Grand Strategy for a Divided America

[a_majoor]

While it is difficult to argue Brad's point, I think this is the result of a number of trends:

1. While most elected legislators in the early years were "self made" men who saw a turn in politics as a sort of public service or a way of rounding out their credentials, over the years they have been replaced by a class of "professional" politicians, who often have had no "real world" experience to speak of.

2. The exercise of power is corrupting, and politicians (especially long term ones) know all the various levers to pull (or create their own) to feather their nests. This leads to a political class which is quite oblivious or even at odds to the stated wishes of the electorate (hence the low regard that politicians have).

3. The current political parties and ideologies are less and less relevant to todays issues, and social institutions, demographics, technologies and economies have changed to such an extent that the current parties literally have no relevant answers to today's issues. Much like the Federalist and Whig parties in the United States (or the Unionist and Liberal parties in the UK, or the Progressive and Social Credit parties in Canada), the current Democrat and Republican parties may simply disappear (something which was breathtakingly fast in the US; especially see how quickly the Whigs were eclipsed).

So how to proceed? The answer isn't obvious. New political movements like "Occupy" and the TEA Party movement exist on a scale large enough to notice but not yet large enough to actually eclipse the old guard, and suites of technological and social tools which allow people to become disconnected from the older "grids" of power and influence and hook up in new "grids" of their own making to bypass the conventional gatekeepers (Libertarianism as a Social Movement) are reshaping society in ways that are quite unfamiliar to the current ruling elites and the institutions that support them, but have not reached their full fruition yet.

 

[CougarKing]

Thoughts, Thucydides? Perhaps Obama is hoping for too much for his legacy to be viewed this way?

Yahoo News

How Barack Obama wants to be the Ronald Reagan of the left
Obama hoping to use economic recovery to reshape the political debate for decades

(...SNIPPED)

Instead, Obama defeated Romney to win reelection, and in 2015, the White House has moved increasingly aggressively to take credit for the recovery. Unemployment is at 5.7 percent, the lowest since June 2008. Real GDP grew at 5 percent in the third quarter of 2014 (although it went back down to 2.6 percent in the fourth). Even the federal budget deficit — once nearing 10 percent of the economy — has been slashed to less than 3 percent, though it is projected to begin growing again in 2018. The nation’s economic rebound from the worst crisis since the Great Depression was a long time in coming, and as evidenced by Romney’s speech in 2012, many knew it was in some respects inevitable.

But it happened on Obama’s watch, and — as the administration sees it — the president now has an opportunity to recast the way that liberal economic policies are thought of for a generation.

“Because the economy did well under Reagan — even though some of the work was done before Reagan got there — we believed in this country for a long time that it was less government, less taxes is good for economic growth,” Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said recently. “And we have been battling that conception, and Democrats were forced to play on that field for a very long time.

“We want to change the field,” Pfeiffer said.

Obama in 2012, like Romney, was looking forward to a post-election economic rebound, Pfeiffer said in an interview with The Huffington Post just before Christmas. Before Obama defeated Romney, the president had been nervous about Romney getting credit for the economic growth that the White House could see coming on the horizon.

"That would be super-annoying," Pfeiffer said. “The thing that worried [Obama] most about losing was the idea that he would lose, Romney would come in, the economy would now do what it’s doing, because it’s on a trajectory."

Obama has often talked in glowing terms about Reagan, the 40th president and a conservative icon. Obama has expressed admiration for Reagan’s iconic status — for the change he represented and the symbolic figure he became.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said during the heat of his 2008 Democratic primary showdown with Hillary Clinton.

This may be his most Reaganesque play of all: riding the coattails of an economy that came out of crisis, and using it to bolster liberal ideas about economics and governance, as well as his own legacy.

*****

The 30,000-foot view of the Obama years that he hopes is taking shape — despite the fact that the recovery has been sluggish, and despite criticism from the right that Obama’s policies have slowed it down — is that he came into office with the economy in a huge hole, and that while he was president, it came back to life. The debate will rage for decades over whether the recovery was because of or in spite of Obama’s policies. But it’s quite possible that many people won’t care about what the economists decide, and will look only at the topline indicators, GDP growth and unemployment. The first line has gone up. The second has gone down.

But what really caused the recovery, and how much credit should Obama’s policies get for the nation’s brightened economic mood?

First off, there are the “normal forces of cyclical recovery,” sparked as “you work off the normal forces that led to the recession in the first place,” according to Joel Prakken, a senior managing director at Macroeconomic Advisers, a St. Louis-based independent research firm that sells economic forecasts to a broad range of customers, including the Obama White House.

The excess supply in the housing market and major “imbalances in household balance sheets” had to go through a natural deleveraging process. In other words, people who had taken out too many loans on their mortgage or bought houses or other assets they couldn’t afford were going to have to tighten their belts and take some losses.

“The further that stuff is in the rearview mirror, the more buoyant the economy is,” Prakken said.

The government could soften the blow for some, but that was about it. And in fact, Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — to help people avoid foreclosure — reached many fewer homeowners than the White House hoped to and saw a large number of mortgages that were renegotiated go into foreclosure anyway.

Second, there are phenomena that have little to do with government policy, such as the domestic energy boom, which was taking off in 2012 when Romney made his remarks in St. Louis. At that time, the shale and natural gas revolution had been ongoing for a few years, but was not widely recognized.

Oil was around $100 a barrel all year in 2012. The price has dropped in half since then. That’s in part because over the last six years, domestic oil production in the United States has nearly doubled. Rising fuel- efficiency standards have reduced demand, particularly in Europe. OPEC nations, as a result, have had to look to Asian markets — where prices are lower — to pick up the slack. OPEC has also declined to prop up prices by decreasing supply, hoping to squeeze U.S. producers into reducing their production.

Oil prices can be expected to rebound as production slows due to falling prices, but in 2015, American consumers could see average savings of about $750 due to lower energy costs, according to a U.S. government estimate. Along with the quickened GDP and lowered unemployment, that’s a big reason why there is more optimism around the economy than there has been in a while.

And the economic impact of the fracking revolution in the U.S. is much broader than simply what American drivers feel at the pump.

“The increase in domestic production has reduced imports by more than $100 billion a year,” said Prakken. “That’s like a $100 billion tax cut to the U.S. economy, and it’s more or less permanent.”

The lower cost of energy is also increasing manufacturing in the U.S. and creating new jobs, although some of those jobs are already being offset by layoffs in the energy sector because of the cratering price of oil.

Without the energy explosion, Prakken said, “It would have been a much deeper recession [after the 2008 crisis], a bigger drop in GDP, and you would have had slower GDP growth in the recovery.”

Third, there is the role that government action has played.

Jared Bernstein, the top economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden from 2009 to 2011, is one of the most prominent voices to argue that the Obama White House did a lot to help the economy.

“Today’s economic revival was, in the end, a victory of the technocrats,” Bernstein wrote in The Washington Post a few days after Obama’s State of the Union address.

“The lesson of the recovery is this: In crucial areas of the economy, we have the historical knowledge to diagnose what went wrong, and when we undertake the prescribed policy responses, they work like they’re supposed to. Conversely, when we fail to apply what we know, we hurt the economy,” Bernstein wrote. “The Recovery Act, the financial and auto bailouts, Federal Reserve policy, and Obamacare are examples of applying the known hydraulics to achieve the intended effects.”

Certainly, the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy — keeping interest rates low and monetizing the big banks — has led to stock market growth and has been great for the wealthy. Of course, it has also arguably increased income inequality. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 61.9 percent of all publicly traded stocks.

*****

(...SNIPPED)

 

[cupper]

I think it was a case that the economic recovery was more due to cyclical forces than anything else. Regardless of your political bent, I believe that the recovery came about in spite of the efforts, or lack there of, of both the Executive and Legislative branches of the Government.

Which makes you wonder just how much faster, and how much further along the US would be had there been any amount of cooperation between the two branches.

And all this in spite of the economic downs and doldrums of the rest of the world.

 

[tomahawk6]

As yet there is no recovery which is why the labor numbers have been skewed.It should be a huge campaign issue.Another will be foreign policy.I look forward to a Republican President.

 

[cupper]

Ah, the silly season is starting to warm up. Looking forward it all once again. It's been far too long. :nod:

 

[a_majoor]

The American Interest talks about how *we* in the west have a massive edge in economic, political, social (soft) and military (hard) power; but have generally failed to harness it. There are various opportunities for an engaged Western Alliance to literally "change the world" without a great deal of blood and treasure (mostly enough blood and treasure to keep the competition from spilling over their borders and inflicting their brands of mayhem on the rest of the world, while they are contained, their own internal contradictions will eat away at them while Western soft power applies its seductive appeal to the rest of the world; a combination that will break brittle authoritarian regimes if done right). Of course, this requires real leadership and vision, something lacking across a broad swath of Western "elites", while alternative social, political and economic structures within the West itself are still developing and maturing:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/02/14/the-open-ukrainian-society-and-its-enemies/

(Part 1)

The Open Ukrainian Society and Its Enemies
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Before the West can develop a Ukraine policy, it must have a Ukraine strategy. Achieving what we want and need in Ukraine, thwarting Russia’s revisionist program and resuming progress toward a safer and more democratic world system, will take not just a concerted effort, but also a smart one.

The American debate on Ukraine these days is dominated by the question of whether or not we should be arming the embattled republic. The usual hawks are saying we must send weaponry and trainers ASAP; the usual doves  caution that doing so may lead to escalation. This is the wrong debate to be having; the West’s biggest problem with Russia isn’t a lack of weaponry in the Donbas. It’s the lack of a sound strategy for dealing with the threat that Putin poses not only to Ukraine but to the coherence of the European Union and to the broader allied project of building a liberal world order.

The West has been caught off guard by Putin because it underestimated the Russian capacity and will for mischief and overestimated its own strength and coherence. This is still to some degree a problem: We are still underestimating the damage that Russia can do to us. The EU is much more vulnerable than many people grasp. The euro project has divided Europe’s north from its south, and the still-evolving euro crisis has the potential both to paralyze European policymaking for years to come and to shake the foundations of the European order. Most NATO members are not fulfilling their obligations on military spending, and Germany’s political appetite for taking on expensive projects on behalf of foreign states is diminished, to say the least.

The West’s distractions and divisions created an opportunity for Russia, a weak and declining power with very poor longterm prospects, to catch the stronger West off guard and pose a significant challenge to the liberal order that the West wants to build. But Putin’s ugly and brutal invasion of a peaceful neighboring state isn’t just a problem for the West. It is also a historic opportunity. The future of Putin’s Russia is as much at stake here as the future of Ukraine, and Putin has quite unintentionally given the West a second chance to promote the construction of a genuinely democratic and prosperous Russia.

Despite its problems, the West is much richer, much bigger and enormously more powerful than Vlad the Invader and the ramshackle state he has built. Putin has rashly challenged us to a contest in which the odds are heavily against him. Our job isn’t to respond to his military probes in the Donbas as much as it is to grasp the nature of our advantages and to bring the immense advantages of the West into play in ways that demonstrate to Russia that the path Putin has chosen is a historical dead end. We didn’t beat the Soviet Union on the battlefield; we beat it by forcing the Soviets leadership to realize their utter inability to compete economically, technologically and ultimately militarily against the kind of open and dynamic society the western world built after World War Two. Putin, from a much weaker position and with a much less coherent set of ideas and institutions, has challenged us to another round of Tear Down That Wall. Dealing with his challenge will be a much less all-consuming and dangerous enterprise than dealing with the empire that Stalin built, but deal with it we must.

Our goal here is, especially by the standards of the Cold War, a simple and attainable one. If a united West can help Ukraine become a stable, prosperous and democratic country, then not only will Putin’s challenge to Ukraine ultimately fail, but he will be very hard put to hold onto power in Russia.

Helping Ukraine to follow Poland’s trajectory toward stable prosperity is not a trivial task, but it will not be as forbidding (or as expensive) as many fear. For different reasons, both the EU and the United States are in something of a funk. The morale and self confidence of the EU has been undermined by the euro catastrophe, and by the increasing difficulties of bringing the Balkans into the EU. Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania: these are not names that fill European politicians and officials with a sense of joy and accomplishment. And in the United States we have our own scars: words like Iraq and Afghanistan don’t fill Americans with a longing to go out and build democracies abroad.

Many people look at the situation in Ukraine and draw the despairing conclusion that even without Russian meddling there is not much the West can do to help. The 25 years since 1990 have been characterized by a continuing failure to build a competent state or strong economy. Anyway, say the pessimists, nation building by well-intentioned outsiders is a fool’s game. The oligarchs who have looted Ukraine since 1990 will divert any Western aid and investment to Ukraine to Switzerland and the other black holes of international finance where pinstriped bankers help kleptocrats and narco-traffickers hide their ill-gotten gains.

Pessimists look at nation-building in Ukraine and remember the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. (Answer: Just one, but the light bulb has to want to change.)

Fair enough, but this time the light bulb wants to change. There is a new Ukraine. Millions of ordinary Ukrainians see in Putin’s brutality and lies the threat of a return to Soviet living, and they don’t want to go back. The refugees fleeing the Donbas and Crimea, and the daily news of attacks by fascist thugs and criminal gangs in the east have had a powerful and even transformative effect on Ukrainian society.

The new Ukraine has a kind of leadership that Ukraine has never had before. A new generation of well trained, well educated Ukrainians, many with experience in the West, are ready, willing and able to rebuild Ukraine. Ukrainians are willing to do the nation building themselves. What the West needs to do is to help Ukraine do what a critical mass of Ukrainians already really want to do for themselves: they want to take the Polish road rather than the Putinist one.

Good strategy is about using the resources you have to achieve your goals and about orchestrating your policies to achieve the largest possible gains with the lowest risks and costs. From this point of view, helping the New Ukraine beat back the Russian challenge offers the West some unique opportunities: We can not only frustrate and weaken our enemies (Putin and the fascists and mafiosos most closely linked to him have made it abundantly clear that they hate us and seek to do us ill) and help our Ukrainian friends: we can strengthen the West as a whole. We can help the EU overcome some of its internal problems, renew a common sense of purpose among the members of the Atlantic Alliance and advance our core values and interests worldwide.

The cost isn’t zero, but, wisely done, the cost of an effective Ukraine strategy is reasonable in its own right—and a lot cheaper than coping with the kind of Russia and Europe that we would face if Putin gets what he wants. Here are some the main things to keep in mind:

First, as Dan Drezner writes in the Washington Post, one of Putin’s goals is to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. We can and should make clear to him that this isn’t going to happen. In fact, we can go farther. The United States was losing interest in Europe before Putin’s attack. Whether we were pivoting to Asia, waging the terror wars in the Middle East, or daydreaming about a return to isolationist peace and quiet, Americans left, right and center were united in the belief that Europe’s problems were not a priority for the United States. Thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Americans are taking another look at Europe and we are disturbed by what we see. Between the euro implosion, the Russian threat and the rise of murdering religious fanatics across the EU, it’s clear that Americans need to re-engage. Putin and his cronies need to understand that their own foolish actions have revived the transatlantic alliance and activism that stymied Moscow in the Cold War. Americans and Europeans, including valuable new allies like Poland and the Baltic states who understand the Russians very well, need to think about and work on Ukraine together. The stronger our alliance becomes, the more isolated Russia is, and the more of a failure Putin and his allies will know themselves to be.

And how should a reviving Atlantic Alliance help the New Ukraine emerge? While we should not rule out military aid from training to arms deliveries, that’s not where we should start. Military measures strain the western alliance and to some degree play into the kind of scenario Putin likes. Our mission is to hold the alliance together and take the battle to terrain where Putin is weak and the West is at its best. We don’t want to say or do anything that would suggest to Putin that he doesn’t have to worry about Ukrainian forces gaining new capacities and weapons, and there could well come a time when weapons deliveries could play a vital role in a coherent western strategy for Ukraine, but neither arms nor debates about arms belong at the center of Western policy right now.

The first big part of the strategy of helping the New Ukraine flourish is financial aid. Some of this is already happening; between the IMF and some European and American loan guarantees and aid packages, up go $40 billion has been pledged to Kiev over the next four years. This is a good start, and is evidence that western institutions are more robust than many of our enemies want to believe. More, Ukraine’s new government and a civil society movement that knows it will have to fight hard and sacrifice are embracing proposed IMF reforms rather than fighting them. But there is much more to do, and much of this can be done by using international and European institutions creatively—and in ways that help crisis hit European economies that are suffering not only because of the euro crisis but also because of the Russia sanctions. One approach would be to create a mutually beneficial system of credits that Ukraine could use to purchase needed goods from Eurozone countries—stimulating their economies and creating jobs where Europe badly needs help, but also helping Ukraine get a leg up. Again, this unifies the West rather than divides it. The snake-bitten economies of southern Europe are desperate for some economic stimulus—and Ukraine is desperate for access to western goods and services. Put France, Italy and Spain in a position to benefit from Western aid to Ukraine, and give companies across Europe and North America the chance to replace business lost to Russia sanctions, and the politics of aiding Ukraine begin to get easier. Crafted intelligently, relatively modest American contributions could help open up a very substantial channel of effective aid while promoting EU cooperation and easing tensions among some of our most important and valued allies.

Meanwhile, as part of an effort to strengthen our alliances and the European Union, the United States should be engaging with Italy, France, Portugal and Spain to think about ways we can offer some constructive help to these old friends and partners now trapped in a difficult situation. Stepping up to the plate for your friends when they really need you is the kind of thing a responsible and forward looking country ought to do, and some of our best friends in the world badly need us right now. Could we offer temporary work visas for qualified college grads in countries where talented young people can’t get work? Can we find ways to sweeten the proposed EU-US free trade agreement in ways that would help these countries rebuild? A cohesive, confident and outward looking Europe is extremely important to the United States; even as we address the Russian challenge we need to be strengthening and renewing the transatlantic relationships that have made the Atlantic community an unparalleled force for prosperity and peace in the post World War Two world.

 

[a_majoor]

Part 2:

Putin has invaded Ukraine in the hopes of weakening Europe and the Atlantic Community; the best riposte is for the West to work collaboratively to strengthen them.

The next big element of the strategy has to do with making the Ukrainian state effective. Putin hates and fears the idea of a strong and well functioning Ukrainian state; ironically, it is his own folly that has created the best opportunity in 100 years for Ukrainians to build the kind of state that can safeguard their independence. There is already a critical mass of New Ukrainians, people who are ready, willing and able to break with the past. These veterans of Maidan and more than a year of intense domestic political struggle and foreign war do not want to see another opportunity lost. These are people who hate the old, corrupt way of doing things, people who are willing to do what it takes to move towards a more Western way of life, people who want to see their country do what its most successful neighbors have done. Our core mission in Ukraine is to ally with these people and give them the tools to make their country work.

They need our help. The Ukrainian state today looks a lot like some of the other bureaucratic disasters left on the beach by the receding tide of communism. The bureaucracies, the police force, the law courts, the schools, hospitals and universities are still filled with people trained and socialized under the old system. 25 years of oligarchical corruption and misrule on top of 90 years of sometimes savage Soviet governance have left Ukraine cursed by one of Europe’s least capable and most sprawling states.

The New Ukrainians want this to change, and there are lots of people in the old institutions who would be willing and even eager to join them. The old system made corruption mandatory: police, teachers, bureaucrats and even judges were paid so little that corruption was for many the only way to survive. The value of a government job wasn’t the salary you got for it; it was the power it gave you to extort bribes from the public. The oligarchs liked things that way; a state without morals or morale was easy for shady rich people to control.

This is where some of the money will have to be spent, and while the current IMF program is part of the answer, more still needs to be done. The conventional austerity and reform agendas that the IMF and its partners often propose may not work in Ukraine. Salaries for government employees (which includes health and education professionals as well as the civil service and law enforcement) have to go up to realistic levels. (They will still be low by western standards, but will allow government employees to live decently on their pay.) In some cases, government bureaucracies will need to shrink, and some people behaved so badly under the old system that they will have to be fired. For our part, though, we need to remember that threatening tens of thousands of people with losing their jobs is not the smartest policy for a government facing both foreign invasion and civil war. That is especially true when many of them, as in the case of local police forces, are both organized and armed. Putin hopes that a coalition of the unwilling inside Ukraine will support his disruption in the east because they fear reform. The West can knock that weapon from his hands at a very reasonable cost by providing Ukraine with the temporary budget support it will need to smooth the path of transition.

The West has another, priceless asset we can offer the New Ukraine. Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states and a number of other successfully transitioning countries have a lot of experience cleaning up the ugly mess that communism leaves behind. European and American support can ensure that the New Ukraine gets the benefits of the experience of neighboring countries who are extremely interested in helping Ukraine establish itself as a strong and truly independent state. The context of general state-building and reform is the context in which military training and aid should be seen. Ukraine’s armed forces suffer from many of the same problems as the civilian bureaucracies; reform, redesign and retraining can make a big difference here.

Next up in this strategy is investment assistance and promotion: prosperity is the silver bullet that beat communism in the Cold War and it can defeat Putin now. What will really help Ukraine will be a surge of foreign investment. Putin knows this, and he is trying to block that by creating military uncertainty in the east. This is not without an effect, but Europe and the US can work together to offset this with, for example, programs that insure foreign investors against political risks associated with Russian action.

Ukraine is anything but bereft of attractive investment opportunities. Take the Ukrainian energy system. Ukraine’s primarily Soviet-era energy infrastructure is outmoded, and a huge amount of gas is wasted through leaks and other inefficiencies. Privatization of the energy monopoly in Ukraine would go a long way, helping to keep corrupt hands off of Naftogaz’s money, opening up a key channel for private foreign investment, and also incentivizing the new stakeholders to pay to update the crumbling, leaking infrastructure that costs the Ukrainian economy as a whole so much. Fixing Ukraine’s own energy system will reduce the country’s dependence on Russia, strengthen the economy, and reduce Russia’s leverage over Europe as a whole. If western governments work with Ukraine and Naftogaz, a framework can be created that allows private foreign investment to make a massive difference in Ukraine’s situation.

From a military point of view, Putin has made some gains in Ukraine. He has conquered Crimea and Russia won’t abandon that beautiful and strategically significant peninsula very easily. He has also occupied some of Ukraine’s most heavily industrialized territory in the Donbas, and despite all of its bravery and sacrifice, Ukraine’s army has no realistic prospect of driving Putin out. But Putin is wrong to think that his victory is assured. Joe Stalin occupied East Germany, and his successors (aided by the young Putin) tried to turn East Germany into a reliable ally and prop of Soviet power. The trouble, of course, was that compared to West Germany, East Germany was an ugly, poor police state and could only hold its people by literally building a wall across the frontier and shooting anybody who tried to escape.

Now Putin has inadvertently trapped himself into a similar contest farther east. Our job is to make sure that West Ukraine becomes a beacon of freedom and prosperity. If we succeed, and we will if we make a serious effort, it won’t just be Putin’s hold over the Crimea and the Donbas that will be challenged. What works in Ukraine can work in Russia, and the Russian people and elites know that. Working with our Ukrainian friends and European partners to build a free and fair Ukraine is how we can learn to someday work with Russian friends and allies to build a genuinely New Russia.

Putin has challenged us to a contest to see whether the ideas and values of the West work better in the old Slavic heartlands of the Soviet Union than the mix of mafioso thuggery and nationalist hysteria emanating from the Kremlin these days. This is a challenge we should welcome; by taking him up on it, we will advance our values, enhance our security, strengthen our alliances and build a better world.

 

[a_majoor]

General Jim Mattis outlines what he sees as a new American Grand Strategy.

http://www.hoover.org/research/new-american-grand-strategy

A New American Grand Strategy
by General Jim Mattis

The world is awash in change. The international order, so painstakingly put together by the greatest generation coming home from mankind’s bloodiest conflict, is under increasing stress. It was created with elements we take for granted: the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods and more. The constructed order reflected the wisdom of those who recognized no nation lived as an island and we needed new ways to deal with challenges that for better or worse impacted all nations. Like it or not, today we are part of this larger world and must carry out our part. We cannot wait for problems to arrive here or it will be too late; rather we must remain strongly engaged in this complex world.

The international order built on the state system is not self-sustaining. It demands tending by an America that leads wisely, standing unapologetically for the freedoms each of us in this room have enjoyed. The hearing today addresses the need for America to adapt to changing circumstances, to come out now from its reactive crouch and to take a firm strategic stance in defense of our values.

While we recognize that we owe future generations the same freedoms we enjoy, the challenge lies in how to carry out our responsibility. We have lived too long now in a strategy-free mode.

To do so America needs a refreshed national strategy. The Congress can play a key role in crafting a coherent strategy with bipartisan support. Doing so requires us to look beyond events currently consuming the executive branch.

There is an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second order effects and more problems for us. I suggest that the best way to cut to the essence of these issues and to help you in crafting America’s response to a rapidly changing security environment is to ask the right questions.

These are some that we should ask:

What are the key threats to our vital interests?

The intelligence community should delineate and provide an initial prioritization of those threats for your consideration. By rigorously defining the problems we face you will enable a more intelligent and focused use of the resources allocated for national defense.

Is our intelligence community fit for its expanding purpose?

Today we have less of a military shock absorber to take surprise in stride, and fewer forward-deployed military forces overseas to act as sentinels. Accordingly we need more early warning. Congress should question if we are adequately funding the intelligence agencies to reduce the chance of our defenses being caught flat-footed.

We know that the “foreseeable future” is not foreseeable; our review must incorporate unpredictability, recognizing risk while avoiding gambling with our nation’s security.Incorporating the broadest issues in its assessments, Congress should consider what we must do if the national debt is assessed to be the biggest national security threat we face.

As President Eisenhower noted, the foundation of military strength is our economic strength. In a few short years paying interest on our debt will be a bigger bill than what we pay for defense. Much of that interest money is destined to leave America for overseas. If we refuse to reduce our debt or pay down our deficit, what is the impact on national security for future generations who will inherit this irresponsible debt and the taxes to service it? No nation in history has maintained its military power while failing to keep its fiscal house in order.

How do we urgently halt the damage caused by sequestration?

No foe in the field can wreck such havoc on our security that mindless sequestration is achieving. Congress passed it because it was viewed as so injurious that it would force wise choices. It has failed and today we use arithmetic vice sound thinking to run our government, despite emerging enemy threats. The Senate Armed Services Committee should lead the effort to repeal the sequestration that is costing military readiness and long term capability while sapping troop morale.

Without predictability in budget matters no strategy can be implemented by your military leaders. Your immediate leadership is needed to avert further damage. In our approach to the world, we must be willing to ask strategic questions. In the Middle East, where our influence is at its lowest point in four decades, we see a region erupting in crises.

We need a new security architecture for the Middle East built on sound policy, one that permits us to take our own side in this fight.  Crafting such a policy starts with asking a fundamental question and then others: Is political Islam in our best interest? If not what is our policy to support the countervailing forces? Violent terrorists cannot be permitted to take refuge behind false religious garb and leave us unwilling to define this threat with the clarity it deserves. We have potential allies around the world and in the Middle East who will rally to us but we have not been clear about where we stand in defining or dealing with the growing violent jihadist terrorist threat.

Iran is a special case that must be dealt with as a threat to regional stability, nuclear and otherwise. I believe that you should question the value of Congress adding new sanctions while international negotiations are ongoing, while having them ready should the negotiations for preventing their nuclear weapons capability and stringent monitoring break down.

Further, we should question if we have the right policies in place when Iran creates more mischief in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region. We should recognize that regional counterweights like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council can reinforce us if they understand our policies and if we clarify our foreign policy goals beyond Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

In Afghanistan we need to consider if we’re asking for the same outcome there as we saw last summer in Iraq if we pull out all our troops on the Administration’s proposed timeline. Echoing the military advice given on the same issue in Iraq, gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible. We should recognize that we may not want this fight but the barbarity of an enemy that kills women and children and has refused to break with Al Qaeda needs to be fought.

More broadly, is the U.S. military being developed to fight across the spectrum of combat?

Knowing that enemies always move against perceived weakness, our forces must be capable of missions from nuclear deterrence to counter-insurgency and everything in between, now including the pervasive cyber domain. While surprise is always a factor, Congress can ensure that we have the fewest big regrets when the next surprise occurs. We don’t want or need a military that is at the same time dominant and irrelevant, so we must sort this out and deny funding for bases or capabilities no longer needed.

The nuclear stockpile must be tended to and fundamental questions must be asked and answered: We must clearly establish the role of our nuclear weapons: do they serve solely to deter nuclear war? If so, we should say so, and the resulting clarity will help to determine the number we need. Is it time to reduce the Triad to a Diad, removing the land-based missiles? This would reduce the false alarm danger. Could we reenergize the arms control effort by only counting warheads vice launchers? Was the Russian test violating the INF treaty simply a blunder or a change in policy, and what is our appropriate response?

The reduced size of our military drives the need to ask other questions: Our military is uniquely capable and the envy of the world, but are we resourcing it to ensure we have the highest quality troops, the best equipment and the toughest training?

With a smaller military comes the need for troops kept at the top of their game. When we next put them in harm’s way it must be the enemy’s longest day and worst day. Tiered readiness with a smaller force must be closely scrutinized to ensure we aren’t merely hollowing out the force. While sequestration is the nearest threat to this national treasure that is the U.S. military, sustaining it as the world’s best when smaller will need your critical oversight. Are the Navy and our expeditionary forces receiving the support they need in a world where America’s naval role is more pronounced because we have fewer forces posted overseas?

With the cutbacks to the Army and Air Force and fewer forces around the world, military aspects of our strategy will inevitably become more naval in character. This will provide decision time for political leaders considering employment of additional forms of military power. Congress’ resourcing of our naval and expeditionary forces will need to take this development into account. Because we will need to swiftly move ready forces to act against nascent threats, nipping them in the bud, the agility to reassure friends and temper adversary activities will be critical to America’s effectiveness for keeping a stable and prosperous world. I question if our shipbuilding budget is sufficient, especially in light of the situation in the South China Sea.

While our efforts in the Pacific to keep positive relations with China are well and good, these efforts must be paralleled by a policy to build the counterbalance if China continues to expand its bullying role in the South China Sea and elsewhere. That counterbalance must deny China veto power over territorial, security and economic conditions in the Pacific, building support for our diplomatic efforts to maintain stability and economic prosperity so critical to our economy.

In light of worldwide challenges to the international order we are nonetheless shrinking our military. Are we adjusting our strategy and taking into account a reduced role for that shrunken military?

Strategy connects ends, ways and means. With less military available, we must reduce our appetite for using it. Absent growing our military, there must come a time when moral outrage, serious humanitarian plight, or lesser threats cannot be militarily addressed.  Prioritization is needed if we are to remain capable of the most critical mission for which we have a military: to fight on short notice and defend the country. In this regard we must recognize we should not and need not carry this military burden solely on our own.

Does our strategy and associated military planning take into account our nation’s increased need for allies?

The need for stronger alliances comes more sharply into focus as we shrink the military. No nation can do on its own all that is necessary for its security. Further, history reminds us that countries with allies generally defeat those without. A capable U.S. military, reinforcing our political will to lead from the front, is the bedrock on which we draw together those nations that stand with us against threats to the international order.

Our strategy must adapt to and accommodate this reality. As Churchill intimated, the only thing harder than fighting with allies is fighting without them. Congress, through the Armed Services Committee, should track closely an increased military capability to work with allies, the NATO alliance being foremost but not our sole focus. We must also enlist non-traditional partners where we have common foes or common interests.

In reference to NATO and in light of the Russian violations of international borders, we must ask if the Alliance’s efforts have adjusted to the unfortunate and dangerous mode the Russian leadership has slipped into?

With regard to tightening the bond between our smaller military and those we may need at our side in future fights, the convoluted foreign military sales system needs a challenge. Hopefully it can be put in order before we drive more potential partners to equip themselves with foreign equipment, a move that makes it harder to achieve needed inter-operability with our allies and undercuts America’s industrial base. Currently the system fails to reach its potential to support our foreign policy.

As we attempt to restore stability to the state system and international order, a critical question will be: Is America good for its word?

When we make clear our position or give our word about something, our friends (and even our foes) must recognize that we are good for it. Otherwise dangerous miscalculations can occur. This means that the military instrument must be fit for purpose and that once a political position is taken, our position is backed up by a capable military making clear that we will stand on our word.

When the decision is made to employ our forces in combat, Congress should ask if the military is being employed with the proper authority. I believe it should examine answers to fundamental questions like the following:

Are the political objectives clearly defined and achievable? Murky or quixotic political end states can condemn us to entering wars we don’t know how to end. Notifying the enemy in advance of our withdrawal dates or reassuring the enemy that we will not use certain capabilities like our ground forces should be avoided. Such announcements do not take the place of mature, well‐defined end‐states, nor do they contribute to ending wars as rapidly as possible on favorable terms.

Is the theater of war itself sufficient for effective prosecution? We have witnessed safe havens prolonging war. If the defined theater of war is insufficient, the plan itself needs to be challenged to determine feasibility of its success or the need for its modification.

Is the authority for detaining prisoners of war appropriate for the enemy and type war that we are fighting? We have observed the perplexing lack of detainee policy that has resulted in the return of released prisoners to the battlefield. We should not engage in another fight without resolving this issue up front, treating hostile forces, in fact, as hostile.

Are America’s diplomatic, economic, and other assets aligned to the war aims, with the intent of ending the conflict as rapidly as possible? We have experienced the military alone trying achieve tasks outside its expertise. When we take the serious decision to fight, we must bring to bear all our nation’s resources. You should question how the diplomatic and development efforts will be employed to build momentum for victory and our nation’s strategy demands that integration.

Finally the culture of our military and its rules are designed to bring about battlefield success in the most atavistic environment on earth. No matter how laudable in terms of a progressive country’s instincts, Congress needs to consider carefully any proposed changes to military rules, traditions and standards that bring non‐combat emphasis to combat units. There is a great difference between military service in dangerous circumstances and serving in a combat unit whose role is to search out and kill the enemy at close quarters. Congress has a responsibility for imposing reason over impulse when proposed changes could reduce the combat capability of our forces at the point of contact with the enemy.

Ultimately we need the foresight of the Armed Services Committee, acting in its sentinel and oversight role, to draw us out of the reactive stance we’ve fallen into and chart a strategic way ahead. Our national security strategy needs bipartisan direction. In some cases, Congress may need to change our processes for developing an integrated national strategy, because mixing capable people and their good ideas with bad processes results in the bad processes defeating good peoples’ ideas nine times out of ten. This is an urgent matter, because in an interconnected age when opportunistic adversaries can work in tandem to destroy stability and prosperity, our country needs to regain its strategic footing.

We need to bring clarity to our efforts before we lose the confidence of the American people and the support of our potential allies.

This essay was adapted from statements made by the author before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 27, 2015.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Sorry, and with all respect, but i find Gen (ret'd) Mattis' "Grand Strategy" neither very grand nor very strategic.

It is, at best, a cri de coeur, for a return to the destructive path that America was on, arguably still is on, pre-sequestration.

A true Grand Strategy begins with a clear, political, statement of "What it is we want to accomplish in the world for ourselves."

A true grand strategy then says "in order to accomplish our aims we need ... < a big, long laundry list of economic, social, political, diplomatic, intelligence, security and military resources > 

A true grand strategy then describes how the country can get from its current resource base to the one it needs .... think Pitt the Younger in 1804-06, Roosevelt in 1939-40 and Truman in 1946-49: they were grand strategists. Gen Mattis is, to be charitable, a pygmy in their company and his "grand strategy" is a bit of a bad, sad joke ... but it is, I guess, what passes for strategic thought in America, which may be why so many analysts suggest that America is failing. 

Consider, please: The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge, (Penguin, 2014). It describes one key aspect of grand strategy, one which I suspect eludes both Gen Mattis and President Obama.

 

[a_majoor]

Not sure if this is the correct thread for this article, but the Economist outlines what appears to be a "Second Nuclear Age", which will certainly be a huge factor in American (and indeed anyone's) Grand Strategy. The Economist is sadly stuck in default mode WRT solutions (negotiations and diplomacy were notably ineffective in preventing the various second wave nuclear powers like Israel, Pakistan, India or the DPRK from becoming nuclear powers, and in contradiction to what the Economist hopes, Iran has been using negotiations and diplomacy to stall for time so they can achieve their goal of nuclear weaponry), so we have a defined problem, but as yet no practical solution:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21645729-quarter-century-after-end-cold-war-world-faces-growing-threat-nuclear?fsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fpe%2Fed%2Fthenewnuclearage

The new nuclear age
A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the world faces a growing threat of nuclear conflict
Mar 7th 2015 | From the print edition

WITHIN the next few weeks, after years of stalling and evasion, Iran may at last agree to curb its nuclear programme. In exchange for relief from sanctions it will accept, in principle, that it should allow intrusive inspections and limit how much uranium will cascade through its centrifuges. After 2025 Iran will gradually be allowed to expand its efforts. It insists these are peaceful, but the world is convinced they are designed to produce a nuclear weapon.

In a barnstorming speech to America’s Congress on March 3rd, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, fulminated against the prospect of such a deal (see article). Because it is temporary and leaves much of the Iranian programme intact, he said, it merely “paves Iran’s path to the bomb”. Determined and malevolent, a nuclear Iran would put the world under the shadow of nuclear war.

Mr Netanyahu is wrong about the deal. It is the best on offer and much better than no deal at all, which would lead to stalemate, cheating and, eventually, the dash to the very bomb he fears. But he is right to worry about nuclear war—and not just because of Iran. Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, the world is entering a new nuclear age. Nuclear strategy has become a cockpit of rogue regimes and regional foes jostling with the five original nuclear-weapons powers (America, Britain, France, China and Russia), whose own dealings are infected by suspicion and rivalry.

Thanks in part to Mr Netanyahu’s efforts, Iran commands worldwide attention. Unfortunately, the rest of the nuclear-weapons agenda is bedevilled by complacency and neglect.

The fallout from Prague

After the end of the cold war the world clutched at the idea that nuclear annihilation was off the table. When Barack Obama, speaking in Prague in 2009, backed the aim to rid the world of nuclear weapons, he was treated not as a peacenik but as a statesman. Today his ambition seems a fantasy. Although the world continues to comfort itself with the thought that mutually assured destruction is unlikely, the risk that somebody somewhere will use a nuclear weapon is growing apace.

Every nuclear power is spending lavishly to upgrade its atomic arsenal (see article). Russia’s defence budget has grown by over 50% since 2007, and fully a third of it is devoted to nuclear weapons: twice the share of, say, France. China, long a nuclear minnow, is adding to its stocks and investing heavily in submarines and mobile missile batteries. Pakistan is amassing dozens of battlefield nukes to make up for its inferiority to India in conventional forces. North Korea is thought to be capable of adding a warhead a year to its stock of around ten, and is working on missiles that can strike the west coast of the United States. Even the Nobel peace laureate in the White House has asked Congress for almost $350 billion to undertake a decade-long programme of modernisation of America’s arsenal.

New actors with more versatile weapons have turned nuclear doctrine into guesswork. Even during the cold war, despite all that game theory and brainpower, the Soviet Union and America frequently misread what the other was up to. India and Pakistan, with little experience and less contact, have virtually nothing to guide them in a crisis but mistrust and paranoia. If weapons proliferate in the Middle East, as Iran and then Saudi Arabia and possibly Egypt join Israel in the ranks of nuclear powers, each will have to manage a bewildering four-dimensional stand-off.

Worst of all is the instability. During much of the cold war the two superpowers, anxious to avoid Armageddon, were willing to tolerate the status quo. Today the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.

Some countries want nuclear weapons to prop up a tottering state. Pakistan insists its weapons are safe, but the outside world cannot shake the fear that they may fall into the hands of Islamist terrorists, or even religious zealots within its own armed forces. When history catches up with North Korea’s Kim dynasty, as sooner or later it must, nobody knows what will happen to its nukes—whether they might be inherited, sold, eliminated or, in a last futile gesture, detonated.

Others want nuclear weapons not to freeze the status quo, but to change it. Russia has started to wield nuclear threats as an offensive weapon in its strategy of intimidation. Its military exercises routinely stage dummy nuclear attacks on such capitals as Warsaw and Stockholm. Mr Putin’s speeches contain veiled nuclear threats. Dmitry Kiselev, one of the Kremlin’s mouthpieces, has declared with relish that Russian nuclear forces could turn America into “radioactive ash”.

Just rhetoric, you may say. But the murder of Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader, on the Kremlin’s doorstep on February 27th was only the latest sign that Mr Putin’s Russia is heading into the geopolitical badlands (see article). Resentful, nationalistic and violent, it wants to rewrite the Western norms that underpin the status quo. First in Georgia and now in Ukraine, Russia has shown it will escalate to extremes to assert its hold over its neighbours and convince the West that intervention is pointless. Even if Mr Putin is bluffing about nuclear weapons (and there is no reason to think he is), any nationalist leader who comes after him could be even more dangerous.

Towards midnight

China poses a more distant threat, but an unignorable one. Although Sino-American relations hardly look like the cold war, China seems destined to challenge the United States for supremacy in large parts of Asia; its military spending is growing by 10% or more a year. Nuclear expansion is designed to give China a chance to retaliate using a “second strike”, should America attempt to destroy its arsenal. Yet the two barely talk about nuclear contingencies—and a crisis over, say, Taiwan could escalate alarmingly. In addition Japan, seeing China’s conventional military strength, may feel it can no longer rely on America for protection. If so, Japan and South Korea could go for the bomb—creating, with North Korea, another petrifying regional stand-off.

What to do? The most urgent need is to revitalise nuclear diplomacy. One priority is to defend the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which slows the spread of weapons by reassuring countries that their neighbours are not developing nukes. It was essential that Iran stayed in the treaty (unlike North Korea, which left). The danger is that, like Iran, signatories will see enrichment and reprocessing as preparation for a bomb of their own—leading their neighbours to enrich in turn. That calls for a collective effort to discourage enrichment and reprocessing, and for America to shore up its allies’ confidence.

You don’t have to like the other side to get things done. Arms control became a vital part of Soviet-American relations. So it could between China and America, and between America and Putin’s Russia. Foes such as India and Pakistan can foster stability simply by talking. The worst time to get to know your adversary is during a stand-off.

In 1960 Albert Wohlstetter, an American nuclear strategist, wrote that, “We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them.” So too today, the essential first step in confronting the growing nuclear threat is to stare it full in the face.

 

[a_majoor]

And of course any Grand Strategy needs to be able to accomodate changing facts on the ground. The Israeli elections and the general chaos in the ME today suggest any new Administration is going to have to revamp whatever assumptions they were making for American Grand Strategy overall, and in the region in particular. I think one of the sacred cows that Americans will ahve to barbecue is the "Two State" solution; conditions for that are so far away that wasting time and resources distracts from more pressing issues:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/03/18/bibi-is-back-the-consequences-for-u-s-israeli-relations/

Bibi Is Back: The Consequences for U.S.-Israeli Relations
Walter Russell Mead

It is, of course, Netanyahu’s right to reject the two-state solution. But given how Americans tend to see the world, doing so will have consequences for the bilateral relationship.


With all votes in, it looks virtually certain that Bibi Netanyahu will remain on the job as Prime Minister of Israel. That will be a big disappointment for some people, including the residents of the White House and a large sector of the American Jewish community who are pro-Israel but anti-Likud. It is also going to cause some pain for plenty of journalists who cover Israel in the American media, many of whom were ready to write Bibi’s political obituary just two days ago.

Bibi’s win is another in a long string of Middle East failures by President Obama and will add to the belief by both our friends and our enemies in the region that the costs of being Obama’s friend can outweigh the costs of his enmity. Egypt’s President Mubarak thought he was Obama’s friend; so did his successor President Morsi. The Syrian moderate rebels expected their friend in the White House to back them. The Zionist Union thought that promising to work more closely with Obama was the ticket to an electoral win in Israel. Meanwhile, as Bibi can now testify, those who defy this White House don’t seem to pay much of a price: just ask Syria’s Assad or, for that matter, his patrons in Iran. ISIS has more visibility and power in the Middle East than al-Qaeda ever did, while the Sunni Arab tribes of Iraq who saved America’s bacon during the surge and who counted on American influence to protect their interests in postwar Iraq are being overrun by Shi’a militias.

Here at TAI, we mostly avoid taking sides in other people’s elections, and we think our readers come to us more for analysis than for guidance about who to root for in political contests around the world. However, there is no denying that, while Bibi won the election convincingly, with the Likud Party winning significantly more Knesset seats than the polls or the pundits predicted, he didn’t win prettily. In particular, Americans are going to focus on his assertion that he will not support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem during his new term.

This is, of course, his right, but if this proves to be the long term position of the Israeli government, as opposed to a temporary pause in the peace process, it will have a chilling effect on U.S.-Israel relations that will outlast President Obama’s time in the White House. It will also deepen Israel’s international isolation and put useful weapons into the eager hands of Israel’s enemies in Europe and elsewhere.

The two-state solution has a long and hallowed history in American foreign policyThe two-state solution has a long and hallowed history in American foreign policy. Harry Truman, the American President who recognized Israel’s independence, was a strong proponent of the two-state solution in the 1940s. The willingness of the Jews of British Palestine to accept the UN-sponsored partition plan, contrasted with the refusal of the Arabs of the country, helped give Israel the moral high ground in American politics for many years. Since Yasser Arafat renounced violence (however insincerely) and recognized (with whatever mental reservations) Israel’s right to exit, promoting a two-state solution has been the linchpin of American policy under Presidents of both parties, with George W. Bush very much included.

Not all American diplomacy in support of the two-state solution has been wise; much of it has been ineffective. More than one American President has made matters in the Middle East significantly worse by pressing the peace process too hard, too fast for an agreement that remains frustratingly out of reach. Few American administrations, much less the well-intentioned but often befuddled wannabe peacemakers in Europe who periodically traipse through the region, really understand just how difficult it will actually be to get what, superficially considered, seems like an agreement that would greatly benefit all sides. Fewer still really understand that, despite Israeli intransigence on various points, the most difficult task is to build the genuinely deep and long-lasting Palestinian national consensus needed for an agreement to stick.

There is a tendency among some hard-headed, hard nosed Israelis to look at the fecklessness of so many wannabe peacemakers and to measure the depth of America’s commitment to the two-state solution by the ineffectual nature of the strategies chosen to advance it. That would be a mistake. The belief that every people on Planet Earth has the right of self-determination is deeply engrained in American political and moral culture. Historically, supporters of Israel benefitted from this widespread American belief. That conviction cannot be turned on and off; support for the goal of a Palestinian state is a permanent feature of American politics. Americans are, I think, prepared to show some understanding both for the difficulties of Israel’s position and the problems caused by the deep structural issues within the Palestinian movement, but it would be extremely difficult to build a long term U.S.-Israeli relationship on the basis of the rejection of Palestinian national rights.

There is a minority of Americans, perhaps on the order of a quarter, whose support for Israel is strong enough (or theologically grounded in certain evangelical readings of Scripture) to embrace an Israel that sets itself openly against the goal of a Palestinian state. Other Americans are so worried about terrorism and radical Islam that they are willing to support Israel no matter what stand the Jewish state takes or doesn’t take on the Palestinian question. But there are enough Americans (and, additionally, enough American Jews) whose support for Jewish self-determination in Israel is linked to support for Palestinian self-determination in a Palestinian state that U.S.-Israeli relations will be significantly and progressively harmed if Israel’s leaders choose to close the door on Palestinian statehood.

This does not, Israelis need to understand, primarily come out of some pandering need to pacify Arabs by covering the American-Israeli relationship with a “peace process” fig leaf. Nor does it primarily proceed from sentimental philanthropy divorced from any understanding of the problems of the real world. It proceeds from the complex of ideas and beliefs about the world that have led so many Americans for so long to support Israel in the face of almost universal global condemnation. It will not go away, and over time its influence is likely to grow rather than to recede.

Achieving a Palestinian state will be difficult—much more difficult than successive American negotiators have ever really understood. Those difficulties are growing, and the problem is less about Israeli settlements (though these are a problem) than about the deepening divisions and dysfunctions in Palestinian society and politics. America will, I hope, over time become a wiser and more patient advocate of a Palestinian state than we have often been in the past. One can understand and even sympathize with the weariness and cynicism of Israeli officials who have watched us dance narcissistic and delusional peace process dances, with Presidents more focused on burnishing their “legacies” and winning a Nobel Prize than on the hard, slow work that can actually make progress. The Obama administration does not have the credibility with Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, or Saudis to play much of a constructive role at this point, and this incapacity has much more to do with White House errors than with Israeli opposition. Whatever Bibi does or doesn’t do, White House fumbling and Foggy Bottom overreach, combined with the diminishing authority of an administration moving into its lame duck phase, pretty much ensure that the next couple of years will not see much progress on the peace front.

But with all this said and acknowledged, Israelis need to understand that support for a two-state solution is not some left-wing fad or passing fancy in the United States. It represents the natural attitude of the American mind to this kind of problem, and both liberal and conservative, Republican and Democratic administrations will keep coming back to it. Abandoning the goal of a two-state solution and failing to develop ideas about how progress can be made in this direction, however tentatively, will continue to carry a significant and growing cost for Israel in American politics.

Rethinking and re-imagining the road to Palestinian statehood: yes. Taking a more sober approach to a problem that is much thornier than many outside the region have grasped: yes. Proceeding with caution when the whole Middle East is in flames: definitely. Thinking comprehensively about the problems of the Palestinian people as a whole rather than just those in the West Bank and Gaza: absolutely, especially now that so many Palestinians in Syria have been made refugees once again. Insisting that the vagaries of American political cycles and presidential legacy hunts no longer drive the pace and timing of Middle East negotiations: please.

If Bibi’s election message is that the peace process as we have known it needs fundamental change and reshaping, he is right. But if his intention is to kill it, or even to proclaim a moratorium during which Israel will create so many new facts on the ground that the concept of a Palestinian state no longer looks viable, then U.S.-Israeli relations will continue to cool.

Zionist history is in part the story of a rivalry within Zionism between Jewish leaders who believed that the movement’s best chances came from cooperation with English-speaking leaders and those who believed that the way to deal with both the Brits and the Americans was to confront them. Chaim Weizmann, who extracted the Balfour Declaration from the British and got a promise from Harry Truman that he would recognize an independent Israel, was an example of the former. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism who planned a war with Britain when that country moved away from its support for the Balfour Declaration, represents the latter. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s roots, despite his own fluent English and his deep understanding of American culture, lie in the more confrontational camp, and Bibi has often drawn on his inner Jabotinsky in confrontations with Obama.

Israelis will have to decide for themselves where their interests lie in these critical times. Let’s hope they find a way forward that keeps the doors of peace open and safeguards the foundations of the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration needs to take a long hard look at the Middle East and ask itself why it keeps getting wrong-footed in this difficult region. Neither loved nor feared, the current White House has lost influence over old friends without replacing them with new ones. Just possibly, this is a time for American officials to think about their own policy problems rather than aggressively criticizing the choices that other people are making in an environment that our own missteps (by past administrations as well as by this one) have helped make more challenging than ever.

 

[Rifleman62]

http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=8300

At the White House, There’s Nobody Home

The absence of true leadership has created chaos at home and abroad.

by Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online -19 Mar 15

What has gone wrong with the U.S. government in the past month? Just about everything, from the fundamental to the ridiculous.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States to warn Congress about the dangers of a nuclear Iran. He spoke without the invitation of an irritated President Obama, who claimed that he did not even watch the address on television.

Obama declined to even meet with the Israeli prime minister, announcing that it would have been improper for him to have such a meeting so close to Netanyahu’s re-election bid.

But if Obama was so concerned about not influencing the Israeli elections, why, according to some news accounts, is a Senate panel launching an investigation into whether Obama’s State Department gave grant money to a nonprofit organization, the OneVoice Movement, that sought to unseat Netanyahu with the help of several former Obama campaign operatives?

Then, 47 Republican senators signed an unusual letter to the Iranian theocracy, reminding it that any agreement on Iran’s nuclear program negotiated with the Obama administration would have to first clear Congress.

Obama shot back that the senators’ letter was undue interference that aided the Iranians. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton agreed that the senators were either empowering Iranian hardliners or sabotaging the diplomatic efforts of their own president. Secretary of State John Kerry concurred.

Nonetheless, the Senate may well pass new sanctions against Iran, if it feels Obama has been too lax in its negotiations or usurped senatorial oversight of treaties.

Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) bucked the Obama administration and expressed doubt about administration concessions to the Iranians. Other Democrats could join him.

But almost immediately after weighing in on Iran, Menendez found himself the target of a federal investigation into purported corruption. And as far as the claim of improper interference in foreign affairs goes, the Obama administration and British prime minister David Cameron jointly lobbied U.S. senators not to pass tougher sanctions on Iran.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Hillary Clinton is bogged down in another trademark Clinton scandal. Clinton never used a standard government e-mail account while secretary. And rather than submitting her actual e-mails to the State Department back in December, Clinton submitted 55,000 printed pages of e-mails — making it much harder for those e-mails to be searched.

Apparently, Clinton also wished to decide which of her private-server communications to release to the government — but only when demanded by congressional investigators and watchdog groups well after her tenure ended.

Clinton’s implausible press conference last week only made things worse. She proved unable to explain her unusual behavior and seemed ignorant about how government e-mail works and is secured.

Abroad, Syria, Iran, and the Islamic State are battling for what is left of the Syrian-Iraqi borderlands after the United States abruptly pulled out all its peacekeepers from Iraq. All are enemies of the U.S. But as they fight each other, the Obama administration is negotiating with Iran over its efforts against the Islamic State. The administration has also expressed a willingness to meet with Syrian president Bashar Assad, after not long ago declaring Assad an illegitimate leader who should step down. Obama had issued red-line threats to Assad over the gassing of his own people.

Back home, two apparently inebriated Secret Service agents crashed their government car into a security barrier near the White House — in the midst of an active bomb investigation. Indeed, the reckless agents may have crashed right through the crime scene. This is after the Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into the culture of the Secret Service following a 2012 scandal in which a dozen agents hired prostitutes during an alcohol-fueled night in Colombia.

Meanwhile, in the midst of nightly demonstrations at Ferguson, Mo., a young demonstrator on parole allegedly shot two police officers. “Whoever fired those shots shouldn’t detract from the issue,” the president editorialized.

But trying to gun down a policeman should amount to something more than a “detraction.”

Obama’s own Department of Justice recently issued a report indicating that the Ferguson Police Department routinely violates the rights of black citizens. But the DOJ also found Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of a charging Michael Brown justifiable. That shooting was the incident that began the Ferguson “issue” in the first place.

Was Obama worried about the wounded policemen “detracting” from the protestors’ “hands up, don’t shoot” allegations, which Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigators, along with a grand jury, had already debunked?

All this chaos has taken amid ongoing IRS and VA investigations, the Supreme Court’s impending decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare, and Saudi Arabia arranging to buy from South Korea nuclear expertise to counter Iran.

The common thread in all this chaos?

More than the usual partisanship at home and barbarism abroad.

No one seems to be in charge at the White House. And that has terrified America’s supporters and emboldened its enemies — with another two years to go

 

[Edward Campbell]

The problem with defining a useful and broadly acceptable grand strategy for America is ... Americans.

American are, broadly, very deeply divided on several key issues including on what it is they want their country to "be" in the world ... there always has been a strong isolationist element in the American body politic ~ isolationism should not be confused with either unilateralism or non-interventionism. The latter is close to isolationism but not quite the same. Unilateralism is almost the polar opposite of non-interventionism. Traditional American isolationism (no entangling alliances, etc) is not the same as 19th century British "splendid isolation" which was, by careful inaction, a form of intervention. The other trend in America ... more modern and still powerful, is engagement: the Truman doctrine and all that. But, in my opinion, both trends isolationism/non-interventionism and engagement/multilateralism are bookends for a very broad base of public indifference ...

I'm alright, Jack​

... which is not surprising, neither is it abnormal ... I think the same thing applies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark and so on, too. (There's a reason elections are rarely decided on foreign policy issues.)

Another problem ... an equally or even more deep division is economic. About  ¼ of Americans understand that they are dangerously overspending while another ¼ believe, sincerely, that more and more and more social spending is necessary for America. The majority in the middle think they are spending too much ... but not on either defence or social programmes!

One essential attribute of any useful, successful grand strategy is that it must be affordable.

Many isolationists (and others) argues circa 1940 that American couldn't afford a war against Germany. FDR argued that what really couldn't be afforded was for Germany to win. In the 1950s President Eisenhower (who was a famously good poker payer) bluffed the Russians into believing that he was overspending on defence when, in fact, he was slashing the defence budget and building roads instead. President Reagan did an imitation in his time with "Star Wars." The fact - and I assert it is a fact - is that America cannot afford the military role it has taken for itself. It could be afforded by an America that had its fiscal house in order, but the America that exists doesn't.

Another attribute for a grand strategy for a great power is, in my opinion, is a national ethos. America had one in 1900, in 1910 and 1940, it still had it in 1950 and in 1960, too ... but it eroded, just as Britain's did after 1900.

 

[Kirkhill]

Perhaps another trend contributing to the isolationist tendency in America is the continuing influx of immigrants?

Despite the maladjusted second generation effect - people wanting to slit American throats etc - I believe it is reasonable to suppose that many immigrants go to America because it is perceived as a safe haven where they can get rich and live the American dream.  They have no desire to get involved in other peoples' wars nor give up their wealth to the government to prosecute them.

With respect to paying the cost - I agree. I don't think the US is in a position to fund an interventionist policy.  They may be closer to Restoration financing - robbing the jewelers to pay the jewelers - than Glorious Revolution financing with the Bank of England underwritten by thousands of rich Huguenot refugees from France, Switzerland, the Rhineland and the Netherlands.  Those that weren't rich were skilled and industrious and built the Industrial Revolution in Britain as well as the Army, Navy and Empire.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I think you're on to something, brother Kirkhill, with your comparison to 17th century Britain. That century, the time of "England's Troubles", was, largely, a result of the Stuarts' (evident? just apparent?) inability to learn from their own mistakes ... just like the 'bases' of the increasingly hardline Democrats and the GOP. I don't think there will be a bloody civil war, à la the 1640s ... instead my guess is that it's already started and is being fought in town halls and state legislatures and in union halls and corporate offices as well as on Wall Street and Main Street and on Avenue K in Washington and it is about the "American ethos."

In 1900 Britain was already in fairly steep decline; Germany, Japan and, above all, America were ascending ... Britain made several poor and one dreadful strategic choices after about 1870 (there were several but the big one to: maintain "splendid isolation" or, at least, a patient, pragmatic approach to Britain's historic vital interests (probably the best choice, but it would require the sort of focus and fortitude that neither Arthur Balfour nor Henry Campbell-Bannerman possessed); align with Germany (perhaps the second best choice, maybe even a more natural choice); or align with France (1904) and Russia (1907) (the worst choice and the one Britain took). America has, it seems to me, made more poor strategic choices, since about 1960, than it has good ones.

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting look at a political action which involved a coalition effort by people on both sides of the political divide. WRM shows how results can be achieved even if people are coming at things from different starting points, but also makes the interesting point that the current political divide is nothing new, but indeed represents two strains of American thought and culture dating back to colonial (pre-Revolutionary) times:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/03/30/a-reform-that-works/

A Reform That Works

On April 1, hundreds of thousands of Americans will be paying more money for flood insurance as a congressional act revising federal insurance premiums takes effect. And that is a good thing. Good in itself, because below-cost federal flood insurance has turned into a massive subsidy of development and waterfront property. Why taxpayers who can’t afford beach houses and river and lake front property should subsidize the insurance bills of those who do is one of the many mysteries of Blue Model America. And good because it points the way forward for meaningful reform in the country.

Reforming this monstrosity—the cost to taxpayers is something on the order of $24 billion in debt that FEMA cannot repay the treasury—is long overdue. The coalition—of crony capitalism-hating GOP fiscal hawks and global warming averse Democrats—demonstrates how even with today’s polarized politics, Left and Right can sometimes come together behind an idea that makes sense.

To global warming activists, rising sea levels due to glacial melt as the planet warms are one of the major costs of climate change. As part of the adjustment process, moving development away from low lying coastal areas is an important part of the response to climate change many greens want to see. By linking this concern with the anger of fiscal hawks who see the flood insurance program as a massive unearned subsidy in which some Americans are unfairly taxed to lower costs for other, often less-needy people, the flood insurance program is exactly the kind of wasteful nonsense that good policy needs to kill. Put the two groups together, and you get a constructive reform.

Liberals and conservatives need to realize that neither group is going away. America is a big and diverse country, and the sources of our ideological diversity lie deep in American history. Both Obama-loving liberals and Tea Party conservatives speak for values and ideas that go back to colonial times. The New England Puritans, while their views on sex and God don’t necessarily resonate with those of contemporary liberals, believed passionately in the need for a strong state that enforced moral mandates on the population at large. John Winthrop and Cotton Mather didn’t know the phrases “nanny state” and “political correctness” but the moral logic behind these ideas was one of the founding principles of Puritan New England. At the same time, the ornery suspicion of central authority, love of firearms and general hawkishness that one finds among many Tea Partiers today has been part of American political and moral culture since the 1600s.

Given our federal system, which ensures that the political diversity of the American people is reflected in the makeup of Congress, both liberals and conservatives in all their variety are going to remain part of the national political picture for a long time to come. For people interested in governing America and hammering out the policies that can help us make a successful transition from a society based in the late stages of the industrial revolution to one capable of handling the information revolution that is now reshaping our world, it’s a reality that the new policies and laws we need will have to reflect and incorporate more than one color in the American rainbow. Red America, Blue America, Green America and a number of other Americas are going to persist far into the future, and the leaders we need are people who can somehow weave all these different strands of thought and opinion together.

That’s why the flood insurance reform, though a small step, is heartening. Many Tea Party activists are climate skeptics; many environmentalists are often big fans of wasteful federal subsidies and expansive government programs. Yet they were able to find common ground on this idea and together they defeated the entrenched lobbies who profit from the flood insurance subsidies.

This is a climate bill that climate change skeptics can love, and it is a blow against big government that true blue liberals (I think he means Classical Liberals) can support. Think tanks and policy institutes should take heed: this is one of the most important ways to make progress in the American political system. This is what a truly creative compromise looks like, and the more of these we can develop, the better.

 

[cupper]

The only problem with this is that all of those waterfront homeowners vote. And they cross the entire political spectrum. And politicians pander. Oh how they pander.

As far as I am concerned, if you build in a flood plane, you should learn to tread water.

Now there are certain cases where the landowner through no fault of their own suffers damages which need to be covered. But those cases are due to poor stormwater management, rerouting water courses, destroying wetlands or other poorly thought out government policies. These people should be compensated or expect litigation.

 

[Edward Campbell]

One vital aspect of any grand strategy is the "ways and means" to execute it. That is, largely, an economic issue, and Larry Summers, a pretty respectable economist points out, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Financial Times, that a "divided America" has botched its previous role as the manager of the global economy:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a0a01306-d887-11e4-ba53-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3WWRMsImr

Time US leadership woke up to new economic era

Larry Summers

April 5th, 2015

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This past month may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system. True, there have been any number of periods of frustration for the US before, and times when American behaviour was hardly multilateralist, such as the 1971 Nixon shock, ending the convertibility of the dollar into gold. But I can think of no event since Bretton Woods comparable to the combination of China’s effort to establish a major new institution and the failure of the US to persuade dozens of its traditional allies, starting with Britain, to stay out of it.
This failure of strategy and tactics was a long time coming, and it should lead to a comprehensive review of the US approach to global economics. With China’s economic size rivalling America’s and emerging markets accounting for at least half of world output, the global economic architecture needs substantial adjustment. Political pressures from all sides in the US have rendered it increasingly dysfunctional.
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Largely because of resistance from the right, the US stands alone in the world in failing to approve the International Monetary Fund governance reforms that Washington itself pushed for in 2009. By supplementing IMF resources, this change would have bolstered confidence in the global economy. More important, it would come closer to giving countries such as China and India a share of IMF votes commensurate with their new economic heft.

Meanwhile, pressures from the left have led to pervasive restrictions on infrastructure projects financed through existing development banks, which consequently have receded as funders, even as many developing countries now see infrastructure finance as their principle external funding need.

With US commitments unhonoured and US-backed policies blocking the kinds of finance other countries want to provide or receive through the existing institutions, the way was clear for China to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. There is room for argument about the tactical approach that should have been taken once the initiative was put forward. But the larger question now is one of strategy. Here are three precepts that US leaders should keep in mind.

First, American leadership must have a bipartisan foundation at home, be free from gross hypocrisy and be restrained in the pursuit of self-interest. As long as one of our major parties is opposed to essentially all trade agreements, and the other is resistant to funding international organisations, the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system.
Other countries are legitimately frustrated when US officials ask them to adjust their policies — then insist that American state regulators, independent agencies and far-reaching judicial actions are beyond their control. This is especially true when many foreign businesses assert that US actions raise real rule of law problems.

The legitimacy of US leadership depends on our resisting the temptation to abuse it in pursuit of parochial interest, even when that interest appears compelling. We cannot expect to maintain the dollar’s primary role in the international system if we are too aggressive about limiting its use in pursuit of particular security objectives.

Second, in global as well as domestic politics, the middle class counts the most. It sometimes seems that the prevailing global agenda combines elite concerns about matters such as intellectual property, investment protection and regulatory harmonisation with moral concerns about global poverty and posterity, while offering little to those in the middle. Approaches that do not serve the working class in industrial countries (and rising urban populations in developing ones) are unlikely to work out well in the long run.

Third, we may be headed into a world where capital is abundant and deflationary pressures are substantial. Demand could be in short supply for some time. In no big industrialised country do markets expect real interest rates to be much above zero in 2020 or inflation targets to be achieved. In the future, the priority must be promoting investment, not imposing austerity. The present system places the onus of adjustment on “borrowing” countries. The world now requires a symmetric system, with pressure also placed on “surplus” countries.

These precepts are just a beginning, and many questions remain. There are questions about global public goods, about acting with the speed and clarity that the current era requires, about co-operation between governmental and non-governmental actors, and much more. What is crucial is that the events of the past month will be seen by future historians not as the end of an era, but as a salutary wake up call.

The writer is Charles W Eliot university professor at Harvard and a former US Treasury secretary

I agree with his three part prescription:

    A return to bipartisan policy making ~ but I don't think the culture wars are going to end any time soon;

    A focus on the real middle class ~ actually should be fairly easy to accomplish, but, yet again, the culture wars will, likely, get in the way;

    Investment to rise, even at the expense of balanced budgets ~ but, and it's a HUGE BUT, this Keynesian prescription must not include even a penny of social spending. Keynes was right but he demanded that
    stimulus spending be turned off when a recession (even the current stagnation) ended. We know that turning off social spending is too hard for politicians to manage. keynes is good IF people actually read the whole book.

 

[tomahawk6]

The Administration's policies have 5m Americans out of work.That wont change until there is a new occupant in the White House.

 

[Kirkhill]

How much "bipartisan" policy was a function of "patrician" leadership?  Nobody could accuse FDR of being a "man of the people", nor Eleanor for that matter - no matter how much they empathized.

And the Kennedies, johnny-come-latelies as they were, got where they did by bulling their way into the patrician clubs.

I don't think there is much appetite anywhere for trusting "patrician" these days.  For good or ill policy is going to have to take into account whether or not the mass of people will follow the prescriptive lead - or will they just studiously ignore the politicos and do whatever they want in any event?