Steve Clemons discusses with Lawrence O'Donnell Obama's big gamble deploying Navy SEAL Team 6 on another high-risk mission

I shared some thoughts with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's The Last Word on the yet again amazing performance of the Navy SEALs, Team 6, in rescuing American Jessica Buchanan and Dane Poul Thisted.

A couple of quick items that I mention in the video clip above.

First, Obama does really keep his cool when major, high risk actions are underway and he's off giving big speeches like he did Tuesday evening at the State of the Union address or when he was speaking at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner and the bin Laden action was being readied for the following morning.

If this incursion into Somalia had failed, had members of the SEAL team been captured and/or killed as happened during the Clinton administration -- that loss would likely tip the electoral contest towards the Republican candidate, whether Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich.

Obama didn't play it safe, and he and his team deserve credit for that.

Second, I ran into a senior legal adviser in the administration who made the good point that this is "not Rambo, not John Wayne, not bravado and swagger." The person said that there is multilateral coordination and legal authority that has been carefully constructed to both legitimate and support these police actions. This is effective, multilateral, legally-valid action, not unilateral swagger that says damn the international rules.

Killing Somali pirates who have kidnapped Americans and Europeans may appeal to the action-lust many have when watching action movies or reading a Tom Clancy novel, but the real achievement of the Obama White House is not just knowing how to deploy this great Navy SEAL team but also how to operate in the international system in a rules based way (and yes, I include the killing of bin Laden in this calculation).

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

View of my balcony at the Grand Hyatt, Doha
-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Are Hispanic Americans on Romney's call list?

While there have been a long slog of GOP debates, and people may be asking why any more encounters matter at this point -- Hispanic Americans want their turn at bat and are working hard to pull off 'the Hispanic issues conversation' next Wednesday. 

Only problem is that Mitt Romney won't return calls and say yes or no to attending.

Scheduled for Wednesday, 25 January at the 140,000 student strong Miami-Dade College, the "meet up with candidates" organized by Univision, the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the college has secured commitments from both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to attend.  Ron Paul's staff is still trying to work it out and has had discussions with the debate organizers.

But despite a full court press by numerous Romney advisers and donors and even senior members of the LDS Church, Romney and his campaign have been radio silent over whether he will appear or not.  The campaign has not yet responded to this writer's inquiries about its position on the event.

At this point, leading members of the Hispanic community say that they have had enough and are going public with their grumbling about the former Massachusetts governor.  One senior Hispanic policy activist has said that Romney is not signalling that America's Hispanic community is a priority for him.

The President and Chairman of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Nina Vaca and Javier Palomarez respectively, have issued these statements "thanking" Santorum and Gingrich for their commitments -- but also implying that Romney is dissing them.

Nina Vaca, Chairman of the Board of Directors

"As the premier voice for America's Hispanic business community, the USHCC has organized this event to provide a forum for the Republican Presidential candidates to directly address the fastest-growing and most dynamic group of job creators - the nation's Hispanic entrepreneurs."

"64% of jobs in our country are created by small business, and Hispanic entrepreneurs are leading the growth in that segment. Our nation's economic recovery will require continued growth in the Hispanic business community, and Speaker Gingrich and Senator Santorum's willingness to speak at this event underscores their understanding of our contributions.

Javier Palomarez, President & CEO

"We have worked closely with two world class institutions -- Univision and Miami-Dade College-- to create an event that will allow the Republican candidates to begin a national conversation with America's Hispanic community.

We are thankful for the participation of Speaker Gingrich and Senator Santorum, these gentlemen have shown they recognize the important role that Hispanic job creators play in the American economy. Our three organizations have a unique ability to reach the very voters who will decide the next Republican nominee, and I hope that Governor Romney and Rep. Paul will decide to join us.

In the fall of 2011, a strange dust-up took place between Florida's leading Hispanic politico, US Senator Marco Rubio, who accused Univision of trying to shake him down by foregoing commentary about the criminal record of one of his family members if he'd do an interview for the network.  Univision denies the allegations -- and The New Yorker's Ken Auletta wrote an extensive, thoughtful profile of this episode here.  The consequence last October was that Rubio then got most of the potential GOP presidential contenders (who might want him on their ticket in the VP slot) to boycott this Univision debate.

So, Romney's reluctance may still be tied to the Rubio-Univision sumo match, or may be that he's just pretty busy and hasn't gotten to his in-box.

But Hispanic leaders involved in trying to get Romney to talk with them and engage Hispanic issues are now issuing alerts that they are not at all happy being ignored.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

(Credit: Alberto Barreto; reprinted with permission, CIPE)

I haven't yet sorted out all of the intense feelings generated by watching the new Angelina Jolie written and directed film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, but I will have something up soon.

The film is still haunting my thoughts -- but during the after party which went longer than any policy issue-oriented, mostly heterosexual after-event I have been to in a long time (that is to say that 'policy events' with my gay crowd always go late), I got the chance to chat with the film's director and to eavesdrop unintentionally on conversations Jolie was having with others at the Holocaust Museum.

During the crush that Angelina Jolie endured and seemed to enjoy for hours, elder woman after elder woman recounted in whispers stories of the trauma their families or relatives had experienced during either the Holocaust of World War II or the genocidal atrocities that occurred during the Bosnia War. I heard many talking about brothers and cousins and children who lived in the forest during the Bosnia conflict -- and inevitably, the discussions -- so many of them -- came down to the abuse of women, their systematic rape, and other horrors that were pressed on them.

Frequently, Jolie and the women she spoke to would comment about what a different world it would be if women were running the show, were more empowered. Wars like this, they said, "would not happen."

I'm not sure that ultimately this view is correct. Margaret Thatcher, as we are reminded of in Meryl Streep's award-winning performance in Iron Lady, was no peacenik.

But what I do think is dead-on right is that around the world, the real nut cases that rise to power and decide to use war and killing as a tool of their further ambitions are nearly always men. And as part of their rise, they make the further subordination and harassment of women a key part of their playbook.

The US is making major strides in the right direction in the equalization of the "state of men" and "state of women" as argued by Hanna Rosin in her cover story on the subject in The Atlantic -- but much of the rest of the world lags.

Thus, awareness-wrangling is important elsewhere and political cartoons can generate a viral edginess that inspires and empowers others to insist on equality. The Center for International Private Enterprise recently held an international competition of political cartoons in three categories -- democracy, corruption, and gender equality.

Here is a link to the cartoon that won the gender equality prize as well as other category winners, and here is a link that gets you to the semifinalists. And for those who want to go a step further, here is a pdf of the interesting media package that includes bios and quotes from various of the cartoonists.

The entry pasted above of the world on the back of an old cleaning woman evoked the strongest response from me -- and was one of the semifinalists in gender equality. It was done by El Tiempo (Columbia)'s political cartoonist Alberto Barreto. This cartoon, at least in my reading of it, depicts the doubled down abuse that women worldwide endure. First, they are expected to do the tasks many men won't do, holding the world and countries and their homes and communities together -- while nonetheless being looked down upon.

Other cartoons in the mix may move readers of this note more than the one I have selected, but as a person who doesn't write much about gender issues -- the power and solemnity of many of the post-film chats I heard Jolie have with women who have dealt with so much man-made tragedy got me thinking about this.

More on this powerful film soon. And yes, you should see it -- but expect to be pounded.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post also appears. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

This evening between about 5:50 pm (might start a few minutes late) and 7:15 pm EST, I will be chairing at Atlantic Exchange event on the subject of Middle East peace.

Former Obama administration Middle East envoy and former US Senator George Mitchell will join us, share some framing remarks, and then be interviewed by Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg.

The event will stream live above.

We have organized tonight's discussion with the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and its director, former Congressman Robert Wexler -- who have partnered with The Atlantic to produce a four-part series online now, each video about 15 minutes long, titled "Is Peace Possible?"

The four topics covered in this fascinating exchange are the clear ones: borders, security, refugees and Jerusalem. I encourage folks to check these out.

The subject of a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is a volatile one that I think should have been not only near the top of the Obama administration's roll out priorities (which it was) but also among the top of their foreign policy/national security priorities -- which ultimately it has not been except rhetorically and perhaps intellectually, not politically.

This increasingly complex knot in foreign affairs has far greater consequence for the world than just the population of Israelis and Palestinians directly involved -- and in my view, the failures and lack of vision in the leadership on both sides of the equation are something that the global community cannot acquiesce to.

C-Span will also be taping the event tonight, and I'll post those links here once they become available on line.

-- Steve Clemons

As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, US military officers -- incumbents and retired -- and others in DC's firmament condemn the US Marines that apparently urinated on dead Taliban militants, I'm wondering how long it will take for a movement to grow inside the United States that embraces the soldiers and the "pissing act" that Panetta has called "deplorable."

Thus far, the Taliban leadership is shrugging off the incident -- stating that what happened is nothing new.  In an AFP report, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed stated:  "Over the past 10 years, there have been hundreds of similar cases that
were not revealed." 

But many Americans are going to pound their chests and celebrate those who would "piss" on their enemies.   Comment sections on some of the YouTube sites that have clips of the group urination scene are already filling up with crude blasts praising the soldiers and degrading the dead Taliban insurgents. Many wish they were part of the group scene.  This is the pugnacious nationalist side of American politics that is growing today -- and many soldiers come from corners of the United States where this behavior is the norm.

I haven't read the latest figures on the number of moral waivers that the US military continues to extend to gain new recruits, but the last time I wrote about this, the New York Times in February 2007 noted that in the preceding three years more than 125,000 moral waivers had been extended (while nonetheless still expelling outed gay military service people) for crimes including serious misdemeanors as well as "felonies such as aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide."

So, while many in the national media and in polite circles promise to investigate this act, to punish those involved as Panetta said "to the fullest extent", the truth is that the Iraq War and Afghanistan War and the building up of national security commitments that rest on the backs of a new generation of soldiers -- many of whom don't understand and operate with nuance -- has empowered those who think pissing on the enemy is the thing to do.

Whether many want to admit it or not, what those soldiers allegedly did represents "us" today -- and that's yet another part of the malignant manifestation of these current conflicts.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Broadcasting live with Ustream
As previously mentioned, I will be chairing a session today at the New America Foundation between 12:15 pm and 1:45 pm EST titled "Reframing US Strategy in a Turbulent World: American Spring?"

The speakers are Georgetown Professor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Charles Kupchan, New America Foundation fellow and Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks, former Congressman Tom Perriello, Duke Professor and co-author of The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas Bruce Jentleson, and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas editor Michael Tomasky.

-- Steve Clemons

The last time I saw Tony Blankley was at an interesting dinner hosted by David DesRosiers of Real Clear Politics and Carl Schramm of the Kauffman Foundation in July 2011 at the Jefferson Hotel. We had a stimulating discussion in the hotel library before the dinner about what the Obama administration was getting right and wrong -- and Blankley expressed some admiration for the Obama team and for how high the policy hills were they had to get over. That said, he was also a hard core, though civil and cordial about it, supporter of the Republican political agenda at that time.

I admired Blankley -- who was close to Newt Gingrich -- for not allowing political and policy differences to divide him from engaging with those who saw the world a different way.

 I learned a great deal from him over the years -- and appreciated very much his interest in what I was up to here and there. I will miss him in this town.

-- Steve Clemons

photo courtesy:  White House

While budget details of President Obama's just unveiled new defense strategy remain scant and vague and the President feels the need to continue hawking his combo of budgetary constraint and military hawkishness, stating that his forthcoming budgets would still be larger than those of the preceding Bush administration.  Obama last week stated:

Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but
the fact of the matter is this. It will still grow. In fact, the defense
budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush
administration. And I firmly believe, and I think the American people
understand that we can keep our military strong and our nation secure
with a defense budget that continues to be larger than roughly the next
10 countries combined.

Nonetheless, the President and his team are indicating serious shifts in America's strategic picture.  A rebalancing is underway -- troops, resources, and attention shifting away from the Middle East and South Asia with a reconfiguration of assets and slight beefing up in Asia -- not just of personnel and naval and air capacity but time on the Presidential attention clock. 

China Vice President Xi Jingping, widely estimated to be the successor later this year to Hu Jintao as China's next generation President, will visit Washington, DC in February -- and the message, communicated by new China handler-in-chief Joe Biden, will be constructive but hard-headed, interest-driven mutual US-China engagement in which the US will communicate that it's legs in the region aren't weakening with China's rise -- but rather getting stronger and providing an ongoing platform for the peace and stability that have benefited much of the region including, as one senior White House national security official told me, CHINA.

To some degree, one might call this element of President Obama's new strategy the "Mearsheimer Imperative" -- responding at long last perhaps unconsciously to University of Chicago uber realist John Mearsheimer's call for US focus on China's inevitable, "offensive realist" ambitions to become "the Godzilla" of the Asia Pacific region -- working to push the US out of the regional picture.  In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Robert Kaplan has written an incisive and daring profile of Mearsheimer that blasts through the surface noise criticisms of Mearsheimer's recent work focusing on Israel's disruption of America's strategic behavior and choices. (will post link when available -- next Tuesday morning 8 am)

But rebalancing slices of the White House's attention pie are but one part of the strategic shift.  It's also clear that the era of large-manned occupations of other countries, the wholesale adoption of and rebuilding of states, or COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy, is over.  One element of COIN that grew in the fold of the doctrine was the integration of highly sophisticated information, communications, and geospatial intelligence -- informed by feeds of massive data as well as from on the ground intel from small units working in the field -- to the battle field and drone targeting.  When America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, its capacities in standing up a "smart army" and "smart soldiers", fighting units integrated into real time intelligence frameworks, far outstripped any other nation.  But in the ten plus years since, America's capacities in the intelligence arena as well as the ability to deliver decisive blows to enemies (albeit frequently at intolerably high costs to innocent civilian lives) from relatively remote distances has upended the need and rationale for large scale troop deployments.

Just as the controversial drone has quietly and quickly replaced the manned bomber as the platform of choice for surgical bombing of targets -- the information and computing revolution and military capacity that has grown out of it -- in part developed in concert with COIN-innovator General David Petraeus' support -- has made COIN and a big chunk of the US Army less relevant to prosecuting contemporary conflicts.  Petraeus, now Director of Central Intelligence, is helping to usher in new strategies and management for the further consolidation of intelligence to conflict missions.  In some ways, Petraeus was a founding father of COIN, and is now helping to oversee the dismantlement of COIN and ushering in a new successor strategy that is potentially, leaner, smarter, and more nimble -- and potentially substantially less costly than COIN.

This gets me to former defense secretary twice over Donald Rumsfeld -- a complicated and controversial personality in the defense and national security arena.  But the overall package that Obama seems to be promulgating in this era of hard choices has played out briefly if unsuccessfully before -- and that was when President George W. Bush called Rumsfeld back to service in early 2001 to reshape and modernize the Pentagon.  The Fiscal Times' Bradley Graham has written an insightful flashback piece about the arm-wrestling over strategy and defense budgets in that pre-9/11 period when Rumsfeld was skirmishing against the Pentagon's generals and working to compel efficiencies and new ways of conducting wars. 

While Rumsfeld argues that he was not part of the information-technology intoxicated "revolution in military affairs" crowd, he did become a flag-waver for the deep integration of next generation IT and communications into the broad defense platform -- arguing that this would turbo-charge America's capacity to command theaters of conflict.  After having heard Rumsfeld on a number of occasions at RAND Corporation meetings in the 1980s, I don't buy his claim not to have seen not only the efficiencies that could come from IT tech leaps but the upticks in real, bottom line military power because of them.

My argument here -- despite the controversies over Rumsfeld's management style and some would argue his disregard for the legal framework for national security decisionmaking after 9/11 -- is that Rumsfeld worked through more than any of his other then colleagues what would be required to transform a large footprint, Army-heavy, clunky, globally sprawling military machine into something that shed a lot of that weight -- and whose priorities, deployments, and budgets were driven by new factors rather than by some equation of inertia spiced up by safe, risk-averse incrementalism.

I feel like I'm somewhat mimicking Robert Kaplan defense of John Mearsheimer's value to America's strategic course in suggesting that Donald Rumsfeld, derided by many, also has quite significant insights into the struggles that the Pentagon and White House are working through now. 

I haven't spoken to Rumsfeld about this subject recently -- but about six months ago at a meeting he and his staff invited me to with Henry Kissinger, I did raise with him my sense that the hard choices the Obama administration would face budgetarily would force a return to the issues he wrestled with in early 2001 and I got no push-back from the former Defense Secretary.

Leon Panetta has continued to talk somewhat obliquely about "numbers" when trying to defend defense and military capacities of the country.  He did this at the recent Halifax International Security Forum -- and has largely continued to do it when responding to Congress or public questions about his concerns that budget cuts not cut deeply into the muscle of America's national security machinery.

What Panetta could learn, and I mean this in a constructive way, from Donald Rumsfeld is the capacity to think and speak out loud about what forces might look like in a reconfigured Pentagon dealing with a very different terrain of conflict than the types of wars and conflict the Pentagon was organized to deal with during the last many decades.

The military has been having this sort of discussion about strategy and mission needs behind closed doors -- not much transparency -- and this is something that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey has said was a good thing.  I respectfully disagree. 

Rumsfeld's public ruminations about what might be possible in achieving efficiencies and dealing with a tough budgetary environment were leading the nation in my view to do some of the "rebalancing" back in early 2001 that would have been healthy for the country.  Robert Kagan, writing in July 2001, strongly disagreed with my perspective, but his piece gives a sense of the times before 9/11 that roughly feel like the budgetary and hard choice debates unfolding today. 

A return to Rumsfeld's efforts to strangle some parts of the Pentagon while conceptualizing new ways to achieve security would be a constructive discussion for the Obama team to consider.  

Obama, Leon Panetta, Tom Donilon, Ashton Carter, David Petraeus, General Dempsey and others on the Obama national security team may find that such public discourse could very well help Americans see something that might be true -- that greater security deliverables are possible with reform and change, even amidst budget cuts. 

Maybe it's time to invite Donald Rumsfeld to be invited to join the respective advisory boards tasked with thinking through new blueprints for a reformed and rewired military strategy.  Controversial, of course -- but also a smart thing to do, even in an election year.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Reuters

A senior White House official has confirmed that Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administration's next phase China policy.

While the Departments of State and Treasury have held important functional roles in conducting the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue meetings, raising the bilateral status of US-China relations with ongoing meetings between two senior US Executive Branch officials with two of China's most senior leaders, Vice Premier Li Keqiang and State Councillor Dai Bingguo, there has been a general sense that neither Timothy Geithner nor Hillary Clinton and her team were comprehensively driving US-China policy. 

The White House official made clear that the coming shift in the locus of US-China policy management was not a critique of either Clinton or Geithner's management of the China portfolio -- but rather, the rise of Hu Jintao heir apparent and current Vice President Xi Jinping as the likely next President of China created certain practical challenges in dealing with him on a same-status level throughout much of 2012 until Xi's accession to the presidency is formalized.

The view of some of the administration's China-handlers is that management of US-China policy has become so central to a vast array of other policy challenges that the administration's approach needs to be both broad and managed with "a deep and senior bench."  The evolution of many functional offices at the Department of State and Treasury tasked with various line items in the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue has helped stabilize many aspects of the relationship and has helped to benchmark meeting to meeting progress on core concerns. 

National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon has essentially been holding the China policy portfolio himself since September 2010 when in the early part of that month he and then Obama national economic advisor Lawrence Summers went to Beijing to attempt a reset in a quickly deteriorating US-China economic and military relationship.  For the most part, currency politics aside, Donilon's mission has succeeded -- and he has since preempted either Clinton's China hands, particularly Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, or Geithner's team from taking primacy over US-China policy. 

The shift to a strategy of engagement with Biden at the top, orchestrated by Donilon, allows the US to deal with China's likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status -- and to continue both the Departments of State's and Treasury's ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese leaders.

After President Obama's 2008 presidential win, the original intention of the White House was to focus the Vice President primarily on domestic matters -- telling this writer at the time to remember that Joe Biden had recently been featured in Working Mother magazine.  Part of the concern at the time was that with such personalities as Defense Secretary Bob Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then National Security Advisor General Jim Jones, super-general-in-the-field David Petraeus, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Envoys Richard Holbrooke, former Senator George Mitchell, Stephen Bosworth, and Dennis Ross -- Joe Biden as a roving foreign policy/national security hand wasn't perceived to be stabilizing to a strong-on-divas Obama team.

However, Joe Biden quietly took on national security tasks that were key to President Obama and that needed more off the newspaper front page handling.  These included laying the groundwork for the major nuclear materials summit that the Obama administration hosted in April 2010 as well as lining up the continuity of thinking and policy deployment tying together this nuclear materials and WMD summit with President Obama's Nuclear Posture Review and the Senate passage of the New START treaty.  Biden also played a leading role -- along with Defense Secretary Bob Gates -- in the "Russia reset." 

And whether Iraq's democratic-appearing government survives or not, the person who did more than any other behind the scenes to broker the deals and to play communications envoy between factions of Iraq's fractured political order was Joe Biden.  Biden has worked nearly every day -- and definitely every week of his tenure in the vice-presidency trying to seduce former, bitter enemies to realize that they had more ultimately to gain for their constituents, their nation, and themselves personally if they held together the semblance of a constitutional arrangement rather than ripping it up and devolving into civil war once again.

Biden has checked off the boxes of Iraq, Russia, and nuclear materials -- and his foreign policy slate is largely clear.

While this writer thinks he should be the person who does for US-Afghanistan policy what he did in the US-Iraq case, a topic for another day, Biden's next big task will be the next phase evolution of US-China policy.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

In the latest issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, former Clinton administration National Security Council staffer and Georgetown University international affairs professor Charles Kupchan has published an interesting essay titled "Grand Strategy: The Four Pillars of the Future." 

The Kupchan essay is partnered in a set considering the future of US grand strategy featuring contributions by Rosa Brooks of the Georgetown University and Law Center and New America Foundation; Truman National Security Project co-founder Rachel Kleinfeld; former Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello; and Duke University professor and co-author of The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas Bruce Jentleson.  I will be chairing a session with several of these thinkers along with Democracy editor Michael Tomasky from 12-2 on 11 January 2012 at the New America Foundation.  (Those interested, drop me a note, and I'll forward an invitation.)

Kupchan suggests a recipe to rebuild American leadership and power in the world.  His four pillars:

1.  Restore the domestic consensus on national security and rebuild the economy at home

2.  America must judiciously retrench and deal with the problem that its commitments abroad have extended far beyond its interests

3.  The US needs to work with emerging powers (like the BRICS plus Turkey) to create a more representative global order that preserves a rules-based international system

4.  The US should resuscitate a flagging, choking Transatlantic relationship

Kupchan concludes his grand strategy contribution with this graph:

Progressive leadership at home is essential to the nation's political and economic renewal, which in turn is the foundation for progressive leadership abroad.  Since World War II, the United States has been dramatically successful in making the globe more stable, prosperous, and liberal.  The recipe for ongoing success in this mission is no different than in the past:  a solvent and centrist America reliant on a progressive combination of power and partnership to safeguard the national interest while improving the world.

My sense of what America's strategic course needs to be rides closely to Charles Kupchan's thinking -- but his neatly drawn pillars distract I think from the dire situation America finds itself in today.

First, there are no magic wands to remedy the ailments Kupchan has outlined.  Building out the US economy and resuscitating America's social contract with workers and the non-financial sector will require a massive shift in thinking and policy about industrial and domestic innovation policy.  China is is driving realities in the global economic sphere today; not the United States -- and America, to revive its economy, needs to figure out how to drive Chinese-held dollars (along with German and Arab state held reserves) into productive capacity inside the United States while not giving away everything. 

America must knock back Chinese predatory behaviors by becoming more shrewdly predatory and defensive of America's core economic capacities.  Without a shift in America's economic stewardship -- which also means a shift in the macro-focused, neoliberal oriented, market fundamentalist staff of the current Obama team -- the US economy will flounder and on a relative basis, sink compared to the rise of the rest.

Also, while I strongly support Kupchan's call for a principled, centrist, non-partisan approach to foreign policy affairs -- the problem is not one between progressives and conservatives, or Democrats and Republicans.  The problem is that both parties are deeply divided within, split among five and perhaps more camps.  Realists or some version of the school of thought that thinks that America must tend to its stock of power first and judiciously apply its national security and economic capacity in a way that either advances US national interests, or at a minimum, doesn't diminish its power capacity, populate both political parties.  Realists today are one of the buried, subordinate personalities of America's schizophrenic national security psyche today.

The dominant personality of the Republican and Democratic parties runs under two monikers -- but is essentially tied to the notion that the US has a moral responsibility to re-order the internal workings of other nations that constrain the freedoms and rights of their citizens.  The liberal (or humanitarian) interventionist school dominates the progressive foreign policy establishment and more significantly populates the power positions of the Democratic Party today than its rivals; and in the Republican Party, various strains of neoconservatism (there is now competition among the heirs of Irving Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter and other founding fathers) dominate.  Neoconservatives and liberal interventionists put a premium on morality, on reacting and moving in the world along lines determined by an emotional and sentimental commitment to the basic human rights of other citizens -- with little regard to the stock of means and resources the US has to achieve the great moral ends they seek. 

I would put the late Richard Holbrooke in this school of liberal interventionists -- but what made Holbrooke such an outstanding global policy practitioner was his willingness to deal with the devil and to hammer out playbooks that were tenaciously committed to results.  Holbrooke was a Nixonian progressive -- and this is what both the neoconservative and liberal interventionist schools have been too short of, a results oriented global progressivism that assured that US national power grew with its achievements and was not squandered on high cost, low return causes that may have been morally gratifying for policymakers to pursue -- but disasters when it came to the national bottom line.  Think Iraq and Afghanistan.

On his second point, Kupchan is absolutely right.  America must judiciously retrench and strategically re-organize its national security assets.  Isolationism is not the answer here -- but extracting America from commitments that make its allies doubt its ability to help them in times of need or that embolden the ambitions of foes is a vital step. 

Withdrawing from Iraq has already been painful.  Perhaps the political deal-making among Iraq's various hate-thy-neighbor factions that Vice President Biden and his team, particularly Antony Blinken, along with former UN Iraq Representative Ad Melkert will hold, but the Iraq invasion and then nation-building enterprise there was nonetheless a major strategic mistake that helped undermine the US economy while removing the cork in the bottle that is Iran and its growing regional aspirations.  Iraq has cost trillions of dollars and never mattered nearly as much as Iran does -- and today, America is in a significantly worse position to deal with an ambitious and not easily deterred Iran.  Afghanistan needs to be next.

When the Obama administration came into office, I believed that his rhetoric about laying new track where other US political leaders had not gone was correct.  Obama talked about outreach to leaders in Cuba, North Korea, Iran and elsewhere.  But what he mustered on the whole were halfway efforts.  His Cuba policy doesn't surpass that which was in place during the Clinton administration -- and if he goes back and looks at the secret files historian Peter Kornbluh is assembling is of what every US president since Gerald Ford (except G.W. Bush) wanted to do on Cuba, Barack Obama will see that despite his lofty pre-presidential vision for a new US-Cuba relationship, his vision pales in comparison to what they were trying then to orchestrate.

Whether it was with Cuba, or setting solid track on Israel-Palestine peace, Barack Obama had an opportunity to show that he was setting the terms of a new global gravity -- starting with some of the seemingly intractables and solving them.  This could have contributed to the perception of revitalized US power in the world.  It is true that Obama and Joe Biden did successfully reset US-Russia relations.  Also with Biden's back room orchestration, Obama pulled off a key global nuclear materials and WMD summit that is far more important historically and internationally than many have issued credit for.  But at the same time, Obama has repeatedly let Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly embarrass him and show his weaknesses.  When Obama did flex US muscles on one occasion, it was over inane posturing about Futenma Air Station in Okinawa, Japan which eventually knocked out Japan's then prime minister Yukio Hatoyama and undermined Japan's first real test of genuine democracy and transition between political parties.  Obama took out the wrong prime minister.

Thus, strategic, judicious retrenchment only solves part of America's geostrategic mess. Smarter policies, deployed well, must replace what has been a line of mistakes not all of which were inherited from the Bush administration.

Kupchan is right that it would be wise for the US to work with the rising powers -- but history is showing that calamity and shocks are what drive America's limited innovation on global governance.  The shift to the G20 was out of necessity given the global financial crisis -- not smart advance planning.  My sense is that Brazil, Turkey, China, and India are not waiting for the US and the West to cede them seats at the table.  They are taking them through new economic might and a 21st century rationalization of what is right.  America's influence on global problems has diminished rapidly in the last decade -- and the relevance of the rising powers increased.  Striking a new "global social contract" with these powers would be smart and forward-looking but there is little chance of this happening short of the emergence of new crises that focus the mind of warring factions inside Congress and the Executive Branch.

Lastly, on Kupchan's point about reviving Transatlantic relations.  OK.  Sure.  Would be nice. But the bottom line is that Europe is internally dissolving and becoming more fragile, less dependable and a drag on global economic growth and stability.   I hope Europe changes these trends and saves itself -- but Germany has decided to engage in a one-upsmanship with its siblings and has driven a deadly internal mercantilism within Europe that will consume the passions and attention of Europe for a very long time. 

Chalmers Johnson used to lampoon NAFTA by pointing out that an economic alliance including the world's then two largest net debtor nations, Mexico and the US, hardly sounded like a threat to other economic powerhouses at that time.  To some degree, restoring and revitalizing a Transatlantic relationship that produced the world's last great global institutions to which they have been overly devoted to preserving is not a recipe for the kind of change and institutional innovation needed today.

In my mind, getting things right with the BRICS plus Turkey are vital to all national security challenges in the future -- and managing the reality that China matters more than all the rest -- is the vital challenge that matters.  Whether or not the US has a track to restoring the Transatlantic relationship is second tier to this much more important task.

Again, I will be discussing the Kupchan paper and others of the series in a program that will stream live on this site from 12-2 pm on the 11th of January.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner is done with 2011. Buddy and Annie still have a little left for the next few days.

(Click image for larger version.)

-- Steve Clemons

This is a photo I accidentally took with my new iPhone from inside a house on the Chester River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Just struck me as beautiful and wanted to share.

Click image above if you would like a larger version. Always interested in your pics as well. Happy New Year in advance!

-- Steve Clemons

Iraq surge architects Frederick and Kimberly Kagan have published an informed, provocative, yet thoughtful commentary, "Is Iraq Lost?", in the latest Weekly Standard.

The authors open with a blast at what they characterize as a self-congratulating Obama administration.  They write:

With administration officials celebrating the "successful" withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, thanking antiwar groups for making that withdrawal possible, and proffering outrageous claims about Iraq's "stability," "sovereignty," and the "demilitarization" of American foreign policy even as Iraq collapses, it is hard to stay focused on America's interests and security requirements. Especially in an election year, the temptation will only grow to argue about who lost Iraq, whether it was doomed from the outset, whether the current disaster "proves" either that the success of the surge was inherently ephemeral or that the withdrawal of U.S. troops caused the collapse. The time will come for such an audit of Iraq policy over the last five years, but not yet. For the crisis in Iraq is still unfolding, and the United States continues to have a huge stake in the outcome. The question of the moment is not "Who lost Iraq?" but rather "Is Iraq definitely lost?"

The Kagans share their granual understanding of the conflict and deal-making between various factions in Iraq's political ecosystem. 

They suggest, and I agree, that the US troop withdrawal has impacted the previous equilibrium and changed the calculations of power players in the government -- and that President Nouri al-Maliki is moving to consolidate his control over the state, working to move Sunni rivals out of their positions -- and has used the pretext of an alleged plot against his life by Vice President Tariq al Hashimi to make his moves.

The Kagans write:

The withdrawal of all American military forces has greatly reduced America's leverage in Iraq. U.S. military forces were a buffer to prevent political and ethno-sectarian friction from becoming violent by guaranteeing Maliki against a Sunni coup d'état and guaranteeing the Sunnis against a Shiite campaign of militarized repression. The withdrawal of that buffer precipitated this crisis and removed much of our leverage. The withdrawal is complete and unlikely to be reversed. Still, the United States maintains some leverage in Iraq and considerable leverage in the region. The Obama administration will have to use all of its skills to maximize the impact of what leverage it retains.

I agree with most of the observations by Kimberly and Frederick Kagan about the fragility and downward course of political trends inside Iraq. 

That said, I believe that a combination of creative diplomacy and deal-making behind the scenes orchestrated and directed by Vice President Joe Biden and his national security adviser Antony Blinken -- in addition to the good work done until his departure by UN Senior Iraq Representative Ad Melkert -- held together a fractious political mess of rival groups that aren't yet fully sure that a democratic order best serves their interests.  But Biden, Melkert, and others made something work that was a complete mess previously and helped many powerful Iraqis realize that there was the possibility of a stable democratic political order rather than a future of convulsive, sectarian civil war.

That said, US forces withdrawing have changed the equation.  One senior White House official recently said that the US "can't midwife Iraq for 18 years; the baby is born and now we have to move back and see what comes of this country."

The point of disagreement I have with the Kagans about the audit they suggest is coming about who has been responsible for success or failure in Iraq has to do with how they frame responsibility for key decisions.  They write:

We can relitigate the wisdom of the invasion, the course of the war, the success of the surge, and other important questions endlessly, but one thing should be perfectly plain. From the moment U.S. forces left Iraq, President Barack Obama owned the policy and its outcome.

From my perspective, President Obama and particularly Joe Biden took a miserable part of the US foreign policy portfolio -- that had already greatly sapped American power and prestige and undermined US credibility -- and improved matters in a way that would not have been achieved without their efforts.

The daily negotiations Biden engaged in between Barzani, Talabani, al-Maliki, al-Hashimi and others -- who to this day have difficulty speaking directly to each other -- allowed for an elemental level of trust-building in the Iraq national enterprise among these rival individuals an groups they represented.  Maybe this will hold and maybe not.  But it's wrong-headed to think that Obama and his team "own" this mess because they have downsized US vulnerability to affairs inside Iraq.

The more significant accounting needed on Iraq is that which led the United States not only to invade -- but then to double down on the surge, an attempt to obligate the US to an empire-building set of responsibilities that the US public never really debated or signed off on.  This is the conceit of many strategic elites who believe that the nation's national security decisions should be made without regard to the public's appetite for sacrificing blood and treasure abroad on questionable ventures.

Saddam Hussein was a monstrous leader -- no doubt.  But the world has many.  Saddam did not contribute to the al Qaeda machine that attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001; was largely in a controlled box that the British and US were imposing with a no-fly zone over Iraq; and had not re-engineered stockpiles of WMDs.  The US invasion of Iraq was an enormous strategic mistake because it triggered a downgrade regarding US power in the world in the eyes of other important nations -- and emboldened the aspirations of Iran which the US and its allies have a diminished stock of power to deal with today.

I think Biden and his team have done the best job that any outsider could have done in helping to calm sectarian distrust and to generate a commitment to a semi-democratic process as Iraq evolves.  That said, al-Maliki could turn out to be a successor strong man to Saddam Hussein; time will tell.

A fair accounting of this escapade, however, must start with those who wrongly obligated the US to an invasion and nation-building project that harmed American interests from the outset.  Blame or achievement starts there. 

To presume that American citizens would go on paying the tab for the midwifing of Iraq for generations is very much out of touch with American aspirations and priorities today.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Special thanks to Marian Tupy for this great photo, though I was there too.

-- Steve Clemons

Something for those who think Christianity and Islam are deeply divided, a holiday card greeting I received from Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States:

In the name of God, Most Compassionate Most Merciful,

Behold, the angels said:

"O Mary, God giveth thee glad tidings of a Word from Him:

his name will be Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, held in honour in this world and hereafter and of  (the company of) those nearest to God;

-- Aurat Al-i-Imran, Holy Quran

I'm a devout secularist, but it's good in this season to be reminded of the deep ties between cultures which some use to divide.

Happy holidays.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Inspired by The Atlantic's 2011 Holiday Gift Guide in which our food and culture senior editor Corby Kummer curated gift idea offerings from the great and the good, I have some ideas of my own.

But to remind, Arianna Huffington wants an old-fashioned analogue alarm clock; former Blogger and Twitter CEO Evan Williams wants a Nest learning thermostat; Nora Ephron wants an extra freezer; former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle a kayak; British Ambassador to the US Nigel Sheinwald Bose headphones; and Zeke Emanuel (yes, the other brother) wants a Yemenite mezuzah. 

I've already suggested two Civil War related ideas given the 150th anniversary this year of that national, bloody tear -- first The Atlantic's special commemorative issue titled The Civil War as well as Adam Goodheart's brilliantly crafted 1861: The Civil War Awakening. 

But one of the gifts I just received from one of my colleagues (but there is no bias in this recommendation) is an attractively labeled bottle of Bully Boy Massachusetts concocted organic vodka.  Here are the online retailers for Bully Boy.  Great stuff.  Mixes well.

When we asked Arianna, Ambassador Sheinwald, Senator Daschle, Evan Williams and others what they wanted for the holidays -- we also asked them to let us know what their favorite charity was. 

Zeke Emanuel told us he supports Mazon, a Jewish charity that distributes food.  Arianna focused her spotlight on the Acumen Fund which invests in start-ups from Karachi to Kenya.  Tom Daschle gives to Southwest Youth and Family Services of Seattle.

Awesome. 

In that spirit, my significant other and I host a fairly large, DC-style holiday party each year, asking all who come to bring with them canned food and other non-perishables which we donate to Food and Friends, which helps foster a community of care for those living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-challenging illnesses. 

The folks at Food & Friends do a terrific job preparing and delivering meals -- and some of these non-perishable items in packages -- to those on their care rosters.

Last night, when Andrew and I were packing up the pick-up truck bed full of cans and boxes, we found a check for $1,000.00 from a friend made out to Food & Friends saying that this might be more help than then cans. 

Thanks so much Walt.  Moving.

Giving and getting need to go together.

Ok, back to what I'd like to have on my holiday gift list -- or what I might suggest for yours.

Among those interesting people who showed up at our holiday party was Marc Pachter, long time and former director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington who is simultaneously brilliant and humble -- and just knows so much.  I didn't get to spend enough time with Marc at the party -- so one of the gifts I want for the next year is a long dinner and night cap with this amazing intellectual. 

He not only spent much of his life collecting and curating the images of our nation's great and good -- but interviewed J. William Fulbright, convinced Julia Child to allow her kitchen to appear as an avant-garde portrait en masse of her life and contributions, and engineered the hanging of Stephen Colbert's picture of himself near the bathroom door of the Portrait Gallery. 

I do a lot of interviewing of folks -- sometimes on camera and some times just to learn.  Watch this TED interview with Marc Pachter who shares wonderful insights about the art of the intimate interview.  It's been watched 150,000 times -- three times by me.

This gift of quality time with Pachter is probably one I can arrange on my own -- but what I need some help on and probably won't get but would love is Cisco's TelePresence System 3010.  I'm not sure what this costs rack rate, but have been told for friends and family, it's around $30k.

I know, pricey -- but it completely changes the way one interacts with others who are 7,000 miles away.  I do love video skype, but when one is sitting across from three screens that have life-sized images of the people sitting at the same height and level you are -- and you can share data and drawings and smiles and photos in real time, almost as if in real life -- you would always prefer that over getting on a plane and spending a day or two traveling no matter how much you loved the miles.

I went to see how the Cisco TelePresence system worked the other day and told them that they should start an affinity program of points given to people for miles they didn't fly by using the system. 

I'm sure that there are some downsides with this system that some informed tech writer might have pointed out -- but I can't find any.  I love this system and want one.  I wonder if President Obama has one.

If I did get a Cisco platform like this or was even able to borrow it now and then, I'd organize live chats with Matt Damon on his global work with Water.org; would chat about Brazil's demands to play a larger role in global governance with the very impressive Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota; and would talk with women active in the Nablus, Palestine-based Tomorrow's Youth Organization that I think is doing amazing work in an area of the world too many are ignoring.      

So that's what I want.  Maybe Cisco will just let me visit one of these things now and then;  And maybe get Matt Damon on line on the other end.  I'll even see the movie.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy New Year!

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

I've been reading a copy of the The Atlantic's Special Commemorative Issue, The Civil War, which includes an introduction by President Barack Obama. 

Most of the essays and photos curated for the issue were drawn from the pages of The Atlantic during and after the Civil War -- and capture a wide swath of the mood and torment of the divided nation at that time.

In the collection, Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a poem written in the fall of 1863, "Voluntaries," in praise of soldiers who gave their lives for the Union. . .

In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right,
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom's fight,--
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay,
And quit proud homes and youthful dames,
For famine, toil, and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benigh
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So night is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

From September 1896, Booker T. Washington commented in his piece, "The Awakening of the Negro":

Some one may be tempted to ask, Has not the negro boy or girl as good a right to study a French grammar and instrumental music as the white youth? I answer, Yes, but in the present condition of the negro race in this country there is need of something more.

Three months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Charles Creighton Hazewell opened his piece published in The Atlantic in July 1865 with:

The assassination of President Lincoln threw a whole nation into mourning . . . Of all our Presidents since Washington, Mr. Lincoln had excited the smallest amount of that feeling which places its object in personal danger.  He was a man who made a singularly favorable impression on those who approached him, resembling in that respect President Jackson, who often made warm friends of bitter foes, when circumstances had forced them to seek his presence; and it is probable, that, if he and the honest chiefs of the Rebels could have been brought face to face, there never would have been civil war, --at that all that they had any right to claim, and therefore all that they could expect their fellow-citizens to fight for, would be more secure under his government than it had been under the governments of such men as Pierce and Buchanan, who made use of sectionalism and slavery to promote the selfish interests of themselves and their party ... Ignorance was the parent of the civil war, as it has been the parent of many other evils, --ignorance of the character and purpose of the man who was chosen President in 1860-61, and who entered upon official life with less animosity toward his opponents than ever before or since had been felt by a man elected to a great place after a bitter and exciting contest ...

There are essays as well by still living writers -- including, as mentioned, President Obama, and Atlantic editors James Bennet, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jeffrey Goldberg. 

In the collection's opener, "The Duty to Think," James Bennet writes:

Sheltering from a thunderstorm in an empty freight car, the one-term congressman--the one with the habit of telling dirty jokes, and dodging tough questions, and lying to deflect annoying visitors--squatted on the floor, wrapped his arms around his knees, and roared with laughter at his wife's ridiculous ambition for him. "Just think of such a sucker as me as President!," Abraham Lincoln told our correspondent, Henry Villard. Villard would later marvel that this man, who caused him "disgust and humiliation," would prove "one of the great leaders of mankind in adversity."

As the writers in this issue witnessed the country's most terrible and transformative passage, they felt, and reported, the "magnetic personality" of John Brown; walked the anxious streets of Charleston on the eve of the attack on Fort Sumter; joined with Union soldiers quartering (and making mock speeches) in the House of Representatives; listened late one starlit night as Ulysses Grant, puffing on a Havana cigar by his tent, defended himself against the charge that he was a butcher of men. They saw the tide of war turn, and were in Richmond when it was liberated--when Lincoln, holding his young son's hand, passed through the jubilant crowd, pausing to remove his hat and, in silence, return the bow of an elderly black man.

It's simply a magnificent collection of essays -- all brief -- complemented by evocative photography of the day.  The photos were curated by David Ward and Frank Goodyear of the National Portrait Gallery. 

A hard copy of The Civil War can be ordered here.  Ipad here.  Kindle here.

I also highly recommend 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart that starts much in the same spirit of The Atlantic's special report -- opening with a nearly real time feel for the decisions, constraints, and conflicting orders received by Major Robert Anderson whose squad sustained the first assault from Confederate forces.

What is terrific about the Goodheart book is the rendering he gives of the state of play politically, culturally, psychologically in the nation before the war. 

It too would make a great holiday gift for those people who like a powerful read.

More to come, and happy holidays to all.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Like my colleague and pal James Fallows, I want one too. . .

-- Steve Clemons

In the clip above, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was queried in Oskaloosa, Iowa by Scott Arnold, an adjunct professor at William Penn University, about how he would engage the gay community that supports same sex marriage.

The thrice-married Gingrich implies that he'll take support from gay voters who care about other issues -- like jobs and national security -- first, but those wanting his support on gay marriage ought to vote Obama.

Only problem is that President Obama isn't a gay marriage supporter either.

Michael Bloomberg is -- and this blogger would love to offer some space to Mayor Bloomberg to share his thoughts on both Newt Gingrich's position and that of Barack Obama.

But until then. . .a reminder of Bloomberg's bold position on gay marriage, it's worth watching this short clip from the 2011 Human Rights Campaign dinner where he was introduced by Sarah Jessica Parker.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Ron Paul's supporters offer a stinging critique of US foreign policy in this provocative campaign ad that should win some sort of prize for making a serious policy point with more than a talking head.

For more interesting writing on Ron Paul, also check out my Atlantic colleague Conor Friedersdorf's deep dive into a "racist newsletter" controversy that deserves some discussion.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons