Tag: Venezuela
Hezbollah in Syria is at risk
Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria has captured media attention and expert analysis around the world. On Tuesday, the Center for Transatlantic Relations (CTR) at Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) organized Hezbollah After Assad, featuring Bilal Saab, executive director and head of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA) North America and Jean-Luc Marret, a Senior Fellow at FRS and CTR and associate professor and senior lecturer in multiple French universities. Ambassador Andras Simonyi, the Managing Director of CTR, facilitated the discussion.
Bilal Saab reminded that a conflict between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East is something that Hezbollah has warned against since its own founding. Such a conflict would not only distract Hezbollah from fighting Israel, but could also alienate the Shiite support base for the organization. Despite knowing this, Hezbollah has acted in a way that increases the likelihood of such a conflict. What explains Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria?
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Opinion matters
Shibley Telhami presented his new book, The World Through Arab Eyes; Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East, at Brookings this week. BBC’s Kim Ghattas was quick to offer an alternative title: “Everything you want to know about the Middle East but aren’t getting from the headlines.”
Telhami explained that Arab public opinion is now the source of real insight into the layers of conflict spread across the Middle East. The Arab uprisings have increased its importance. The essential theme emerging after the first uprisings of 2011 was Arab identity. Understanding identity is central to understanding public opinion.
While domestic issues and authoritarian abuses may have triggered the Arab uprisings, foreign policy was also important. The years leading up to the Arab uprising were not inherently different from decades past in regards to domestic and economic woes. But Arabs are angry about the collapse of Israeli/Palestinian negotiations in 2000, the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq war and the Gaza wars. It was a strikingly violent decade (and more) in international relations.
Arab populations are angry because their leaders and governments were powerless to stand up to foreign invasions and defend the wishes of their citizens. Arab identity and sovereignty were compromised. Arab leaders played no role in stopping it.
Arab public option polls during this period were striking. One question, “who is the leader you admire most in the world?” is a crucial lens for seeing how Arabs judged and chose leaders at that time. Jacques Chirac, Hassan Nasrallah, Hugo Chaves and even Saddam Hussein were the most common answers. Telhami attributes these responses to each leader’s strong and defiant role in foreign affairs. Post Arab spring polls show Turkey’s Prime Minister, Erdogan, as one of the most popular leaders for his assertive stance in foreign policy and his ability to stand up for Turkey’s identity.
Telhami observes that identification with the state has declined while identification with Islam has increased. The adage, “you are what you have to defend” applies here, as Muslims see Islam as under assault. Increased identification as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’ is also correlated with the rise in transnational media in the Middle East. Arabs are associating with others outside their national borders. This has important implications for the relationship between people and their governments, which have to take into account public opinion that extends beyond their borders.
The discussion of transnational Arab identity naturally led to a discussion of Israel and Palestine. For Arabs, the Palestinian issue reflects decades of painful defeats and remains a humiliating reminder of their powerlessness. It as an open wound.
Kim Ghattas disagreed that the Palestinian issue was central to Arab identity. She thought the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has taken a back seat now that people finally have a chance to change their domestic situation. In the past, Palestinian issues were used as a rallying cry for Arab autocrats trying to suppress and distract their own people. Finally, Arabs have a say within their own country, and they are going to speak.
There is no going back. Public opinion has been empowered.
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Prevent what?
Most of us who work on international affairs think it would be much better to use diplomacy to prevent bad things from happening rather than waiting until the aftermath and then cleaning up after the elephants, which all too often involves expensive military action. But what precisely would that mean? What do we need to prevent?
The Council on Foreign Relations survey of prevention priorities for 2013 was published last week, just in time to be forgotten in the Christmas rush and New Year’s lull. It deserves notice, as it is one of the few nonpartisan attempts to define American national security priorities. This year’s edition was in part crowd-sourced and categorizes contingencies on two dimensions: impact on U.S. interests (high, medium, low) and likelihood (likely, plausible, unlikely).
Syria comes out on top in both dimensions. That’s a no-brainer for likelihood, as the civil war has already reached catastrophic dimensions and is affecting the broader region. Judging from Paul Stares’ video introduction to the survey, U.S. interests are ranked high in part because of the risk of use or loss of chemical weapons stocks. I’d have ranked them high because of the importance of depriving Iran of its one truly reliable ally and bridge to Hizbollah, but that’s a quibble.
CFR ranks another six contingencies as high impact on U.S. interests and only plausible rather than likely. This isn’t so useful, but Paul’s video comes to the rescue: an Israeli military strike on Iran that would “embroil” the U.S. and conflict with China in the East or South China seas are his picks to talk about. I find it peculiar that CFR does not treat what I would regard as certainly a plausible if not a likely contingency: a U.S. attack on Iran. There are few more important decisions President Obama will need to make than whether to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Certainly it is a far more challenging decision than whether to go to war against China in the territorial disputes it is generating with U.S. allies in Pacific. I don’t know any foreign policy experts who would advise him to go in that direction.
It is striking that few of the other “plausible” and high-impact contingencies are amenable to purely military responses:
- a highly disruptive cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure
- a mass casualty attack on the U.S. homeland or on a treaty ally
- severe internal instability in Pakistan, triggered by a civil-military crisis or terror attack
It is not easy to determine the origin of cyberattacks, and not clear that a military response would be appropriate or effective. The same is also sometimes true of mass casualty attacks; our military response to 9/11 in Afghanistan has enmired the United States in its longest war to date, one where force is proving inadequate as a solution. It is hard to imagine any military response to internal instability in Pakistan, though CFR offers as an additional low probability contingency a possible U.S. military confrontation with Islamabad “triggered by a terror attack or U.S. counterterror operations.”
In the “moderate” impact on U.S. interests, CFR ranks as highly likely “a major erosion of security in Afghanistan resulting from coalition drawdown.” I’d certainly have put that in high impact category, as we’ve still got 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and a significant portion of them will still be there at the end of 2013. In the “moderate” impact but merely plausible category CFR ranks:
- a severe Indo-Pakistan crisis that carries risk of military escalation, triggered by a major terror attack
- a severe North Korean crisis caused by another military provocation, internal political instability, or threatening nuclear weapons/ICBM-related activities
- a significant increase in drug trafficking violence in Mexico that spills over into the United States
- continuing political instability and emergence of a terrorist safe haven in Libya
Again there are limits to what we can do about most of these contingencies by conventional military means. Only a North Korea crisis caused by military provocation or threats would rank be susceptible to a primarily military response. The others call for diplomatic and civilian responses in at least a measure equal to the possible military ones.
CFR lets two “moderate” impact contingencies languish in the low probability category that I don’t think belong there:
- political instability in Saudi Arabia that endangers global oil supplies
- renewed unrest in the Kurdish dominated regions of Turkey and the Middle East
There is a very real possibility in Riyadh of a succession crisis, as the monarchy on the death of the king will likely move to a next generation of contenders. Kurdish irredentist aspirations are already a big issue in Iraq and Syria. It is hard to imagine this will not affect Iran and Turkey before the year is out. Neither is amenable to a purely military response.
Most of the contingencies with “low” impact on U.S. interests are in Africa:
- a deepening of violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo that involves military intervention from its neighbors
- growing popular unrest and political instability in Sudan
- military conflict between Sudan and South Sudan
- renewed ethnic violence in Kenya surrounding March 2013 presidential election
- widespread unrest in Zimbabwe surrounding the electoral process and/or the death of Robert Mugabe
- failure of a multilateral intervention to push out Islamist groups from Mali’s north
This may tell us more about CFR and the United States than about the world. Africa has little purchase on American sentiments, despite our half-Kenyan president. All of these contingencies merit diplomatic attention, but none is likely to excite U.S. military responses of more than a purely emergency character, except for Mali. If you’ve got a few Islamist terrorists, you can get some attention even if you are in Africa.
What’s missing from this list? CFR mentions
…a third Palestinian intifada, a widespread popular unrest in China, escalation of a U.S.-Iran naval clash in the Persian Gulf, a Sino-Indian border crisis, onset of elections-related instability and violence in Ethiopia, unrest in Cuba following the death of Fidel Castro and/or incapacitation of Raul Castro, and widespread political unrest in Venezuela triggered by the death or incapacitation of Hugo Chavez.
I’d add intensification of the global economic slowdown (high probability, high impact), failure to do more about global warming (also high probability, delayed impact), demographic or financial implosion in Europe or Japan (and possibly even the U.S.), Russian crackdown on dissent, and resurgent Islamist extremism in Somalia. But the first three of these are not one-year “contingencies,” which shows one limit of the CFR exercise.
I would also note that the world is arguably in better shape at the end of 2012 than ever before in history. As The Spectator puts it:
Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.
May it last.
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שנה טובה! لله أكبر
It is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the seventh month, when Jews celebrate the new year and creation of the world. Don’t ask me how or why the world was created in the seventh month. I have no idea.
I’d like to wish a happy new year (שנה טובה, shana tova) to all my readers: it was a beautiful fall morning in Washington, one that belies the horrors of the repression in Syria, the murderous attack in Benghazi, the violence against American embassies, consulates and bases in Tunis, Cairo, Khartoum and elsewhere. We are fortunate indeed to enjoy a peaceful capital, one that approaches the November election with some anxiety but no real fear. I can write what I like, say what I like, publish what I like, worrying only about who might sue me rather than who might kill or arrest me. This is not my privilege, but my right.
I talked yesterday with a Venezuelan who left her country because of a well-founded fear of persecution and found asylum in the United States. She anticipates Chavez will win again in her country’s elections next month. I’ve seen her look of pain and longing for home in the eyes of Bosnians, Kosovars, Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians and I don’t know how many other nationalities. My immigrant grandparents never had it though: they were glad to leave places that are now in eastern Poland and Belarus for a better life, as they had previously left Russia, and likely Spain before that. My grandmother refused to tell me where she was born. When I came back and asked what her native language was, she told me (in heavily accented New Yorkese), “Don’t be smart. I told you I did not want to talk about that!”
I feel reasonably safe in predicting that the year ahead will see many more people displaced and unable to return home. Some will be fortunate enough to find asylum in the U.S. or some other decent place. Some may even adopt my grandmother’s attitude: I’m better off now, why should I look back? But all too many will not. They will suffer violence, brutality, poverty, hunger, thirst, dislocation, discrimination, abuse. They will fight for their rights, rebel against oppression, flee for their lives. If you believe the statistics, the world is a good deal more peaceful and a good deal more democratic than it was in the last century. But there are a lot more people and a lot of bad things are still happening to a substantial percentage of them.
Jews devote most of the new year to worship of the deity. The basic message is the same as the Muslim one:
الله أكبر
Allahu akhbar. God is great.
But it is not a god who creates the problems that lead to mistreatment of people, or a god who will solve them. Sometimes nature contributes with a drought, a storm, an earthquake or something of that sort. But most of the problems that still plague large parts of the world are man-made. Even worse, they are often made with good intentions. All the people I know who have committed war crimes can give you decent rational explanations of why the did what they did: to protect their own people, to prevent massacres in the future, to respond to provocations. Their reasoning often hides greed for money or power. It almost always requires that they not be judged by the standards they use to judge others.
So the part of this morning’s synagogue service I liked the best was not the praise of our common, much-praised deity, but this part:
When will redemption come?
When we master the violence that fills our world.
When we look upon others as we would have them look upon us.
When we grant to every person the rights we claim for ourselves.
שנה טובה الله أكبر
Happy new year. God is great.
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GOP critique: Russia and Latin America
This is the fifth installment of a series responding to the Romney campaign’s list of ten failures in Obama’s foreign and national security policies.
Failure #7: A “Reset” With Russia That Has Compromised U.S. Interests & Values
The “reset” with Russia has certainly not brought great across the board benefits to the United States, but things were pretty bad between Washington and Moscow at the end of the Bush Administration, which had started in friendly enough fashion with George W. getting good vibes from Putin’s soul. Bush 43 ended his administration with a Russian invasion of a country the president wanted to bring into NATO. Neither our interests nor our values were well-served by that. But there was nothing we could do, so he did nothing.
A reset was in order. With Putin back in the presidency, it should be no surprise that it hasn’t gotten us far, but certainly it got us a bit more cooperation during Medvedev’s presidency on Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan than we were getting in 2008. The Russians are still being relatively helpful in the P5+1 talks with Iran and the “six-party” talks on and occasionally with North Korea. Their cooperation has been vital to the Northern Distribution Network into Afghanistan.
The Republicans count as demerits for President Obama his abandonment of a missile defense system in Europe, without mentioning that a more modest (and more likely to function) system is being installed. They also don’t like “New START,” which is an arms control treaty that has enabled the U.S. to reduce its nuclear arsenal.
I count both moves as pluses, though I admit readily that I don’t think any anti-missile system yet devised will actually work under wartime conditions. Nor do I think Iran likely to deliver a nuclear weapon to Europe on a missile. It would be much easier in a shipping container.
The fact that the Russians could, theoretically, increase their nuclear arsenal under New START is just an indication of how far behind the curve we’ve gotten in reducing our own arsenal and how easy it should be to go farther. The Romneyites don’t see it that way, but six former Republican secretaries of state and George H. W. Bush backed New START.
The GOPers are keen on “hot mic” moments that allegedly show the President selling out America. This is the foreign policy wonk version of birtherism. In this instance, they are scandalized that he suggested to then Russian President Medvedev that the U.S. could be more flexible on missile defense after the November election. The Republicans see this as “a telling moment of weakness.” I see it as a statement of the screamingly obvious. Neither party does deals with the Russians just before an election for some not-so-difficult to imagine reason.
More serious is the charge that President Obama has soft-pedaled Russia’s backsliding on democracy and human rights. I think that is accurate. The Administration sees value in the reset and does not want to put it at risk. The arguments for targeted visa bans and asset freezes against human rights abusers are on the face of it strong.
The problems are in implementation: if someone is mistreated in a Russian prison, are we going to hold Putin responsible? The interior minister? The prison warden? The prison guards? How are you going to decide about culpability for abuses committed ten thousand miles away? And if the Russians retaliate for mistreatment of an American citizen in a Louisiana State penitentiary, what do we do then? While many of the people involved may not care about visas and asset freezes, where would the tit-for-tat bans end up?
Russia has unquestionably been unhelpful on Syria, blocking UN resolutions and shipping arms to the Asad regime. The Russians have also supported Hugo Chávez and used harsh rhetoric towards the United States. But what Romney would do about these things is unclear. His claim that Russia is our number one geopolitical foe is more likely to set the relationship with Moscow back than help us to get our way.
Failure #8: Emboldening The Castros, Chávez & Their Cohorts In Latin America
I’m having trouble picturing how the octogenarian Castros have been emboldened–to the contrary, they are edging towards market reforms. Obama’s relaxation of travel and remittance restrictions has encouraged that evolution. It would be foolhardy to predict the end of the Castro regime, but cautious opening of contacts is far more likely to bring good results than continuation of an embargo that has never achieved anything.
I’d have expected the Republicans to compliment Obama on getting the stalled trade agreements with Colombia and Panama approved, but instead they complain that he waited three years while negotiating improvements to them that benefit U.S. industry. Given the difficulty involved in getting these things ratified, it is unsurprising that President Obama doesn’t want to reach any new trade agreements in the region, or apparently anywhere else.
Hugo Chávez looms large for the Republicans. They view him as a strategic threat. Obama thinks he has not “had a serious national security impact note on us.” That Chávez is virulently anti-American there is no doubt. But to suggest that he seriously hinders the fight against illicit drugs and terrorism, or that his relationship with Hizbollah is a threat we can’t abide, is to commit what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” We’ve got a lot bigger drug and terrorism challenges than those Venezuela is posing.
Except for Mexico, Obama has not paid a lot of attention to Latin America. That’s because things are going relatively well there. If Chávez goes down to defeat in the October 7 election and a peaceful transition takes place, it will be another big plus, one that will redound to Obama’s credit. There are other possibilities, so I’d suggest the Administration focus on making that happen over all the other things the GOP is concerned about.
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