State Department

By David J. Kramer

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came away from her visit to Moscow this week with mixed results. The two big ticket items involved Iran and the human rights situation inside Russia.

By all appearances, Clinton struck out on moving Russia closer to supporting sanctions against Iran should current negotiation efforts fail. "We did not ask for anything today," she said, in a rather stunning admission. "We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails."

That she would not try to push Russia toward supporting sanctions is hard to believe -- and, if true, frankly irresponsible. More likely, she tried and failed but was putting the best spin on it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's comments after his meeting with Clinton clearly indicated continued Russian resistance to any sanctions push. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, never a supporter of getting tougher toward Iran, reinforced this position in comments from Beijing on Wednesday when he argued that discussing sanctions now against Iran would be "premature."

This contrasts with comments Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made in New York last month and that he reportedly reiterated in his private meeting with Clinton on Tuesday. The Kremlin, however, has not publicly challenged either the foreign minister's or prime minister's contradictory comments, even though the president is ultimately in charge of Russian foreign policy (the idea that Medvedev would slap down Putin is rather laughable). Yet these conflicting messages cause confusion about who calls the shots in Moscow. Then again, perhaps the situation is very clear: it is Putin and not Medvedev (more on this in a future blog entry). What a shame, then, that Putin was in Beijing, not Moscow, during Clinton's visit. All this is not a surprise to those of us who have been saying that Russia is unlikely at the end of the day to support tough sanctions against Iran -- even in exchange for the Obama administration's regrettable decision September 17 on missile defense (which, by the way, was handled abysmally).

In contrast to the bad news on Iran, Clinton's comments on the human rights situation inside Russia were a pleasant surprise. In spite of her short shrift of human rights concerns in the past (recall her comments on the way to Beijing in February when she said she didn't want those issues to "interfere" with other pressing matters), Clinton made clear the concerns of the Obama administration about the deteriorating situation inside Russia.  Her meeting with human rights and civil society activists was a very good follow-up to President Obama's similar meeting in July. Her interview with independent radio station Ekho Moskvy and her remarks to students at Moscow State University (MGU) also touched on these issues in a strong way.

"I think all of these issues -- imprisonments, detentions, beatings, killings - it is something that is hurtful to see from the outside," Clinton said at MGU. "Every country has criminal elements, every country has people who try to abuse power, but in the last 18 months ... there have been too many of the incidents," adding that not enough was being done to "ensure no one had impunity from prosecution ... I said that this is a matter of grave concern not just for the United States but for the Russian people, and not just for activists but people who worry that unsolved killings are a very serious challenge to order and the fair functioning of society," Clinton said. In an innovative society, she observed, "people must be free to take unpopular decisions, disagree with conventional wisdom, know they are safe to peacefully challenge accepted practice and authority."

In her interview with Ekho Mskvy, she highlighted the attacks on journalists and human rights defenders, noting they are "of such great concern. ... in the last 18 months ... there have been many of these incidents. ... I think we want the government to stand up and say this is wrong."

Her strong statements on these issues were especially important given an unnecessary and unfortunate situation caused by an article in the Russian newspaper Kommersant earlier in the week based on comments made by NSC Senior Director Michael McFaul suggesting that human rights concerns would receive less attention from the Obama administration. The thrust of the Kommersant article seemed out of synch with Obama's handling of the issue in July, with Clinton's comments this week, and with McFaul's own passion for human rights over his career (and I've known him for some 16 years). Clinton stepped into the fray and allayed the concerns, at least for the time being, of those who were worry that human rights issues will fall down the list of priorities in the interest of the Obama Administration's overall "reset" policy with Moscow. 

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter D. Feaver

An intriguing article in today's New York Times addresses a favorite Beltway party game: Where is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on important policies? This game, which was temporarily suspended for a weekend so insiders could play another game ("What is the best Nobel Peace Prize joke you have heard?"), really matters and, if the NYT piece can be believed, it may prove dispositive in determining President Obama's Afghanistan decision.

Secretary Clinton has largely sailed under the radar and contented herself with high-profile actions on low-profile issues like trips focusing on women in Africa and efforts to promote peace in Northern Ireland. She has won some oddly effusive plaudits, but few people not directly on her payroll would credit her as a driving force in President Obama's foreign policy thus far.  Indeed, the pattern has been unmistakable: The more important the issue, the less prominent the activity and voice of Secretary Clinton.

The thesis of today's NYT story is that this pattern may obscure her real influence. Secretary Clinton's power may come by way of serving as an amen corner for Secretary Gates, the most powerful member of President Obama's cabinet. By endorsing Gates's view on Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and other issues, Secretary Clinton guarantees that the issue will not be framed internally as an us vs. him issue, where the "us" is Team Obama and the "him" is the holdover appointee from the Bush administration. She has thus played a crucial role in forging the most important, if most often misunderstood (cf. the curious convergence of views between former Vice President Dick Cheney and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee) fact about President Obama's national security policy thus far: its dramatic continuity with President Bush's national-security policy.

Ironically, however, that continuity may have played out its course.  As the NYT story also suggests, Clinton and Gates appear to be teaming up to do something that Bush did not do: Stick with an incremental policy rather than embrace a surge. The reporters seem confident that Clinton and Gates favor a middle course between Biden's abrupt shift in mission and McChrystal's Iraq-like (Bush-like) surge in military and civilian resources.

Even without Clinton and Gates recommending it, most observers probably would bet that President Obama is going to split the difference in this fashion. The politics of the Afghanistan decision are such that a split-the-difference option is almost inescapable. Having the two most important cabinet principals endorsing it would make it virtually a foregone conclusion.

It would also do one more thing, which thus far has not happened: It would put Secretary Clinton's imprimatur on an important policy. The war in Afghanistan has already become President Obama's war. If he adopts Secretary Clinton's recommendation, it will also become her war. What comes of that war may well determine a key part of how history rates both of these political leaders in the foreign-policy arena.

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

By Michael J. Green

While conducting research for a book I am currently writing on the history of American strategic thought on Asia, I came across a memorandum prepared by the State Department in the early 1840s to guide the United States' first treaty negotiations with China. The memo stressed that the paramount goal of the U.S. commissioner to China was to secure trade access, and that under no conditions was the U.S. delegation to let on that the United States was a republic, since this might frighten the Qing. Instead, the delegation was instructed to highlight that unlike Britain, the United States would maintain a strict policy of noninterference in the affairs of other states and to express respect for the benign rule of the Celestial Emperor toward his people.

In its day, this was probably considered "smart power" and its advocates have made something of a comeback in recent months.

There has been a great deal of speculation about why the Obama administration has changed the tone and substance of U.S. policy on democracy and human rights. It is partly related to the tension between anti-imperialism and human rights in the liberal foreign-policy playbook. Iraq has also contributed to a backlash against values-based foreign policy strategies in a repeat of what happened to democracy-promotion after the Philippines intervention, World War I, and Vietnam. Politics are at play too, since Democrats now seem to believe that they can seize the political high ground on national security by embracing realism as their own (and perhaps peeling off some moderate Republicans in the process).

However, it would be far too simplistic too argue that the administration has "abandoned" human rights and democracy -- at least in Asia. In fact, the administration has actually made the case for real pressure on regimes like Burma, North Korea, and even China. The problem is that these statements of policy have been overshadowed by conflicting signals sent in speeches by the president or decisions like not inviting the Dalai Lama to the White House during his visit to Washington this week. Ironically, by being both tough and soft at the same time, the administration risks losing both American prestige and progress on the democratic causes America has always championed.

The consequences of this confused message were obvious in a meeting I had earlier this week with a senior delegation from Vietnam. The delegation raised a trip I had taken to Hanoi in early 2005 to hammer out a religious freedom agreement in advance of the Vietnamese prime minister's first visit to the White House (I was then NSC senior director for Asia). In that agreement, Vietnam agreed to open hundreds of house churches in the Central Highlands, paving the way for a successful summit and a strategic advance in U.S. relations with Vietnam. My interlocutors this week raised the trip because they wanted to confirm that U.S. strategy had now changed. They noted that President Obama's U.N. speech identified four pillars, none of which touched on human rights and democracy. Authoritarian states take what leaders say far more seriously than what bureaucrats say. So they asked my advice on how to approach intransigent U.S. bureaucrats now that the president had "moved beyond" the difficult issues of human rights and democracy.

The administration's confused signals have also hurt on Burma. After weeks of speculation that U.S. sanctions would be lifted -- speculation fueled by self-proclaimed advisors to candidate Obama now seeking to ingratiate themselves with the SPDC and by the administration's own proengagement rhetoric -- the administration's policy review on Burma turned out to be fairly modest in terms of course correction. In fact -- and this was largely missed by the press -- Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell testified that if there was not progress on securing the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and integrating the NLD and the ethnic minorities into the new constitution, the U.S. would actually seek to increase sanctions on the regime. But by then the regime had already internalized the wrong message and thought that reducing Aung San Suu Kyi's sentence from three years to 18 months would be enough to get sanctions lifted (even as the regime launched violent new military offensives against ethnic minorities along the Chinese and Thai border). Just as bad, states in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, are moving away from their own very healthy debate about how to implement the human rights standards in the association's new charter and focusing on getting the United States to change its policy instead (Singaporeans could not be more gleeful at the opportunity to escape an internal ASEAN debate on values by shifting the burden back on Washington to change its approach). Now the prospects for progress in this new engagement of the regime are diminished because U.S. signals have softened everyone else's resolve.

Ditto for North Korea. Secretary of State Clinton's July 23 statement on North Korea, emphasized that the United States will "continue to work closely with other governments, international organizations, and NGOs to address human rights violations and abuses perpetuated by the regime, and would soon announce an envoy for North Korean human rights." But the senior envoy dispatched to the region has made barely a mention of the situation in the North.

On China, Secretary Clinton fumbled early with statements that she would not let issues like human rights and Tibet interfere with more important strategic issues. But senior administration officials have steadily adjusted since. President Obama raised human rights in welcoming remarks for the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and in a Sept. 24 speech to the Center for a New American Security, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg said that he "could not disagree more" with Chinese officials who say that there is no place for human rights in the U.S.-China dialogue.

The problem is that nobody seems to believe any of this anymore. Than Shwe and the thugs running Burma guessed wrong on the administration's expectations. The Vietnamese clearly think the heat is off on religious freedom in their country. Japan's new foreign minister, Katsuya Okada, gloated in a joint press conference with the Cambodian foreign minister this week that the U.S. was "moving closer to Japan and Cambodia's position" -- even though Campbell had clearly testified on the content of the policy the week before.

Now with the administration's decision not to invite the Dalai Lama to the Oval Office during his visit to Washington this week (the first noninvite by a president during the visit of the Dalai Lama since 1991), the White House is compounding the mistakes in its messaging on human rights and democracy in the region.

The elements of a strong policy on human rights and democracy are a matter of record in the statements of senior Obama administration officials (for which they deserve full credit), but those points have been muddled or drowned out by conflicting narratives about engagement, access, "smart power" and the president's own apparent ambivalence about championing universal values. I suspect this will change as feigned neorealism comes up short in terms of results. Indeed, one can already see some evolution in the administration's approach to these issues. However, until the president clearly reaffirms America's commitment to human rights, democracy, and governance, there will be five consequences in Asia that even hard-core realists will lament (not to mention the idealists who would normally be comfortably at the core of a Democratic foreign policy):

1. Change agents within repressive states who matter most will be demoralized, disempowered and possibly endangered;
2. Repressive regimes will continue to think that they can get away with much lower standards than the administration could sell to the Congress or the American people if they want to lift sanctions or advance engagement (as happened in Burma with respect to Aung San Suu Kyi's sentence);
3. Repressive regimes will continue citing evidence of a higher U.S. tolerance for human rights abuses (something that now worries the Tibetans in the wake of the postponement of the Dalai Lama's visit to Washington);
4. The emerging debate in ASEAN, Japan, and Korea on the importance of addressing human rights and democracy will subside;
5. America's greatest source of soft power -- our values -- will suffer.

By Christian Brose

Going back to that Foreign Policy Initiative conference I mentioned earlier, I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of democracy promotion between Ken Wollack (president of the National Democratic Institute) and Elliott Abrams (formerly Bush's deputy national security advisor, now with the Council on Foreign Relations). Not surprisingly, they spent most of their time on whether the United States should promote democracy and less time on how to do it. But in the current debate, the two seem pretty linked: After the Bush administration, many people think we don't know how to promote democracy and thus question whether we should do it.

It's a tricky question. After all, democracy is not like, say, disease, where one output (medicine) is likely to achieve the desired outcome (health). There are so many contingent factors that go into democratization, and it's not clear which of these factors -- economic development, a rising middle class, anti-corruption programs, improvements in basic security and rule of law, outside support for democracy activists, external pressure on autocratic governments to reform, free elections, among other factors -- gets a country to democracy. And that's to say nothing about what influence and role an external actor like the United States can have on another country's democratization.

So how exactly do we promote democracy? I put this question to Elliott Abrams, and here is his response:

The United States is not without useful experience in helping foreign democracy activists, and helping governments that are trying to democratize. Some of the expertise resides in the National Endowment for Democracies and the two party institutes, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. Some resides in Foreign Service personnel who have served in posts where this was a major issue, and have seen what works and what does not. So the first part of an answer is to involve people who have worked on this on the ground, pragmatically. 

Sounds simple. But the State Department does not greatly value such expertise; it is most often not very "career-enhancing" because it often involves tangling with your ambassador or deputy chief of mission, your USAID mission director, and the local government. State most often pursues smooth relations with other countries, and pushing for democracy through backing local dissidents is not the path to that over-valued goal. We need less to discover, from scratch, what works, than to harness the knowledge that exists in various corners of the U.S. government. The failure to do this -- for example, at the Foreign Service Institute -- and teach it to Foreign Service  officers is scandalous.

It is hard to generalize about what does work. Societies are not like bodies, to use your analogy -- all fundamentally alike. In some situations, free elections are the best path forward, and our role is mostly pressure and activism to guarantee the integrity of elections. In other cases, there will not soon be elections, and all we can do is try to protect dissidents -- by meeting them, championing them, visiting them in prison, helping their families, advertising their situation. I do believe, as President Bush did, that elections are often transforming events (not least if they are stolen!) and should not be delayed until all conditions are ideal -- the sequentialist view. But there is no playbook that works in all situations; there is only the accrued experiences of success and failure. 

I would say that always and everywhere we should make our position clear, backing peaceful democracy activists (as Bush said in his Prague speech). I reject the view that we need to be silent about abuses, or very quiet about them -- the view that seemed widespread in the Obama Administration as it reacted to Iran after the June elections. Our comments about stolen elections, or the safety of jailed activists, or the trials of dissidents, are always helpful.

By Will Inboden

There are few policy subjects more boring than the so-called “interagency process.” The quickest way to find yourself standing suddenly and awkwardly alone at a Washington cocktail party is to say something like “well, what I am really interested in is the reform of the interagency process within the national security infrastructure.” Even devoted policy professionals will quickly change the subject, if not flee your presence entirely (unless you happen to be at a party with any folks from this outfit, who will rush over to buy you a drink). Simply put, it is hard to muster much excitement or interest even within the Beltway, let alone outside the Beltway, for thinking about how the organizational processes of the various departments and agencies of the U.S. government function together to advance national security objectives. 

But just how, and how well, the U.S. government and its various agencies organize, plan for, and allocate resources to national security policy matters profoundly to the conduct of foreign and defense policy. And for anyone who doubts this, exhibit A on what can happen when the process doesn’t work is Iraq up through 2006, exhibit B is Afghanistan today, and exhibit C is any number of possible future interventions (cf. Pakistan, or Iran, or North Korea, or Sudan, or...).

So Secretary Clinton’s announcement on Friday that the State Department and USAID will conduct a “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review” (QDDR) is significant. Modelled on the Pentagon’s “Quadrennial Defense Review” (QDR), the QDDR will, in Secretary Clinton’s words, be

a tool to provide us with both short-term and long-term blueprints for how to advance our foreign policy objectives and our values and interests. This will provide us with a comprehensive assessment for organizational reform and improvements to our policy, strategy, and planning processes.

Overall, this is a noteworthy and laudable initiative, and has the real potential to strengthen how American foreign policy is made. But there are also a few looming pitfalls. Herewith some thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the QDDR.

The good:

•    The QDDR might elevate strategic planning at the State Department and USAID. In other words, the QDDR might actually work. It has become a truism that the State Department almost ignores long-term planning about emerging threats, challenges, and opportunities, and instead remains myopically stuck in day-to-day relationship management with other nations. Likewise USAID spends too much time as a contracting agency shackled by Congressional earmarks and merely administering development dollars around the world. The QDDR could force new and creative thinking about global trends and State and USAID’s roles in shaping them.

•     The QDDR might better integrate policies with resources, and State with USAID. Though the Secretary of State ostensibly has authority over USAID, in practice State and USAID have too little integration, so that State’s diplomatic priorities are often not reflected in USAID’s resource allocation. 

•    The QDDR might link State and USAID more closely with the Pentagon. One problem revealed most acutely by the early post-conflict reconstruction failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is the severe disparities between the State Department and the Pentagon in culture, capabilities, and resources. Having State and USAID go through a similar review process, simultaneously with the Pentagon, could begin to bridge this gap. Otherwise, in former Policy Planning Director Steve Krasner’s vivid formulation, “to meet 21st century foreign policy challenges, we might just need to create a new cabinet agency that sits in the middle of the Potomac River” (er, in other words, combining the functions of State, USAID, and the Pentagon).

•     The QDDR makes academic research relevant to policy. The QDDR concept seems to have its roots at least in part in the Princeton Project on National Security, co-chaired by then-Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and now State’s Director of Policy Planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter. More avenues are needed to bring such scholarly research from universities into the policy world; the QDDR could be a good start.

The bad:

•    The QDDR risks disregarding other vital elements of national power and security policy. There is much more to foreign policy than just diplomacy and development. Trade policy, fiscal policy, energy policy, and intelligence, for starters, all play major roles in the exercise of national power. As I have written previously, the “3 D’s” may have alliterative appeal but it is a less accurate and less comprehensive acronym than, say, “DIME” used at the Pentagon for the different elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, military, and economic. More practically, what role will the Treasury Department, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Intelligence Community, the Energy Department, and the Commerce Department have in the QDDR process? And if they have little or no role, how can the QDDR be a credible assessment of resources and strategy?

•    Where’s the National Security Council? The NSC is supposed to coordinate and lead all departments and agencies behind a common policy. But other than an obligatory nod towards “coordinating with the interagency process,” Clinton’s announcement of the QDDR asserts that State will control it, and leaves unclear what if any role the NSC would play in the QDDR process.  Given the endemic differences between State and DoD, it is plausible that the new QDDR could construct even taller stovepipes separating defense from diplomacy and development. To take just one plausible example, what if in the next QDR, the Pentagon identifies China as America’s most likely peer-competitor threat, whereas in the QDDR State identifies China as a strategic partner for the United States? Only leadership, coordination, and yes, control of the process by the NSC can prevent such bureaucratic contradictions and strategic incoherence.  

The ugly:

•    The QDDR risks being, as Mark Twain would put it, “chloroform in print.”  Secretary Clinton described the QDDR as a “bottom-up review.” On a good day this means that input will be solicited far and wide from every embassy and bureau, the people in the field and in the trenches who best understand their patch of turf. On a bad day (which happen more often in government) it means that the QDDR will be a stale, written-by-committee laundry list of bureaucratese that avoids difficult trade-offs and lacks strategic coherence. Even if it is a “bottom-up review,” it will need a firm hand from the top to succeed, and ideally one principal official who controls the writing process.

•    What about the National Security Strategy? The Goldwater-Nichols Act, the law which mandated the QDR, also directed each Administration to produce a National Security Strategy (NSS).  The NSS is the only strategy document which brings all elements of national power into a coherent and integrated framework of policy priorities.  The besetting weakness of the NSS is that it is not linked to budget authority and resource allocation.  Because the QDR and QDDR both ostensibly tie policies with resources, they have more immediate relevance.  So here’s an idea for the White House, which others have suggested but bears repeating: why not fold the QDR and the QDDR into the National Security Strategy, and produce a genuinely integrated, whole-of-government National Security Strategic Review?

By Kori Schake

Gary Schaub has an op-ed in today's New York Times on the disparity between State and Defense. Here's the heart of it:

Not surprisingly, the State Department has trouble pulling its weight — and the Defense Department fills the void....

General Petraeus oversees Central Command — America’s military presence in the Middle East — and has assembled a task force to develop a strategy for the area that stretches from Egypt to Pakistan. This task force will not develop a traditional military strategy with a focus on offensive and defensive operations. Centcom will aim to help nations in the region govern effectively, build their economies and provide security to their people. It will also try to communicate America’s foreign policy intentions clearly.

Regional commanders oversee policy in their regions because no one else can. They have staffs of thousands, forces numbering in the tens of thousands and vast financial resources. These generals tower over civilians who share responsibility for securing American interests abroad: ambassadors, regional desk officers and assistant secretaries of state.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates recognizes the imbalance and has called for increasing the State Department’s budget. But this is a long-term proposition. As he rebuilds his team in a new administration, Mr. Gates should see to it that every command has civilian officials to work alongside their military counterparts.

Building civilian posts into military headquarters will aggravate rather than solve the problem of the discrepancy between our military and diplomatic capacity. No civilian is ever going to be promoted to CENTCOM commander, and that tells you all you need to know about why Schaub’s proposed solution is inadequate. Civilians will provide diplomatic input to the military decisions, and that’s a good thing, but it shouldn’t be confused for developing an integrated politico-economic-military strategy or having the respective departments take responsibility for their slices and apportion resources to its execution.

CENTCOM’s strategy for U.S. relations with countries in its military area of responsibility deserves no more credence than a historian with expertise on Pakistan would deserve in crafting a military strategy. I mean no disrespect to General Petraeus and his team, just that it’s not their area of expertise, and it’s unfair of the U.S. government to thrust them into the work of setting priorities that are fundamentally political or diplomatic in nature.

What is needed is a wholesale rethinking of how we organize, train, and equip our diplomats and how we connect them to the President’s priorities. Does anyone really think we have enough diplomats for the people-intensive tasks of winning the war of ideas? How about advancing democracy? Strengthening civil society? Showing people in societies threatened by globalization the power of America’s creed of opportunity and self-reliance? There are more than 200 cities in the world with populations over a million people that have no U.S. diplomatic representation at all.

Beyond the baseline numbers, we don’t train our diplomats in anything except languages. In the course of a military career, a top officer spends about seven years being educated for the expanded responsibilities their subsequent jobs entail –- that’s in addition to the training for their current job that is part and parcel of their routine work. A comparably senior diplomat will have had less than a year. That our diplomats are as admirably capable as they are is a tribute to their individual excellence.

The State Department didn’t teach them to swim; they threw them in the water and promoted the ones who didn’t drown. Requiring virtuoso individuals to make the system work in an average way is a sub-optimal (and often disastrous) way to structure an institution. Bureaucracies are supposed to support and enable better performance, not inhibit it.
 
I've worked in both Defense and State, and the difference money makes on the culture just screams out at you. The State Department feels itself lucky to send people to the National War College –- they’ve been living on small budgets for such a long time they can’t even envision a world in which our country has a National Diplomatic University that teaches statecraft and our military pleads for admission to gain that essential education. State’s culture is one of doing the best you can with inadequate resources.

While Congress is frequently vilified for stinginess toward the State Department, they mostly meddle in foreign assistance accounts, not the baseline budget. The White House almost always gets the money requested in the President’s budget. The President should ask for money, and lots of it, to bring our non-military national security departments up to the standard our military performs at.

We need diplomats who are the peers of their military counterparts, not their subordinates.