On the campaign trail, Republican candidates such as Gov. Mitt Romney frequently criticize President Obama for moving America towards a "European-style entitlement society" with sclerotic social welfare programs and crushing debt burdens. Two recent decisions by the Obama administration raise the prospect that the White House might also be following the European ethos -- or at least the prevailing French model of "laicite" and aggressive secularism -- on religious liberty. With apologies to historic French America-philes such as Lafayette and de Tocqueville, this is not the direction our country should go.

Normally domestic policy developments like Obamacare insurance mandates and school employment disputes in Michigan wouldn't be of much relevance for a foreign policy forum like Shadow Government. But the administration's position on the recent Supreme Court case on Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School and Friday's Obamacare mandate eviscerating conscience provisions for religious institutions providing healthcare -- while appalling in their own right -- might also help explain a foreign policy puzzle that I have raised before -- why this administration has been so indifferent to the promotion of religious liberty abroad.

To briefly recap, on the Hosanna-Tabor case, the Obama Justice Department took the position that religious liberty does not protect the right of religious institutions to hire their own employees in accordance with the organization's faith commitments. And the Obama Health and Human Services Department mandated that religious institutions such as hospitals and schools need to fund and include sterilization, contraceptive, and abortifacient coverage in their health insurance plans regardless of any doctrinal convictions otherwise. Just how bad for religious liberty were these two positions that the White House took? So bad that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the White House on Hosanna-Tabor in a 9-0 smackdown (those votes included Obama appointees Justices Sotomayor and Kagan), and the normally understated US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the HHS decision as "literally unconscionable" and "a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights."

The Obama Justice and Health and Human Services Departments -- with at least a green light if not a strong push from the White House -- embraced positions on religious liberty that can only be described as extreme. Religious believers may disagree among themselves on any number of theological, moral, and political issues, but they hold near unanimity on the imperative and importance of religious freedom -- in part precisely because religious freedom preserves the space for diversity and tolerance of differing opinions.

Why does this matter for foreign policy? Because it might help explain the Obama administration's otherwise baffling apathy on international religious freedom. I have lamented previously the administration's negligence on this issue, including the delay until over halfway through its first term to even put in place an Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, and the complete omission of religious freedom from the 2010 National Security Strategy. When seen alongside the administration's myopic positions on the two domestic policies mentioned above, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this White House sees religious liberty with indifference.

Read on

This week, global economy mavens are waiting once again for European leaders to emerge with a panacea. Tradition dictates that financial panaceas should be presented on Sunday evenings, before Asian markets open. The Europeans actually scheduled their panacea accordingly, but whiffed. The cure-all was rescheduled for Wednesday.

There has been much gnashing of teeth and rolling of eyes over eurozone leaders' repeated inability to solve their financial crisis once and for all. U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner traveled to Poland last month and told a gathering of European finance ministers to Just Do It. Oddly enough, the gathered Europeans did not really appreciate the admonishment.

So President Obama joined in and added further encouragement: "In Europe, we haven't seen them deal with their banking system and their financial system as effectively as they needed to." Quoth the coverage: "Obama didn't specify what steps should be taken."

And therein lies the problem. There has been a presumption that if only German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy could stop bickering and summon the political resolve, they could take the decisive set of actions to put everything right. The rest of the world can best help, the reasoning goes, by shouting exhortations at Europe to just try harder.

But what, exactly, are Europeans being urged to do? The grand fix must address a knot of interconnected problems. First, there is the issue of Greek debt; it's huge and the Greeks can't pay it. That leads to worries about what will happen with other larger highly indebted countries around Europe's periphery; such worries mean that lenders demand higher interest rates and worry turns to panic. This sovereign debt crisis, in turn, stirs fear in those who hold all that debt; since many of the debt holders are European banks, that stirs fear in pretty much everyone -- or it should.

Now consider some candidate solutions.

1. The leaky lifeboat solution: start bailing.

This was Europe's first response, with the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), with a lending capacity of roughly $600 billion. Although Greece's debt is huge relative to the size of the Greek economy, it is certainly small enough to be handled by the fund. Why not just pay it off and be done with all this? There are three problems. First, that wouldn't solve Greece's problems. Although the country has significantly cut its budget deficit, it would still need to borrow even if its old debt were wiped out. Second, there is the moral hazard of rewarding miscreants. Cutting budget deficits is painful and politically treacherous; if Europe will ultimately pick up the tab, why go through the agony? Third, Greece is not alone. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy have all drawn the suspicion of bond markets. To cow those markets into submission would take a bailout fund of trillions of dollars, not just hundreds of billions.

Could Europe just swallow hard and provide the cash? Obstacle: the borderline state of French finance. France currently has a AAA credit rating, but has substantial debt of its own. If it were to join Germany to backstop such a large fund, its credit rating could be downgraded, as Moody's warned last week. Without a top credit rating behind it, the finances of the bailout would not work.  

Read on

In Paul Miller's excellent post below, he makes a persuasive case that much of the European reluctance to make the necessary resource commitments to NATO stems from a decades-long "rational choice" to free ride under the American security umbrella. I think Paul is largely correct, but would add that there is an additional dimension of culture and historical memory that also shapes the European mindset on defense.

Last week when Secretary Gates gave his Brussels speech, I happened to be on vacation with my wife in southern France. We spent a few days touring the French countryside and its many villages. As enchanting as each village was, with their timeless stone houses, quiet streams, and idyllic vineyards, every last town center also featured a monument to death, in the form of an obelisk listing the names of the men of the village who had died in World War I. These monuments, each one bearing witness to scores of names, serve for the French as inescapable reminders of the carnage and costs of war. In France's case, this meant the deaths of 1.3 million of its soldiers in the Great War alone. Even as the World War I generation has now passed from the scene, such obelisks, and their comparable memorials in other European countries, continue to shape Europe's collective memory - a memory further seared by the Great War's even bloodier sequel.

This traumatic twentieth century history forms much of the prevailing twenty-first century European worldview on security issues. The German Marshall Fund's invaluable annual survey, Transatlantic Trends, offers one of the most vivid illustrations of these transatlantic differences. According to the most recent 2010 edition of the survey, "when asked whether they agree that war is necessary to obtain justice under some circumstances, three-quarters of Americans (77%) and only one-quarter of EU respondents (27%) agreed. Although both numbers are up slightly from last year, these numbers have largely remained the same over the past several years and represent a significant and lasting divide in American and European public opinion....The differences are even more pronounced when considering 49% of Americans and only 8% of EU respondents agree strongly."

For Europeans, despite the European Union's prevailing economic woes, the EU's great political achievement has been forging the bonds and identity that make another continent-wide war almost unthinkable. And as Paul points out, NATO's formation after World War II may have been prompted most immediately by the Soviet threat, but it also played an important role in the Franco-German reconciliation and the foundations for European peace.

While American policy-makers should be mindful of how this historical sensibility influences European choices, this is not to excuse those choices. In Europe's case, the fact that history helps shape a culture does not mean that history should determine a culture. As a matter of policy, Secretary Gates' sharp critique is correct, both in its substance and tone. European nations do need to increase their defense budgets and their political will to use force for alliance missions, whether in Afghanistan or Libya or future conflicts. Just as Europe has largely been able to escape its past of catastrophically destructive continent-wide wars, Europe also needs to escape its more recent past of anemic commitments to security.

There is a strong temptation to take European stability for granted. After an exceedingly shaky start to the 20th Century, Europe got its act together, overcame animosities, and became a steady and supportive ally of the United States.

Perhaps for this reason, when foreign policy cognoscenti run down threats on the global horizon -- or at least issues that are likely to feature prominently between now and the next U.S. presidential election -- there is a temptation to cite China, Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, and perhaps pending trade agreements with partners in Latin America and across the Pacific. I have heard discussions in which Europe was omitted entirely.

Beyond Europe's history of stability, this may also have to do with the language used to describe Europe's brewing financial crisis. The articles dwell on yield spreads, credit default swaps, and risks to central bank balance sheets. The issue just begs to be relegated to the back business pages. But it would be misplaced.

The serious economic implications alone should earn the story a front-page spot above the fold (for you kids out there, that's the equivalent of a prominent link with a large font). At least the economic issues have received some careful scrutiny (see here and here). What if you're an old-school, throw-weight and Congress of Vienna foreign policy type? Herewith, four first-order foreign policy implications:

1. Relations between European countries could dramatically worsen. The tensions that union was meant to bury are apparently not as deep as one might have thought. A year ago, when the first Greek bailout was under discussion, some German parliamentarians suggested that the profligate Greeks should just sell off some islands. "We give you cash, you give us Corfu," one paper offered. Greeks responded with recollections of Nazi plunder and atrocities. Meanwhile, countries like Spain, with strikingly high unemployment, are being told to launch austerity programs, under the tutelage of the Germans and the French. Any potential for resentment there?

Read on

As NATO leaders prepare for their summit in Lisbon this week, attention has focused on the war in Afghanistan, approval of a new Strategic Concept (NATO's roadmap for the future), and the challenge of sustaining the alliance's military capabilities in an era of fiscal crisis. Missing from the agenda is the future of the U.S. military presence in Europe, the cornerstone of the transatlantic security relationship.

On Feb. 1, the Obama administration rolled out its Quadrennial Defense Review, a planning document that articulated the principles that would guide the administration's decision-making regarding the stationing of U.S. forces beyond its borders. It stated that "pending the review of NATO's Strategic Concept and an accompanying U.S. assessment of our European defense posture network," new plans regarding Europe would be approved. For an administration that prides itself on consultation, it has been surprising how little discussion there has been of this strategically important issue of growing concern among NATO Allies.

These pending decisions follow the Bush administration's 2004 Global Defense Posture Review. The latter initiated a reduction of U.S. forces stationed in Europe from about 100,000 personnel down to approximately 60,000. The decision was interpreted by many in Europe as a disturbing sign of declining U.S. commitment to Europe.

Moreover, the Commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and the U.S. Joint Staff later concluded that the plan would leave EUCOM unable to fully execute its missions, including those supporting NATO's crucial Article 5 security commitment. On November 21, 2007, in response to these concerns Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suspended implementation of the posture review decisions regarding Europe pending the 2010 QDR. This decision essentially froze U.S. forces dedicated to the continent at some 80,000 personnel.

In March of this year, Admiral James Stavridis, the current EUCOM Commander, testified in Congress that should the United States withdraw additional brigade combat teams, his command would have to "[assume] risk in its capability to conduct steady-state security cooperation, shaping, and contingency missions. Deterrence and reassurance are at increased risk."

With the summit now imminent, a number of allies are expressing unease, even though some are unwilling to press Obama as they cut their own defense budgets and lest their concerns undercut the meeting's precooked message of alliance unity and revitalization. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, naturally concerned about the viability of NATO's security guarantee, stated that it is important for U.S. forces stationed in Europe to remain at their current levels. German delegations from the communities that host U.S. bases have travelled to Washington urging that they not be subject to further reductions or, even worse, closure.

Obama's impending decisions on this matter come in an increasingly challenging domestic fiscal context, one that has led many in his party to press aggressively for significant defense cuts. On October 13th, 57 members of the House of Representatives wrote the President urging a hard look at the basing of U.S. forces overseas. The 2010 Congressional election yielded a Congress whose clear focus on job creation and deficit elimination could well reinforce skepticism on both sides of the aisle toward permanent deployments in Europe. The roll out of the deficit commission report and its recommendations, including reduced spending, will surely further catalyze calls for cut backs in forward presence.

Heeding those calls would be a mistake. Moving military forces based overseas to facilities at home involves high near term costs, including building of new infrastructure. The long term savings are marginal at best. Second, once basing privileges in another country have been terminated, it is never easy to regain them.

Most importantly, the United States would deny itself a critical force multiplier. U.S. troops based in Europe provide the most effective way to develop and sustain allied forces that are truly interoperable and ready to fight side by side with us. This is a critical and challenging necessity. U.S. military units that visit Europe once or twice year can in no way match the levels of joint training and exercises currently available to those stationed in Europe.

Accordingly, at Lisbon, Obama should announce a decision to keep U.S. forces stationed in Europe at their current levels. That would be a strategically serious and politically needed demonstration of U.S. commitment to the transatlantic alliance.

Evasion regarding this matter, so vital to the future of the NATO alliance would contradict both Obama's repeated rejection of unilateralism and his commitment to genuine consultations. Europeans, too, would be remiss if they fail to speak up. Collective silence at Lisbon regarding a matter so central to American-European security interdependence will only give further validation to those who assert that US military presence in Europe is an anachronism.

As part of the developed world's most dramatic effort to put its public finances on solid footing, the Conservative Liberal Democratic government in Britain announced significant reductions to its defense program yesterday. Their review is a fearless example to others, including the United States.

Prime Minister David Cameron's government put health care and (somewhat oddly) development assistance off limits, subjecting most departments to a reduction of 25 percent from their current budgets. Defense was reduced only around eight percent across four years. An equivalent reduction in U.S. defense spending would clip $56 billion dollars (the entirety of the British defense budget) in the same time frame. By contrast, Sec. Robert Gates is seeking to keep U.S. defense spending increasing by one percent per year.

And what did they cut? Most importantly, they did not reduce their commitment to the wars we are fighting, although they plan to significantly reduce their forces as their commitments wind down. They are reducing their civilian defense workforce by 25,000 and their uniformed military by 17,000. The army will take the smallest reduction, appropriately, given their tempo of operations through 2015 (the period of cuts).

The reductions will make Britain less able to fight continuously, as we and they have been doing since 2001. But they have preserved the ability to project 30,000 troops to a fight, a feat no other country except us could likely achieve. They even added funding for additional helicopters and mine-resistant vehicles important to operations in Afghanistan.

The British cut by 40 percent their tanks and artillery, betting they will be less valuable in future wars than capabilities currently employed in the war in Afghanistan. I'm not sure that's true, but it's not an unreasonable view -- in fact, it is also Secretary Gates's rubric for U.S. forces.

The cuts do mean Britain will be even less able to fight wars unless they are fighting alongside the United States, but they gave that option up in the 1998 Defense Review. The further diminution is of degree, not type. It will be most prevalent in Britain's air and maritime operations. Four frigates will be decommissioned. Both the navy and air force will be reduced by 5,000 people each.

Harrier jets, MRA4 reconnaissance aircraft, and R1 battlefield surveillance aircraft will be eliminated; C-130J airlifters will be retired a decade early. As currently envisioned, it will create a gap in carrier air through 2019. This could be attenuated by a faster shift to unmanned airframes (that is not in the spending plan) or greater cooperation with France and other power-projection countries (although it is heresy to say so on Trafalgar Day, the French could, for example, deploy fighters on British carriers and vice versa).

They have kept crucial niches of excellence valuable to remaining a first-tier military, including:

• The nuclear deterrent (more slowly modernized but to retain continuous at-sea deployments; related Less to spending than to disarmament, operational warheads to be reduced by around one-fourth);
• aircraft carriers (two, although they are reducing their aircraft buys and allowing a gap in fighter capability while transitioning to JSF);
• cyber security (increasing spending to around $27 billion per year);
• special forces (increasing their numbers);

But Britain's value as a strategic ally of the United States is not just the quantity or quality of their military forces. Their value is crucially dependant on their willingness to fight. And here, Britain really is different and better than most other potential allies of the United States. Britain losing the will to fight is a subject very much worrying U.S. defense experts; these defense reductions to not call into doubt that fundamental sensibility.

Britain's reductions are substantial, and one wishes they had not been necessary. But the Cameron government deserves an awful lot of credit for facing Britain's debt crisis and making hard choices that accept risk in the near term to put their country on stronger strategic footing. The British set sensible priorities and programmed to them, making cuts that do not damage their ability to protect and advance their interests. Lots of other countries are set to make reductions in defense spending, including the United States; probably none -- including us -- will do as proficient a job as Defense Minister Liam Fox and the British defense establishment have done.

The politics of debt reduction will drive the severity of budget cuts; we Republicans should be actively building intellectual capital to make smart choices at different budget top lines. We would be much better positioned had Secretary Gates's instruction for the Quadrennial Defense Review been to design sensible defense programs at several different baseline budget levels (say, varying by $50 billion dollars a year). That would have permitted a debate -- and given the elected leadership a real choice -- over where to accept risk, which is the essential question.

On Friday the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo will announce the winner of this year's prize. One of the leading candidates (the odds-on favorite according to Irish book-makers Paddy Power) is imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu is the intrepid author of the "Charter 08" document calling for democracy in China. Modeled on the landmark "Charter 77" that played an instrumental role in galvanizing freedom's voices behind the Iron Curtain (and written in part by then-Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, himself a supporter of Liu's Nobel candidacy), Charter 08 has been signed by hundreds of Chinese intellectuals. It has prompted wide attention and support from Chinese dissidents, and the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party, such that Liu is now serving an 11-year prison sentence.

The Chinese Government fears that Liu might receive the Peace Prize, evidenced by the PRC's preemptive threats against the Norwegian Government. Nobel Institute director Geir Lundestad astutely dismissed China's ham-handed efforts at intimidation: "China has come with warnings before, but they have no influence on the committee's work."  

The Peace Prize might go to another worthy recipient, such as Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai or Afghan women's rights advocate Sima Samar. We will all know soon enough. This is an opportunity for the White House to begin putting some follow-up action behind President Obama's laudable UNGA speech two weeks ago, affirming his commitment to promoting human rights and democracy - and to show support for a fellow Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. 

For example, if Liu does indeed receive the prize on Friday, how about President Obama makes an in-person, live statement to the press congratulating Liu and calling on the Chinese government to release him from prison, immediately and unconditionally? (The latter meaning not house-arrest but true freedom of movement, speech, and association.) This would be a profound show of support not only for Liu but for all of China's dissidents and prisoners of conscience. And on next month's trip to Asia, President Obama could encourage the leaders of the other Asian democracies he visits -- such as India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan -- to speak out on Liu's behalf as well. This would make clear that China's repressive system is not just an American concern but a concern to all free nations. 

China's recent thuggish attempts at power-projection in Asia have alarmed many neighboring nations. But the core problem with China is not that it is a rising power; it is the nature of the regime. China's rising power would be much more welcomed by the region if the Chinese government was accountable to its citizens and respected their rights and freedoms. This is the kind of China that Liu Xiaobo and the other signatories to Charter 08 seek to bring about. They deserve our support.

Today, 12 August, is the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the international treaties designed to protect soldiers and civilians during armed conflicts.  The treaties became the focus of international attention in 2002 when the Bush administration controversially concluded that al Qaeda and the Taliban were not entitled to their protections. President Obama has reaffirmed America's "commitment" to the Geneva Conventions but has not been specific about how the Conventions apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. To re-assert U.S. leadership with respect to the laws of war, the Obama administration should announce that the United States accepts specific provisions of the Conventions and engage other countries to develop new rules where the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

The 1949 Geneva Conventions consist of four separate treaties originally signed by 59 countries in Geneva, Switzerland. In light of the horrific experiences of World War II, the first three agreements revised previous treaties dating from 1864, 1906, and 1929 that provided humanitarian protections for sick or wounded soldiers on land, sailors at sea, and prisoners of war. The fourth agreement, added in 1949, establishes protections for civilians in conflict zones. The best known of the agreements is the Third Geneva Convention, which provides detailed articles of protection for those who qualify as Prisoners of War (POWs).

The Geneva Conventions apply to conflicts between the 194 countries that are now party to them. Since 1949, three Additional Protocols have been added to the Conventions to provide further protections in light of changes in modern warfare. The United States has long objected to certain provisions in the First Protocol, although it has stated its support for others. President Reagan submitted the Second Protocol to the Senate in 1987, but the Senate has not acted on it. The Bush administration was a driving force behind (and signed and ratified) the Third Protocol, which created an alternative protective symbol (a Red Diamond) for countries (primarily Israel) that do not use the Red Cross or Red Crescent.

Together, the four 1949 Conventions and the three protocols form the bedrock of the international laws of war.

Read on

Europe's attempt at shock and awe exploded Sunday night, blasting the markets into a Monday of euphoria. Now the dust and debris are settling and we can inspect what just happened. In particular, we can ask whether Europe's big move will solve the problem and what this means for the European Union going forward economically and politically.

To figure out whether it will solve Europe's problem, we first have to decide what the problem is. That, in fact, is at the crux of the matter. There are two very different ways of thinking about the crisis along Europe's periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain -- PIIGS):

1. It's a solvency crisis. These countries have let their debts get out of hand. In some cases, it was government borrowing, in some cases private sector borrowing, but in all cases it looks unsustainable. The problem first became apparent in Greece, but investors soon recognized the same symptoms in the other countries. The spread of rising spreads (higher borrowing costs) was not so much contagion as it was a dawning recognition that a number of countries had been afflicted by the same syndrome. Or:
2. It's a liquidity crisis. These countries have some debt problems, but they are really victims of ravenous and amoral speculators. Those speculators create crises, rather than recognize them. When they stampede out of bond markets and drive up interest rates, otherwise viable budget situations become untenable.

Europe's solution of a trillion dollars of backup funds is aimed squarely at the liquidity crisis interpretation. By providing funds to the beleaguered countries at reasonable rates, those countries will have time to get their fiscal affairs in order and work their way out of this mess.

Read on

Watching Greeks fire-bomb their banks, shut down their airports and ruin the tourist trade that is their economy's main prospect, I can't help but hear Virgil reprised. In that Roman poet's great narrative The Aeneid, survivors of the Trojan War seek a place to start anew, after much difficulty founding what will become the Roman Empire. It's rough going, and after much hard luck and stormy seas, the Trojan women burn the ships in order to prevent the men returning them all to sea.

They knew the Sybil (a rough approximation to an oracle for the Greeks) had prophesied that when they "quit at last of the sea's dangers / for whom still greater are in store on land... wars, vicious wars / I see ahead, and Tiber foaming in blood." Seeing the fleet in flames, Ascanius' reaction is "but your own hopes are what you burn!" And so it is with the Greeks -- they burn their own hopes by such unwillingness to do the unpleasant but necessary belt tightening.

Tourism provides one in five jobs in the Greek economy and a full sixteen percent of its gross domestic product. Being tied to location, it cannot be manufactured elsewhere. Being tied to history and culture, it is inherently Greek. And the best way to attenuate the effects of the austere cutbacks in government spending necessitated by Greece's financial crisis is to grow their economy as fast as possible. The debt to GDP ratio goes down both by reducing the numerator and increasing the denominator. Yet the Greek riots against the austerity program are sure to diminish tourism.

It is difficult not to sympathize with German hesitation to bail Greece out. Germany has labored for nearly 20 years to bring the former East Germany up to par with the West. Greece leapt into the euro on questionable accounting and proceeded to splash around the cheap credit that German stolidity in finances extended to the rest of the eurozone. One in three Greeks is a government employee. Hairdressers can retire at age 50 with full pensions because their jobs are categorized as hazardous.

But now much more outrageous is that than our Foreign Service Officer's Union refusing rewarding diplomats that serve in war zones? When Secretary Rice tried to give preferential promotion to diplomats that volunteered for service in Iraq or Afghanistan, the union representatives argued that every posting is dangerous -- as though volunteering to serve in Iraq took no more courage than volunteering to serve in Costa Rica. Currently two-thirds of foreign postings are designated as hazardous duty posts.

The state of our public finances is not as bad as Greece's, but we'll get there fast. Current and future obligations already incurred by our government amount to 500% of our GDP. And President Obama's budget will triple our already staggering national debt by 2020.

What may -- may -- save America from Greece's fate is that public outrage is building at our government spending money we don't have. When California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to move against public sector unions in 2005, voters rejected his ballot initiatives. Californians cannot yet bring themselves to make the hard choices Greece is now having imposed on it by the IMF and its EU allies. New Jersey governor Chris Christie seems more successful, perhaps aided by greater public awareness of the parlous state of government finances. The hold of "entitlements" and public sector unions over government finances needs to be broken -- otherwise we really will be Greece.

Markets will not bankroll U.S. profligacy forever. No one can say when the chill will start, but once it does -- as Greece's example demonstrates -- the effects are dramatic. The longer we stall before facing up to the unpleasant reductions we must make, the more draconian will be the demands. As the spiraling cost of reassuring markets of the EU's commitment to support Greece demonstrates, it's much better to beat markets to the reckoning.

Here again Virgil offers sound advice. As the Sybil gives Aeneas instructions to Hades, she cautions:

The way downward is easy from Averinus.
Black Dis' door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to heaven's air,
There is the trouble, there is the toil.

It's easy to become Greece. But it's very hard to get out of their predicament.

The final frenetic 24 hours of campaigning are kicking in before tomorrow's elections here in the United Kingdom. And there is a tenuous yet palpable sense that momentum has shifted in favor of David Cameron and the Conservatives. Whether this late surge will be enough to overcome a hung parliament and produce a Tory governing majority remains anyone's guess.

Five factors all broke in the Conservatives' favor over the past week. First, the feckless Gordon Brown made his open microphone "bigoted" voter gaffe -- and in one fell swoop further demoralized his Labour base while reinforcing the concerns of undecided voters that he is just another calculating politician whose public pandering belies a private condescension towards the populace. Second, Cameron acquitted himself well and by most accounts won the third (and most important) television debate. Third, because Brown's "oops, is this mic on?" moment highlighted voter concerns over unchecked immigration, it also shined an unfavorable spotlight on the Liberal Democrat platform's support for an immigration amnesty -- just when Nick Clegg's burst of fame was starting to lose its luster. (And you know you have an immigration problem when even immigrants themselves are complaining about excessive immigration). Fourth, already leading with their chin on immigration, the LibDems took another punch courtesy of the week's headlines about Greece's economic travails. The LibDem platform's support for Britain joining the Eurozone, already unpopular, looks even less appealing to voters reading about a 110 billion euro bailout of the profligate Greeks. Fifth, the Tories enjoyed almost a clean sweep in media endorsements, which still carry a lot of weight here. Besides the expected support of the Telegraph, the Sun, and the Daily Mail, the Conservatives picked up some pleasant surprises in backing from the Times, Financial Times, Daily Express, and the Economist.

The Economist is especially bracing on the dire state of the British economy:

But in this British election the overwhelming necessity of reforming the public sector stands out. It is not just that the budget deficit is a terrifying 11.6% of GDP, a figure that makes tax rises and spending cuts inevitable. Government now accounts for over half the economy, rising to 70% in Northern Ireland. For Britain to thrive, this liberty-destroying Leviathan has to be tackled. The Conservatives, for all their shortcomings, are keenest to do that; and that is the main reason why we would cast our vote for them.

As my colleague Alan McCormick points out in today's Wall Street Journal Europe, the UK's only prospect for a sustainable economic recovery will come from empowering private sector entrepreneurs, not further expansion of government. And it is here that prospects of a hung parliament -- and its accompanying gridlock, credit rating downgrades, weakened pound, and stagnation on economic reform -- may have chastened voters into staying with the Tories rather than flirting with a protest vote for the LibDems. Sometimes wishing "a pox on all their houses" can bring, well, a pox on all houses including one's own.

Yet even with these five favorable breaks, polls are still tight and the Conservatives may not run the tables they need in enough marginal seats to snag a majority. Thursday night will be a very late night indeed as the UK, and the world, watches the returns come in.

When I became the U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), I was often told by my State Department colleagues that if the U.S. and Russia worked well together in OSCE, the organization would also work well.

The United States and Russia, indeed, worked well together in my initial years at OSCE and my Russian counterparts and I were able to achieve a few things. That has not been the case in recent years. The United States and Russia, in effect, gave up on the organization. Its budget shrank. Russia and others became disillusioned with western standards on human rights. Security took a back seat when then-President Vladimir Putin suspended Russia's participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) in 2007. In 2008, speaking in the Bundestag, President Dmitry Medvedev presented a plan for a new security architecture for Europe that did not seem to build on OSCE.

President Obama proposed to change the relationship when he called on both the United States and Russia to hit the "re-set" button. Suddenly, things began to happen. New incentives ranging from arms control to overflights to Afghanistan were agreed to. But nothing of consequence was happening at OSCE, one of the world's few organizations where both the United States and Russia are full-fledged, voting members. There was lots of attention given to NATO; little, if any, to OSCE, notwithstanding Secretary Clinton's Paris speech as recently as this past January, where she called for more responsibilities for OSCE. 

There are many reasons for this inattention, especially from the United States. One is the absence of an OSCE summit since 1999, when President Clinton went to Istanbul with other national leaders. That was 11 years ago. According to an agreement at the Helsinki Summit in 1992, the OSCE was to have a summit every two years. That has not happened.

When Kazakhstan took over the OSCE chairmanship on January 1 of this year, as is done by a different member-country every year, it made an OSCE summit at the heads of government or state level its highest priority. Russia has indicated its support, as have a number of other states.  Many more members are looking to the U.S. for its leadership on this issue. The United States has been tepid in its response. President Nazerbayev's visit to Washington, where he met with President Obama as part of the Nuclear Security Summit, was a missed opportunity for definitive U.S. agreement to an OSCE summit and for setting a time and place. The other OSCE members will follow if the U.S. and Russia agree.

Read on

In the Cold War, public sensibilities about imminent threats were partly shaped by pop culture offerings, such as the spy thriller. For a modern version, imagine the following scene:

The camera captures the late afternoon sunlight glittering off the Aegean Sea as music thrums and hints of action to come. A yacht coasts across the screen, sporting a languid beauty sunning herself on its prow. Eventually, the cabin comes into view. Within, we see a dapper gentleman in a tuxedo. The voiceover intones:

"The fate of Europe rests with one figure: Bond. Greek Bond."

Zoom in on gentleman's laptop spreadsheet.

Greek government bonds have been sinking, and they threaten to take the grand European integration project down with them. The crisis has tapped into deep-seated feelings about Europe and its history: Greek politicians claimed they would not have these problems if not for the residual effects of Nazi plunder; German politicians responded that if the Greeks were really hard up, why didn't they go ahead and sell a few islands?

Greece is deeply in debt and borrowing heavily, its economy is contracting, and since joining the euro in 2001 it no longer has its own currency. A bailout would be nice, but the European Union has rules forbidding it. If we run down the standard list of palatable economic remedies, that leaves Greece with...

Nothing. A currency depreciation is a standard remedy when prices and consumption have risen too high, but that's not possible within the euro. Austerity can bring down borrowing, slow the economy, and induce deflation, but it would be extraordinarily painful in Greece's case. Greece has a budget deficit above 12 percent of GDP. Draconian budget cuts could slam the brakes on an economy in which unemployment crested 10 percent -- before adoption of serious austerity measures.

So Greece is left only with unpalatable options. It could tough it out with cuts and contractions, it could look to renegotiate its debts, or it could leave the euro. The last option is seen as nearly unthinkable. FP's Annie Lowrey has explained that a withdrawal from the euro would necessitate a departure from the European Union at the same time. Since Greece has been borrowing in euros, a departure and depreciation would make its massive debts harder still to pay, thus almost ensuring default. A default would have its precedents; University of Maryland economist and debt expert Carmen Reinhart notes that since its independence in the 1830s, Greece has been in default roughly half the time. 

Read on

After a fairly quiet year of retirement, former President Bush was back in the news this week after being asked to assist the Obama administration in Northern Ireland. This intervention may have surprised many of the president's critics, but not those of us who had worked with President Bush on this issue.

President Bush was heavily involved in the details of the peace process, knowing not only the major actors like John Hume, Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and of course Gerry Adams, but also the relatively less powerful political leaders from the other parties in the North. 

In the annual St. Patrick's Day ritual at the White House that came to be known as the "stations of the cross," the president would meet in turn with the leadership of each party as he made his way around the room.  He had mastered the alphabet soup of acronyms designating the myriad political parties, and would discuss with each group its political prospects and major challenges. 

All relatively minor stuff, critics might sniff. But this was more than just the nuts-and-bolts responsibilities that come with the Oval Office. These moments revealed the president's deep respect for the everyday political courage and physical bravery of these men and women who risked their lives in the cause of peace. 

This was most clearly demonstrated when I invited the McCartney family to the White House for the St. Patrick's Day that immediately followed the brutal murder of their brother, Robert, by IRA thugs outside a Belfast pub. The president was deeply moved by their story and listened with compassion to the hardship they had suffered and their quest for justice (a quest that sadly remains unfulfilled to this day).

This was the same president who would subsequently overrule his NSC staff in late 2006 when he believed that it would enhance the chances for peace if Gerry Adams was allowed to visit the United States, a policy I supported because Adams had fulfilled his promise to move his constituency to support the rule of law. The decision also showed that Bush would reflexively favor no particular religious, ethnic, or political group (even when it might have been advantageous to do so for domestic political reasons). What mattered most was advancing the cause of peace.

It is therefore no surprise that the Obama administration has reached out to the former president for his assistance. And the Bush's prompt assistance should remind everyone that the Northern Ireland peace process has been a bipartisan effort for decades, and the better for it.