I imagine the Obama administration may be wondering whether or not to release another edition of the National Security Strategy (NSS). They released Obama's first (and so far only) one in May 2010. Although the law mandating the NSS calls for annual updates, at the time it looked like the administration might follow the George W. Bush precedent of releasing just one per term.

The one-per-term standard makes sense for a number of reasons. First, we shouldn't expect the overall national security strategy of the country to change on an annual basis. Second, producing a quality document takes a surprising amount of work; better to invest those resources in monitoring the implementation of the old one than in finding ways to repackage old wine in new wine skins. Third, as an administration creeps closer to the silly season of campaigning, the temptation to turn the document into a brag-sheet rather than a serious articulation of the administration's worldview becomes irresistible. Whether or not you agreed with the content of the arguments, Clinton's first NSS and both of Bush's were more substantial and thus more consequential documents than the later ones produced by the Clinton administration.

However, I would not be surprised to learn that a new version is under consideration. Doubtless the campaign temptation is pulling mightily on the Obama team. President Obama will be the first Democratic incumbent in decades -- maybe since Roosevelt -- to have reason to believe that his bragging rights on national security are stronger than they are on domestic policy and the economy. When the applause lines are louder on national security than they are on the economy, it is easy to predict that the candidate will proffer the former more often than the latter (insert late night comic riff about Giuliani mentioning 9/11 here). Whether or not they can produce a document at least as serious as their first one, let alone on par with earlier ones is tougher to predict. Campaign-induced distortions will be a big challenge.

Yet there is one good reason why they should release another version in the current term -- perhaps good enough to overcome all of my other caveats. A few weeks ago, President Obama released a much-ballyhooed "new strategic guidance" and the administration went to considerable lengths to emphasize the boldness and novelty of what they were doing. The commentariat responded in kind -- a Google search of "Obama strategic pivot" produces some 1,200,000 hits.

If it really is so new and so bold, it raises the obvious question: is it new and bold enough to require changes in the (now) old NSS, from which, in theory, such defense guidance is supposed to emanate?

On the other hand, if the new strategic guidance does not require a change in the NSS, how bold and new can it be?

The Obama administration is sending contradictory messages on a crucially important national security subject. At the NATO Defense Ministers' meeting in Brussels, Leon Panetta seemed to accelerate the withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan from the end of 2014 -- what NATO nations have been committed to -- to "mid-to late 2013." In Chicago, meanwhile, the President's Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes insisted there will be no change to the 2014 plan, warning that "We will need allies to remain committed to that goal." The president's Special Assistant for European Affairs Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, evidently ignorant of Panetta's statement, assured reporters that the Secretary of Defense "will be very clear about our plans to remain on the Lisbon timeline."

The evident confusion among senior policy makers in the administration prefigures the administration's cratering commitment to win the war in Afghanistan. The White House has narrowed its war aims from defeating all threats to only defeating al Qaeda. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, testified to Congress this week that the deaths of senior al Qaeda leadership have brought us to a "critical transitional phase for the terrorist threat," in which the organization has a better than 50 percent probability of fragmenting and becoming incapable of mass-casualty attacks. 

The White House appears set to use progress against al Qaeda as justification for accelerating an end to the war in Afghanistan. Since the president has concluded that we aren't fighting the Taliban, just al Qaeda, no need to stick around Afghanistan until the government of that country can provide security and prevent recidivism to Taliban control. The president will declare victory for having taken from al Qaeda the ability to organize large scale attacks, and piously intone that nation building in Afghanistan is Afghanistan's responsibility.

This policy will not win the war in Afghanistan. It will not even end the war in Afghanistan. It will only end our involvement in that ongoing war. Because arbitrary timelines do not translate into having achieved the objectives that cause enemies to throw down their weapons. And it is the enemy ceasing to contest our objectives that constitutes winning. Interrogations with prisoners in Afghanistan have caused the American military to conclude that "Once ISAF is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable."

Secretary Panetta's public affairs folks will likely spend a few days prettying up the mess, emphasizing the secretary was referring to the transition from combat operations to advising and training Afghans. But the damage has been done. As Michael Clarke of Britain's Royal United Services Institute said, "the suspicion that America is going to pull out early will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and there will be a rush to the exit." The Obama administration created this problem by the president's own arbitrary timeline. It is hard to blame Nicolas Sarkozy for playing politics with the issue; politicization is contagious, and allies caught it from President Obama.

A favorite topic for FP bloggers is the so-called gap between practicing academics and practicing policymakers. I have weighed in, but see also contributions from Dan Drezner (here or here and Steve Walt).

It is an important topic (at least to "yakademics" like me -- I don't sense it has quite the burning appeal for my non-academic Shadow Government teammates) and well worth the focused attention it has received. There are several excellent programs designed to help bridge it, including one run by Eliot Cohen and Tom Keaney at SAIS, another by my Duke colleague Bruce Jentleson and Berkeley's Steve Weber and American U's Jim Goldgeier, and a third by Dick Betts at Columbia. There is probably room for more such efforts.

But at the risk of undercutting the urgent language used in grant applications, I think it is only fair to point out that the situation may not be irredeemably bleak. I just had the pleasure of reading through the most recent issue of International Security, the top academic journal in the field of security studies and one of the highest-impact journals in the entire discipline of political science. I was struck by how policy relevant the issue was, without sacrificing in any way academic rigor. Mind you, the articles were too long and perhaps on the academic side to make the reading list of, say, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. But policymakers would benefit from understanding the arguments contained therein and foreign policy specialists inside the administration would benefit from digging into some of the articles more closely. 

Consider the menu:

• An article by Nuno Monteiro theorizing the conditions under which unipolarity conduces to peace or conflict. This is grand system theorizing in a form that is particularly "academic." I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, but I can easily see how speechwriters and strategists would benefit from understanding the framework. [Note to entering Ph.D. students seeking dissertation topics: this article also reflects the turning of the wheel of academic fashion as the field cycles through different levels of analysis. In the early 1980s, system-level work like neorealism and neoliberalism were hot; in the 1990's state-level work like democratic peace theory was hot; in the early 2000's transnational-level work on ethnic conflict and terrorism was hot; right now individual-level work on leaders is hot; it is about time for the system-level work like this about power transitions and polarity to have another run.]
• An article by Michael Beckley rebutting the claims of declinists that a rising China is eclipsing the United States. Again, one can imagine ongoing academic (and policy) debate, but the work speaks directly to a topic of urgent policy priority.
• An article by Ole Magnus Theisen, Helge Holtermann, and Halvard Buhaug presenting a sophisticated empirical test of the link between droughts and conflict and showing that, contra the repeated claims of policymakers, the systematic evidence of a link is missing. This is exactly the sort of policy relevant enterprise that academics are ideally suited to perform.
• An article by David Elbladh tracing the influence of a Depression era historian on the formation of the security studies field. Ironically, in some ways, this is the article that is the least "useful" to policymakers, even though it is the one most directly focused on the gap question itself. It is, however, helpful to academics interested in closing the gap and so I still count it as supporting my thesis.
• An article by David Kang reviewing three recent books on North Korean politics and economics. Given the long lead times of academic publishing, this is a serendipitous masterstroke. The sudden death of Kim Jong-Il has plunged North Korea into a regime crisis and the U.S. national security community is doing an urgent deep dive into the black box of North Korean politics. They couldn't do better than reading this detailed and insightful book review (and, as needed, the underlying academic books themselves).
• An exchange of letters between Michael McKoy and David Lake about bargaining theory and the origins of the Iraq war. Most policymakers might give this a miss, but that would be a shame. McKoy's brief account of the bargaining dilemmas leading up to the Iraq war is one of the fairest and truest summaries of the dynamic that I have read. Academics have really struggled to explain the Iraq war and have all-too-often settled for distorted caricatures. This brief exchange rises well above that.
• At the very end of the issue is an exchange of letters between me and two critics, Betts and Mike Desch, concerning my earlier article about civil-military relations and the surge. I will let readers decide who gets the better of the exchange, but regardless it, too, bridges the policy-academy gap.

Finally, note an interesting fact: the issue predominantly features the work of junior scholars, in some cases scholars not yet holding a tenure track position. (Interestingly, one of the IS authors has made his own useful contribution to the debate about the gap.) Perhaps the emerging generation has not gotten the word about the gap crisis. Or perhaps they are already well on their way to fixing it.

The President has finished up a grueling trip to the Asia-Pacific region and can generally feel good about what he accomplished. Like everything this President does, however, the trip was very heavy on political spin. His team could not stop talking about their "pivot" to Asia. Whether this is a foreign policy strategy or just rhetoric in an election year, it deserves careful and considered deconstruction. Our colleague Dan Blumenthal began the critique last week by rightly pointing out that the pivot doesn't work when you hollow out defense spending. And Dan is not alone; Tom Donnelly also pointed out some of the flaws with the pivot concept. Now that the trip is over, more can be said.

PROS:

The Indo-Pacific region is the fastest-growing economic zone in the world; home to six of the eight known nuclear weapons states or proliferators (US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea); and scene of both 21st century economic integration and 19th century balance-of-power rivalry. The United States is a Pacific power with interests, influence, allies and territory right at the center of the region. Polling by the German Marshall Fund of the United States shows that Americans, by a considerable margin, believe Asia is more important to their country's national interests than Europe. At the same time, Asians have real questions about American staying power in their region (as they have on-and-off since Vietnam).

The president's success in signaling high-level American attention to the region should be reassuring to nervous friends and allies. Enactment of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (after years of deferring to the Democratic Party's labor base) and progress on negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership put momentum behind the goal of a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific that President Bush put forward. President Obama's conversion to these policies and the cause of trade liberalization has come late, but it is welcome nonetheless.

It also appears that despite embracing dangerously deep defense cuts overall, the Obama administration has decided that force structure reductions will mostly come in Europe and not Asia. Secretary of Defense Panetta sent that signal on his first trip to Asia, and it helped to blunt the growing concerns about American defense capabilities in the region.

Finally, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deserves credit for spending more time on and in Asia than most of her immediate predecessors. For all those reasons, whether it is called a "pivot" or not, the administration's increasing focus on Asia has big pros.

CONS:

But is a "pivot" the right way to frame this? First of all, without resources the big talk will quickly seem hollow to friends and foes alike. The United States is facing the prospect of up to a trillion dollars in defense cuts over the coming decade. Defense cuts of this magnitude cannot but undermine U.S. capabilities, and with them our ability to reassure and deter, in Asia. Defense spending cuts may come out of Europe and Southwest Asia, but when Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan get hot in the decade ahead, where will the forces come from? If we hollow out our force structure in Europe and Southwest Asia, we set up a situation where forces will eventually be drained out of East Asia. Our friends and adversaries know this.

In addition, the "pivot" spin makes the United States look like a spastic superpower that swings around focusing on only one region at a time. During the Cold War, the United States managed a grand strategy that was global in scope with skill; are we not capable of doing so today, when our freedom of maneuver and our relative power are in fact greater? It is unbecoming of a global power; unnerving for our European allies (whose support we also need to manage China's ascendance); and carries the unfortunate connotation that we may "pivot" again based on a new, reductionist, one-region-at-a-time concept of grand strategy.

Finally, by suddenly framing this entire trip as a swing against China, the White House risks unsettling the careful ground work done by American diplomats and military officials over the past year. The Australian base agreement is a good first step toward constructing a dispersed but robust forward presence as we prepare to cope with more missile threats to our forces. But as Teddy Roosevelt said, it is better to speak softly and carry a big stick. Now friendly countries like Indonesia are recoiling against U.S. strategy because of the last minute verbal assault on China. The "pivot" is even more jarring because the administration spent the first year framing Asia strategy in terms of a new U.S.-China bipolar condominium, articulated in the November 2009 Obama-Hu joint statement that trumpeted respect for each others' core interests and followed U.S. decisions to postpone meetings with the Dalai Lama and arms sales to Taiwan. Supporters of a strong U.S.-India relationship in Delhi were actually told by senior Obama administration officials at the time that the United States no longer believes in the concept of the balance of power. You cannot blame them for being a bit confused now. The pivot can be dizzying.

At the end of the day, we suspect the "pivot" is a convenient political frame for the White House to try to explain that the Obama administration remains muscular and strategic, despite its accelerated retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan. When domestic politics intrude on the framing of foreign policy in this way -- especially when it happens so suddenly-- the result can undercut what would otherwise be solid building blocks for a regional strategy in Asia. Still, kudos to those like Secretary Clinton who have remained consistent in their focus on Asia and to those U.S. officials who worked hard to reverse misguided early policies against trade liberalization and an ill-conceived U.S.-China bipolar condominium. Their work paid off on this trip. Meanwhile, let's be clear: superpowers manage rising powers with leadership and steadiness -- not pivots.

The next Republican president needs to look at Brazil as we do Canada and Mexico. Consider that Brazil is currently the sixth or the seventh biggest economy in the world, and depending on whose projections you follow, is forecasted to become the fifth sometime in the next ten years. After 16 years of political and economic stability, targeted social programs, and private sector led growth through the opening of the economy, over 25 million people have been pulled out of poverty.

Much has been written about the major oil discoveries off the coast of Brazil. Some predict that Brazil will be one of the top five oil producers in the world in 2020 and the largest in South America. There is talk of as much as $1 trillion needed to drill off shore in very complicated contexts to achieve these production levels. The business opportunities for American oil and oil service companies and the changes to the way we think about energy security are favorable to the United States.

Brazil is the leading producer and innovator in the field of biofuels with significant portions of their car and truck fleets running on sugar based ethanol.

Not as publicized, but equally important, Brazil has, for the most part, gotten a handle on its rainforest problem and is seeking to balance agriculture (mainly soy and beef production) with preservation of the rainforest. With three center-left governments elected since 2002 with the implicit or explicit backing from the Green party, the debate between agriculture and environment has found a balance the Brazilians are happy with. Recent satellite photos demonstrate that the rainforest is reclaiming over 20 percent of the lands that have been cut down. Ask yourself when was the last time you heard a plea from an environmental NGO to "save the rainforest" and you'll see what I mean.

Brazil is hosting the World Cup and the Summer Olympics over the next five years. Even if we don't take soccer seriously, the rest of the world does and these are both big prestige wins for Brazil and a big opportunity for American business.

Brazil's largest trading partner is China -- something that has happened only in the last five or seven years. Its second is the European Union with the United States close behind. At the same time, the bloom has come off the rose with the Chinese and this may present an opportunity for the United States over the medium term on a free trade agreement between the United States and Brazil. The Brazilians are concerned about the "invasion" of "cheap" Chinese manufactured goods competing with local Brazilian goods. In other words, in the Brazilian Mind: "selling soy to China good. Buying Chinese shoes is bad..." This may be our opportunity to restart bilateral trade talks down the road if this continues to be a source of worry for the Brazilians.

The U.S. embassy in Brazil processes more visas to visit the United States than that of any other country in the world -- more than China. By the way, we are well represented in the country by Ambassador Tom Shannon -- Shadow Government readers will remember him as Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere in Bush 43.

Read on

Having spent a week in Brasilia, Sao Paulo, and Rio meeting with senior representatives of the Brazilian government and major influencers in the country, it's clear to me that Republicans and conservatives need to understand that Brazil could be as consequential to the United States in the next twenty years as Canada or Mexico are to us now. The next Republican president needs to make Brazil a top priority by firstly, naming a high-level ambassador and secondly, making Brazil one of his first stops overseas.

Brazil is still considered a developing country, but this classification is about ten years out of date. The United States needs to develop new ways to work with countries like Brazil that are on their way to becoming industrialized countries. Instead of foreign aid and development, we have "cooperation interests" with Brazil that are linked to our foreign policy, national security, and commercial interests.

Republicans and conservatives, like others across the political spectrum, have historically had other interests in the region (e.g. Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua to name a few). Brazil has not presented itself to the United States as either a security threat or much of a market. There, of course, have been historical ties that are often overlooked and ignored (e.g. Brazil sending troops to fight on the Allies' side in World War II).

The Brazilians have been too poor, too self involved, or too chaotic to warrant much of our attention or for them to pay us too much attention. Also, in moments of delusions of grandeur, the Brazilians have seen themselves almost as rivals to us -- something we have not reciprocated for the simple fact that Brazil has not been on our radar.

Over the last 20 years, much of the energy in the relationship has been around the environment. Many will remember the "Save the Rainforest" campaigns focusing on the Amazon of the late 80s and early 90s.

Finally, how many people in the United States actually speak Portuguese who do not have some family tie to the language? The Latin Americanists, almost to a person, speak Spanish and focus on Spanish speaking countries for good reasons. All of the above is changing or is going to change.

The window of opportunity is there.

Following the lead of Presidents George W. Bush and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Presidents Barack Obama and President Dilma Rousseff have been deepening relations between the two countries since at least 2005, with more frequent meetings and on-going high-level government dialogues. Rousseff and her Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota are broadly pro-American. We have an opportunity to consolidate this relationship and move it from a third level relationship to a first level relationship over the next 10 years. If there is a Republican in the White House in 2013, we need to build on the Bush/Obama legacy, create an office in the State Department focused solely on Brazil, just as we have for Canada, and find new, more strategic ways to work together through networks that exist or that need to be built between our two societies.

The administration announced on Oct. 19 that talks will resume with North Korea in Geneva and that a new team will represent the U.S. side. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, the administration's Special Envoy on North Korea and the distinguished Dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, will make Geneva his last official meeting before stepping down. He will be replaced by Glyn Davies, the current ambassador to the IAEA. Meanwhile, Ford Hart, one of the Department's top China hands, will continue to serve as U.S. representative to the Six Party Talks.

This shift demonstrates several things about the Obama administration's diplomacy. First, it signals the end of candidate Obama's promise of dramatic new engagement strategies with the world's most difficult regimes. High profile special envoys (Mitchell to the Middle East, Grayson to Sudan, Holbrooke to Af/Pak, Bosworth to North Korea) are being replaced by steady but low-profile professionals from within the foreign service. Davies is only the most recent example. It turns out, as John McCain warned in 2008, that the problem with these regimes is NOT that we lack unconditional high-level negotiations. The Obama team realized that early on, but it takes a little time to reverse signature foreign policy promises.

The other factor at play, I suspect, is the 2012 election. I recall that in 2004 the White House began imposing message discipline and tighter controls over sensitive foreign policy issues like North Korea, Taiwan, and Iraq. High profile special envoys and message discipline tend not to go together, and the Obama White House is clearing the decks for a major fight for the presidency next year.

Finally, lower key professionals make sense at a time when North Korea is unlikely to yield much ground. Big breakthroughs are hard to imagine, given the fact that Pyongyang tested a nuclear device, conducted two lethal attacks on South Korea, and revealed its uranium enrichment program since the last tentative agreement was reached on denuclearization in October 2008. Of course, they also failed to implement their side of that agreement -- provision of verification protocols -- even after we unilaterally lifted sanctions to the great dismay of our Japanese and Korean allies. The North is in a more talkative mood, but Pyongyang has also been telegraphing its intention to consummate its nuclear weapons status in 2012 for some time. The talks in Geneva will at best yield something of a time out in which the North freezes its provocations and perhaps its facilities at Yongbyon. However, we know from experience that they will only agree to easily reversible steps and that we will likely have another crisis before too long -perhaps even in 2012. It is unlikely therefore that we, Japan or Korea will pay much to rent the North Korean nuclear program for a few months all over again. On the other hand, Washington, Seoul, and Beijing all have elections or leadership changes in 2012 and might be willing to take some steps if it keeps things quiet with North Korea for a while.

Given those realities, the team running North Korea diplomacy is reassuring. They are some of the best professionals in the Foreign Service and a bit like the unflappable cops on the old black and white TV shows. I don't expect we will have a problem with any melodramatic rush for supposedly historic breakthroughs.

"Just the facts, Ma'am."

In advance of tomorrow's Big Speech on foreign policy, the Romney campaign has released a list of 22 special advisors and 13 working groups in the area of foreign policy and national security.

Since I am not on the list (though I am happy to see that several Shadow Gov colleagues are), I feel free to comment on the quality. It is very high. This is a classic "ready to govern on Day 1" list. Most of the names have had experience serving in senior positions in the prior administrations, and many have public service records that go back decades. Because so many were Bush-appointees, this list will anger the Bush-haters. But my sense is that reflexive Bush-hatred is on the wane, at least among voters who might plausibly pull the lever for Romney. And, just as importantly, there is real value in signaling that you are ready to handle the national security challenges of a post-9/11 world. It is hard to do that without tapping the bench of people who have experience handling those challenges.

Another feature of this list is that it includes many people who are respected not only inside Republican circles but also, to a certain extent, across the partisan aisle and among reporters specializing in foreign policy and national security. I say "to a certain extent" because the list does not have prominent "Republicans That Democrats Most Love to Love (So Other Republicans Don't)" but neither does it have many "Republicans That Democrats Most Love to Hate." Instead, Romney's list is comprised of the types of people who would be quietly consulted by Democratic national security experts and reporters, if only to know what smart people on the other side think about a given policy.

Of course, campaigns are not won or lost through lists like this and this campaign in particular will hinge on other factors. Still, the quality of the list poses an interesting double challenge. First, it challenges President Obama, making it harder for him to argue that Romney is an irresponsible extremist whose views would put the country in jeopardy. I expect Romney's speech to double-down on that challenge.

Second, it challenges Romney's most formidable rival for the nomination, Governor Perry, making it all the more imperative for him to establish his own foreign policy credentials. Perry has the distinct disadvantage of entering the campaign late and while his impressive fundraising numbers prove his campaign deserves its first-tier status, his late entry has slowed his effort to assemble the rest of the apparatus of a first-tier campaign. Now Romney has raised the bar just a wee bit higher on him. One reporter asked me, "Who is not on the list that is still available for Perry? I can't think of anyone." I can think of many good people (for starters, the Shadow Gov roster has many, and we haven't cornered the market ourselves), so the reporter was wildly exaggerating. But there is no question Perry has his work cut out for him.

A unicorn is a beautiful, make believe creature. But despite overwhelming evidence of its fantastical nature, many people still believe in them. Much of China policy is also underpinned by belief in the fantastical: in this case, soothing but logically inconsistent ideas. But unlike unicorns, our China policy excursions into the realm of make believe could be dangerous. Crafting a better China policy requires us to identify what is imaginary in our thinking about China. Author James Mann captures some in his book.

Here are my own top ten China policy unicorns:

1) The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. This is the argument that has the most purchase over our China policy. Treat China like an enemy, the belief goes, and it will become an enemy. Conversely, treat China like a friend and it will become a friend. But three decades of U.S.-China relations should at least cast doubt on this belief. Since the normalization of relations with China the aim of U.S. policy has been to bring China "into the family of nations." Other than China itself, no nation has done more than the United States to improve the lot of the Chinese people and to welcome China's rise peacefully. And, rather than increase its deterrence of China -- a natural move given the uncertainty attendant to the rise of any great power -- the United States has let its Pacific forces erode and will do so further. We may soon go through our third round of defense cuts in as many years. Here is just one example of how unserious we are about China: As China continues to build up its strategic forces, the United States has signed a deal with Russia to cap its strategic forces without so much as mentioning China. Unless Beijing was insulted by this neglect, surely it could take great comfort in an anachronistic U.S. focus on arms control with Russia. But despite our demonstrations of benevolence, China still views the United States as its enemy or, on better days, its rival. Its military programs are designed to fight the United States. The self-fulfilling prophesy is far and away the most fantastical claim about China policy and thus the number one unicorn.

2) Abandoning Taiwan will remove the biggest obstacle to Sino-American relations. Since 2003, when President Bush publicly chided then-Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian on the White House lawn with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at his side, the United States has been gradually severing its close links with Taiwan. President Obama's Taiwan policy has been the logical dénouement. Arms sales have been stalled, no Cabinet members have visited Taiwan since the Clinton years, and trade talks are nonexistent: there is essentially nothing on the U.S.-Taiwan policy agenda. The reaction from China? Indeed, it has moved on. But rather than bask in the recent warming of its relationship with Taiwan, China has picked fights with Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and India. It does not matter what "obstacles" the United States removes, China's foreign policy has its own internal logic that is hard for the United States to "shape." Abandoning Taiwan for the sake of better relations is yet another dangerous fantasy.

3) China will inevitably overtake the U.S. and we must manage our decline elegantly. This is a new China policy unicorn. Until a few years ago, most analysts were certain there was no need to worry about China. The new intellectual fad tells us there is nothing we can do about China. Its rise and our decline are inevitable. But inevitability in international affairs should remain the preserve of rigid ideological theorists who still cannot explain why a unified Europe has not posed a problem for the United States, why post-war Japan never really challenged U.S. primacy, or why the rising United States and the declining Britain have not gone to war since 1812. The fact is China has tremendous, seemingly insurmountable problems. It has badly misallocated its capital thanks to a distorted financial system characterized by capital controls and a non-market based currency. It may have a debt to GDP ratio as high as 80 percent thanks again to a badly distorted economy. And it has created a demographic nightmare with a shrinking productive population, senior tsunami, and millions of males who will be unmarriageable (see the pioneering work of my colleague Nick Eberstadt).

The United States also has big problems. But we are debating them vigorously, know what they are and are now looking to elect the leaders to fix them. China's political structure does not yet allow for fixing big problems.

4) (Related to 3). China is our banker. We cannot anger our banker. In fact, China is more like a depositor. It deposits money in U.S. treasuries because its economy does not allow investors to put it elsewhere. There is nothing else it can do with its surpluses unless it changes its financial system radically (see above). It makes a pittance on its deposits. If the U.S. starts to bring down its debts and deficits China will have even fewer options. China is desperate for U.S. investment, U.S. treasuries, and the U.S. market. The balance of leverage leans towards the United States.

5) We are engaging China. This is a surprising policy unicorn. After all, we do have an engagement policy with China. But we are only engaging a small slice of China: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party may be large -- the largest in the world (it could have some 70 million members). We do need to engage party leaders on matters of high politics and high finance, but China has at least one billion other people. Many are decidedly not part of the CCP. They are lawyers, activists, religious leaders, artists, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs. Most would rather the CCP go quietly into the night. We do not engage them. Our presidents tend to avoid making their Chinese counterparts uncomfortable by insisting on speaking to a real cross section of Chinese society. Engagement seen through the prism of government-to-government relations keeps us from engaging with the broader Chinese public. Chinese officials come to the United States and meet with whomever they want (usually in carefully controlled settings, and often with groups who are critical of the U.S. government and very friendly to the Chinese government). U.S. leaders are far more cautious in choosing with whom to meet in China. We do not demand reciprocity in meeting with real civil society -- underground church leaders, political reformers and so on. China has a successful engagement policy. We do not.

6) Our greatest challenge is managing China's rise. Actually, our greatest challenge will probably be managing China's long decline. Unless it enacts substantial reforms, China's growth model may sputter out soon. There is little if nothing it can do about its demographic disaster (will it enact pro-immigration policy?). And its political system is too risk averse and calcified to make any real reforms.

7) China's decline will make our lives easier. China's decline may make the challenge for the United States more difficult for at least a generation. It could play out for a long time even as China grows more aggressive with more lethal weaponry (e.g., what to do with surplus males?). Arguably both Germany and Imperial Japan declined beginning after World War I and continuing through the disaster of World War II. Russia is in decline by all useful metrics. Even so, it invaded a neighbor not too long ago. A declining, nuclear-armed nation with a powerful military can be more problematic than a rising, confident nation.

8) We need to extricate ourselves from the "distractions" of the Middle East and South Asia to focus on China. This is a very popular unicorn among the cognoscenti. But how would this work? As Middle Easterners go through a historic revolution that could lead to the flowering of democracy or the turmoil of more extremism, how do we turn our attention elsewhere? Are we supposed to leave Afghanistan to the not-so-tender mercies of the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence? This view is particularly ironic given China's increased interests in the Middle East and our need for a partnership with India to deal with China. There is no way to create the kind of order we wish to see in Asia without exerting a great amount of influence over the oil producing states in the Middle East and by allowing India to become tied down in a struggle in South Asia. We are the sole superpower, our foreign policy is interconnected. "Getting Asia right" means "getting the Middle East and South Asia right."

9) We need China's help to solve global problems. This is further down on my list because it is not really a fantastical unicorn. It is true. What is a fantasy is that China will be helpful. We do need China to disarm North Korea. They do not want to, and North Korea is now a nuclear power. The same may soon be true with Iran. The best we can get in our diplomacy with China is to stop Beijing from being less helpful. It is a fact that the global problems would be easier to manage with Chinese help. However, China actually contributing to global order is a unicorn.

10) Conflict with China is inevitable. A fair reading of the nine "unicorns" above may lead to the conclusion that we are destined to go to war with China. It may be a fair reading, but it is also an inaccurate one. Sino-American relations will be determined by two main drivers; one we can control, the other we cannot. The first is our ability to deter aggressive Chinese behavior. The second is how politics develop in China. The strategic prize for Washington is democratic reform in China. Democracy will not solve all Sino-American problems. China may be very prickly about sovereignty and very nationalistic. But a true liberal democracy in China in which people are fairly represented is our best hope for peace. The disenfranchised could force their government to focus resources on their manifold problems (corruption, misallocated resources, lack of social safety net). The United States and the rest of Asia will certainly trust an open and transparent China more, and ties would blossom at the level of civil society. Historically, the United States has almost always been on China's side. It is waiting patiently to do so again.

Dan and Kori have great posts about U.S. policy towards Pakistan. Dan seems to suggest that we should war game what it would look like to walk away from our 57-year-old alliance with Pakistan, come what may. Kori thinks that is impractical and we are stuck with the ally we have, not with the ally we want. Both are primarily focused on Pakistan's foreign policy and how it affects American interests. But the thing we need to recognize is that Pakistan today is teetering on the brink of civil war, and this may be the greater danger to the United States than anything it does in Afghanistan or India.

According to the Brookings Index on Pakistan, insurgents, militants, and terrorists regularly launch more than 150 attacks on Pakistani government, military, and infrastructure targets per month, and have been for at least the last three years. Pakistan has deployed nearly 100,000 regular army soldiers to its western provinces since 2001 -- to combat fellow Pakistanis, not to counter an external threat. Nearly 3,000 soldiers have been killed in combat with militants since 2007. Tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and militants -- the distinction between which is not always clear -- have been killed in daily insurgent and counterinsurgent operations that have accelerated dramatically in recent years across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Baluchistan. Pakistan is facing its gravest domestic crisis since the Civil War of 1971 sundered the country in two and changed the map of South Asia.

The war is, broadly, between Islamist jihadists and the autocratic Pakistani Army. That is a vast simplification, because the jihadists are split into dozens of factions who all have different agendas, and the Pakistani military is hiding behind the fiction of civilian authority. (And, of course, the Pakistani military has ties to other militant groups and uses them as proxies in Afghanistan and India. They are mostly different groups from those waging an insurgency inside Pakistan). But the real contest for power is between those who want an Islamic State in all or part of Pakistan and those who want to continue the military-enforced secular order that has held power for most of Pakistan's national existence.

Neither side is very nice. Neither likes the United States very much. And neither side is committed to democracy or human rights. But between the two, the Pakistani military is plainly the better option. A jihadist-controlled nuclear Pakistan would be the gravest threat to American national security since the Axis Powers signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940 (more dangerous than the Soviet Union because the latter was more predictable and could be deterred). We need the military autocrats to win. We need them to win even though they support militant groups in Afghanistan, even though they actively oppose U.S. interests, even though they are themselves a source of instability and danger. If there were a third option, I'd take it, but there isn't.

That should be the starting point for U.S. Pakistan policy. It pains me to say it, but this is more important than the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan is too big to fail -- which, like Lehman, doesn't necessarily mean we can stop its failure, only that the consequences are so dire as to require our attention and effort. And for those bothered by the weakness of democracy in a military-controlled Pakistan, consider which side is more likely to consider reform and liberalization after the civil war is over.

That perspective I think can help us rethink through some of the issues Dan and Kori raised.

Military Aid. We should continue limited aid to the Pakistani military -- limited, that is, to counterinsurgency-relevant equipment and training. Helicopters and night-vision goggles, yes. F-16s and artillery, no. And we certainly should insist on more conditionality and transparency, even if that is unpopular with Pakistanis.  

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.

The Obama administration is getting itself in trouble trying to satisfy both Beijing and the Congress by providing Taiwan with upgrades of its F-16 A/Bs instead of the new F-16 C/Ds Taipei has requested. Administration efforts this week to spin a skeptical Congress about what a great deal this is for our friends in Taipei only made matters worse.

By any objective measure Taiwan needs the additional -- not just retrofitted -- F-16s. The Taiwan Relations Act requires the United States to provide Taiwan with arms and services of a defensive nature. Commitments such as the Six Assurances provide clear policy guidance: decisions about Taiwan's military requirements should be made on the basis of Taiwan's defensive needs and not U.S. diplomatic relations with Beijing. U.S.-China relations are obviously important, but U.S. resolve in standing by our friends and allies is a critical backstop to ensure that our policy towards Beijing works. The PLA Air Force is growing in leaps and bounds, including the fast-tracking of stealth aircraft. Taiwan needs to replace its aging fleet of F-5s to keep planes in the air, let alone counter the PLAAF's rapidly growing advantage. Taipei repeatedly requested F-16 C/Ds only to be told by the Pentagon not to ask again. Leading officials in Taipei are now being quite open in their disappointment and concern at the U.S. decision not to provide the F-16 C/Ds.

Efforts to spin the A/B upgrades as an even better deal for Taiwan simply are not flying on the Hill, including among leading Democrats. There are three dubious arguments being deployed by the administration and its defenders. The first is that the retrofits can be done faster than the sale of new F-16s. Not only is this wrong, it is beside the point. As Taiwan retires older fighters such as the F-5s and Mirages (in part because France is no longer willing to supply the ROCAF because of Chinese pressure), the size of Taiwan's air force will shrink. Upgrading the F-16 A/Bs will cut that fleet in half for several years as the other half is being upgraded. The upgrades are necessary ... and so are new fighters. It's not politics ... it's math.

The second claim made against Taiwan's request is that the PLA would overwhelm them anyway. Ballistic missiles would destroy the ROCAF on the ground, it is said, but is this not the same operational challenge facing the U.S. Air Force in Japan and Korea and isn't the answer the same -- missile defense, hardening and redundancy? Others point to simulations that show the whole ROCAF being shot down in two hours by the PLAAF, but these simulations mistakenly assume that the ROCAF would scramble all their fighters in the first fight like the Battle of Britain, instead of preserving assets to attrit key PLA forces and continue the fight until international support is mobilized. More importantly, the U.S. decision to continue abiding by the TRA is itself a deterrent against Chinese use of force. Friends and foes in Asia will ask a reasonable question: if we are nervous about selling weapons, how willing would we be to actually fighting if it came to that?

The third claim thrown around is that the United States is helping maintain a positive environment for cross-Straits reconciliation with a "prudent" level of arms sales. Why then, is the architect of cross-Straits reconciliation, President Ma Ying-jeou, adamant that Taiwan needs adequate defense capabilities, including F-16 C/Ds, in order to continue rapproachment with Beijing from a position of strength?

We both expressed public frustration that in its final year the Bush administration chose not to respond to Taiwan's first request for F-16 C/Ds. However, President Bush had already approved 30 billion dollars worth of arms sales to Taiwan at that point. The Obama administration's current package merely finishes the remaining sales queued up by Bush and presents a Solomon like political compromise on the new tactical air requirement identified by Taiwan. The Pacific Command and the Air Force have been dutifully silent on what recommendations they gave the administration on Taiwan's tactical air needs a year ago, but one has to wonder how much that assessment was massaged over the last year to reach the current conclusion.

After some initial stumbles vis-à-vis China, the Obama administration has gone a long way to reassure friends and allies in Asia that the United States will not accommodate a rising China at their expense. The transparently self-restrained decision on Taiwan arms sales will set that strategy back.

Last month, three members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) -- Chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Subcommittee Chairman Connie Mack (R- FL), and freshman member David Rivera (R-FL) sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing their concern over information they had received on suspicious activity involving Argentina, Venezuela, and Iran and asking the State Department to investigate whether any nuclear cooperation is at play between the three countries.

Rather than making any serious effort to look into the matter, however, State dismissed the legislators' queries within a matter of days with a perfunctory: "We have no reason to believe that Venezuela serves as an interlocutor between Iran and Argentina on nuclear issues, nor that Argentina is granting access to its nuclear technology."

Well, the members didn't have any reason to either -- until information started to coming to light that has raised disturbing questions.

Argentina-Iran nuclear ties are nothing new, dating from the 1980s. The reactor in Tehran is largely of Argentinean design and Argentina was shipping highly enriched uranium to Iran as late as 1993. That relationship, however, ended under intense U.S. pressure in the early 1990s and seemingly was severed forever as Iran's role in the terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 came to light.

Still, Tehran never lost hope about restoring nuclear ties with Argentina and has made it a priority since. In 2009, the Iranian representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency publicly reaffirmed, "We are interested in buying [nuclear fuel] from any supplier, including Argentina."

Enter Hugo Chavez.

Read on

As I posted earlier, I have been in Singapore for a series of lectures and meetings with strategic studies specialists inside and outside of government, courtesy of the wonderful people at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. This was not my first visit to Southeast Asia, but it was my first (and hopefully not last) visit to Singapore.

I usually gain more from these exchanges than I give out, and that was the case this time. For folks who like to talk strategy -- and who like to sample extraordinary cuisines while doing so -- there is no place better than Singapore. Singapore is a tiny country, essentially a city-state, that punches well above its weight in international affairs both because of its record of economic success and because it takes seriously the need to think and act strategically. And, Singaporeans love to dine.

American visitors like myself get asked lots of tough questions and, since my visit coincided with the gruesome spectacle of the debt crisis, my answers often left me (and perhaps my audiences) second-guessing American power and purpose.

Still I had some takeaways:

Geostrategic tragedies happen when leaders hesitate to act and cling to beliefs in the face of all evidence. Prior to World War II, the British were confident that Singapore was an impregnable fortress, a "Gilbratar of the East." If the Japanese were foolhardy enough to attack it, the big guns on Singapore's hills would destroy the naval armada before it could reach the shore. And so they might have, if the Japanese had attacked from the sea. Instead, the Japanese launched an attack on the northern part of the Malaya peninsula and fought a bloody advance through the jungle in order to attack Singapore from Johore to the north, not, as the British expected, from the sea to the south. This strategic disaster unfolded over two months, so there was plenty of time for the British to adjust their defensive plans. But they didn't. Of course, the British also missed an opportunity perhaps to block the Japanese attack from the outset, if only the Brits had executed their planned preemptive raids to seize more advantageous terrain. But they didn't. And slowly, inexorably, the Japanese advanced until they trapped a very sizable British force in a tiny perimeter with limited water supplies. I kept asking myself as I visited those sites: are U.S. strategists clinging to mistaken beliefs that will come back to haunt us? Have we, through hesitation and uncertainty, ceded the initiative to forces that are not as complacent as we are?

Read on