The Washington Note

The 3 am Call Clip: Obama vs Romney

2012-02-07T09:12:00-05:00

Last evening I had an interesting chat with Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word, considering how President Obama has done answering the "3 am call" versus how Mitt Romney might answer the crisis call.

As promised, here is the clip.

The Atlantic's Steve Clemons speaks to Lawrence O'Donnell about the "3 am call"

And yes, I know that I should 'never' use sports metaphors when talking politics.

In the clip above, I mention Obama's nuanced use of the clock with Iran, comparing it to "that football game we just saw. . .uh, the Superbowl."

We use what we have in our experience to communicate -- and for the first time in many years, I watched the big game and got obsessed with the clock and those final plays.

I bet something like this shows up in President Obama's White House Correspondent's Dinner speech.

-- Steve Clemons

The 3 AM Call: What Would Romney Do vs Obama?

2012-02-06T20:59:31-05:00

Tonight at about 10:45 pm EST, I will be chatting with MSNBC anchor of The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell about the comparative foreign policy and national security strengths of President Obama versus GOP contender Mitt Romney.

I wonder how many layers of staff (i.e. servants) Romney's hypothetical 1600 Pennsylvania household would have to work through before handing him the phone -- but that aside, this is an interesting issue. I wasn't impressed with Romney's Citadel speech, though I do think he has a smart foreign policy advisory team around him (John Bolton being a serious recent exception).

But Obama has pulled off a Nixonian strategy of talking democracy, principles, values that we Americans care about, as well as transparency -- while at the same time not running away from the fact that America has core strategic interests and has no magic wand to dispense with thugs. Dealing with thugs around the world is part of how America moves the foreign policy needle and how it ultimately (used to anyway) made the world a more stable and less dysfunctional place.

More tonight for those of you who want to stop in. I'll post the clip from the show here in the morning.

-- Steve Clemons

Corruption Watchdogs Pull a Joe Kennedy with New Blogger Jack Abramoff

2012-02-03T13:05:08-05:00

Holy Indian reservation roulette wheels Batman!

The newly launched Republic Report, an anti-corruption blog focusing on how self-interested dollars are warping the public-interest responsibilities of America's democratic institutions has actually hired convicted felon Jack Abramoff to be one of its lead bloggers.

Yes, that Jack Abramoff, "Casino Jack", as profiled in the Alex Gibney film, Casino Jack and the United States of Money.

The Republic Report may be "pulling a Joe Kennedy" here -- and I think it's provocative, bold, will attract a huge heaping pile of hate mail -- but nonetheless brings in DC's version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox to tell the world how the system works and what to watch out for.

This is what Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he hired Joseph Kennedy Sr., a known stock manipulator and inside trader, to serve as the inaugural chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Roosevelt wanted to catch the crooks on Wall Street, and said to a person asking why he had appointed a crook to be the watch dog, "Takes one to catch one."

And to the naysayers out there, it's probably better for Abramoff to be writing out about how DC-style corruption works so as to help those unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of 'how to make a Senator smile' do a better job reforming the system rather than getting Ambramoff back out there advising the bad guys how to cash in on the system.

The other bloggers in the group are outstanding and have, for the most part, crystal clear clean progressive track records -- including former Think Progress writer Lee Fang, former Center for American Progress youth and college program activist David Halperin, also another former Think Progress correspondent Zaid Jilani, former Foreign Policy and The Atlantic staffer Suzanne Merkelson, tough-minded investigator for the conservative Senator Charles Grassley Paul Thacker -- and one of the undisputed early leaders of modern grass roots, digital political activism, Matt Stoller.

Thacker the exception -- the rest are real progressives and none have done felony convicted jail time. Bringing Abramoff into this mix is one really interesting way for this blog to distinguish itself in a very crowded marketplace.

Nick Penniman, the well known former TomPaine.com editor and former lead of Huffington Post's investigative unit is the president of United Republic which has launched the blog.

I really want to go to the holiday party these folks throw and see if Stoller and Abramoff can do a buddy to buddy thing under the mistletoe -- and unite in their common work highlighting the corruption of America's key democratic platforms.

Abramoff's first post has gone up -- and in it he offers a Joe Kennedy-esque rationale for why he's doing this with a bit of confession:

It is a privilege for me to add my insights and experience to
their strong and sagacious team and I look forward to working with them
to reveal to our nation the way Washington really works.

There is a rising tide of outrage in our land about the abuse in
our system. Sadly, in my former life as a lobbyist, I participated in
this dysfunctional and byzantine world. But now, in these pages, and
with my other efforts, I intend to do what I can as we all attempt
to repair our democracy.

Interesting move by Nick Penniman and his team. We really look forward to following the entire line up there but also to the next and next next contributions by Jack Abramoff.

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

Afghanistan 2013: America Shifts Course

2012-02-03T09:16:51-05:00

Chris Matthews speaks with The Atlantic's Steve Clemons and Matthew Hoh of the Center for International Policy

Last night, former State Department official and US Marine Matthew Hoh, now a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, and I had a very good discussion with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball about Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's comments that the US would cease combat operations in Afghanistan in 2013 -- rather than the end of 2014.

Key points made during the discussion: First, this is a key shift in strategy -- and a positive one.

Second, this remains consistent with the President's announced strategy, also articulated well by Vice President Joe Biden, that the military's job today is not to "beat" the Taliban but rather to shape the choices in the field for the political stakeholders and to be able to preempt any effort to overthrow the government in Kabul.

Third, I believe that there is a bit of an 'invisible hand' at work here in sending confidence building signals during a fragile early process of trying to negotiate with the Taliban. There are secret negotiations that various sides are attempting to hatch -- and Panetta's comments may be designed to shore up the process. The trip by Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar to Kabul yesterday and his comments blessing the peace talks seem likely to also be part of this mutual posturing, confidence building process.

Lastly, for those like GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who think that the US should commit itself, its military manpower, and a bigger hold of debt to a longer stay in Afghanistan, I suggest to Chris Matthews that the outcome after another five or ten years would be a much more strategically deflated and impotent United States that fuels the ambitions and agendas of nations like Iran in the region, and China globally.

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

Obama's Speeches and that SEAL Team: Bad News for Bad Guys

2012-01-26T08:38:35-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nate Silver Wins Again -- and Doha's Shafallah Forum

2012-01-21T23:41:57-05:00

View of my balcony at the Grand Hyatt, Doha

Good morning to those of you heading to bed on the news that Newt Gingrich dominated the South Carolina GOP primaries. I don't have much to add to the pundit commentary on Newt's return -- other than that take a look at the forecasting success yet again of 538's Nate Silver.

I've been a junkie for his electoral commentary for quite a while -- but every time he drops numbers before something happens, it's eery to see that he just about nails it every time.

Here is what Silver published on his New York Times blog before today's primary:

Souce: FiveThirtyEight, New York Times

As I wake up this morning in Doha, Qatar -- and yes, that's a picture off of my balcony at the Grand Hyatt this morning -- it looks like Nate Silver's estimates on Gingrich's 39% share and Romney's 29% take are dead on. Ron Paul seems to have come in last -- just behind Rick Santorum, but Silver's models still predicted well their general market share of the primary.

For those in Doha today, I'm here with Bob Woodruff, Cherie Blair, Sheikha Moza, Valerie Amos, and many others for the Shafallah Forum on Crisis, Conflict and Disability. I'll be moderating a session this afternoon on the challenges those who are disabled face during natural disasters. Bob Woodruff is moderating the session on disability issues in military conflicts. Luckily, I have an excellent set of panelists who have thought deeply about what might be done to even out the chances for those who are disabled during either man-made or natural shocks.

I don't see a spot on the website for live-streaming. Come on Doha!! But if there is a video, I'll try to get it posted later.

Here are some interesting data points and references I plan to raise during my opening remarks. First, a reference to Europe's 2003 heat wave that killed more than 50,000 people -- the majority of whom were elderly and/or disabled. A flashback to Katrina's deadly impact on the disabled. And a look at what some NGO groups, like Prepare Now, are doing to encourage those with disabilities and constraints to plan ahead.

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

Romney Snubbing Hispanics?

2012-01-20T12:35:50-05:00

Are Hispanic Americans on Romney's call list?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"64% of jobs in our country are created by small business, and Hispanic entrepreneurs are leading the growth in that segment. Our nation's economic recovery will require continued growth in the Hispanic business community, and Speaker Gingrich and Senator Santorum's willingness to speak at this event underscores their understanding of our contributions.
Javier Palomarez, President & CEO
"We have worked closely with two world class institutions -- Univision and Miami-Dade College-- to create an event that will allow the Republican candidates to begin a national conversation with America's Hispanic community.
We are thankful for the participation of Speaker Gingrich and Senator Santorum, these gentlemen have shown they recognize the important role that Hispanic job creators play in the American economy. Our three organizations have a unique ability to reach the very voters who will decide the next Republican nominee, and I hope that Governor Romney and Rep. Paul will decide to join us.

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

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

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

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

Man-made Tragedies, Angelina Jolie, and Women

2012-01-16T10:31:49-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STREAMING Live: George Mitchell & Jeffrey Goldberg on Middle East Conflict

2012-01-12T15:46:07-05:00

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

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

The event will stream live above.

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

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

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

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

They are "Us": Pissing on the Taliban

2012-01-12T14:05:15-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reframing US Strategy in a Turbulent World

2012-01-11T11:23:09-05:00

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

RIP Tony Blankley

2012-01-09T11:31:10-05:00

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

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

Obama's Team Could Learn from Rumsfeld on Defense Department Shifts

2012-01-09T11:02:42-05:00

photo courtesy: White House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden Gets China

2012-01-02T09:40:14-05:00

Reuters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding America's Stock of Power

2011-12-28T10:52:49-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kupchan concludes his grand strategy contribution with this graph:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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