(photo credit: Kori Schake)

I have had a pretty busy couple of days reading a dozen or so books competing in the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize for which I was drawn in to be a judge by Ron Brownstein. This is one of the best things I have ever done. Not all history books are gems, but one can't help but learn a ton of new things doing something like this.

The picture above was just sent to me by my friend and national security expert Kori Schake, who was on the foreign policy advisory team to John McCain's presidential campaign as well as a national security adviser to President Bush. This is a bit of her current paradise in Lake Tahoe.

But speaking of Kori Schake, I want to highlight something she wrote for the Washington Post in January 2009 about Afghanistan -- capturing themes and concerns that I think many on the Obama team really need to absorb and think through again.

More American troops isn't enough to succeed in Afghanistan. What else needs doing depends on why you think the Taliban have gained ground in the past 18 months. Is it because we have too few troops to hold areas that have been cleared of Taliban influence? Is it because Afghans are fundamentally sympathetic to Taliban aims? Or are Afghans so downtrodden from the terror and distrustful of American staying power they won't stand up and help?

According to the United Nations, this is a country that stands second to last in the entire world in human development rankings. So the potential for rapid turn-around of Afghan society is low. The Taliban are increasingly targeting development workers and nongovernment organizations. They are destroying the schools and hospitals to crush hope for a better Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is also a country that has received a plethora of international assistance in the past eight years and hasn't made particularly good use of the window of international interest.

The United States is over-invested in the government of President Hamid Karzai, spending too little of its political heft diversifying the potential leadership and setting rules in the political domain that will produce a less corrupt, broader-based government. Democracies grow strong as the result of vibrant civil societies underpinning the political process. Afghanistan has little of that, and Afghans are fast losing confidence in their government.

If the United States is to succeed in Afghanistan, our military might, economic assistance and political attention should be tied to building the Afghan government. If you watch the migration of poppy-growing in Afghanistan, it does not follow areas of increased violence, it tracks to areas of corrupt governance. We need a governance strategy to which our military operations will be subordinate; we won't succeed otherwise.

I would see that nearly all of her central concerns remain relevant today, despite the greater talk of building up and cleaning out Karzai's government.

But on to other fronts -- HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

For those wondering, I'll be in Dubai Saturday-Monday. San Francisco next Tuesday through Thursday. Los Angeles, Thursday and Friday. New York, Saturday through Monday.

It's already an action packed new year.

Best to everyone.

-- Steve Clemons

The Center for American Progress' Matt Duss has a sharp, detail-rich mind when it comes to discussing beneath the surface Middle East issues. But so too does Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who I have enjoyed appearing with on Al Jazeera from time to time (before his current post) and who I suspect is going to one day reinvent himself out of Avigdor Lieberman's party into a more substantial role in either a reconstituted Kadima or progressive wing of Likud someday.

In a significant Wall Street Journal piece today, Ayalon attempts to assert a provenance of the West Bank that no Republican or Democratic administration -- nor any major nations of which I am aware -- would agree with.

I think Ayalon is negotiating with this article, trying to bolster his credentials in the right leaning political fray in Israel at the moment, trying to invent leverage yet again to check any progress by the weakened George Mitchell team, and contriving to make Israeli non-concessions in the peace process appear like genuine gestures that that the progress-needy Obama team might grasp for out of desperation.

In a terrific essay that he has allowed TWN to reprint, and which first appeared at Think Progress' "Wonk Room", Matt Duss takes a scalpel to and fillets Ayalon's assertions.

This is a guest post by Matt Duss, a National Security Researcher/Blogger at the Center for American Progress.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister: The West Bank Isn't Occupied

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon takes to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to argue that the West Bank, where numerous aspects of Palestinian life continue to be proscribed by Israeli military law, as they have been for over forty years, is not really occupied. Ayalon complains that "little appears to be truly understood about Israel's rights to what are generally called the 'occupied territories' but what really are 'disputed territories.'"

That's because the land now known as the West Bank cannot be considered "occupied" in the legal sense of the word as it had not attained recognized sovereignty before Israel's conquest. [...]

After the war in 1967, when Jews started returning to their historic heartland in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, as the territory had been known around the world for 2,000 years until the Jordanians renamed it, the issue of settlements arose. However, [U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Eugene V.] Rostow found no legal impediment to Jewish settlement in these territories. He maintained that the original British Mandate of Palestine still applies to the West Bank. He said "the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors." There is no internationally binding document pertaining to this territory that has nullified this right of Jewish settlement since.

And yet, there is this perception that Israel is occupying stolen land and that the Palestinians are the only party with national, legal and historic rights to it.

On it's face, this is a laughably tendentious argument, the sort that one would find in the pages of Commentary but that's not taken particularly seriously by actual legal scholars or historians. Unfortunately, given that the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel has taken it up, it has to be taken seriously, at least in as much as it indicates the extreme irredentist views of the current Israeli government.

Leaving aside the appeals to the authority of the British Mandate -- the right of European colonial powers to carve up and give away their subjects' land in the first place is, let's just say, not uncontroversial -- Ayalon's quoting of Rostow is very selective. Rostow recognized in no uncertain terms (in the very same piece that Ayalon references, in fact) that the West Bank was occupied territory.

As did former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, decidedly not a Palestinian nationalist, who admirably cut through the bull in 2003 and acknowledged the bare fact: "You cannot like the word, but what is happening is an occupation -- to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians." Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, also affirmed this view, noting in reference to the resentment and hatred created by Israel's military control of over 3 million Palestinians that "We see the occupation as problematic."

As to the notion that the previous status of the territories as Jordanian-administered somehow absolved Israel from its commitments under the Geneva Conventions, this argument was actually made and rejected by the Israeli foreign ministry's own legal counsel before the first settlement brick was even laid. As recounted by Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg -- whose history of the settlements The Accidental Empire is well worth reading -- "the legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land."

In a memo marked "Top Secret," Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention -- to which Israel was a signatory -- forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. [...]

Mr. Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory, because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal, he wrote: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government ignored Meron's legal advice, and developed a series of shifting legal rationales to justify the annexation and colonization of the occupied land, which has helped to create the exceedingly difficult and volatile situation we have today.

Attempts at arriving at an internationally recognized legal dispensation for the land of Israel-Palestine have been based on the understanding that the land is legitimately claimed by two peoples, and that neither of those two peoples are going to get all of what they want. Mr. Ayalon's argument turns this understanding on its head. Israel currently controls around 75% of what was Palestine -- land on which Israel recognizes no Palestinian claim, and indeed which the current Israeli government insists the Palestinians must relinquish any claim even before negotiations.

At the same time, the current Israeli government now also insists that Israel's own claims on the remaining 25% must be taken into account. Yet, in rejecting this frame-up, we're apparently supposed to believe that it's the Palestinians who aren't being reasonable.

-- an essay by Matt Duss that first appeared at Think Progress' "Wonk Room"

-- Steve Clemons

("The Sea Venture in a Heavy Sea in 1609", painting by Christopher Grimes)

Former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) revved up traditional American isolationism into a variant of what I frequently call "pugnacious nationalism".

Helms hired and trained hundreds of leading national security and foreign policy operatives during his tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and morphed together strident isolationist sensibilities with the seemingly conflicting but, in the end, happily cooperating neoconservative movement.

But after reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's new article in GQ, "American Grotesque", I think "grotesque nationalism" may fit just as well as "pugnacious nationalism."

Read the entire, fascinating essay (which I think can only be purchased in magazine form right now) -- but I want to share two clips here -- one recounting a battle between pugnacious colonists sent from England to relieve the embryonic Jamestown colony and 'would-be socialists' on the expedition. The other is a selection on an assault by a group of anti-health care reform zealots on a town hall meeting hosted by Congressman Tom Perriello (D-VA) in Virginia.

And when you are done, for more -- go check out Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.

America's First Revolution -- Pugnacious Colonists vs. Socialists, from "American Grotesque", GQ, January 2010:

The first American Revolution was fought over socialism, in 1609. This is never mentioned. Even before slavery and the Indian genocides, it's a founding schism.

In that year, a ship called the Sea Venture wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. She'd been on her way to relieve the struggling infant Jamestown colony in Virginia. So the ship hadn't even reached here yet--that's how early this was.

Among the passengers were several of separatist tendencies, the Brownists and Familists, whose ideas about society and Christianity had been shaped by the radical sectarian movements that rose up before the English Civil War. These were the parents, then, of the Levelers, Diggers, and Quakers (the people you read about in Christopher Hill's 1972 classic, The World Turned Upside Down). Most of those movements contained at least some communitarian element.

The passengers made it ashore and right away set to work building another ship.
Some of them did. The others said, What are we doing? Why are we killing ourselves to get to Jamestown, where they'll put us to work as colonial drones until we starve or get eaten by heathens, when we have everything we need on this island? Fresh fruit, seafood, plenty of space. Let us live here in common, worshipping God and sharing the bounty of the earth, and no man shall be master to any other.

Nor was there was any indigenous population in Bermuda. It was terra pura, pure soil.
What happened? The ones who intended to go to Jamestown tried to imprison, banish, and execute the ones who wanted to stay. The latter ran off into the forest.

The governor killed one of their leaders, a man named Henry Paine, to set an example. He wanted to hang him, but Paine begged to be shot, as more befitting a gentleman. His last recorded words were "The governor can kiss my arse." That's literally what he said.
In the end, almost everyone went to -Jamestown and perished.

Siege on Perriello, from "American Grotesque", GQ, January 2010:

I ARRIVED AT the town-hall meeting in Virginia on time, but the doors were locked. Too many people inside already; the fire department had made the call. A bunch of us stood outside, going through the ritual bonding gesture of greeting each new person who came up to try the door. "It's locked," we mutter in friendly warning. Really? (Trying anyway.) What the hell? "We know! What the hell!"

I asked a willowy redheaded woman who looked about 40 why she was there.

"Because I'm afraid," she said. "I'm -really afraid of this president. I mean, they're starting to talk about limits on family size, how many children you can have. In our America."
A guy came up and pulled on the door. "Figures," he said. "He's a liberal" (meaning the Democratic congressman hosting this town hall).

People around me snort and harrumph, but there are some guys here from a union.

"Oh, some of us are pretty smart," a white-bearded one of them says.

"Oh yeah?" the guy says.

"Yeah," the labor guy says. "Some of us even have master's degrees and Ph.D.'s."
Pretty tame, as political combat goes, but still you could tell it made the people in our little group edgy. (A couple of days later, someone bit somebody's finger off at a Move-On event. We were ready.)

Three people exited, the fireman let in three, that's how it worked. It took me over an hour to sausage-press my way through this process into the hall itself, where Representative Tom Perriello (D-Va.) was facing questions from a constantly self-refreshing queue of disgruntled Republican constituents. It turned out I needn't have worried about missing anything; this meeting would go for hours. It seemed every person who'd come intended to speak.

As we shuffled up the hallway toward the room with the microphones, distinct words began to emerge from the doors. The one we heard clearest and loudest, and that generated the biggest response by a huge measure, was "socialism."

A man you couldn't see from where I was standing got up and said to Perriello--he didn't so much say as intone--"From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs." He paused. "Karl Marx said that was the credo of Communism. Now, I want you to tell me the difference between that...and what we're headed for."

It was the one time all day the place actually shook.

"But that's from the Bible," I muttered. "From the New Testament." (I couldn't help it, I used to be a hard-core Christian. Acts 2 and 4: The believers "had all things common...as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.")

The lady next to me reeled and looked at me like she'd just caught me sniffing my finger.

"It is!" I said.

The next man up to the mike was very somber, soft-spoken, bearded; a study in browns and khakis; he walked slowly. He had been waiting for this moment. "I have one question," he said to Perriello. "Where in the Constitution does it state that we are required to provide health care for everybody?"

It's probably taking things too far to say that if the tea-baggers were in control, that America and Americans would perish under their leadership. . .but then again. . .

-- Steve Clemons

I didn't have the opportunity to know "Chess", or William Chessley Butler, who died this past week at the age of 23 from cystic fibrosis. Chess was the son of one of my closest high school friends, Nikki LeMaster Butler, and I just received word of his passing.

I am posting this beautiful video tribute to him and doing so with permission of his family -- but at this time of year, I not only think through what challenges lie ahead, what I did and didn't get done the year before, but I reflect on the people who have meant so much to me.

I would have liked to have known this young man - but had only recently re-connected with his mom and her brother, Bill LeMaster, via facebook.

One of my great mentors, Walter Beran, passed away in 2007 -- and I couldn't bring myself to write or think about his passing these last two years. He was one of the essential people in my life who launched me in my career. He kept me from becoming a bureaucrat, said I'd be a lousy accountant, and encouraged me to leave law to others. He pointed me the direction I've been going for a couple of decades.

Another close friend of mine, a Japanese diplomat who loved mountain climbing, Koichi Haraguchi, died October of this year at the summit of Mt. Amakazari in Itoigawa, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. I miss him too.

I'm sure many folks who read this blog have been close to people who have passed -- or who are close to moving on.

I just wanted to reserve this space on TWN to pay respects to Walter, Haraguchi-san, and Chess Butler -- who seems to have had a terrific life.

-- Steve Clemons

On January 4th, former US Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) will formally announce his candidacy for the governorship of Rhode Island -- as an Independent.

In September 2007, Chafee resigned from the Republican Party. He authored his farewell memoir to the party, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President. Chafee distanced himself from the pugnacious nationalist wing of Republicans by allying with Center for American Progress CEO and Obama confidante in co-chairing the Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests.

As an Independent with Republican credentials, Chafee joined former US Representative Jim Leach and Republican national security and intelligence expert Rita Hauser in launching "Republicans for Obama."

At an event I chaired at the New America Foundation titled "What Does Patriotism Look LIke?", Chafee went into significant detail as to the reasons he was opposed to the direction George W. Bush and Richard Cheney and their followers had taken the party. When asked at the event by Kiki Ryan, who was then working for the Washington Examiner and now is on the fast track at Politico, what Chafee thought of Sarah Palin, the former Senator reported she was "cuckoo." See the short two minute video clip posted further below.

Chafee and his team delivered the decisive blow ending John Bolton's chances of securing a vote confirming his appointment as US Ambassador to the United Nations -- thus ultimately compelling the recess-appointed John Bolton's resignation from the post in December 2006 before the 110th Congress convened in 2007.

From challenges on the environment and climate change to sensible economic policy -- to issues of war and peace -- and presidential appointments that were over the line, Chafee has shown himself to be a thoughtful, deliberative leader. I still enjoy recounting that on an occasion when I stopped in to meet Mark Silverman, Chafee's then foreign policy adviser who now heads government affairs for the International Committee of the Red Cross, I found a bunch of scruffed up "farrier licenses" that Linc Chafee had had over the years mounted and framed in as nearly a scruffed up manner. Chafee was a hard-working, long-haired guy who shoed horses, if that's what they call it.

I knew (in the way any staffer in the Senate rubs elbows and shares trams with Senators) the late and great moderate political Republican icon, John Chafee (R-RI), who served in the US Senate for 23 years. The elder Chafee had a raspy grasp of basic folks but held himself in the posture of a Newport, RI state aristocrat -- and all I could think about was what holidays with the hippie-looking son Lincoln and the elder Senator dad, John Chafee, must have been like.

But despite his leadership and sensible decisionmaking process, I support Lincoln Chafee for another reason -- for his brave and correct view on same sex marriage equality in Rhode Island. Chafee is showing the kind of commitment to American civil rights advancement within his state that I wish Barack Obama could muster at a national level.

In June of this year, Chafee penned an oped that addressed same the sex marriage debate in Rhode Island.

The piece, which should be read in full, starts:

On Wednesday, June 3, 2009, the New Hampshire legislature took another step in our country's ongoing struggle to ensure full equality for gays and lesbians by voting to permit same-sex couples in their state to legally enter into civil marriages. The vote makes New Hampshire the sixth state in the country--along with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine-- to provide equal marriage rights to all its residents, and it now leaves my home state of Rhode Island as the only New England state that does not permit same-sex marriage.

Rhode Islanders are currently facing enormous challenges, particularly with an unacceptably high unemployment rate and a growing state budget deficit. State lawmakers should therefore quickly join our New England neighbors on the right side of history and pass a marriage equality bill, so that their energies can be focused on the priority issues that affect all of us.

To me, the issue of same-sex marriage boils down to a question of basic fairness. We all know someone who is openly gay or lesbian. Gays and lesbians have contributed to the diverse fabric of Rhode Island and the rest of the country for generations, strengthening our communities in innumerable ways. Far too often, same-sex marriage has been used as a wedge issue to divide and distract us from the bigger problems we face as a nation.

But once you acknowledge that homosexuality exists not by choice, the next obvious step is to grant gays and lesbians the same liberties and freedoms as every other American. We all share the same basic aspirations: a safe town and an affordable home to live in; a good job to provide us and our families with economic security; good schools for our children; quality health care; and, perhaps most importantly, someone to love, share experiences and grow old with so we're not alone.

As a proud Rhode Islander who thinks of my state as a leader when it comes to treating others with dignity and respect, it troubles me to think we've fallen behind in granting our gay and lesbian family members, friends and neighbors something as fundamental and important as the right to have their relationships fully recognized by the state. That is not in keeping with the state's proud history of inclusion and progressiveness, which can be traced back to Rhode Island's very foundation.

This is exactly the right tone -- and substance -- that America's political leaders should be setting whether at the federal level or in states.

I had the pleasure of speaking recently to a couple hundred students at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island -- and got a brief but real sense of Rhode Island's people and some of its challenges. Over the years, I have gotten to know many other Rhode Island citizens from other political battles -- and although I 'rarely' endorse any candidates, I am conveying to all of them my strong support of Lincoln Chafee's independent bid for Governor.

-- Steve Clemons

Abubakr Al-Qirbi, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Yemen, addresses the general debate of the sixty-third session of the General Assembly. (official United Nations photo)

Below the break follows the official statement from Yemen's Ministry of Foreign Affairs about would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Yemen is in a very complicated place when it comes to its efforts against al Qaeda, other rebel tribes, and managing the lines of its sovereignty against explicit foreign intrusion.

Despite the Obama administration's strange non-denial denial regarding military activities inside Yemen in which passions are running strongly inside Yemen against the US, the US is working with the Yemeni government in trying to identify and attack al Qaeda operations. Some are arguing that a quid pro quo is developing in which the administration is now engaged in a covert war against Houthi rebels, which the US has refused to identify as a terrorist group, in partial exchange for more kinetic action from the Yemen government against al Qaeda operations.

The Obama administration has to step back at some point and ask itself what the dangers and downsides are of an ever-widening military span of operations. Some neocons in addition to Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) are now pointing to Yemen as "threat next" and agitating for a much more aggressive American presence there.

National security officials in the administration need to go back and read Peter Bergen's Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden in which he recounts many aspects of bin Laden's plan from the Islamic extremist uber-guru's own words - which was to draw the US deeply into the Middle East, and by its presence -- destabilize the governments in the region.

Bin Laden, hiding somewhere in Pakistan, remains the single most significant sculptor of global affairs today, pushing the buttons of an American superpower as well as other regimes, so that they engage in emotional, knee jerk crusades that undermine what is left of a global equilibrium and the perception of American power.

Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and enemies yet to be named win with each new soldier deployed to the Middle East and South Asia.

President Obama must step back and think about America's current strategic course.

Here is the official statement from the Yemen Foreign Ministry about the Nigerian well-heeled, educated, would-be bomber:

-- Steve Clemons

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's legitimacy as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran is at a very fragile moment and being challenged by Iranian citizens throughout the nation, according to reports streaming in, despite media controls and a Western press blackout.

To see a very disturbing video in which men who were going to be hanged appeared to be saved by citizens in the streets, watch this clip.

Reform presidential candidate Mir Hossen Mousavi's nephew was killed today in clashes with police. There is no easy way now for the opposition to back down and wait for a more appropriate time to move their advocates and followers into the street.

Ayatollah Khamenei has become the new Shah -- hated by so many within the country that it seems implausible that Iranian elites will ever be able to operate without much distrust and fear of each other.

The United States needs to be very cautious -- and not do anything on the ground in Iran that would allow the incumbent government to to evade "the death to the dictator" chants directed at it by distracting the country with evidence of credible external interventions.

This phase in Iran's next revolution could subside again before an even larger explosion by embedded protesters. It's just too hard to tell at this moment.

But as Iran expert Barbara Slavin just wrote to me, things don't look good for Khamenei and his government. She wrote to me via Facebook: "[Khamenei] is stuck. If he begins to compromise, he's lost -- and if he doesn't, he's lost."

-- Steve Clemons

UPDATE: This video shows that the protesters are trying to win over the police. This is a fascinating clip of police and protesters on the edge -- but trying not to go over what would be potentially horrible lines:

-- Steve Clemons

I have been pretty busy today and unable to post much -- but after many emails after the holiday pup pics, I thought I'd share one other.

Oakley, Annie and Buddy send their greetings.

Very glad that there wasn't a disaster in Detroit. I hope to address the issue of terror threats tomorrow.

-- Steve Clemons

Two years ago on Christmas Eve, I wrote a piece for Huffington Post and the Washington Note titled "When the Intolerant Kill Christmas."

According to my friends at Huffington Post, more than half a million people read that piece. It was a deeply personal snippet not of my life - but that of a close friend - who had "come out" to his family as a gay man and who was not having an easy time of it.

My friend, who is a reserve soldier who spent six hard months this past year in Iraq and Afghanistan, is off this season skiing with the same family that had rejected him. He's not there with his boyfriend, but his family has made major strides in accepting him and dropping the constant pressure for him to slip back to a path he never really had.

His and their struggle is not over. I know his mother, deep in her heart, still can't accept that she has a gay son - but a stronger part of her is not allowing her to cut him off either. His brother and sister-in-law, also fundamentalist Christians, have no fear about my friend playing with their young nephew. My friend's facebook page is filled with excellent pictures of this great kid. Progress.

Accepting people for who they are seems to me to be what Christmas ought to be about.

As a nation, we still aren't doing that with gay men and women in the military services. We seem oblivious to the fact that literally dozens upon dozens of thousands of gays and lesbians are serving this nation in Iraq, Afghanistan, in Asia, in North Africa, Honduras and elsewhere and are hiding who they are because they will be expelled from their service if it became known that their lover or partner or one night stand was of the same sex.

My mother lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma - a conservative oil town just north of Tulsa that was one of the more important centers of oil industry development in the United States. Bartlesville's population is around 35,000 people today.

Estimates vary, but from data in the 2000 Census the Urban Institute estimates that there are more than 36,000 gay men and lesbians in active duty - roughly the same as the entire population of a significant town in Oklahoma. The same study suggests that there are 65,000 gay men and lesbians if reserve units and the national guard are included.

My own hunch is that there are closer to 70,000 people in the uniformed military - simply based on discussions with military officers in the know at the Pentagon. The number if including guard and reserve units would probably be about three Bartlesville's, or a city of 110,000.

But back to my friend. This year, he wanted to wear his full dress military uniform to the annual gala dinner of the Human Rights Campaign, a leading civil rights organization in Washington focused on advancing the rights of the GLBT community.

This year, Lady Gaga opened for President Barack Obama who reassured the gay community he was with them. When one person in the audience said "We love you, Barack!", the President quickly responded, "I love you back."

Matthew Shepard's amazing but earthy, put-up-with-nothing-but-tolerance parents, Judy and Dennis, were awarded the first Edward M. Kennedy National Leadership Award. The cast of Glee was there.

But I told my friend that if he did wear his stand-out-in-the-crowd mess dress uniform, full of medals he had earned fighting for this country, he ran the risk of attracting media attention.

He wanted the President of the United States, Barack Obama, to see that uniformed military were embedded throughout the US military and that they too were calling for the rights of the gay community. My friend wanted Barack Obama to see that gay men and women in the military supported him.

But by doing so, this brave and very good guy ran the real risk of being discharged from the military and becoming one of the mounting statistics of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which is another great outfit fighting for the rights of discharged gay military men and women.

I convinced himself to anonymize himself if he wasn't quite ready to pay the consequences for standing out and being himself.

American society at its best should be a melting pot, tolerant, embracing culture and yet acultural enough that most can latch their worldview into the mix and feel fulfilled. I felt terrible outlining for my friend what could be the downside of what should have been a natural and proud gesture.

We need to move forward on accepting those men and women who are sacrificing for this nation - at home and abroad - and accept them for who they are. We really do.

Despite the step by step progress my gay friend is making with his family, he is not accepted for who is in the military - and he could not walk up to the President of the United States at a gay rights dinner and salute his Commander in Chief without losing his job.

That's intolerance - and yes, for far too many, it is still killing Christmas.

President Obama, let's fix this soon in the new year. Make history by turning another page in the history of American civil rights.

And to everyone else who is already comfortable with the kind of tolerance we should be celebrating in the 21st century, thank you.

-- Steve Clemons

Merry Christmas to all from Oakley, Annie, Buddy, and the team that brings you The Washington Note!

-- Steve Clemons

Had Ted Kennedy been alive today, either Ben Nelson would not have been able to undermine women's health care equities and move his anti-abortion beliefs into national consequence or Joe Lieberman would not have been able to get included in the health care bill nearly whatever the big insurers wanted -- no matter how much these positions conflicted with earlier Lieberman positions.

Barack Obama's victory ahead in signing major health care legislation would have been cleaner, stronger, better with Ted Kennedy at his side.

The "public option" would have survived.

I'm not a health care expert, though I have been following the debate closely for years, largely through the excellent work of my colleagues who run the New America Foundation Health Policy Program. Len Nichols and his team have been equipping proponents of health care reform in the White House and the Congress about the importance of expanding access and neutralizing the many weapons health care insurers use to undermine or exclude American citizens who have significant health care needs.

Nichols' predecessor at the New America Foundation was my good friend, Laurie Rubiner, who helped craft for the late Senator John Chafee (R-RI) one of the first pieces of health care legislation calling for a mandate that health care cover all Americans. Rubiner's work later appeared in test programs that Mitt Romney ran in Massachusetts while Governor and also in California where Arnold Schwarzenegger gave it a very good try. She also crafted Hillary Clinton's second health care proposal which was pitched during her presidential campaign.

Rubiner and Nichols are both two of the vital, key intellectual architects behind an expanded health care mandate -- and Len Nichols has been a passionate, tireless, practically Messianic force in moving behind the scenes this legislation forward.

On one hand, I am pleased that President Obama is going to have a major success he can point to that does address some of the nearly unbelievable practices of health insurers in blocking access and support for Americans. Obama needed this success to be able to succeed in other things.

Losing in health care would have meant calling it a day on nearly every other major policy issue. And the world is in too dire a mess for Obama to be made impotent this early in his tenure. So, I'm glad we are moving forward, passing something, and will hopefully get into other major national security and domestic challenges facing the country.

But I am very saddened that in order to succeed, Obama had to undermine the rights of women in the process. Laurie Rubiner who now heads government affairs for Planned Parenthood, must be very conflicted right now -- on one hand seeing a massive expansion of health care that nonetheless erodes the rights of women in ways unacceptable to her organization and to many liberals and progressives around the nation.

Ben Nelson has probably made himself a target now for liberals and progressives who greatly resent the portal he forced all Americans to go through to get to a greater social need.

When George W. Bush achieved his most important domestic priority -- tax cuts -- he did so after winning a conflicted presidential contest and with very thin margins of support. But there was no sense that the glass was half full or half empty in Bush's crowning policy achievement.

It is awkward and strange that Barack Obama who one his keys to the White House with the greatest political landslide since LBJ's victory barely squeaked by in this health care gambit and was undermined by alleged allies in his own party.

But a victory is a victory and Obama will be able to claim it. I'm glad Americans will not be able to be told that they have no health care insurance options and can't be excluded from coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

I think that the entire nation -- Republicans, Democrats, and Independents -- need this President to succeed. It's vital because the challenges ahead are so massive.

I hope that Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson understand the importance of this too -- and again, I think we all miss Ted Kennedy.

-- Steve Clemons

(This post also appears at The Race for Iran.)

Jay Solomon reports that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry is considering what would be the highest-level American visit to Tehran in thirty years.

The White House has endorsed such a trip.

This is a good idea - and an opportunity to stem the slide toward sanctions and ongoing antagonism that the Obama administration's "engagement" policy appears headed.

But, of course, the key is not merely whether Senator Kerry goes to Iran but what message he delivers.

The message should be that the United States is ready to enter into comprehensive negotiations with the Islamic Republic that go beyond the nuclear issue and address all of the major bilateral issues along the lines of the 'Grand Bargain' laid out by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett last year.

-- Ben Katcher

President Obama did a very good job, in my view, outlining in this NPR interview the positives in the health care package that has not been completely ironed out in Congress, but in his terms, is 95% there.

I have problems with the fact that women's rights, particularly in abortion policy, have been eroded -- but as I have written before -- I want to move beyond health care to the many issues that are getting short-changed while this legislation dominates and distracts public attention. I want the President to succeed, but this has to get done.

As my colleague Len Nichols says, we are going to be litigating for thirty years what this health care bill means. Just wrap it up, please.

Excellent job by the National Public Radio reporters.

-- Steve Clemons

Over at the Lowy Institute's blog, The Interpreter, I found a link to a Boston Globe assembly of the 50 best news photographs of the decade.

I've added the photo above as a reminder of the "hope" that many people have for what President Obama can deliver in the next decade.

These photos are really fantastic and are worth at least 50,000 words.

The hanging chads photo makes one wonder how much different the decade could have been...

And it is amazing how many of these photos would never have been taken were it not for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

-- Ben Katcher

The New America Foundation/American Strategy Program and The American Interest are teaming up to host a a policy forum in snow-recovering Washington D.C. today to assess the Obama administration's performance on major national security and domestic priorities after one year in office.

The event will feature several essayists who represent a diverse set of ideological perspectives and who participated in a symposium on this topic that appears in the current issue of The American Interest.

This event will run from 12:15pm - 1:45pm EST and will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

CSPAN will also be taping the event and will air it later this week.

I have pasted the full agenda below.

The full set of essays -- including ones by Francis Fukuyama, Jessica Mathews, Josef Joffe, Anne Applebaum, Michael Barone, William Galston, Joseph Nye, and others as well as those people speaking in today's program -- is available online here.

featured speakers
Walter Russell Mead
Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
Council on Foreign Relations

Richard Perle
Resident Fellow
American Enterprise Institute

G. John Ikenberry (via conference call)
Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University

Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program
New America Foundation
Publisher, The Washington Note

Will Marshall
President
Progressive Policy Institute

Stephen Krasner (via conference call)
Former Director of Policy Planning, US State Department
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Stanford University

Ronald Steel
Professor Emeritus of International Affairs
University of Southern California

stage-setting remarks
Adam Garfinkle
Editor
The American Interest

moderator
Steve Coll
President
New America Foundation
Staff Writer, New Yorker

-- Ben Katcher

My friend and colleague Nicholas Thompson -- a senior editor at Wired, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, and the grandson of strategist and Kennan-thorn Paul Nitze -- has a terrific new book out about the personal and intellectual rivalry and relationship between Nitze and George Kennan.

The book is titled The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War. It's a fantastic book to give for the holidays -- and runs in the style of Fred Kaplan's Wizards of Armageddon that profiled the rivalry between early nuclear strategists Bernard Brodie and Albert Wohlstetter -- as well as Strobe Talbott's arms control era epic Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control which gives a captivating account of the internal battles between Reagan administration officials Richard Burt and Richard Perle (who will be speaking on a panel with me at this American Interest/New America Foundation event tomorrow).

I interview Nick briefly about the book above, but for a longer discussion that was held at the New America Foundation, you can watch this link here.

I will be back to posting more new stuff tomorrow. I have a huge holiday party tonight in my home and have been struggling to get beyond the issues created by two feet of snow and a lot of ice.

Happy holidays to all.

Steve Clemons

Wow. David Axelrod acknowledged this statement today from David Gregory on Meet the Press:

[Barack Obama] supported the public option. He did not fight for it till the end of the day.

What a stunning acknowledgment!

Well more than half of the US Senate wanted that public option -- which President Obama preferred -- and he didn't fight for it?

Did he fight for women's health rights? Or did the President support the right of women to have coverage for abortions but not fight for that either?

We know that Barack Obama supports the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell in the US military -- but is he "fighting" to end this discrimination against gays and lesbians serving their nation?

We know that Barack Obama supports a fair, no false choice approach to a viable Palestinian State next to Israel -- but is he going to fight for it?

How does David Axelrod, or anyone in the White House, think it squares with citizens to hear that Barack Obama supported some issue or group -- for which they want political donations and votes -- only to hear him say that the President opted not to fight for his position?

Would love to know what many of you think about this health care legislation that still has some time to go before making its way into law.

While I'm glad we are getting past this distraction in the near term, I do worry a great deal that women's issues were strongly pushed to the side by a lot of elder men in the US Senate.

Here is a statement from the President of Planned Parenthood on the "abortion language" in the Senate bill:

STATEMENT BY CECILE RICHARDS, PRESIDENT OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA, ON PROPOSED ABORTION LANGUAGE IN THE SENATE MANAGER'S AMENDMENT

"Planned Parenthood strongly opposes the new abortion language offered by Senator Ben Nelson in the manager's amendment. Last week, the Senate rejected harsh restrictions on abortion coverage, and it is a sad day when women's health is traded away for one vote.

"The Nelson language is essentially an abortion rider. It creates an unworkable system whereby individuals are required to write two separate checks each month, one for abortion care and one for everything else. There is no sound policy reason to require women to pay separately for their abortion coverage other than to try to shame them and draw attention to the abortion coverage. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that insurance companies will be willing to follow such an administratively cumbersome system, leaving tens of millions of women without abortion coverage.

"After the passage of the Stupak amendment in the House, we heard loud and clear from women across the country that they will not stand for the undermining of their rights and their access to benefits. This Nelson abortion check provision will no doubt create the same outrage, as women learn that they are being made second-class citizens when it comes to health care coverage.

"As many members of Congress and the president believe, Planned Parenthood does not think that health care reform is the forum to litigate abortion policy. Unfortunately, opponents continue to use abortion as a political wedge at every step of the reform process.

"There is no policy reason for this action, it is simply a political maneuver. We understand that leaders in the Senate and the White House want to move the process forward, but given this provision, we have no choice but to oppose the Senate bill. Planned Parenthood will now work with leaders to fix the abortion coverage language in conference."

I wonder how many New Year's Resolutions Barack Obama will make of things he wants to do or wants to believe in but won't fight for.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Taylor Marsh notes that Meet the Press failed to secure any women to discuss health care reform legislation even though it is "abortion politics" and a deal undermining women's access to abortions that the Obama administration struck with Nebraska U.S. Senator Ben Nelson.

President Obama demonstrated his work-the-situation prowess in Copenhagen in which he molded a meeting planned with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who may have been trying to duck Obama, into a five way chat between the leaders of China, Brazil, India, South Africa and the United States.

When Obama is on, he really is on. Obama biographer Richard Wolffe hammered home Obama's approach to challenges as basketball games and how he sees situations like the one he confronted in the quickly deteriorating Copenhagen scene.

I wish there were more situations -- Israel/Palestine comes to mind -- where he was able to get his game on, and move others to get to "yes" more frequently.

I realize that there are a lot of doubts lingering about the details and substance of the Copenhagen agreement, but what Obama achieved there in the last hours of the Summit is impressive. (Here is a pdf of the text of the Copenhagen Climate Accord.)

From Politico's Glenn Thrush:

A senior administration official, briefing reporters aboard Air Force One en route Andrews Air Force Base: "[T]he President said to staff, I don't want to mess around with this anymore, I want to just talk with Premier Wen. ... Our advance team called their advance team to try to set this meeting up, and in all honesty make one more chance, make one more run at getting something done.

The Chinese say they need to call our advance guys back. So it's clear that it's going to take some time to get this Wen meeting done. ... The Chinese then call and say, can we move our 6:15 p.m. bilateral back to 7:00 p.m. And we said -- we put them on hold, talked a little bit, the President walked up, the President said, move it to 7:00 p.m., I'm going back to the multilateral. ... [A] couple of us start to walk up to the room where the multilat is because we had sent advance to look at the room, the room where we were going to have the China bilat and realize the room is occupied by what we think are the Chinese and we can't get into the room to look at it.

So they come back and it sort of got our antennae up a little bit. So by the time several of us, including Denis McDonough and I, got into the multilateral room we've now figured out why we can't get into that room: because that room has Wen, Lula, Singh and Zuma. They're all having a meeting. ...

"[W]e weren't crashing a meeting; we were going for our bilateral meeting. We found the other people there. ... That's when the President walks in ... 'Are you ready for me?' ... [T]here aren't any seats, right, I mean, I think if you've seen some of the pictures, there were basically no chairs. And the President says, 'No, no, don't worry, I'm going to go sit by my friend Lula,' and says, 'Hey, Lula.' Walks over, moves a chair, sits down next to Lula. The Secretary of State sits down next to him. ... [A]ll four countries that we had been trying to arrange meetings with were indeed all in the same room. ... [T]he room that the meeting is being held in for our bilateral currently contains the leaders of those four countries. ...

He said, 'Good,' on the way to walking to the meeting. ... We briefed him that our 7:00 p.m. meeting is in a room currently occupied by not just the Chinese, but the three other countries. And the President's viewpoint is, I wanted to see them all and now is our chance. ... [A]ctually I think we were shown into the room, in all honesty. I think we were shown which direction to go to the room and I think there was no doubt there was some surprise that we were going to join the bigger meeting. ... I want to make clear, we did not break into what we thought was a secret meeting, okay? ... We were walking to meet our 7:00 p.m. appointment."

Obama-style statecraft achieved a deal. Now, we need to see more of this in other policy arenas.

One really interesting thing that some may note is the role of National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.

Recently, I asked General Jim Jones, National Security Advisor to the President, about climate change as a national security issue -- and how complicated it must be to build in climate and other avant-garde modern security issues into the decision-making process. Jones has a thoughtful, sophisticated approach to broadening the voices included in policy consideration and decision making, but in his response -- he intimated that he personally would not be going to Copenhagen.

The fact that McDonough as there from the National Security Council does underscore what Jones was saying -- that climate change is a real national security concern, and this is reflected in the types of personnel involved.

-- Steve Clemons

My friend Andrew Sullivan gave me permission long ago to let me use his "View from my Window" feature -- and publish interesting photos sent in by others and post my own.

This is the scene outside my front door. Cold, white, lots of it. Caps off the really, really bad head cold I have -- which is why coherent posts from yours truly have been slow in recent days. Thanks to my team for picking up the slack while I've been sick.

Hope those of you in the Northeast corridor blanketed under all this find a way to have fun in it. But be careful -- have already seen a bit of never-driven-in-snow idiocy this morning.

-- Steve Clemons

The New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative is hosting the New America Foundation's first every sing-along policy discussion/performance featuring Cuban singer-songwriter Carlos Varela.

Carlos will be joined by New America Foundation Senior Fellow and New York Times Senior Writer Tim Golden as well as Washington Post Columnist and Associate Editor Eugene Robinson.

Tim Golden was formerly the Times' bureau chief in Mexico with responsibility for Cuba, and Eugene Robinson is author of Last Dance in Havana, a book about the end of the Fidel era and the next Cuban revolution.

Center for Democracy in the Americas Executive Director Sarah Stephens and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Director Steve Clemons will provide introductions.

The event is TODAY from 12:15pm - 1:45pm and will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

President Barack Obama meets with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during a bilateral at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Dec. 18, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

This photo captures a great deal -- an earnest, hardworking President of the United States trying to make his case to skeptical, stand-offish foreign leaders, in this case China's premier, whose buy-in is vital if a global climate change deal that is worth anything is to be struck.

-- Steve Clemons

I am enjoying receiving pretty quick updates from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the meetings President Obama is having in Copenhagen.

These kind of releases primarily give the nuts and bolts of who the President is meeting rather than anything on the substance of the sessions - but this kind of material from the White House is very helpful in understanding the gravity of what is going on there.

When one looks at the roster of world leaders that Obama is meeting with, the seriousness of what is being attempted at this climate change summit becomes more clear -- and consequently seems evident that there will be serious political consequences for many who have invested heavily in this process if nothing real is achieved.

As I have time today, I'll try to keep updating these notes from Robert Gibbs in the extended section link below.

Here is the latest from White House press director Robert Gibbs:

This may not seem like a big deal to many, but as one who watches Senate process closely, I believe that this seemingly minor exchange is a symptom of how stressed the US Senate is regarding health care reform and Senator Joseph Lieberman's role.

Minnnesota Senator Al Franken shut down Lieberman who wanted a "moment" to finish his remarks and asked "unanimous consent" to be able to do so.

Franken refused to play along.

Fascinating.

-- Steve Clemons

What follows below is a chunk of the President's speech today in Copenhagen.

I am not sure whether Obama's presence and behind the scenes arm-twisting of other leaders will secure a deal there, but I do think that his outline here today is pragmatic and sensible:

As the world's largest economy and the world's second largest emitter, America bears our share of responsibility in addressing climate change, and we intend to meet that responsibility. That is why we have renewed our leadership within international climate negotiations, and worked with other nations to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. And that is why we have taken bold action at home - by making historic investments in renewable energy; by putting our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.

These actions are ambitious, and we are taking them not simply to meet our global responsibilities. We are convinced that changing the way that we produce and use energy is essential to America's economic future - that it will create millions of new jobs, power new industry, keep us competitive, and spark new innovation. And we are convinced that changing the way we use energy is essential to America's national security, because it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and help us deal with some of the dangers posed by climate change.

So America is going to continue on this course of action no matter what happens in Copenhagen. But we will all be stronger and safer and more secure if we act together. That is why it is in our mutual interest to achieve a global accord in which we agree to take certain steps, and to hold each other accountable for our commitments.

After months of talk, and two weeks of negotiations, I believe that the pieces of that accord are now clear.

First, all major economies must put forward decisive national actions that will reduce their emissions, and begin to turn the corner on climate change. I'm pleased that many of us have already done so, and I'm confident that America will fulfill the commitments that we have made: cutting our emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020, and by more than 80 percent by 2050 in line with final legislation.

Second, we must have a mechanism to review whether we are keeping our commitments, and to exchange this information in a transparent manner. These measures need not be intrusive, or infringe upon sovereignty. They must, however, ensure that an accord is credible, and that we are living up to our obligations. For without such accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page.

Third, we must have financing that helps developing countries adapt, particularly the least-developed and most vulnerable to climate change. America will be a part of fast-start funding that will ramp up to $10 billion in 2012. And, yesterday, Secretary Clinton made it clear that we will engage in a global effort to mobilize $100 billion in financing by 2020, if - and only if - it is part of the broader accord that I have just described.

Mitigation. Transparency. And financing. It is a clear formula - one that embraces the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities. And it adds up to a significant accord - one that takes us farther than we have ever gone before as an international community.

-- Steve Clemons

One of the most striking aspects of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's visit to Washington last week was the attention paid to Turkey's increasingly active role in the Middle East. Several members of the Prime Minister's delegation made a point to emphasize that Turkey's growing commercial ties with its neighbors should be viewed as a positive development likely to contribute to regional stability, rather than as evidence of Turkey's "eastward turn" or "neo-Ottomanism."

It seems that the United States might learn a thing or two from the Turks about how to engage the political economic elements in the Middle East that want to integrate the region into the global economy.

To discuss how the United States can engage the rising Muslim middle class in the Middle East, the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program is hosting an event today featuring Vali Nasr, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of law and Diplomacy of Tufts University and author of Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World.

New America Foundation/Iran Initiative Director Flynt Leverett will moderate the event, which will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

Yesterday, the New America Foundation hosted a public forum which considered whether a coherent strategy or "Obama Doctrine" is emerging after nearly one year of President Obama's presidency.

Today, the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program is hosting an event with Nicholas Thompson, Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the critically acclaimed book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. The event will address the question, "Where Have America's Grand Strategists Gone?"

After the liberal hegemony of the 1990s and the neoconservative theory of military dominance and democratic peace theory of the 2000s, what is the Obama administration's theory of America's place in the world?

Another aspect of the grand strategy debate that I hope will be addressed is how the Cold War leadership managed to persuade the entire American political, military, and corporate establishments to adopt a consistent worldview and execute a coordinated strategy.

The event will run TODAY from 12:15pm - 1:45pm and will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

Photo credit: Carly/Hoboken Now

Anya Landau French is director of research for the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative and contributes regularly to the Havana Note.

On Friday afternoon, right before he voted to send the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2010 to President Obama's desk, Senator Bob Menendez, a Cuban American from New Jersey, threatened to vote against it because of a provision that would facilitate U.S. food sales to Cuba:

. . . [T]he process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that I have no intention - no intention - of continuing to vote for omnibus appropriations bills if they are going to jam foreign policy changes down throats of members, in what some consider "must pass" bills."

Senator Menendez wanted to be clear, so he reiterated the threat and put his colleagues "on notice" that (though he was about to vote in favor of this particular bill), in the future, if any of them add Cuba provisions, count him out.

What's all the fuss about? I'll just warn you now, it's much ado about nothing.

The video clip above is well worth the time -- focused on thinking through what "soft power" really means in today's world and how British and American efforts are similar and/or diverge.

I co-moderated the meeting, hosted by the New America Foundation, from Berlin over video skype, and the featured guest was British Council CEO Martin Davidson.

Thanks to Amjad Atallah, Co-Director of the New America Foundation Middle East Task Force, for moderating from Washington.

Andrew Kneale, writes more about the event.

-- Steve Clemons

Last Monday - the same day that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Washington to meet with President Obama - ten United States senators wrote the letter below to Turkey's Ambassador to the United States Nabi Sensoy - expressing concern about the recent deterioration of relations between Turkey and Israel. (Sensoy has since resigned, but that is another story)

The senators can hardly be faulted for raising this issue. The United States has a clear interest in constructive Turkish-Israeli relations, particularly since Turkey has served as an effective mediator between Israel and Syria and is the Muslim country with the most significant history of positive relations with Israel.

The letter is also fair because it reaffirms the importance of the U.S.-Turkey relationship and is careful not to convey the message that the United States is singularly concerned about Israel and is ungrateful for Turkey's cooperation in other areas.

But I hope that these Senators take the same level of interest in those issues on which the United States and Turkey are working together including stabilizing Iraq, diversifying Europe's energy supply and integrating the Middle East into the global economy.

The letter is below. The pdf - courtesy of the Weekly Standard - can be found here.

-- Ben Katcher

Is it too early in the Obama Administration to start using the phrase "Obama Doctrine" or is a clear vision and accompanying strategy emerging?

Between laying out his strategy for the war in Afghanistan last week and delivering a surprising oration on the Just War tradition upon receiving his Nobel Peace Prize this week, a doctrine is taking shape.

Peter Beinart, Senior Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, has written an excellent piece in Time Magazine on Obama's Afghanistan policy and what it says about his foreign policy vision. Beinart claims that Obama's strategy of refocusing or downsizing the war on terror is "partly a function of personality and mostly a function of circumstance."

President George W. Bush's overconfidence in the United States' ability to tackle "all terrorism-supporting movements and regimes" was based on an outmoded conception of U.S. military supremacy from the 1990s. But due to an overcommitted military and a poor domestic economy, the Obama Administration has been forced to reassess America's power and role in the world.

In stark contrast to what Beinart calls President Bush's "epic faith in the United States' military, economic and ideological power," the Obama administration realizes that it must make decisions based on America's current economic and military limitations, as well as on an understanding of the diversity of ideologically driven groups facing the United States today.

TODAY at 3:30 pm EST, the New America Foundation will host a panel discussion on how the Obama Doctrine is taking shape.

The event will feature Peter Beinart; Glenn Kessler, Diplomatic Correspondent for the Washington Post; and David A. Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times. Andres Martinez, director of the Bernard L. Schwartz fellows program at the New America Foundation will moderate.

This event will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Faith Smith

This morning, I learned in Politico that the AP's Ron Fournier, The Atlantic's James Fallows, the New York Times' Adam Nagourney, HuffPost's Sam Stein, and now Politico's Daniel Libit all are getting as much attention from, if not more, from "news hound" Daniel Lippman, an 19-year old George Washington University student who sends "us" a frequent stream of good corrections, things we might not have seen and should in the press or opinion world, and other items about the cool parties he expects to see me at.

Lippman is amazing -- and much appreciated. He really deserves the title "regular contributor" at The Washington Note as he sends so much that I use here.

One of the items Lippman brought to my attention this morning is that at 4:30 pm today, Vice President Joe Biden will administer the oath of office to former Senators Chuck Hagel and David Boren who will co-chair the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

This swearing-in is one that I really want to attend as I am a huge fan of Hagel's and think that the Obama/Biden team's stock just went up a great deal by getting him on board.

But alas -- closed to the press. But how about think tank friends?

Thanks again to Daniel Lippman for getting this news on top of my morning pile.

-- Steve Clemons

Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL-19), who will soon leave his post to take on the presidency of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation has just sent this morning an important note to Congressional Members about a New America Foundation poll of Israeli public attitudes yesterday.

New Israeli Poll Shows Strong Support for President Obama And Middle East Peace Process

Dear Colleague:

I wanted to bring to your attention the following poll released by the New America Foundation on December 10, 2009, focusing on Israeli public attitudes towards President Obama and his administration, U.S. efforts to resolve the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, and other pertinent policy issues facing Israelis. The New America Foundation poll can be found at the following website.

Over the last several months, there have been many articles suggesting that President Obama's efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and his robust Middle East engagement have been rejected by the Israeli public. There have also been reports suggesting U.S.-Israel relations have been damaged, and that President Obama favorability rating in Israeli is at 4%. Given the important polling information released by the New America Foundation this week, nothing could be further from the truth.

After reviewing the New America Foundation's national survey of 1,000 Israelis it is clear that there is greater support among the Israeli public for President Obama and American efforts to move the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward than previously reported. These poll numbers suggest the Israeli public is willing to move the peace process forward with its ally, the United States, and under the right circumstances. It also suggests that President Obama has a unique window of opportunity to directly engage the Israeli public to pursue a course of peace in cooperation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. It is my hope that President Obama will seize this opportunity and strongly consider visiting Israel and speak directly to the Israeli public, laying out his agenda for peace, security and prosperity in the Middle East and his strong support for U.S.-Israel relations.

According to the New American Foundation Poll, President Obama has a 41% favorable / 37% unfavorable rating among Israelis. His unfavorable rating is only four points higher than the unfavorable rating for George W. Bush, who is routinely characterized as very popular among Israelis. A majority of Israelis (55%) believes Obama is honest and trustworthy and 52% believe Obama will strengthen America's standing in the world.

Additionally, the poll reports that by a 65% to 31% percent margin, Israelis believe that the United States is the only powerful country that Israel can count on in the world today. Further, they do not believe Israel will be able to build alliances with other powers if relations with the U.S. ever deteriorate. According to the poll, if President Obama were to put forward a peace plan based on the previous Taba talks, such a plan would receive the support of a majority of Israelis if Prime Minister Netanyahu is on board (53% to 45%), while the public is evenly split (48%) if Prime Minister Netanyahu rejects the plan.

I strongly urge you to review the New America Foundation poll, which highlights an opportunity for President Obama and the United States to maintain and strengthen our efforts to promote Israeli-Arab peace over the coming weeks and months. This poll is a helpful reminder that the unbreakable bond shared by Americans and Israelis remains strong and that only through greater cooperation can we ensure peace, prosperity and security in the Middle East.

With best regards,

Robert Wexler
Member, US House of Representatives

-- Steve Clemons

I love holidays -- nearly all of them, but there is a clutzy side to me that sometimes reveals itself too much when I get into religious and cultural festivities that are a degree removed.

For instance, a couple of years ago -- walking through the William Penn Omni Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on the way to a fantastic holiday party -- I noticed that the light bulbs on a beautiful menorah had been partly unscrewed that some were lit and others were not.

I promptly "fixed" that and got them all blaring brightly again. Looked great -- but oops, learned later that I had messed with success.

Apologies to all -- but I still enjoy Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa (!), and all the rest.

Happy Hannukah to my many Jewish friends around the world -- and in particular, to those who read The Washington Note.

All best.

-- Steve Clemons

American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Desmond Lachman is an excellent forecaster and describer of economic trends and their likely consequences. I know Lachman has a reputation as a bear, but having had the privilege to meet him several times I can tell you he does not come across as a personality riven by bombast or paranoia.

That makes his latest article - appropriately titled "Lurking Dangers" - all the more scary.

After reading the first half of the article - which explains the risks to Europe and the euro posed by the recessions in Eastern European countries, Greece, and Ireland - it is depressing to read Lachman's analysis of the looming commercial real estate crash and subsequent regional banking crisis that he foresees in the United States.

I'm not sure what to say other than this is really scary stuff - and that throwing incomprehensible amounts of money into Afghanistan makes even less sense given the risks to the global economy that Lachman lays out.

-- Ben Katcher

Oliver Lough is a research intern at the New America Foundation.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Willy Lam broke a disturbing story on China's burgeoning police state:

"On December 2, senior state-security personnel met in Tianjin to fine-tune a new nationwide antisubversion network to help safeguard the Chinese Communist Party's ruling status. Official media says the network is aimed at fighting "the redoubled threats of separatism, infiltration and subversion" and stopping the leakage of state secrets.

In the words of State Security Minister Geng Huichang, the new effort aims to "win the 'people's warfare' in safeguarding national security and ensuring socio-political stability under new conditions." Big and medium-sized cities are setting up state security "leading groups" which will be headed by municipal Party secretaries. These leading groups set the agenda for police and security departments, and ensure that enough vigilantes and voluntary informants can be recruited from the populace."

It could be lifted from the pages of 1984. An informant in every house, gangs of pro-government thugs kicking dissenters into line, police chiefs waging 'people's warfare' against subversive elements. It's certainly a sinister prospect. Fortunately for just about everyone, this bout of nostalgia for totalitarian days of yore is also likely to prove unworkable.

A great deal has been made over the past couple of years about China's whizz-kid attempts to control the flow of information online, or the brutal treatment of high-profile dissidents. But while such incidents deserve attention, they mask the fact that Beijing's ability to project its power into the nooks and crannies of everyday life was compromised years ago.

Ever since China adopted a pseudo-federal model of government back in the 1980's, state authority has become severely fragmented. Public security services are now largely organized, monitored and funded at a local level, meaning that they are often under-funded and, as a recent scandal in the mega-city of Chongqing has shown, astonishingly corrupt. Directives from Beijing are now skewed and often plain ignored as they filter through various levels of competing interests.

The police aren't the only ones not coming to heel. When it comes to managing the economy, Beijing often finds itself running into problems with the locals. In full collusion with regional governments, businesses regularly start work on projects they know are unlikely to meet with central approval in the hope that, by the time anyone notices, calling a halt to them will be more trouble than it's worth. Earlier this year, China's premier Wen Jiabao was forced for a second time to personally block the 'illegal' construction of several multi-million dollar dam projects in the south of the country.

There is no doubt that China is still run by a domineering regime capable of some very unpleasant things, but it would be a mistake to imagine that whenever Beijing snaps it's fingers, the entire country springs to attention. Behind the overblown pomposity of Minister Geng's remarks, there is perhaps more than a little hint of wishful thinking. The Stasi rarely dwelt on their grand plans for 'ensuring socio-political stability' - they were far too busy knocking on doors in the middle of the night.

-- Oliver Lough

The Washington Note Publisher Steve Clemons is flying off to Portland, Oregon this evening to speak to the Portland Business Alliance tomorrow on the subject of America's "Green Trade Deficit."

Steve will be delivering a presentation based on "Green Trade Balance," a New America Foundation/Economic Growth Program policy paper.

As New America Foundation policy analyst Sam Sherraden argues in an article for CNN Online, "Job creation for production of green technologies may occur far more outside than inside the United States. Investing in green energy will create jobs, but many of these jobs may be created elsewhere."

After recent trips to China, Japan and Germany -- not only the world's three leading capital surplus countries but all leaders far ahead of the United States in renewable energy R&D, manufacturing and commercial and industrial deployment -- Clemons is well-positioned to discuss the comparative aspects of the Obama administration's green jobs and renewable energy policy targets.

Steve will be discussing how the United States can engineer the kinds of public-private partnerships necessary to ensure that green technologies are developed here in the United States.

The details for the event can be found here.

-- Ben Katcher

A new survey commissioned by the New America Foundation and conducted this November by Gerstein Agne Strategic Communications reveals that Israeli opinions of President Obama and the peace process contrast starkly with popular reports -- though Israeli support for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his security-focused policies also remains strong.

In particular, the poll discredits what has become a bit of an urban legend that claims that President Obama has a 4% approval rating among Israelis.

To discuss the results of the poll, the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force is hosting an event TODAY, Thursday December 10 from 9:15am - 1:00pm.

This event will stream live here at The Washington Note.

The agenda for today's session is below.

Panel I - 9:45am to 11:00am: 'Presentation of NAF Israel Attitudes Poll Results and Response'

panelists
Jim Gerstein
Founding Partner, Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications

Gil Tamary
Washington Bureau Chief
Israel TV10

Toni Verstandig
Senior Policy Adviser, Center for Middle East Peace
Director, Middle East Programs
The Aspen Institute

moderator
Susan Glasser
Executive Editor, Foreign Policy Magazine

Panel II- 11:00am to 12:00pm: 'The American Politics Portal: Any Implications from Poll Results?'

panelists
Dr. Stephen P. Cohen
Author, Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East
Founder and President, Institute for Middle East Peace and Development

James Pinkerton
Contributor, Fox News Channel
Senior Adviser, Huckabee for President Campaign

Heather Hurlburt
Executive Director, National Security Network
Former Special Assistant and Speech Writer to President Clinton

moderator
Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program
New America Foundation
Publisher, TheWashingtonNote.com

Panel III- 12:00pm to 1:00pm: 'Taking Stock of Current Developments in the Region and What are the Policy Options Going Forward'

panelists
Shibley Telhami
Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development
University of Maryland
Non-Resident Fellow, Saban Center
The Brookings Institution

Daniel Levy
Senior Research Fellow
Co-Director, Middle East Task Force
New America Foundation

Brian Katulis
Senior Fellow
Center for American Progress

moderator
Amjad Atallah
Co-Director, Middle East Task Force
New America Foundation

-- Steve Clemons

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, in response to declining interest in H1N1 immunization from risk group citizens, opened up the immunization pool to those who wanted it.

I'm out at the colonial era founded liberal arts college founded in 1782, Washington College, and decided to go ahead and get immunized. I meet tens of thousands a people each year and have begun to worry about the stuff I am picking up from just so many handshakes and encounters.

So, probably a good move -- but I do hope that those in need and those at risk go out and get immunized.

Thanks to Governor O'Malley and Washington College for making this vaccine available.

More disturbingly, I learned yesterday from very reliable sources that some Chinese farming operations are giving tamiflu directly to their pigs -- while not necessarily altering the disease-incubating conditions in which they are raised and farmed. This runs the risk of dangerous viruses evolving key tolerances to Tamiflu, and is really dangerous.

Note to Chinese government authorities: Send some serious top-down instructions to halt this practice.

-- Steve Clemons

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has this soft side that Ted Kennedy often connected with -- and it's on display in this video (hat tip to Adele Stan and Mike Rogers).

Apparently, the Atlantic Monthly's Jeffrey Goldberg egged Hatch into doing this -- and the song is sort of fun. I've listened to it a few times -- and it's growing on me.

Of the lyrics, Goldberg writes:

His lyrics are not postmodern or cynical, which is a blessing, because I for one have tired of the Adam Sandlerization of Judaism in America. Yes, we are, as a people, funny (at least when compared to other people, such as Croatians) but our neuroses, well-earned though they may be, have caused us to lacerate our own traditions, which are in fact (to borrow from Barack Obama) awesome. The story of Hanukkah is a good case in point -- maybe the perfect one.

This would have even been more cool if Goldberg and the Senator had gotten Barack Obama into the act.

Happy Hannukah!

-- Steve Clemons

I have to admit that since watching Afghanistan Commander General Stanley McChrystal's mesmerizing interview on 60 Minutes, I have made time nearly every day to get back in shape and do some running. He is impressive on many levels -- and wrote in his leaked analysis of America's challenges in Afghanistan one of the very best treatments I have seen, steely-eyed in the bleakness of circumstances there.

I am also impressed today that he is going on Al Jazeera English's Riz Khan Show live at 3:30 pm EST. Riz will be feeding live questions to General McChrystal as well. I was invited to join as an observer today at the studio but am on the wrong side of the Chesapeake Bay to make that practical.

While I disagree pretty substantially with McChrystal's -- and now President Obama's -- prescriptions for the Afghanistan quagmire, I think that it's excellent that he's reaching out broadly to varied audiences.

Next time he puts a war plan together for Afghanistan though, he should include people less surge-happy than Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, who were the primary sculptors of the Iraq surge. If he wanted some tilting his direction, then the general should consider my colleagues Steve Coll, author of the book on the subject -- Ghost Wars, or al Qaeda-tracking Peter Bergen. For those on the skeptic side, I am sure that Flynt Leverett, Andrew Bacevich, Paul Pillar, Stephen Walt, or I would be happy to give him some straight, contrarian counsel.

Bravo to General McChrystal though for reaching out to Al Jazeera.

This shows a substantial shift in the Obama administration's direction in dealing with Arab media.

I won't forget when one day I was at the Democratic National Convention about to do a spot with Al Jazeera English which was co-habiting a booth with a local Fox affiliate when then DNC Chairman Howard Dean walked in to do an interview that had been arranged by his staff and when he saw the Al Jazeera signage said, "Hey, wait, I can't do this!" . . .and then tore out of the berth overlooking the convention floor.

Very glad we are getting passed the era of not talking to the part of the world we are spending a lot of time messing with.

-- Steve Clemons

Sitting in my Berlin hotel room last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning at about 1:30 am, I saw a note from the White House come through the transom that was not about the President's West Point speech on Afghanistan and Pakistan but rather about new presidential appointments.

While foreign policy junkies were focused on America's war challenges, the White House released news that it has appointed my friend and frequent Washington Note blogger Douglas Rediker to its international economic team to serve as United States Alternate Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund.

Long time Department of Treasury official David Mills was also nominated by the President to serve as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement at the Department of Commerce.

Rediker has been serving as Director of the New America Foundation Global Strategic Finance Initiative and is one of the country's leading commentators on the re-emergence of state capitalism as a key feature of the global economy.

This is an excellent choice by the White House as Doug Rediker is highly competent on both macro and micro policy questions - and understands both the strengths and limits of markets.

Congratulations Doug -- from the readers and team at The Washington Note and the New America Foundation.

-- Steve Clemons

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) is speaking at Brookings today on the Obama administration's course in Afghanistan.

His speech, while largely supportive of the frame that Obama has brought to the challenge -- a narrowed mission, discussion of an offramp, and more -- also includes lingering doubts.

He stated:

There is much that is commendable in the president's plan. I applaud his focus on ensuring that Afghanistan's future is in the hands of Afghanistan's people. I believe his decision that our commitment is not open ended, and that we begin to withdraw troops in July of 2011, is important in getting the Afghans to take responsibility for their own security. And I believe the inclusion of efforts to reintegrate into Afghan civil society local Taliban fighters with loose affiliation to the Taliban's extremist ideology is an important step, one we pursued with great success in Iraq and that commanders such as General McChrystal believe can be successful in Afghanistan.

But I am concerned that the large new commitment of U.S. combat forces included in the plan may undermine the over-arching goal of preparing the Afghans to secure their own success. Because of those concerns, I have been and will continue to urge the administration to focus intently on the training aspect of our mission.

The confusing part of this debate hits on the July 2011 exit plan, outlined by Obama but watered down by Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton and Michael Mullen in later Congressional testimony. Levin states:

Finally, the much-discussed July 2011 date for the beginning of U.S. troop reductions is vital. It performs a "forcing function," as Ambassador Eikenberry and General McChrystal said yesterday. So long as the Karzai government sees an open-ended U.S. commitment to carry the fight, there is too little motivation to energize its own institutions - either to provide accountable governance and quality services, or to provide for Afghanistan's security.

President Karzai himself has acknowledged the value of the July 2011 date, saying, "it is good that we are facing a deadline" and that his nation must begin to stand on its own. But if deeds don't follow those words, we will find ourselves in a frustrated mission. The Afghan government must begin a meaningful anti-corruption campaign, work much harder to provide basic services, develop plans to reintegrate local, reconcilable Taliban fighters into Afghan civil society, recruit the security forces needed to ensure the country's long-term security, and employ those forces aggressively.

If the Afghan government honors these commitments, we and our allies should renew our commitment to helping it along the way - without taking on the whole job ourselves. We owe it to the men and women of our military, who have served so well and bravely, act to improve the immediate security situation we face in Afghanistan. But that nation's future can only be secured by its own people.

I also think that the President needed to sketch an exit window, one that is more firm than soft.

However, the quicksand that Obama's leading national security cabinet members and military advisers have poured around the July 2011 date actually gives Karzai an incentive to "not succeed too much" but to continue to seem "earnestly committed" to America's general goals. Karzai doesn't want US forces to leave -- not while he is around.

In fact, Karzai has asked for fifteen years of security aid.

So, rather than being a "forcing function," the July 2011 date may actually be a date to make sure the Afghan security forces are seen to be working real hard but having great difficulty. The forcing function would be to keep American forces in theater, not to allow them the offramp the President outlined.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Nicholas Kitchen, Editor of IDEAS Reports and a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS -- or for acronym-challenged, Diplomacy & Strategy at the London School of Economics

Barack Obama: Last Transatlantic President?

When Barack Obama took office in January, expectations of what the new President could bring to international affairs were stratospheric. If his name, race, origins and upbringing were anything to go by, Barack Hussein Obama was a revolutionary choice of the American people.

Europeans celebrated the swearing in of a President whose "mere presence at the White House pulls America up", according to Le Monde. Here was an individual of clear intellect and extraordinary eloquence who promised a new era of American multilateralism and a subtler approach to the intricacies of international diplomacy. Comparisons with his predecessor, derided in Europe as much for his parochialism as his good vs. evil approach to foreign policy, only served to heighten these hopes, with Die Zeit declaring that "The Age of Stupidity is Over".

Yet such high expectations were at odds with the litany of challenges facing the new Administration. Obama's inbox included two wars, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the intensifying problem of global climate change, a resurgent and belligerent Russia, an Iranian regime intent on stirring regional instability and gaining nuclear weapons - as too were North Korea - and global opinion of American leadership at all-time lows.

Domestically, the new President faced not only the challenge of reversing a deep recession, but had also pledged to tackle that most difficult of public policy challenges: reforming healthcare. Taken together, no President had taken office under more difficult circumstances since Franklin Roosevelt.

That the FDR comparison was so often made ensured that Obama's first hundred days were more intensely scrutinized than any previous President. The initial announcements were surprisingly far-reaching, as the Democrats exploited the Republicans' disarray to push hard on all fronts, as if, noted one observer, he was trying to accomplish one thousand days' work of change in one tenth of the amount of time.

Guantanamo, the symbol of Bush's deeply flawed Global War on Terror, would be closed, and the policies of waterboarding halted. American combat forces would be withdrawn from Iraq within eighteen months as the President sought to hasten the transition to full Iraqi civilian and military authority. The repeal of two Bush administrations blocks on funding to groups that allow abortions and for research on embryonic stem cells similarly met well with more liberal European opinion. The President's advocacy of Keynesian stimulus policies with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also bought the United States more into line with the social-democratic conception of market democracy more common in Europe.

The candidate that had drawn a crowd of 200,000 to hear him speak in Berlin shared, it appeared, the beliefs and priorities of his European allies.

A year on the outlook for Transatlantic cooperation has not lived up to the promise of those first months, as a series of diplomatic gaffes have soured relations with European leaders. The new administration returned a bust of Churchill that Tony Blair had loaned to the White House following the September 11th attacks, and followed this up by reciprocating Gordon Brown's gift upon his visit to Washington - a pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship, the HMS Gannet - with a box of DVDs.

This lack of diplomatic tact might have been considered trivial had these incidents not been followed up with the relegating of Britain's cherished "special relationship" to the status of a "special partnership", a partnership which was made to appear more of a nuisance when Obama repeatedly refused to grant Brown a private meeting at the United Nations in September. That Britain had ignored the expressed wishes of the White House in releasing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, hardly told a tale of close transatlantic cooperation.

Other European leaders have fared little better, with both Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel expressing their annoyance with the US administration's attitude towards sensitive historical anniversaries: Sarkozy over Obama's flying visit to mark the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings and Merkel over the President's refusal to attend the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall.

These diplomatic contretemps were the outward face of more serious divides: over the best response to the financial crisis and in particular the issue of regulation of complex financial services instruments, with Mirek Topolanek using the Czech Republic's presidency of the European Union to describe American bailouts and stimulus policies as "the road to hell".

Transatlantic relations have of course experienced profound disagreements in the past, including when the Alliance was more tightly bound together in its shared opposition to the Soviet Union. But there is reason to believe that the current coolness is an expression of something more fundamental than family squabbles over policy details.

In the last ten years the world has in many ways left behind the post-Cold War era, and as a result other relationships have come to matter more for the United States than its alliance with Europe.

In advance of his trip to Asia, Obama announced himself the 'Pacific President'. There were visits to longstanding American allies in the region in Japan and South Korea, as well as attending the Asia-Pacific Cooperation Forum where the President described the United States as "undoubtedly a Pacific nation". For a man raised in Hawaii, this kind of talk should perhaps come as no surprise, but it reflects an underlying reality in world politics over the last ten years which is now being made explicit: the rise to superpower status of China.

Obama spent four days in China on his Asia trip (compared to just one in Japan) and at every major international summit it has been China's President Hu Jintao that Obama has most sought to speak to. The geopolitical relationship between the two countries is complex. China's rapid economic growth has been predicated upon exports to the United States, and tensions exist between the two countries over what China's export subsidies and the artificially low level of the Yuan. At the same time, the United States has essentially been paying for its Chinese imports on credit: China now holds $2.27 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest cache, most of which is in dollar-denominated bonds.

As the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted in November, the United States today is no longer the world's biggest creditor; it is the world's biggest debtor, with China as the largest overseas holder of U.S. debt instruments. Not that this puts China in a position of dominance over the United States, far from it - American consumers remain the guarantors of Chinese growth, and by extension, the domestic legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.

What it does mean is that the United States and China are locked together in a symbiotic relationship that defines our world, and whilst each seeks to leverage the relationship for their own gain - China for example has attempted to make inroads in America's structural power by hinting that the dollar's status as reserve currency could come under question - each knows that it is dependent upon the other.

What Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the "G2" is the relationship that defines our age.

Not that Europe can complain. The Lisbon Treaty presented the European Union with the opportunity to make more of an impact on world affairs, but the appointments of international unknowns reflected the major European powers' reluctance to pool control over foreign policy.

Whilst Tony Blair's "candidacy" was never likely to generate enough consensus within European capitals and publics still mindful of the transatlantic rift generated by the Iraq war, the decision to eschew the appointment of a internationally recognizable figurehead for Europe who could drive a truly European foreign policy means that Washington will remain, in the words of one prominent American observer echoing Henry Kissinger's three-decades-old complaint, "unsure of who to call" when it wants to speak to Europe.

On Afghanistan too, Europe has been reluctant, at best prepared to await the announcement of a new American strategy, at worst appearing to bandwagon on the back of American power when the perception in the US is that Europe's security interests are at least as threatened by the situation in Afghanistan as are United States'. Some in Europe have come to believe that its interests are more bound up in relations with Russia, whose divide and rule policy towards EU member states over energy policy has to date prevented a policy consensus emerging on that issue, and Turkey, which forms the gateway between the European and Islamic worlds and whose succession to EU member status generates hostility in much of Europe.

Yet the truth remains that if Europe wants to be a major player on the world stage it needs to think of its role more strategically and systemically if the United States is not to regard the relationship with China as its most important bilateral tie.

It is ironic that the President whose election was so lauded throughout Europe may therefore turn out to be the President under whose tenure neorealist predictions of the demise of the Transatlantic Alliance come to pass.

There is no doubt that the United States - from an ideological and political perspective - would prefer to partner with Europe in the management of international relations. Whether Europe and America have, or are prepared to construct for themselves, sufficiently similar interests to make such partnership a possibility, is however very much in doubt.

If Obama really is the United States' first Pacific President, he will surely be its last Transatlantic President.

-- Nicholas Kitchen

The Carnegie Endowment's Karim Sadjadpour is one of the best commentators explicating the Iranian Government's behavior in the business. He recently did and interview with Middle East Progress on the state of play in Iran that I found insightful.

Sadjadpour tilts toward the direction that the Iranian regime's legitimacy is eroding but that the US has to deal with it. He seems ambivalent about sanctions and their efficacy and pessimistic about the prospects for a breakthrough while the Supreme Leader and the hardliners he has lined up remain in place.

From my perspective, the sanctions path on trying to influence Iran's behavior has more to do with providing a focus for American frustration and emotion than achieving a successful course correction with Iran. Neither the bill that House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman has been pushing in Congress nor a more watered down sanctions effort from the United Nations Security Council will influence Iran's calculations at this point.

What the sanctions may do, however, beyond making those angry with Iran's behavior feel better is help give Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the external provocation to further justify their actions and themselves and permit a further consolidation of power. Sadjadpour seems to suggest that this purge of moderates and pragmatists is mostly done -- but I suspect that there is still a great deal of fragility and internal mistrust among Iran's top elites and even within the sprawling machinery of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

But what is also clear from Sadjadpour's assessment is that Iran has a rigid, more suspicious-of-its-own-team leadership that has diminished capacity to solve problems and has diminished aura across the broad Middle East.

I will share a clip below of some of Karim Sadjadpour's views from the Middle Eeast Progress interview, but recommend reading the entire thing.

I think it's also clear that the US government and allies should be working over time in finding ways to work with Iran's allies and proxies, who in this time of Iran's weakness, may be more interested in diversifying their portfolio of relationships. In my view, that means expediting a peace process with Syria -- and also in my book would be trying to find a way that ends the isolation of Hamas and Hezbollah.

It's not possible for the US to be the interlocutors with these two organizations on a lot of political levels -- but it may be time to remove the US veto on say, the French -- Jean-David Levitte would be my choice -- to begin seeing if there is a track that leads to more responsible and potentially internationally acceptable behavior for these two groups.

It's important not to think that simply talking to these groups changes their DNA or core views -- but the process could lead to a distancing at some level between them and Iran.

Sadjadpour's thoughts follow:

Middle East Progress: The Iranian government has yet to agree to the IAEA proposal for enrichment of Iran's low enriched uranium in a third country. What do you think are the aims of the government with regards to the proposal?

Karim Sadjadpour: Over the last several years--and especially since last June's tainted presidential elections--any remaining moderates or pragmatists that were once part of the Iranian government's decision-making structure have essentially been purged from the system. Today the country is being run by a hardline Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who is surrounded by likeminded ideologues who have two overarching instincts: mistrust and defiance. They generally perceive proposals and overtures that are endorsed by the United States as poison pills. Individuals who were capable of deal-making--like former President Hashemi Rafsanjani--are now on the outside looking

MEP: But what about someone like Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani, who seemed willing to make deals when he was Iran's nuclear negotiator, but is now sounding more strident?

Sadjadpour: Larijani is a good litmus test. While less than a decade ago he was referred to in the Western press as an arch hard-liner, in the current context he's thought of as a pragmatist. If the color spectrum of the Iranian regime now ranges from pitch black to dark grey, Larijani is dark grey. But given that Larijani's rise to power has been based on his fealty to Khamenei, he's not going to say anything out of step with the Leader.

MEP: What do you make of the recent announcement about the ten new uranium enrichment plants?

Sadjadpour: I think it's mostly bluster. To put it into perspective: it has taken Iran over two decades to complete the enrichment facility at Natanz, and it's still not fully operational. Creating ten Natanz-size enrichment facilities, at a time when they're facing more international scrutiny than ever, would take decades, and is certainly not an imminent threat. To the credit of the Obama administration they've projected the poise of a superpower and have largely chosen to ignore Iran's bombast.

MEP: If the IAEA proposal doesn't lead anywhere, what are the options for next steps for the United States and the international community?

Sadjadpour: I think the door of dialogue and engagement will remain open, but the Obama administration will be forced into policies--sanctions and other punitive measures--they would have liked to avoid.

In contrast to the Bush administration, I think the Europeans, and even the Russians and Chinese, recognize that since Obama's inauguration last June the United States has made numerous overtures to Iran, made a good-faith diplomatic effort to change the tone and context of the U.S.-Iran relationship, but Tehran was either unable or unwilling to reciprocate. For this reason the Obama administration is in a much better position to attain a robust international sanctions regime than the Bush administration was.

MEP: You spoke a little bit about Russia and China. What is your sense of how far they are willing to go in terms of putting pressure on Iran?

Sadjadpour: Both countries are instinctively opposed to sanctions, but Iranian intransigence has put them in a bind. In the last few years, Russia's modus operandi has been to endorse sanctions against Iran that they themselves have watered down. This way they can claim to the U.S. and EU that they're supportive of their position, while privately also reassuring the Iranians that they're sympathetic to Tehran's position. U.S. officials feel more confident than ever that Russian patience with Iran is waning, but it remains to be seen what that means in concrete terms.

One of the reasons why Russian support is so important to the U.S. is because China has tended to follow Moscow's lead on Iran policy. The China-Iran relationship is a more straightforward commercial relationship--China needs Iran's energy--and I don't think anyone believes that China will completely sever its economic ties with Iran. That said, though China has signed a lot of seemingly lucrative memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with Tehran, few deals have actually been executed, and because of the headaches of dealing with Iran the Chinese have increasingly sought out energy relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In essence, China will not be willing or able to singlehandedly fill the enormous vacuum left behind by Western companies in Iran.

-- Steve Clemons

Some quick thoughts on Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's visit to Washington this week.

-It is clear that Turkey and the United States have different approaches to Iran's nuclear program. The United States is still calling for "zero enrichment" and is threatening additional sanctions if Iran does not cede to the P5+1 demands. In contrast, Turkey has maintained that Iran has a right to nuclear power, though it should not develop a nuclear weapon. Prime Minister Erdogan generated headlines and aroused Western criticism when he traveled to Tehran last month and called Iranian President Ahadinejad a "friend."

During a speech last night sponsored by the Foundation for Political, Economic, and Social Research (SETA) - the first Turkish think-tank to establish a presence in Washington - the Prime Minister acknowledged that Iran's nuclear power capability represents a "threat" to the region and the world, but called on all countries to work toward nuclear disarmament. The notion of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East is not a new one, and has been discussed recently by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.

Western analysts must understand that Turkey does not have a choice between friendly or antagonistic relations with Iran. (Neither does the United States, but that's another story). Turkey shares a large border with Iran and has a very important and growing energy relationship with the Islamic Republic. Turkey is concerned about Iran's nuclear program, but cannot support U.S. or P5+1 policies that seek to isolate the regime. They believe that this is a tactical mistake and a risk Turkey cannot afford to take. The Turks believe that more diplomacy can lead to a successful outcome.

-Prime Minister Erdogan said that analysts lamenting Turkey's "eastward turn" are basing their conclusions on "ill-based rumors."

The evidence at least partially supports Erdogan's claim that Turkey is merely reestablishing relations with its neighbors in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus with whom it had "unnaturally" distant relations as a result of the Cold War.

At a briefing sponsored by the New America Foundation/Iran Project today, Turkish Foreign Affairs Committee Spokesman Suat Kiniklioglu explained that Turkey's trade with 11 of its neighbors (including Russia) has risen from $2.76 billion in 2000 to $28 billion in 2007. Clearly economics and unexploited trade opportunities explain at least part of Turkey's recent activism in the Middle East.

For those unwilling to take the Turkish officials at their word, the International Crisis Group's Hugh Pope, a vigorous proponent of Turkey's European Union aspirations and western orientation, offers an important, objective analysis of Turkey's engagement with its neighbors that largely supports Erdogan's and Kinikloglu's statements. Pope makes a compelling case that suspicions of Turkey's "neo-Ottoman" turn have been blown out of proportion and concludes that the AKP's main foreign policy goal is "doing business."

-Prime Minister Erdogan criticized the European Union for placing "enormous obstacles" in the way of its accession negotiations. This statement refers primarily to the eight accession chapters blocked by the Republic of Cyprus (an EU member) due to the ongoing political conflict between Turks and Greeks on that island, as well as French and German statements that Turkey is not "part of Europe."

Prime Minister Erdogan is certainly correct that "political prejudice" plays a role in some European countries' opposition to Turkey's membership - and he is also right that this is bad for Europe and bad for Turkey. But Turkey will not meet the criteria for EU membership until it further liberalizes its constitution and ensures greater respect for fundamental personal freedoms. Prime Minister Erdogan seemed to acknowledge this point when he joked that if Europe gives up on Turkey, Turkey will turn the Copenhagen Criteria into the Istanbul Criteria. That is, Turkey will continue to reform regardless of how the EU process plays out.

-Chuck Hagel introduced Prime Minister Erdogan last night and said that "no country had been a more indispensable ally to the United States since the end of the second World War than Turkey."

-Turkey's desire for respect among members of the international community has been a common theme of official statements this week. Chief Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister Ibrahim Kalin said at the New America Foundation briefing today that Turkey resented that European countries did not include Turkey in its initial deliberations about sending a peacekeeping force to Lebanon or choosing Anders Fogh Rasmussen (who has made comments questioning whether Turkey belongs in Europe) as the next Secretary General of NATO . Prime Minister Erdogan also mentioned in his speech that he interpreted Israel's decision to make him wait 35 minutes in a car before entering the Gaza strip as a sign of disrespect.

-Finally, I am disappointed that no major announcement on U.S.-Turkey cooperation was made at the White House. We need a strategic dialogue with Turkey that goes beyond the commercial working group announced yesterday.

More soon.

-- Ben Katcher

Hillary Clinton would have probably flown more miles this year had she not badly injured her wrist in a nasty State Department parking lot fall, but she still logged a very impressive 185,731 in flight miles so far this year.

Andrea Mitchell, master of ceremonies at the US Global Leadership Coalition 2009 Tribute Dinner and senior diplomatic correspondent for NBC News, told me that she called State and got the very latest numbers as Secretary Clinton was just back from Brussels. Boeing Corporate President James Bell said, "and thanks for flying all those miles on Boeing."

Hillary Clinton was last night the most compelling and comfortably confident I have seen her since taking on the responsibility of serving as Barack Obama's Secretary of State.

When I was standing in a threesome with Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Eric Schwartz and the USGLC's John Glenn at the very end of a long line waiting to get through security into the thousand person dinner at DC's Grand Hyatt, I saw Hillary Clinton and her entourage pass us by. She caught my eye and I said, "Any chance you can help us out??"

Hillary's reply: "Oh, are you guys trying to crash the party and cause some trouble?"

Hillary Clinton was relaxed off stage and on last evening - and my view is that she knows well and enjoys speaking about the nuances of American "smart power" as opposed to the "hard power" national security portfolio.

Clinton is sometimes characterized as a liberal hawk, an interventionist, a Democratic neocon, a person who clings a little too tightly to the rhetoric of "coercive diplomacy." But last night I saw and heard a different Secretary of State than the one who seems to tilt easily towards force and triggers.

Clinton explained more fairly and fully the concept of "smart power" than I had heard in any of her speeches of late. She talked about elevating the roles of "diplomacy" and "development" alongside the "third D" of "defense."

She stated that the world's challenges today - the big ones - are so sizeable that "no nation can meet today's challenges - or seize its opportunities - alone. Leadership in this era means stepping up to the plate and galvanizing others to do the same." She is right. She didn't offer swagger or platitudes about American exceptionalism. She talked about creating lasting, sustained change in the international system in concert with other stewards of the global order.

There was one disappointment in her talk, a mistake that she should not continue to make.

Clinton expressed her support, obviously, of the surge of US forces to Afghanistan - noting that the US would soon send 30,000 troops to buttress those already in theater, along with another 7,000 pledged troops for ISAF allies. But then she said:

When I became Secretary of State, there were about 320 civilians in Afghanistan, and many of them were on six-month tours. And we have been on the path to more than tripling that number, and we have one-year tours and we have very specific assignments for the people who are being sent to Afghanistan.

This is all true - but what I have learned in the last week is that Secretary Clinton's own SCRS group (called the Secretary's Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization) - which is designed to be the short term, applied shock therapy for rapidly stabilizing conflict zones and which is considered by some to be the first solid, tangible deliverable in the State Department's "smart power" arsenal is not being used by Secretary Clinton and her team in Afghanistan.

Instead, the 300 plus civilian personnel being ramped up to approximately 900 civilians mentioned by Clinton last night at this "smart power" tribute dinner largely supported by private businesses and NGOS are "private contractors" hired by State.

There are rumors of internal bureaucratic strife between Deputy Secretary of State for Management Jack Lew and the folks who run SCRS, which reports directly to the Secretary, as well as with AfPak envoy Richard Holbrooke who according to several State Department sources wanted none of the internally trained professionals ready to go into the field and wanted to hire contractors on the outside.

There is probably more to the back story on this than I have at the moment, but last evening's focus on "smart power" seemed perfectly designed to highlight the success and personnel output that Secretary Clinton's SCRS (just say it Secretary Clinton - the Secretary's Coordinator for Reconstruction and Development. . .) could have for her Department. As it is those emerging from the program are being dispersed here and there around the world - but not in Afghanistan.

But beyond this bureaucratic hiccup, Hillary Clinton's focus in her speech on women, girls' education, health, development, poverty, water, and the like - her mention of a "Global Partnership Initiative" in which the Department of State and US AID had partnered with General Mills and African farmers in 15 Sub-Saharan nations to provide healthy and fortified foods; her salute to the Millennium Development Goals and the development work of the Millennium Challenge Corporation; her passion about global justice, international law, and human rights were all on display last night.

Clinton said that her Department of State would re-establish and re-brand USAID as the "premier development agency in the world."

Hillary Clinton also revealed strategic alliances with Google's Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board of the New America Foundation, who recently committed to digitize all of the Iraqi National Museum archives and artworks as well as to launch an Iraq Government YouTube Channel to promote transparency in government.

Clinton bundled all of this into what she termed "21st Century Statecraft". She noted that even at the height of the Cold War with many nuclear warheads pointed at each other, the Soviets and Americans had never stopped talking (she might consider then a shift in US-Cuba interactions?).

Bottom line last night was that Clinton was on top of this portfolio. Global justice, climate change, development, human rights, women's rights - all of this is her thing.

Lately, I have felt that Hillary Clinton has been trying to prove herself in the hard power arena - competing with Generals and war counselors to Obama to show that she too could hang on the tough challenges of Iran, North Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

This reminds me of the old Soviet studies days when scholars, government officials, and other public intellectuals who watched for tiny shifts in Politburo politics or who were expert in the US-Soviet arms race - or arms reduction talks - were at the highest rung of national security experts. Those with expertise in anything else - like Japan at that time, or Latin America - were lesser mortals.

I attended and heard an interesting speech that Hillary Clinton gave on the Obama administration's nuclear non-proliferation efforts for the US Institute of Peace - and she just didn't have any of the confidence or ease of thought that she demonstrated last night. She misstated a key point in her speech then that the US would oppose any new expansion of full fuel cycle capacity in the world (implying this to be the case even if consistent with the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty). She also recently experienced rough, unforgiving encounters during trips to Pakistan and Israel/Palestine.

But these aren't her strong suit themes.

After watching Hillary Clinton last night, I saw that she has a lot to say and much depth in the question of how to make "smart power" something more than a thin or vapid phrase. She has thought about this stuff and is on to something in the way that she frames "21st century statecraft."

Kudos to Clinton and the US Global Leadership Coalition last night for an impressive dinner - that featured at the end young Republican Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL) speaking on behalf of many other Congressman and US Senators in a letter to the President calling for a robust increase in America's foreign aid and international engagement budgets.

This is a big change. Aaron Schock has a passport - and he's convincing many of his colleagues to come out of the dark ages and recognize the importance of US global engagement.

Hillary's speech, on the whole, gets my applause - and Aaron Schock was a great cap on a very impressive, internationalist evening.

-- Steve Clemons

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is leading a delegation of top Turkish political and business leaders in Washington D.C. this week. Erdogan met with President Obama this afternoon, after which the two leaders offered brief remarks and President Obama answered just two questions from reporters at the White House (one of which was about the domestic economy).

While the two leaders' public statements were typically brief and laudatory (transcript below the fold), Erdogan did make one noteworthy statement.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the attention paid by analysts to strategic issues (Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iran) in the Middle East, the most consequential statement concerned the possibility of increased societal cooperation between Turkey and the United States.

Here is what Prime Minister Erdogan said as part of his prepared remarks:

Of course, there are many sides to the development of this relationship -- be it in the economic area, in the areas of science, art, technology, political areas and military areas.

We have also appointed two people from our side to act as counterparts in order to liaise with their American counterparts to continue on this process. Those two people are the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Ali Babacan; and the Minister of State responsible for economic affairs, Mr. Zafer Caglayan.

As many Turkey-watchers have pointed out over the years, relations between Americans and Turks have suffered from a dearth of commercial and cultural ties between the two nations. The result has been that Turkey does not have a large enough constituency in Washington to maintain strong relations between the two countries when political disagreements inevitably arise between Washington and Ankara.

I will be watching over the next several weeks to see whether Prime Minister Erdogan's statement is backed up by concrete actions. Establishing a more significant American presence at the civil society level in Turkey would go a long way toward creating the political space within Turkey for a more pro-American posture in Ankara.

Off now to Prime Minister Erdogan's speech at the Mayflower sponsored by the SETA Foundation.

I just had the privilege of attending the swearing-in ceremony for my old friend David Huebner as the next US Ambassador to New Zealand.

Demonstrating the importance of this appointment to the White House, Vice President Joe Biden gave the oath to the openly gay lawyer turned diplomat.

The bible on which the oath of office was sworn was held by Huebner's partner, and now husband, of more than 20 years, Duane McWaine -- who is putting his Los Angeles-based psychiatry practice on hold In Los Angeles to accompany his spouse to New Zealand. Joe Biden paid particular tribute to the role that McWaine would be playing and credited the many significant others and spouses that make such sacrifices for the American people.

The South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building was packed with well-wishers including Ambassador of New Zealand to the US Roy Ferguson.

I sat next to Ferguson and told him that he was likely to see a real uptick in tourism from bright and festive gay Americans who want to journey to New Zealand to check in with Ambassador Huebner and Dr. McWaine, who are clearly one of America's newly recognized power couples.

Ambassador Ferguson's reply: "Bring it on!"

Gay icon and human rights activist Frank Kameny attended and was recognized by Vice President Biden on his way out of the hall as a "truly famous American. . .like a really, really famous American" as Biden went over to shake Kameny's hand.

White House Deputy Director for Public Outreach Brian Bond did a great job, from what I could see, of bringing many communities together -- but many leading GLBT leaders -- to this swearing in of Barack Obama's first gay Ambassador.

Obama campaign National LGBT Finance Committee Co-Chair and former GLAAD Executive Director Joan Garry sat to my left. Administration staff members Kei Koizumi and Ajit Joshi were there wearing GLIFAA pins (Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies).

Joe Biden acknowledged openly the administration's support of appointing people to positions of national service from all walks -- including the diversity of sexual orientation -- but also said that Huebner was a widely acknowledged, brilliant lawyer involved with many successful cases of high powered conflict resolution and that he was nominated by the President to this post because of all of his skills and for deciding early in his life, as Sir Edmund Hilary once said, "not just to be extraordinary person" but rather to commit to "accomplishing extraordinary things."

It turns out that Huebner and Biden are both from the same part of Pennsylvania -- Huebner from Mahanoy City and Biden from Scranton.

It was a great swearing-in to attend -- and excellent to see the administration reaching out as it did to members of the GLBT community to be part of this.

-- Steve Clemons

Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation as well as the co-director of New America's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, where Katherine Tiedemann is a policy analyst. This post was originally published at the AfPakChannel.

Scott Shane has a must-read in today's New York Times about the possible expansion of the CIA's program of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas to Baluchistan, the large and sparsely populated southern Pakistani province where the Afghan Taliban is headquartered.

Having written about the drones a bit ourselves, we read it with great interest and were struck by one of Shane's anonymous sources, a government official who claims that the more than 80 drone strikes in less than two years have killed "more than 400" enemy fighters and "just over 20" civilians.

A study we conducted in mid-October, based on a careful analysis of the most accurate media counts of the strikes, found that between some 370 and 540 militants were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since the start of 2008. There have been a few more strikes since the study was released, bringing the total of militants killed to between 384 and 578. So that's close enough to be in the same range as the government official's estimate of more than 400 militants killed.

What is troubling -- and in our view, highly unlikely -- is the official's claim that only some 20 civilians have been killed by these drone strikes, a fatality rate of only around 5 percent. Given that one strike alone on the funeral of a suspected Taliban militant in South Waziristan in late June killed at least 18 people described as civilians, according to a report in the London Times, it seems implausible that only a handful more were killed in all of the 81 drone strikes that have occurred since the beginning of 2008.

The methodology by which the anonymous government official arrived at his conclusion of "just over 20" civilians and "more than 400" militants killed by drone strikes since the start of 2008 is unknown, but we worry that the official may be putting a good deal of spin on the figures about civilian casualties because of the unpopularity of the drone strikes in Pakistan; Pakistanis often complain that they not only violate national sovereignty but cause large numbers of civilian casualties.

Our own data shows that if we consider just the period from 2008 until the present, the average civilian fatality rate is between 35 and 40 percent; far more than the five percent claimed by the government official.

-- Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann

Al Majalla, the Arab magazine, recently published a special report on Turkey called "7 years of AKP Rule."

The report provides a variety of perspectives on Turkey's political situation and the impact of the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) seven years in power.

I was most impressed with Nicholas Burch's interview with Islamic Studies scholar and foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Erdogan Ibrahim Kalin, who provides a clear and balanced official perspective on Turkey's increasingly independent foreign policy.

The special report also features the Christian Science Monitor's ace correspondent in Istanbul Yigal Schleifer, who focuses on one of Turkey's most significant challenges: engaging in an honest reckoning with both its past and its internal ethnic and ideological divisions.

-- Ben Katcher

If one thing was obvious about President Obama's speech on Tuesday night it was how complex the United States' challenges in South Asia are.

As Steve Coll points out, Obama's speech lacked the oratorical skill to which we have become accustomed in large part because the United States' strategic situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is filled with contradictions and does not lend itself to a seamless narrative.

For those of you trying to keep up, I highly recommend Nir Rosen's latest piece in the Boston Review. Nir has barely come back from the Middle East and South Asia since September 11, and his articles are always full of details and color that so much of the national security analysis out there lacks.

For those interested, The Washington Note's Steve Clemons will be participating in a forum tomorrow morning sponsored by the American Security Project called "Beyond the Surge: Assessing America's Plan for Afghanistan."

-- Ben Katcher

Amidst the analysis of Turkey's "eastern turn" and the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) alleged ambivalence toward Europe, the ongoing political conflict among Turkey, Greece, Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots, and the European Union over Cyprus remains the largest obstacle to Turkey's European Union accession.

European leaders are holding a summit today and tomorrow in Brussels to decide whether to make Cyprus an even bigger impediment to Turkey's membership. I think this would be a mistake, but first a bit of background.

Cyprus is a small island in the Eastern Mediterranean - about 40 miles south of Turkey and 60 miles west of Syria - divided between Turkish Cypriots in the North and Greek Cypriots in the south. The Greek Cypriot government is recognized by the international community (with the exception of Turkey) as exercising sovereignty over the entire island. However, the Greek Cypriot government's sovereignty over the northern part of the island has been true only in theory since the Turkish Cypriots formed their own government and declared an independent Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in 1983. The two entities are completely separate politically and a visitor to Northern Cyprus is unlikely to meet a single Greek. (Full Disclosure - I recently returned from attending the TNRC's independence day celebration as a guest of the government).

Turkey remains heavily involved on the island as a result of the massive subsidy it provides to keep the TRNC economically viable. Turkey also maintains somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 soldiers (estimates vary) on the northern part of the island. The Turkish army invaded the island when violence broke out between Turks and Greeks in 1974, and has insisted on staying since in order to guarantee the security of the Turkish Cypriots.

The last opportunity for a solution came in 2004 when the "Annan Plan" of a bizonal, bicommunal, bifederal, unified state was voted down by the Greek Cypriots in a referendum.

The reason that the conflict represents an existential threat to Turkey's European Union negotiations is that the Greek Cypriot government (or the Republic of Cyprus, as they preferred to be called) became a member of the European Union in May 2004.

As a result of the ongoing conflict - and specifically Turkey's refusal to open its ports and airports
to Greek Cypriot vessels - the Greek Cypriots have blocked eight of the 35 negotiating chapters Turkey must fulfill to become part of Europe.

That brings us to today's summit and whether Europe should impose additional sanctions on Turkey.

If there is one thing that I learned from my meetings in Cyprus with Turkish and Turkish Cypriot government officials and journalists it is that Turkey is very unlikely to "sell out" the Turkish Cypriots in order to curry favor with Europe. Imposing further sanctions will not change Turkey's strategic calculus with regard to Cyprus and is unlikely to encourage Turkey to make concessions.

It is especially important for Europe to tread lightly right now given the status of the negotiations between Turkish Cypriot President Mehmet Ali Talat and Greek Cypriot President Demetris Christofias. Talat and Christofias represent the most conciliatory parts of each side's highly nationalist political spectrum. The two leaders have met dozens of times over the past fourteen months to try to hash out an agreement.

While the talks are not going well, there is no good reason for Europe to make it easier for nationalist elements in Turkey and on both sides of Cyprus to stifle the negotiations. This is especially true given that President Talat faces reelection in April and is likely to lose to a more hard-line candidate (most likely current hard-line Turkish Cypriot Prime Minister Dervis Eroglu) if he cannot deliver a deal.

Europe also risks its credibility as a global actor if it allows one (or two - if you include Greece) country to dictate its foreign policy on such an important issue. The best thing Europe can do now is try to get out of the way and hope the parties can reach an agreement.

-- Ben Katcher

Jonathan Guyer is a program associate at the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

Watching Al Jazeera English following President Obama's Afghan speech, I was struck by Riz Kahn's question about where Special Representative Richard Holbrooke fits into all of this.

Steve Clemons pointed out Holbrooke was "off skiing for the weekend"and absent from last week's state dinner.

Well, my sources aren't that good but I'll stay tuned to The Cable and keep you posted.

-- Jonathan Guyer

This is a guest note by British Ambassador to Cuba Dianna Melrose.

Contrary to what has been suggested on the Capitol Hill Cubans website, I couldn't agree more with Senator Richard Lugar and Representative Howard Berman's recent assessment that "over the last five decades, it has become clear that isolation will not induce the Castro regime to take steps towards political liberalization." (Miami Herald, Lift the ban, let Americans visit Cuba).

Several excellent reports issued this spring by Senator Lugar, the Lexington Institute, Brookings and others, together with diplomats in Havana agree on this point: attempts to politically isolate Cuba and the economic embargo have not served US strategic interests. They have harmed ordinary people on the island. As dissidents argue, they have given the Cuban government a convenient scapegoat for all the hardships inflicted on their people by tight state control and lack of economic freedoms. Moreover, it is much easier to maintain political legitimacy whilst suppressing fundamental human rights and freedoms, if people on the island are made to feel that their country is under attack.

The Obama administration has already made a positive move in lifting the restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban Americans. This has been widely welcomed on the island, especially amongst divided families. Members of Cuban civil society and dissidents on the island, with whom we are in regular contact, are hoping for more, most immediately Congress lifting of the broader ban on Americans traveling to Cuba.

Opponents of freeing up travel to Cuba for all US citizens argue that an influx of US tourists would benefit the government, not the people, given heavy state control of the economy. But former political prisoners, like the economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, Miriam Leiva, the blogger Yoani Sánchez (who recently hit the headlines when she received a letter from President Obama) and many others disagree. They argue that the arrival of thousands of US citizens would put pressure on the government to allow more free enterprise (more family businesses offering rooms to rent, more privately owned "paladar" restaurants and more taxi licences). The government would have to import more food for the tourism sector, potentially creating new markets for US suppliers. Critics of the government here see it as deeply ironic that, whereas US citizens are unable to visit Cuba without special licences, the US is now Cuba's fifth largest trading partner (primarily because of some $1 billion food imports last year).

People here want change, but they also fear the unknown and what they might lose. Because the vast majority are unable to leave the island, they are also starved of international contacts. If they were able to talk to US citizens, with whom they share so many sporting, cultural and historical links, they could benefit from learning about the civil liberties and economic freedoms which US citizens enjoy. This contact would also help debunk the daily fare of anti-US propaganda they have grown up with in the state-run media.

I witnessed first hand the excitement and joy of hundreds of thousands of mainly young Cubans who crowded into the Plaza de la Revolución for the Juanes concert in September, with its messages of peace and reconciliation and the need for change. Following a very successful tour by our Royal Ballet in the summer, many Cuban friends expressed their deep disappointment that US travel restrictions meant the visit of the New York Philharmonic planned for this autumn was cancelled.

The UK has full diplomatic and trading relations with Cuba and is the second largest source of tourists here after Canada. Changes in US policy towards engagement and dismantling the embargo (including the extraterritorial provisions of Helms-Burton) would be popular with US allies, like the UK, and enable a more joined up multilateral approach to encouraging peaceful democratic change. Together with our EU partners, and the wider international community in Havana, we have decided that isolation is not an effective policy with which to help improve the lives of ordinary Cubans.

We have no illusions that democratic reforms and economic freedoms will happen overnight. This takes us into the difficult terrain of the extent to which moves by the US and others should be conditioned on human rights improvements. I have put this to critics of the government here. Their view was that the US should not condition every move on specific action by the Cuban government because, as they see it, leaving the ball in the Cuban government's court risks the status quo continuing. The main losers would be some 11 million ordinary people on the island.

-- Ambassador Dianna Melrose

As part of the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program's new media roundtable series, I am hosting a small roundtable discussion today with British Council CEO Martin Davidson and British Council Board Member and communications expert Raoul Shah.

The event will run from 3pm to 4pm EST and will stream live here at The Washington Note.

The topic will be roughly "Britain's Approach to Smart Power."

I am going to moderate the discussion from Berlin via video skype - with some on site assistance from my colleague Amjad Atallah.

The British Council is the world's largest cultural relations agency, which is receiving increased attention from US policymakers seeking to revamp America's "public diplomacy" operations. Davidson is fresh off a trip to Lahore where he just released a major report on Pakistani youth.

Davidson is also going to discuss why the British Council has been thrown out of both Russia and Iran in the past two years - and what the consequences of that are as the Council tries to re-establish itself in both places.

-- Steve Clemons

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here are some of my early thoughts on President Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan "Way Forward" speech from a clip I did with Keith Olbermann on Countdown tonight.

I said 40,000 troops in my opening comments when I meant 30,000 troops. It was nearly 4 am in Berlin when I taped this -- so slight slip there.

Look forward to other informed, thoughtful reactions to the President's remarks in the Comments section. Be civil.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by former Department of State Chief of Staff Lawrence B. Wilkerson. Wilkerson is the Pamela C. Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William Mary

Damned if You Do and Damned If You Don't

President Obama is in a corner.

He is there because of things he did and things others did and are doing, and because of realities he cannot escape.

The decision he will announce tonight is not based on militarily strategic thinking. It can't be because if it were the minimum number of additional troops he would be sending to Afghanistan would be a quarter million.

That's using a "Ken Shinseki" template, i.e., looking at the formidable terrain, the population size and composition, the sheer size of the country, and the seven years of under-resourcing and neglect, and estimating the number of troops to, under the present circumstances, carry out a counterinsurgency campaign with at least a 50-50 chance of success in a 5-10 year time frame.

The arsenal is just about empty.

Given U.S. force deployments in Iraq, Korea, Europe, and elsewhere, plus Secretary Gates' commitment to increase time between troop rotations and the overall stress already felt by the Army and Marine Corps, there simply are not sufficient land forces left in the U.S. arsenal. So the President is going with a little less than what does remain.

Moreover, the decision will be made partly because of the President's own campaign promises, i.e., to focus on the war in Afghanistan rather than the war in Iraq, reversing the emphasis of the administration from which he inherited both wars, badly waged.

The decision will be made too because the President's generals-in-the-field--principally Generals Petraeus and McChrystal--have contributed to his being cornered. Secretary Gates and Chairman Mullen have added their bureaucratic weight as well.

McChrystal was ingenious enough to make his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan so dismal that it colors him innocent regardless of whether he fails in Afghanistan--the clear likelihood--or succeeds.

Petraeus too has kept a foot in both camps, being simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic.

The Generals artfully ensnared their Commander-in-Chief.

Furthermore, no Democrat wishing to stay in the Oval Office can show ankle on a national security issue without incurring the wrath of the Limbaugh-led opposition party, without risking the mid-term elections, and without adding to the image of a feckless political party when it comes to that all-important issue, national security.

Adding, I am certain, immeasurably to the President's woes, is the fact that he is sitting atop a nearly bankrupt republic. He inherited two wars that were paid for--indeed are still paid for--to the tune of a couple of trillion dollars by largely the Japanese and the Chinese backing American debt. He hasn't even been able to return the dissemination of those borrowed dollars to the standard process, i.e., to the oversight of properly appropriated funds. Supplemental spending is still being used.

Next year, as state tax revenues plummet even further, as real unemployment approaches 20%, as more foreclosures rock the housing market, as empty commercial real estate sprouts more and more "for lease" signs, and as increasing numbers of foreigners register their deep concern about the dollar, the President will be trapped and, like his predecessor--and very decent man--Herbert Hoover, probably be unable to extricate himself from one-term doomsday.

So, tonight's decision is made on a wing-and-a-prayer.

My academic field is presidential decision-making, particularly from Harry Truman to Barak Obama.

In that short history, there have never been, in combination, similar circumstances to those I've described above. A few aspects are repetitive. Harry Truman had to rid himself of a politically-motivated general-in-the-field when he fired Douglas MacArthur. John Kennedy promised to handle Cuba if he were elected over Richard Nixon, only to have to "handle" Cuba with the Bay of Pigs.

Lyndon Johnson had to make a decision to escalate in Vietnam when it was likely that every bone in his body told him to get out. But there has not been a case where all the circumstances described above impacted a president's decision-making at one time and, clearly, never has the U.S. been in such fiscal straits as it is in now--and faced them without the incredible productive capacity that it possessed in 1929 and that, with the advent of WWII, was able to "produce" the nation out of ruinous financial circumstances and, stunningly and simultaneously, offset staggering war debt.

All this to say that I understand the political circumstances that are compelling our President to the decision he will announce tonight--as much as any academic could understand them, at any rate.

If you are a praying person, he needs your prayers and support. If you are not, he needs your support. Because all of us Americans put him where he is--and I do not mean by votes.

We--all of us--let George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney set us up. Moreover, we all contributed to creating the perilous fiscal state that is now a more dangerous threat to our country than any terrorist could ever hope to be.

-- Lawrence B. Wilkerson

Excerpts follow after the fold. . .

From what we know of Joe Biden's "skunk at the White House picnic" skepticism of increasing troop deployments to Afghanistan during President Obama's three month strategy review process, it would appear -- on the surface -- that Biden didn't come up with the winning hand.

After all, Obama is committing to sending 30,000 more US troops next year on top of the 68,000 there now. Doesn't sound like the Biden plan.

Or does it?

Scratching beneath the surface, the fact is that a lot of the new framing and focus -- and the so-called exit horizon -- are all solidly Biden.

Given what I have seen of the speech leaks thus far, Joe Biden deserves significant credit for key parts of the President's plan and also gave President Obama what he wanted through this process -- a public airing of civil debate and heterodoxy of thought that came smack dab up to President Obama's desk.

Biden played his advisor-in-chief role and worked vigorously for a "narrowing" of America's objectives and commitments in Afghanistan.

According to a senior White House source, Vice President Biden believes that the review led by the President has produced a sound strategy -- but that the Vice President's contributions helped shape clear, narrow and achievable goals for Afghanistan: denying Al Qaeda sanctuary, disrupting the Taliban so it can't topple the government, and accelerating transition to Afghan responsibility for their own security and governance.

Biden has helped choke down the nation building script and encouraged that the surge Obama will outline not be open-ended.

According to this senior White House official, "the strategy calls for a commitment of additional resources up front, but it also tells American people how and when this ends."

The how and when it ends part is very much Bidenesque.

Tomorrow morning, Vice President Joe Biden will be appearing on all three network morning shows explicating and defending President Obama's plan.

-- Steve Clemons

Greetings from Berlin where I'm having a very productive set of meetings organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Way busy today -- much to post on at a later time, but the big news now is that in a few hours President Barack Obama will be outlining his revised Afghanistan policy at West Point.

Representative Jane Harman has issued her thoughts and while she praises the President for trying to deal with the corruption challenge and for outlining clearer goals for US forces in Afghanistan, she strongly underscores concerns about enlarging the US military footprint there.

She writes:

I do not agree that inserting 34,000 additional U.S. and 5,000-10,000 additional ISAF troops into southern and eastern Afghanistan will enhance the chance of success. Just the opposite. Expanding our military footprint in Afghanistan is a mistake.

I will be on SIRIUS and XM Radio's "Stand Up! with Pete Dominick" at 5 pm EST and 11 pm Berlin time talking about Afghanistan today.

Then at 6:15 pm EST and 12:15 am (Wednesday) Berlin time, I'll be chatting about Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's quick trip to Washington this week as well as climate change politics and Obama's Afghanistan moves on "Mornings with Deborah Cameron" on ABC Sydney 702 radio. Not sure what time this works out to be down under.

At 8:00 pm EST and 2:00 am in Berlin, I'll be watching the Obama speech and twittering and chatting on line live with WNYC's Brian Lehrer.

Shortly after the speech -- not sure of the time -- I will be chatting with Larisa Epatko of the Online News Hour. Again, topic will be Afghanistan. That exchange should be posted on the News Hour's web page.

Then, perhaps finally for the night, I'll be discussing Afghanistan and Pakistan with Keith Olbermann on Countdown at 9:50 pm EST or 3:50 am in Berlin. And I won't look tired.

Hope some of you can tune in.

-- Steve Clemons