Shadi Hamid at Democracy Arsenal suggests that the U.S. should not abandon the Middle East:

The problem with the Bush administration wasn’t that it was overly focused on the Middle East; it was that it was overly focused on the Middle East, and managed, at the same time, and somewhat amazingly, to make it even more screwed up than it already was. The latter part – rather than the former – is where we went wrong. The correct corrective, therefore, is not to decrease “meddling” but rather to address the region’s myriad problems not by engaging less, but by engaging better.

At what point will the failure to finesse properly the politics of hundreds of million of people of varying cultures, sectarian devotions and tribal loyalties half a world away be credited to the impossibility of the task and not the inadequacy of the tools?

To the extent that the Middle East is "screwed up," it's because the region has been the scene of so much "engagement" by great powers throughout its history. Why not try something novel for a change?

Posted by Greg Scoblete at 8:27 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

What is "tough, direct diplomacy?"

That phrase from Senator Obama's acceptance speech tonight seems to do a fairly good job of capturing how he portrays his foreign policy. He critiques the "empty rhetoric" of President Bush and Senator McCain. The implication is that he would both provide more substance to the rhetoric and tone down the rhetoric.

Which is a little difficult to reconcile with pledges to "build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation, poverty and genocide, climate change and disease."

So is Senator Obama a hopelessly cosmopolitan idealist? Or a hard-nosed pragmatist?

Probably both. Probably neither, too.

Foreign policy has a way of subverting partisan stereotypes. Conservatives are all for an overly limited, interest-based foreign policy that neglects other nations, until they're deeply committed to ending tyranny the world over, or at least remaking a country or two through massive commitments of troops. Liberals are supposedly enthrall to open-ended commitments, airy values, and a globalism that fails to put American interests first. Until, of course, they are the ones pointing out the limits to American power and the need to take seriously the security concerns of Iran and North Korea and make deals with them.

These are all stereotypes, of course. But they're interesting because somehow two diametrically opposed stereotypes are both simultaneously widespread about both parties.

That's a result, more than anything, of the unique status of the presidency. The office has pretty much unchecked authority in international affairs - far more independence than most other democracies' executives. And as a result, the party tends to take on the general bent and frame of mind of the guy in charge, and party ideology will usually bend to accommodate. The process is probably helped along by the fact that, most of the time, economic and social issues are more important to most voters, so the parties have tended to organize themselves around both issues. Realists and internationalists and neoconservatives and isolationists all can find niches in both parties.

It also makes figuring out a candidate's likely foreign policy pretty tough. Few of the foreign policies any president offered while on the trail have lasted much beyond the first year. But it makes it even more important to evaluate a candidate's general attitude and approach.

Senator Obama's speech did not include anything that indicated his approach to me - it was mostly just politics, which is appropriate for a convention speech anyway. I doubt Senator McCain will say much substantive or interesting in his convention speech either. But how the two respond to each other, and to events, in the next several weeks could shed light. What does Obama mean by "tough diplomacy?" How would McCain actually give shape to his get-tough instincts? Both have given some indications of this in the last few months and years. But the details that surface in the campaign will be much more instructive than the broad stereotypes that have already attached to both.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 3:27 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Writing in the National Interest, Ted Galen Carpenter suggests that America's recognition of Kosovo's independence set the table for Putin:

When the United States and its key European allies ignored Russia’s protests and recognized Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blithely insisted that the Kosovo situation was unique and set no international precedent whatsoever. Prominent members of the foreign policy communities in Europe and the United States echoed her argument.

Moscow’s August 26 decision to recognize the independence of Georgia’s separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia demonstrates the arrogant folly of that position. In just a matter of months, the Kosovo precedent has backfired on the United States and generated dangerous tensions between Russia and the West.

Christopher Hitchens demurs in Slate, plausibly arguing that the Russians are merely using Kosovo as a handy excuse. I think Hitchens gets the better of this specific argument, but I think he's far too glib in over-looking the precedents the U.S. established in Kosovo.

Out-going editor of the National Interest, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, reviews some of the reasons proffered by Russia for their action in Georgia:

1) Russia had a right under "responsibility to protect" (R2P) to intervene to defend a civilian population and could intervene without the permission of the Georgian government or of any international body

2) Russia had a right as the "guarantor" of regional security

3) Russia had a right under prior agreements that created the cease-fire and peacekeeping missions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia

Gvosdev goes on to note that these rationales originated echo those made by the U.S., "at a time when the power of the U.S. individually and of the West collectively seemed to dwarf possible challengers and when the only real initiator of military action might be the United States. Will, in the future, proponents of R2P, for instance, want to see China use this as a rationale for action?"

This cuts to the question of whether international norms really do restrain nations. You heard a lot of concern several years ago that America's use of preventative war in Iraq would open the door to any number of countries taking similar actions under the rubric of self defense. That didn't happen. Not to say that preventative war was a good idea on the merits, but it does suggest that a lot more goes into the calculations of war and peace than the handy availability of fig leaves.

However, to the extent that international norms do exercise some kind of restraint on a nation's behavior, it seems to me that you would want to set the baselines as modestly and objectively as possible. That would mean abandoning subjective notions like R2P and preventative war and resetting to a position that rejects the acquisition of territory by military force.

Gvosdev goes on to wonder if "in the next several years we may see a return to enhancing the position that the international system should be defined by sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and the importance of the imprimatur of the Security Council for any military action other than self-defense, or perhaps the international system will become more anarchic. But I do think that some of the notions about an "international community" which were fashionable earlier may be coming in for some serious re-examination."

Put me down in the "anarchic" camp.

Is there any evidence, in either the McCain or Obama campaigns, that they pine for a return to an "international system... defined by sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and the importance of the imprimatur of the Security Council for any military action."

If anything, they seem to go out of their way to repudiate that system. Senator McCain has proposed a "League of Democracies" precisely because he wants to circumvent the veto-wielding autocracies on the Security Council. In the Obama camp, you have a number of people - including his top foreign policy adviser Susan Rice and now his VP pick, Joe Biden - who have urged the use of military force against the regime in Sudan for their internal crimes.

Posted by Greg Scoblete at 10:04 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Thomas Friedman hits the US hard today for missing out on the last seven years, while China has passed us by on so many levels:

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

But dig a little deeper, and the comparison rapidly becomes less useful.

Start with that mag-lev train Friedman points to. I've ridden it; it's worse than useless. The thing doesn't actually go all the way into Shanghai, you have to get off and transfer to another, non-high-speed rail to get anywhere you actually want to go. Plans to extend the train into the city proper were halted by angry residents this year. It was a vanity project, meant to inspire columns exactly like this one by people who don't take the time to actually find out what's going on. The mag-lev folks tried to build demonstration trains in the US on several occasions and failed, because it was too expensive and delivered poor results.

Or take the Olympics. Big impressive show, yes. But did it actually make anyone's life better? Sure, you could point to the massive infrastructure investments in Beijing. But, why, exactly, couldn't the Chinese government have invested those funds without the Olympics as a pretext? And why should China be spending $47 billion in one of its wealthiest and most developed cities, when more than 100 cities of 1 million people or more have far inferior infrastructure? Because that spending wouldn't have shown up on TV, and wouldn't have shown up in Friedman's column.

Security spending? Definitely the wrong example to pick as a point of comparison. China's security spending for the Olympics was so over-the-top that they proudly (eighth picture down) unveiled the world's first Segway-mounted assault rifle brigade in preparation. Their overly zealous security measures before the Games probably cost billions more in lost business.

Meanwhile, what has the US been up to in the last seven years? Well, iPods aren't that bad, nor is Facebook, nor this blogging platform that I'm using right now. Google has done some pretty neat things that perhaps you've heard of. Unlocking the human genome might prove to be somewhat useful. Throw in the thousands upon thousands of incremental improvements in science, technology, health, and living-standards generally, and well, I would not choose to live in the world of 2001 over today's world at all.

Friedman makes two errors, both common. One is harmless - confusing catch-up with progress. He looks at China, and rightly sees the enormous strides the place is making. As I'll never tire of marveling at, the country is growing faster, for longer, and on a bigger scale than any human society ever has. But it's not blazing new territory, yet. Most of China still looks like something out of the early 19th century, and most of the people still live in desperate poverty. Of course the place can change quickly if it gets a few things right. There's a lot of room for improvement. Developing countries can do that; established, developed ones can't, because we don't have easy models to follow. If the US could grow that quickly, we'd all have jet-packs next year, and hover cars the year after that.

I don't mean to take anything away from the phenomenal accomplishments of the Chinese people - just to point out that their situation is different from that of the US or other big, older economies.

Friedman makes a more pernicious error in mistaking appearance for reality, however. China can mount enormous vanity projects like the Olympics, or Shanghai's Pudong skyline, because the government is able to do what it wants in pretty wide parameters without checks and balances. So, it can funnel a great deal of wealth and attention to giant projects that look good if it wants. But it's also free to ignore the costs of displacing thousands of people for the Olympics, or a million and a half people for the Three Gorges Dam. Environmental assessments that would have prevented other governments from building Shanghai's skyline on a swamp didn't function in China, so now that part of town is sinking at a terrifying rate.

The centers of China's showpiece cities are futuristic and dazzling, but at the cost of depleting most of China's water, fouling most of its air, and leaving a creaking infrastructure in the interior that is currently struggling with massive power shortages and transport bottlenecks.

China's young, and these are growing pains to be expected; they're not unlike conditions in Britain in the 18th century, or the US in the 19th. But I wouldn't want to emulate those times here today.

Yes, flying in the US is a miserable experience (which seems to be the real animating complete behind Friedman's piece). And yes, flying is actually almost enjoyable in China. And the buildings there have neat lights and you can get better Internet reception, as long as you don't care about the censorship. But it's important not to forget how much of what shows on the surface in China comes at real, hidden costs to its people. And how much of our bickering, seemingly unproductive stasis really represents a flexible system that lets private individuals make the progress and at least holds the government back from doing too much just for show.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:52 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

With apologies to Ben Franklin, nothing is certain in this world except death, taxes and North Korea's president reneging on a negotiated promise.

In related North Korea news, apparently their scientists do more than develop clandestine nuclear weapons, they've also engineered a super-noodle that "delays the feelings of hunger." [Via Patrick Fitzgerald]

Welcome news for a communist nation repeatedly wracked with massive, man-made famines.

Foreign Policy magazine has an article on the North's leader by his former tutor, Kim Hyun Sik.

Posted by Greg Scoblete at 8:28 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Mugabe's Zimbabwe is one of the world's worst regimes, by common assent - inflation in the millions, widespread oppression and violence by the state, and of course Mugabe's recent theft of the presidential election make that undeniable. What to make of the fact, then, that opposition has been allowed to take control of the legislature?

The victory of the opposition candidate, Lovemore Moyo, by a vote of 110 to 98, underscored the opposition’s newfound control of Parliament. Despite widespread attacks on its members, the opposition holds a majority in Parliament for the first time since Zimbabwe achieved independence from white minority rule in 1980 — and now seems ready to wield that power.

But it raises some odd questions. Why didn't the security services or army stop the parliament from sitting? Why did Mugabe call the parliament in the first place? Members of parliament used a secret ballot to elect their candidate - why wasn't the ruling party able to force them to vote openly, and open themselves to intimidation?

It's actually fairly easy for a strong police or military to run roughshod over a parliament if it chooses. The article linked above hints at some of the options - arrests of key leaders, threats of violence or intimidation, bribery, or just refusing to let the legislature sit. The fact that Zimbabwe's security services were either unwilling or unable to frustrate the people's will in the legislature to the same extent that they were with the presidency is interesting.

It could suggest either of two things. It's possible the ruling party just doesn't care, and will just ignore the parliament's decisions and go on running roughshod over the country. Or it could mean that, despite the months of violence and economic collapse, there remain strong civil institutions in the country that the thugs in charge are afraid to openly destroy. Given the obvious (and somewhat ham-handed) attempts by the ruling party to steal legislative seats, it looks as if they do care, and the second explanation might be more likely.

If that's true, then there is at least hope for the country after Mugabe finally leaves the stage. Unlike a lot of other brutal dictatorships like, say, North Korea or Belarus, Zimbabwe seems to have amazingly resilient institutions in place that could credibly step in and start to direct the rebuilding of the country, once the men with guns are somehow forced or convinced to stand down. And the legislature may be a voice that Mugabe and his lieutenants feel unable to completely ignore. If nothing else, Tsvangirai can now be sure of more leverage in his negotiations with Mugabe than he would have been confident of even two days ago.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 2:44 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Well, the hoo-rah of the Olympics has finally passed, and we can all now be spared overly earnest references to the "sacred" Olympic spirit and flame and world unity, the Chinese government's sometimes desperate and over-eager attempts to make sure everything went right, and tired cliche's about China's "coming out party." Sports can go back to being about sports, and not some strange stand-in for international politics.

Even better, it looks like the London Games might actually turn out to be fun . At least, they will be if London Mayor Boris Johnson is in charge. His joy that Ping-Pong, "invented on the dining tables of England," where it was first called "whiff whaff," is coming home understandably got lots of attention. I was more impressed by his pledge to try to bring back the pankration,

"whose chief exponent was Milo of Croton, whose signature performance involved carrying an ox the length of the stadium, killing it with his bare hands and then eating it on the same day."

As Anne Applebaum pointed out in the Washington Post today, that approach - laughter, not overpowered awe - is a much better take on the Olympic spirit.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 2:09 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

We here at RCW will leave most of the US commentary to our friends over at the mothership, but one of Senator Joe Biden's remarks over the weekend just cries out for expert world commentary.

In listing the many fine things that Senator Obama would change as president, Biden veered into a geospatial issue I have not seen addressed yet by either campaign:

He will have such an incredible opportunity, incredible opportunity, not only to change the direction of America, but literally, literally to change the direction of the world.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 1:33 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

We’re used to hearing a lot about the geo-politics of oil, but thanks to soaring prices, the geo-politics of food is emerging as an important global issue:

The race by food-importing countries to secure farmland overseas to improve their food security risks creating a “neo-colonial” system, the United Nations’ top agriculture official has cautioned. The warning by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, comes as countries from Saudi Arabia to China plan to lease vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia to grow crops and ship them back to their markets…. Joachim von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, said importing nations realised that dependence on the international market made them vulnerable – not only to surging prices but, crucially, also to an interruption in supplies. “They want to secure the supply lines of food,” he said.

The article goes on to note that western officials "worry about countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe gaining more geopolitical leverage following investment in their agriculture."

This strikes me as an example of both the up and downsides of globalization converging in one place. On the one hand, globalization was supposed to make what happens inside a state more relevant to the outside world. In an increasingly interconnected world, a failed state is no longer a global backwater but the potential breeding ground for international dangers like terrorism or pandemic disease (I tend to think that case is over-stated, for the reasons elucidated here by the folks at CATO, but that's for another day).

On the other hand, greater inter-dependence was suppose to strengthen the incentive for states to cooperate, lest they endanger their economic interests.

If Sudan becomes a "Saudi Arabia of food" then many nations that may feel compelled to take stronger action in Darfur will feel correspondingly stronger pressure not to act, lest the supply of food be interrupted.

Posted by Greg Scoblete at 9:46 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Rasmussen Reports finds in a poll that 50% of Americans believe the United Nations should send peacekeepers into Georgia, but only 22% say U.S. troops should be involved.

They also found that:

Republicans are definitely more bullish in their attitudes toward Russia and the Georgia situation than Democrats. Fifty-five percent (55%) of GOP voters, for example, believe the United States should take diplomatic action against Russia versus 35% of Democrats. Nearly a third of Republicans (31%) believe U.S. troops should be part of a multi-national effort to bring peace to the region, although 46% disagree. By comparison, only 17% of Democrats say U.S. troops should be involved, while 65% are opposed.

What they didn’t ask, or at least, didn’t report on, was whether Americans would support sending military aid to Georgia to help them expel Russian forces from their territory – a suggestion that’s been floated by several American commentators.

What was more interesting (to me at least) was this finding: “In the new survey, 35% say they are worried that Russia will launch a nuclear attack on Poland, including eight percent who are Very Worried.”

Posted by Greg Scoblete at 9:38 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat points to several essays from prominent foreign policy thinkers -David Frum, Robert Kagan, Fareed Zakaria and Edward Luttwak - that go to bat for the soon to be former Commander in Chief. History, they say, will redeem Bush’s foreign policy. (Douthat makes his own contribution to the debate here.)

With the exception of Zakaria, this historical absolution is being rendered by people who are generally invested in Bush’s foreign policy. Before we can grant President Bush “Truman-esque” status, we’ll need to see some serious defections among the ranks of Bush’s liberal and realist critics (not to mention Democratic politicians).  

That said, I do think that President Bush is likely be vindicated by history – at least on a popular basis – for the reasons Douthat elucidates here.

The big question mark, to my mind, is how liberals react to Bush in the long run. Democratic Presidents like Truman and Kennedy have seen their legacy enhanced in part because Republicans eventually came around to their view of the role that values must play in foreign policy. Republicans used to be the ruthless calculators of national interest, while Democrats were the universalist moralizers. President Reagan’s repudiation of Nixon-era détente changed that, and Republicans have never really looked back (not even during the brief, under-rated, tenure of George H.W. Bush).

On the other hand, President Bush’s tenure may spark a newfound liberal love affair with Kissinger-style realism. But I’m not holding my breath.

Posted by Greg Scoblete at 9:24 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Hua Guofeng, Mao's anointed successor, died yesterday at the age of 87.

He was either a historical footnote or a pivotal figure, depending on your view of things.

Soon after he took power in 1976, Deng Xiaoping re-emerged on the political scene, sidelining Hua by 1978 and launching China on the reform and opening path that has taken it to where it is today. In the intervening years, Hua just advocated following whatever policies Mao had set down before his death (literally). He may have been instrumental in arresting the Gang of Four (the radical clique that had seized control of the country in Mao's declining years) and ending the Cultural Revolution. Or he may have simply been too ineffectual to prevent this from happening; the exact events are still unclear.

It will be interesting to see how the current Chinese government decides to commemorate Hua's passing. He was, after all, the leader of the country for a couple tumultuous years. He was never purged or banished; even after being consigned to irrelevance, he was allowed to remain a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, the collection of 200-odd leaders that that chooses the top leadership and sets national policies for the Party, until 2002.

Still, his greatest contribution to China, and the world, was probably being so bad at his job. If he had held onto his position and prevented Deng's emergence, China might have stayed on a ruinous socialist path for decades more. His fall from power essentially marked the beginning of modern-day China.

The official reaction to his death will probably be a good example of the strange historical knots the Chinese leadership has to occasionally tie itself in. Mao's policies are recognized as having been pretty disastrous post-Civil War, especially in the Chairman's last decade. But he's still smirking over Tiananmen Square, peeking out from every wallet, and standing magisterially over many a public square in China. The CCP's image of itself and its legitimacy is so tied up with its historic role that it can't jettison the iconography, or much else from its past. Hence the odd willingness to keep Hua around for all those decades on the Central Committee, a strange relic from a past that most everyone was anxious to move past and forget.

The official China Daily has spoken relatively well of him:

Hua was "an outstanding CPC member, a long-tested and loyal Communist fighter and a proletarian revolutionary who once held important leading posts in the CPC and the government", the statement said.

No mention of the tumult surrounding his brief rule, or the decisive nature of his fall from grace. I wouldn't expect one to surface in the official press, but the Chinese Internet is a surprisingly vibrant place where Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen aren't involved, and Hua's passing might spark some interesting reflection or commentary. The deaths of former leaders are occasionally used as opportunities to take shots at the current leadership in China; it will be interesting to see if any officials or scholars find a way to use Hua's passing to comment on current policies or leaders.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:12 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Samantha Power - erstwhile foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama currently at Harvard - has forgotten more about conflict and humanitarian relief than I will ever know. All the more disappointing, then that her op-ed on how to "protect the protectors" doesn't even mention what seems to me to be a crucial unanswered question: what relationship should aid providers have to military forces?

Power identifies a growing concern among the international aid community: UN and other aid providers are increasingly becoming the targets of insurgents and terrorists in the countries where they work. Once upon a time, a blue flag or red cross or crescent could provide real protection, marking the bearers as neutral noncombatants. But al Qaeda and a host of other violent non-state actors no longer see things that way. Last week, aid workers with the International Rescue Committee were killed in Afghanistan by the Taliban; yesterday, an employee of the World Food Program was killed in Somalia. Most famously, in an attack Power describes in detail here, the UN's mission in Iraq itself was struck by suicide bombers in 2003 and top UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello and twenty others were killed.

Power's suggestions amount to recognizing that there are times and places when aid workers simply cannot operate. She argues that "the United Nations and aid organizations must have more tangible, urgent reasons for placing unarmed civilians in the most dangerous parts of the world," that t"he 192 countries that are part of the United Nations must spend substantially more money on security for the organization's missions," and that "international organizations and aid groups get the cooperation of their host countries." Good ideas, all; I doubt many would argue.

But what do you do when there are tangible, urgent reasons for placing civilians in harm's way, but the protection that aid organizations can provide is not enough to protect them? Or when the host country isn't willing or able to provide sufficient protection, but dire humanitarian need exists? After all, in Darfur, the host government is part of the problem, while in Somalia, the government barely functions.

A debate has been raging for some time about whether aid workers can or should cooperate with peacekeepers or other military forces to get help where it needs to go; when I was in graduate school it was a particular point of discussion between students in the development and security tracks. There aren't easy answers: by cooperating with military forces, aid workers lose their neutrality and the protection it should bring, and may become unwitting parties to the conflict. By shunning them, they either leave themselves open to violence and intimidation or leave vast populations abandoned.

I don't know how to square this circle. But I'm not sure how useful any attempts to protect the protectors can be without grappling with the issue.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:50 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

BEIJING, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Nino Salukvadze of Georgia embraced her Russian rival and made a moving appeal for peace after winning an Olympic bronze medal in shooting on Sunday.

Salukvadze, who competed only after the 35-member Georgian team were told by their president to remain at the Games in the “best interest of the country” despite Russian military attacks on its territory, finished behind Russia’s Natalia Paderina.

“If the world were to draw any lessons from what I did there would never be any wars,” Salukvadze said.

The two rival shooters—who were once team mates in the Soviet Union—hugged and kissed each other on the cheeks after the dramatic final in the Beijing shooting range hall, where China’s Guo Wenjung came from behind to win the gold medal.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:43 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

The Centre for Global Development, a well-respected DC think tank, has a sobering new report out arguing that "AIDS donors may actually have weakened the health systems necessary for an effective AIDS response." $20 billion in spending may have actually been counterproductive:

"The big HIV donors are creating AIDS-specific systems that compete for health workers and administrative talent, share the same inadequate infrastructure, and further complicate already complex flows of information," said Nandini Oomman, lead author of the report.

Laurie Garret, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, made a similar point in Foreign Affairs in January 2007:

Today, thanks to a recent extraordinary and unprecedented rise in public and private giving, more money is being directed toward pressing heath challenges than ever before. But because the efforts this money is paying for are largely uncoordinated and directed mostly at specific high-profile diseases -- rather than at public health in general -- there is a grave danger that the current age of generosity could not only fall short of expectations but actually make things worse on the ground.

The reasons for this are almost entirely political: individual diseases are easily identified, targeted, and measured; disease-specific interventions are easy to sell to domestic audiences; affinity groups of those in the rich world with the same disease provide powerful lobbying help; perhaps most importantly, system-wide health interventions are really, really hard to pull off, and may be impossible to manage without many times more money.

It's not time to abandon disease-specific interventions, even if these arguments are correct (and it's by no means certain that they are; I'm sure responses and critiques by people who know more than me will surface soon): at the very least, interventions to address HIV-AIDS or malaria or tuberculosis benefit the millions of poor who have or are at risk from these diseases, and that's no small thing.

But findings like this are a healthy reminder that, even when taken with the best of intentions, backed by the best science available, and run by the smartest, most committed individuals possible, any foreign policy is going to cause unintended side effects. The best policymakers can do is try to anticipate them, and when unanticipated ones come along, try to adjust.

With the HIV-AIDS projects, it seems like a few incremental changes - simplified reporting requirements, broader mandates for health care providers, and focusing more on working with and strengthening local health care systems - could probably go a long way. Even if it has created challenges, the commitment by so many countries to fight nasty diseases on a global level is itself an important start towards making genuine improvements in world health. Let's hope reports like this inform efforts to make this commitment more effective.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:14 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

The latest Guardian/ICM poll looks especially bad for Labour:

Voters would overwhelmingly prefer David Cameron as prime minister, even if Labour replaced Gordon Brown with David Miliband, a new Guardian/ICM poll shows.

The prime minister returns to No 10 tomorrow after his summer break to find Labour stuck a long way behind the Tories. The only silver lining for Brown is that Miliband, his foreign secretary and possible leadership rival, would not do any better as a credible challenger to the Conservatives.

When people were asked to choose the best prime minister between Cameron and Brown, or Cameron and Miliband, the Tory leader beat both men by the same 21% margin.

Posted by Kevin Sullivan at 3:23 PM | Email Author | Permalink |

Matthew Yglesias, blogging at his new Think Progress digs, comments on Georgian aspirations for NATO membership:

Whether or not you support NATO membership for Georgia as some kind of long-term measure, this doesn’t make much sense as a short-term strategy for getting Russian troops to leave. For one thing, it’s just not going to happen (a topic to which we’ll return). For another thing, it’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg device — we persuade the Europeans to extend a NATO security guarantee to Georgia and then, with that guarantee in place, Russia has to choose between leaving and war with the United States and we hope they choose leaving. It would be quicker and simpler, albeit insane, for the United States to just straight-up threaten Russia with war unless they withdraw from Georgia. Then Russia needs to choose between leaving and war with the United States, and our plan to use a threat of war to force them out isn’t held hostage to the vagaries of French and German decision-making.

It seems to me that the opposite outcome is more likely were Georgia (and Ukraine) finally granted NATO membership. It's worth pointing out that the most outspoken critics of Russia's recent behavior - aside from the United States - are the former bloc states that are now protected under the NATO umbrella. However, far from pounding the drums of war, most of these states are instead using their treaty membership to lobby for diplomatic action in the Caucasus. Ukraine, on the other hand, has seen the proverbial writing on the wall in Georgia and is rushing into the waiting arms of America's unilateralist community. The former is showing faith in the entailed protections of NATO, while the latter is scrambling to protect their sovereignty.

This, to me, is the point of a 21st Century NATO. Georgia has been on the path to NATO membership for over two years now. Their democratically elected government has worked to increase defense spending and liberalize their public institutions in order to meet membership criteria. This isn't a casus belli for the U.S., nor is it an impetuous reaction to the Russian incursion. Georgia has played by the rules, gone through the process, and now they're simply hoping for a little advanced capital from the West.

Nowhere in the NATO charter - or even the more recent Membership Action Plan (MAP) - does the 'interoperability' of aspirant states depend on whether or not an occupying power disagrees with the overall process. Yglesias' argument, if I'm correct, seems to go as follows: Don't let Georgia join the organization built to deter the Russians, because it might upset the Russians.

So if Georgia is turned away, then what options remain for NATO? Why does it exist? Moreover, what options remain for Georgia? If Europe's definitive military body can't protect them, where then can Georgia turn?

Think John Bolton.

UPDATE: Just to add to my point here, check out Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's rhetoric in his respective WSJ and WaPo columns on the invasion. Rather than framing the conflict as a regional, niche problem for Georgia to deal with, he inflates it (rightly or wrongly) into a test of Western values. This rhetoric is perfectly consistent with the American hawk community.

I think it's safe to say that his rhetoric would be slightly different were Georgia a NATO member today.

Posted by Kevin Sullivan at 9:28 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Robert Kaplan's piece in this month's Atlantic is ostensibly about Burma, but what it says about US power in today's world is much, much more interesting.

The piece presents the views of a missionary and three former US Special Forces who have moved into the NGO sector in Burma and Thailand. These are not your traditional civil society folks though. The usual model for international aid and development groups is to set up a field office or two, disburse some funds, teach some classes, and issue some reports. The institutions usually try to stay out of domestic politics and draw a bright line between themselves and governments and militaries.

Kaplan's interlocutors, on the other hand, seem to be explicitly working to strengthen separatist militias and bring down the Burmese junta. One group, the Free Burma Rangers, operates in tandem with some of the ethnic militias, according to its founder:

We stand with the villagers; we’re not above them. If they don’t run from the government troops, we don’t either. We have a medic, a photo­grapher, and a reporter/intel guy in each team that marks the GPS positions of Burmese government troops, maps the camps, and takes pictures with a telephoto lens, all of which we post on our Web site. We deal with the Pentagon, with human-rights groups …

This group and the others Kaplan mentions are shadowy organizations that funnel funds and humanitarian relief to hard-pressed ethnic groups, assist the militias, attempt to organize disparate tribal groups with little in common, spread information among resistance groups within Burma and from Burma to the outside world, and liaise with US government officials and military planners. Were there to be clandestine US government activity in Burma, the smart money would be on these groups being involved in some way.

Most of the funding for these groups seems to be much less interesting, though: church donations and grants, mostly. One of the people profiled was caught smuggling weed into the US to fund his activities, but the other three seem to rely on fundraising drives and grant proposals just like those more traditional NGOs use.

It's quite a testament to the strength of US civil society that is willing and able to fund all this (not to mention the better well-known groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that are also active there). It's an example of amazing private initiative and the wealth necessary to support it that few other countries' populations are both willing and able to produce. Leveraging this commitment are the Americans in the region themselves - highly competent people, often former military, who know the local languages, have dense networks of local connections, and know how to access the support of constituencies back in the US. As Kaplan points out, the US has long produced lots of these regional operators, largely via missionary movements. The global commitments that the Cold War led the military and intelligence communities to make created a whole new breed of on-the-ground operator.

It's a strange but important example of the ways US leadership in the world functions in a different way from that of many former world powers. It's not quite soft power, but not quite hard power either; and while these groups seem, at times, plugged into the US government, it doesn't look like they take orders from it. These guys bear an eery similarity to Rambo, who, in his most recent film incarnation was hanging out in the Thai jungle until summoned to wage one-man war against the Burma's military rulers. Except the real-life examples don't operate with machetes, grenade launchers, and assault rifles (at least, not as far as I know); they fight their battles by posting evidence of human rights violations online and raising funds from American churches.

Networks of independent operators like this twine through countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They don't quite run their own foreign policy, but neither can they be discounted completely by the US or other countries who are setting policy towards these regions. They could be a help, could be a hindrance, depending on how effective the US and other governments can coordinate with them and how much their policies are in line. (The Burma-focused groups Kaplan profiled seem to be at odds, for instance, with hopes for more engagement and less confrontation from the US expressed by Burmese city-dwellers to the Economist this week.) Regardless, these freelancing groups are just one of the many ways that, despite the much-heralded decline of relative US power, Americans will continue to exercise a disproportionate influence on the rest of the world for a long time to come.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 1:43 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

From the Daily Times of Pakistan:

The coalition government has offered indemnity and security to President Pervez Musharraf if he resigns, sources privy to the developments said on Thursday.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Nawaz Sharif has agreed to change his rigid stance against the president, who is likely to finalise a decision in the next few days. The drop scene is likely in a few days, the sources said.

They said the United States, the United Kingdom and Arab rulers had been pressuring the government for a safe exit for Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup against Nawaz in 1999 and has been a US ally in the international war on terror since September 2001. American and British diplomats reportedly discussed the matter directly with Nawaz Sharif after other parties in the ruling coalition told them Nawaz was not willing to show flexibility.

Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari – the widower of slain two-time prime minister Benazir Bhutto – and Awami National Party chief Asfandyar Wali said they gave more importance to the moral aspects than the legal ones, according to the sources. Wali told Aaj Kal the outcome of impeachment would be no different from those of previous military rulers, but did not elaborate the statement.

You can read the whole report here.

Posted by Kevin Sullivan at 10:12 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

While anti-terrorist operations have been successful here and there in a patchy way, and the fate of Afghanistan remains in doubt, the far more important ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush.

So saith Edward Luttwak in Prospect, a British monthly.

I don't know if Luttwak is right, but he tries here to get outside of the daily back-and-forth and take a longer view of things, and that should be commended. Go read it.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:59 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Democracy and wealth tend to go together. Very poor countries are rarely democratic, wealthy ones rarely dictatorships. Debate rages over which is cause and which is effect, but in general the two seem to reinforce each other.

Which makes a recent argument published in the IHT by Anand Giridharadas, an Indian journalist, all the more interesting:

India was a country of ideas in its youth. At its moment of independence, 61 years ago on Friday, Jawaharlal Nehru declared that its dreams "are for India, but they are also for the world." India championed decolonization, nonalignment and disarmament around the world; it earned a reputation for haranguing philosophical lectures at the United Nations. In the salons of Delhi and Mumbai, an educated class that had come of age as freedom came to India spent long evenings debating the world and their place in it.

But in those days India was all ideas and no power. Today the situation is reversed. If one mingles with its affluent, reads its newspapers, observes its politics, roams its campuses, one sees in India what affluence has wrought: a turning inward, a slow-burn privatization of concern. This is globalization's great irony: It gives you influence in the world but then, with its gadgets and gizmos, distracts you from using it.

He goes on to lament the many ways that India's middle class has largely given up on politics and government, leaving India's democracy in an increasingly tenuous position.

I don't share Giridharadas's pessimism, but the logic of it is worth considering regardless. India has always been the great exception to the democracy-wealth correlation, managing to be both desperately poor and yet still a vibrant democracy. Will the strains of its growth prove too much for its system to handle? What happens when a poor democracy sprouts a middle class practically overnight?

China's unprecedented changes have rightly captured the world's attention. But India's evolution is just as unprecedented. It'll be interesting to see what new lessons about the interrelationships of economics and politics emerge from its development.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:43 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

RealClearWorld is now accepting applications for interns. This is an excellent opportunity for college students interested in international relations, world politics, journalism and new media. Although prior experience in these fields is a plus, it is not a requirement. May require some flexible hours.

If you are interested, please email a cover letter and resume to info@realclearworld.com.

Posted by Kevin Sullivan at 1:50 PM | Email Author | Permalink |

Much has been written on the demographic dilemma that lay ahead for Israel. In addition to a booming Palestinian population, the Israeli Arab birth rates within the Jewish state's own borders continue to outpace those of their Jewish citizens (excluding the latter's more orthodox and devout communities).

Andrew Lee Butters of TIME's Middle East Blog reports on one consequence of Israel's demographic predicament and the effects it's having on the nation's military:

Just as Israel's leadership has shifted from a kibbutz-born generation of military men towards those with business backgrounds and the corruption scandals to prove it, young Israelis have taken a less idealistic and more careerist approach to the military. They jockey to get training in valuable skills, or work family connections to get into elite units, which, like prestigious fraternities, help them build social contacts and job opportunities out in the real world. And the changing role of the military since 1967 -- from campaigns against standing Arab armies to sticky counterinsurgency operations in Lebanon to the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza -- hasn't exactly helped morale either.

Moreover, the fastest growing parts of Israeli society are those that are exempt from military service: Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews. (Many ultra-Orthodox don't recognize the legitimacy of the man-made state of Israel, and are waiting for God to do the job himself.) By some tallies, only 56 percent of young Israelis now join the military. Because Arab and especially ultra-Orthodox birth rates are much higher than other Israelis, military service could soon become a minority experience.

Demographics may be the deciding factor in the war for the Holy Land. While Israel's more secular and Westernized residents continue to mirror the behavior of those in Europe, her more orthodox and religiously zealous citizens stand ready to assume the country's majority. This puts a new light on the one-state/two-state debate, and places the onus of resolution on the Israelis.

Butters describes an Israel that has lost the expansive and nationalist zeal it was once known for. While the country's "Jewishness" may remain intact, its founding identity is clearly in jeopardy. In order to preserve this, Israel has to accelerate and promote the peace process, as hobbled and flawed it may be to date. One need only observe the way in which the IDF pulled out of Gaza, or the way in which they deal with militants in the occupied territories. Israel understands the urgency, and they realize that a few flawed options today are far better than the one facing them down the road.

Posted by Kevin Sullivan at 9:58 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili appeared on CBS' The Early Show today to discuss the situation in his country:

Full transcript below the fold:

HARRY SMITH, co-host: Joining us from Tbilisi, Georgia's capital city, is the president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili. Good morning, Mr. President.

President MIKHAIL SAAKASHVILI (Georgian President): Good morning, sir.

SMITH: Please tell me what is the situation in your country now? We are hearing conflicting reports about what is happening in Gori. We understand that the Russians are very active even as we speak in that town, not so many miles away from Tbilisi?

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: Well, situation is dramatic. We are witnessing a new stage of full-blown Russian invasion and aggression against my country and what we have--the situation developing on three different fronts.

First, in the Georgia...(unintelligible)...region of South Ossetia, where Russian tanks are going through villages inhabited by Georgian population and throwing people out of the houses, putting people into concentration camps that they are setting up in those villages and separating men and women and doing worse kinds of atrocities, unheard of since Balkans or since the war in Chechnya.

SMITH: Hm.

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: The other thing is Upper Abkhazia, in the region of Abkhazia, which is several hundred kilometers--miles away removed from the South Ossetia where they're going through villages again inhabited by Georgians and throwing out every single Georgian man or woman and children.

And the third one is that they have moved into the town of Gori and they rampage the town, looted the town. These are regular Russian troops. They go into houses, they destroy houses. There is all this documentary footage around that can prove it.

SMITH: Hm.

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: This is not he said, she said, you know. It's--we are lucky that there are television stations around and they're taking things like, you know, furniture, toilet seats, killing people, terrorizing people. What we are seeing now is deja vu from, you know, when Soviet Union was doing these things in the past.

SMITH: Hm.

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Nazi Germany...

SMITH: Mm-hmm.

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: ...after pact in Munich in 1938, so there should be...(unintelligible)...to the West.

SMITH: Right.

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: Italy's appeasement, like they did with Germany over Czechoslovakia when Chamberlain, the then British prime minister said, `Oh, we don't care about Czechoslovakia, it's far away country about which we know very little' or say that democracy's at stake. You know, I heard yesterday Senator McCain saying `we are all Georgians now.' I hope people understand that these are their values at stake. This is freedom in general at stake.

This is not about some far away remote country in which we know little. I mean, Georgia is very, very modern, normal country.

SMITH: President Mikhail Saakashvili. We thank you very much for your time this morning.

Pres. SAAKASHVILI: Thank you so much.

Posted by Kevin Sullivan at 8:45 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

Everyone, it seems, has something to say on Georgia; too many to even bother a roundup at this point. I couldn't possibly have anything new to add about the situation itself. But, in reading through the mountains of commentary, one strain has emerged: the potential for the same event to confirm pretty much every pre-existing idea about how the world works.

The Internet is awash in I-told-you-sos. Conservatives and liberals and Republicans and Democrats and neocons and realists and leftists and pacifists and internationalists and Russian nationalists and Georgian apologists and, probably somewhere, royalists and syndicalists and anarchists all seem to agree on one thing, and one thing only - even though it isn’t quite clear what happened yet, the events most certainly proved right everything they've been saying all along.

If you were concerned about a new Cold War last week, well, the fighting in Georgia shows that it has dawned, or at least another version of the great battle of ideas between democracy and authoritarianism. Of course, if the trial of civilizations is still over, then the fighting is nothing more than a classic imperialist land grab that means very little.

The international community, meanwhile, is obviously useless to act to rein in this sort of thing; we rely on it too much. Unless, of course, you think that the international community is the only thing that can act to rein in this sort of thing, which happened because we don't rely on it enough.

The US was either too aggressive or not aggressive enough; we need to recognize Russia's interests or make clear that Russia's gone too far in pushing them; Russia must be tied down in international institutions or unceremoniously booted out of them. On it goes.

Of course people will disagree about what happened and why, but the real interesting disagreements don't usually involve Georgia as such at all.

Where someone comes down on the fighting in the Caucasus will probably be entirely determined by their answers to a few questions: What kind of regime runs Russia? How much does democracy matter in international relations? Are national interests and power all that drives international relations, or do ideas matter? And is force best met by counterforce, or best bargained with and sidestepped?

That's about it. If you answer those four questions, then I'm pretty sure I can predict what you think about the past week's fighting, and what you think should be done.

If you think Russia is run by thugs, well then you'll see their attacks as thuggish. If you care a lot about democracy, then you've probably accepted most of Georgia's claims, and wonder why we haven't done more to help them. You're optimistic we could have prevented this from happening if you believe in the power of ideas; if you're a power-and-interests type, this was pretty much inevitable. If you think superior force wins, you want to exercise it here; if not, you're hoping cooler heads prevail.

That's not to say those aren't valid questions to stake and hold opinions on. Or that thoughtful, insightful commentary about the conflict isn't possible. Only that those four questions are where the real debate is. And that the debate that actually is happening over this crisis - and most crises - is really mostly a proxy for bigger disagreements about how the world works.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 12:46 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

How does one explain anything Russia has done? It often seems the Ultima Thule of paradox itself. Epoch after epoch, Russia has taken its enlightened place among those few, world-shaping nations - only to lapse, at the worst moment, into darkness. In 1839 a French nobleman called Russia "a nation of mutes." A century and a half later a Russian physicist would say, "Russia is not a country, not a people, it is a 1,000-year-long sickness." China, India, France - all places as vexed with interest as Russia. But could they ever be called a sickness?

That's from Chasing the Sea, an always amusing, and sometimes insightful, 2003 travelogue by self-described "adventure journalist" Tom Bissell. The book is nominally about a trip of his to Uzbekistan, but Bissell manages to work in plenty of Russian and Central Asian history, and some none-too-subtle opinions, like the one above.

I'd recommend Russia watchers start to bone up on Central Asia. Sure, everyone is looking at Russia's western flank now - that's where all the action is. But after Georgia, there isn't much for Russia to do in Europe right away - Ukraine is too big and too important to the West for a blatant move by Russia, and the rest of the countries in Russia's western near-abroad seem either too smart to let themselves be provoked like Georgia was or too stable to give Russia much of an opening.

Central Asia, though, is a lot more promising. Despite superficial friendliness, it's pretty clear that Russia and China are intense rivals for access to the region's energy resources. Most of the states in the region have drifted uneasily into and out of alignment with these two countries and the United States. Islamic terrorism is still a threat, the regimes in the region are still less than stable, and maybe most importantly, there are still lots of ethnic Russians spread throughout Central Asia to provide the motherland with an excuse to intervene if security deteriorates. Throw in the fact that no one in the West really likes these regimes - all but Kyrgyzstan are authoritarian, some of the countries emphatically so - and intervention there would be less likely to provoke Western hand-wringing.

If the Russophobes are right, and Russia really is gearing up for a grand return to the salad days of Soviet power, then Georgia could be little more than a warm-up.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 2:12 AM | Email Author | Permalink |

For the first time in almost a decade, war has come to Europe. Russia is attacking a sovereign nation for the first time since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And for the first time ever that I'm aware of, a head of government declared war while actually at the Olympics, making a mockery of the tradition of the Olympic truce.

Russia is pummeling cities and defenses all over Georgia and driving Georgian forces out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the country's two separatist regions. Georgia has pleaded for a truce, but none seems forthcoming.

Beyond that, not much is clear. Claims and counterclaims are flying fast - over who started the hostilities, over whether or not Russia has invaded Georgia proper, over Russia's stated war aims, over whether Russia has targeted a key pipeline, over what could have been done and what should be done now to prevent Russia from completely dismembering a tiny, democratic U.S. ally on its border.

Debate on all these issues is already intense. A partial roundup:

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has published an appeal for support from the West in today's Wall Street Journal. He concludes, somewhat ominously, that if help isn't forthcoming then the entire region may have to rethink its commitment to Western political ideals and true independence from Russia.

Georgian citizens in and around the fighting are pleading for help from the US and NATO and wondering just why they committed 2,000 troops to the war in Iraq, if not to earn protection from their allies.

Charles King, an expert on the region at Georgetown, lays much of the blame on Georgia itself for what he describes as "a form of calculated self-sacrifice," taken in the hope "that Russia's predictable overreaction would convince the West of exactly the narrative that many commentators have now taken up."

The Guardian has largely accepted claims that Georgia attempted to retake South Ossetia by force, and argued that the fighting has been a strategic defeat for Russia. David Clark, a former UK government adviser, took a different tack in the same pages, arguing that the fighting was the result of long-standing Russian scheming, but also betrayed weak self-esteem of a bully.

Ed Lucas, a long-time critic of Putin's Russia, takes a dim view of things, seeing in the fighting the success of Russia's military and propaganda strategy to regain complete freedom of action in its periphery. He urges the West confront Russia now before it starts to eye bigger prizes, like Ukraine.

Thomas de Waal lays the blame more squarely on Georgia's president.

Robert Kagan sees August 8 as the "official return of history," the return of an active confrontation between democracy and autocracy. The argument is either convenient or prescient, as Kagan has been advancing just this theory of world affairs for a year now.

Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, both Clinton-era State Department officials, see the crisis as an example of a failure of trans-Atlantic unity.

It will be some time before the details of just what is going on become clear. Whatever emerges, though, it seems clear that the fighting is more than the expression of leftover ethnic squabbles, or territorial feuding over some obscure territories. How and whether the US and other nations are able to rein Russia in, and what lessons the other small countries in the region take away, will set the tone and direction of the terms by which the rest of the world relates to Russia for a long time.

Posted by Michael H. Cognato at 4:42 AM | Email Author | Permalink |