Obama in the Middle East: Fading Red Lines and Eroding Credibility

A post last month argued that President Obama was fast approaching a defining moment for his foreign policy in view of the mounting evidence that the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria used sarin, a lethal nerve gas, in violation of Mr. Obama’s numerous warnings not to do so.  The day of reckoning has now arrived and it reflects badly on the president.

Speaking at a White House press conference last week with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama made plain that he is now unwilling to enforce the red line he so recently staked out in Syria.

Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s Day of Dissonance

Last Wednesday was a day of extremes for the former Secretary of State, who was in Beverly Hills to pick up a public service award from a private foreign policy organization.  There her tenure at the State Department was lauded as activists from a group called “Ready for Hillary 2016” gathered nearby to round out the chorus.

Yet hours earlier and on the opposite side of the country, her legacy came under heavy fire in a hearing convened by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  There a trio of State Department witnesses offered gripping testimony calling into sharp question Clinton’s conduct and that of her senior staff in the run-up and response to the September 2012 jihadi assaults on the U.S. diplomatic mission and a CIA annex in Benghazi that killed J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans.

The hearing did not live up to the hype (here and here) about exposing Watergate-style malfeasance, but it gave renewed vigor to criticisms about Mrs. Clinton’s actions in her final months at Foggy Bottom.

Time for a North American Energy Initiative

UPDATE (May 14, 2013): In a report released today, the International Energy Agency predicts that surging North American oil production — driven by U.S. shale development and Canadian oil sands — will help transform the global oil market over the next five years.

—Original Post—

This blog regularly focuses on the foreign policy reverberations of the U.S. energy boom.  As discussed in earlier posts (here and here), these include the gradual paring back of U.S. strategic commitments in the Persian Gulf*, the diminution of Russia’s great power aspirations**,  as well as a boost to America’s soft-power prospects and global standing.  But it’s time to add another upshot to the list: The shale revolution will redraw the North American energy landscape, prompting in turn a renewed U.S. emphasis on its immediate neighbors.

President Obama was right to focus on enhancing cross-border commercial ties during last week’s visit to Mexico, Latin America’s second largest economy that has become a darling of foreign investors.  Important changes over the past few years in the global production process – including rising labor rates in China, higher shipping costs, and a growing desire by companies to locate manufacturing centers closer to the consumer markets they serve – have led to a manufacturing resurgence in Mexico.  The country now exports more manufacturing products than the rest of Latin America combined and HSBC predicts that it is poised to eclipse China and Canada as the chief supplier of merchandise goods to the United States by 2018.

And despite fears among U.S. military planners just four years ago that Mexico was fast becoming a failed state, a flourishing middle class has instead taken hold.  According to a World Bank report, Mexico’s middle class has grown faster than in most of Latin America over the past 15 years, with the result that over half of the population can now be considered in that socio-economic category.  This development helped expand U.S. exports to Mexico by some $50 billion over the last two years.

So it was a fine idea when Mr. Obama and Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexico’s new president, established last week a high-level bilateral group focused on bolstering economic cooperation.  But Obama missed a shining opportunity while in Mexico City to do something even more visionary and consequential: Setting in motion the creation of a truly integrated North American energy market.

Red Line Blues: North Korea, Iran and Syria

A defining moment for Mr. Obama’s foreign policy legacy is fast approaching

From the Levant and the Persian Gulf to the Korean peninsula, events in recent weeks have offered a clinic in the difficulty of enforcing red lines on rogue regimes and their weapons of mass destruction, as well as how U.S. credibility suffers when presidents continue to stake out red lines they ultimately are not prepared to act on.

The past month has served up a triple dose of proliferation trouble.

The Iraq Endgame and the Lessons for Afghanistan: An Update

Washington is in a rush and everyone knows it

The U.S. commentariat spent much of last month ruminating over the lessons of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.  Left unexamined were the important lessons relating to the U.S. endgame in that country and how they should be applied to the accelerating withdrawal from Afghanistan.*  I explored these questions a few months ago and Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s recent visit to Baghdad has once more brought them into focus.

Mr. Kerry’s journey, the first by an U.S. Secretary of State since 2009, was another startling sign of how the Obama administration’s hasty exit from Iraq has brought about the marked loss of American influence with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, along with growing Iranian clout in Baghdad.  Kerry attempted, futilely, to persuade Maliki to stop nearly daily Iranian flights ferrying weapons to the Assad regime in Syria via Iraqi airspace.  Indeed, so diminished is Washington’s pull, no Iraqi official appeared with Kerry at his Baghdad press conference and he resorted to publicly calling out the Iraqi government in an effort to gain traction.

U.S. Strategic Credibility in Asia: An Update

In a post two weeks ago, I argued that the Obama administration confronts a serious credibility gap in Asia and cited as one example the small but growing number of influential South Koreans calling for their country to develop its own nuclear weapons because of renewed doubts about Washington’s commitment to South Korea’s security.  This specific problem involves what is known in strategic policy circles as “extended deterrence” – that is, the convincing projection of U.S. nuclear deterrence power over far-flung allies confronted with menacing enemies.

Extended deterrence entails a two-fold challenge: Dissuading hostile states from taking offensive action while also persuading allies that there is no need to bolster their security through nuclear proliferation.  Washington spent a great deal of treasure and psychic energy during the Cold War coming to grips with these problems, mainly in Europe as it tried to reassure NATO countries that America had their back even as Soviet nuclear forces grew in size and capacity.  To a much lesser extent the problems of extended deterrence were also at work in East Asia during the Cold War.  But they are now cropping up again as the regional security order becomes more complex.

This can be seen most clearly in the drama now playing out with North Korea.  The United States has responded to Pyongyang’s increasing bellicosity in a way straight out of the Cold War playbook: 1.) by beefing up missile defense capabilities in Alaska; and 2.) sending nuclear-capable B-2 and B-52 bombers on practice runs over the Korean peninsula.

As illustrated in a Pentagon press conference following the bomber runs, the intended audience for these moves is not just Pyongyang.  General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a point of emphasizing:

The reaction to the B-2 that we’re most concerned about is not necessarily the reaction it might elicit in North Korea, but rather among our Japanese and Korean allies.  Those exercises are mostly to assure our allies that they can count on us to be prepared and to help them deter conflict.

As the mission was being announced in an official statement, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was also on the phone with his South Korean counterpart, reaffirming the United States’ “unwavering” commitment to defend the South.

Regardless of how the current North Korean crisis ends or the Obama administration’s success in dealing with the broader credibility problems of its “Asia pivot,” Washington’s challenges with extended deterrence will only grow in the years ahead as nuclear proliferation expands in the region and what some (here and here) are calling the “Second Nuclear Age” takes more concrete shape.

FYI: For more detailed examinations of the problems of extended deterrence in an evolving East Asia, see here, here and here.

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The Desi Factor in U.S.-India Relations

According to a new Gallup survey, more than two-thirds of the U.S. public has a positive impression of India, a score that even edges out Israel’s traditionally-high favorability rating.  This is the latest indicator of how decisively American perceptions about the country have changed.  Not too long ago, India was regarded as the very epitome of what the term “Third World” meant – decrepit, destitute and pitiable.  Yet in a relatively short period of time, the popular view of India has changed in critical ways.

For many decades most Americans were inclined to the views of President Harry S. Truman, who dismissed India at its birth as an independent state as “pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges.”  His Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had an even more incisive perspective: “by and large [Indians] and their country give me the creeps.”  When Daniel Patrick Moynihan was U.S. ambassador to India from 1973-75, he regularly lamented that Washington was utterly indifferent to the country’s fate; writing in his diary, he confided that it “is American practice to pay but little attention to India.”  In a cable to the State Department, he complained of dismissive attitudes, “a kind of John Birch Society contempt for the views of raggedly ass people in pajamas on the other side of the world.”

Public opinion kept close track with official attitudes in Washington.  Harold Issacs’s classic 1958 survey of U.S. elite opinion, Scratches on Our Minds, revealed that influential Americans held very negative perceptions of the country, associating it with “filth, dirt and disease,” along with debased religious beliefs.  A State Department analysis prepared in the early 1970s found that U.S. public opinion identified India more than any other nation with such attributes as disease, death and illiteracy, and school textbooks throughout this period regularly portrayed it in a most negative light.  This view was again underscored in a 1983 opinion poll, in which Americans ranked India at the bottom of a list of 22 countries on the basis of perceived importance to U.S. vital interests.

So, what accounts for the significant shift in perceptions?