Robert Gates, multilateralist in chief

It's often been noted that in its second term the Bush Administration has quietly walked back the arrogant unilateralism that was its first-term signature.

Much of the multilateral restoration has doubtless occurred under the radar. Much is the result of the balance-tipping gene-splice from the administration of Bush Sr. that occurred with the advent of Robert Gates as defense secretary (Cheney and Rice, not to say Wolfowitz, were also part of Bush Sr.'s team, but with Cheney and Rumsfeld dominant, the offspring was aberrant).

A speech Gates delivered yesterday (Dec. 13) in Bahrain highlights the strategic emphasis he places on a worldwide web of formal and informal multinational cooperative ventures. The heart of the speech was an appeal to the enlightened interest of Gulf states to re-engage with Iraq diplomatically and economically and to work together to seal its borders and curb Iran's influence. In a sense, though, Gates more fully communicated his brand of multilateralism while recommending more low profile and quotidian joint efforts:

The final topic I want to discuss is related to what I've already mentioned: regional security through venues like the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Gulf Security Dialogue. While the GCC and the GSD cover a wide range of issues - from trade and energy infrastructure security to counter-terrorism and regional stability - I want to focus on two in particular: air and maritime security.

Along with the traditional challenges facing our nations, there is a range of diverse, unconventional threats that transcend national borders. Some are ancient - such as piracy, ethnic strife, and poverty. Others are of more recent vintage: terrorist networks harnessing new technologies; weapons proliferation; environmental degradation; and the emergence of deadly and contagious diseases that can spread more rapidly than ever before in human history.

What these challenges have in common is that they simply cannot be overcome by one, or even two countries, no matter how powerful or wealthy. They require multiple nations acting with uncommon unity.

That is particularly true of air defenses and maritime security - areas where multi-national cooperation is not just a preference, but a necessity.

The momentum from last year's Gulf Security Dialogue meetings led to significant progress in air and missile defense throughout the Middle East. Several Gulf Cooperation Council nations are in the process of acquiring, or have expressed interest in, Shared Early Warning - near real-time information on air and missile attacks that would allow maximum time for a nation to defend itself.

Additionally, all GCC countries have expressed a desire to obtain, or are already obtaining, active defense systems. These procurements demonstrate the GCC's commitment to regional security and interoperability with each other and the United States.

The need for increased maritime security - and potentially new and better means of cooperation - has been highlighted by the recent, high-profile acts of piracy off the coast of Somalia and the Gulf of Aden. As with terrorism, piracy is a problem that has serious international implications - and should be of particular concern to any nation that depends on the seas for commerce.

Earlier this year, the United States Fifth Fleet, based here in Bahrain, established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden and is leading an international coalition to keep shipping lanes safe. I thank Saudi Arabia for agreeing to support the effort and encourage other nations to do so.

Given the vast coastal areas of Somalia and Kenya - more than one million square miles - there are limits to patrolling alone. More must be done.

• Under the United Nations Security Council resolution passed last week, members of the international community must work together to aggressively pursue and deter piracy.
• Companies and ships must be more vigilant about staying in recommended traffic corridors - and should consider increasing their security personnel and non-lethal defensive capabilities.
• New efforts for countries represented here might include developing a maritime surface picture and standard operating procedures against seaborne threats beyond just piracy - such as terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and smuggling.

All told, multinational efforts like these are encouraging. They bolster the defensive capabilities of everyone involved, while not diminishing pre-existing bilateral or multilateral relationships.

They are, I believe, a model for how all of us can better address the challenges of the 21st century by fostering cooperation between and among the nations of the Gulf.

Let me close with a personal observation. In preparing to - at some point - retire from government service, I have been pondering all I have seen since joining the United States government in 1966. There have been good times and bad times - great successes, and haunting failures. Yet, despite the challenges, no matter how tough the problems, I have always been amazed by the ability of many nations of the world to come together and get the big things right.

Gates presents multinational cooperation as both a long tradition -- something "I have always been amazed by" -- and as a newly urgent imperative, in that the theats of the day "require multiple nations acting with uncommon unity."

In this speech as in Gates' speaking and writing generally, there is a complex interplay -- a striving for "balance" -- between innovation and continuity. Constant twin themes are the need to break through bureaucratic inertia--particularly at the Pentagon--to prepare for tomorrow's threats, and the need to remain true to a multi-decade foreign policy consensus to which his memoir of service to six presidents, From the Shadows, is a kind of extended paean. That consensus, as he presents it, on the whole struck a balance (notwithstanding some dreadful mistakes) between U.S. strength and leadership on the one hand and multilateral cooperation on the other -- between hard and soft power.

At times, Gates' calls for balance seem to include muted repudiations of the one Administration since World War II that I believe he sees as rejecting that consensus -- that of W.'s first term. One such implicit repudiation is quoted above: What these challenges have in common is that they simply cannot be overcome by one, or even two countries, no matter how powerful or wealthy. They require multiple nations acting with uncommon unity.

The interplay between innovation and continuity is present in the part of this speech that received the most attention, Gates' counterpoint to Biden's notorious warning that some nation or other would seek to test Obama shortly after he takes office:

I bring from President-elect Obama a message of continuity and commitment to our friends and partners in the region. Though the American political process is at times tumultuous - and our open and vigorous debates might seem to indicate deep divisions - I can assure you that a change in administration does not alter our fundamental interests, especially in the Middle East. Throughout my career in government - which began over 42 years ago - the security of the Gulf has been a central concern of every administration for which I have worked. That will not change, especially considering the great challenges we all face - from the need to defeat violent extremism to the necessity of forging a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians that will allow everyone in that region to live in peace and prosperity.

I had thought that my remarks would be a valedictory and farewell, but that was not to be. The President-elect asked me to stay on as Secretary of Defense and, as you know, I accepted. I am honored to continue leading the Department of Defense, and am doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition. On that note, I should mention that more extensive planning has been done across the government in preparation for this transition than at any time I can remember - and I have worked for seven presidents, soon to be eight. So anyone who thought that the upcoming months might present opportunities to "test" the new administration would be sorely mistaken. President Obama and his national security team, myself included, will be ready to defend the interests of the United States and our friends and allies from the moment he takes office on January 20th.

Unprecedented continuity is the oxymoron here. A transition more thorough than any other. That oddly captures Obama's brand of "change," which Obama always casts as back to the future -- a restoration of balance, a new drive to fulfill old ideals.

Related posts:
Son of Bush Sr.? Obama prepares for state-Croft
Gates repudiates Rumsfeld's "army you have" doctrine
Gates at West Point: 3 principles we've violated?

Son of Bush Sr.? Obama prepares for state-croft

Some weeks ago, Obama let it be known that he admired the way foreign policy was conducted during the administration of George Bush, Sr. Today, the Wall Street Journal notes that "many of the Republicans emerging as potential members of the Obama administration have professional and ideological ties to Brent Scowcroft" -- Bush Sr.'s national security adviser. And it's widely reported that Obama will keep on Robert Gates as defense secretary. Gates was deputy national security adviser under Scowcroft.

The Journal article stresses policy affinities between Scowcroft and Obama -- most notably that both opposed going to war in Iraq. But "no drama Obama" is probably equally drawn to Scowcroft's management style. Here's how his eternally loyal deputy, Gates, described Scowcroft's modus operandi in his memoir, From the Shadows:

A dogged defender of the Presidency, Scowcroft's lack of egotism and his gentle manner made possible the closest working relationships with other senior members of the national security team. Further, the strong individuals who ran State, Defense, CIA, and the other key institutions of national security trusted Scowcroft as no other National Security Adviser has been trusted--to represent them and their views to the President fairly, to report to him on meetings accurately, to facilitate rather than block their access to the President. Scowcroft ran the NSC and its process as it should be run (457-58).

Gates himself ran the deputies committee, which oversaw the interagency NSC process. Of that group he claims:

The friendships--and-trust--that developed among the core members of the Deputies Committee in 1989-1991 not only made the NSC process work, but cut down dramatically on the personal backstabbing and departmental jockying that had been so familiar (459).

It's often been reported that Obama welcomes -- and in fact demands -- open debate from his advisers. Gates describes Bush Sr. in similar terms:

He was an eager learner and interested in reaching out beyond government experts for insights and information...his decision process was encompassed in small, frequent meetings of trusted advisers and an open dialogue with former senior officials and others, from whom Bush encouraged different views and debate (454).

Gates is not a disinterested observer: he is immensely proud of the role he played in Bush Sr.'s Administration. But he's not indiscriminate in praise, either: he describes Bush's foreign policy team as the most cohesive and effective among those of five presidents for whom he worked (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush). It's plain that Obama's bent is to forge teams with the cohesion (as well as the intellectual firepower) that Gates claims for George H. W. Bush's foreign policy shop.

Related posts:
Obama and Gates in Sync on Pakistan
On the Same Page: Gates, Mullen, Powell, Obama
Back from the Shadows: Can Gates Steer the Surge?

Back from the Shadows: Can Gates Steer the Surge?

Fred Kaplan's Times Magazine profile of Robert Gates includes a fascinating moment in which Gates, that veteran of Cold War consensus coursing, takes satisfaction from working his middle course magic on the Democratic presidential candidates:

At last summer's debate on Iraq, Cheney urged the president to resist the Democrats' call for troop withdrawals and to prolong the surge indefinitely. But the Join Chiefs argued that they didn't have the troops to sustain the surge beyond the summer of 2008. Gates made a more political point: that if there were no prospects for gradual but substantial troop withdrawals, popular support for the war would evaporate, and the next president would probably pull out all the troops as quickly as possible, resulting in Iraq's potential collapse. On the plane from Fort Hood, Gates spelled out his position. "We need bipartisan support for a prolonged presence in Iraq," he said. "But to do that, we need to demonstrate that we're drawing down to lower levels." He recalled watching one of the early Democratic presidential debates. The moderator asked the candidates if they would promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, the end of the first term. The three candidates with the highest poll ratings all declined to make that pledge. Gates remembered saying to himself, 'My work here is done."

That satisfaction is sure to drive proponents of a quick withdrawal bats. But those appalled by McCain's talk of a 100-year presence and by Bush's attempt to lock in the infrastructure of a long-term occupation should look closely at Gates' more qualified and nuanced support for the surge, and the long experience that brought him to it. Points to consider:

1) If Gates seeks to steer a Democratic Congress and likely future Democratic President away from a quick troop withdrawal, he also seeks to channel Democratic pressure to help force political action on the Iraqis. Very early in his tenure, when Bush partisans were crying treason at Democrats pushing for a quick withdrawal, Gates said that Congressional debate on war financing put useful pressure on the Iraqi government.

2) Gates is a master at deploying countervailing pressures in this manner. In Afghanistan, he is working on both the Europeans and the Pakistanis to win more effective support for war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Frustrated by the unwillingness of NATO countries including Germany to place troops at risk, Gates has been uncharacteristically confrontational, charging that some countries are not willing to fight and die, and he is now is appealing directly to the European public not to lump the war in Afghanistan together with the war in Iraq as an American misadventure, but rather to recognize that conditions in Afghanistan directly affect their security. "'I think they combine the two,'" he said, according the AP(2/8). "'Many of them I think have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan and don't understand the very different — for them — very different kind of threat' posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, as opposed to the militant group in Iraq that goes by the same name and is thought to be led by foreign terrorists linked to al-Qaida." There is a remarkable implicit admission here that Europeans are justified in considering Iraq an American debacle but that they should differentiate and recognize Afghanistan as a core NATO mission. When Gates is confrontational, the pressure is highly calculated and tempered by recognition of opposing perspectives.

On the other side of the Afghan border, January 25, the FT reported Gates saying that the U.S. would consider joint military operations with the Pakistanis inside Pakistan if asked - notwithstanding that we haven't been asked. “We remain ready, willing and able to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them to provide additional training, to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so.”

Gates does not want to lose in Iraq -- to see it revert to full-scale civil war. But his primary focus is al Qaeda. So he understands the imperative to reduce our presence in Iraq as quickly as possible. The future viability of the military also requires a drawdown. Kaplan reports that Gates told a Texas Chamber of Commerce meeting, "The people who encourage young people to go into the military are less positive than they used to be...Until we reach the point where joining the Army doesn't mean an automatic assignment to Iraq, we'll have a challenge."

3) Gates has also played point-counterpoint with regard Iran. According to Kaplan, Gates was a major force in getting the NIE on Iran released. But having used that bludgeon to avert the catastrophe of a preemptive strike on Iran, he is now tacking back quite sensibly and "has since publicly stressed the less assuring aspects of the estimate -- that Iran is still enriching uranium and may resume the weapons program at any time" (see Gates Validates, 12/5/07 ).

4) Triangulation, Gates style, is rooted in his experience in five prior administrations, particularly his role as Deputy National Security Advisor under Brent Scowcroft in George W. Bush's Administration. Gates is not particularly modest in portraying Scowcroft and himself as masters of orchestrating debate between national security principals, honest brokers effectively controlling presidential access, and forgers of administration consensus. While Gates emphasizes trust and open debate, Scowcroft, in Kaplan's article, characterizes his own role and Gates' as one of, shall we say, steerage: "Before his meetings, Bob would come in and ask, 'How do we want this meeting to end up?' He and I would figure out what we wanted. And sure enough, it would end up exactly that way. And everybody loved him. They all came out of the meeting thinking that they'd come up with the solution." (One of the happy campers in the N.S.C. Deputies Committee that Gates chaired was a certain Paul Wolfowitz. And one of the "strong individuals who ran State, Defense, CIA, and the other key institutions of national security" who, according to Gates, "trusted Scowcroft as no other National Security Adviser has been trusted -- to represent them and their views to the President fairly, to report to him on meetings accurately, to facilitate rather than block their access to the President" was Dick Cheney.)

5) More broadly, Gates' approach to policymaking is rooted in his view of the breakup of the Soviet Union as a bipartisan success spanning several decades. In his book, he portrays each of the five presidents he worked under as tacking a course between hawks and doves among their senior advisors, to varying degrees maintaining military pressure while seizing any negotiating opportunities available. He gives Carter ample credit for beginning the Soviet unraveling process - by his emphasis on human rights, and by his late beginning of a military buildup and support for Afghan resistance. He also recognizes the role of Congress: "The obstructionism and complicating role of Congress...did have a useful function. I sat in the Situation Room in secret meetings for nearly twenty years under five Presidents, and all I can say is that some awfully crazy schemes might well have been approved had everyone present not known and expect hard questions, debate, and criticism from the Hill. And when, on a few occasions, Congress was kept in the dark, and such schemes did proceed, it was nearly always to the lasting regret of the Presidents involved. Working with the Congress was never easy for Presidents, but then, under the Constitution, it wasn't supposed to be."

6) Gates bolsters his credibility by taking stances that don't boost his institutional interests. Time reports this week that he is "putting a damper on pressure from his own Air Force for Congress to buy more F-22 fighters ." The F-22 is a high-tech fighter "principally for use in 'near-peer' combat,'" i.e., for eventual combat with China, which has replaced the Soviet Union as a prospective major league foe. Gates wants to buy half the number his generals recommend. Late last year, in a speech at Kansas State University, he astonished Pentagon observers by telling students that the U.S. needed to boost the State Department's budget -- that is, redress the balance between hard power and soft power.

For all Gates' skillful piloting, Kaplan rightly notes that there may be no middle course in Iraq:

[Gates] added that it's 'important to send the Iraqis a message: that we're going to be coming home, and it's time for them to step up to the plate.' But on his trip to Baghdad, he was confronted with the gnawing question: If the Iraqis don't, or can't, 'step up to the plate,' should we come home anyway? And if the troops don't start coming home at a faster clip, if they stay embroiled in sectarian conflicts that the Iraqis do nothing to settle, what happens to the bipartisan support that Gates has sought as his highest priority? Gates is very skillful at controlling a bureaucracy, but a war is something else. As Gates himself said on the plan from Fort Hood, once a conflict starts, the statesmen -- people like him -- lose control.

In other words, to Powell's pottery barn rule -- if you break it you own it -- add the Humpty Dumpty rule -- if you break it, you may not be able to fix it. One irony that may thwart Gates is that his book, published in 1995, describes in detail a foreign policy practice that worked across five administrations -- contentiously and creakily, but effectively -- and that, in his telling, worked most effectively under George H. W. Bush. It also frames perfectly, by negation (years before the fact), how that practice broke down under W., as the Cheney lauded as a team player by Gates hijacked the decision-making process. Gates may have done much to repair that process. But as Kaplan suggests, he may not be able to control the outcome of decisions made while the process was broken.

"From the Shadows": Did Gates Shape the New NIE on Iran?

Having just finished Robert Gates' excellent book 1996 From the Shadows, my immediate reaction upon reading of a new National Intelligence Estimate that downplays the likelihood of Iran developing nuclear weapons before 2015 is that Gates, a 25-year CIA veteran and former DCI, very likely had a shaping hand - if not in the report itself, then in its release. Until quite recently, Gates has kept a very low profile since becoming Secretary of Defense about a year ago, but the evidence is strong that he has had a calming, rationalizing effect on Bush Administration policy and rhetoric. Last week, in a speech at Kansas State University, he astonished Pentagon observers by telling students that the U.S. needed to boost the State Department's budget -- that is, redress the balance between hard power and soft power. Prior to that, the only public comments of his since taking office that I can remember cropping up in mainstream news were two checks to belligerent Administration rhetoric-- to say in one instance that Congressional debate on war financing put useful pressure on the Iraqi government, and in another that Hillary Clinton's request for contingency withdrawal plans was reasonable. Both of these interventions are in keeping with the balanced assessment in From the Shadows of the five presidents Gates worked for (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr.). In the final section of that book, Gates notes that doves and hawks worked effectively, though often in bitter competition, to keep those five presidents on containment course, and that Congressional intrusion on foreign affairs could be meddlesome and counterproductive but also served as an essential check on executive power. Also, as a top member of Bush Senior's national security team, he lauds that team's cohesion and mutual trust, born of confidence that the National Security Adviser Scowcroft (and deputy Gates) would present all views to the President. The unwritten sequel haunts the book like a shadow limb: that Bush 43 in so many ways destroyed the balance born of separation of powers, bipartisanship, and competition of views within prior administrations.