What a masterful speech by Obama. His delivery, as normal, was eloquent and well-timed, but it was the content of his speech and the enthusiasm with which he delivered his fifth SOTU address that was so positive and encouraging.
What a masterful speech by Obama. His delivery, as normal, was eloquent and well-timed, but it was the content of his speech and the enthusiasm with which he delivered his fifth SOTU address that was so positive and encouraging.
Last month’s issue of Outside Magazine has an excellent article about the havoc and destruction brought to Sochi by the preparation for this February’s Winter Olympics. I’m not surprised that Putin is doing whatever he wants in this supposedly public and protected corner of Russian wilderness, but to read many first-hand accounts of Putin’s forces crushing various attempts by citizens to end illegal construction or bring attention to previously protected natural habitats is astonishing. One such mission by these concerned citizens is to investigate an illegal compound (named Moonglade) on or near a Unesco world heritage site. It is rumored that Putin has built one of his palaces there. At the moment, everything and everyone going to this palace is flown in by helicopter. Russia has already been warned by Unesco to stop the construction of one road, but it is reported in Outside’s article that another road is under construction, this one coming in from the other side of the property.
It’s embarrassing that the Olympic Games are awarded to countries (really their leaders) that are going to permanently destroy homes and natural beauty to put on a sporting event for two weeks. Sochi will never be the same and the people of the region, if they profit at all from this, are eventually going to be left poor with a nice selection of bulldozed-over nature preserves.
Thank you, Outside, for bringing to your readers a better understanding of Putin’s dirty methods.
An advantage to still living in Denver is that I can attend speaking events at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where I received my graduate degree. Today, the dean of the school (Ambassador Christopher Hill) had a discussion with Stephen Kinzer and David E. Sanger, two of the best journalists writing today, at the Anderson Academic Commons on DU’s campus. The discussion was especially focused on China, Iran, and Syria, but it did touch on Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Israel, Germany, and Turkey. My intention with this post is to simply highlight a few of the things that were mentioned today regarding the countries listed above.
An interesting point that Kinzer hit on right away is that China and India are the number one and number two importers of Saudi Arabian oil, respectively. He rhetorically asked the audience what these countries are doing to protect their supply of oil from the Kingdom. The answer is nothing, because as Kinzer pointed out to the audience, the US is doing all the work. Now to today’s crowd at DU this didn’t really come as a shock, but it would to many Americans. Kinzer expressed an idea that was also written about by Fareed Zakaria in last week’s issue of Time, it’s the idea that what is good for the US is not necessarily good for Saudi Arabia. Or as the title of Zakaria’s piece puts more bluntly, “The Saudis Are Mad? Tough!”
Sanger spent a decent amount of time talking about the light footprint strategy (with drones, special forces, etc.) Obama has used in the Middle East and how that strategy is losing a little steam in the second term so far. In the first term it gave America the chance for it to protect its interests, but to avoid a long-term operation, such as the Iraq War or the War in Afghanistan.
Moving on to Iran, Sanger did highlight just how much closer the Iranians are to a bomb now than they were when Obama first took office. He thinks that for a legitimate deal to be struck with the Iranians, they would have to deconstruct some of what they’ve built since 2008. This would, in theory, give the US and its allies in the Middle East, a little time to deal with an Iran that suddenly leaped forward in construction of a bomb. I think Sanger makes a good point. I do not see an agreement with Iran moving forward unless they take some steps backward. If they do not, I do not think there is a chance of Israel supporting us in an agreement with Iran and, of course, the Right in America will attempt to further destroy Obama’s foreign policy legacy, which the Right already has determined as embarrassing for America.
Kinzer’s most interesting contribution to this afternoon’s panel discussion was about Iran and the ongoing sanctions there. He pointed out that goods banned by sanctions still arrive in the marketplace, but that they are just absurdly expensive and typically controlled by very powerful factions. These people or groups are called sanction busters, and Iran’s biggest sanction busting group is the Revolutionary Guard. Naturally, if they are gaining in power and raking in the money from the sanctions on Iran, the Revolutionary Guard is not very interested in a deal between the US and Iran being struck. He mentioned that in George W Bush’s administration there was a sort of rule that no one could refer to Iran as having legitimate security interests. That is easy to believe. Can you imagine this guy being concerned about Iran? That’s what I thought. Kinzer highlighted the “huge trust gap” between the two countries and he emphasized the need for “verification mechanisms” if any deal is to be made. I especially liked this quote from him, “Emotion is always the enemy of wise statesmanship.”
Hill asked both men if a nuclear Iran could be contained? They seemed to agree, that Iran would not instantly launch missiles at their enemies if the country had them, but the real threat from a nuclear Iran is the message that would send to the rest of the region. Other Middle East nations would immediately start to move toward nuclear development. Of course, Iran would be able to powerfully (and probably successfully) intimidate the entire region if they did have a bomb.
Snowden and the NSA were bound to come up. Sanger shared that Angela Merkel’s phone has been periodically tapped since 2002. She was on a lengthy list of Europeans who were being eavesdropped on. Now, since the Snowden revelations have revealed the extent to which the US is spying on its friends and enemies, Sanger shared that the country has to review the cost of targeting its partners. In regards to China, Sanger pointed out that the NSA story has soured China-US talks on cyber security. China now has more reason to call the US a hypocrite when it comes to spying, but what the NSA has done is not comparable to China’s “industrial espionage.”
There seemed to be agreement between the two journalists that a breakthrough with Iran would be Obama’s key foreign policy achievement. Kinzer spoke of the pro-American sentiment that he has personally experienced in Iran. I think the fact that most Iranians are pro-American is not widely known by Americans nor widely shared by most American media outlets. It wouldn’t surprise me if a decent amount of Americans thought Iranians were still like the Iranians portrayed in last year’s Oscar-winning Argo. Unfortunately, America does get a large dose of their understanding of the wider world through Hollywood.
Overall, today’s event was one of the best Korbel has put on during the last three years I’ve been affiliated with the school. Until next time, DU.
Nearly sixty-eight years ago, the last hot war among great, world powers ended. Since then, the world has seen many conflicts, but none that have encompassed the globe. John Gaddis first dubbed this period of relative peace the “long peace”.[1] Surely, this is an era enjoyed by scholars belonging to varying schools of thought in international relations, but not all scholars agree that the long peace will endure. On this one, I’ll side with the realist scholar Kenneth Waltz, who rightly points out, “Every time peace breaks out, people pop up to proclaim that realism is dead.”[2]
In a November 2011 infographic, the New York Times borrowed data from Matthew White’s book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, to plot the number of deaths from wars, institutional oppression, failed states, and despots.[3] The infographic lists the ten deadliest wars and intrastate conflicts by percentage of world population killed. There are some shocking statistics, such as this, 11.1% of the global population falling victim to the rule of Genghis Khan, but as one traces the conflicts into the modern era, Bill Marsh notes, “killings as a percentage of all humanity are probably declining.”[4] Indeed, that seems to be the trend since only two events after the year 1900, World War II (which killed 2.6% of humanity) and the rule of Mao Zedong (which killed 1.3% of humanity), made it onto the ten deadliest list.[5] But does the decline in killings as a percentage of all humanity mean we have arrived at a long peace that is to last? The chances are not great that it does, especially looking at the list in a different way.
There is no predicting exactly when the next great power war will happen, but if we calculate the average number of years between the ten deadliest conflicts from the list mentioned above, we see that the gap averages 197 years.[6] There are great wars not included in this list, such as World War I, which would shorten that gap, but nevertheless, it is significant that two conflicts since the year 1900 are included among the ten deadliest of all time, especially when confronting those that argue great power wars are a thing of the past. Sixty-eight years of peace between the major powers is noteworthy, but Waltz would argue, and I agree, that sixty-eight years does not represent a change of the system and “the ominous shadow of the future continues to cast its pall over interacting states.”[7]
In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker also uses statistics from Matthew White’s research where he constructs a list of the twenty-one “Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other.”[8] Pinker adjusts the death toll for each of these conflicts to a mid-twentieth century equivalent, showing that if some previous atrocities occurred when the global population was much larger, the death toll would far exceed that of World War II.[9] Thus, the argument that wars are becoming less deadly emerges again. This pattern is promising, but not strong enough to argue that a great power war won’t occur again, nor that the next conflict doesn’t have the potential to surpass one of the countries on Pinker’s list. In fact, the data is disturbing because six conflicts from Pinker’s list occurred in the twentieth century and an additional conflict (Congo Free State) continued from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century.[10] That means seven of the twenty-one worst things humans have done to each other have taken place in the last 113 years. That these seven conflicts are not at the top of the list isn’t much of a comfort since together they have killed 150 million people since the beginning of the Congo Free State.[11] A more honest extrapolation from this list is that great wars don’t happen in any predictable pattern, but they do happen. Whether there are just twenty-one years between the conflicts, as in the case of the World Wars, or, if like the current situation, the peace lasts sixty-eight years, the chances of history repeating itself are heavily in the realists’ favor.
It is understood that most of these conflicts were not great power wars and in fact were intrastate wars or internal policies that led to a huge loss of life, as was the case under the rule of Mao Zedong. However, assessing these conflicts from a realist perspective means it is likely that in the modern era an intrastate conflict that approaches anything near killing one percent of humanity, would attract the ire and intervention of great powers. Additionally, in an increasingly interdependent world, an intrastate conflict of the magnitude near that of the conflicts listed above certainly has the promise of creating a great power war. This belief is based on “realism’s five assumptions about the international system,” according to John Mearsheimer.[12] The assumptions are “that the international system is anarchic,” “states inherently possess some offensive military capability,” “states can never be certain about the intentions of other states,” “the most basic motive driving states is survival,” and “states think strategically about how to survive in the international system.”[13]
A possible scenario that could end the long peace is the appearance of new, great powers that “will emerge as the uneven growth process narrows the gap between the hegemon and the eligible states that are positioned to emerge as its competitors.”[14] Christopher Layne argues that this happens either through balancing, where states seek “to correct a skewed distribution of relative power in the international system,” or through the sameness effect, where states, seeking to replicate the hegemon, merely imitate its behavior.[15] The authors of Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century would not disagree with this assessment. They believe the states most likely to do this in the next century are China by 2050 and India by the end of the twenty-first century.[16] Where they might differ with Layne, is that they believe “transitions within regional hierarchies are inevitable,” and that the dominant power will have to “stabilize regions in order to avoid great power intervention.”[17] This is an extremely fine line to walk and the success of the dominant power in doing this rests in a policy that simultaneously intervenes in regional disputes, but also keeps the emerging powers satisfied so as not to start a major power war.
There are those that do believe international institutions have the capability to bring great powers to the proverbial table so that all can walk away satisfied, maintaining the long peace we have enjoyed for sixty-eight years. These same people are often skeptical of the realist’s assumptions and predicted patterns of behavior. Robert Keohane and Lisa Martin criticize Mearsheimer’s idea that, “‘every state would like to be the most formidable military power in the system.’”[18] They point out that no one thinks Switzerland and Argentina want to be the dominant power.[19] But they fail to mention a time when Switzerland and Argentina had the window of opportunity to become the world’s dominant power and declined that role. That is because that window never existed for either of those countries and a realist would argue that given the chance/s, it is inevitable that Argentina and Switzerland would have made a move to become a global power if they had the capability to do so. Continuing to criticize the realist perspective, Keohane and Martin mention that even the United States “could reasonably have expected to become the most powerful state in the world, but did not seek such a position” during the interwar period.[20] This was true for twenty-three years, but given enough chances, a country will try to assume the title of great power or global hegemon if it has the capability. The United States did exactly that following World War II and it hasn’t expressed any interest in relinquishing that title since.
In a 1990 paper, John Mueller likened major war as falling out of fashion like dueling and slavery, but he fails to mention that both of those practices continue to this day in the form of gang violence and sex trafficking, to name two.[21] He writes, “If war, like dueling, comes to be viewed as a thoroughly undesirable, even ridiculous, policy, and if it can no longer promise gains, or if potential combatants come no longer to value the things it can gain for them, then war can fade away.”[22] But the realist contention with this argument is that great powers, even moderate powers, will always desire their security and thus always view war as a viable option as long as they aren’t willing to give up their land and sovereignty to a dominant power. Mueller’s larger argument suggests that war has fallen out of favor with the great powers, especially following World War I, when “the notion that the institution of war, particularly war in the developed world, was repulsive, uncivilized, immoral, and futile” took hold as a powerful idea, one that the victors of WWI were committed to.[23] But then what happened with World War II? His answer, the European powers understood that war was bad after WWI, but it took WWII for Japan to get “the message most Europeans had received from WWI.”[24] But then how do we determine who has and has not received this message? Is it through membership in the United Nations? Iran is a member nation, but many would argue Iran has not received this message, perhaps now they have with Rouhani at the helm, but that has yet to be truly tested. Even though Iran is not a great power, it has powerful allies in China and Russia that, if brazen enough, could stand up to the United States in the scenario that the United States felt so threatened by Iran’s nuclear program that they ordered air strikes to take out all of Iran’s enrichment facilities.
I am afraid that another war is inevitable, even though it may not be nearly as deadly as WWII. The next great power war may be a cyber war. “That we have not seen a cyber-incident as shocking as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is not a cogent justification for academics to neglect the topic.”[25] How does a country prepare for this? It must maintain a strong offensive and defensive military capability. Luckily, the United States is over-prepared in this respect, but it could afford to scale back the size of its military to a more reasonable size when compared to China’s military, for example. Additionally, an increase in cyber warfare capabilities should be implemented to protect against the possible new frontier of great power war.
Lastly, despite my realist tendencies in tackling this question, I do believe maintaining membership in international institutions is important if the United States is committed to eliminating some war, but we would be foolish to subscribe to the idea that an institution can overpower all of the inherent realist patterns of behavior in international politics. Similarly, recognition of the fact that great power war is on the decline does not mean that great power wars are over. Whether it is another sixty-eight years or twenty years, another war will disturb the long peace as it has disturbed every other long peace in human history.
Notes
[1] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), 190.
[2] Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” International Security 25, no. 1 (2000): 39.
[3] Bill Marsh and Matthew White, “Population Control, Marauder Style,” New York Times, November 6, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] I calculated this average by taking the number of years between the end of a conflict and the beginning of the next for the ten deadliest conflicts by percentage of humanity killed. If conflicts overlapped, then the gap was valued as 0 years.
[7] Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” International Security 25, no. 1 (2000): 39.
[8] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2012), 194-95.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (1994/95): 10.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise,” International Security 17, no. 4 (1993): 11.
[15] Ibid., 12, 15.
[16] Ronald L. Tammen et al., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (New York: Seven Bridges, 2000), 42.
[17] Ibid., 185.
[18] Robert O. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory,” International Security 20, no. 1 (1995): 41.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] John Mueller, “The Obsolescence of Major War,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals 21, no. 3 (1990): 321-328.
[22] Ibid., 322.
[23] Ibid., 324.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Adam P. Liff, “Cyberwar: A New ‘Absolute Weapon’? The Proliferation of Cyberwarfare Capabilities and Interstate War,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 35, no. 3 (June 2012): 404.
I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but because the exchange about journalism between the Times‘ Bill Keller and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald is so long, I didn’t finish reading it until today. I wanted to link to it here on the blog because I really value the Times‘, but I also agree with some of Greenwald’s criticisms of the Times. And, of course, an exchange about journalism, its past, present, and future, is quite relevant to international relations/events and the way they are reported and analyzed by traditional news organizations, like the Times, and by an adversarial journalist, such as Greenwald.
Read the exchange here. Money quote:
You insist that “all journalism has a point of view and a set of interests it advances, even if efforts are made to conceal it.” And therefore there’s no point in attempting to be impartial. (I avoid the word “objective,” which suggests a mythical perfect state of truth.) Moreover, in case after case, where the mainstream media are involved, you are convinced that you, Glenn Greenwald, know what that controlling “set of interests” is. It’s never anything as innocent as a sense of fair play or a determination to let the reader decide; it must be some slavish fealty to powerful political forces. – Bill Keller
Last year, on September 12, 2012, the day after the eleven-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I read an article in the New York Times. I found one snippet of the article to be profoundly disturbing. Like many 9/11 anniversaries, there was a rally at Ground Zero on this day last year. Someone was speaking to the assembled crowd and the line that received the loudest applause was not, “We will never forget,” but “We will never forgive.”
I understand if someone who lost a loved one on 9/11 has not forgiven those who are responsible, but I don’t think “We will never forgive” should be our rallying cry on this day or any other. If we rally around a statement like that it puts us in a reactive state of mind, the one everyone was in the morning the towers fell.
I have searched for and have failed to find a video I remember watching on this day twelve years ago. The video was of a man, one of the thousands walking out of Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge that day. He saw that a news camera was filming the scene and he took a moment to yell into the camera. His voice was understandably filled with rage and he said, “You see this, you see this?” as he pointed toward downtown, “Whoever you are, wherever you are, we are coming for you. We are coming for you!” It was a moment of raw emotion that we all felt that day. It was healthy to have that feeling, to express it, but not healthy to hold on to it.
During the interregnum, between that crisp, fall morning and this morning twelve years later, the US’ ventures in the Middle East have often been misguided by the “We will never forgive” attitude, an attitude that helped fuel erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11 and that he was intent on using WMDs or getting them into the hands of terrorists. It is an attitude that has fueled the rise of Islamophobia in the US. It is a “shoot first—think later” state of mind that some still cling to and that others are slowly beginning to shed as the country learns how to walk that fine line between Never Forgetting and Moving On. Do both today.
One of the biggest questions that looms over the Syrian intervention is who exactly would we be helping if we were to limit Assad’s capabilities and help rebel groups in their war against Assad? So far, I have not heard one politician articulate a clear answer to this. Why not? Well, it’s just so damn hard for the US to truly know who is with us and who is against us, for one. And two, we don’t really know who is the most militarily effective group in Syria. Is it a group that has expressed similar goals to the US? Is it a group who allies itself with al-Qaeda? Or is it a group who has the best chance at getting their hands on part of Assad’s chemical weapons if he falls?
So far, the US has most closely allied itself with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but are they having the most success in their fight against Assad? The New Yorker‘s Rania Abouzeid went to Syria in August to find out. Thus, we get this disturbing nugget:
The fight here is critical: this is Assad’s heartland, the base of his support. The battle in these parts is led by a conservative Islamist coalition, spearheaded by Al Qaeda’s the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Suqoor el Ezz, headed by a Saudi called Sheikh Sakr. The coalition includes Jabhat al-Nusra, which is also tied to Al Qaeda; the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham brigades; and groups solely made up of foreign fighters, who are here in great numbers. The rebel Free Syrian Army is also fighting here, but not in the lead.
You can read the rest of the article here. It’s not very long at all and I strongly recommend reading it if you want to get a feel for just how many groups are fighting against Assad and his army.
If you haven’t been following the recent developments from the UK regarding the ongoing Snowden saga, then here’s a primer. David Miranda, the boyfriend of Glenn Greenwald, the US-born writer for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, was held by UK authorities at London’s Heathrow airport two days ago.
Technically, this is legal in the UK under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows for an “examining officer” to, without warrant or suspicion, detain any individual in a “border area” (defined as airports, train stations, ports, etc) for up to nine hours. During this time, the officer can search the person, their vehicle, or “anything which he reasonably believes has been, or is about to be, in or on a vehicle.” The officer can ask any questions of the detained individual.
Schedule 7 is scheduled to be rewritten, as it has prompted some of the worst complaints from UK citizens because of its potential for abuse, but it hasn’t been rewritten yet. Although the law is designed to ease the collection of information regarding terrorists or the suspicion of terrorism-related activities, The Guardian feels like Miranda’s detention is in no way justifiable, writing:
…There is not the slightest suggestion that Mr Miranda is a terrorist. But Mr Miranda does live with and work with Mr Greenwald, who has broken most of the stories about US and UK state surveillance based on leaks from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. None of that work involves committing, preparing or instigating acts of terrorism, or anything that could reasonably fall within even the most capacious definition of such activities. Yet anyone who imagines that Mr Miranda was detained at random at Heathrow is not living in the real world.
I agree with the Guardian here. Government intimidation of the media is not a new development in the UK. Today, the Guardian and Greenwald called the detention of Miranda a clear attempt at intimidation. Although I do not always see eye to eye with Greenwald’s take on other topics such as politics, international security, and foreign policy, I too would approach any government official with a deep suspicion if they told me that Miranda’s detention solely relates to terrorism-related activities. His involvement in a story about terrorism-related activities should not qualify him for any detention concerning terrorism or terrorists. Miranda’s detention sets a dangerous precedent, which suggests that the press is not entirely free to write about a government’s counterterrorism measures without putting them [the media] at risk of government intimidation, even if their work as journalists does not put at risk an ongoing counterterrorism operation.
This story is certainly not over. I will likely post again after more details have come to light.
Since I just watched and reviewed 5 Broken Cameras the week before I left on vacation, I thought the latest development in the Israel-Palestine peace talks was timely. From the Los Angeles Times:
Capping one of the busiest periods in settlement approval in years, Israel gave final planning permission to build about 900 more units of housing on land it seized in 1967, brushing aside U.S. and Palestinian objections ahead of peace talks scheduled to resume in Jerusalem on Wednesday.
This most recent settlement approval has frustrated Palestinian leaders who see this as a huge roadblock to any successful negotiations in the coming days. On the same day Israel approved these settlements, they released 26 Palestinian prisoners. But to call the prisoner release a coup for Palestine is to overlook the huge setback the settlements pose to successful peace talks. The anger and frustration on display in 5 Broken Cameras is once again at the surface as Israel continues settlement expansion. Furthermore, this most recent expansion preceding peace talks is seen by some as an Israeli effort to set the talks up for failure:
…the left-leaning Haaretz daily blasted what it called a “targeted assassination” of the talks and urged the government to overcome the urge to aggressively expand settlements whenever peace talks come around.
I tend to agree, that to the extent Israel keeps allowing settlements on post-1967 land, peace will continue to be a spontaneous visitor in the Holy Land.
Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be on vacation and not posting until Monday, August 12th. Have a great week.