RealClearWorld - The Compass Blog

Understanding Cameron

David Cameron's recent trip to Turkey and his comments regarding the flotilla incident ("completely unacceptable") and conditions in Gaza (a "prison") have provoked some push back. The central theme of the criticism seems to be that Cameron is (A) misguided; (B.) trying to bolster his politically correct bona fides.

There is another explanation, however, and that is that Cameron knew what he was doing:

Nonetheless, the very fact that the Prime Minister is prepared to set out Britain's stall as having an independent and sympathetic policy towards a Muslim country, and could go on to India to express the desire for a new, more equal relationship with the rising economies, does say something important about Cameron's confidence in his approach to foreign affairs. It also says something about the way in which he defines British interests as primarily commercial.
Plus ça change, as he might say if the language of diplomacy was still French and not English. It is now 35 years since a British Prime Minister defined "export-led growth" as the "Holy Grail of British policy".

See also this. At the beginning of the month, Cameron's foreign secretary, William Hague, laid out a vision of British foreign policy that placed the emphasis on improving bilateral ties with emerging powers in the service of boosting Britain's economy. Forging good ties with Turkey would certainly fall under that rubric.

(AP Photo)

Britain Reaction to Lockerbie

A new survey from Angus Reid shows lingering bitterness in Britain over the release of the Lockerbie Bomber:

In the online survey of a representative national sample of 1,992 British adults, three quarters of respondents (75%) oppose the release of Megrahi, a Libyan national, which was conceded on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government citing the prisoner’s poor health condition...
Many Britons (41%) believe that the Scottish government’s decision to let Megrahi out of prison has something to do with the commercial interests of the British oil company BP, which has major operations in Libya.

Live Stream: Gingrich on U.S. Security at Risk

Free TV Show from Ustream

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will give a speech on U.S. national security at the American Enterprise Institute. It will be live-streamed here beginning at 2pm EST.

Ahmadinejad's Dislikes

The Daily Telegraph runs down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's various dislikes. The list has one rather huge omission, I think.

(AP Photo)

Canadians Support Burqa Ban

Via the Toronto Sun:

Canada should ban burkas in public, according to more than half of the people polled exclusively for QMI Agency.
The Leger Marketing online poll found 54% of people surveyed said the government should follow France's lead and not allow women to wear burkas in public for safety and transparency reasons.

Only 20% of respondents said Canada shouldn't consider a ban because it's an issue of freedom of religion and freedom of expression, and 15% said it didn't affect them either way.

Older Canadians were more likely to agree with a ban, with 71% of those 65 years and older choosing that option. Only 40% of Canadians 18-34 years old said burkas should be banned.

Leger Marketing vice-president Dave Scholz said the poll surprised staff at the research firm.

"This is Canada -- we don't ban anything," he said.

Sentiment was particularly strong in Quebec, where the debate over reasonable accommodation for new Canadians has been raging, with 73% of respondents saying they want a ban.

David Cameron on Pakistan

The British Prime Minister continues his making friends and influencing people tour:

David Cameron today sparked a furious diplomatic row with Islamabad after accusing elements of the Pakistani state of promoting the export of terrorism.
In the strongest British criticism of Pakistan so far, the prime minister warned Islamabad it could no longer "look both ways" by tolerating terrorism while demanding respect as a democracy.

But in an angry response, Pakistan's high commissioner to Britain accused Cameron of damaging the prospects for regional peace, and criticised him for believing allegations in the Wikileaks documents published in the Guardian earlier this week.

I doubt publicly brow-beating Pakistan over their not-so-covert support for militant networks is going to work, but then again, will anything?

Turkey's AKP Trailing

Via Angus Reid:

Turkey’s governing party is not the most popular political organization in the country, according to a poll by Sonar Arastirma. 33.5 per cent of respondents would vote for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in the next legislative election, up one point since May.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is a close second with 31.1 per cent, followed by the National Action Party (MHP) with 15.5 per cent. Support is lower for the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the Felicity Party (SP), the Democratic Left Party (DSP), and the Turkish Democratic Party (DP).

Strength in Weakness?

Richard Gowen sees the upside of a weakened West:

Containing new crises will be difficult. Instead of Bush-era “coalitions of the willing”, it may be necessary to form “coalitions of the weaklings”: groups of states that can’t handle international problems alone, but have sufficient leverage between them to do something.
In June, Germany and Russia proposed a new EU-Russia Security Committee – and said it should find ways to resolve the frozen conflict in Moldova. Less than two years after the EU and Moscow fell out over Kosovo and Georgia, this shows how both sides’ awareness of their weaknesses may boost security cooperation. Similarly, Russia’s sense of vulnerability has arguably helped ease diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program.

Structuring coalitions to deal with complex issues like Afghanistan is horribly hard. Yet the EU’s leaders need to recognise that weakness isn’t an excuse for inaction – it should be a stimulus for more activist diplomacy to resolve actual and potential crises now.

Certainly countries are going to be more cooperative if they think they're playing a bad hand. But shouldn't we be devoting just as much time seeking to improve that hand, than in learning how to cope?

Japan to Add Submarines

According to a report in the Japanese press:

Japan is to increase its submarine fleet for the first time in 36 years, the Sankei Shimbun reported Sunday. The plan apparently aims to counter China's naval build-up by partially filling the void created by the U.S. reduction of submarines in the Pacific area.
The paper said the Japanese government plans to increase the number of submarines from the current 18 including two trainer submarines to more than 20 when it revises its Defense Program Guidelines by year's end.

Michael Auslin sees this development as reflecting "uncertainty" about Japan's ties to the U.S. It could be. But this uncertainty isn't necessarily a bad thing if it catalyzes an arms race in Asia: front line states should be the ones that assume the lion's share of the burden and cost of their own defense.

I think the role of the U.S. as a balancer of last resort should be maintained, but we should certainly not be discouraging countries like Japan or South Korea if they want to make a more substantial investment in their own defenses. If the Obama administration is creating some uncertainty in the minds of America's Asian allies about the U.S. commitment, and that uncertainty is catalyzing greater defense expenditures on the part of our allies, is this really a bad thing?

Notice also that instead of "bandwagoning" with China, key Asian states are asserting their own interests. As the Lowy Institute's Graeme Dobell writes, China's handling of North Korea has definitely pushed the South Koreans closer to the U.S. when the conventional held that South Korea was primed to fall into China's "orbit."

(AP Photo)

Nation Building & Interventionism

Many of my non-interventionist friends see the new Republican skepticism about nation-building as a bridge that can bring hawkish conservatives more towards our view, but what keeps worrying me is that the same people who now find nation-building wasteful and futile never seem to think that far ahead when it comes to starting wars that ruin whole nations. Instead of a recognition of limits on American power, impatience with nation-building (or even with the most minimal reconstruction efforts) seems just as often to be an unwillingness to take full responsibility for the decision to use force. While this reflects a desire to minimize costs to the U.S., which is a good start, this perversely makes the decision to use force easier and less politically risky, and that in turn tends to make interventions more frequent rather than less. Becoming more conscious of the costs of prolonged wars doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be more reluctance to use force next time. All that it does guarantee is that there will be less patience with any attempted reconstruction afterwards. - Daniel Larison

This is quite true. It makes little sense to oppose nation building without also restraining the use of military power. But while there's a constituency for the former, there doesn't seem to be much of one for the later.

The Churchill Temptation

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Newt Gingrich is worried:

Newt Gingrich will deliver a major national security address at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Thursday in which he will reprimand the Obama administration's "willful blindness" to the threat of extremist Islam...
Gingrich "will warn," according to a synopsis of the event, "that now is the time to awaken from self-deception about the nature of our enemies and rebuild a bipartisan commitment, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to defend America."

Justin Logan thinks Gingrich is in hock to Carl Schmitt. I'd add another unhelpful influence: Winston Churchill. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Churchill. But just as neoconservatives have a tendency to view every threat through the prism of the 1930s there is also a burning desire on the part of certain politicians to be seen as the contemporary Churchill - the leader who saw and spoke out against the dangers that others didn't see or were too scared to face. This has produced a largely pernicious impact on the public debate, leading to an atmosphere of alarmism where what's required is calm rationality. As Login notes, Gingrich has suggested that the Jewish people are poised to suffer a second Holocaust yet doesn't seem too energized by this belief.

(AP Photo)

David Cameron's Views

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It doesn't look like David Cameron will be winning a lot of friends on the American right:

British prime minister David Cameron, who has often described himself as a "friend of Israel," harshly criticized Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, telling a group of Turkish businessmen in Ankara that the strip was "a prison camp."
"The situation in Gaza has to change," he said. "Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp."

He also insisted that Turkey be admitted into the European Union.

(AP Photo)

WikiLeaks and the COIN Consensus

Andrew Exum, writing in the pages of today's New York Times, shrugs at the WikiLeaks brouhaha:

ANYONE who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper. [Emphasis added - KS]

But is this really the case? "Move along, nothing to see here" certainly appears to be the consensus from the media and the policy community, but this is an incredibly small (albeit vocal) sample size of Americans. Broader survey data paints a slightly different picture of the American public's war understanding - one which is more confused, critical and mixed about the U.S. mission and prospects in Afghanistan.

I agree with Exum that much of the information revealed in the leaks was common knowledge to the commentariat and the think tankers, but I wonder if the same can be said so unequivocally of the greater public. Would support for the war radically change if, for instance, the American public better understood the Pakistani intelligence community's relationship with a co-conspirator in the 9/11 attacks? What about that aid package Washington just handed to Islamabad?

Exum would have us all believe that the WikiLeaks disclosures are both ho-hum and irresponsible journalism. Both may be true, but if there's been any kind of journalistic failure here it began not with WikiLeaks, but with the pundits and policy makers who have failed to enhance public understanding of the war. There was no need for such debate and education however, because a bipartisan consensus had already congealed around a counterinsurgency strategy.

Exum accuses WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of being an activist with an agenda, which is no doubt true. But is Assange really the only one with an agenda here, or does his agenda simply not sit well will the COINdinistas?

Photo of the Day

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(Russia's Vladimir Putin attends an international bikers convention in Ukraine. AP Photo)

The Tea Party's Foreign Policy

It's taking shape. Josh Rogin reports:

Almost two dozen Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers cosponsored a new resolution late last week that expresses their support for Israel "to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force."
The lead sponsor of the resolution was Texas Republican Louie Gohmert, one of four congressmen to announce the formation of the 44-member Tea Party caucus at a press conference on July 21. The other three Tea Party Caucus leaders, Michele Bachmann, R-MN, Steve King, R-IA, and John Culberson, R-TX, are also sponsors of the resolution. In total, 21 Tea Party Caucus members have signed on, according to the latest list of caucus members put out by Bachmann's office....

Last week, a Tea Party-affiliated grassroots organization launched a nationwide campaign to build popular opposition to the administration's nuclear reductions treaty with Russia, called New START. The group is led by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife Ginny and it dovetails with similar efforts by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The resolution also continues a theme among Tea Party leaders, such as Sarah Palin, who are seeking to separate the movement's domestic policies, which call for small government and fiscal restraint, from libertarian views on foreign policy, promoting instead an aggressive, unilateralist view of world affairs and unchecked military spending.

The cognitive dissonance of this view is staggering: you cannot have a small government at home if you insist on an interventionist, activist government abroad.