Given how many times Newt Gingrich rose from the proverbial electoral grave to become campaign-relevant again, I will not join the chorus claiming the fight for the Republican nomination is over. However, I will endorse another cliché: the primary season is at an important turning point, or at least it should be. It is high time the candidates focused on providing a compelling alternative to President Obama rather than providing a litany of reasons for detesting the other Republicans in the race.

The urgency is especially acute in foreign policy and national security. I have been fretting about this for some time now and I concede that the worst of my fears have not been realized; there won't be a crack-up within the party over foreign policy. Moreover, I endorse the conventional wisdom that the election will be won or lost on domestic policy and the economy.

However, that is no reason to settle for sloppy critiques and platforms in the area of foreign policy. Republicans must come to terms with the fact that this will be the strongest Democrat incumbent on national security and foreign policy they have faced in decades. This has more than a whiff of damnation with faint praise, since both President Clinton and especially President Carter were hobbled with substantial national security baggage during their reelection campaign. But for precisely that reason, I think Republicans have sometimes settled for an intellectually lazy critique because, given how weak the opposing party's record is, that seems to have sufficed.

Not this time. Obama has serious national security weaknesses and a record that warrants critique, but it is immune to superficial sound bite attacks. Soft on protecting America? The SEALs bought Obama immunity on that one when they took down Bin Laden. Naïve about the Iranian threat? Candidate Obama was demonstrably naïve about Iran and governed that way for the first half of his term, but since then has talked tough and marshaled strong sanctions.

Even issues where he has made bigger mistakes, like the failure to secure an agreement for stay-behind forces in Iraq, he may not be as politically vulnerable because they have been popular mistakes. The Iraq case illustrates my larger point well. Obama's hands-off approach to Iraq merits criticism (and I have supplied some here, here, and here, but it is hard to present the argument in a fashion that is brief enough to engage but fair enough to withstand administration rebuttals). Thus, Obama may have been hands-off personally, but the administration was not; Vice-President Biden devoted considerable time to the Iraq file, and with Ambassador Crocker on the ground, the administration had a good team in place. Moreover, the lion's share of the blame for the failure rests with the Iraqi leadership. I think reasonable people can question the way Obama handled the Iraq file, but it requires a nuanced line to explain how the administration missed the mark. Offer a sloppy critique, and the administration and its allies in the media swat it down with "But Bush negotiated the withdrawal agreement" -- and all too often the discussion ends there.

The Obama team's rare invocation of a Bush policy in the defense suggests two fruitful lines of contrast that the Republican nominee should develop:

1. Obama's foreign policy successes have come when he has followed Bush policies; his failures have come when he has struck out on his own. I have made this point before, but it bears reemphasis. Republicans need not fear giving Obama credit for his successes because to a remarkable extent they have come where he has governed like a Republican not like candidate Obama.

2. Obama has made relatively effective use of the tools and instruments of power that he inherited from his predecessor -- it raises the question, what new tools and instruments of power is Obama bequeathing to his successor? The SOF capabilities that produced the successful hunt for Bin Laden were honed on his predecessor's watch, especially by General McChrystal in Iraq. Likewise with tactics, techniques, and procedures associated with drone strikes. The financial levers that are squeezing Iran today were perfected by the Bush team. The key elements of Obama's Asia strategy -- the ones that have the best chance of yielding positive results -- were built under Bush and expanded under Obama. (Of course, in each of these areas, the Bush team took capabilities that were at an even more embryonic stage under Clinton's watch, so there is plenty of credit to be shared on both sides of the aisle. By the way, this is precisely how things transpired during the first Cold War, as the history of key programs like stealth technology demonstrate.) In some of these cases, Obama wisely kept many of the same architects who did the innovative work under Bush and expanded their influence and authority. So, the Republican nominee should ask, in what ways will Obama's successor have a larger and more powerful toolbox than the one Obama got to use?

Framing Obama's national security successes this way cuts sharply against the triumphalism that characterizes the White House communications operation. And, as the saying goes, it has the additional virtue of being true.

Republicans do not need to fear an accurate and fair evaluation of the record. But they will have to do the hard work of supplying it. Careless sound bites won't cut it this time around.

Update: When I said Ryan Crocker above of course I meant James Jeffrey. Crocker was an able Ambassador to Iraq under Bush and is now an able Ambassador to Afghanistan. James Jeffrey replaced Chris Hill in 2010 and, by all accounts, has worked assiduously to advance U.S. interests in Iraq.

Sadly, the tragic death of another Cuban dissident hunger striker will not change conditions in that island-prison nor provoke governments to reassess their historical indulgence of the Castro regime's crimes. Business as usual will continue.

In fact, this week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is in Cuba promoting business opportunities for Brazilian companies. She plans no meetings with Cuban dissidents.

But the Jan19 death of 31-year-old dissident Wilman Villar Mendoza will not be in vain. Indeed, when decent people arrive in Cuba to pick through the rubble left by the most oppressive regime this hemisphere has ever seen, his sacrifice -- and that of thousands of Cuban martyrs before him -- will be rightly honored on Cuban soil.

But if there is one immediate purpose that the tragic death of Wilman Villar can serve, it is to put the definitive lie to the currently fashionable meme that Cuba, under Raúl Castro, "is changing."

For example, according to the Associated Press, Cuba just wrapped up a "dramatic year of economic change." The BBC informs us, "Cuba expands free-market reforms," while Reuters adds, "Cuba to free 2,900 in sweeping amnesty."

Frankly, the only thing sweeping Cuba these days -- besides the ongoing state repression -- is the hyperbole in foreign correspondents' dispatches.

I have dealt with Cuba's smoke-and-mirrors reforms in this space before, but to briefly summarize, all interested observers need to know about Cuban "reforms" are two things:

They signify no new recognition of the inalienable rights of the Cuban people by the regime. "Allowing" a few new bits of heavily circumscribed individual economic freedoms is hardly indicative of fundamental change. The relationship between state and citizen remains the same -- although instead of controlling 100 percent of the economy, the regime will now control 99.5 percent.

Secondly, recent changes are not meant to reform the system but to save the system. Allowing Cubans to repair children's dolls outside the purview of the state does not mean Cuba is on the road to a free market; it means the regime is looking for new ways to generate revenue through confiscatory taxes of limited private economic activity.

Raul Castro himself serves as the best spokesman that the regime is not contemplating any kind of fundamental reform. Speaking recently at a party conference, he said, "There has been no shortage of criticism and exhortations by those who have confused their intimate desires with reality, deluding themselves that this conference would consecrate the beginning of the dismantling of the political and social system the revolution has fought for more than half a century."

To be sure, the hyperbole surrounding recent changes in Cuba has an ulterior motive. It is meant to apply pressure on U.S. policymakers to make unilateral changes in U.S. policy, because Cuba is ostensibly "reforming." Thankfully, the Obama administration so far hasn't taken the bait. In fact, last September, the President took the matter head-on, saying, "They [the Castro regime] certainly have not been aggressive enough when it comes to liberating political prisoners and giving people the opportunity to speak their minds."

Indeed, at a time when no quarter is being given to undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, the suggestion that the U.S. should lessen pressure on an undemocratic regime ninety miles from our shores strikes a wholly discordant note and is unlikely to be entertained by any serious policymaker. The Cuban people deserve no less than what the peoples of those regions deserve: the freedom to live their lives as they see fit. Clearly, that concept was as alien to Muammar al-Qaddafi as it is to the Castro brothers -- which is why they deserve the same fate.

Over at the indispensable Cable, word comes that the White House is now pushing the line that President Obama eschews the notion of "American decline," and has even become a devoted reader of Bob Kagan. As presidential reading lists go, this is a welcome development. If present trends continue, perhaps the White House communications shop will soon issue a story noting that President Obama is also a reader of Shadow Government? [ed. Dream on! Are you just saying this to bait the anonymous snarky responses that will soon appear in the "Comments" section? Or are you in denial that the President is much more likely to read Dan Drezner's blog? Who, by the way, is funnier than you -- and also doesn't believe in American decline.]

All kidding aside, this is a serious issue that merits some scrutiny. On the one hand, President Obama's rhetorical rejection of American decline is significant and welcome, precisely because presidential rhetoric plays a role in forming a nation's character and actions. As I have commented before, if a nation's leadership and citizens start believing the nation is in decline, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and infecting the nation's actions.

But presidential rhetoric is only a small part of the decline debate. Actions and policies are more important. So before junior White House staff start emulating their boss's reported new reading tastes and prompt a surge in Pennsylvania Avenue subscriptions to the likes of the Weekly Standard (to our friends at the Standard: may it be thus!), it is worth taking a closer look at this claim that the Obama administration rejects American decline.

This theme not inconveniently comes in an election year, as President Obama attempts to lay out his policy successes. As many others have pointed out, the White House seems reluctant to run on his major domestic policy initiatives such as ObamaCare or the $787 billion stimulus, judging by their almost complete absence from the State of the Union address. Instead, part of the campaign strategy seems to be pointing to foreign policy successes, such as in Obama's recent interview with Fareed Zakaria (himself a frequent apostle of American decline) where the president repeatedly claims that America's standing in the world is better than it was three years ago.

The inconvenient truth behind this claim is that most the Obama administration's foreign policy successes have come from adopting policies and strategies from the Bush administration. While as Jackson Diehl among others has pointed out, most of the Obama administration's signature initiatives have been failures. On the explicit question of American decline, rather than offering a full-throated rebuttal in his interview with Zakaria, Obama seems curiously ambivalent. On the one hand he strongly affirms American global leadership and repeats Madeleine Albright's description of the United States as the "indispensable nation," but on the other hand he says it is "inevitable" that China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy.

Besides being a gifted journalist, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker has also emerged as one of the White House's favored conduits for channeling the Administration's mindset and messages. For example, earlier this week Lizza published an article based on exclusive access he'd been given by the White House to internal decision memos on domestic policy. And it was also Lizza who received extensive access from senior administration officials for his famous profile of the White House's foreign policy last spring. Most notorious is the "leading from behind" phrase that the White House has regretted ever since, but the context it came from in the article is revealing and bears recalling (emphasis added):

Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President's actions in Libya as "leading from behind." That's not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It's a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.

This deliberate message from the White House probably bears a closer resemblance to President Obama's strategic mindset than election year sit-downs with journalists or campaign lines from State of the Union addresses. Why? Because it also reflects many of the administration's actions. Such as the drawdown decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan that seemed to reflect political timetables more than conditions on the ground and commitments to maintaining American credibility. Or the recent "pivot" to Asia, which as many of us have pointed out is a welcome assertion of American presence in a strategic region but loses its potency if it is under-resourced, and presented as a retreat elsewhere because of our diminished capabilities. Or the administration's persistent refusal to make any serious cuts and reforms to the domestic entitlements that are fueling our runaway debt -- while the only spending cuts the White House has actually implemented are to the defense budget, which as Gary Schmitt points out is what we can least afford. And yes, even "leading from behind" our European allies during the Libya intervention.

Given the above actions the administration has taken that do diminish America's power and credibility in the world, is America actually in decline? No -- not yet anyway. Bob Kagan is correct. Our nation has too many strengths and is too resilient to be set back that much in such a short time. America's problems are considerable, but I would still rather have our challenges than the problems facing any other nation, whether China's brittle governance, imbalanced economy, demographic troubles, and resentful neighbors, or the European Union's currency and debt crisis, democratic deficit, and anemic defense capabilities. Rather, the worry is that the Obama administration's combination of actions and inactions are setting the United States on a trajectory towards decline -- a trajectory that if it continues unabated will be hard to arrest.

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama jumped from issue to issue. At times, in all this leaping, he found himself on the opposite side of a stance he had taken minutes before.

Early on, he claimed success on his bailout of the auto industry (continuing a policy launched by Pres. Bush) and claimed it was a model that could be replicated:

"On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen...We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back. What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh."

Then, minutes later:

"It's time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody."

One of the most striking themes of a generally hodgepodge speech was strong skepticism about trade. The president fully embraced the "lump of labor" fallacy, in which one imagines a fixed number of jobs in the world that are simply slung back and forth across oceans.

"Let's remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores…we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed."

The strong implication is that the rest of the world has been booming, enjoying all those factory jobs they swiped from us. It's difficult to find that in the data. But the president promised to chase down foreign wrongdoers with a new Trade Enforcement Unit.

He claimed previous efforts at trade enforcement, such as his tariffs on Chinese tire imports, had saved American jobs (1,000, in that case). This is interesting on several counts. First, he made the claim in the context of saying that "I will not stand by when our competitors don't play by the rules." Yet the Chinese tire tariffs case never even alleged wrongdoing on the part of the Chinese. They were just selling at low prices.

Second, other observers have generally found no evidence those tariffs did anything to help American workers. The U.S. China Business Council, in a study, concluded:

"U.S. imports of the low-end tires involved in the case have actually increased substantially since the tariffs were imposed -- but have shifted from China to other countries. And, there is no objective evidence that the tariff boosted U.S. tire manufacturing jobs."

A Wall Street Journal report last week reached a similar conclusion. In order to be fair, the Journal offered the administration the chance to rebut, but reported: "Spokespeople at the ITC, the Commerce Department, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative say they have no comprehensive analysis yet of the broad effect that the tariff has had." That was last week. So how did the President determine that 1,000 jobs were saved?

The third point on this illuminating case is that -- even if his numbers were right -- the president thinks it would be a successful policy to charge tens of millions of Americans more for their tires if it protected 1,000 jobs. That's a fairly stark statement in favor of protectionism.

So much for what the president did say. What about the things he did not say? He made no mention of his vaunted Trans-Pacific Partnership. Recall that two months ago, in Hawaii, this was a pillar of his administration's turn back to Asia. It is a highly ambitious undertaking and would require a huge administration effort, in close collaboration with Congress, if it were to conclude this year. The State of the Union is traditionally where an administration sets out its priorities for the year ahead. Yet not a mention.

Nor did the president say anything about the economic crisis in Europe. One hears that the White House considers it the biggest threat looming over a nascent U.S. recovery. If the president were truly trying to describe the State of the Union, Europe's predicament would seem to deserve some serious mention.

But it would fit awkwardly in a campaign speech and was thus, presumably, omitted. The topic, after all, seems to highlight the potential dangers of excessive borrowing, as Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels demonstrated in his response:

"In our economic stagnation and indebtedness, we are only a short distance behind Greece, Spain, and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe. But ours is a fortunate land. Because the world uses our dollar for trade, we have a short grace period to deal with our dangers. But time is running out, if we are to avoid the fate of Europe, and those once-great nations of history that fell from the position of world leadership."

That's certainly not an image the president wanted to invoke, as he moved on to a grab bag of new spending proposals and as his administration delays the release of his budget.

Thus, the state of our union: we're in campaign mode.

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

The Obama administration has changed U.S. strategy toward Iran three times. At the administration's inception, President Obama shed the Bush administration's refusal to negotiate with Iran's government, ending support for regime change, sending flowery good wishes at Persian new year and declining to condemn that government for election fraud in 2009. This was a strategy of unconcern for the nature of Iran's government, banking instead on working with it to achieve mutual interests. Let's call that strategy detente.

The administration's second policy shift was to give up hope for progress in government-to-government channels (after remarkably little effort), and instead emphasize multilateral sanctions. In order to gain support of reluctant potential partners, the administration further dialed back U.S. policy in two areas: threat of military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, and condemnation of Iranian domestic policies. Even the Pentagon leadership -- civilian and military -- downplayed what could be achieved by destroying elements of Iran's programs.

The main limiting factor on the effectiveness of a sanctions strategy is our ability to cajole or coerce other countries to comply. The United States has had near complete sanctions against Iran since the 1979 seizure of our Embassy; there is little we can do directly. But to their credit, the Obama administration has done much to persuade Europeans and the countries of the Gulf to enforce sanctions. The EU is seriously considering an embargo of Iranian oil purchases; Gulf countries with close banking and commercial ties to Iran have even for the first time curtailed their activity. 

And Congress, to their credit, has done even more, passing legislation to sanction companies that do business with Iran's central bank. Congress took the administration at its word and put in place sanctions that Iran could not circumvent. Ken Pollack, one of the best Middle East hands, estimates the new sanctions could impose a 30 percent penalty on the Iranian economy. That will put enormous pressure on the government of Iran, especially in the run up to Parliamentary elections in March.

The White House objected to the legislation so vehemently that Congress suspects the administration will stint on implementation. But Treasury Secretary Geithner was sent to China and Japan, lesser officials to South Korea and other purchasers of Iranian oil to explain the administration will have only narrow avenues to exempt countries temporarily from exclusion from the dollar zone unless they comply with the legislation.

The administration's third policy shift on Iran was necessitated by two things: the Arab spring, and Iran's provocative behavior. An administration that didn't want to champion democracy was pressed into it by the fact that the so-called Arab Street -- so often depicted as virulently opposed to American values -- actually wants the political liberties we have and is taking responsibility for outcomes in their own countries. But the way the Obama administration navigated our response to the Arab spring managed to infuriate both democrats in the region and authoritarian governments we are allied with.

Here the administration's incapacity to develop a strategy has had deeply detrimental effects. They don't seem to realize their writing off Iraq has fanned sectarian tensions throughout the middle east, how their inactivity on Syria is further destabilizing Iraq (and vice versa), or their approach to the peace process undercut Palestinians working to build a state and further isolated Israel, can't tell the difference between success in Libya and success in Egypt, what fleeting opportunities now exist to contain Iranian activity and influence in the region, how far -- and even just how -- to support the transition to democracy, whom to partner with, or coordinate their rhetoric about priorities (a pivot to Asia?) with in this once in a century set of changes occurring in the middle east.

Our saving grace, at the moment, is that governments in the region see the effects of our strategic incoherence and are taking actions that mostly help them and us. The two crucial changes are in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both precipitated as a reaction to, not an endorsement of, our policies. Many middle easterners see Turkey as a model for their own countries' development as democratic governments in Muslim societies, a position the government of Turkey thirstily wants to retain. Turkey refused to support U.N. sanctions against Iran and gets 30 percent of its oil there, but its policies have evolved and oil refiners are now moving to comply because of Iran's recent bellicosity and continued support of Bashir al Assad's bloody crackdown in Syria.

Saudi Arabia is even turning the screws on Iran, offering to provide additional supplies of oil to countries that refuse contracts with Iran. Iran reacted with predictable threats that Saudi and others will be considered accomplices of the West. That approach used to worry the Saudis, when Iran could plausibly claim the crown of Islamism to delegitimize governments. But Iran's use of religion to justify a fraudulent election, assassination plot involving the Saudi Ambassador, and stoking of sectarian tensions has devalued that currency even more than sanctions have devalued the rial.

This is worse than leading from behind: being handed a propitious set of circumstances, we are failing to set the conditions for a middle east that will be conducive to American security. Syria's chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood actually declined Iranian offers of mediation, saying Iran's support for Assad made them unacceptable as an interlocutor. Allegiances cast in stone for generations are fracturing -- what opportunities the rocking of boats in the Middle East presents! What a pity the Obama administration can't come up with a strategy to capitalize on them.

The LA Times is carrying an interesting and important story about the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of the war in Afghanistan. The NIE is classified, but has been briefed to Congress (Congressional sources seem to have formed the basis for the article). The article states that the intelligence community has concluded that while the military has made significant gains against the Taliban, the war has ground to a stalemate. It cites three causes for the stalemate: (1) pervasive corruption and incompetence by the Afghan government; (2) sanctuary for Taliban in Pakistan; and (3) reductions in U.S. forces.

The commentariat will have a feeding frenzy on the Director of Central Intelligence supporting a set of conclusions he had objected to last year when he was commander of the war effort in Afghanistan. But Dave Petraeus' reaction is the least interesting part of this story.

If the LA Times is accurate (and they have the best reporting on the middle east of any American newspaper), the NIE is going to be very damaging to the war effort. It also sounds about right in its assessment: we are militarily winning the war, but badly hindered by the shoddy Afghan government and the willingness of Pakistan to assist the Taliban. The NIE itself is quoted to question the viability of the Karzai government, even before the U.S. withdraws its troops.

The NIE evidently earned a formal protest from the entire leadership fighting the war, including General Mattis, the CENTCOM commander (responsible for all the Middle East and South Asia); Admiral Stavridis, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (it is a NATO mission); General Allen, the Afghan war commander; and Ambassador Crocker, the Ambassador in Afghanistan. Among their reported objections are that the NIE bases its analysis on the assumption that all U.S. troops will depart Afghanistan in 2014; the Afghan war team insist that decision has not been made.

I hope they're right. The central problem with President Obama's strategy for the war in Afghanistan has always been his deadline. The Taliban claim that we have the watches, but they have the time. And the President has already compromised our war effort(s) by setting deadlines for troop withdrawals that are unconnected to the end states his strategy seeks to achieve.

Our exit strategy for Afghanistan is to build an Afghan government, including security forces, that can do the work Americans are fighting and dying to succeed at now. That's both sensible and achievable, the only way to make our gains more than transitory. But nothing in the Administration's choices about either Iraq or Afghanistan suggests they will allow facts on the ground to determine the pace of their drawdown.

The Obama Administration scored a lot of cheap points against their predecessor by hailing the arrival of "smart power" -- using political, military, and economic means in seamless orchestration. If reports of the NIE are accurate, it would be a terrible condemnation of the Administration's efforts. For only the American military has proven able to achieve any effect in the complex task of nation building in Afghanistan, and it has done so without either the political or diplomatic support necessary to make their achievements durable.

The United States today faces a growing gap between its commitments and capabilities. There are, in theory, three approaches to dealing with this mismatch. The first would be to ensure that the U.S. military is fully funded to protect American interests. According to the bipartisan 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, such an approach would require additional funds to modernize U.S. forces and increase force structure to counter anti-access challenges; strengthen homeland defense, including cyber threats; and conduct post-conflict stabilization missions. The panel called for an increase in the size of the U.S. Navy, the acquisition of a next-generation bomber, and new long-range strike systems.

A second approach, favored by neo-isolationists of various stripes in both parties, would be to scale back U.S. commitments and accept a narrower definition of America's role in the world than we have played for the better part of a century. Reducing commitments is, however, easier said than done. Protecting the United States against attack is one of our government's most fundamental responsibilities. Similarly, we would lose more than we would gain by abrogating any number of treaties that commit the United States to the defense of allies across the globe. A failure on the part of the United States to continue to command the commons would similarly incur great economic, political, and military costs.

The third approach would be to accept greater risk - that is, to seek to pursue a broad international role on the cheap.

The Obama administration's newly released defense strategy sits somewhere between the second and third approaches. That is, it envisions a scaled-back American presence and incurs greater risk without leveling with the American people as to the nature and magnitude of that risks.

Read on

The president and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced today the administration's approach to cutting defense spending back to a $583 billion topline, the requirement for next year's budget. The guidance issued today does not set the parameters for all the cuts necessitated by last summer's budget agreement -- a whopping $500 billion across a decade will yet need to be found, and DOD has been loudly saying that cannot be done within this strategy. The Pentagon's approach is sensible, but the real problem is the president avoiding a serious discussion about risk -- and that is dangerous when cuts of this magnitude are underway.

There's not really much news in the strategic guidance released to such fanfare today. The administration hype is that this is a new strategy. That is not true. The "two war strategy" under discussion is not a strategy at all, but a planning construct for sizing the force.  Previously, the U.S. has maintained active duty forces ostensibly adequate to fight two wars nearly simultaneously in different regions. But the planning translates only loosely to actual war (because of allied military and political limitations, the Kosovo air campaign required all the assets of one war, even though it was a limited mission). The president -- any president -- is not going to refuse our treaty commitments to the defense of Korea if it is attacked, or precipitously end operations in Afghanistan if that should happen. By cutting the force, you are not saying we will only fight one war, you are saying we will take greater risk and time to fight the wars we need. If the President is really saying we will not fight two wars simultaneously, it would beg challenges between now and 2014, when he's committed to ending the one war we are fighting.

Panetta's plan looks to (the details of programmatic cuts are not yet public) take the bulk of cuts in the size of the force, which is not a bad choice, given the administration has chosen to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manpower is the quickest return of cash, and our military has demonstrated in the past decade that it can recruit, train, and equip quality soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to surge our ranks when the demands of two wars require more forces. Whether Panetta's approach remains viable as the sequestration cuts go into effect next year is an open question; even accepting we're unlikely to choose to fight our wars by counterinsurgency means anytime soon, I'm skeptical enough can be cut from manpower to bring the budget into alignment. 

There is also a crucial guns versus butter issue Panetta fails to take up, at least so far. As Arnold Punaro from the Defense Business Board puts it, unless major changes are made to DOD medical and retirement programs, "If we allow the current trend to continue, we're going to turn the Department of Defense into a benefits company that occasionally kills a terrorist." The same growth of medical and retirement programs that is the principal driver of our federal debt is also crowding out other spending within the DOD budget. I expect that is where Panetta will focus the second tranche of cuts.

The Panetta approach reverses his predecessor's relentless attention to near term demands of the wars we are fighting and accepting greater risk in the out years. Gates' strategy heavily weighted the need for manning and equipping the current force for winning two simultaneous wars by counter-insurgency, the most personnel-intensive and long-term approach. Gates' strategy was also, it must be acknowledged, the most likely to produce results conducive to America's security and a stable, prosperous international order. Other means (stand-off strikes, greater reliance on allies, adopting a marginal contribution formula, decapitation attacks, etc) are cheaper but bring greater risk of failure to achieve stable political objectives and a wide range of collateral problems. Gates' strategy is a costly way to win the nation's wars, but it is also the best of our current options.

Read on

There is a lively debate among theorists of civil-military relations about the appropriate levels of political activity in which the military may engage. Some advocate fairly tight restrictions, even encouraging soldiers to emulate Gen. George C. Marshall who famously refused to vote so as to demonstrate his apolitical professionalism. Others allow for greater leeway, and encourage the military to speak out more regularly in policy debates, even when those debates have a partisan overlay.

I tend towards the restrictive end of the spectrum. I do not discourage the military from voting, for instance, but I do think it is a mistake for prominent retired senior generals and admirals to campaign actively for political candidates (I do not see a problem with veterans of whatever rank running as candidates in their own right. When they do that, they clearly cross over to the pure political side. The problem is trying to maintain the authority, even deference, that comes with professional distance while simultaneously politicking for a candidate).  

For a good introduction into the complexities of this debate, I recommend reading Risa Brooks survey of the topic: her chapter on "Militaries and Political Activity in Democracies,"  an excellent chapter in a recent compendium. (Full disclosure: I have a chapter in that same book, which I co-authored with a brilliant graduate student. I got permission to present and publish that article while still on the NSC staff because, when my superiors reviewed it, they declared it so academic and abstruse that no one would read it, and thus it would neither constitute a conflict of interest nor expose the White House to any risk of embarrassment -- or words to that effect. Sometimes, there is utility in academic irrelevancy.)  

It is also clear that there is a spectrum of opinion within the ranks. A first-rate Georgetown U. dissertation by Heidi Urben (more full disclosure: I was on her dissertation committee) documents that Army personnel have some difficulty in determining where to draw the line -- is it acceptable to encourage fellow military comrades to vote? How to vote? To demonstrate the same with bumper stickers in the barracks?

So I accept that there are gray zones in the area of military and politics and that it is especially difficult to draw clear lines for reservists who have feet planted firmly in both civilian and military worlds.

However, I am hard-pressed to think of a specialists who would tolerate this: an Army reservist, Corp. Jesse Thorsen, speaking to a campaign rally before the Iowa caucus while in uniform. Perhaps there are lawyers who will try to argue that because the corporal was not on active duty at the time he may avoid the harshest punishment. And most people will point out that a corporal is very close to the bottom of the totem pole so hardly on his own capable of destroying our democratic institutions. But this seems a pretty clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Department of Defense regulations.

Of equal importance, it is corrosive of healthy civil-military relations. The corporal may believe he is speaking only for himself, but the reality is that if he is wearing his uniform, his audience seems him as speaking on behalf of the institution. For that matter, almost no one is interested in what civilian Jesse Thorsen has to say; the primary reason he was invited to speak was that the campaign knew that folks would be interested in what a corporal had to say. It was his military status, in other words, that gave his political views cachet. That makes it a matter for civil-military relations and a matter for public rebuke.

A nation can be judged by how it cares for and protects the most vulnerable.  As our fearless curator Will Inboden pointed out, it was a welcome change when President Obama gave due credit to President Bush for one of his proudest legacies, combatting HIV/AIDs globally.  It would have been easy for President Bush, when faced with the global suffering caused by HIV/AIDs, to look the other way or to do lip service to addressing it.  Instead, he made it a signature initiative that saved millions of lives just because it was the right thing to do. 

A related challenge presents a similar opportunity to President Obama. Millions of highly vulnerable children today are living outside family care in every country including our own.  Some have been orphaned by HIV/AIDs, others trafficked or forced into labor and still others are living in institutions, on the streets or in refugee camps alone.  The Obama Administration, mostly due to Secretary Clinton's leadership, has made significant progress addressing this global challenge and could leave behind a solid legacy if it builds upon it again this year.

I recently participated in two groundbreaking events focused on highly vulnerable children. The first in November was the Way Forward Project Summit sponsored by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) which brought together African and U.S. officials and experts in this field to make recommendations for strengthening child protection systems in six African countries.  The event was held at the State Department and Secretary Clinton gave solid remarks making her the first Cabinet level official to specifically address this important cross-cutting issue. 

The second event in December was an Evidence Summit on protecting children outside family care.  It was sponsored by USAID with participation and support from over a dozen U.S. government agencies or offices that work with vulnerable children.  For the first time, a true ‘whole of government' approach was presented that is beginning to break through the silos that typically define our government's approach to children's issues globally.   USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah drew from his personal experience in Haiti seeing the devastating toll of the earthquake on children and ended his opening remarks by noting that the most important line of protection for vulnerable children is a safe and loving family. 

There remains a strong disconnect between our diplomacy and foreign assistance when it comes to children's issues that I highlighted here.  Still anyone who has worked on children's issues for awhile knows that this interdisciplinary gathering was a welcome step forward for USAID which is not always known for its flexibility or coordination.  The credit here goes to the hard-working team from the P.L.109-95 Secretariat that manages a congressional mandate to coordinate the U.S. response to orphans and other highly vulnerable children.  The mandate is of the dreaded ‘unfunded' sort, but USAID and the other offices involved have proven that hard work, commitment and a little cooperation can accomplish much.   They also have shown that a relatively small amount of money directed strategically through coordinated mechanisms could go a long way in protecting children from exploitation, abuse and neglect.  The social return on investment (SROI) numbers for money targeting at-risk children are impressive.  There are huge benefits to children, families and whole societies by decreasing crime, human trafficking, gang violence, unemployment and poor physical, mental and emotional development of entire populations.  It's a strategic opportunity to use our limited foreign assistance dollars wisely.  

There are two big challenges to launching a global initiative to help vulnerable children.  Money is tight and it's an election year. But money also was tight when President Bush launched his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.  He made it a priority and did it anyway.  It may be wishful thinking to believe any progress could be made on a major new initiative for children and families in an election year. But like HIV/AIDs, this is a strongly bipartisan issue. It garners broad, passionate support on both sides of the increasingly polarized political divide. The Congressional Caucus on Adoption is the largest bipartisan caucus in the U.S. Congress. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) is one of its House co-chairs and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D), who attended both the events I referenced above, is one of its most vocal Senate leaders.  Many Members of Congress - both Republicans and Democrats - also are champions of the fight against human (child) trafficking.  For these reasons, I will continue my wishful thinking that, even in these difficult times, we might still pull together as a nation to help the very poorest and most vulnerable.  Because securing liberty and justice for all is simply the right thing to do.     

In assessing the most important things that the Obama Administration got right and got wrong in 2011, there are an abundance of choices in both categories.  National security-wise, the Administration had a very mixed year -- genuinely so, in terms of a number of notable successes as well as a number of significant failures.  The former include an improved strategic posture in Asia, the discovery of a freedom agenda for the Middle East and Asia, helping engineer Qaddaffi's ouster in Libya, and of course killing Osama bin Laden, Anwar Al-Awlaki, and other Al Qaeda High-Value Targets.  The latter category includes being repeatedly behind the curve on the Arab Spring, waffling on Iran's nuclear program, botching the drawdown and military exit from Iraq, losing Pakistan, further alienating Israel, and getting left holding an empty bag on the Russia "re-set."  While any of the above would be legitimate choices, my main criteria for selecting the best and worst is how each will look in the light of history.  In other words, 25 or 50 years from now, what might historians look back on and evaluate as the best and worst of the Obama Administration's policies in 2011?  I honestly don't know, and anyone who insists we can know history's judgments in advance is committing historical malpractice.  But that doesn't mean we can't at least speculate -- and admit it is mere speculation -- on what might have the most enduring consequences.  Here are mine.

The Obama Administration's Most Significant Success: Creating a new strategic posture in Asia.  If the Obama Administration's initial Asia policy consisted of naively pursuing an illusory "G-2" with China while neglecting our regional allies and universal values such as human liberty, than 2011 marked a substantial course correction in the Indo-Pacific.  A renewed commitment to allies such as Japan and Australia, increased attention to emerging partners such as India and Indonesia, outreach to potential partners such as Vietnam and Burma, and an upgraded strategic posture across the region were all features of a substantially improved Asia policy that has the potential to pay dividends for a generation. 

The Obama Administration's Most Substantial Failure: The National Debt.  Recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen frequently called the national debt "the single biggest threat" to our national security.  Yet it was also the biggest failure of the Obama Administration during the year, a failure that might hurt America for decades to come.  What was the White House's fault on this?  Part of it was, to paraphrase Governor Mitch Daniels, a failure of arithmetic: presiding over the increase of the debt to the unfathomable amount of $15 trillion (an unprecedented increase of $4 trillion just since Obama took office) without making any effort to reform entitlement spending.  But the bigger part of the failure was the White House's cheap demagoguery that attacked any credible plan such as Paul Ryan's, and the cynical disregard of bipartisan efforts such as Obama's own Simpson-Bowles Commission.  All of which further poisoned the political environment and put any prospects for fiscal sanity on life support. 

Why is this a national security failure?  For the obvious reasons of how the debt strangles needed resources for the defense, diplomacy, and development budgets, or how it gives China economic leverage over us, or how it threatens the dollar's status as the global reserve currency.  But more perniciously, the debt is a national security failure because of how it undermines one of the main pillars of American power and global preeminence: our economic dynamism and our model of an opportunity society.  Ryan Streeter astutely calls this a "crisis of aspiration," and a national debt that now equals our national GDP cuts at the heart of American exceptionalism and leadership. 

In my previous two posts I began my argument that the world today is actually more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.  I argued that the basic threat of great power rivalry with China and Russia has not gone away and, in the case of China, has increased.

My second argument is that, in addition to Russia and China, we now face up to three new entrants in the lists of authoritarian nuclear powers hostile to the United States:  North Korea, Iran, and possibly Pakistan.  During the Cold War the United States faced only one or two hostile nuclear powers at a time.  We may soon be facing five. And the new nuclear powers are likely to present a direct threat to the American homeland in the near future, similar to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War.

North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons (which they didn't during the Cold War) and Iran is almost certainly going to get them.  North Korea and Iran are avowed enemies of the United States; Pakistan is teetering on the brink.  All three states have invested in medium and long-range ballistic missiles that could hit U.S. allies and, in all likelihood, will soon be able to produce missiles that could hit the U.S. homeland.

It is true that North Korea's nuclear arsenal is probably very small, and Iran is likely to have a small arsenal for a few years yet.  But they only need a few warheads to pose a major threat to the United States.  The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear warheads, but after the first hundred or so each additional nuclear weapon doesn't add much more threat to the United States:  you can already wipe out our entire civilization several times over.  Given a few more years, Iran and North Korea will both probably have built enough warheads and developed the long-range ballistic missiles to pose an existential threat to the United States equal to that posed by the Soviet Union's and China's nuclear arsenals during the Cold War.

In addition to their nuclear capabilities, all three states have some of the largest conventional forces in the world today.  It is true that all three countries are poor and lack a sophisticated military-industrial base, and Iran's and North Korea's conventional militaries have been debilitated by sanctions.  I don't doubt our ability to win a hypothetical conventional war with any state.  But because of their sheer size, even strictly conventional, non-nuclear wars with Iran, North Korea, or (heaven forbid) Pakistan would surely be much more costly in lives and treasure than anything since Vietnam, and possible since World War II.

Read on

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said in two consecutive debates now that "We've given our all" to Afghanistan, which is why he believes it is time for U.S. troops to come home regardless of the consequences. Huntsman, and those who applauded him at the debate on Thursday night, is wildly off the mark. We have never even come close to giving our all.

Afghanistan is the second-cheapest major war in U.S. history as a percentage of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service.

For the first five years of the mission, Afghanistan received less aid on a per-capita, per-year basis than any other major reconstruction and stabilization mission since the end of the Cold War, according to a series of RAND studies and my own research.

The international community also deployed fewer troops-per-capita than for any major stabilization or peace building mission in the same time frame.

Because so few troops served there and because the fighting was very low-level until recently, this is also one of the least lethal wars in our history. I honor the memory of every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine killed or wounded in this war, including several friends of mine. But we should not cheapen the memory of those lost in past wars by exaggerating our current conflict. As of Friday, 1,394 U.S. military personnel have been killed in action in Afghanistan, the smallest number of any major U.S. war in history.

Afghanistan was never perceived to be, or treated as the priority of U.S. efforts. When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testifies to the U.S. Congress that "In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must," as Admiral Mullen famously did in 2007, you cannot possibly claim that we were "giving our all" to Afghanistan.

Huntsman is riffing off the sense that the war in Afghanistan has simply lasted a very long time, which surely must mean that we've been trying really hard, and if we haven't succeeded by now, we probably never will. He is wrong on his facts and his analysis. The Taliban insurgency began in 2005, so the war is only six years old. Even if you consider the war to be 10 years old, it is still shorter than the U.S. interventions in the Philippines (1898 - 1913), Haiti (1915 - 1934), the full stretch of Vietnam (1954 - 1973), and what the U.S. Army calls the Indian Wars (1865 - 1898). This is not the United States' "longest war," contrary to the media's mythmaking. Nor, as demonstrated above, have we been trying very hard for ten years or even five years.

Our concerted effort to actually wage a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan began slowly in 2007 and picked up steam in 2009. The problem is not that we have been trying so hard for so long but failed, but that for so long we failed to try very hard at all. Huntsman should really give the United States a chance to succeed before declaring failure.