Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 194

Fear and the Logic of Alliances

Do states align with or against the power they fear the most?

It is natural to expect that a state will seek to protect itself against a nearby rival—that is, against a power that has the intention and the capacity to extend its influence and control over its neighborhood. The geographic proximity makes the threat clear and present; there is no escaping behind the potential safety of vast oceans or expansive steppes and deserts. Most often, therefore, a state’s desire to protect itself will take the form of containing a rival by seeking allies that bolster its independence and security, and even by engaging in military actions to counter the influence of the menacing neighbor. The threatened state should try to deter, and if that fails, to fight against an aggressive neighbor nourishing imperial aspirations. In brief, balancing should be the more likely strategic path of the threatened state: balancing trumps bandwagoning. Or so, at least, we anticipate.

Today, the “balancing prevails” view is common in particular among those who want to see a small U.S. footprint abroad. If states will balance against a regional revisionist, then the United States is not required to instigate and support this indigenous and natural response. The might of the United States may be needed in extreme cases when expeditionary forces can shore up a weakening equilibrium, but the frontline states have inherent incentives to balance even without the United States. A large and consistent presence of U.S. forces in overseas bases to underpin strong security alliances is therefore not needed. Frontline states will sooner or later balance against their menacing neighbors. In fact, the argument goes, a long-term American presence near the expansionistic powers—Russia, China, and Iran—is counterproductive because it suppresses the frontline states’ natural proclivity to balance; it disrupts market forces, preventing them from reaching a regional equilibrium.

But reality is more complicated. Under certain conditions, the fear of a nearby aggressive power leads a state to hedge and to align itself with it, rather than against it. In particular, when the option is to cozy up to an aggressive neighbor or to rely on the uncertain commitment of a distant maritime power, the former may be a safer bet.

The case of 5th century BC Camarina in Sicily can illustrate this logic and the conditions that lead to it. Camarina was a town on the southern shores of Sicily, near powerful Syracuse, that faced a choice between following the neighboring city or trusting in the protection of the Athenians. Convinced by an ambitious Alcibiades, the Athenians were in Sicily, seeking to strengthen their position relative to their rival Sparta. And their strategy for this expedition was built on the expectation that local cities—the frontline states, so to speak—would follow them. The Athenians trusted in the belief that Sicilian cities, fearful of Syracuse’s hegemonic ambitions, would grab the chance to balance against it.

In 415 BC, in search of local allies in Sicily, the Athenians sent an envoy to Camarina, expecting support on the basis of a past treaty (6.75). Syracuse, fearing that a nearby city would supply manpower and especially cavalry to its enemy Athens, sent its own envoys. The two rivals presented their respective cases in front of the Camarinaeans through two speeches—one by Syracuse’s Hermocrates and the other by Athens’s Euphemus. These speeches—as is often the case in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War—present the author’s take on the likely reasoning of the opposing leaders.

On Syracuse’s side, Hermocrates gave several arguments why Camarina should not side with Athens. He suggested that states align themselves on the basis of fear. The question was then, as it is now, fear of whom? Hermocrates bluntly stated that whoever won the conflict between Syracuse and Athens would likely subjugate Camarina, were it to side with Athens. “If the Athenians reduce us [Syracuse], they will owe their victory to your decision, but in their own name will reap the honor, and will receive as the prize of their triumph the very men who enabled them to gain it. On the other hand, if we are the conquerors, you will have to pay for having been the cause of our danger.” (6.80.4) Were Camarina to side with Athens, its outlook was dark: Athens wins, Camarina will be under it; Syracuse wins, Camarina will be punished. Hermocrates presented the threat of Athens as the smaller one for Camarina: Athens would claim that their victory was due to their own forces and take their Sicilian ally as some sort of prize, as a tribute paying protectorate. But Athens was far away while Syracuse was nearby. A victorious Syracuse on the other hand would retaliate against those who, like the Camarinaeans, would have supported Athens. Syracuse’s “enmity is likely to be lasting,” he ominously threatened. (6.80.5). In brief, Camarina ought to fear Syracuse and therefore ally with it.

The Athenian envoy, Euphemus, did not deny that Syracuse was a serious threat to Camarina. In fact, he reminded his audience that Syracuse was the main threat, being a large and proximate power. “The Syracusans live close to you, not in a camp, but in a city greater than the force we have with us.” (6.86.3) He added that Camarina should not fear Athens, a maritime and distant power that could not and would not maintain a long-term presence in Sicily. “We are not able to stay here without you, and if we proved perfidious enough to bring you into subjection, we should be unable to keep you in bondage, owing to the length of the voyage and the difficulty of guarding large, and in a military sense mainland, cities.” Distance mitigates fear.

This last description of Athens was meant to be reassuring, assuaging Camarina’s fear of a potential Athenian domination of Sicily. In reality, it may have had the exact opposite effect. Underscoring that Athens was distant and unwilling to commit large forces to Sicily diminished Camarina’s fear of Athens, and so elevated the risks associated with a potential Syracusan victory. At a minimum, in fact, short of its complete annihilation, Syracuse would have remained nearby while the Athenians would sooner or later leave Sicily, firmly believing that a maritime power could maintain stability in distant regions through its naval power and occasional projections of power. The fear of Syracuse was lasting; the support of Athens (and even the threat of Athens) was not.

The choice in front of the Camarinaeans was to align themselves with the distant Athens in fear of Syracuse (Euphemus’s logic) or with nearby Syracuse, also in fear of Syracuse itself (Hermocrates’s logic). As Thucydides put it,

sympathizing with the Athenians, except in so far as they might be afraid of their subjugating Sicily, [the Camarinaeans] had always been at enmity with their neighbor Syracuse. From the very fact, however, that they were neighbors, they feared the Syracusans most of the two, and being apprehensive that the Syracusans might win even without their help, both sent them in the first instance the few horsemen, and for the future determined to support them most in fact, although as sparingly as possible. (6.88.1)

They appeared to side with neither, but de facto supported Syracuse, fearing that it would outlast the Athenians.

Fear of the nearby enemy did not lead to balancing but to a hedged bet, and ultimately to support for Syracuse. In fact, two years later, as the Athenians continued to fight against Syracuse, the Camarinaeans supplied Syracuse with a substantial number of forces. Almost all of Sicily “now ceased merely to watch events as it had previous been doing, and actively joined Syracuse against the Athenians.” (7.33.2)

The Athenian mistake was twofold.

First, the argument presented by the Athenian envoy, Euphemus, fundamentally misunderstood the strategic plight of a frontline state like Camarina. Euphemus thought that Camarina’s enmity with Syracuse would always translate in a posture of balancing, and a momentary support by Athens would only convince this city to steel its opposition to their nearby adversary. As he said, “instead of being always on the defensive against the Syracusans, unite with us [Athenians], and in your turn at last threaten them.” (6.87.5) But he did not understand that hostility toward a large neighbor did not automatically and always translate into a policy of balancing. On the contrary, without a credible and permanent support of a bigger power, the frontline polity like Camarina has to always consider the possibility of being left alone to face the aggressive neighbor. And Athens, the exemplar of an “offshore balancer,” was not offering anything more than a fleet and some land forces, but certainly no long-term commitment. As Euphemus told the Camarineans, “friendship or enmity is everywhere a matter of time and circumstance.” (6.85.1)

The second mistake is related to the first one, and it may even stem from it. The Athenians did not have sufficient land power to defeat Syracuse, nor did they have the will or capacity to engage in a long-term containment of it. Camarina therefore perceived the Athenians as lacking staying power. A large navy without an army is appealing to a maritime power (such as Athens then, and the United States now). It allows for distant projections of power, it bestows great flexibility, and it maintains control over the maritime commons. But a posture privileging naval assets (and now airpower) over the physical presence of large land forces must be underwritten by a belief that faraway states will maintain the regional balance against a rival, sustaining regional stability without the need for a consistent support. This belief proved to be mistaken for Athens in Sicily because naval power without a long-term continental presence does little to assure potential or existing allies facing the prospect of a land attack from a neighbor.

It is equally risky for a maritime great power, like the United States, to base its foreign policy on the expectation that states, located on the Eurasian frontlines, will naturally balance against their nearby adversaries. In the end, a lasting “continental commitment” of the maritime power is necessary.

Is the College Business Model Unraveling?

The business model that the American higher education system has relied on to boost revenue and enrollment over the last few decades—steadily rising tuition, moderated by increasingly generous financial aid packages—may finally have run its course. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Private colleges are offering deeper tuition discounts than ever before, hoping to lure more students and boost overall revenue—and it appears the strategy isn’t working.

Tuition-discount rates for first-time, full-time freshmen hit a record 49.1% in the current school year, according to preliminary results from a National Association of College and University Business Officers survey of 411 schools. That 2016-2017 figure compares with 48% in the prior year. At schools with fewer than 4,000 students—those for whom just a small shift in enrollment can have a big impact—the freshman discount rate was 50.9%.

The hefty discounts in sticker prices signal how pricing power is shifting from schools to students and their families as some grow skeptical about the value of a costly college degree.

There is a bubble logic at work here. Marginal institutions are afraid to cut sticker prices, because many parents and students see high tuition as a mark of prestige. So colleges are forced to simply offer an increasing array of credits and scholarships to induce students to enroll, even as they keep jacking up tuition to keep pace with competitors.

But as the WSJ story suggests, it may be that pent up demand for higher education has already peaked. That could mean the whole industry is in for a disruptive adjustment.

What might this look like? Smaller, less-prestigious institutions could close. Others will be forced to roll back the administrative bloat that has accompanied rising tuitions. Vocational training programs might start to get more enrollees. Cost inflation and debt accumulation could slow down. All of this could be good for a higher education industry that costs too much and delivers too little and that seems to have contented itself with stagnation for quite some time. Expect the academic lobby to start pushing even harder for “free tuition” and other government crutches to postpone the reckoning for as long as possible.

Merkel Strengthens Her Hand

Angela Merkel struck a third blow to the hopes of the her rival Martin Schulz this weekend, as her Christian Democrats staged an upset electoral victory in Germany’s most populous state. FT:

The Christian Democrats took control of North Rhine-Westphalia, upsetting the odds in the traditionally Social Democrat stronghold and dealing a heavy blow to SPD leader Martin Schulz as he bids to unseat Ms Merkel in Berlin. […]

According to preliminary final results, the CDU won 33 per cent in Sunday’s vote, well up on the 26 per cent they scored in the last election in 2012. The SPD saw its vote plunge from 39 per cent to 31.2 per cent, its worst result to date.

The CDU enjoyed a late surge in support, charging SPD with being weak on security while appealing to Merkel’s image as an experienced, steady hand capable of guiding Europe. The CDU’s tougher line on security and immigration also helped neutralize the far-right AfD, which underperformed the polls on Sunday.

Ahead of September’s national elections, though, Merkel will likely add fiscal issues to the pitch—and that will complicate life for both Schulz and Emmanuel Macron. Ahead of Sunday’s election, Schulz took the surprising step of backing the new French president’s calls for a common Eurozone budget and a relaxation of Eurozone spending rules. But Merkel has taken a harder line on the matter, playing to tight-fisted Germans’ fears’ that such reforms would transform the EU into a “transfer union”, giving handouts to less responsible member states. Top CDU officials like Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble have already signaled that Macron’s more ambitious proposals for closer integration—like a common Eurozone budget run by a common finance minister—are dead on arrival. In the lead-up to September, expect the party to harden its line further, resisting Macron’s early reform efforts while accusing SPD of being the party of fiscal irresponsibility.

And if, as expected, Merkel and her party win big in September, their fiscal mandate will only be strengthened. In that case, Macron may have to settle for Schauble’s favored, modest reform proposal: the creation of a European Monetary Fund that would increase the EU’s ability to monitor states’ financing while ignoring Macron’s calls for deeper fiscal integration.

Much can change in four months, of course, and Macron is already beginning discussions on Eurozone reforms in Berlin today. But if CDU’s current momentum is any indication, it will continue to be Merkel and Schauble, not Macron or Schulz, calling the shots on Europe’s fiscal agenda.

UK: Vast Majority Favor Brexiting Ahead of Snap Election

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Tories are sitting pretty with double-digit polling leads as the opposition Labour and Liberal-Democrats struggle to find a resonant and coherent position on Brexit. A new poll from YouGov helps explain why the 52-48 Leave-Remain Brexit vote won’t translate into a tightening election race:

There is a third group who change the dynamics of EU-related arguments – the “Re-Leavers.” These are people who voted to Remain in the EU and many still think that leaving was the wrong decision, but crucially now believe the government has a duty to carry out the will of the British people.

When taking this into account, we can split the country into three groups instead of two: The Hard Leavers who want out of the EU (45%); the Hard Remainers who still want to try to stop Brexit (22%); and the Re-Leavers (23%). The other 9% don’t know.  

This group means that when discussing Brexit and its implications in the campaign the electorate is not two pools of voters split almost down the middle 52/48. Instead, it is instead one massive lake made up of Leave and Re-Leave voters and one much smaller Remain pond. This means that the Conservatives and UKIP are fishing among 68% of voters with Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens and nationalists scrapping for just 22%.

“Re-Leaver” is an overly cute moniker, but the poll raises a couple interesting points. As we’ve noted before, these results should put to bed any notion of “Bregret. Not only is there no evidence that some huge portion of Britons regret or feel misinformed about their decision, the proportion of the country that thinks that the result of a free and fair referendum should be overturned by other means is vanishingly small—and rightly so.

It also exposes the flawed logic of the Liberal-Democrats and some anti-Corbynites in Labour who think that if only their parties back a hard Remain position that they’ll get the lions share of the 48% and enough of the mythical Bregret vote to win a majority. Whatever other limitations he has as a party leader (and these are many) Corbyn’s decision to keep Labour as a pro-Brexit party looks pretty sensible when he knows that a large proportion of hard Remainers are Scottish nationalists who won’t be voting Labour anyways. It’s unsurprising then that the Lib-Dem’s gambit to be the “Party of Remain” didn’t pay off at local elections earlier this month. While the leader of the Lib-Dems has said they may “double [their] seats,” that’s from a paltry 9, and they seem unlikely to outperform expectations.

Between Brexit itself and Scottish nationalists pushing for a second independence referendum, Theresa May has plenty of challenges ahead. But with her opponents boxed into a corner on Brexit, the June elections are looking poised for a Tory landslide.

Making Diplomacy Great Again

The profession of diplomacy—which is the execution of foreign policy—is in crisis in the United States today. The rise of near peer competitors threatening the U.S.-led global security system, the disappointing results of U.S. Middle Eastern engagement—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, even the Iran nuclear agreement—and the Trump Administration’s cuts to State Department funding (and tardiness in nominating Department leaders below the level of Secretary), have all contributed to this crisis.

But at its core the present crisis is not the result of a bad conjuncture of disparate elements; rather, at the core lies a failure of the primary practitioner of diplomacy, the Department of State, and of the larger American foreign policy community, to understand what diplomacy does. Getting this right is as important as any other aspect of foreign policy. Fortunately, the threats aimed at America and the reform that budget cuts will require of State provide twin incentives to get diplomacy right—or, to put it in the contemporary vernacular, to make American diplomacy great again. But reform must start by understanding the problem.

The Drug of Internal Engagement

Foreign policy circles throughout Washington rejoiced when the Trump Administration seemed to shift over the past several months from a rhetoric suggestive of a military-heavy, “America First” foreign policy to a more traditional “maintain the global order” posture. Over the same time, officials like Defense Secretary James Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and NSC staff chief strategist Dina Powell have appeared to become the most influential figures in Trump’s foreign policy dramatis personae. These officials are steeped in the lore of “diplomacy first,” with the use of military force being a last choice, best summed up by General Mattis’s 2013 quote: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.”

This apparent shift is welcome, but the idea of diplomacy envisaged in the new approach may end up having little to do with what diplomacy can actually accomplish. The Trump team’s reference point, shared by many military leaders and encouraged institutionally by the Department of State and USAID, sees “diplomacy” ever more as societal reconciliation, along with economic and governance outreach, to select foreign populations with the mission of either transforming their societies into “Denmark”—as Michael Mandelbaum put it recently in Mission Failure—or “winning hearts and minds” to support American policy goals. Not only is this approach rarely successful; it also obscures how diplomacy advances American interests, which, to put not too fine a point on it, it does by helping to avoid the use of force or, when necessary, by exploiting its use to achieve specific policy goals.

How did U.S. “diplomacy” get turned around wrong this way? The answer is twofold: first, a post-Cold War loss of focus in the government, military, and foreign policy community on the ends and means of foreign policy; and second, a Department of State that has played down, in its institutional structures and culture, traditional diplomacy while advancing an outreach-to-populations, or social engineering model, of U.S. international action.

The starting point for understanding all of this is definitions. If foreign policy establishes the ends of a nation’s involvement in the world, then diplomacy is the conduct of that policy through the interaction of a state with foreign actors—usually but not always states (international organizations, sub-state actors, trans-state political movements, and other non-state actors do matter)—to advance the interests of all sides. In conducting diplomacy an actor wields the carrots and sticks available to it, even as it often enough seeks to acquire more of both.

These carrot and sticks, in turn, can be military, economic, or political (UN votes, state visits, and so on). In certain contexts (such as the security dilemmas in the greater Middle East) military tools are predominant. In others, say U.S. relations with the Organization of American States, there is very little military element. But in the end these are all tools, and even the military one comes under diplomatic overview, since the underlying issues that provoke a resort to arms are between the states or other political actors that deploy them.

Once the definitions of goals (foreign policy), their operational execution (diplomacy), and the specific tools are clear, the confusion in U.S. thinking between diplomacy, the overall implementation of foreign policy, and the diplomatic “tool” of outreach becomes apparent. Economic assistance, governance coaching, and reconciliation of squabbling groups are all forms of the outreach tool; they are not and cannot be ends in and of themselves. Yet for practical purposes that is how many State Department officials have come to think of them.

This outreach tool is a reasonable if exceptional element of diplomacy when dealing with crises or longer-term problems within states, although its efficacy is limited. The U.S. government and the so-called international community generally succeed with emergency assistance—food aid, disaster relief, refugee programs, stemming contagious diseases, and related crisis response. But longer-term success of development assistance typically is limited to the micro level or specific sectors. For example, the international community has advanced education in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government helped build a competent Iraqi central bank. But experience in a hundred countries over seven decades has yielded few examples of transformational political change by means of outside assistance, as development assistance expert Tom Dichter has just pointed out in Quartz.1

Despite this experience, particularly since American engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq began, this exceptional tool has taken on huge significance, having been “tasked” with missions it could not accomplish.2 For the past several decades America’s foreign policy has focused on internal conflicts, and a tool that was once thought to be able to “transform” conflict-producing societies obviously was welcomed as a secret sauce to avoid the usual choices: retrenchment, all-in commitment of U.S. forces for decades, or distasteful compromises to achieve “half-a-loaf.”

The belief in this tool is ubiquitous in the policy community, especially the military. There, it is doctrinally anchored in the joint Army Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, published in 2006, drafted under the supervision of then Generals Petraeus and Mattis, and the game plan for the militarily successful “surge” in Iraq. It emphasizes “Phase IV” or stability operations, the “build” phase (civil security and control; governance; essential services; economic/infrastructure development) of the counterinsurgency “clear-hold-build” triad. It acknowledges that in internal conflicts political factors are primary, and the main objective is the establishment of legitimacy. In theory, these are largely tasks for a local government, but the manual bears an extraordinarily broad definition of those tasks: “Counterinsurgents take upon themselves responsibility for the people’s well-being in all its manifestations. “

If the host government cannot accomplish this responsibility (and typically the U.S. government is engaged only when it cannot), then that becomes the U.S. objective at the heart of “victory” in a counterinsurgency, a counter-terror operation, or an internal conflict-resolution mission. That mission is typically the responsibility of the State Department and the local embassy-led country team. (Under certain circumstances the military, with its robust “services” and ability to “self protect,” takes on Phase IV, but this is a deviation from doctrine.) But 3-24, written by soldiers and marines, did not consider how civilian agencies long focused on government-to-government relations could transform themselves into fundamental change agents at grassroots levels, often under fire. As it turns out, this is very hard to do—or at least hard to do well.

Studies of America’s recent wars highlight stability operations but mainly document the failures. For example, “Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War,” an official National Defense University study of Afghanistan and Iraq, argues that “when it became clear State could not do (stability operations) . . . DoD argued it should assume responsibility for some . . . civil military duties.” But the study concluded: “We seem incapable of solving the problem.” The Rand Corporation’s November 2013 study on the transition of stability operations in Iraq following the 2011 troop withdrawal, “Ending the U.S. War in Iraq,” states that despite the military efforts in Phase IV and a massive post-2011 State Department-led stability operation, Iraq was left with “enduring challenges . . . to its political and democratic development.” Voluminous reporting by the congressionally mandated Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) and the counterpart for Afghanistan (SIGAR), on the $60 billion Iraq program and $115 billion Afghanistan one, documents countless failures, along with some successes. The conclusion from the SIGAR January 2017 update to Congress is damning: “Much of the reconstruction mission is at risk” and “could ultimately fail” despite the huge investment made.

In spite of these sobering and consistent analyses of stability operations gone wrong, the view among many military and policy community organs seems to be, “the mission is still right, but we got the execution wrong somehow.” For example, the influential former House Intelligence Committee Chair, Mike Rogers, writing in the Washington Post on April 21, argued: “The State Department was found wanting in Iraq and Afghanistan, unable to . . . support counterinsurgency programs.” The above-cited Rand study concluded, among other things, that in ending any military operation in an internal conflict the U.S. government should “reassess the campaign goals and objective . . . recognizing that previously established goals likely will not be achieved by the end of the transition.” While that sounds like healthy skepticism toward stability missions, the report then provides a list of recommendations to make mission execution finally work properly. Yet another example is the congressionally funded United States Institute for Peace, created to reflect faith in transformational engagement in societies, whose current program includes: “We recommit ourselves to prevent, mitigate and resolve violent conflicts around the globe.” The Department of Defense has its own Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, focused on how to get execution right. One of its recent publications advocated the creation of a “civilian surge” capacity to ensure “robust civil­ian participation” in future (reconstruction and stability) operations.

These various peacekeeping, reconstruction, and stability-oriented institutions and task forces within the U.S. government, think tank, and academic communities, as well as in international institutions and other countries, are well-funded publicly or privately, netted to each other, and extraordinarily influential in espousing the “transformation is feasible” message. And to be sure, the international community and the U.S. government as its leader cannot ignore internal conflicts, nor can they ignore the internal drivers of aggressive behavior, civil wars, and outbreaks of terrorism. Programs that effectively reinforce local political forces arrayed against such drivers make sense, as do reconciliation and peacemaking efforts between political forces. Certain assistance of proven effectiveness as noted above—disaster assistance, food aid, and technical programs by governmental or corporate entities to improve specific sectors—are tools that can also make a difference.

But that is not the argument of those who have pushed this line in government, in institutions, in journals, and on the ground for a broad strategic mission to operate inside states. One does not justify spending almost $200 billion dollars in ten-plus years in Iraq and Afghanistan to achieve improvements “at the margins” but rather to have a transformational effect on a state. Max Boot, a well-respected and prolific writer on the “small wars” theme, is a leading proponent of the strategic use of this tool. In his November-December 2014 Foreign Affairs piece, “Counterinsurgency Is Here to Stay,” he advocated nation-building, arguing that the U.S. military finally got the strategic execution right with the Iraq surge. As with other commentators in this vein, he reacts to the dismal record of such efforts by focusing on failure of execution, stressing the inability of civilian agencies to respond. His solution: Transform USAID “into an organization focused not on development for its own sake but on state building” in the service of global stability.

Yet there has been little “state building” success since the 1940s. The closest has been Plan Colombia, which took decades to achieve modest success. With no real track record to justify turning a tool into a goal, a means into an end, where then did the idea of transformational American diplomacy arise?

The answer is rooted in American history and values. To twist slightly Henry Kissinger’s quote concerning Iran, the U.S. government has never decided whether it is a country or a cause. Furthermore even as an international “cause” it is bifurcated—between an international order of law and collective security among sovereign, “equal” nations (Wilson’s concept) and the even more far-reaching mission to transform societies and liberate individuals within states.

This combined (and contradictory) mindset is etched into the 1945 Preamble to the UN Charter, now the lodestone of international law. That document reiterates the League of Nations worldview (“treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained . . . equal rights . . . for nations large and small . . . maintain international peace and security”), and a call to arms for liberal values to peoples within their states (“faith in fundamental human rights, the dignity and worth of the human person, . . . promote social progress . . . practice tolerance . . . promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”)

This double definition of “liberal values,” as order and collective security among states and as advancement of individuals and peoples as a global responsibility, has characterized U.S. foreign policy since World War II. Moreover, the more far-reaching element—transformation within states—was reinforced by advancing democracy and individual freedom in Germany and Japan, then the Marshall Plan’s success transforming economies in Europe, and the conduct of the Cold War itself. The discipline of a peer competitor required Washington to focus primarily on realpolitik containment, but the ideological conflict between liberalism and collectivism at the heart of the confrontation encouraged both camps to appeal to liberal values.

In the post-Cold War period the United States, as Mandelbaum documents, maintained its leadership of a global security coalition now focused not on near-peer challenges but on fixing the internal order of states under stress. Each problem tackled was seen as separate, not linked to a common strategy beyond the idea that “the West” had to lead the international community against disturbances that troubled moral consciences and security at regional levels. Thus the U.S. government and its allies intervened in internal conflicts in Colombia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, northern Iraq, Libya, and (in a desultory way) Syria, and tried to resolve “frozen conflicts” from Northern Ireland and Kashmir to the West Bank, Georgia, Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Cyprus. And as country after country following 1989 invited the West and its institutions to help transform themselves into liberal states, interest grew in the policy community and especially in Congress to extend this “nation-building” and “values” agenda to recalcitrant states that balked at the American world order—up to and including, in some cases, regime change.

After 9/11, this seemingly “on the shelf” capability was seized to respond to the terrorist threat, and then in Iraq and Afghanistan. The formula was (1) totalitarian or failed states (or the terrorists they generate) are threats to international order; (2) America has a diplomatic tool which, combined with the universal values peoples everywhere share, can transform these states and thereby end their threat to global security. To quote from President George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. . . . Advancing human rights and self-government is the mission that created our Nation. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security.”

State’s Complicity

The State Department itself has contributed to the problem of mis-defining U.S. diplomacy since World War II, beginning as noted above with the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and the ideological battles with Communism. Both of these endeavors elevated advancement of abstract ideals and appeals to populations as complements to traditional diplomacy’s realpolitik focus on state-to-state communication in the service of avoiding war or, failing that, to direct the use of force to achieve U.S. political goals.

The Department has also been hampered over many years by internal tinkering and congressional interference. Unlike any other diplomatic service, the U.S. State Department expanded its corps of generalist diplomatic personnel (Foreign Service Officers or FSOs, the group that provides most Ambassadors and senior State officials) into a specialized or “cone” system by integrating officers doing labor-intensive “services” jobs in consular affairs, internal administration, and later cultural programs. This massive broadening of what constituted FSO duties reduced diplomacy to essentially anything someone in an FSO career path was doing. Thus the Foreign Service could not follow the usual pattern of successful professional cadre in focusing relentlessly on core competencies (for example, “every Marine a rifleman”).

Meanwhile, congressional mandates, motivated by ambivalence about funding Department activities in the first place, or else by support of foreign social engineering projects, added enormously to State’s workload, particularly by way of new and usually unfunded reporting requirements. In particular, congressional “pet rock” priorities competed for attention and resources with traditional diplomatic operations, further muddling any core concept of diplomacy.

But the greater impulse in this direction within the Department was the end of the Cold War. As diplomatic engagement shifted ever more to humanitarian or values-driven issues, institutional emphasis on tools to implement such social engineering gained ground within State. One major step was the incorporation totally of the United States Information Agency, responsible for overseas messaging, and partially of USAID as well, into the Department of State.

At the time staffers in those agencies feared that their ameliorant culture would be pushed aside by the realpolitik-centric Department. Instead, the opposite occurred, as seen by the dominance of articles related to outreach to populations after integration in the official Department organ, State Magazine, and the American Foreign Service Association’s Foreign Service Journal.

Faced after 2000 with internal situations generating security threats—first 9/11, then Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush Administration’s State Department embraced bottom-up societal transformation, in part to compete with the Defense Department, which increasingly was taking on civil affairs and governance functions in Afghanistan, and particularly in Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Colin Powell, a believer in Embassy and State Department-leadership in civilian stability operations, assigned two of his most trusted subordinates, John Negroponte and Richard Armitage, to oversee these activities in Iraq.

Powell’s successor Condoleezza Rice even more enthusiastically embraced the idea of civilian-led transformation of troubled societies, arguing before Congress for the “clear-hold-build” concept, and strongly backing civilian-military “provincial reconstruction teams” (PRTs) to undertake grassroots transformation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hillary Clinton took the transformation even further. While Powell and Rice focused State’s internal engagement on security threats in the greater Middle East, Secretary Clinton pursued a global transformational agenda complete with special emissaries, from women’s rights to LGBT and small business. Moreover, she introduced the Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), modeled on the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which establishes operational and budget priorities and institutional focus.

The State product, published in 2010 and updated in 2015 under John Kerry, took a further step in turning diplomacy on its head.3 Intervening in foreign societies for transformational goals seemingly became the Department’s core mission. Some of its goals were reasonable, including combating terror and climate change, but state-to-state relations, alliance building, and containment of classic security threats were all played down as “so 19th century,” to quote a certain former Secretary of State.

Moreover, the preferred means for any State success was engagement with populations to achieve transformational successes, essentially over the heads of their governments. As State organizes its operating bureaus and embassies and even the work requirements (and evaluations) of its officers along QDDR lines, its influence has proved profound in substituting this new concept of State Department purpose—in which governments are targets—for the more traditional one in which governments are business partners.

Impact

Much of the controversy about the State Department’s mission and relative lack of success, and particularly its friction with the Defense Department, is generated by the perversion of diplomacy’s primary focus toward engagement at the sub-state level for supposed transformational results.

In the worst-case scenario (which has actually materialized twice), this focus encourages large-scale military commitments under the assumption that only regime change by force of American arms could generate the social petri dish in which our transformational agenda could work its magic. But such engagements ignore local realities, the interests of neighbors (Pakistan, Iran, and Syria, respectively, in the Afghanistan and Iraq cases), and the engrained impatience of the American people. So while the cause may appear just, the remedy at hand temptingly complete, and the values and institutions to be implanted unarguably admirable, the “secret sauce” ultimately and inevitably fails to achieve far-reaching U.S. goals. As costs approach $200 billion in a given case—that seems to be the magic threshold number—the Department of State is accused (especially by the military) of failing to achieve this allegedly “core” mission. If there is one theme in the various studies of stability operations, including those cited above, it’s motivating State to “figure out” how to execute stability operations.

But this is a category error of the first order. The Department of State has never in all its history been equipped, trained, focused or (except the Marshall Plan) funded, on transformational missions of other countries’ political cultures. Making the State Department the lead agency in a theoretically unlimited quest to bring a secularized messianic age into being does not magically make it capable of doing any such thing. But the outreach mindset behind it is dismayingly absolutist: The U.S. government, if it uses the right techniques, can win total success on the cheap—transformation that advances universal moral values while simultaneously eliminating security threats. So the whole world becomes in effect a 1989-period Eastern Europe.

And diverting an institution to this peripheral “mission impossible” comes at a cost. As Walter Russell Mead first noted in these pages in 2013, the United States now faces near-peer competitors intent on tearing apart the U.S. global security system.4 This means, first, a return of classical high-stakes balance-of-power diplomacy at the state-to-state level. Given America’s recent neglect of this threat, diplomacy properly understood now has to do some heavy lifting, but a Department of State oriented institutionally toward internal population outreach has lost the proper muscle tone as both resources and attitudes have been diverted away from traditional diplomacy.

Meanwhile, back in the realpolitik world, in dealing with China, Russia, or their allies North Korea and Iran, there are no easy victories. The two diplomatic tools here are major military or economic engagement, at great risk and cost, or international diplomatic initiatives for compromise outcomes distasteful to many, such as the Iran nuclear deal. Under such circumstances, traditional diplomacy appears nearly illegitimate as it promises only limited gains but considerable pains.

In addition, the great power competition now facing us is often played out (as it was throughout the Cold War) within weak or failed states wracked by civil wars and internal unrest, such as Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. There is a place for stability tools in such conflicts, to achieve—as discussed above—micro successes and sector improvements, and respond to emergencies. But the priority has to be on traditional diplomacy. Vladimir Putin turned a low-cost intervention in the Syrian internal conflict into a significant strategic victory not because he focused on (to quote FM 3-24) “responsibility for the people’s well-being” for transformational ends, but rather because he chose a decidedly “people unfriendly” savage bombing campaign to achieve very limited but feasible ends. The U.S. government cannot emulate him, but we can’t counter him with transformational schemes that don’t work, especially when they come at the expense of (more humanely) using our own power

 

Transforming State

The issues raised over the past twenty years about intervention inside societies, now complemented by “near peer” challenges we all recognize, are still being debated within the foreign affairs communities of the United States and the West. But one initial step can be taken with the Department of State. The Department’s leadership advocates significant reform, and personnel and budget cuts will necessitate it in any case (with, by the way, development assistance and thus the “sinews” of transformational diplomacy being on the chopping block). If done correctly, such reform can position State to lead the U.S. government in dealing with the range of challenges from classic state-to-state or alliance-to-alliance confrontation to conflicts within states, and would encompass three areas: mission, organization, and personnel.

Reforming State’s mission is the simplest to describe and the most vital to implement. The key is to put classic diplomacy—state-to-state relations to advance American and universal security and other interests—in pride of place. Much can be done by public statements by senior Department officials. But a new QDDR or a successor document should be issued once the Administration releases its National Security Strategy document, or comparable “Trump Worldview.” The Department document should track with the White House product, but elaborate on the principles and priorities on which the Department will focus. They include the building and maintenance of alliance relationships, developing common international positions, and mobilization of all elements of national power. While engagement within states is one of those elements, it should not be oversold.

Finally, the Department must assert formally and in every way possible bureaucratically, that under the National Security Council, State has the overall coordination responsibility in government for international security, including military as well as non-military tools.

The Department is currently a rabbit-warren of Under Secretaries, special emissaries, bureaus, officers, and single purpose units, many of the latter urged or thrust onto it by Congress. It also is drowning in paper, much of it also congressionally mandated. The Trump Administration did the State Department a service by cutting two of the four true subcabinet positions (the second Deputy Secretary and the Counselor). This allows the Deputy Secretary to concentrate on classic Deputy duties—stand in for Secretary, monitor those disparate Department programs not under the policy Under Secretary, and promote internal operations, essentially a chief operating officer position. The Under Secretary for Policy should focus on diplomatic operations through the geographic and UN bureaus and their embassies. Various hard-power elements within the rest of the State bureaucracy—police and justice programs, counter-terrorism, stability programs, energy diplomacy, and political-military operations—should be placed under him/her and integrated with the bureaus.

Special emissaries should be eliminated. Mandatory reporting and other taskings that torment the Department should be placed in an “intensive care unit” headed by the Deputy Secretary to radically reduce the number, and length, of Department products. Many such are not formally mandated; even those that are, typically by Congress, can be drastically shortened and simplified. Even better, Department leadership can lobby Congress to retract dysfunctional mandates and properly fund the valuable ones.

While this is in the interest of most everyone in the Department, in bureaucracies general benefits cannot compete with entrenched special interests: the combination of congressional players, a few advocates within the Department, and true-believers in the NGO world who create this mountain of work. In a Department facing a dramatic cut in personnel, this must be first area to rationalize.

State-Defense relations could be most effectively improved by clarity over what State can and cannot do overseas, and certain organizational changes would help the clarification process along. State’s operating arms—the geographic bureaus, should at long last be aligned with Defense’s combatant commands. This would dramatically improve coordination at that crucial level.

To that end, State’s nearly one hundred POLADs (political advisors) to military headquarters should be largely discarded. We should retain only POLADs with whom Defense Department leaders coordinate with State or embassies daily. This would include the combatant and functional military commands, a total of ten, along with a handful of Pentagon leaders. POLADs should not be Ambassador rank but senior mid-level officers (colonel equivalent), integrated into the commanders’ personal command team, and reporting back to the bureau “twinned” with that command or agency. If POLADs are lower in rank and number, State can find truly exceptional officers for these critical jobs. Finally, POLADs and other State-Defense mechanisms should monitor Defense Department assistance programs that inevitably overlap with State programs.

Embassies typically perform well, including coordination with other civilian agencies, the intelligence community, and regional commanders (COCOMs). The latter could be further improved if the COCOM and the chief of mission would inventory each specific military element’s reporting responsibility in a given country. (Such an inventory is already done for security.) A directive from the Secretary of Defense to each COCOM on coordination and cooperation with chiefs of mission that parallels language the latter have in their letter from the President would improve an already healthy relationship.

Personnel change should focus on the Foreign Service generalist officer corps, central to executing diplomacy. As discussed above, its functions have been watered down. Internal structuring on a quasi-voluntary or agreed basis with staffers and unions is virtually impossible. But under the pressure of budget cuts, the Department could employ a top-ranked consulting firm, with a mandate drawn up not by the personnel system but by the Secretary and his Deputy, to examine personnel issues such as the cone system, recruitment, advancement, and discipline. Adoption of the “national security agencies” standard, as at CIA, at least for the Foreign Service, should be considered.

Such reorganization of State does not guarantee a more realistic approach to what diplomacy can do in support of foreign policy. But no such approach is possible as long as State is institutionally confused about its core mission, as it has become since the end of the Cold War. It will take fully engaged leadership to set that straight.

1Dichter, “I’ve worked in foreign aid for 50 years—Trump is right to end it, even if his reasons are wrong,” Quartz, April 21, 2017.

2Similarly, security assistance policy as an adjunct to the internal focus was imagined to be able to accomplish far more than it ever could. See Justin Reynolds, “Training Wreck,” The American Interest (March/April 2017).

3I reviewed these studies extensively in Foreign Policy: “To Save the State Department, Rex Tillerson May Have to Break It,” March 3, 2017.

4Mead, “The End of History Ends,” The American Interest Online, December 2, 2013.

Russia and Saudi Arabia Commit to Oil Cuts Through Next Year

“Whatever it takes.” That was the sentiment expressed by the Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih this week when he, along with the Russian energy minister Alexander Novak, committed to extending production cuts through March of next year to help eat away at the global oversupply of crude. The FT reports:

It was expected that Opec and other producers such as Russia would extend the agreement, reached late last year, until the end of 2017. But the move to prolong the deal until March of next year surprised market analysts…They recommended that the next round of reductions should be on the same terms as the first deal, when producer nations agreed to cut almost 1.8m barrels a day for the first six months of 2017. […]

Opec ministers are due at the end of this month to meet in Vienna to discuss the extension of output curbs, seeking to reach agreement among all participating members inside and outside the cartel. The May 25 meeting is when a final decision will be made on the nine-month extension. The ministers from Saudi Arabia and Russia were optimistic that “a wider circle of countries” outside the current group would join in implementing the cuts.

Moscow and Riyadh were the two most important players in this collection of petrostates, so it’s not surprising to see Brent crude jump nearly $1.50 in trading today. But Russia, OPEC, and its ilk won’t be satisfied with oil continuing to trade in the $45-$55 per barrel range. Their regimes have been forced to adapt to today’s market environment, but that transition has been an exceedingly painful one, coming after years of $100+ per barrel oil.

But it isn’t clear that these cuts will be able to reduce the glut of oil that precipitated crude’s price collapse. The biggest reason for that is, of course, the United States, whose shale producers have seized on this petrostate plan as an opportunity to once again crank output back above 9 million barrels per day. Since November, when cuts were announced, American production has jumped more than 600,000 barrels per day, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

So while Russia and Saudi Arabia are doing all they can to induce a price rebound, they’re also handing over valuable market share to their most dynamic competitors: American frackers.

The Pension Storm Cometh

Last April, we highlighted research from Joshua Rauh, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, placing America’s state and local pension shortfall at an eye-popping $3.4 trillion. This year, Rauh has crunched the numbers again—and, despite a growing stock market, the situation has not improved. The Financial Times reports:

US cities and states face a “looming crisis” after the collective funding hole in the public pension system jumped by $434bn in just one year, raising fears of further Detroit-style bankruptcies.

According to academic research shared exclusively with FTfm, US public pension funds lack $3.85tn that they need to pay the retirement benefits of current and retired workers. […]

Big pension deficits have already contributed to the bankruptcy of several US cities, including Detroit. Puerto Rico, the US territory, this month declared a form of bankruptcy after amassing debt and pension obligations of $123bn.

The numbers are so grim that it is hard to see how America gets through the next recession and its aftermath without a wave of municipal bankruptcies. Public employee unions have managed to extract promises from state and local governments that are simply impossible to keep. And those governments have been papering over the extent of their obligations with accounting assumptions that are so overly-optimistic as to be deceptive.

Before the bankruptcies, however, there will be pain. School budgets will be cut, civil servant salaries will stagnate, welfare services will atrophy, new fines will be imposed, and infrastructure will be neglected as state legislatures and city councils try to make room in their budget for ballooning pension contributions.

If the governing class had shown more backbone, accounted for pensions more responsibly, imposed reasonable restrictions on union power, and distributed cutbacks more gradually, the situation might not be as dire as it is today. But now the pension vise is tightening fast, and it looks like decades of elite shortsightedness will come at a great cost, especially for the most vulnerable Americans.

Hezbollah Withdraws from the Syrian Border

Hassan Nasrallah’s latest anti-Israel blustering could be regarded as typical for the Hezbollah leader; on Thursday, he promised, as he so often does, that Hezbollah will rain destruction on Israel in any future conflict. The circumstances under which he made his latest threat bear keeping in mind. As Reuters reports:

Nasrallah said Hezbollah was pulling out of areas along the Lebanon-Syria border, suggesting that the group had helped make the area secure.

“Along the eastern Lebanese border there is no longer a need for our presence, so now we have dismantled and will dismantle (our) remaining military positions. The mission has been accomplished … from now on (this area is) the responsibility of the state,” he said. [….]

Nasrallah said Syria’s conflict had reached a “new and critical phase” with insurgents severely weakened, and that Damascus, Moscow, Tehran and Hezbollah were “in more harmony politically and militarily than at any time”.

While neither Hezbollah nor Israel appear to be keen for renewed conflict, Hezbollah’s eventual withdrawal from the Syrian war presents a strategic dilemma for Israel. By all accounts, Hezbollah’s fighters in Syria have been among the most effective in the conflict, and their return south of the Litani will greatly strengthen the group along Israel’s border. Their presence might just be enough to lend credence to Nasrallah’s threat that part of the next war might be fought on Israeli soil—a possibility that the IDF reportedly takes quite seriously and is preparing for.

As effective as Iron Dome may be against rocket fire from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbolla’s larger and more sophisticated arsenal may be able to simply overwhelm Israeli defenses. Another Israeli-Hezbollah conflict would certainly be more bloody than the last, but Israel will face a tough choice as its enemies regroup whether to strike sooner or risk facing a much more able foe later on.

South Yemeni Political Leaders Launch Secession Council

Political leaders in Aden on Thursday announced the formation of a new body aimed at having South Yemen secede. As Reuters reports:

[Aden’s former governor] Aidaroos al-Zubaidi made his announcement in a televised address in front of the flag of the former nation of South Yemen, whose forces were defeated by the north in 1994 and brought into a reunified country.

Zubaidi said a “national political leadership” under his presidency would administer and represent the south – a region which holds much of Yemen’s modest oil deposits, the backbone of its economy.

The announcement raises the prospect of more division in an already complex conflict in the impoverished Arabian Peninsular country, where Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition of Gulf Arab forces against Houthi fighters allied to Iran.

The Hadi government rejected the proposal out of hand, but that in and of itself may not mean much. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, keen to fight the Iran-backed Houthis, have cobbled together a coalition composed of President Hadi’s own supporters, the Islamist Islah movement, Aden-based secessionists and the myriad other actors that make up what remains of Yemeni society. Should the Saudi-led coalition achieve some kind of eventual victory against the Houthis in Yemen, the winning side will have no easy time keeping the country together.

All of this might give pause to Pentagon officials weighing deeper U.S. involvement in Yemen. For those looking for a quick win against Iran’s proxies in the region, nothing in the Yemeni conflict so far has been very quick or much of a win. As much as he’d like to bloody some Iranian noses, Secretary Mattis’ preference for a political solution, as complicated as that would be, might be the less fraught choice.

Argentina’s Shale Hoping for Cash Windfall

The shale boom has thus far remained a uniquely American phenomenon (for a long list of reasons), but the issue of other countries replicating that success has always been a question of when, not if. Argentina’s Vaca Muerte formation contains the second-largest reserves of shale gas in the world behind China, and as the WSJ reports, those multitudes of hydrocarbons are attracting the keen interest (and capital) of oil and gas companies:

Oil and gas companies will be investing $15 billion a year in unconventional energy in Argentina by 2020, Energy Minister Juan José Aranguren said.

Argentine state-run oil company YPF, Chevron Corp. and others are now spending about $1 billion a year in Vaca Muerta, a massive shale oil-and-gas basin in Patagonia, Mr. Aranguren said in an interview Tuesday.

The surge in investment, which some analysts say is far from certain, would come as a result of Argentina’s effort to overhaul its energy industry, Mr. Aranguren said. The country is winding down a decade of price controls and subsidies that distorted the market so much that until recently many families here paid more for a cup of coffee than for their electricity bill.

If and when this cash does start flowing, it will be because Argentina identified its need for market reforms, and followed through on making those necessary changes. We’ve been tracking this story for many years now, and each time we’ve checked in on the Vaca Muerta it’s looked a little bit closer to fulfilling its potential. And progress has been made—labor unions have agreed to up drilling productivity and lower costs, a necessary step for Argentina’s shale ambitions to be fully realized.

But the country’s energy minister is still talking in terms of action two or three years from now, and that means that, for the time being, the United States is going to remain the only real player in the shale game. But if and when Argentina can hack away at its red tape and install more market friendly policies to attract foreign capital, the shale oil and gas could start flowing fairly rapidly.