The Great Debate

Obama’s first foreign policy blunder

David Unger

Mar 20, 2012 11:30 EDT

This is an excerpt from The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs, published recently by Penguin Press.

The defining mistake of Obama’s first-term foreign policy was his decision to escalate American military operations in Afghanistan. There were 35,000 American troops in Afghanistan when Obama was inaugurated. By the summer of 2011 there were roughly 100,000. The main national security rationale for their presence was to prevent the Taliban from regaining sufficient strength to invite Al Qaeda back to the Afghan training camps and sanctuaries they had operated from before 9/11. But since early 2002, seven years before Obama became president, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden himself — until he was tracked down and killed by U.S. commandos in May 2011 — had been based in Pakistan, under the protection of a Pakistani army that continues to receive billions of dollars in American military aid.

Long before his presidential bid, Obama had called for an increased American military effort in Afghanistan. He repeated that position frequently during the 2008 campaign. Obama’s strong opposition to the Iraq War led many supporters to imagine that he rejected the idea of defending America against terrorism by waging conventional military conflicts in distant Islamic lands. Some of the more philosophical passages in Obama’s autobiographical books, writings, and speeches elaborating on his opposition to the Iraq War fed that misimpression.

In a widely noted November 2006 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he emphasized his belief that the war had been not just a “failure of implementation” but “also a failure of conception,” going on to argue that “the rationale behind the war,” including an excessive faith that “we can impose democracy on a country through military force,” was “misguided.”

Some thought they heard echoes of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous 1967 speech declaring opposition not just to the war in Vietnam but to “a far deeper malady of the American spirit” that, if not confronted then, could lead to other misguided wars in other countries also waged in the name of guaranteeing liberty.

But Obama had long made a clear distinction between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unnecessary war of choice and a diversion from the main battle against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He supported the war in Afghanistan as a justified response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and necessary to America’s future security. On that basis Obama had harshly criticized the Bush administration for diverting military resources from Afghanistan to Iraq after 2003. And during his presidential campaign Obama had talked about sending three to five more brigades to Afghanistan as he drew down U.S. combat forces in Iraq.

Within a month of taking office, Obama approved a 17,000-troop increase for Afghanistan. That was less than the top U.S. commander there, General David McKiernan, had requested. But it was within the range Obama had called for during the campaign. It amounted to a roughly 50 percent rise in troop strength.

from Ian Bremmer:

The secret to China’s boom: state capitalism

Ian Bremmer

Nov 4, 2011 14:45 EDT

By Ian Bremmer The views expressed are his own.

One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the world since the 2008 financial crisis can be summed up in one sentence: Security is no longer the primary driver of geopolitical developments; economics is. Think about this in terms of the United States and its shifting place as the superpower of the world. Since World War II, the U.S.’s highly developed Department of Defense has ensured the security of the country and indeed, much of the free world. The private sector was, well, the private sector. In a free market economy, companies manage their own affairs, perhaps with government regulation, but not with government direction. More than sixty years on, perhaps that’s why our military is the most technologically advanced in the world while our domestic economy fails to create enough jobs and opportunities for the U.S. population.

Contrast the U.S. and its free market economy with China’s system.  For years now, that country has experienced double digit growth. Many observers would say that China’s embrace of capitalism since 1978, and especially since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, has been responsible for its boom. They would be mostly wrong. In fact, a new study prepared for the U.S. government says it’s not capitalism that’s powering China, but state capitalism -- China’s massive, centrally directed industrial policy, where the government positions huge amounts of capital and labor in economic sectors it intends to nurture. The study, prepared by consultants Capital Trade for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, reads in part:

In a world in which central planning has been so utterly discredited, it would be natural to conclude that the Chinese government and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party have been abandoning the institutions associated with the communist economic system, such as reliance on state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), as fast as possible. Such conclusion would be wrong.

In a G-zero world where no country can claim the mantle of international leadership, China has pulled an accomplished head fake. While the media focuses on China’s special economic zones, like Hong Kong and Macau, and the rise of the banker class and Chinese tech industry, state directed spending is the real engine of growth.  Capital invested in infrastructure like factories, heavy industry, roadways, and high speed trains continues to power annual double digit growth in GDP. Reliable data from 2004 shows that 76% of Chinese non-financial firms are classified as State Owned Enterprises (firms with government ownership of greater than 10%).

In short, while the U.S. has spent decades and vast treasure building up its defense system (and yes, by extension, the sectors of the economy that service it), China has spent its time and money building up control over the broad direction of its entire economy. In today’s world, where the first sentence of this essay rings true, which country currently looks better positioned to, pardon the pun, capitalize, in the years ahead?

During last week’s euro zone bailout talks, French President Nicolas Sarkozy went hat in hand to China, painting a stark picture of China’s still-growing economic importance internationally. Never mind that the phone call didn’t result in any particular action; the mere act raised Chinese President Hu’s profile going into the G-20 talks in France this week. Not only that, the entreaty by Sarkozy made plain that China has nothing to hide about the economic path it’s chosen for itself. After decades of hectoring from the West, the tables are perhaps about to turn. After all, what economic model should China emulate? Europe’s? The United States’? “With all due respect,” you can almost hear President Hu saying, “we like the way our system is working, thanks.”

U.S. military power: When is enough enough?

Bernd Debusmann

Feb 5, 2010 11:16 EST

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. —

The numbers tell the story of a superpower addicted to overwhelming military might: the United States accounts for five percent of the world’s population, around 23 percent of its economic output and more than 40 percent of its military spending. America spends as much on its soldiers and weapons as the next 18 countries put together.

Why such a huge margin? The question is rarely asked although there is spirited debate over specific big-ticket weapons systems whose conception dates back to the days when the United States was not the only superpower and large-scale conventional war against the other superpower, the Soviet Union, was an ever-present possibility. Those days are over.

Now, the U.S., deep in deficit and grappling with the aftermath of the worst recession since the 1930s, is reaching a point where the only way the country can maintain its role as the world’s towering military giant is to borrow money from the country many military planners see as a potential future adversary – China. “Obviously, this is not a tenable arrangement over the long run,” says Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Institute, a think tank with close ties to defense contractors.

The Pentagon, he says, must wean itself from the idea that the American military can go anywhere and do anything equally well.

Whether that weaning process will ever happen is open to doubt. “America’s interests and role in the world require Armed Forces with unmatched capabilities,” according to the just-published Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a report required by Congress on the future of U.S. national security strategy.

“Unmatched” is one thing, dwarfing the rest of the world is another. The U.S., for example, has 11 aircraft carriers in service; the rest of the world has eight. China is building one but analysts say it won’t be completed before 2015. “The United States,” notes the QDR, “remains the only nation to project and sustain large-scale operations over extended distances.”

The Underwear Bomber and the war of ideas

Bernd Debusmann

Dec 31, 2009 12:18 EST

- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -

Who is winning the war of ideas between the West and al Qaeda’s hate-driven version of  Islam?

It is a question that merits asking again after a  23-year-old Western-educated Nigerian of privileged background, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to murder almost 300 people by bringing down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with  explosives sewn into the crotch of his underpants.

The administration of President Barack Obama, averse to the bellicose language of George W. Bush, has virtually dropped the  phrase “war of ideas.” But that doesn’t mean it has ended. Or that Obama’s plea, in his Cairo speech this summer, for a new  beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world  has swayed the disciples of Osama bin Laden, whose 1998 fatwa  (religious ruling) against “Jews and Crusaders” remains the  extremists’ guiding principle.

“To…kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and  military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” the fatwa said. “This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah  (to) fight the pagans all together as they fight you all  together.”

That this exhortation is as appealing today, to a fanatical  minority, as it was 11 years ago underlines that the United States has had scant success in meeting the objective the Bush  administration set out in its 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. “Together with the international community, we will wage a war of ideas to make clear that all acts of terrorism are illegitimate, to ensure that the conditions and ideologies that promote terrorism do not find fertile ground in  any nation…”

That aim was spelt out just weeks before the United States  invaded Iraq, an event that provided ample ammunition for the  extremists’ assertion that the West was stepping up an unrelenting war it has waged against the Muslim world for  centuries. Such claims, and al Qaeda itself, should be easy to  discredit, write two political scientists, Peter Krause and Stephen Van Evera in the fall issue of the Middle East Policy  Council Journal.