Hey, remember how the new Al Qaeda was going to be more networked and more capable of inspiring home-grown terrorism?  Remember how today's threat enviroment was supposed to be worse than the Cold War? 

Bear these points in mind when considering two news items that crossed my screen today.  In the first, courtesy of Micah Zenko, a Pentagon official suggests that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. overrestimated Al Qaeda's capabilities: 

With the benefit of more than a decade of hindsight, America may have misjudged the true threat posed by al-Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, a top Pentagon official said Tuesday.

“Al-Qaida wasn’t as good as we thought they were on 9/11,” said Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict.

“Quite frankly, we, the American people, were asleep at the switch, the U.S. government, prior to 9/11. So an organization that wasn’t that good looked really great on 9/11,” Sheehan told a room full of special operators in Washington who were attending an annual Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict Planning Conference.

“Everyone looked to the skies every day after 9/11 and said, ‘When is the next attack?’ And it didn’t come, partly because al-Qaida wasn’t that capable. They didn’t have other units here in the U.S. … Really, they didn’t have the capability to conduct a second attack.”

The true limitations of al-Qaida are one of two key reasons that America has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 2001.

“The other reason is that we actually responded … and crushed al-Qaida immediately after 9/11, and continually for the last 10 years,” Sheehan said. “We are better than we often give ourselves credit for. We have a very polarized political system and it’s very difficult for anybody to actually give credit or receive credit for how good we are.”

Well, sure, Al Qaeda abroad has been weakened, but this homegrown thing, I mean, that's probably a really big-- hey, what is Scott Shane reporting about in the New York Times? 

A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.

Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans "a minuscule threat to public safety." Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina (emphasis added).

Digging a wee bit into the actual report -- and read the whole thing, it ain't long -- I'll just reprint the closing two paragraphs below: 

Repeated alerts by government officials may be issued as a precaution, even when the underlying threat is uncertain. Officials may be concerned about how they would look if an attack did take place and subsequent investigations showed that officials had failed to warn the public. But a byproduct of these alerts is a sense of heightened tension that is out of proportion to the actual number of terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11.

This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sense of proportion. (emphasis added)

Now, I'm sure that the reason for this lull is that Al Qaeda's remaining assets in the United States are focusing their energies on getting all turkeys to become halal or something.  That said, I'm going to continue to insist that the United States faces a much less threatening threat environment now than it did fifty years ago.   Oh, and that I don't need to listen to Representative Peter King when he opens his mouth on national security issues. 

In my experience, pundits tend to be risk-averse in calling out a very rich person on their economic or financial analyses.  There's a couple of intuitive logics at work here: 

1)  Most pundits don't know much about economics, and so are leery of entering those waters;

2)  The really rich person likely became really rich because they demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the markets -- therefore, who is the low-six-figure-or-less-earning pundit to challenge such high-yielding wisdom;

3)  Most pundits refuse to admit that they don't understand something that reads like gobbledgook, because they're afraid this makes them look like an idiot.

Well, your humble blogger has never been afraid of looking like an idiot... which brings me to PIMCO's Bill Gross.  I'll occasionally read his monthly newsletter when a link to it pops up in my Twitter feed.  Every time, I'm amazed at the florid, rambling, not-really-related-to-his-main-point way he opens these little essays. Sometimes I find the analysis afterwards useful, sometimes I find it eerily similar to what someone says after spending too much time with Tom Friedman.  I gather he's had better years as an analyst than he did in 2011, but everyone has down years and bad predictions. 

Here's the thing, though -- I can't understand a word of his latest Financial Times column:  Here's how it opens: 

Isaac Newton may have conceptualised the effects of gravity when that mythical apple fell on his head, but could he have imagined Neil Armstrong’s hop-skip-and-jumping on the moon, or the trapping of light inside a black hole? Probably not. Likewise, the deceased economic maestro of the 21st century – Hyman Minsky – probably couldn’t have conceived how his monetary theories could be altered by zero-based money.

Things get a little clearer towards the end of the op-ed... but not much.  His February 2012 newsletter appears to be an expanded version of this op-ed (plus the usual wacky opening), so let's go there to see what he's trying to say: 

[W]hen rational or irrational fear persuades an investor to be more concerned about the return of her money than on her money then liquidity can be trapped in a mattress, a bank account or a five basis point Treasury bill. But that commonsensical observation is well known to Fed policymakers, economic historians and certainly citizens on Main Street. 

What perhaps is not so often recognized is that liquidity can be trapped by the “price” of credit, in addition to its “risk.” Capitalism depends on risk-taking in several forms. Developers, homeowners, entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes epitomize the riskiness of business building via equity and credit risk extension. But modern capitalism is dependent as well on maturity extension in credit markets. No venture, aside from one financed with 100% owners’ capital, could survive on credit or loans that matured or were callable overnight. Buildings, utilities and homes require 20- and 30-year loan commitments to smooth and justify their returns. Because this is so, lenders require a yield premium, expressed as a positively sloped yield curve, to make the extended loan. A flat yield curve, in contrast, is a disincentive for lenders to lend unless there is sufficient downside room for yields to fall and provide bond market capital gains. This nominal or even real interest rate “margin” is why prior cyclical periods of curve flatness or even inversion have been successfully followed by economic expansions. Intermediate and long rates – even though flat and equal to a short-term policy rate – have had room to fall, and credit therefore has not been trapped by “price.” 

Even if nodding in agreement, an observer might immediately comment that today’s yield curve is anything but flat and that might be true. Most short to intermediate Treasury yields, however, are dangerously close to the zero-bound which imply little if any room to fall: no margin, no air underneath those bond yields and therefore limited, if any, price appreciation. What incentive does a bank have to buy two-year Treasuries at 20 basis points when they can park overnight reserves with the Fed at 25? What incentives do investment managers or even individual investors have to take price risk with a five-, 10- or 30-year Treasury when there are multiples of downside price risk compared to appreciation? At 75 basis points, a five-year Treasury can only rationally appreciate by two more points, but theoretically can go down by an unlimited amount. Duration risk and flatness at the zero-bound, to make the simple point, can freeze and trap liquidity by convincing investors to hold cash as opposed to extend credit (emplases in original).

And... sorry, I still don't get it.  I get why zero interest rates are bad for bondholders like PIMCO.  I get that flat yield curves + high amounts of economic uncertainty = cash hoarding.   What I don't get is that:

A)  Gross himself acknowledges that the yield curve ain't flat;

B)  Low interest rates allow for private-sector deleveraging, which is a prelude to stimulating market demand;

C)  Low interest rates prevent today's government binge from being even more expensive than it would be in normal times (by keeping financing costs down);

D)  If uncertainty is decreasing -- and that appears to be the case with the U.S. economy -- then low interest rates should spur greater entrepreneurial investments. 

So, at the risk of threatening my status in the International Brotherhood of Serious Global Political Econmy Bloggers That Talk Seriously About Economics, I hereby ask my commenters to explain Bill Gross' concerns to me. Because I don't get it -- and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not the only one.

The AP breathlessly reports that Punxatawney Phil saw his shadow today, which means another six weeks of winter.  Based on recent data, I'm wondering if Syria's Bashar al-Assad can say the same thing. 

Earlier this week the U.S. intelligence heads testified on Syria, and offered some surprising assessments:

Syrian President Bashar al Assad will not be able to maintain his grip on power in the wake of a wave of opposition that has dragged on for almost a year, America’s top intelligence officials told Congress today.

“I personally believe it’s a question of time before Assad falls,” James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  CIA Director David Petraeus added, “I generally subscribe to that as well.”

Clapper said “it could be a long time” before the Assad regime falls because of “the protraction of these demonstrations” and a Syrian opposition that remains fragmented.  Despite that, Clapper said “I do not see how long he can sustain his rule of Syria.”

Hey, remember how, a year ago, Clapper got into trouble for being honest about the state of affairs in Libya despite his honesty being a political inconvenience?  This is precisely why I find his testimony so credible. 

Recent facts on the ground buttress Clapper's assessment -- as does the Financial Times' David Gardner's reportage, which is chock-full of interesting facts about the Assad regime's constrained ability to repress:

The [Assad] regime believed it could crush the uprising, which began in mid-March after revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, by the end of April and then in the summer Ramadan Offensive. It failed.

These operations revealed its reliance on two dependable units -- the 4th Armoured Division and the Republican Guard, made up of Alawites, the heterodox Shia minority that forms the backbone of the regime, and commanded by Mr Assad’s volatile younger brother, Maher. Whenever the Assads deployed units with a rank-and-file reflecting Syria’s 70 per cent Sunni majority -- as they had to if their offensives were to cover more than the hot spots of the moment -- defections ensued.

Even more interesting is Gardner's take on the evolving Russian position:

Russian diplomats…despite their rhetoric, have been talking to Syrian opposition figures and, according to the latter, carefully considering the Arab League proposals. As a veteran U.S. diplomat puts it, “there is a squishiness to where they [the Russians] are now”.

Russia does have a commercial interest in Syria, and arms the regime but the value of this depends on whether it will get paid, by a government running out of cash. It is only six years since Moscow had to write off more than $10bn in unpaid Syrian debts from the Soviet era.

Its real interest is in retaining its base facilities at the port of Tartus, its last naval asset in the Mediterranean. For that it will eventually need to reach an understanding with Syria’s future, not hold on to its past. Tartus is a long-term strategic asset. The Assads are no longer a long-term proposition.

This is new and interesting information, and does appear to track multiple reports that the negotiations in Turtle Bay will lead to an actual Security Council resolution on Syria. If Russia cuts a deal with the opposition and removes its veto from multilateral action, how long can Assad hold out? 

What do you think? Will Assad be out of power in Syria inside of six weeks or not?

Developing…

The term "inflection point" has become one of those overused bits of meaningless jargon in political discourse.  I'm rather more fond of the notion of a "focal point" -- that is to say, an event or cluster of events in which everyone that cares about a particular problem focuses on the same set of stylized facts -- after which, they conclude that, gee, maybe the status quo set of policies ain't working so well and there should be a new status quo. 

The fall of 2008 was one such focal point, during which there was remarkable consensus that a Keynesian boost in public spending was the only way to avert another Great Depression.  At the fiirst G-20 leaders summit in  Washington, there was consensus on expansionary fiscal policy.  Oh, sure, there were grumblings about "crass Keynesianism," but even Germany reluctantly went along. 

The Greek sovereign debt crisis was another such focal point.  Greek profligacy seemed to be a synecdoche for excessive government borrowing and lax fiscal discipline.  With the global economy seemingly still in the doldrums, a lot of Europrean governments climbed on the "expansionary austerity" bandwagon.  By the Toronto G-20 summit in June 2010, the consensus had switched from Keynesian stimulus to fiscal rectitude.  Oh, sure there were mutterings about "short-term austerity makes no macroeconomic sense whatsoever in a slack economy" but even Barack Obama started talking about slashing government spending. 

Are we at another focal point?  Consider the following:

1)  According to the New York Times' Stephen Castle, European leaders now seem to recognize that austerity on its own ain't working: 

Bowing to mounting evidence that  austerity alone cannot solve the debt crisis, European leaders are expected to conclude  this week that what the debt-laden, sclerotic countries of the Continent need are a dose of economic growth.

A draft of the European Union summit meeting communiqué calls for ‘‘growth-friendly consolidation and job-friendly growth,’’ an indication that European leaders  have come to realize that austerity measures, like those being put in countries like Greece and Italy,  risk stoking a recession and plunging fragile economies into a  downward spiral.

2)  The data is starting to come in on governments that have embraced austerity whole-heartedly, and it's pretty grim.  Cue Paul Krugman on Great Britain:

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

3)  Even commentators who would be tempermentally sympathetic with austerity are starting to bash Germany question whether it's a solution.  Consider Walter Russell Mead: 

It takes some truly talented screw ups to come up with a worse plan for Greece than the one the Greeks have developed for themselves, but the Germans have risen to occasion in fine form....

Deep reform is needed if Greece is to stay in the euro, and so far the Greek political establishment — firmly backed by public opinion — is digging in its heels.  Much whining, much talk, many promises and precious little action seems to be the favored Greek approach to the crisis.  On the other hand, the austerity policies the Germans favor are hopelessly biased in favor of German banking interests and are aimed more at the preservation of the reputations of German politicians than at helping Greece.

The German political establishment seems willing to destroy Europe to avoid telling German voters the truth about how stupid it has been. 

[UPDATE:  For exhibit B of this trend, see this Niall Ferguson interview with Henry Blodget.  My favorite part of the interview is this quotation:  "I think the reason that I was off on that was that I hadn't actually thought hard enough about my own work.... My considered and changed view is that the U.S. can carry a higher debt to GDP ratio than I think I had in mind 2 or 3 years ago."]

4)  U.S. 4th quarter data reveals that, consistent with GOP criticisms, the government has been the real drag on the U.S. economy.  Not quite consistent with GOP criticisms:  the reason why the government is dragging down the U.S. economy.  Cue Mark Thoma: 

[P]remature austerity -- cutting spending before the economy is ready for it -- is taking a toll on the recovery. The fall in government spending reduced fourth-quarter growth by 0.93 percent; if government spending had remained constant, GDP growth would have been 3.7 percent, rather than 2.8 percent. 

This is the opposite of what the government should be doing to support the recovery. We need a temporary increase in government spending to increase demand and employment through, for example, building infrastructure. That would help to get us out of the deep hole we are in. Instead, the government seems to be trying to make it harder to escape.

We do need to address our long-run budget problems once the economy is healthy enough to withstand the tax increases and program cuts that will be required. But the idea of "expansionary" austerity has failed. Austerity in the short-term simply makes it harder for the economy to recover and delays the day when you can finally address budget issues without harming the economy. The lesson is that government needs to support the recovery, not oppose it through a false promise that contraction of one sector in the economy will be expansionary.

5)  Central banks are acting more gung-ho on expansionary monetary policy.  The unspoken quid pro quo in Europe seems to the that the ECB will expand its balance sheet and turn on the monetary taps in return for some kind of fiscal compact.  The U.S. Federal Reserve announced a zero-interest rate policy for the next three years.  Even China is showing (halting) signs that its reverted back to monetary easing. 

Given that the United States has been the country to move the slowest on austerity, and given that the United States is doing the best job among the OECD economies (an admittedly low bar) of restoring confidence among investors and paying down non-governmental debt, have we reached another focal point? 

One could argue that Krugman and Thoma are just biased in favor of Keynesianism, that Greece and the other Club Med countries haven't really embraced austerity, that the Euromess is dragging down British economic growth, and that the long-term numbers on developed country debt are really very scary.  There are some large grains of truth in many of those statements. 

It doesn't necessarily matter, however.  Greece was not a genuine harbinger of the fiscal problems of large markets -- but it was a useful hook for austerity advocates to spread their gospel.  What matters now is not whether these perceptions about the failure of austerity are 100% accurate, but whether they are accurate enough to become the new conventional wisdom. 

What do you think? 

One could argue that the job of ambassador has been made obsolete by macrotrends in technology and politics.  Oh, sure, maybe traditional envoys from great powers still play an important role in smaller countries that don't normally capture much attention in major capitals.  Among the great powers, however, one  could posit that ambassadors are superfluous.  In a world in which heads of government and foreign ministers have multiple direct means of communication, in which you can't go a week without some big global summit, and in which leaders are wary of confiding with ambassadors because they'll quit and then run for head of government that's just another press leak waiting to happen, what can ambassadors really do?  Will we see the likes of Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, or even Anatoly Dobrynin ever again? 

Probably not, but even in the 21st century, great power ambassadors to other great powers still serve a purpose.  In the case of American ambassadors to Russia and China, they can excel at getting under the skin of their host country governments.  Gary Locke seems to be doing that pretty well in China, in no small part by being an ethnic Chinese politician that doesn't seem to be behaving like Chinese politicians. 

In the case of Russia, there's the new ambassador Michael McFaul, who before this was in Obama's National Security Council and one of the architects o the "reset" policy, and before that was a professor of political science at Stanford (full disclosure:  Mike's first year at Stanford as a professor was my last there as a grad student, and he's been a friend to me ever since). 

The New York Times' Ellen Barry, following up on the excellent reportage of FP's Josh Rogin, has a long story on how McFaul is really pissing off official Moscow.  The good parts version: 

 In the annals of American diplomacy, few honeymoons have been shorter than the one granted to Michael A. McFaul, who arrived in Russia on Jan. 14 as the new American ambassador.

Toward the end of the ambassador’s second full day at work, a commentator on state-controlled Channel 1 suggested during a prime-time newscast that Mr. McFaul was sent to Moscow to foment revolution. A columnist for the newspaper Izvestia chimed in the next day, saying his appointment signaled a return to the 18th century, when “an ambassador’s participation in intrigues and court conspiracies was ordinary business.”....

Mr. McFaul, 48, has arrived in a city churning with conjecture and paranoia. The public attack illustrates how edgy the Kremlin is about the protest movement that has taken shape, turning Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s re-election campaign into a nerve-racking test for the government. It also reveals how fragile relations are between Washington and Mr. Putin’s government, which has repeatedly accused the State Department of orchestrating the demonstrations.

If the blast of venom that greeted Mr. McFaul was intended as a warning to maintain a low profile in his new role, he seems unlikely to comply. At the end of his first week, he was exuberant, saying his goal was to “destroy cold war stereotypes,” especially misstatements about the United States’ intentions in Russia.

“I know I’m just going to go in full force, I’ve got nothing to hide, and we feel very confident in our policy and in selling our policy,” said Mr. McFaul, a native of Bozeman, Mont., who spent much of his career in academia. He does not need to fret over his next diplomatic posting, he added, because there will not be one.

“I ain’t going nowhere else,” he said, with a big smile. “This is it. I am not a career diplomat. And so I am here to do that in a very, very aggressive way.”

As someone who spent a short stint in DC, I recognize the sentiment McFaul expressed in that last paragraph.  The exit option is one of the greatest assets an academic has if they enter the foreign policymaking world.  Of course, that option can also encourage policymakers to stray way outside the reservation, so it kind of depends upon which academic has been appointed.  In the case of McFaul, I'm very confident he will use this power for the forces of good. 

Read the whole story -- and check out McFaul's (Russian language) blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube greeting to Russians.  Gonna be some interesting Web 2.0 diplomacy. 

Developing....

Let's consider and contrast American foreign policy towards Russia and China over the past few years.

With Russia, the Obama administration announced a much-ballyhooed "reset" with the goal of improving bilateral relations.  In an effort to advance that goal, the administration reworked missile defense system plans in eastern Europe, creating political headaches for governments in the region to make Moscow happy.  The administration took great pains to endorse a Russian proposal on Iran's nuclear program.  The administration signed a fresh new arms control treaty and then expended a decent amount of political capital to get NewSTART ratified.  Washington conducted some serious behind-the-scenes diplomacy to get Russia into into the WTO.  Most recently, the administration appointed a chief architect of the "reset" policy as ambassador to Russia.   

With China, the Obama administration (after some idle G-2 talk) has been far more aggressive.  The administration has "pivoted" it's foreign policy resources toward the Pacific Rim, with the not-so-subtle signal that China is the focus of this pivot.  Washington has poked its nose into the South China Sea dispute, and recently announced a decision to station troops in Australia.  It pushed forward a framework trade agreement that pointedly does not include China, while simultaneously calling on that country to let its currency appreciate.  The State Department has reached out to one of China's longstanding allies in an effort to coax the nascent democratization in that country into something more long-lasting.  This is simply part of a larger theme in which Washington is seemingly bear-hugging any significant country that is concerned about Beijing.  The U.S. ambassador to China, when not becoming an online sensation among ordinary Chinese, is busy criticizing Beijing's human rights record. 

So, to sum up:  the Obama administration has made it something of a priority to improve relations with Russia, while at the same time investing serious amounts of diplomatic capital into various frameworks and initiatives that hedge against a rising China. 

Now compare and contrast how Moscow and Beijing are thinking about Washington this week.  In Beijing: 

China and the United States should cooperate more closely to defuse international crises and ensure friction does not overwhelm shared interests, China's likely next president, Xi Jinping, said on Monday, setting an upbeat tone for his impending visit to Washington.

"No matter what changes affect the international situation, our commitment to developing the Sino-U.S. cooperative partnership should never waver in the face of passing developments," Vice President Xi told a meeting in Beijing.

"In dealing with major and sensitive issues that concern each side's core interests, we must certainly abide by a spirit of mutual respect and handle them prudently, and by no means can we let relations again suffer major interference and ructions."

Xi's mood-setting speech did not unveil new policies or give the precise date for his U.S. visit. But he stressed Beijing's desire for steady relations for his visit and his accession to running the world's second biggest economy after America's.

And now Moscow:

Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warned Wednesday that outside encouragement of antigovernment uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to “a very big war that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far beyond its boundaries.”

Mr. Lavrov’s annual news conference was largely devoted to a critique of Western policies in Iran and Syria, which he said could lead to a spiral of violence.

His remarks came on the heels of a report on state-controlled television that accused the American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who has been in Moscow for less than a week, of working to provoke a revolution here. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, at an impromptu meeting with prominent editors, also unleashed an attack on the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, which he said was serving American interests.

Now, it's possible to find other news stories that suggest China might not be handling all aspects of the bilateral relationship with equal aplomb, and its possible that these Russian statements contain more bluster than bite.  Still, stepping back, the larger narrative does seem to be that Russia has adopted an angrier and more belligerent posture toward American foreign policy in recent months, while China has responded with more aplomb. 

Why?  I don't know if there's an easy and accurate explanation.  Some neoconservatives might proffer that authoritarians only respond positively to strength, and therefore Russia feels more emboldened than China.  I seriously doubt that this is about bandwagoning.  Similarly, it could be argued that Russia is more domestically insecure than China, what with the recent protests and all.  Again, I seriously doubt this, as it's not like China hasn't experienced some domestic hiccups as well this year.

There are two more compelling explanations, but I honestly don't know if they work either.  The first is that Russia and China have different diplomatic styles.  Russian diplomats are far more comfortable with being blunt in their assessments of American intentions and actions, whereas Chinese diplomats are more comfortable laying low and not making as much of a public fuss.  Furthermore, China has moved down the learning curve, recognizing that its 2009-10 policy of "pissing off as many countries as possible" didn't turn out so well.  It's possible that the substance of both countries' approaches toward the United States are not that different -- they just go about it in ways that play very differently in the media. 

The second, more realpolitik explanation is that China and Russia are looking into the future, and Beijing is far more sanguine than Moscow.  Russia is suffering from institutional dysfunction and demographic decay.  It's only great power assets are bountiful natural resources, a huge land mass, and nuclear weapons.  China will encounter difficulties in the future, but does not have nearly the same kind of structural stresses as Russia.  Beijing is therefore simply less anxious than Moscow about U.S. policy, because it has more hard and soft power resources. 

To be honest, I'm not thrilled with either of these explanations. So, dear readers, I put it to you: why is Russia acting more bellicose toward an accommodating policy from the United States, whereas China is reacting calmly toward a more aggressive United States? 

Developing ...

The New York Times' Roger Cohen files an optimistic column today, arguing that predictions of American decline are premature.  I tend to agree with Cohen's sentiment but not his logic because, well, it's God-awful.  Here's the key bits:

Perhaps the most successful U.S. chief executive of the past decade is stepping down this month. Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. has presided over a remarkable transformation of the technology giant, extracting it from the personal computer business and shifting it toward services and software to power a “Smarter Planet.”

In a fascinating interview with my colleague Steve Lohr, Palmisano said the first of the four questions in his guiding business framework was, “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?” At root, business is still about getting money out of your pocket into mine. By being unsentimental in making I.B.M. unique, Palmisano ensured a lot of money flowed the company’s way.

Profits followed. The stock price surged. Warren Buffett, who knows which way the wind blows, recently acquired a stake of more than 5 percent. I.B.M. has been re-imagined, not least in the way it has shifted from being a U.S. multinational to a global corporation powered by rapid expansion in growth markets like India and China.

The question arises: If an American colossus like I.B.M. can be turned around, can America itself?  (emphasis added)

A small aside:  if Cohen's logic is correct, then the 2012 election is over and everyone should vote for Mitt Romney.  This kind of ruthless turnaround is exactly what Romney did while at Bain.  While his track record can be disputed, there's no doubt that he was willing to be ruthless to increase profits.  So, whether he knows it or not, Cohen is making the argument that a turnaround specialist like Romney would be just the ticket for the United States, transforming America's political economy into a leaner, more efficient engine for progress. 

The thing is -- and this is kind of important -- governments are not corporations.  I cannot stress this enough.  There's the obvious point that in democracies, legislatures tend to impose a more powerful constraint than shareholders, making it that much harder for leaders to execute the policies they think will be the most efficient. 

There's also the deeper point that it's a lot harder for governments to be "unsentimental" when it comes to the provision of public services.  It's a lot harder for states to eliminate the functions that are less efficient.  Frequently, demand for government services emerges  because of the perception that the private sector has fallen down on the job in that area.  This means that the government has been tasked with doing the things that are difficult and unprofitable to do.  It is precisely because these government outputs are often so hard to measure that Newt Gingrich's claims about Six Sigma sound pretty laughable.  Even libertarians who want the government to reduce its operations drastically will acknowledge the political risks and costs of trying to execute this plan. 

To be fair, there are some policy dimensions where this analogy holds up better.  Cohen implicitly argues that America's willingness to jettison costly and inefficient foreign ventures -- cough, Iraq, cough -- is an example of this kind of turnaround strategy.  Fair enough.  Even on foreign policy, however, it's hard to execute this kind of ruthless efficiency.  Israel is prosperous enough to not need the $3 billion it gets in U.S. aid.  Good luck to anyone trying to cut that.  Africa is not a vital strategic areas of interest for the United States, but I suspect AFRICOM isn't going anywhere.  I've been a big fan of getting the United States out of Central Asia, but critics make a fair point when they observe that the last time the United States tried this gambit, Al Qaeda took advantage of it. 

There's been a lot of bragging in the 2012 primary about candidates that have "real world" business experience, and how that translates into an effective ability to govern.  That logic is horses**t.  Being president is a fundamentally different job than being a CEO -- because countries are not corporations. 

The genesis of this blog post is a bit arcane.  In response to news reports about proposed changes in U.S. defense doctrine, Andrew Exum jokingly suggested "replacing the 'Two Wars' strategy with a 'Who Wants Some? You? How About You, Tough Guy?' strategy" on Twitter.  This led to other suggested mottos, expressed in YouTube videos, which eventually led to me issuing a grandiose call:  suggest the YouTube clip that "best encapsulates American grand strategy."   

Yeah, that should bring you up to speed. 

Below you will find the ten eleven suggested clips that resonated the most for me, with some further elaboration by your humble blogger. WARNING: some profanity. Then again, if the profane is offensive to you, it's best that you not think too hard about American foreign policy.   

W. Thomas Webb suggests "Orchestra Fail":

A penetrating critique of the orrery of errors that have befallen American foreign policy as of late.  Clearly, the United States is trying to conduct its international affairs in a sea of darkness, lacking crucial information to light the way.  Despite the best efforts to get all the components of American power into alignment, it's hard to pull off. 

Steve Saideman linked to this scene from Crocodile Dundee:

Steve's rationale: 

The new or not so new defense strategy of having enough of a military to fight one war while deterring or spoiling an adversary's plans requires a "bigger knife" not to use but to dissuade challengers. 

Such a grand strategy also plays to the U.S.'s current strength -- dominating conventional war through bigger and better weapons.  In the video, Croc Dundee is confronted not by one mugger but several (and one can read race into this if one wants, since the mugger was African-American, and most threats to the U.S. are by non-white folks).  His big knife spoils the plans of each of them.  Sounds like a good use of resources.

"Cosmopolitan Scum" put forward "Jessica's Daily Affirmation," suggesting it as a symbol of "soft power":

I think it works as an example of soft power and American exceptionalism.  Via her affirmations Jessica demonstrates that Americans think America is awesome -- and therefore, why the rest of the world will/should want the same things Americans want.

FP's Michael Cohen proffers this climactic speech from Animal House:

Not bad, actually.  Note that Bluto's inspiring speech has no appreciable effect on the apathetic Deltas at first.  Only when other elites -- like Otter -- indicate their support, does the rest of the country -- I mean, fraternity -- rally around the flag.  A subtle exegesis of how elite consensus can drive the mass public into stupid, futile gestures. 

Andrew Exum's suggestion was -- wait for it -- "Leeroy Jenkins!"

An utterly brilliant exposition of the ways in which the best strategy in the world will be subverted by the cowboy who shoots first and asks questons later. Indeed, this clip works on two levels. On the one hand, you can think of it as the struggles that go on within the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy to make sure everyone is on the same page -- and the ways in which hawkish actors can unilaterally set the agenda. Or, look at it as an exegesis of how the United States, through its willingness to take immediate aggressive action, can exacerbate tensions among its less powerful allies. This exuberance can breed resentment among America's partners, but often, Washington doesn't care, because, well, at least we ain't chicken. 

Matt Fay offers up this scene from Ghostbusters:

Hmmm ... I'm intrigued.  This appears to be a subtle indictment of the idealpolitik that occasionally governs American foreign policy.  After all, Ray is trying to "think of the most harmless thing ... something that could never destroy us." Naturally, this leads to the creation of an entity that causes his paranormal colleagues to be "terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought." Think of this as a potential metaphor of both liberal and neoconservative enthusiasm for democracy promotion.  Sure, it sounds good in your head, but then you see who winds up doing well in the post-Arab Spring political environment, it's easy to lose the capacity for rational choice. 

Jake Sternberger goes for ... well, just see below:

Ha, I bet you think you've been rickrolled.  Think again!  Rick Astley smartly presaged one of the central dilemmas of America's post-Cold War foreign policy: how do you get nervous allies to believe that the United States will honor its overseas obligations?  You have to have attractive bleach-blonde back-up singers reassure them that "a full commitment's what I'm thinking of" and that "you'll never get this from any other guy."  You have to pledge, repeatedly, that America is "never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down."  Furthermore, the United States is "never gonna run around and desert you."  This kind of reassurance mechanism, done with the proper tone and in harmony with other voices, can make even the wariest of allies vault over political barriers and do backflips in celebration of their alliances with the United States. 

Steven Metz proposes this bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: 

Steven suggests that, at a minimum, this explains public discourse on grand strategy, and he has a point.  On the one hand, you have an angry public that appears to be willing to fabricate evidence to justify taking aggressive action.  On the other hand, you have elites that reject the absence of any logic to justify action.  Instrad, they rely on their own galactically stupid set of axioms to guide their thinking. 

Zach of Arabia offers up "Team America sad song":

Sure, the song is an obvious choice, but as he notes, it was no accident that he chose this version.  The joyful version makes light of America's exuberance for all things American.  That's not the point of this clip -- it suggests the dark side of American exceptionalism, the burden that the United States faces as it tries to preserve global order in a world gone amok by odd, tacit alliances between terrorists and rogue states. 

Hayes Brown, however, submitted my hands-down favorite, a short but sweet clip: "Go! Bwaaaah!"

In less than three seconds, this clip hints at a myriad number of rich textual interpretations. Does the dog represent what happens when force is used, dragging the rest of the country along? Or, perhaps the canine symbolizes the big influence of small allies. Actors that the United States thinks it has under its thumb are actually driving foreign policy more than you would think. Without question, however, critics of the Obama administration would conclude that this clip is the definitive explication of the perils that come with "leading from behind."

UPDATED BONUS CLIP:  Diana Wueger submitted this very late, but it's too good not to add:  "Like a BUS!" 

Like most of these seemingly short clips, Wueger's submission works on two levels.  On the one hand, it demonstrates the ways in which hegemonic power allows some actors to be able to pursue policies that small actors simply cannot.  In this comparison, this clip reminds the viewer of the many global public goods that a hegemonic actor might feel obligated to provide.  Compare Bus 62 with the U.S. Navy after the 2004 tsunami, for example.  On the other hand, hegemonic power can also have unanticipated negative externalities.  Sure, Bus 62 simply plows through the barrier.  However, it does so without helping the other people stuck in traffic, and, like a boss, nearly plows over the person in the way.  A cautionary tale about the uses and possible abuses of power. 

OK, readers, what are your suggestions? 

It's time to admit that I'm getting old.  I feel the aches and pains from workouts a bit more keenly.  I have to Google acronyms I see on Twitter all the time.  No matter how hard I try, I just don't feel comfortable wearing an untucked shirt with a blazer.  Only now am I discovering Alison Brie, which makes me way behind the curve.  Most importantly, however, I find myself reading threat assessments made by junior international relations scholars and shaking my head at these young-security-kids-with-their-having-no-memory-of-the-Cold-War. 

To explain where I'm coming from, here's what I wrote a little more than a year ago: 

Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however.... 

I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

I'll stand by that statement, and I'm not the only one here at FP to believe it.  Over the past week, however, I'm seeing some young whippersnappers junior scholars evince a different estimate of threats to U.S. national security. 

Over at Shadow Government, Paul Miller has a four-part series  -- count 'em, one, two, three, four -- of blog posts arguing that the world is a more dangerous place now than before.  He sums up his argument in this concluding section: 

Essentially, the United States thus faces two great families of threats today:  first, the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers, of which there are at least twice as many as there were during the Cold War; second, the aggregate consequences of state failure and the rise of non-state actors in much of the world, which is a wholly new development since the Cold War.  On both counts, the world is more dangerous than it was before 1989.  Essentially take the Cold War, add in several more players with nukes, and then throw in radicalized Islam, rampant state failure, and the global economic recession, and you have today.

I recognize that the world doesn't feel as dangerous as it did during the Cold War.  During the Cold War we all knew about the threat and lived with a constant awareness-usually shoved to the back of ours minds to preserve our sanity-that we might die an instantaneous firey death at any moment.  We no longer feel that way. 

Our feelings are wrong.  The Cold War engaged our emotions more because it was simple, easily understood, and, as an ideological contest, demanded we take sides and laid claim to our loyalties.  Today's environment is more complex and many-sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to.  Nonetheless, the danger is real. 

Meh.  Actually, meh squared. 

To be fair to Miller, I do think he is getting at something that has changed over time during the post-Cold War era.  First, the threat envorinment does seem higher now than twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  China is more economically powerful, Russia is more revanchist, North, Korea, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the barriers to entry for non-state actors to wreak havoc has gone up.  The likelihood of a conventional great power war is lower, but the likelihood of a serious attack on American soil seems higher than in late 1991.  So in terms of trend, it does feel like the world is less safe. 

What's also changed, however, is the tight coupling of the Cold War security environment (ironically, just as the security environment has become more loosely coupled, the global political economy has become more tightly coupled).  Because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were such implacable adversaries and because they knew  it, the possibility of a small dispute -- Berlin, Cuba, a downed Korean airliner -- escalating very quickly was ever-present.  The possibility of an accident triggering all-out nuclear war was also higher than was realized at the time.  The current threat environment is more loosely interconnected, in that a small conflict seems less likely to immediately ramp up into another Cuban Missile Crisis.  Indeed, the events of the past year support that point.  Saudi Arabia essentially invaded Bahrain, and Iran did.... very little about it.  The United States deployed special forces into the heart of Pakistan's military complex.  The aftermath of that is undeniably uglier, but it's not we-are-at-DEFCON-ONE kind of ugly.  Miller might be more accurate in saying that there is a greater chance of a security dust-up in today's complex threat environment, but there's a much lower likelihood of those dust-ups spiraling out of control. 

In Miller's calculations, it seems that any country with a nuclear weapon constitutes an equal level of threat.  But that's dubious on multiple grounds.  First, none of the emerging nuclear states have anywhere close to a second-strike capability.  If they were to use their nukes against the United States, I think they know that there's an excellent chance that they don't survive the counterstrike.  Second, the counter Miller provides is that these authoritarian leaders are extra-super-crazy.  I'm not going to defend either the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Kim the Younger, but are these leaders more crazy than either Mao or Stalin or Kim Jong Il?  Those are three of the worst leaders in history -- and none of them came close to using nuclear weapons.   Finally, the Pakistan case is instructive -- even after getting nukes, and even after getting very cozy with radical terrorist groups, that country has refrained from escalating hostilities with India to the point of another general war. 

As for the non-state threats, they are disturbing, but I'd posit that on this front the United States really is safer now than it was a decade ago.  The only organization capable of launching a coordinated terrorist strike against the United States is now a husk of its former self.  Indeed, I'd wager that Miller's emotions, or his memory of 9/11, are getting in the way of dispassionate analysis. 

In essence, Miller conflates the number of possible threats with a greater magnitude of threats.  I agree that there are more independent threats to the United States out there at present, but combined, they don't stack up to the Soviet threat.  To put it another way, I prefer avoiding a swarm of mosquitoes to one really ravenous bear. 

In related exaggerated threat analysis, Matthew Kroenig argues in Foreign Affairs that an airstrike on Iran might be the best of a bad set of options in dealing with Iran.  This has set poor Stephen Walt around the bend in response, as op-eds advocating an attack on Iran are wont to do. 

I've generally found both sides of the "attack Iran" debate to be equally dyspeptic, but in this case I do find Kroenig's logic to be a bit odd.  Here's his arguments for why a nuclear Iran is bad and containment is more problematic than a military attack: 

Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran. Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb. For those nations and the United States itself, the threat will only continue to grow as Tehran moves closer to its goal. A nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war, forcing Washington to think twice before acting in the region. Iran’s regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, would likely decide to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, sparking an arms race. To constrain its geopolitical rivals, Iran could choose to spur proliferation by transferring nuclear technology to its allies -- other countries and terrorist groups alike. Having the bomb would give Iran greater cover for conventional aggression and coercive diplomacy, and the battles between its terrorist proxies and Israel, for example, could escalate. And Iran and Israel lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War -- secure second-strike capabilities, clear lines of communication, long flight times for ballistic missiles from one country to the other, and experience managing nuclear arsenals. To be sure, a nuclear-armed Iran would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. But the volatile nuclear balance between Iran and Israel could easily spiral out of control as a crisis unfolds, resulting in a nuclear exchange between the two countries that could draw the United States in, as well.

These security threats would require Washington to contain Tehran. Yet deterrence would come at a heavy price. To keep the Iranian threat at bay, the United States would need to deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come. Alongside those troops, the United States would have to permanently deploy significant intelligence assets to monitor any attempts by Iran to transfer its nuclear technology. And it would also need to devote perhaps billions of dollars to improving its allies’ capability to defend themselves. This might include helping Israel construct submarine-launched ballistic missiles and hardened ballistic missile silos to ensure that it can maintain a secure second-strike capability. Most of all, to make containment credible, the United States would need to extend its nuclear umbrella to its partners in the region, pledging to defend them with military force should Iran launch an attack (emphasis added).

OK, first, exactly who is bandwagoning with Iran?  Seriously, who?  Kroenig provides no evidence, and I'm scratching my head to think of any data points.  The SCAF regime in Egypt has been a bit more friendly, but Turkey's distancing is far more significant and debilitating for Tehran's grand strategy.  Iran's sole Arab ally is in serious trouble, and its own economy is faltering badly.  The notion that time is on Iran 's side seems badly off. 

Second, Kroenig presume that a nuclear Iran would be more aggressive in the region and more likely to have a nuclear exchange with Iran.  I will again point to India/Pakistan.  Despite similar religious divides, and despite the presence of pliable non-state actors, those two countries have successfully kept a nuclear peace.  Kroenig might have an argument that Israel/Iran is different, but it's not in this essay.   Indeed, the bolded section contradicts Kroenig's own argument -- if Iran is not prepared to use its nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely that it will escalate crises to the point where its bluff is called.  If Kroenig's own scholarship suggests that America's nuclear superiority would still be an effective deterrent, then I'm not sure why he portrays the Iran threat in such menacing terms. 

There's more, but this post is long enough anyway.  Both Kroenig and Miller are correct to highlight current threats.  But, to put it gently, until all of these threats, combined, can cause this to happen in under an hour, I'm sleeping soundly. 

Am I missing anything? 

Following up on Newt Gingrich and his assessment of threats, I see that the New York Times has a William J. Broad front-pager on Gingrich's obsession with the possibility of adversaries using an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) against the United States:

[I]t is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.

The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.

“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”

Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthy analysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”

Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment. But the candidate, a former history professor and House speaker, has defended his characterizations as accurate. At a forum in Des Moines on Saturday for military veterans, Mr. Gingrich said an electromagnetic pulse attack was one of several pressing national security threats the United States faced. “In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he told the veterans.

I'm neither a security expert nor a rocket scientist.  After reading Broad's article, the Space Review annalysis, the rebuttal to that analysis, and Sharon Winberger's excellent FP write-up from last year, however, I'm reasonably confident that the threat posed by EMP is remote for the near-to-medium future.  The scenarios in which an EMP would affect the United States rely on a) rogue states making serious leaps forward in their ballistic missile technology and nuclear engineering; and b) those same actors deciding that it's in their national interest to launch a first strike against a country with a reliable second-strike nuclear deterrent. 

Nevertheless, I can see why Newt Skywalker would be concerned.  Most of the taking-EMP-threat seriously essays harp on the devastating effect of such an attack.  Surely, Gingrich would argue, even a small possibility of this actually happening justifies at least some investment into countermeasures and preventive actions.  Indeed, Gingrich has explicitly made that argument: 

Without adequate preparation, its impact would be so horrifying that we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.... I think it's very important to get people to understand now, before there is a disaster, how truly grave the threat is.*

Fair enough... let's be generous and say there's a 10% chance of this being a real problem over the next two decades.  If that's the case, maybe Gingrich is right to bring it up as an underestimated threat. 

Here's my question, however.  If we're talking about threats to civilization as we know it, isn't there another possibility that has a much higher probability of occurring -- let's say, better than 50% at least -- and a similarly lax amount of preventive action?  Like, say, climate change? 

As Uri Friedman and Joshua Keating have documented for FP, however, Gingrich's assessment of that threat has changed recently.   Last month, on this issue, he said the following: 

I actually don't know whether global warming is occurring.... The earth's temperatures go up and down over geologic times over and over again. As recently as 11,000 years ago the Gulf Stream quit for 600 years. And for 600 years you had an ice age in Europe because there was no warm water coming up. And then it started up again. Nobody knows why it quit, nobody knows why it started up. I'm agnostic.

This is fascinating.  On the one hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the planet that commands the consensus of an overwhelming majority of experts in the field.  On the other hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the United States that commands nowhere close to the same level of consensus.  Based on his rhetoric, Gingrich wants urgent action to be taken on the latter, but not the former.  Why? 

I'm not bringing this up to suggest that Gingrich is a buffoon.  He could plausibly argue that a lot of people are harping on climate change while only Gingrich can call attention to the EMP possibility.  It's possible that the costs of preventive action on climate change are much greater than dealing with EMP (though if that includes preventive attacks on Iran and North Korea, I'm dubious). 

What I'm wondering is whether there is a partisan divide in assessing threats, as there is in assessing economic principles.  I wonder if conservatives are far more likely to focus on threats in which there is a clear agent with a malevolent intent, whereas liberals are more likely to focus on threats that lack agency and are more systemic in nature (climate change, pandemics, nuclear accidents, etc.) 

What do you think? 

*Incidentally, this is the same logic I used to justify greater research into the threat posed by the living dead.  Just saying.... 

Yesterday I appeared on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss Niall Ferguson's latest book, which argues that the West in general and the United States in particular is losing its mojo. 

The theme of Western decline was still running through my head as I perused the New York Times website this AM.  In his Damascus dispatch today, Neil MacFarquhar dutifully details the Syrian government's position on the cause of the sustained unpleasantness in the country:

Rather than responding to the motivations and demands behind the antigovernment uprising, opponents and political analysts say, the government has stubbornly clung to the narrative that it is besieged by a foreign plot....

Senior government officials — including Mr. Assad — and their supporters reel off a strikingly uniform explanation for the uprisings, blaming foreign agents and denying official responsibility for the violence.

“Most of the people that have been killed are supporters of the government, not the vice versa,” Mr. Assad said in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday. In the interview, Mr. Assad denied ordering a crackdown. “We don’t kill our people,” he said. “No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person.”

Virtually no one in the Syrian government links the uprisings to the sentiment inspiring revolutions across the Arab world, to a public fed up with the status quo. Instead, they say the United States and Israel, allied with certain quisling Arab governments, are plotting to destroy Syria, to silence its lone, independent Arab voice and to weaken its regional ally, Iran. To achieve this aim, they are arming and financing Muslim fundamentalist mercenaries who enter Syria from abroad, Syrian officials say.

“Syria is one of the last secular regimes in the Arab world, and they are targeting Syria,” said Buthaina Shaaban, a presidential political and media adviser, warning that the West would rue the day that it enabled Islamist regimes.

And then I read David Herszenhorn's update on Vladimir Putin's thinking on the causes behind Russian protests earlier this week:

With opposition groups still furious over parliamentary elections that international observers said were marred by cheating, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday accused Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of instigating protests by baselessly criticizing the vote as “dishonest and unfair” and he warned that Russia needed to protect against “interference” by foreign governments in its internal affairs.

“I looked at the first reaction of our U.S. partners,” Mr. Putin said in remarks to political allies. “The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers.”

“She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin continued. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

Mr. Putin’s assertions of foreign meddling and his vow to protect Russian “sovereignty” came after three days in which the Russian authorities have moved forcefully to tamp down on efforts to protest the elections, arresting hundreds of demonstrators and deploying legions of pro-Kremlin young people in Moscow to occupy public squares and to chant, beat drums and drown out the opposition.

Wow, I had no idea that the United States was this powerful!!  Hillary Clinton is apparently capable of getting thousands of Russians in the streets with just a few sentences. 

Now clearly, actual American influence over events in Russia and Syria is pretty limited.  Still, if the perception of power is a form of power in and of itself, I wonder if the Secretary of State -- perhaps after consuming too much egg nog at the State Department holiday reception -- would be tempted to give the following address to the diplomatic press corps: 

I'd like to take this oppportunity today to admit that the United States, is, in fact, responsible for the nine-month uprising in Syria and the recent unrest in Russia.  Oh, hell, who am I kidding -- we're responsible for the entire Arab Spring!  It's true, the whole thing started about a year ago, at the Policy Planning Staff's Secret Santa party.  One of them said, "hey, you know what would really advance American interests in the Middle East?  If we destabilized secular authoritarian despots and empowered Islamist parties across the region!  Those parties would really be more likely to back American policies in the region!  Oh, and we should start with Egypt too, because of their peace treaty with Israel."  

That initiative was sooooo successful that, again, my Foreign Service Officers came up with the brilliant concept of instigating the Occupy Wall Street movement, so we could demonstrate a template for how protests should naturally germinate in other countries.  Did you like how some of the policy forces overreacted to those movements?  Yeah, that was the State Department's idea too.  We were hoping to encourage authoritarian leaders to overreact and crack down -- because without our inspiration, they would never have brutally repressed on their own. 

Now, some of you might wonder, "if the United States was really this all powerful, why not target countries that pose even bigger security concerns, like Iran, or China, or even Venezuela?"  Well, they're next.  Think of the Middle East and Russia as just the out-of-town premieres before a show gets on Broadway.  We've been working out the kinks to our methods, and now we think we've really perfected a universally applicable formula to apply to all our enemies in one fell swoop.  Remember the baptism scene in The Godfather?  Well, Hugo Chavez will wish he was Moe Green when we're through with him. 

Happy holidays, authoritarian cabals!! 

In general, I like the bulk of Politico's coverage of campaigns -- as someone who's not a DC insider, I learn a fair amount from their coverage.  Every once in a while, however, Politico betrays a worldview that political process is always more important than substance.  As someone who appreciates process, there are still limits on this formulation. 

Exhibit A for this is today's Jonathan Martin story on What Went Wrong with the Herman Cain Train.  This part stood out: 

It was in Milwaukee, of course, where Cain struggled to recall his talking point on Libya and served up what’s bound to be one of the campaign’s enduring YouTube moments.

Cain’s unfamiliarity with major foreign policy events can only be partially attributed to his campaign. The underlying problem — that the candidate was even talking to the editors and reporters of a newspaper in a state that doesn’t figure prominently in the nominating process — was the decision of campaign manager Mark Block (emphasis added).

I'd go off on a rant right here, but Jonathan Bernstein has done it for me: 

Um, no: the underlying problem is that a candidate for President of the United States doesn't appear to be willing and/or able to converse about basic foreign policy issues at a level that wouldn't embarrass a strong high school student. That isn't Mark Block's fault.

As I noted before, both Rick Perry and Herman Cain were done in by their own incompetencies -- not their staffs.  For Politico not to get that is disturbing. 

Walter Russell Mead has not been the biggest fan of the current president, so it's worth quoting at length what he said in a recent blog post about Obama's Pacific Rim trip: 

The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever.  The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.

Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted.  Rarely have so many red lines been crossed.  Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast.  It was a surprise diplomatic attack, aimed at reversing a decade of chit chat about American decline and disinterest in Asia, aimed also at nipping the myth of “China’s inexorable rise” in the bud....

[I]t was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see.  Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team.  The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy.  They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power.  In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.

You know it was a good foreign policy trip when Politico runs the "Obama will soon miss his foreign policy successes as he returns to the Washington mire" storyline upon his return. 

The standard line among the press and expert analysts is that the combination of speeches and actions represents a dramatic foreign policy "pivot" to East Asia.  This elides some prior speeches that suggested this was under way for some time, but still -- what does it mean? 

I'd suggest three things.  First, it's an interesting moment to highlight some macro trends that are relatively favorable to the United States.  In comparison to, say, China or Europe, the United States looks to be in decent shape.  Over the longer term, trends in both energy and manufacturing suggest that the United States will continue a time-honored tradition and emerge from a crisis of its own making in a stronger relative position than before.  If the administration is smart, it will marry its recent successes to these longer-term trends as a way of constructing a more optimistic strategic narrative. 

Second, China is likely to pursue a more accommodating posture in the short run.  As Mead notes, the official Chinese reaction has been muted.  The unofficial reaction has ranged from the hyperbolic to the inscrutable.  Still, as I've pointed out repeatedly, China's behavior in 2009 and 2010 was a giant honking invitation for the rest of the Pacific Rim to cozy up to the United States.  And that's what should worry Beijing.  It's not that the United States is interested in maintaining its presence in East Asia -- that interest has not wavered.  What has changed is the eagerness with which the countries in the region, ranging from Australia to Myanmar, have reciprocated. 

Third, while the Obama administration deserves credit for this foreign policy swing -- and for some fun, compare and contrast coverage of this trip with Obama's Pac Rim swing from two years ago -- the "pivot" language is badly misplaced.  A pivot implies that the United States will stop paying attention to Europe or the Middle East and start paying attention to East Asia.  While I'm sure that's what the Obama administration wants to do, it can't.  Europe is imploding, as are multiple countries in the Middle East.  The United States can't afford to ignore these regions, since uncertainty there eventually translates into both global and domestic problems.  A European financial meltdown or an Egyptian political meltdown will have ramifications that simply can't be ignored. 

Talking about a United States "pivot" in foreign policy is meaningless.  The US, like an overstuffed couch, is simply too big to pivot. 

What do 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.