Obama the minimalist nation builder

Ever since he questioned Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus on U.S. goals in Iraq on April 8, 2008, I have noted Obama's minimalist criteria for success, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. Here's what he said to Crocker at that time:

I'm not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way. I'm trying to get to an endpoint. That's what all of us have been trying to get to.

And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi- sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.

If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe.

Compare what he told Fareed Zakaria about the endgame in Afghanistan in an interview published today (my emphasis):

I never believed that America could essentially deliver peace and prosperity to all of Afghanistan in a three-, four-, five-year time frame. And I think anybody who believed that didn’t know the history and the challenges facing Afghanistan. I mean, this is the third poorest country in the world, with one of the lowest literacy rates and no significant history of a strong civil service or an economy that was deeply integrated with the world economy. It’s going to take decades for Afghanistan to fully achieve its potential...

"No bomb-bomb Obama"

Back in April, David Brooks predicted that Obama was getting himself into "read my lips" trouble by sticking to his pledge to withdraw most American troops from Iraq within 16 months:

If Obama is elected, he will either go back on this pledge — in which case he would destroy his credibility — or he will risk genocide in the region and a viciously polarizing political war at home.

Three months later, with progress in Iraq seeming to solidify, it seems that luck may be giving Obama enough wiggle room to both adjust and essentially stick to his pledge. He now has Iraqi government endorsement for his timeframe, with eight extra months thrown in as if by design to fit the "tactical adjustments" and "refinements" he's allowed himself (after a couple of zigzags, Maliki's spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh set the end of 2010 as a target for withdrawal).

At the same time, Gideon Rachman (in a dispassionately logical column that reminds me why I love the FT) points out that Obama has withstood considerable pressure to allow himself crucial flexibility on what may be an even more important front. Honing in on what he casts as the most fateful decision the next President is likely to make in the short term, Rachman points out that unlike McCain (and, Rachman might have added, every other serious Presidential candidate),

Mr Obama, by contrast, carefully avoided an absolute commitment that Iran would never go nuclear on his watch. He has stressed again and again how seriously he takes the threat but he has never crossed the line into in effect promising military action. To reverse the McCain position, it seems that the only thing worse for Mr Obama than a nuclear Iran would be a war with Iran.

Like Fareed Zakaria, Rachman recognizes Obama as the true realist in this campaign:

The US has already had to learn to live with nuclear weapons in the hands of countries that are far more oppressive and irrational than Iran: North Korea, Mao's China, the Soviet Union.

One of the great lessons of international relations since 1945 is that nuclear deterrence has worked. Mr Obama respects that lesson. Mr McCain does not. For that reason alone, Mr Obama would make the better commander-in-chief.

Obama has been widely accused of serial flip-flopping of late. But it has required considerable political courage to stick to commitments to draw down troops in Iraq, ramp up efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and negotiate with Iran. Those are central pillars in a coherent middle east strategy, spelled out in a series of speeches and a recent op-ed, that is as noteworthy for stipulating what we can't do (spend $10 billion per month and pin down 100,000+ troops in Iraq) as what we must do (develop a more multidimensional counterinsurgency effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan).

Economics, Post-American Style

Fareed Zakaria has devoted a book to sketching in the portrait of a Post-American World. In today's Financial Times, columnist Philip Stephens --the first non-eponymous winner of a Wolf-Munch-Rock award -- gets across the economic reality of the coming multipolarity in 1200 words. "Globalisation," Stephens begins, "belonged to us; financial crises happened to them." No more:

the boot is now on the other foot. The IMF is forecasting that the advanced economies will just about keep their heads above water. With luck, growth this year and next will come in at a touch above 1 per cent. If they do avoid recession - and most of my American friends think it unlikely as far as the US is concerned - they will have to thank robust growth rates in Asia and Latin America. The forecast for China is growth of about 9 per cent in both years, for India 8 per cent and for emerging and developing economies as a whole something more than 6 per cent.

The old powers have not grasped this new reality. There are nods, of course, to a need to restructure international institutions. The rising nations, you hear western politicians aver, must be given more of a voice. More seats, maybe, at the World Bank, the United Nations and, yes, on the board of the IMF. But the assumption is that the rising powers will simply be accommodated within the existing system - a small adjustment here, a tweak there and everything will be fine again. Missing is a willingness to see that this is a transformational moment that demands we look at the world entirely afresh.

Like Zakaria, Stephens sees the world at the end of a 200 year cycle of Western dominance. Also like Zakaria, he does not regard 'decline' as a foregone conclusion. But coming changes will be wrenching:

The response of governments thus far has lain somewhere between despair and denial: there is nothing to be done in the face of global market forces; or the benefits of globalisation will eventually trickle down. The active education and welfare policies necessary to ease the adjustment have been conspicuous by their absence. How do you tell your electorates that all the old assumptions about welfare capitalism must be rethought?

Difficult. But these two sets of pressures - between nations and within them - cannot indefinitely be ignored. That way lies an inexorable slide into the beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism that would make the recent financial storm seem like a summer squall. However it is handled, the adjustment process to the new world order will be wrenching. The US and Europe, after all, have between them have enjoyed the best part of two centuries of effortless political and economic hegemony.

There is no reason they should not continue to prosper in a world where power is more evenly spread. Globalisation need not be a zero-sum game. But if the west is going to adapt, it must recognise that it can no longer expect to write the rules.

League of Democracies, anyone?

The FT columnists, collectively, are unmatched in their ability to compress broad economic and geopolitical trends into the confines of a column. They wear whatever ideological framework they subscribe to lightly, cram their columns with facts, often explore multiple points of view, and sometimes seem to be thinking their way toward a conclusion as they write. When you get tired of the bloviosphere, try parking your eyeballs at ft.com for a space. You're alloted a few articles without a login.

Karl Rove pimps out the swiftboat

Perhaps Karl Rove is running for Vice President. He's using his freehold on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to test attack lines on Barack Obama that are, well, Rovian. Here's how he characterized comments by Obama attempting to place the threats posed by Iran and other 'rogue states' in context:

On Sunday at a stop in Oregon, Sen. Obama was dismissive of the threats posed by Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. That's the same Iran whose Quds Force is arming and training insurgents and illegal militias in Iraq to kill American soldiers; that is supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in violent attacks on Lebanon and Israel; and that is racing to develop a nuclear weapon while threatening the "annihilation" of Israel.

By Monday in Montana, Mr. Obama recognized his error. He abruptly changed course, admitting that Iran represents a threat to the region and U.S. interests.

Conveniently, Rove neglects to quote Obama before slipping into a schoolmasterly lecture about the carefully prepared negotiations of Nixon and Reagan. Obama was not in fact 'dismissive' of the threats posed by rogue states; his aim was to defuse the hysteria of the Bush Administration's years-long effort to inflate these threats to the magnitude of those posed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Here's a CNN digest of what Obama actually said:

"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union," Obama said. "They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us, and yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet.

"We should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. We might not compromise on any issue, but at least we should find out are there areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that have caused us so many problems around the world," Obama said.

Obama said he was aware of the "grave" threat Iran poses to the United States, but that it was "common sense" that Iran is less of a threat today to the U.S. than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

Nor did Obama "recognize an error" and walk these statements back the following day; he simply elaborated:

The Soviet Union had the ability to destroy the world several times over, had satellites spanning the globe, had huge masses of conventional military power, all directed at destroying us," he said. "So, I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave. But what I've said is that we should not just talk to our friends. We should be willing to engage our enemies as well. That's what diplomacy is all about...

Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust," he said. "The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely.

In his attempt to bring the rogue state threat to scale, Obama seems to be channeling in an argument spun out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria last October:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

You don't have to think that the threats posed by Islamic extremism and nuclear proliferation are "overblown," as John E. Mueller has argued in a book of that title, to appreciate Obama's attempt to counter Cold War nostalgia that craves a superpower-weight enemy against which the U.S. can define itself.

As Obama fights to break the spell of Rovian fear-mongering, I do wish he hadn't weakened himself in the famous YouTube debate exchange last summer, when he responded "I would" to the question, "Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?" Hillary was quite right to call him out on this. I thought at the time and continue to think that Obama didn't fully absorb the question and didn't mean to say that he'd meet all five personally within a year--just that, on principle, it makes sense to be willing to meet when there's something to be negotiated. But in post-debate dueling he went the other route and tried to suggest that Hillary wouldn't be willing enough to negotiate with rogues. This is one major instance of Obama's sometime tendency to dig deeper when he's in a hole.

Still, that error is as nothing compared to McCain's serial expressions of strategic incoherence. McCain's vision of a decades-long but casualty-free occupation along the lines of our presence in Korea and Japan betrays the kind of Cold War imprinting Obama is trying to defuse (our presence in those countries was part of global competition with the Soviets and their allies). His assertion that Iran backs al Qaeda in Iraq reveals a penchant for lumping all "Islamic extremists" together into one monolithic adversary, as strident Cold Warriors did with the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam. His "bomb bomb Iran" 'joke' is infinitely more "dismissive" of the nature of the threats we actually face than Obama's contextualizing.