light-footprint approach to regime change is more effective than the troop-heavy occupation-style approach used by the George W. Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, a top White House official told Foreign Policy today in a wide-ranging interview.

"The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis of legitimacy for this but also will provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for communications, in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with FP. "While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition."…

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Rhodes said that the United States is not going to be able to replicate the exact same approach to intervention in other countries, but identified the two core principles of relying on indigenous forces and burden sharing as "characteristics of how the president approaches foreign policy and military intervention."

Excuse me for a second; I have to go do this. 

Look, ceteris paribus, burden-sharing and local support are obviously nifty things to have. I guarantee you, however, that the time will come when an urgent foreign-policy priority will require some kind of military statecraft, and these criteria will not be met. The Obama administration should know this, since its greatest success in military statecraft to date did not satisfy either of these criteria. 

There is always a danger, after a perceived policy success, to declare it as a template for all future policies in that arena. Pundits make this mistake all the time. Policymakers should know better. 

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.

Pssst… international relations majors and masters students. Having a hard time coming up with a BA or MA thesis topic? Worried that too many of your friends are writing about Wikileaks?

Here's a fun little project, courtesy of the Financial Times' Andrew Ward and Geoff Dyer:

China's campaign to boycott this year's Nobel Peace Prize was shown to have had some success after 18 countries joined Beijing in declining invitations to Friday's award ceremony for Liu Xiaobo, a jailed democracy activist.

Russia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and Pakistan are among 19 countries, including China, that have declined invitations to the prize-giving.

The Norwegian Nobel committee has accused Beijing of applying "unprecedented" pressure on countries to boycott the Oslo ceremony, amid Chinese anger over the award to the jailed dissident.

The other absentees are expected to be Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco, according to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which is organizing the ceremony....

Ambassadors from all countries with embassies in Oslo are invited to the ceremony each year. As of Tuesday, 44 countries had indicated they would be represented on Friday.

Two countries - Algeria and Sri Lanka - had not replied.

It was not clear that all 19 absentees were staying away because of China but the Nobel Institute said the number of expected no-shows was higher than usual.

In 2008, for example, when the prize was won by Martti Ahtisaari, a relatively uncontroversial Finnish politician, 10 embassies were not represented at the ceremony for various reasons (emphases added).

OK, here's your thesis topic: what were the key factors that determined a country's decision not to attend Lu's Nobel ceremony? How much of this was due to Chinese pressure, how much was due to ideological affinity with the Chinese regime, and how much was due to the ambassador's spouse renting The Expendables on Netflix and absolutely needing to watch it that night?

The obvious variables to consider are alliance patterns, regime type, trade with/aid from China, proximity to Beijing, and maybe a corruption measure. That said, if you look at the list of all foreign embassies in Oslo, there are some interesting questions to ask. Why is Thailand attending but not the Philippines? Why is Colombia joining Venezuela in not attending? Why is Vietnam, an enduring rival of China, allying with China on this issue?

Go to it, students! And check out the lively comments that I'm sure will be posted down below that provide additional hypotheses. And remember, "A day without social science is like a day without sunshine."

UPDATE:  Reuters does some preliminary field work.  The most interesting and candid admission:

Embassies are not required to explain why they accept or decline a Nobel invitation, but a senior Filipino diplomat spoke candidly, underlining China's growing power, especially in Asia.

"We do not want to further annoy China," he said.

There's going to be a lot of scholars, policy analysts and enthused amateurs who are going to drink up the Wikileaks documents as a great new empirical resource. So they should -- they did nothing to cause their release, and these are documents that ordinarily would have taken 25 years minimum to be declassified.

That said, there's going to be a natural inclination to think that any Wikileaks document will endow it with the totemic value of Absolute Truth. "If it was secret, then it must be true," goes this logic. That's a more serious problem. For Exhibit A, let's go to Simon Tisdall of The Guardian's interpreting what the Wikileaks documents reveal about how China views North Korea:

China has signaled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and is privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime, according to leaked US embassy cables that reveal senior Beijing figures regard their official ally as a "spoiled child"....

The leaked North Korea dispatches detail how:

•  
  •  
    • South Korea's vice-foreign minister said he was told by two named senior Chinese officials that they believed Korea should be reunified under Seoul's control, and that this view was gaining ground with the leadership in Beijing.
    • China's vice-foreign minister told US officials that Pyongyang was behaving like a "spoiled child" to get Washington's attention in April 2009 by carrying out missile tests.
    • A Chinese ambassador warned that North Korean nuclear activity was "a threat to the whole world's security".
    • Chinese officials assessed that it could cope with an influx of 300,000 North Koreans in the event of serious instability, according to a representative of an international agency, but might need to use the military to seal the border.

In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.

Ah, OK, this explains why China has slowly distanced itself from North Korea's recent actions. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, China has done nothing of the sort.

I don't doubt that Chinese officials said everything reported in the documents. I do doubt that those statements mean that China is willing to walk away from North Korea. It means that Chinese diplomats are... er.... diplomatic. They will tell U.S. and South Korean officials some of what they want to hear. I'm sure that they will say somewhat different things to their North Korean counterparts.

The key is to determine whether China's actions reflect their words. And over the past six months, China has not acted in a manner consistent with Tisdall's claims.

This is not to imply that China is acting in a particularly perfidious or underhanded manner, by the way. They're acting like any great power would -- stall for time while trying to figure out the best way to handle a troublesome ally. The point is, just because someone says something in a Wikileaks memo doesn't make it so.

The Christian Science Monitor's Yigal Schliefer reports on a less-than-productive meeting between Israel and Turkey:

A diplomatic spat is threatening to worsen Israel’s strained relations with Turkey, traditionally one of its most important allies in the region. The rift exposes growing Israeli frustration with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who in a bid to increase Turkey’s regional standing has increasingly spoken out against Israel.

This latest crisis included a showdown at Israel’s Foreign Ministry, where Turkey’s ambassador was summoned to explain Mr. Erdogan’s recent harsh criticism, as well as a TV show that portrayed Israeli intelligence agents holding a woman and her baby hostage.

Breaking with diplomatic protocol, Israeli officials failed to include the customary Turkish flag on the table between them and the Turkish ambassador, whom they seated on a low couch. To rub it in, they instructed the press members in attendance to note that they were sitting in higher chairs and the usual diplomatic niceties were conspicuously absent.

“The message was, ‘We’ve had enough,’” says Ephraim Inbar, an expert on Turkey-Israel relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. “Erdogan has taken things too far. It might have not been the best treatment for an ambassador, but it came from the gut. The signal is that we’re not going to take it anymore.” (emphasis added)

Yes, because heaping petty humiliations on another country will always shift their attitude in a more favorable direction.

Beyond Erdogan's statements -- which, from the Israeli perspective, are probably infuriating -- the proximate motivation for the meeting appears to be the depiction of Israelis on a 24-style show broadcast in Turkey.   Let me repeat that -- the Israeli Foreign Ministry is cheesed off about a Turkish television show. 

So, is this just Israeli overreaction?  Stupidity?  According to Ha'aretz's Barak Ravid, it's a bit more complicated than that: 

Senior officials in his own ministry say Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is trying to foil the scheduled visit of Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Ankara following renewed tensions in relations between the two countries. Barak is scheduled to travel to Turkey on Sunday for an official visit in which he will meet with Turkey's defense and foreign ministers....

"There's a feeling Lieberman wants to heat things up before Barak's visit to Turkey," a senior Foreign Ministry official said. "Everything that took place yesterday was part of Lieberman's political agenda."

This raises a very troubling question:  what does it say about the state of Israel's body politic that Avigdor Lieberman thinks he can enhance his political position by snubbing one of the few semi-friendly countries in the region? 

UPDATE:  This was such a picayune slight that I'm sure it will all blow over.  Oh, wait....

My FP colleague Marc Lynch has dissected Alan Kuperman's New York Times op-ed on the wisdom of bombing Iran.  Lynch takes great pains (more on that in a moment) to rip apart Kuperman's argument so I don't have to, but I can't resist pointing out the most tendentious point in the essay:

As for the risk of military strikes undermining Iran’s opposition, history suggests that the effect would be temporary. For example, NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia briefly bolstered support for President Slobodan Milosevic, but a democratic opposition ousted him the next year.

Now, this assertion contains facts, but is so radically incomplete as to  be f***ing insane.  

To add a bit of detail:  maybe, just maybe, the reason Slobodan Milosevic was ousted had less to do with the bombing itself, but because the Serbian leader completely capitulated to NATO's demands on Kosovo after eight weeks of airstrikes.   The bombing angered those already on the outs with Milosevic; the acquiescence after costly punishment angered Serbian nationalists and technocrats.  So it wasn't just the bombing that affected Serbian politics -- it was Milosevic's decision to alter Serbian policy in a manner favorable to NATO.

So, yes, if the Iranian leadership does what Kuperman wants them to do after being bombed -- acquiesce on the nuclear program -- then yes, they'll be gone.  Now, raise your hand if you think the current Iranian leadership will respond to a bombing campaign by shifting their position closer to the U.S. position. 

So, yes, this is a pretty silly op-ed, and the New York Times wasted an awful lot of column inches on it.  Go ahead, heap some calumny on them. *

That said, the venom directed at it by Lynch and others seems a bit over the top.   Lynch's explanation for why is that unless these arguments hit some strident pushback, we'll be going to war again:

The Obama administration almost certainly doesn't want to make such a wrong-headed move --- but, then, there are a lot of things which the Obama administration doesn't want to do but has been forced into by political realities (Gitmo, the public option, escalation in Afghanistan) and intentions aren't enough.   Many people may have assumed that the legacy of Iraq would have raised the bar on such arguments for war, that someone making such all too familiar claims would simply be laughed out of the public square.  The NYT today shows that they aren't.  I suspect that one of the great foreign policy challenges of 2010 is going to be to push back on this mad campaign for another pointless, counter-productive war for the sake of war. 

I would interpret things differently.  Changing the policy status quo is really, really hard, and it's normally pretty easy to gin up significant political opposition to any proposed change.  The status quo on Iran is that we're not bombing them , so I expect that to continue for a good long while. 

Indeed, the reactions to this op-ed remind me of the panic among progressives in 2007 that the Bush administration was gearing up to bomb Iran.  The truth was somewhat different.  

By all means, critique Kuperman's argument.  But let's not pretend that Dick Cheney is still vice president, or that Bill Kristol can start a war with a Weekly Standard column.  The world really has changed a bit. 

*UPDATE:  The more I think about the massive flaws in this op-ed, the more I'm beginning to wonder if this wasn't a strategic move by the New York Times op-ed page editors to subtly undercut the neoconservative argument for war.  Indeed, I would not describe the GOP links to the essay as terribly enthusiastic.  I do love Tom Gross' characterization of it as, "dry and academic and long (it runs to two pages online)."  Yes, because if you can't make the case for military action in under 400 words, there's just no point in bothering.