Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 616

Should America Power Down?

Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World

by Ian BremmerPortfolio, 2015, 240 pp., $27.95

In 1912, many people predicted that the United States would be one of the most powerful states in the 20th century. Its economy was strong and its potential seemingly limitless. But it would have been ludicrous to suggest that within a half-century it would be the dominant resident power in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East or that in less than a century it would be a unipolar power. After all, on the eve of World War I, German power was ascendant, Britain bestrode the world wearily but still as a Titan, and the United States had little appetite to venture outside its hemisphere.

Of course, the inconceivable happened. The United States became the world’s only superpower because it made better strategic decisions, and far fewer mistakes, than its competitors. Germany destroyed itself twice. Russia imploded and rose again under an ideology that contained the seeds of its future destruction. Britain was pulled into two world wars that sapped its power and forced it into retirement.The lesson of the 20th century is that strategic choice matters. It is what great powers do geopolitically that makes history, not how much or how fast their economies grow. The contemporary debate on American power has mostly lost sight of this fact. Relying on a couple of crude metrics, like GDP and military spending, experts say with certainty whether this century will be Chinese, American, European, or run by no one at all. It is a little like declaring baseball season over before it begins and awarding the World Series to the team with the largest payroll or highest batting average.The importance of strategic choice is the starting point for Ian Bremmer’s new book, Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World. Bremmer, a political scientist and the founder and CEO of the Eurasia Group, argues that the United States will remain a superpower for many years to come. The only question that matters is how it will use its power. Bremmer lays out three options for the United States and makes the best case he can for each. Only at the end does he tell us his preference. The book is written as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” with a gimmicky quiz to boot. But it is actually a manifesto in disguise.Bremmer’s favored strategy is what he calls “Independent America,” whereby the United States would dramatically reduce its international commitments and pivot to the home front. Defense spending would be slashed and directed to homeland security, and Russia and China would each be allowed a sphere of influence. The United States would stop being the security guarantor of last resort for NATO and Japan, and would withdraw from the Middle East entirely.Bremmer writes, “It’s time for a new declaration of independence—a proclamation of emancipation from the responsibility to solve everyone else’s problems.” He is exhausted by alliance commitments to defend those who won’t look out for themselves: “Why should Americans lead a fight to defend Latvia or Estonia if Germany, now one of the world’s wealthiest nations, won’t share more of the cost?” “America will be better off,” he says, “if we mind our own business and let other countries get along the best they can.” The United States should not get involved in wars or crises, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and Ukraine, where the others “care more about the outcome than you do.” The superpower must explicitly tender its resignation: “Only a crystal clear signal from Washington that America will now lead mainly by example will force our traditional partners to stand on their own.”Above all, Bremmer longs for what the United States could do without its heavy burden. “Imagine what might become possible,” he writes, “if we redirected the attention, energy, and resources that we now squander on a failed superhero foreign policy toward building the America we imagine, one that empowers all its people to realize their human potential.” He would slash military spending and shift what’s left away from aircraft carriers and toward intelligence, homeland security, and cybersecurity. With the money saved, he would increase spending on infrastructure, education, veterans’ benefits, and tax cuts. The only time he breaks with the pure version of Independent America, as detailed in an early chapter, is in his support for free trade.The two strategies that Bremmer rejects, after laying them out in full, are Moneyball America and Indispensable America. The former is, of course, an allusion to Michael Lewis’s best-selling book Moneyball, about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. Beane succeeded by jettisoning common baseball practice and using data and statistics to invest in players undervalued by the market. Under this option, Bremmer says, the President should invest in the value of America by making several calculated bets designed to deliver a significant return. However, he believes this will not work; America is not a corporation and cannot behave as if it is one. The U.S. government is simply too big and too complicated to achieve the nimbleness required for moneyball. And corporations make bad bets all the time. In the economy, failure is part of the process of creative destruction. But we can afford less risk when it comes to the nuclear codes.Indispensable America is the latest iteration of traditional U.S. grand strategy dating back to the late 1940s. Here, the United States will continue to underwrite the liberal international order through alliances, military intervention, the provision of public goods, and an outsized leadership role. But Bremmer believes the U.S. doesn’t have the influence it needs to play this role any more. Even more importantly, he says, the American public is not prepared to play that role, especially if it means going to war with China over some rocks in the South China Sea or fighting Russia over the Baltics. “Indispensable America,” he writes, “was the right strategy at the end of World War II…But we can’t ignore the ways the world has changed.”Bremmer’s choice, an Independent America, is not isolationist. Indeed, even the isolationism of the 1930s was not truly isolationist, since it allowed for commercial, political, and cultural engagement with the rest of the world. Independent America is, however, strictly non-interventionist. It is the product of what my colleague Robert Kagan has termed a desire to return to normalcy—that notion that the United States does too much as a superpower and should become a normal nation with normal interests.The idea that the United States must retrench and reduce its international commitments has been percolating in academic circles over the past decade. The most advanced and sophisticated case is Restraint, a 2014 book by Barry Posen, a professor at MIT and perhaps America’s top academic defense expert. Restraint explains in detail why and how the United States should divest itself of its international security commitments and give up the liberal international order. Posen is not an outlier. Retrenchment is the preferred strategy of the majority of security studies scholars, especially in the younger generation of professors. It is the internationalists—William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks of MIT and John Ikenberry of Princeton University—who are in the minority.Despite its success in academic circles, retrenchment has failed to gain much traction in the policy community, except at the Cato Institute. Others, including Richard Haass in his book Foreign Policy Begins at Home, have flirted around the edges of a greater domestic focus but none have called for an unwinding of the alliance system or a dramatic change in America’s global role. Bremmer makes the argument that U.S. strategy is terribly wrongheaded and has been for some time (for instance, he sees the expansion of NATO as a historic error). The entire global order is unsound and the United States needs to act unilaterally and pull the entire edifice down.It is for this reason that Bremmer’s work is important. It marks the crossover point between academic critiques of U.S. grand strategy and the policy mainstream. It may be the beginning of a debate that the United States has not had since the mid-1940s—should it look out for itself or should it underwrite a liberal international order?The first big question that retrenchers have to answer is this: what problem does retrenchment solve? For better or worse, American leadership is the status quo. For over sixty years, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East have been organized around U.S. security guarantees. The abandonment of that leadership, especially in security, will radically change world politics and the international order. To make a case for such a change, one must first convincingly argue that the status quo is untenable. You wouldn’t blow the existing order up and replace it with something else just on a whim or to save some money. There must be a pressing need.Bremmer suggested in an earlier book, G-Zero, that America’s economic problems were such that it would be unable to continue to play the role of world leader. But in Superpower, he is more optimistic about U.S. capacity. America can be a leader if it wants to, but it should choose not to, he says.Instead, the problem is that the United States is currently adrift, and the uncertainty about its future role is destabilizing the international system. No one knows what the United States will do next. It is clear, he says, that the public wants to do less. America’s influence is also decreasing as other powers rise. Allies know all this and can’t trust the President. Adversaries know it too and do not fear U.S. power. America’s indecision is contributing to a heightened sense of geopolitical risk. Exhibit A is the red line debacle in Syria when President Obama reversed himself on airstrikes while the planes were fueling up on the runway.But Syria is only a symptom of a much greater problem—America’s inability to make good on its commitments. The epicenter of this coming earthquake is America’s alliance system—those commitments that the United States is treaty-bound to uphold and where reneging on a red line is impossible without incurring a terribly high cost. Bremmer wants to effectively disband these alliances so the United States is no longer on the hook to protect others. He believes that the American public no longer supports the U.S. commitment to its allies, the allies themselves are not doing enough, and there is a risk that the United States will get dragged into conflicts that are not in its interests.Take NATO, for example—one of Bremmer’s favorite targets. NATO, he says, made a historic error by expanding to include new members after the Cold War. The expansion aggravated Russia and bound America to protect states that are not strategically important. Now that the Russia threat is back, this is a big problem. The United States is not ready or willing to defend its new member states. The American public can’t locate Latvia or Estonia on a map and the Obama Administration has been ambiguous about its commitment, all of which makes it more likely Russia will do something to test its resolve. Bremmer writes,

“If Russian troops one day cross the border into Latvia, whatever the pretext, will the president of the United States declare war on Russia? President Obama has suggested that he would be he hasn’t said it. Europe needs to know. America’s men and women in uniform, their families, and America’s taxpayers need to know. Leave it ambiguous and Moscow might one day decide to find out what it can get away with.”

It’s a powerful charge, if true. But here his specific claim and broader case about a crisis begins to fall part. The footnote reveals that Bremmer is referring to President Obama’s speech in Estonia in September 2014. Yet in that speech the President said this:

“We will defend our NATO allies, and that means every ally. In this alliance, there are no old members or new members, no junior partners or senior partners—there are just allies, pure and simple. And we will defend the territorial integrity of every single ally. Today, more NATO aircraft patrol the skies of the Baltics. More American forces are on the ground training and rotating through each of the Baltic states. More NATO ships patrol the Black Sea. Tonight, I depart for the NATO Summit in Wales, and I believe our Alliance should extend these defensive measures for as long as necessary. Because the defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London.” 

Now, one can believe that more must be done to protect the Baltics, but it’s hard to see how this speech supports the notion that the United States is unclear on whether it will fight Russia to defend them. Certainly, the United States has been leading the charge to bolster Article V in the face of the Russian threat. There is also no reason to believe that Russia doubts America’s assurances about Article V because of Syria or anything else.

Indeed, there is a cottage industry in political science on the topic of credibility. Its primary finding is that credibility of commitments depends on the interests of the countries in each case and not on what they do elsewhere. In other words, the Syria red line debacle is unlikely to have any impact on Russian assessments of U.S. credibility in the Baltics or in Asia. Bremmer actually acknowledges this when he praises Ronald Reagan for having the courage to renege on his own red line—when he withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 241 Americans.There is also no evidence to suggest that America’s alliances make war more likely. In fact, the opposite is true. Michael Beckley, an assistant professor at Tufts University, conducted a study of all of America’s alliance commitments since 1945 and found that entanglement almost never happens. It is much more common for alliances to restrain the United States or for the United States to restrain its allies.Yet what of public opinion? Is Bremmer right that even if the political leadership wants to continue to play the role of the indispensable power, the public does not? He cites opinion polls that show only 56 percent of the American people would come to the aid of Britain if attacked. However, the political science literature finds that public opinion exerts little influence on U.S. foreign policy. There is no reason to think that the answer to a very general question about minding your own business is any indicator as to what the United States would or would not do if a sovereign allied state were invaded. In fact, the United States has previously gone to war to defend non-allied states that it had indicated it would not help (South Korea and Kuwait).The question Bremmer can’t answer is if the American public is so dissatisfied with foreign policy activism, why does it keep voting for candidates who support it? Why is Rand Paul reversing his previous pro-retrenchment positions as he runs for president?There is an alternative explanation for where the United States is right now. America’s default strategy is Indispensable America. President Obama has, in a very disciplined way, been trying to shift to a Moneyball America strategy. In fact, the chapter on Moneyball reads remarkably like the Administration’s current approach. The next president is likely to move back to a more ambitious foreign policy. But under either approach, America’s alliances are sound. There are foreign policy challenges, but the foundation of world order—America’s system of alliances—is not falling apart and much of the world relies on it.Even if there is no pressing need to change strategies, what would happen if we gave retrenchment a try? Isn’t it possible that it would improve America’s position by reducing foreign commitments and freeing up resources at home? No, not even close. The reason is simple: it will inject unprecedented risk and uncertainty into world politics.Retrenchment is a revolutionary strategy. The day after the President of the United States gives the Independent America speech will be the day that every defense planner and diplomat the world over scrambles to understand how to survive in the post-American world. Alliances will be worthless. The glue that held everything together will no longer stick. The United States would have created the mother of all vacuums.Japan would likely rearm, and may even go nuclear, to defend itself against China. China would see a window of opportunity to establish its dominance over East Asia. In Europe, Russia would likely move on the Baltics to put the final nail in NATO’s coffin and would establish full control over Ukraine. Some western European countries would rearm, but the overwhelming impulse would be to seek a balance of power. It is unlikely that globalization would survive the return to full-throated rivalry.This is not some far-fetched scenario. Bremmer himself writes:

“A drive to refocus Washington on domestic priorities will inflict significant damage on relations with allies like Japan, Israel, and Britain. We will forfeit some of the already limited influence we have with China’s leaders as they make critical decisions.”

Other advocates of retrenchment like Barry Posen recognize that the world will become a much more dangerous place. They just believe that these regional conflicts will not affect the United States. America can protect itself behind its oceans and nuclear deterrent. The United States only has to worry about other regions if one rival power is poised to dominate East Asia, Europe, or the Middle East. The sheer physics of balancing mean this is very unlikely to happen but if it did there would be enough time to intervene and tip the balance against the rival. They even argue that the United States could manipulate regional tensions to its benefit.

This belief could not be further from the U.S. post-war tradition. For over seven decades, the United States has sought to quell and reduce regional security competition in Western Europe and East Asia. Yes, the alliances were intended to contain the Soviet Union. But they were also intended to create a community of nations that did not fear each other. And they were designed so that the United States could influence its allies to exercise restraint. Thus, the United States provides for much of Japan’s security so it will not build capabilities that worry South Korea or others. It is also the reason why, even after the Soviet threat disappeared, the United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote regional integration and cooperation in Asia and Europe. EU and NATO expansion helped to consolidate democracy in Eastern Europe and reduce the potential for rivalries and territorial disputes.It is worth pondering how much more dangerous Eastern Europe would be if Bremmer had his wish and NATO expansion never happened. It’s possible that in such a world Russia would not be revisionist because it would not be insecure, but Russian history suggests otherwise. More likely is the possibility that Russia would try to move on the Baltics and parts of Eastern Europe. NATO expansion took those countries of the chessboard.The United States has also intervened militarily to prevent regional rivalries from rising. U.S. military actions in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo were not in response to a direct threat to a U.S. vital interest. Instead, they were wrapped up in broader notions of what constitutes security. This is not to say that all interventions are good—the Iraq War being the obvious example. In that war, however, the U.S. did not intervene to preserve regional stability but rather to attempt to impose it. It was a break from tradition, not a continuation of it.Bremmer will no doubt argue that retrenchment must be done in a sensible and prudent way. The United States should not abandon its alliances overnight but rather give fair warning and a timetable—Posen has suggested a decade—after which those alliances would no longer be operative. The American president should deepen diplomacy with Russia and China to dissuade them from destabilizing actions that would hurt everyone involved. Additionally, the United States should redouble its efforts to increase cooperation and burden-sharing to tackle common threats and challenges.It sounds lovely, but it is awfully hubristic to believe that a president or strategist is capable of undertaking such an awesome task and preventing it from getting out of control. A superpower retreat of this magnitude would be without parallel. And there are too many actors to manage. But surely, some might say, the difficulty of retrenchment is more manageable that being the world’s policeman? Perhaps, yet that is a comparison between the known and the unknown. America is an imperfect leader, but its track record over seventy-odd years is well known. Iraq may be a mess, but Western and Eastern Europe are in pretty good shape, as are U.S. alliances in East Asia.By voluntarily liquidating its own order, the United States would be placing the mother of all bets that it would be significantly safer in a much more dangerous world. This is the reason why any president, even Rand Paul, would be reluctant to run the experiment. Ultimately, America’s expansive security commitments are not a favor to the allies, even though they work to their benefit. They were created and supported because the United States believes that reducing rivalry through forward-deployed forces is in America’s long-term interest. There is little reason to think anything has changed. Indeed, if the big bet on retrenchment does not work out and a combination of nuclear weapons and two oceans is not enough, the United States will find itself having to deal with severe threats without its alliances and forward-deployed forces. These could prove impossible to put back together.One is left puzzled that an expert on geopolitical risk, like Bremmer, would opt for the strategy that seems most likely to turn the world upside down. In an earlier book, Bremmer coined the term “G-Zero world” to describe the lack of international leadership after the financial crisis. At the time, this seemed like a call for more leadership to fill the vacuum and reduce geopolitical risk. But Superpower does the opposite. The inescapable reality is there is no way to reverse the G-Zero dynamic unless America does more in the world. Yes, others should step up to the plate, but no one expects that they will. Thus, G-Zero has gone from a diagnosis to a recommendation.Bremmer doesn’t clearly state why he changed his mind, but he does hint at it. He says that greater uncertainty is increasing volatility in world politics. The outcome of that volatility will depend on whether China becomes revisionist or not, whether Japan pushes back or not, whether Russia keeps Putinism or not, and so on. The United States will have very little influence over these decisions, so the better course of action is to stand aloof from them and find another purpose for American energy and values. He has come to terms with what he feared.One gets the impression, however, that Americans, and America’s allies, still believe in the notion of an international order, even if they disagree about how to sustain it. If the United States has a conversation about strategic choice at the next election, one hopes that it will dwell, at least for a few moments, on the rationale behind underwriting an order that transcends narrow national interests and dollars-and-cents accounting. Some may also recall that the United States tried all three strategies in the 20th century. When World War I broke out, Wilson pursued an Indispensable America. In the 1920s, the United States switched to a Moneyball approach, but this fell apart after 1929 and led to an Independent America, despite Roosevelt’s best efforts. After that collapsed in ruins, Roosevelt put together the post-war Indispensable America grand strategy that has been largely with us since.Ultimately, choice is relative. By reminding people of the alternatives, Bremmer may have done more to help Indispensable America than he intended.

Beijing’s Threat to Freedom of Navigation

Chinese ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua was asked about China’s rationale for warning away a U.S. surveillance plane with a CNN crew aboard back in May. In reply, he laid out China’s thinking about land reclamation projects, its claims to 12 mile exclusion zones, and the small matter of how it thinks about the “freedom and navigation” of the ships that carry almost a third of the world’s trade through the waters that China says are its sovereign territory. An AP report, republished by the Military Times, has the story. It bears quoting at length:

When asked why China shooed away the U.S. Navy plane when it has pledged to respect freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, Zhao outlined the limits in China’s view.

“Freedom of navigation does not mean to allow other countries to intrude into the airspace or the sea which is sovereign. No country will allow that,” Zhao said. “We say freedom of navigation must be observed in accordance with international law. No freedom of navigation for warships and airplanes.“Zhao also repeated an earlier pronouncement by Beijing that China’s use of land reclamation to create new islands at a number of disputed Spratly reefs has ended. China, he said, would now start constructing facilities to support freedom of navigation, search and rescue efforts when accidents occur, and scientific research.“When we say we’re going to stop reclamation, we mean it,” Zhao said.He acknowledged that “necessary defense facilities” would also be constructed. […]Adm. Scott Swift, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said last month in Manila that Washington does not recognize any of the territorial claims and its position won’t change even if disputed areas are reinforced by construction work. [Emphasis added]

Even if China is just bluffing, it’s hard to overstate how aggressive and dangerous this policy is. Threatening to do what it would take to deny U.S. warships and airplanes (not to mention Vietnamese and Philippine ones) access to either the area within China’s “nine-dash line” or the exclusion zones China illegitimately claims around its freshly built islands in the Spratly chain constitutes, in effect, a threat of war. Washington, for its part, shows every sign that it’s going to stick with its current strategy of intentionally violating these areas in order to demonstrate its non-recognition of Beijing’s claims. Where does this lead?

ISIS Hit Kurds With Chemical Weapons

ISIS fighters in Iraq used chemical weapons, likely a mustard agent, on Kurdish forces this week, according to German and U.S. officials. The American officials said that ISIS probably had gotten the mustard agent in Syria. The Syrian regime declared large quantities of it in 2013, and ISIS has captured territory near the regime’s storage sites for its chemical weapons. International inspectors hadn’t been able to confirm the regime’s claim that it had burned all of its mustard stockpiles, and U.S. intelligence agencies suspect that the regime squirreled some away instead of destroying it.

ISIS has reportedly used chlorine gas in Iraq before, though the U.S. has no evidence that it possesses either sarin or VX, far deadlier agents that the Assad regime also stockpiled. American officials say that Kurdish, Iraqi, and moderate Syrian forces fighting ISIS may need special equipment and training to combat the use of chemical weapons if the gas becomes part of ISIS’ standard repertoire, though ISIS is not thought to have very much mustard agent on hand as of now. Officials also warn that the Assad regime, which is losing ground and possibly nearing collapse, could use whatever chemical weapons it has held in reserve to defend its remaining positions.If you’re surprised by the new allegations, our own Adam Garfinkle, who has been writing since 2013 on the sham deal over the Syrian weapon stockpile, is an excellent read on the background to this story:

On several occasions the President and his Secretary of State lauded the achievements of the chemical weapons deal with Syria, via Russia. It suited them to do so because it has tended to erase, or at least to blur, the unnerving memory of the infamous “non-strike” event in Syria. It allows the narrative that the threat to use force, even in “an incredibly small” way, to recall Kerry’s madcap remark at the time, resulted in a diplomatic achievement via arms control with real security policy benefits. It did not. It resulted in the U.S. government’s backing down on account of being successfully lied to and hoodwinked by a small cabal of weaker parties; the only security policy benefits accrued to our enemies.

And, then, of course, there’s the real problem that Garfinkle pointed out:

Worse, it arguably led all three major revisionist powers—Iran, Russia, and China—to ratchet up their risk-taking.

The taboo on chemical weapons has been seared into western thought since the First World War, preserved through everything from pictures to poetry and enshrined in the consensus against the forbidden triad of WMDs: nuclear, chemical, biological. But in the Syrian Civil War, the U.S. (and European) will to stop the use of chemical weapons has been proven to lie below the threshold for meaningful action: the Assad regime—and, now, its enemies—have felt free to use the weapons as they choose. As Garfinkle indicates, it’s rational to wonder what sort of precedent this will set for the region—particularly if the U.S. continues to stay on the sidelines as the Syrian conflict reaches its endgame and things, potentially, get even worse.

Israel Ready to Unleash Its Leviathan

Israeli’s domestic energy prospects have dramatically changed over the past few years as natural gas has started to flow from the offshore Tamar gas field. That field alone is estimated to contribute a full percentage point to Israel’s GDP, but it has an even larger neighbor, the Leviathan field. Appropriately, the Leviathan field contains 22 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than double the Tamar find, but production hasn’t started yet due to a dispute between the Israeli government and the consortium of energy firms looking to develop it. Now, as Reuters reports, a deal has been struck, and the Leviathan is ready to come to life:

After weeks of talks over the government’s initial proposal in June, the controversial deal will allow Texas-based Noble Energy and Israel’s Delek Group to keep ownership of the largest offshore field, Leviathan. They are required to sell off other assets, including stakes in another large deposit called Tamar. […]

Leviathan, with estimated reserves of 22 trillion cubic feet (tcf) or 622 billion cubic metres, is slated to begin production in 2018 or 2019 and expected to supply billions of dollars of gas to Egypt and Jordan in addition to supplying Israel.

These offshore gas finds have almost overnight changed Israel’s energy security concerns from having to deal with irregular imports from Egypt to preparing to export to its neighbors. Last year Israel signed a $15 billion gas deal with Jordan, a moved that “[showed] a growing pattern of Israeli investment in long-term energy relationships with its Arab neighbors, and thus a firmer embedding of the country into the region,” as Rachel Bronson wrote on this site at the time.

Now Israel’s largest offshore gas field looks set to start production within the next three or four years, and you can be sure its arrival on the scene will make waves in the region.

A Full Picture of ISIS’ Brutality

A piece in the NYT today about ISIS’ theology of rape traces similar ground to Nina Shea’s piece on the group’s sex slavery in our own pages late last month. But the NYT account only gives a partial picture, for it downplays something that Shea’s piece highlights, namely the vulnerability of “People of the Book”—which includes Christians—to ISIS’ sexuality brutality:

The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.

Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran as “People of the Book.”

But ISIS has issued a fatwa that allows Christians, just as much as Yizidis, to be enslaved, and there are cases on record of Christians falling victim to the practice. Here’s Shea:

The Fatwa Department of the Islamic State made clear that the females of the “People of the Book,” including Christians, can be enslaved for sex as well, though Muslim “apostates” cannot. The number of Christian sex slaves is unknown. Three—Rana, Rita, and Christina—are publicly known. In March, 135 women and children were among those taken captive, from 35 Christian villages along Syria’s Khabour River. Their families, unable to afford the $23 million ransom demand, were told by ISIS, “They belong to us now.” The older women were released; the younger ones may be enslaved, though this has not been confirmed […]

Under rules for “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour [of Judgment],” Dabiq gives a theological justification for selling women as war booty: “The enslaved Yizidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the polytheists were sold by the [Prophet’s] companions.” It also cites more recent precedents: namely, the “enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the Mujahidin there.”

We’re glad to see more attention brought to this issue, but for a full picture of ISIS’ practices, we recommend reading Shea’s whole piece.

Israel to Lift Blockade in Return for Hamas Ceasefire

Israel and Hamas may be about to ink a major deal trading a long-term truce for relief of Israel’s blockade. The Times of Israel reports:

A leading Arab daily reported on Thursday that Israel has agreed to “entirely” remove its blockade on the Gaza Strip and establish a naval passageway between the Hamas-controlled territory and Cyprus, in return for a long-term ceasefire lasting seven to 10 years.

Quoting “trusted Palestinian sources,” the London-based al-Hayat said that the agreement was reached through indirect negotiations conducted by outgoing Quartet representative to the Middle East Tony Blair, a former British prime minister.

al-Hayat is among the most trustworthy Arabic-language news sources, and multiple Israeli papers, including Haaretz, are running with the report. There may be something to this beyond the usual rumors.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the details of ceasefire (if real) and about its potential implications. One serious question is whether Israel has gotten Egypt’s support for it; Egypt has been hostile to anything like this and it would a major problem if Israel hasn’t cleared it with the country. Another issue is what impact the agreement might have on the ongoing wrangling in Israel over the Leviathan gas field.But from what we do know, it seems the deal would be good news for the people of Gaza and of Israel. That’s assuming it would hold, of course; to modify Ben Franklin, this would be “a truce, if you can keep it.” But more than that, this ceasefire would have big geopolitical implications: Sunni Gulf monarchies may have been closely involved in these negotiations, and the deal could be a sign that the Sunnis and Israelis are getting seriously close to a united front against Iran.We’ve been realistic in these pages about the chances of the Iran deal surviving Congress, which are almost certain. But that doesn’t mean that opponents of the deal, both at home and, especially, abroad, don’t have options. This proposal, if real, is ground-shaking, and it should indicate how much Arab countries and Israel both want to block the Iran deal. Perceiving Iran as a mortal threat, both seem to believe that checking the country is worth almost any other sacrifice.This time, the impulse to unite against Iran may have yielded a ceasefire that America would welcome. But other responses to Iran (such as the Saudis getting nukes from Pakistan) could run just as strongly in the other direction. American policymakers will have to be swift, nimble, and far-sighted to navigate the changes coming to the Middle East.

Polish President: NATO Treats Us Like a Buffer State

In the battle over the future of NATO’s European defenses, it’s not quiet on the eastern front. Andrzej Duda, the conservative president of Poland elected in May, doesn’t like what the map of European NATO bases says about where a eastern would be in the event of a war. In effect, he argues in an interview with the FT, the positioning of NATO’s defenses indicate that the alliance would use Poland as a buffer. Atlantic Sentinel:

Poland’s new president has called on NATO to place military bases in the country and take a stronger stand against what he described as the “imperialist actions” of its former Soviet master, Russia.

“We do not want to be the buffer zone. We want to be the real eastern flank of the alliance,” Andrzej Duda, who was elected in May, told the Financial Times.

Duda further stated, “If Poland and other Central European countries constitute the real flank of NATO, then it seems natural to me, a logical conclusion, that bases should be placed in those countries.”

If Duda’s early days are anything to go by, this criticism of NATO’s current policy could become a more public issue in Poland. His defense-minded Law and Justice Party looks set to round out its recent presidential victory by winning October’s general elections, and Duda will have a major platform to keep raising these issues at NATO’s next summit, which, as it happens, will be held in Warsaw.Duda’s campaign could meet both active resistance and passive inertia. It will pit Poland against Germany, which is anxiously glancing at its wallet and wary of muddying its lucrative relationship with Russia any further. And whether it will at all help Europe get serious about defense, well, that remains to be seen.

The Defenseless “New Europe”

Just last month Russian paratroopers conducted a series of live-fire military exercises in Pskov, some twenty miles from Estonia’s border. The exercises fit into a pattern of saber-rattling along Europe’s northeastern flank: IHS Jane’s 360 reported, for instance, that NATO fighters intercepted a record number of Russian combat aircraft over the Baltic last month, and the high tempo of airspace and maritime incursions have been matched by high-temperature revisionist rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin. But while policymakers in the Baltic states and Poland have been ringing alarm bells about Russia’s increasingly aggressive posture, other post-communist countries have adopted a much more blasé attitude—not just toward Russia but toward their own security as well.

Military spending in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, for instance, doesn’t come anywhere near NATO’s aspirational goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. Whereas their numbers were close to that target around the time of their accession, they have been in free-fall since then and currently hover at about 1 percent. Not even Poland is meeting the goal—though the current government, in office until an election this fall, plans to gradually increase spending on defense to 2 percent over the coming years.Absolute levels of spending matter. After all, militaries are expensive and invariably involve waste. The fact that many military projects are beset by cost overruns or performance issues is a reason countries should be spending more, not less, in order to remain secure.The composition of the spending matters too, of course. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, spending on personnel—as opposed to capital investment—has been on the rise. Slovakia now spends almost 70 percent of its budget on military personnel. Part of this is due to the fact that the Central European militaries have become professionalized, pushing the cost of salaries and benefits up. However, as spending shifts from equipment to personnel, Central Europe’s militaries run the risk of becoming collections of bureaucrats in uniform rather than effective fighting forces.When Central Europe’s militaries do spend money on equipment, it is often done in a haphazard way, without deeper thinking about how the new purchases will fit within NATO’s overall military infrastructure. This is a critical oversight; the countries of Central Europe aren’t large enough to field significant militaries on their own. They rely on matching spending to an explicit strategy to make their armies effective complements to the military forces of larger NATO states.Poland appears to be an exception to many of these problems. In absolute and relative terms, its defense spending has grown over the years, and the country is also pursuing an ambitious program of military modernization that began in 2013 and is to continue through 2022. As Andrew Michta wrote in an AEI paper about Poland’s modernization plans, the new purchases include “ships, helicopters, tanks and armored personnel carriers, additional aircraft, and most importantly, new air missile defenses.”Poland also appears to be the only country in the region whose strategic thinking was informed by an understanding of Russia’s resurgence as a threat even before the Ukrainian crisis. This understanding guided Poland’s investments into conventional defense forces capable of deterring local conflicts—most significantly ones focused around the militarized Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.Because its details tend to be hidden from public scrutiny, military procurement in Central Europe breeds corruption. In 2009, the Czech government approved the purchase of 107 Pandur armored personnel carriers for the Czech armed forces in a deal worth about $577 million. The purchasing price per carrier was more than three times higher than in Portugal, where the government bought, at around the same time, a different batch of Pandurs with superior features and equipment from the same company. It also came to light that the Austrian company Steyr, the manufacturer of the Pandur, secretly contracted with the Czech lobbyist Jan Vlček to mediate informal talks between the company and Czech politicians, who allegedly diverted some of the profits of the sale to their own political parties.In 2014, Slovakia bought two military transport aircraft (C-27J Spartans) for €99 million from the Italian manufacturer Alenia Aeromacchi. Rival manufacturers EADS-CASA and Lockheed Martin were both excluded from the tender, leaving Alenia as the sole remaining supplier. While the full details of the contract are classified, the costs of the purchase far exceed the catalog price for no apparent reason. Nor are these corruption problems restricted to big ticket purchases. Even small-scale procurement of items like protective glasses and solar panels tends to be vastly overpriced relative to the list prices available online.Not even Poland is immune to these problems. In 2011, revelations about irregularities in procurement at Poland’s Ministry of Defense resulted in charges against 22 individuals over contracts totaling $5.5 million. One of the scandals involved several purchases by Poland’s elite commando unit, GROM, including 58 off-road vehicles that are unsuitable for military use. Other violations of the law have also been uncovered elsewhere in the military services.Corruption aside, defense capabilities across the region are fragmented, with a low degree of interoperability. Since 2011, the governments of the four Visegrad countries have been planning the creation of a permanent “Visegrad 4 EU Battlegroup”, which should bring some 2,500 soldiers online in the first half of 2016.The arrival of the Battlegroup could represent a major step toward the creation of a force that could make a difference in Russia’s and NATO’s strategic calculus. But much more needs to be done to fill the gaps in military cooperation between the four countries.Air defense of the Visegrad countries could be organized jointly, instead of through four national independent air forces. In the Baltic states, other NATO members conduct air policing on a rotational basis. Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and Slovaks, in turn, have the capacity to secure their airspace, but they would benefit from pooling their resources. Military education and training could be brought to a regional level, as is the Baltic states, where the joint Baltic Defense College was created in 1999. Military procurement in the region could also be coordinated and run jointly.Attempts at deeper coordination would face serious bureaucratic hurdles. The four countries, for instance, each follow different procedures for military procurement, and the interoperability between the four military systems is limited. The solution to these problems lies in a political leadership that understands that the strategic interests of the four Visegrad countries are closely aligned, notwithstanding the differences in the rhetoric emanating from their capitals. Leadership is also needed to overcome the long-standing complacency paralyzing the region. In areas such as cybersecurity Central Europe remains behind the curve. Slovakia, for example, still lacks a dedicated bureau to tackle cybersecurity issues.For better and for worse, such political leadership depends on the popular will expressed in elections. Unfortunately, for most voters in the region, security and defense rate at the very bottom of their priority lists.

Moody’s Downgrades Brazil

With economic stagnation, the high-profile Petrobras scandal, and the ever-increasingly unpopular President Dilma Rousseff all plaguing Brazil, it’s no secret that the county’s problems have been worsening. But if further proof of the country’s troubles were necessary, Moody’s has given it earlier this week. The WSJ reports:

Moody’s lowered Brazil’s government bond rating to Baa3 from Baa2, and changed its outlook to stable from negative. The change still leaves the country’s ratings out of line with other countries in a similar debt situation, but Brazil’s large, diverse economy and “low susceptibility to event risk” help justify the investment grade level, Moody’s said. […]

Despite the downgrade, Moody’s move to a stable outlook could be considered positive, suggesting no more changes in the short term.“It was good that Moody’s didn’t cut by two notches, and has a stable outlook. It amounts to saying that, despite the fiscal deterioration, Brazil can still keep its investment grade,” said Jankiel Santos, chief economist at BES Investimentos do Brasil in São Paulo.

Moody’s surely has its reasons for calling Brazil’s outlook stable, but the immediate future doesn’t look good for this country of great promise but middling fulfillment.

Large protests are planned for this weekend, and organizers are hoping to match the turnout from the two demonstrations that shook Brazil in the spring. Moreover, while Rousseff herself appears to have been cleared from direct involvement in the ever-expanding Petrobras scandal, a probe into governmental accounting irregularities could still trigger impeachment proceedings. The only silver lining for the Rousseff government is that the numbers for impeachment are just not there yet in congress. But these things can change on a dime.

Iran Loses a Longtime Ally

The sectarian split across the Middle East has reached northern Africa, where longtime Iranian ally Sudan is shifting sharply to the Sunni camp. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Late last year, President Omar al-Bashir ordered the network of Iran’s cultural centers in his country shut down, ostensibly on the grounds that they were propagating Shiite Islam in a country that has virtually no Shiites.

Then, in April, he unexpectedly joined Saudi Arabia and its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council monarchies in the war in Yemen, sending Sudanese warplanes to bomb pro-Iranian Houthi forces. He also sought to nurture close ties with Egypt’s new ruler, President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. In a Middle East divided along sectarian lines, impoverished Sudan—the Arab world’s third-largest nation by population and size—for now has firmly placed itself in the Saudi-led Sunni camp.

This realignment is a result of two interconnected phenomena we’ve been covering here at TAI: the previously mentioned sectarian split in the Middle East between Sunni and Shi’a, which is getting increasingly bitter, and Saudi Arabia’s newly assertive, petrodollar-driven foreign policy. As the Journal reports, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been explicit: his country “cannot have strategic ties with Iran at this time [of] escalating tensions between Sunnis and Shiites.” As a result, Iran stands to lose a conduit through which it has passed arms to Hamas.

And for that reason, among others, at least one important Iranian scholar thinks this story is a pretty big deal:

“The tilt by Sudan toward Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most important victory for Saudi Arabia and the GCC in its strategic competition with Iran in the past decade,” said Mohsen Milani, an Iran expert and executive director of the Center for Strategic and Diplomatic Studies at the University of South Florida.

The loss of Khartoum won’t be the blow that fells the mullahs, by any means. New sources of funding, new international ties, and new ways to transport weapons will be opening up to Tehran in the wake of the nuclear deal. But if Iran can’t keep Bashir—a wanted war criminal—and his regime in its bad boys camp, it may have underestimated the severity of the sectarian backlash it is fomenting across the Arab world.