Before his public downfall, General Stanley McChrystal had a reputation for being a consummate professional. In Iraq, he became known as a savvy operator, a thinking-man's general with an every-man personality. Respected in Washington and venerated by his subordinates in the field, McChrystal was, in short, someone with a lot to lose.

Which makes his decision to grant such privileged access to an unknown journalist all the more mysterious. Vanity clearly played some part. But even that doesn't account for how an apparently seasoned general could so swiftly, so completely, bring about his own professional demise.

Of course, the whole affair might have resulted from a series of unforced errors. In the midst of war, perhaps stage managing the general just didn't rank as a priority. There's some suggestion that the reporter might have violated the terms of an off-the-record discussion or that 'Team America' should have been given the opportunity, after the fact, to contextualise the offending material (other reports claim McChrystal's staff did vet the final draft).

Or could it be, as some suspect, that McChrystal, whether consciously or not, pulled the pin on a hand-grenade and held on for grim death, trapped as he was between Washington's expectations and the intractability of the Afghanistan war?

The more we get to know Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the more enigmatic he seems.

In the latest Quarterly Essay, David Marr portrays the Prime Minister as a man whose distinctive mindset and behaviour stems in large part from the pain and loneliness of a childhood shaped by a recurrent sense of loss: the death of his father, his family's eviction from their farm, and his own compromised sense of dignity at having to depend for a time on the charity of others.

For Marr, it's this deep-seated yearning for redemption which manifests itself in the kind of behaviour for which Rudd has become renowned: his instinct to control; his innate sense of self-importance; vaulting ambition; tempestuousness; and, perhaps most importantly, his determination to conceal his true self behind a calm, reasonable, almost folksy persona.

Marr's essay is an important one. It tells a compelling personal story and explores the interaction between Rudd — in all his psychological complexity — and the structures and institutions of a political system in which power has become concentrated at the top.

But it also provides insight into Rudd's view of the world.

As Graeme Dobell reported yesterday, the Lowy Institute has released a report that explores the ways a changing balance of power, together with critical political choices, could produce a number of different scenarios for Asia's future security environment. 

It was propitious timing. Asia is changing and, as events in recent weeks suggest, not necessarily for the better. North Korea's sinking of the Cheonan (pictured) has raised tensions between the two Koreas to levels unseen since the Cold War.

Worse still, the crisis – as always on the Korean Peninsula — appears to be taking on a major power dimension, with reports today that the US is considering sending the carrier USS George Washington, along with its battle group, to the Yellow Sea, a maritime zone on China's periphery.

On one level this announcement is designed as a strong signal to the two Koreas: to the North that its provocations could have deep ramifications; and to South Korea that its alliance with the US is on steady footing. But at another level, it's all about China, and in particular about applying some not-so-subtle coercive pressure on Beijing to keep its ally and client on a tight leash.

China's likely reaction is an open question. Will it bring Pyongyang into line? If the US does dispatch a major force to the Yellow Sea, will China shadow it, as it has a number of Japanese vessels in recent months? Or will a diplomatic compromise be reached to head off the risks of escalation or miscalculation?

As the crisis unfolds, it is striking to see elements of each of the four scenarios we explore in the paper: enduring US primacy, a more competitive balance of power, a cooperative concert of powers, or a new version of primacy with China at the top.

It reminds me of a more general point we make in our introduction:

...Asia’s strategic future will be something of a hybrid. Indeed, it may well be that each future emerges then recedes in succession, or that a more fluid or composite order arises...In this regard, our four futures may be imagined as the corners of a square, with the reality of Asia’s strategic future lying somewhere in between.

Photo by Flickr user S.KOREA KDN, used under a Creative Commons license. 

What is it about the struggle for Afghanistan that makes the countries involved say one thing and do another?

The Europeans speak with purpose but do little more than keep up appearances. Pakistan has given new meaning to the idea of being on both sides of an argument, manoeuvring itself into bed with both the US and the Afghan insurgency. Not to be outdone, Afghan President Hamid Karzai calls for good governance as he steals elections, encourages corruption and, while relying on the US, coddles everyone from China to Iran. 

From the outset, Australia's role has been framed in more virtuous terms, and Australians have become accustomed to the belief that Australian forces are there for the right reasons: the alliance usually rates a mention, but above all the emphasis is  on fighting terrorism and extremism, and helping Afghanistan to its feet after years of internecine war. But of course, Canberra too plays something of a diplomatic double-game in Afghanistan, with a military commitment that has never matched its lofty rhetoric.

This is no accident. Rather, the disconnect between what Australia says and does is a kind of by-product of its alliance management strategy, which aims to shore up Australia's credentials as a reliable US ally without incurring costs and risks out of proportion to such a limited strategic objective. 

In dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, President Obama is in a tight spot.

His preferred strategy of engagement, with all carrot and no stick, has predictably failed to deliver. The military option is off the table.

And even if the US is able to secure the acquiescence of Russia and China to a new UN Security Council resolution — an uncertain prospect, given the recent deterioration in US–China relations — nobody seriously expects the resulting sanctions to change Iran’s course.

Needless to say Iran has not unclenched its fist, as Obama had hoped, but instead raised its middle finger.

With the clock ticking and few preventative options at hand, the Obama administration finds itself, once again, quietly lowering its objectives. As an alternative, it’s begun assembling a containment strategy designed to check the expanding power of a potentially nuclear armed Iran, politically unreconstructed and casting a wider shadow over the Persian Gulf.

Over the past year or so, Washington’s strategic relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have been tightened. US arms sales to the region have been boosted. And new diplomatic efforts are underway to pull Syria out of Iran’s orbit.

Meanwhile, US officials are being dispatched to the region on an increasingly regular basis to garner support for sanctions which, despite having no chance of preventing a nuclear Iran, would be part of containment.

Like engagement, however, there’s a problem at the heart of Obama’s containment strategy read more

Is it a conventional expectation in Washington that a stronger China will also be more cooperative, as I recently suggested? Sam’s doubtful, and in a number of respects, I can understand his scepticism.

The notion that a more powerful country will be more deferential seems so counterintuitive, so at odds with the weight of historical experience, that you really would be hard pressed to find anyone, let alone a serious analyst of international affairs, who openly agreed with it.

And yet, strange as it seems, that is precisely the assumption that has operated at the heart of US China policy for two decades, and which continues to shape Washington’s largely bipartisan approach towards China today.

America’s policy of engagement towards China — with its emphasis on trade and investment, on facilitating China’s growth by assuming responsibility for regional stability and security, and on integrating China into the institutions that make up America’s international order — was always intended, or at least justified, as a means to an end. The objective, like American strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was nothing less than the wholesale transformation of China itself.

Internally, engagement was intended to democratise China by creating economic conditions that would eventually necessitate political liberalisation. Externally, it was just as paternalistic, designed to attenuate China’s great power ambitions by ensuring that Beijing’s interests were fundamentally enmeshed in, rather than arrayed against, the status-quo, a bit like Japan today.

As China became more prosperous, so too, it was imagined, would its stake in the international arrangements that had abetted its rise become more deeply entrenched — to the point where its interests would be virtually indistinguishable from those of the US.

Hold on to your hats — US-China relations are about to get ugly.

Obama may have turned out to be something of a diplomatic masochist, but even he has his limits. Having been rolled in China and dragged through the mud by the Chinese in Copenhagen, his serenity in dealing with Beijing over the past year appears to be giving way to a combination of indignation and frustration, and a desire to reassert US dominance in the face of China’s new triumphalism.

Last week, Hillary Clinton was dispatched to Asia with a simple message for the region: 'America's back'. That wouldn't have been music to Chinese ears, though the impact of her message was dulled somewhat by the fact that she canceled her trip to attend to a more urgent matter on the other side of the world, and, ironically, never made it past Hawaii. Welcome back.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Administration is putting the finishing touches on a massive arms package for Taiwan. At the very least, the deal looks set to contain several hundred advanced Patriot missiles, which, once deployed, would represent a significant qualitative improvement on the ballistic missile defences presently fielded by Taiwan.

President Obama might have bowed in Japan, but it was China where he was really humbled. Beyond the countless diplomatic formalities and expansive, but typically platitudinous communiqué, the most striking thing about Obama’s recent trip was his inability to wrest a single, meaningful concession from Beijing.

Of course, human rights were always going to be a non-starter. China is already too powerful for western leaders to be censuring it loudly and publically for the mistreatment of its own citizens, and Obama, having dodged the Dalai Lama in Washington, was never going to lay down the law in Beijing.

But even on issues as important to the US as China’s currency manipulation, which may be stoking US unemployment at a time when the US economy is reeling, or the Iranian nuclear program, which threatens to undermine American dominance in the Persian Gulf, Obama found himself ‘talking to the hand’.

Here’s the problem: since at least the mid 1990s, US China policy has been built on the dubious expectation that China, read more

I've learned a lot from Stephan Fruehling in recent years. He's a former teacher of mine at ANU and a shrewd analyst of international and strategic affairs. But his recent criticisms of my sceptical take on counterinsurgency (COIN), however forcefully delivered, hit pretty wide of the mark.

First, to distinguish between the various factors that resulted in a more benign environment in post-surge Iraq is not to miss the point of COIN as a strategy, as Stephan claims. The question of which factor was decisive in quelling violence in Iraq is today of real importance, since the confidence — almost zealousness — with which the US military has begun advocating population-centric COIN in Afghanistan appears to rest in large part on a sense of triumphalism over the perceived success of that approach in Iraq.

Would officers really be studying anthropology and linguistics and languages like Pashtu and Urdu — in anticipation of ingratiating themselves with populations — without these perceptions, simply on the basis of the rich tradition of COIN that Stephan alludes to, from the Philippines and Malaya to Vietnam and Northern Ireland? And would Generals Petraeus and McChrystal have been given responsibility for the next war, had they not been lauded for producing a successful outcome in the last one?

Nor is it as self-evident as Stephan presupposes that there is a causal relationship between the US military's tactical, operational or strategic reorientation to COIN in Iraq and the political realignment of Sunni tribes and militias.

Military strategy, like most human enterprises, has fashions that come and go with changing political and technological circumstances. These tend to originate as innovative responses to thorny strategic problems that have defied resolution by more established means.

Having produced a successful outcome in one instance, these newly proven ideas then become entrenched in the habits or preferences of military organisations — often as a result of their leading exponents being promoted to senior positions – usually until they prove unsuited to the changed circumstances in which they're next employed.

In recent years, the strategy of the moment has been counterinsurgency (COIN), an approach that emphasises protecting local populations, respecting their institutions, listening to their concerns, and providing for their basic needs. The ultimate aim is to alienate the insurgency from local people, who can then either resist the insurgency themselves or at least throw their support behind nascent central institutions, such as the military or police forces, to fight the insurgency on their behalf.

Whatever one thinks of COIN, it has resonated deeply throughout western defence establishments. As President Obama weighs his options in Afghanistan, the default strategic preference of the US military – reflected most vividly in the McChrystal Report, which in my view lacks the exhaustive strategic reasoning that one might expect of such an important document – is for a full-fledged counterinsurgency.

What underpins this preference for COIN?

Like many people, I tend to think the decision to pre-emptively award President Obama the Nobel Peace prize was a very poor one. Not only is Obama undeserving, having failed thus far to secure any substantial foreign policy achievement, but the decision appears to have been motivated primarily by a desire to strait-jacket his policy choices and, more obviously, to bash the Bush Administration over the head once again for its own excesses.

But if it was the Nobel Committee's intention to influence US policy in a more peaceful direction, I suspect it could have precisely the opposite effect, instead compounding Obama's sensitivity to his 'bleeding heart' image and reinforcing his determination to entrench his national security credentials, including by at least forging on, if not escalating, in Afghanistan.

But if not Obama, then whom? To my mind, perhaps the most worthy candidate would have been Ma Ying-jeou, president of Taiwan. Since his election in March 2008, Ma has provided the impetus for the most rapid and wide-ranging rapprochement in cross-Strait relations in sixty years.

The last 18 months have been inauspicious ones for the bold, multilateral foreign policy agenda that Kevin Rudd seemed to embrace with such enthusiasm.

First, there was the Asia Pacific Community, hastily conceived and motivated by no less an ambition than to banish power politics from Asia, either through new institutions or by refashioning old ones or, as it now appears, through an annual one and a half track dialogue.

Then there was the disarmament commission, mapping out a path toward a nuclear weapons free world, only to discover that the steps needed to get there — namely, massive reductions in the major nuclear arsenals — represented a nightmare strategic scenario for Japan, our reluctant ICNND co-chair.

Of course, these are largely harmless initiatives — a little embarrassing perhaps, but inexpensive and without any real bearing on Australia’s foreign relations.

The same, however, can not be said of Canberra’s bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, which comes with real opportunity costs, as Glen Milne recently highlighted, and, even more alarmingly, is predicated on a serious miscalculation of Australian interests.

Vanessa Newby clearly doesn’t share my confidence in the feasibility or desirability of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. So before I elaborate on what an effective US military strategy might look like, allow me to respond to her very thoughtful riposte by exploring what I think might be a few tender spots in her own analysis.

Vanessa warns against confronting Iran, concerned that it might compromise political reforms arising from the ongoing post-election upheaval. To me, this overstates both the probability of political change in Iran and its likely impact on Iranian foreign policy. While the clerical leadership is clearly divided, the ruthless efficiency with which the regime has restored and maintained order in the weeks since the election suggests a determination on the part of Khamenei and his cohorts to consolidate their political dominance.

Of course, even if it were to occur, political reform in Iran is neither a vital US interest nor an end in itself. Moreover, the assumption that it might dampen Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, making it more receptive to compromise, is at best a tenuous one, as Obama himself has acknowledged.

So if diplomacy isn’t going to deliver the goods, how might the US go about constructing an effective military strategy? The first element is perhaps the most challenging, but also one to which the US military is well suited: a short, sharp campaign of crippling air strikes against Iran’s air defences and nuclear facilities, using a combination of air and sea-launched cruise missiles.

If President Obama’s bruising encounters with North Korea serve any general purpose, they might well be a reminder of the consequences of nuclear proliferation to rogue states, the ineffectiveness of engagement as a means of preventing it, and the dilemmas of containment once all else has failed.

Unfortunately, however, these lessons appear to be lost on Obama, whose ideological worldview lends itself to a seemingly unerring faith in the value of conciliatory diplomacy and schmaltzy gestures of understanding and goodwill.

Instead, Obama is preparing to replicate in his approach to Iran the same flaccid strategy that his predecessors used to deal with North Korea, which culminated, ignominiously, in a North Korean nuclear arsenal, an anxious set of allies, and a grinding diplomatic process of which Pyongyang’s ally, China, is the principal arbiter.

Iran, like North Korea, has every reason to want nuclear weapons and almost no reason to give them up. And there is little sign that the Ayatollahs are prepared to be tempted away from nuclear weapons, which promise to add to their legitimacy and security and allow them to exert a level of influence out of proportion to other elements of their national power.
 
In a number of respects, the choices facing Obama over Iran in the coming years are similar to those Bill Clinton faced over North Korea in the mid 1990s, except for one important difference: Obama has a viable military option.

What a difference a couple of years and a handful of nuclear tests make.

Until early 2008, the Six-Party Talks were viewed by many, including our own Prime Minister, as the most promising future model for regional security cooperation. Having cajoled Pyongyang back to the table and extracted from it a commitment to phased nuclear disarmament, the talks had always presented a seemingly golden opportunity: to marshal the diplomatic efforts of the region’s major powers to a common end, to resolve a major security challenge in a region well known for its simmering rivalries and anaemic multilateral security architecture.

Over the past few years, however, that vision has collapsed, culminating in North Korea’s recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Pyongyang remains as opaque and obstreperous as ever, deeply committed to its nuclear program and, if its increasing bellicosity is any indication, determined to reset negotiations on its own terms.

Meanwhile, a more acute sense of anxiety has been aroused in Japan and South Korea, as the limits of America’s capacity, and China’s willingness, to constrain Pyongyang have once again been laid bare before the world.

The futility of the Six-Party Talks boils down to the fact that they were predicated on two illusions, the first of which was a belief that North Korea might one day be prepared to give up its nuclear weapons, if only the price was right.

My soft power skepticism last week elicited some very thoughtful responses, both from Sam and elsewhere in the Australian blogosphere.

Sam seems to accept my general proposition that soft power does not really constitute a form of power at all, lacking as it does the capacity to change the behaviour of states in situations where interests diverge. However, he’s uncomfortable with my inference that the international system, stripped bare, is alone regulated by calculations of power and interest.

For Sam, that formulation fails to account for a number of features of international society, not least the important role of political authority, which, he argues, need not have material foundations. In this view, a state may assume authority regardless of its material capacity to enforce it, as his analogy from the world of cricket seems to imply.

Once again, there’s something naturally enticing about this idea. Americans in particular have always found it much easier to accept their state’s privileged global role as confirmation of the universal applicability of its values and the providential endorsement of its mission, rather than a product of its immense power. Unfortunately, however, that conception of authority does not comport with experience.

Over at Worldview, The Age’s international affairs blog, Daniel Flitton last week took up where many before him left off: grappling, somewhat incredulously, with the elusive concept of ‘smart power’ and the implications of its increasing centrality to US foreign policy.

In practice, smart power seems to have become short-hand for a more pragmatic statecraft, defined by a renewed emphasis on negotiation, a more conciliatory diplomatic style, and the relegation of economic and military coercion to a less prominent role in America’s foreign policy conduct. Its theoretical foundations, however, derive from Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘soft power’, a concept which is well known, widely misunderstood and, in my view, highly problematic.

Soft power refers to a state’s ability to achieve desired objectives through attraction rather than coercion or inducement – to get others to ‘want what you want’. According to Nye, soft power arises not from the accumulation of capabilities that can affect the behaviour of other states, but from the magnetism of a country’s culture, values, ideals, and the style — as well as the substance — of its domestic and foreign policies.

Two problems come to mind. First, even if a state is full of admiration for those elements of another society that supposedly give rise to its soft power, it is not clear to me why, when divergent interests are concerned, that admiration might lead the first state to subordinate its own objectives to the other’s.

And second, the concept seems to imply that a state can be powerful, and capable of attaining its preferences in international affairs, by virtue of its goodness, and not just its strength. This is a nice thought, though one that does not square with reality, as demonstrated by the need to create ‘smart power’, which seeks to integrate all elements of national power. 

Photo by Flickr user -nathan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Like Hugh, I was surprised by the Government’s frank acknowledgement in the latest defence White Paper that nuclear weapons, as well as being a source of insecurity, are in other ways beneficial to Australia’s national security, and continue to play an important stabilising role in the international system.

Indeed, despite a declared abhorrence for nuclear weapons, and a determination — through the ICNND — to work towards their abolition, there are at least four related areas where the government nevertheless ascribes a high value to nuclear weapons, particularly in relation to nuclear deterrence.

First, the White Paper (in paragraph 4.16) arrives at the judgment — correctly, in my view — that nuclear weapons are a central element of US global primacy. A potent nuclear arsenal enables the US to extend nuclear deterrence to its allies and provide relatively credible security assurances that maintain the cohesion of its alliance systems. These, in turn, contribute in various ways to regional and global security.

Second, the White Paper identifies extended nuclear deterrence as one of the most critical inhibitors of WMD proliferation, More...

This is the sixth contribution to our debate on Australia's defence policy which started here. Here are parts two, three, four and five.

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Mike Pezzullo. With the imminent release of his White Paper, he was probably rather enjoying his new public profile as Russell Hill’s hard-man, a role recently ascribed to him for circumventing the starry-eyed forecasts of Australia’s intelligence agencies, and for shrugging off the US defence establishment’s current preoccupation with small, strategically inconsequential wars.

That is, until Wednesday, when Hugh White made some very substantial revisions to his judgements regarding Australian defence capability. Using the same concentrically hierarchical strategic objectives that he outlined in the 2000 White Paper, Hugh has called Pezzullo’s hand and, it seems, raised him at least six submarines, one hundred Joint Strike Fighters, and four army battalions — requiring a perpetual increase in Australian defence expenditure to around 2.5% of GDP.

There’s a lot to like about Hugh’s latest formulation, but its greatest strength is the degree to which it restores to prominence the principle of self-reliance as the fundamental basis of Australian strategic policy. By meeting three basic criteria, such a posture promises to insulate Australia from the most serious risks arising from the decline of American hegemony: More...

In his thoughtful rejoinder to my recent admonition against ‘going big’ in Afghanistan, Soldier X at once seems to accept Australia’s commitment as strategically tokenistic, and at the same time recoils from the thought of it being described in such a way. It’s a telling position, not dissimilar to the view held by our own Government.

Above all, it reflects the strange disjuncture that has grown between Australia’s operational and strategic realities in Afghanistan — between the extraordinary exertions of our servicemen on the one hand and the symbolic political purpose to which their overall effort is being directed on the other.

As I suggested, Australians are naturally averse to the idea of fighting wars for tokenistic purposes, simply to consolidate Canberra’s credentials as a reliable US ally. To civilians in Australia, the acknowledgement of this as our fundamental purpose in Afghanistan would be unpalatable and, frankly, a little disempowering. I can only imagine how disconcerting the same thought must be to our soldiers on the front line, exposed to the horrors of war and whose lives, as we were tragically reminded this week, are very much at at stake. 

I think we do ourselves no favours by mincing words. That the war has begun to exact a greater human cost only reinforces the need to think and speak as clearly as possible about what we’re doing in Afghanistan, why we’re there, and whether – under conditions in which none of our vital national interests are stake — we should be prepared to expend the lives of our soldiers.

As things go from bad to worse in Afghanistan, President Obama has begun the familiar process of managing expectations, conscious that the barriers to success, however modestly defined, remain virtually insurmountable. With his credibility at stake, however, Obama is gambling on more forces, a more realistic strategy, and the comforting thought that Afghanistan has finally been afforded its rightful prominence among competing strategic priorities.

For its sins, the Rudd Government’s loud and frequent calls for a more coherent strategy have been answered. Canberra is under no illusions about American expectations, and is almost certain to enhance its commitment to the war. Against this backdrop, a number of Australia’s leading strategic thinkers have made the case for Australia to substantially upgrade its military presence, to double or triple its force levels, or take responsibility for Oruzgan province.

These are, in my view, eminently misguided recommendations. In operation, they would be dangerous, costly, and out of touch with the scale of Australian interests in Afghanistan, as well as the strength of our alliance position. While the Government should seriously rethink its long-term commitment to the war, if it is determined to ‘stay the course’, here are some strategic considerations that ought to guide the size and composition of any additional contribution.

1. The war is already lost: The invasion of Afghanistan seems to have been motivated more by a reflexive desire for retribution than by a rational set of political objectives. To the extent that the war was based on strategic objectives, it was to deny al Qaeda a permissive environment and a territorial base from which it could raise and train forces, command and control operations, and conduct its affairs with relative impunity.

This might once have been possible, had the war been conducted differently, but no longer. More...

Sam is quite right that Indonesia’s own strategic circumstances might eventually lead it to acquire very powerful air and maritime forces and afford them greater relative prominence in its defence strategy, just as China has over the last two decades.

If Jakarta can begin to utilise the productive capacity of its large population more fully, sustaining high levels of internal cohesion and economic growth, there is no reason why it should not eventually emerge as a major regional power with military forces — land, air and sea — that greatly exceed Australia’s.

As a matter of prudence, however, Indonesia, like Australia, cannot ignore the greater potential dangers inherent in the strategic environment to its north. More...

There is something intuitively attractive about Sam’s case for a ‘non-provocative’ defence policy – the idea that Australia might enhance its own security by adjusting its force structure and declaratory policy in ways that make its neighbours feel more secure, and hence less inclined to acquire countervailing military capabilities. But let me explain why, in my view, his argument is not entirely compelling.

Sam’s overall argument rests on the problematic assumption that Australia’s current defence policy — built as it is on a highly offensive war-fighting doctrine and an explicit commitment to the maintenance of military superiority — must, at some level, be provocative; that is, likely to provoke security consequences which are at least serious enough to outweigh the benefits of retaining the current defence policy, and the risks of changing it. The problem, as Sam himself seems to recognise, is that this is an assumption for which there is very little supporting evidence.

Australia has enjoyed relative military superiority in Southeast Asia for at least four decades now, yet no state in the region, not even Indonesia, has seriously concerned itself with balancing Australian power or attaining strategic parity through a build-up of military capabilities. Even today, with Canberra on the cusp of acquiring a whole range of new offensive war-fighting capabilities, there has been no corresponding build-up in Southeast Asia and no general deterioration in political relations, much less rapid, focused, and interactive military procurements characteristic of an arms race. More...

Like Chris Skinner, I’m deeply skeptical about Sam’s proposition that Israel could improve its own security by resorting to unilateral nuclear disarmament, as a means of resolving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

The logic of Sam’s argument appears to rest on the dubious assumption that Iran’s bid for nuclear weapons – or at least the ability to quickly acquire them – is motivated almost entirely by a desire either to deter an Israeli nuclear attack or prevent itself from falling victim to Israeli coercion. Should it no longer have to confront these threats, the argument goes, Iran would have no requirement for nuclear weapons and, consequently, neither would its Arab neighbours. More...

Hugh is spot on when he points out that the crisis over Georgia is, in large part, a product of divergent perceptions in Washington and Moscow about the means and ends of post-Cold War US grand strategy.

From Washington’s perspective, the expansion of NATO, the colour revolutions, and the embrace of places like Georgia and Ukraine have all been important components of Washington’s liberal hegemonic strategy, designed to preserve America’s global leadership through the promotion of what it believes to be universal goods — democracy, open markets, strategic stability, and a whole range of international institutions – which accord with everyone’s interests, including Russia’s. More...

Hugh White is always persuasive; and this speech, made at the IISS in early June, is a particularly elegant account of how he believes the major powers of Asia must adapt themselves to a new kind of strategic order if they are to preserve the peace, stability and prosperity of the past three decades — and why he isn’t holding his breath for it to happen.
 
The basic principles of Hugh’s thesis will likely be familiar to readers of The Interpreter. If the US and Japan are unable to accommodate China’s rise, Beijing and Washington will be drawn inexorably into a systematically adversarial relationship, in which US primacy – which for the past thirty years has been the foundation of strategic stability in Asia – will become a source of hostility, competition, and possibly conflict.

The optimal configuration, according to Hugh, is a ‘concert of Asia,’ in which Washington gracefully concedes its primacy, treating China not just as a ‘responsible stakeholder’ but as an equal in regional and global affairs. China, for its part, needs to accept Japan as an equal and abandon its own hegemonic aspirations. And Japan must come to terms with the prospect of a long-term, cooperative relationship between the US and China, and increasingly provide for its own security.

Hugh is deeply pessimistic about the prospects for a Concert of Asia emerging, because the particular concessions that each party would have to make in the interest of the general good just seem too painful to accept. And while I share his doubts, my own pessimism runs even deeper. More...

A battle is unfolding in the backroom of John McCain’s campaign headquarters. This is the battle to influence McCain’s world-view, and to shape the overarching ideas and principles on which he will build his foreign and strategic policies. According to this New York Times piece, Republican foreign policy pragmatists with whom McCain regularly consults — figures such as Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Richard Armitage — are becoming increasingly concerned about the influence of a competing group of neo-conservative McCain confidantes. The neo-cons, who achieved ideational dominance in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, include Max Boot, John Bolton, and Robert Kagan. 

Though McCain has sought to synthesise the two approaches by proclaiming himself to be a ‘realistic idealist’, his vision for American foreign and strategic policy has, as Fareed Zakaria points out, taken on a confusing, schizophrenic complexion, vacillating awkwardly between shrewd self-interested realism and idealistic neo-conservatism. Take this speech, for example, delivered to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles in March. Though McCain waxed eloquent on the practical complexities of dealing with the increasing diffusion of power and influence in the international system and the rising prominence of non-democratic states like  Russia and China, he nevertheless articulated a vision for renewing American global leadership based almost single-mindedly on his faith in the significance of shared values between America and its democratic international partners. More...

The New America Foundation recently hosted an event here in Washington, moderated by the Arms Control Wonk himself, Jeffrey Lewis, on the nuclear dimension of Sino-US relations. The presenters, Darryl Press and Keir Lieber, have published a number of provocative articles on the topic (see here, here and here). Boiled down, their observations are predicated on the idea that the US has either achieved or is fast approaching nuclear primacy, a condition in which Washington could be very confident in its ability to destroy China’s intercontinental range strategic nuclear forces in a pre-emptive first strike. According to Press and Lieber, the strategic implications of American nuclear supremacy are a double-edged sword. More...

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter and one of the deans of US foreign policy, recently turned 80. To celebrate, CSIS threw him an honorary colloquium here in Washington on the history and directions of US grand strategy. The event attracted some of the most eminent and influential names in the business, including Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and of course Brzezinski himself. More...

It’s been a big day here on Capitol Hill, with Ambassador Crocker and General Petraus testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the situation in Iraq. The briefing provided prospective presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain with an opportunity to validate their own strategic perspectives on the war. Predictably, Clinton highlighted the practical problems associated with an open-ended military commitment, while McCain sought to capitialise on Petraus’s view that a premature withdrawal would be detrimental to US national security. Barack Obama is scheduled to have his turn soon. 

Beyond the political jockeying, the political and military outlook in Iraq is pretty bleak, and despite some positive developments, the general security situation is, according to Petraus, 'fragile and reversible.' More...