Category: Daniel Serwer
Grexit is no exit
Here is Greek Prime Minister Tsipras announcing Sunday his intention to default on the country’s International Monetary Fund obligations:
What? You didn’t hear the announcement? Welcome to the Greek hall of mirrors, where calling a referendum triggers default but is announced to the public as a necessary exercise in democracy, unjustifiably opposed by Eurocrats.
Timing isn’t everything in international affairs, but it does count. Had Tsipras wanted to go to a referendum, he needed to call it earlier than he did and schedule it in advance of the default deadline, which is today.
He is right, however, about fear. And Greeks have a lot to be afraid of. Their banks are closed and may never reopen in a euro-denominated economy. People are withdrawing as much as they can at ATMs. A “no” vote in the referendum will end Greece’s access to euros and force it to print drachmas again, which will plummet in value and impoverish the whole country. A “yes” vote may lead to fall of the government, an interim administration, and the austerity Tsipras was trying to avoid, with serious consequences for pensions and jobs.
I suppose Russia may come to the rescue with a big loan, but that is a fate I’m not sure I would wish on my worst enemy. Putin’s money comes freighted with conditions and cronyism. It also has to be paid back.
However this plays out, Greeks don’t get a way out of the predicament into which they have driven themselves. At best it will be years before a semblance of normality returns. Ordinary people who have worked hard and saved will pay the price. The politicians who created the problem and others who then failed to solve it will try to reap support from the resentment Greeks will justifiably feel. Greece may be leaving the euro (or not), but it has no way to leave its problems behind.
Grexit is no exit.
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Self-defeating
Shpend Limoni at Pristina daily Gazeta Express asked some questions this morning about the defeat in the Kosovo parliament of the much-discussed proposal for a special court to prosecute some war crimes cases. Here in English are his questions and my replies:
Q: Kosovo rejected the creation of Special Court on yesterday’s vote in Parliament. US Ambassador Samantha Power a couple of days ago said that this issue would be a test for Kosovo leader’s credibility. Is there any consequence that Kosovo will face in the future?
A: Yes. At the very least, Kosovo will be seen as unwilling to administer justice to those who sullied the reputation of the Kosovo Liberation Army by committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder. For a country seeking international recognition and acceptance, that is not good.
There is nothing patriotic about such crimes—a Kosovo patriot should want to see the perpetrators brought to justice.
I hasten to add that it is not easy to do that. It is still too difficult for the Kosovo judicial system, which in any event has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in Albania. There is no realistic possibility of a serious prosecution in Kosovo.
Q: Prime Minister Mustafa and his Deputy Hashim Thaçi said that issue of Special Court would be on Kosovo Assembly agenda soon rejecting the creation of Tribunal by UN. Is it to late for Mustafa and Thaçi?
A: My understanding is that the constitutional amendment required failed to get a two-thirds majority by just five votes. That could change tomorrow if the political will can be found.
Q: US ambassador in Prishtina Tracey Ann Jacobson on here first reaction said that US won’t put veto against initiatives to establish a Tribunal under UN mandate. Do you think such Tribunal will be imposed?
A: Foreign Minister Thaçi said it well in Parliament: “We have two options: to create this court ourselves, together with the EU and U.S., and to end this issue once and for all in three to five years; or we fail and it will go to the U.N. Security Council where the court will be created by the opponents of Kosovo independence and will last 15 to 20 years.”
The sad fact is that Kosovo in the future will find it difficult to get many kinds of help from the US and EU if this decision stands.
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What’s the alternative to a deal?
Not long ago, President Obama’s legacy was said to be up for grabs. He faced three big outcomes with more or less a June 30 deadline: the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, Congressional approval of “fast track” (trade promotion authority, which allows only an up or down vote on trade agreements without any amendments), and the Iran nuclear deal.
He has now won the first two bets (in addition to housing discrimination and gay marriage). The third however is a biggy, even if the real deadline may be July 9.
So many people have written so many intelligent things about what a nuclear deal with Iran should contain that it is difficult to contribute. But my own personal criterion for whether the deal is acceptable or not is just this: is it better than no deal?
To assess that, we need to understand what no deal would mean. There is more than one possible scenario:
- Best case: the Joint Plan of Action is maintained, which would continue IAEA inspections and limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and stockpiles as well as its plutonium production.
- Worst case: the Joint Plan of Action and multilateral sanctions go down the drain, along with IAEA inspections and pursuit of questions about the possible military dimensions (PMDs) of Iran’s past activities.
The worst case is really very bad. It would not be hard for an imperfect agreement to be better than that.
The decision then boils down to whether we can somehow keep the Joint Plan of Action, multilateral sanctions, and IAEA inspections as well as work on PMDs intact if the talks break down.
This issue is path dependent. Maintaining sanctions in particular depends on who causes the breakdown in negotiations. If the US is perceived to reject an agreement that the Russians, for example, think adequate, why would they agree to continue to do their part on sanctions? They might even be inclined to block IAEA inspections as well as its work on PMDs. Even Germany might abandon our cause, which would end European Union sanctions.
So to those who think the diplomacy useless, I say this: without it, you have no chance of avoiding the worst-case scenario, which is patently worse than even a bad deal with Iran. Ditching the talks leaves the US with no other option than war.
That of course is what some people want. Let us suppose that the United States can destroy all of Iran’s key nuclear infrastructure (centrifuges and centrifuge production facilities as well as plutonium production reactor), without suffering any significant military losses or precipitating Iranian retaliation against Israel or American interests in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (or elsewhere). That’s a giant and highly unlikely assumption, but so be it.
No one I know thinks that would delay the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons for as many as ten years, which is the minimum the nuclear deal claims to do. The best advocates of war can do is to suggest Iranians might overthrow the regime in the wake of war or that we’ll repeat the exercise as needed. But there is no guarantee a successor regime would be any less committed to nuclear weapons than the current one, or that the Iranians will oblige us by rebuilding their nuclear program in ways we will find possible to destroy the next time around.
There are definitely deals that will not fly however. Last week Supreme Leader Khamenei chimed in suggesting that Iran wants sanctions lifted before implementation and verification of its obligations and no IAEA visits to Iranian military sites. Those are deal breakers for the Americans, who should expect an agreement with such provisions not to be disapproved in Congress, perhaps even with a veto-proof majority.
Ray Takeyh in this morning’s Washington Post opposes the deal on the basis that it will give Iran ample resources for its regional troublemaking. But he doesn’t consider the alternatives. Iran isn’t going to make less trouble in the region as a nuclear power, or as one that has suffered an American military attack.
Negotiating leverage comes from your best alternative to a negotiated solution. Those who don’t consider what that is are fated to make big mistakes.
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Who let the Black Christian out?
President Obama’s eulogy yesterday at the Clementa Pinckney funeral in Charleston was both strikingly Black in its cadences–not to mention his rendition of “Amazing Grace”–and Christian in his theology, which includes a concept of grace foreign to a Reform Jew like me:
While the occasion was a somber one, the President has good reason for his new-found confidence and connectedness. He has won in the last week a remarkable series of battles:
- in Congress, he got “fast track” negotiating authority (aka Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA) that will enable him (and eventually his successor) to get an up or down vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), without possibility of amendment;
- at the Supreme Court, he won make or break cases on Obamacare subsidies, gay marriage and housing discrimination.
“Fast track” required the President to support Republican maneuvers around Democratic resistance. House Minority Leader Pelosi, who nominally lost, is likely none too upset at the outcome. She got credit from labor unions for resisting TPA, but avoided undermining a Democratic President. The result also liberated Hillary Clinton from the need to take a stand she has been trying to avoid.
I imagine a good number of Republicans feel the same way about losing on Obamacare. They got credit for opposing it but avoided the mess that would have followed annulment of the law. It wasn’t going to help their cause to upset the more than 10 million or so voters who get subsidies for health insurance under Obamacare, never mind the millions who have stayed on their parents’ health insurance because of the law or wouldn’t have insurance at all because of pre-existing conditions. Ditto gay marriage: Republicans are on the record in opposition but can now accept the decision and avoid surrendering the entire LGBT community to the Democrats.
The Supreme Court victories all depended on more conservative justices crossing the line to support more liberal views. The passage of “fast track” depended on Democrats crossing the line to support Republican views on trade.
So American democracy and justice, which not long ago were thought to be hopelessly deadlocked, have somehow bounced back to make important decisions that by my lights go in the right direction.
President Obama has good reason to feel more confident. Maybe that is what allowed him to let the Black Christian out, despite the likelihood that his audience included many who would not support him on gay marriage. I doubt he’ll have much success on gun control, which was one his memes in Charleston yesterday, but for the moment at least it looks as if the Confederate flag will be coming down in many places, another meme he emphasized.
Politics is war by other means. You win some and you lose some. But this was a winning week for President Obama, who is looking like a pretty peppy, Black and Christian, lame duck.
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Ransom, publicity and talk
The change of policy on hostages announced today is a welcome one: it made no sense for the US government to be threatening their families with criminal prosecution and even less sense for the government to continue to claim that it refuses to talk with terrorists holding US citizens. The announced formation of a new interagency office to handle intelligence on hostages and improvements in how the government interacts with families are also welcome.
I can well imagine that complaints about the Obama Administration’s handling of hostage families and negotiations are justified. My own family has instructions to go public in a big way if my sometimes perilous travels put me in the hands of kidnappers. In the absence of public pressure my former colleagues at the State Department, where I served for 21 years, and the National Security Council will prefer to claim to be working quietly, and quietly forget I exist.
But we should not be sanguine about the impact of these moves on the frequency with which Americans are kidnapped and the resources available to terrorists. Allowing private parties to pay ransom increases the incentive to kidnap Americans. It will likely also result in the payment of millions to enemies who will spend the money to do more harm to other Americans.
According to the State Department only three private U.S. citizens were kidnapped in terrorism-related incidents in 2014 (one in Nigeria and two in Afghanistan). Based on news coverage, many more Europeans were captured. The New York Times reports that ransom payments bankrolled Al Qaeda to the tune of $66 million in 2013, much of it from European government sources. ISIL in the last year or two has been far more active in kidnapping than Al Qaeda ever was. Both the numbers of Americans kidnapped and the total revenue provided to our enemies will likely increase under the new policy.
The sad fact is that American willingness to allow families to pay will generate greater terrorist focus on Americans, who are presumed to have the means. That of course is untrue of many of us. Nor is the USG prepared to ante up, unlike the Italian, French and other European governments. This puts Americans in a double bind: more likely to get kidnapped than in the past and less likely to pay up relative to other nationalities. The predictable result is more kidnapped and dead Americans, not fewer, at least until the kidnappers get the nuances.
The decision to talk with terrorists, without making any real concessions to them, also provides an incentive for kidnapping, as recognition and status are often among the goals of extremist groups. But this was a policy more honored in the breach than the observance. The US government has been talking with terrorists in secret, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, for decades. It will still be necessary to evaluate case by case when talking might be productive, whether of release or delay in harm to hostages.
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Libya agonistes
The Council on Foreign Relations yesterday issued an update of my 2011 Contingency Planning Memorandum on post-Qaddafi violence in Libya. Overdue, it is necessarily gloomy. Libya has suffered mightily since the revolution, which has degenerated into an internecine squabble with deadly consequences.
UN efforts to negotiate a solution, which faced a deadline yesterday (the start of Ramadan) seem unlikely to succeed. Some think the UN is too beholden to the Tripoli-based government; others that it too supportive of its Tobruk rivals. No one sees a likelihood the various militias will come to terms any time soon.
Even if an agreement were to miraculously appear, implementation would be an enormous problem. In yesterday’s update, I suggested the US had to be ready to train and equip as many as 8000 Libyans, which was the intention a couple of years ago when we embarked on (and later abandoned) preparation of a General Purpose Force. But the total required to ensure a safe and secure environment in a country the size of Libya is more like 50-75,000. The European Union and Arab League should bear most of that burden. It is likely to be a long time before we see that happen.
Here are the first couple of paras of my update. You’ll have to visit CFR’s website for the rest:
The potential chaos highlighted by a 2011 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Contingency Planning Memorandum, “Post-Qaddafi Instability in Libya,” has come to fruition. Libya today is in the midst of a civil war—one as confusing as it is ferocious. Atrocities against civilians are mounting. The collapse of the Libyan state and the country’s division is possible. This could threaten Libya’s remaining oil and gas production and spark new waves of migration to Europe and neighboring countries in North Africa.
Libya’s transitional road map fell apart in 2012, as the elected parliament and several subsequent governments failed to demobilize, disarm, and reintegrate revolutionary brigades that had fought against the Qaddafi regime. As a result, the brigades aligned with political factions and began to fight each other, killing thousands of Libyans, internally displacing about 400,000 people, and creating a refugee population of one to two million abroad.
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