The state of NATO
A ray of light in the dark defile
The Western alliance is in trouble in Afghanistan. But France is ready to help take on the Taliban, and others still want to join NATO
ANOTHER fighting season beckons in Afghanistan, and the strain is beginning to tell. Many European countries are weary of the war, America is growing tired of reluctant allies and Afghans are becoming disenchanted. Still, NATO says it retains the initiative: the Taliban have been forced to abandon set-piece battles in favour of “asymmetric” suicide-bombs.
This is brave talk. Last year was the bloodiest yet, with more than 230 Western soldiers killed. Opium-poppy production is at a record high, financing the Taliban and corrupting the government in Kabul. The old truth of counter-insurgency still holds: armies can win every battle, yet lose the will to fight an intractable war.
Paddy Ashdown, the British politician and ex-commando who was nearly appointed as the United Nations' envoy to Kabul, makes the point by quoting “Arithmetic on the Frontier”, a poem by Rudyard Kipling describing the British empire's troubles fighting Afghan tribesmen armed with the jezail, a home-made musket:
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
In such a fight against a weaker but elusive enemy, says Kipling, “the odds are on the cheaper man”. Indeed, a recent report overseen by General James Jones, formerly NATO's supreme military commander, declares: “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.” Failure, the report says, will “put in grave jeopardy NATO's future as a credible, cohesive and relevant military alliance”.
As NATO leaders gather in Bucharest next week, Robert Gates, America's defence secretary, has given warning that NATO could become a two-tier alliance with “some allies willing to fight and die to protect people's security, and others who are not”. The cost in blood and treasure is being borne mainly by the Americans, British, Canadians and Dutch. But the Dutch (together with the Italians and Germans) have wobbled, and the Canadians say they will remain only if another ally sends 1,000 troops to join them in Kandahar. It is left to America, despite its commitments in Iraq, to put up most of the fighting power in Afghanistan, do most of the training of Afghan forces and provide the bulk of economic aid. It is now deploying some 3,000 more marines.
But out of the gloom comes some hope, in the dashing form of Nicolas Sarkozy. Despite the Bush administration's unpopularity in Europe, the French president has gone out of his way to befriend America and wants France to rejoin NATO's integrated military structure, from which de Gaulle withdrew in 1966. Even better, French forces hitherto deployed in Kabul seem ready to fight the Taliban. Mr Sarkozy is expected to announce in Bucharest the deployment of about 1,000 French soldiers alongside the Americans in eastern Afghanistan. This would release some American forces to move to Kandahar, keep the Canadians in Afghanistan and, perhaps, encourage others to do more.
A further measure of support may come from another unexpected quarter: Russia. For all the Kremlin's rage about NATO enlargement and American missile defences in Europe, President Vladimir Putin has been invited to Bucharest, where he may sign an agreement opening up air and land routes through Russia to supply NATO forces in Afghanistan.
If all this happens, NATO may not look quite so embattled. The arrival of American and French troops will, for a while at least, fill much of the shortfall in the forces requested by the local NATO commander. That said, Afghanistan is still short of soldiers (and of trainers embedded with Afghan troops). The surge in Iraq shows that numbers can make a difference.
Unequal allies
Plainly, America and Europe do not share the same commitment to Afghanistan; America considers itself to be at war. But they also have vastly different military means. Although Europe has a larger GDP than America, and more soldiers, its global military punch is puny. America spends roughly 4% of GDP on defence, while just five of the 24 European allies—Britain, France, Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria—meet NATO's minimum defence-spending target of 2% of GDP. America has designed its forces for expeditionary warfare, while most European armies are still configured to defend their own borders.
Within Europe, only Britain and France (both nuclear powers) have a tradition of wielding military force far afield. But these days both are struggling with overstretched equipment budgets. Whether because of national pride, incompatible priorities or the desire to prop up domestic industries, European defence spending is fragmented and duplicative. A study for the European Parliament in 2006 found that Europeans operate four models of tanks, compared with one in America; 16 kinds of armoured vehicles compared with three American ones; 11 types of frigates versus one in America. The NATO Response Force (NRF), a 25,000-strong package of land, sea and air contingents meant to be ready for action at five days' notice, was supposed to help transform static European armies into nimbler forces. But barely a year after the NRF was declared operational, NATO admits the Europeans are too stretched to meet its requirements.
With deployments in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa, many European countries are close to the limit of what they can sustain in terms of overseas operations. A NATO source reckons that, short of all-out war, only 10,000 more troops can be squeezed out of Europe. Helicopters fit for war zones are scarce everywhere. Any hope of a big increase in military resources in Afghanistan must await a reduction of American forces in Iraq.
That said, American officials see France's return to the fold as a “gigantic opportunity”. NATO debates have long been a miserable mixture of French stubbornness and American frustration. America regarded the European Union's attempt to develop its own security and defence arm as wasteful, if not an attempt to split NATO. At the “Praline summit” in April 2003, at the height of the crisis over the Iraq war, France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg announced plans to create a separate EU operational headquarters in Tervuren, near Brussels. Britain and other Atlanticists blocked this, seeing it as a rival to NATO's vast Supreme Headquarters Allied Power Europe (SHAPE).
Now the mood has changed. Instead of getting a reflexive French non, American ideas tend to be greeted with peut-être. NATO meetings have been transformed from highly charged confrontations into meetings that, in the words of one diplomat, “are as boring as Sunday mass”.
Still, joining NATO's integrated military structure is harder than leaving it. The previous French attempt to regain a place at the top table of military planning collapsed in 1996, partly because France bid too high for senior commands. This time there is, as yet, no horse-trading over NATO jobs. Instead Mr Sarkozy seeks a political trade-off: American support for expanding the EU's security role.
America, too, is undergoing what senior NATO officials call a “Copernican revolution”. It now appears convinced by Mr Sarkozy's assurance that a stronger EU defence policy would complement rather than supplant NATO. In two striking speeches in Paris and London earlier this year, Victoria Nuland, the American ambassador to NATO, argued that far from being a threat, the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) was an urgent necessity. “Europe needs, the United States needs, NATO needs, the democratic world needs—a stronger, more capable European capacity,” she said. “An ESDP with only soft power is not enough.” If Europeans spent more on their own defence, she added, their troops would be more useful when deployed with Americans.
The Franco-American courtship leaves Britain looking oddly out of place, not least because it is hobbled by the effort to ratify the EU's Lisbon treaty. Britain helped launch ESDP in 1998, but these days it is seen by the Eurocrats as the biggest obstacle to an autonomous EU defence policy. Partly at America's behest, Britain has denied the EU all but a small staff for “strategic” planning, and has squeezed the budget of the European Defence Agency, whose job is to rationalise European defence procurement. Now Britain is being encouraged by America to reverse course.
France would like to relaunch Europe's defence ambitions during its six-month presidency of the EU, which starts in July. This, in turn, could allow it to rejoin NATO's integrated military structure in time for NATO's 60th anniversary summit in 2009. Mr Sarkozy told Britain's Parliament this week that he wanted a “brotherhood” and hoped to abandon “theological” debates over defence. But, perhaps mindful of Britain's sensitivity over further integration, he avoided going into detail—and that is where the problems will arise. Time is running out. France has yet to present firm ideas, and its own defence review is not yet complete.
The lessons of Afghanistan
Realising the limits of America's military power, Pentagon officials nowadays say that the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting one without them. In Afghanistan, moreover, the problem is not just the strength of the Taliban but also the weakness of the Afghan state.
The 82nd Airborne division, which the Bush administration once said should not be wasted on escorting schoolchildren, is now building schools, refurbishing mosques and doing other “armed social work”. Commanders say what they need most urgently is more non-military muscle: agricultural experts, vets, even anthropologists. Mr Gates must be the only defence minister who lobbies for money for diplomats and aid workers.
Armies, aid donors and international agencies in Afghanistan often work at cross-purposes—for instance, building schools without enough teachers. One attempt to give direction to this dysfunctional reconstruction effort was the expected appointment of Lord Ashdown as the UN representative in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai, though, seemed to regard the former international supremo in Bosnia as the embodiment of a British viceroy, and blocked his nomination. Kai Eide, a respected but low-key Norwegian diplomat, has now been appointed.
Addressing a seminar at Policy Exchange, a London think-tank, Mr Ashdown summed up the problem thus: “We will not beat the Taliban. Those who will beat the Taliban are the Afghan people. If we do not win their support in the process we cannot win.”
The question of how best to meld military with civilian tools—“the comprehensive approach”, as many call it—occupies the minds of strategists on both sides of the Atlantic. America and Britain are planning to build a “reserve” of civilian experts who can be sent out to help the soldiers.
In this light, the EU starts to look more attractive to America. The union already combines economic aid with anti-corruption training, police and gendarmerie-style missions, election monitoring and other tools useful for state-building. The EU is currently running or planning 12 ESDP operations around the world, most of them small police and rule-of-law missions. Its military ambitions, though, are growing. The EU runs the peacekeeping force in Bosnia and, after much trouble finding troops and equipment, is sending 3,700 soldiers to Chad to police the border with Darfur.
It has also set up a rotation of battlegroups—quick-reaction forces of about 1,500 men. Some contingents, such as the Nordic battlegroup, are a model of integration. They may be small, but many experts think the battlegroups are a more useful tool for crisis management than NATO's hard-punching response force.
Europe's awkward shape
America wants to tap into these resources, and seems ready to reconsider the taboo against a separate European operational headquarters. Ms Nuland has suggested creating a new headquarters to plan civil-military missions “as a NATO-EU family”. But she is careful to recognise that Europe “needs a place where it can act independently”. British officials speak of attaching such a body to SHAPE, giving it a NATO label. Some Americans propose trimming NATO's top-heavy structure and converting one of its commands—perhaps the headquarters at Brunssum in the Netherlands that oversees Afghanistan. EU officials retort that, if the aim is to harness non-military skills, it would be best to put the HQ in Brussels, next to EU institutions. Hervé Morin, the French defence minister, says Europe must have military clout, and not be “the civilian branch of NATO.”
NATO and the EU are, in many ways, two limbs of the same body. The clubs have 21 members in common, and are both headquartered in Brussels. The EU developed under NATO's protection and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the integration of former communist states has been a joint venture: membership of NATO has usually preceded joining the EU.
But like ill-fitting gears, the two bodies jar against each other. Fixing the relationship with America only highlights other blockages, such as the dispute over the divided island of Cyprus and Turkey's place in Europe. The Cypriot government tries to exclude Turkey from European defence bodies, while Turkey forbids NATO from meeting the EU if Cyprus is represented—as the EU usually insists.
The result is a dangerous absurdity. NATO and the EU speak only about Bosnia. NATO does not formally offer protection to the EU's police mission in Afghanistan, though many countries contribute to both. In Kosovo, too, there is no agreement between NATO peacekeepers and the incoming EU rule-of-law mission that is supposed to be taking over many of the UN's functions. The two sides co-operate informally, but key documents such as intelligence assessments can only be exchanged “under the table”. The election of a new president in Cyprus and the promise of renewed peace talks may lubricate contact between the bureaucracies. But for as long as Turkey's membership of the EU is in doubt, there will be more breakdowns.
The borders of Europe are causing difficulty elsewhere. Albania and Croatia seem certain to be invited to join NATO at Bucharest, but Greece is holding up Macedonia's membership because of a dispute over the country's name. America wants to go further and extend NATO's “membership action plan” (a promise of future membership) to Ukraine and Georgia. America and ex-communist countries see this as a means of stabilising emerging democracies. But Germany is leading the resistance, arguing that Ukrainian opinion is dangerously divided about NATO. Georgia's democratic credentials, moreover, have been questionable of late, while territorial disputes over Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain unresolved.
The Kremlin regards NATO's expansion as an affront, particularly when it encroaches on chunks of the former Soviet Union. Germany and several other European countries are wary of riling Russia at a time when the presidency is being transferred from Mr Putin to Dmitry Medvedev (although the new man seems no less suspicious of NATO). The alliance says that outsiders have “no veto” on its decisions. That said, few members relish the idea of extending NATO's promise of mutual defence to countries that could drag them into direct confrontation with Russia.
Bad neighbours
Mr Putin will be an awkward guest at NATO's party. He has done much to stoke fears of a new cold war, especially since a speech at Munich last year accused America of having “overstepped its national borders in every way”. He has suppressed democracy at home and acted more aggressively abroad. Long-range bombers once again lurk close to NATOcountries, and the rust is being taken off other bits of Russia's military machine.
Russia has suspended the treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe. And it has threatened to target nuclear missiles at Poland and the Czech Republic if they agree to host America's missile defences. Russia has used oil and gas as a political weapon, periodically cutting off fuel supplies to neighbours. Increasingly it plays the spoiler on several issues of European interest, from the independence of Kosovo to sanctions against Iran.
Mr Putin has sent an abrasive nationalist, Dmitry Rogozin, as his ambassador to NATO. Mr Rogozin's office, in a faraway corner of the NATO compound, is decorated with a Soviet-era poster of Stalin leading the tanks of the victorious Red Army. He says Russia wants good relations, but NATO has abused its friendship. “We made peace with our neighbour,” he explains. “Then he says, ‘Is it all right if I use your garage?’ Then he says, ‘Is it a problem if my friend lives in your place?’ Then he says, ‘Do you mind if I sleep with your wife?’ When we protest, we are told we have no right of veto.”
Western diplomats argue that Russia's bullying tactics are backfiring, forcing Europeans into adopting a more assertive stand. Russia may still be a long way from posing a conventional military threat to NATO, although it does scare its immediate neighbours, such as the Baltic states. Even once-neutral Finland and Sweden are talking of joining NATO.
There will be much talk in Bucharest of NATO's need to reinvent itself by drawing up a new “strategic concept”. But despite NATO's troubles in Afghanistan, and even the possibility of failure, Russia's snarling may yet provide the clearest reason for the allies to stick together.
UBS
Marcel waves goodbye
The boss departs after more big subprime-related writedowns at UBS
NOT long ago, when an illustrious bank was in trouble, it could announce, with some fanfare, the support of sovereign-wealth investors from the Gulf states or the Far East. In December, when UBS secured SFr13 billion ($11.5 billion) in such funds from Singapore and the Middle East, some of its long-standing investors grumbled that they, too, should have been given the opportunity to help recapitalise the bank on the same generous terms.
Be careful what you wish for. On Tuesday April 1st UBS announced – and it was no prank – that it was writing down a further $19 billion on its investments in American subprime and other mortgages, as part of an unexpected SFr12 billion projected loss in the first quarter. The Swiss bank also said it would call on its shareholders to supply SFr15 billion in additional funds to shore up its depleted reserves of capital. That means its sovereign-wealth backers face severe dilution, in addition to the potential losses that they have already suffered on their holdings since December. In penance, Marcel Ospel, architect of the merger that created UBS in 1998, said he would step down as chairman, to be replaced by Peter Kurer, the bank’s general counsel.
Even for long-term investors such as sovereign-wealth funds, experiences such as that suffered at UBS are painful. But they are not unique; by one estimate, sovereign-wealth funds as a group have lost about a third so far from their investments in Western banks and private-equity firms during the current credit crisis. Do not expect them to have cheque books at the ready the next time an ailing Western bank has a whip round.
That is why banks are now tapping ordinary shareholders instead. On Tuesday Lehman Brothers raised $4 billion from selling additional shares to strengthen its capital and convince the financial markets it was not headed in the same sorry direction as Bear Stearns. By some estimates banks are preparing to issue $100 billion in new debt and equity this year.
So far, shareholders have been surprisingly receptive to the cash calls. Lehman’s shares went up by 11% in New York after the announcement and UBS’s shares also climbed sharply higher. Both are benefiting from a period of relative calm in the financial markets—which is probably why they decided to act at this time.
But if they set a precedent, a rush to raise capital may well be painful for both banks and shareholders. Meredith Whitney, an analyst at Oppenheimer, expects a “barn rush” of firms trying to raise capital, and believes it will get more expensive as the year progresses. Nor is there much hope that UBS’s poor first-quarter performance was a one-off. On Tuesday Deutsche Bank, which had sailed through the crisis fairly smoothly last year, announced a €2.5 billion ($3.9 billion) writedown on leveraged loans, commercial property and mortgage-backed securities. March, the month in which Bear Stearns almost collapsed, was considered particularly tough for the industry as a whole.
But is the worst over now? That was one implication from the fact that UBS was able to sell some—though it won't say how much—of its poor quality mortgage positions between January and March. On the other hand, it still has $31 billion of those problem securities on its books, so it is by no means free yet.
It was also considered positive that four leading investment banks, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas and Goldman Sachs, are fully underwriting its share issue. They demanded an “aggressive” valuation as part of their due diligence of UBS, according to Daniel Zuberbuehler, director of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission. That suggests they are comfortable with UBS’s numbers, which should be somewhat reassuring to investors. Unless the markets continue to slide again, that is.
Turkey
A threat of turmoil in Turkey
Considering a ban on the ruling party
TURKEY edged towards prolonged political and economic turmoil on Monday March 31st after the country's most senior court unanimously agreed to consider a case calling for the banning of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party and for the prime minister to be barred from office.
The decision by the Constitutional Court could lead to a dangerous escalation in tensions between the AK party, with its roots in Islam, and its secular detractors in the army and the judiciary, who accuse the party of leading the country towards sharia rule.
In a 162-page indictment AK is accused of becoming “a centre for anti-secular activities” and the prosecutor calls for 71 of the party’s officials, including the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to be banned from politics for five years. The court, which is dominated by secular judges, voted without exception to consider the case. A majority of the judges also agreed to hear similar charges against the president, Abdullah Gul.
Mr Gul, who began politics in an overtly Islamist party, said the decision came as no surprise and promised to “carry on with business as usual.” The first signs of the case came at the start of the year after AK set out to ease a strict ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in universities. That provoked uproar among secular university rectors, who called it an assault on Ataturk's republic. It was cited as evidence in the prosecutor’s indictment along with various comments made by Mr Erdogan when he criticised restrictions on religious garb.
Turkey has shut at least four pro-Islamic parties since 1970. AK was formed by a group of moderate Islamists led by Mr Erdogan who came to power five years ago pledging to lead Turkey into the European Union. During its first term AK enacted a raft of radical reforms that persuaded EU leaders to open long-delayed membership talks. These, along with a strong economic record, helped AK to return to office last year with an increased share of the vote.
Western observers say the case against AK is unabashedly political and could further dampen Turkey's hopes of joining the EU. “In a normal European democracy, political issues are debated in parliament and decided in the ballot box, not in the courtroom,” said the EU's enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn.
The case may be an act of desperation by an old guard whose power is waning as EU-inspired changes take hold. Most obvious among them is the army, which has long tried to dictate policy from behind the scenes. The generals suffered a humiliating defeat last year when a campaign to prevent Mr Gul from becoming president backfired. Fearing that Mr Gul would rubber stamp AK-inspired laws, they went as far as to threaten a coup. Judges weighed in on the army's side and Mr Gul was forced to withdraw after the Constitutional Court upheld opposition claims that parliament lacked a quorum during a first round of balloting.
But AK's big electoral win allowed Mr Gul to revive his presidential ambitions and to claim the post in a fresh vote. Meddling by the army probably helped to bolster AK's ratings. A defiant Mr Erdogan has predicted that efforts to ban his party will have the same effect now. In any case, most outlawed parties resurrect themselves under a new name. So why bother trying to ban AK? Some pundits speculate that, rather than closing the party, the court will bar Mr Erdogan and a few of his lieutenants from politics. Without its charismatic leader the party would disintegrate, allowing the secular opposition to seize power again.
But things may not be that simple. Mr Erdogan is threatening to tweak the constitution to make it harder to ban political parties. He would then seek a referendum on the changes. Opposition leaders give warning that such “provocations” would lead to more tensions. AK officials counter that the greater risk is if their disgruntled supporters disregard Mr Erdogan's appeals for calm and take to the streets. Violence might ensue. Either way, Turkey's future is looking decidedly more unsure.
| Under U.S. Treasury Plan, Fed Reserve Would Lose A Key Power |
By: Intellpuke Submit to Digg |
| Conventional wisdom has it that the Federal Reserve is a big winner in the Treasury Department's plan to overhaul how the financial system is regulated. Yet the Fed would give up its power to regulate the day-to-day affairs of banks, responsibilities that many in the institution view as essential to its role as guardian of the economy - even as the central bank gains new powers to insert itself into the affairs of any business creating risk for the financial system as a whole. In the Treasury Department's plan, the Fed would lose the responsibility for day-to-day monitoring of banks' financial stability. It would gain a more loosely defined ability to monitor and correct risks to the entire financial system, whether they come from banks, investment firms or hedge funds. To many people with ties to the central bank, that is a lousy trade. "The Fed should not be enamored of this proposal at all," said Ernest T. Patrikis, a former senior official at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who heads the banking regulation practice at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. "It takes away a lot of authority, power and involvement." It would be hard to understand threats to the financial system, said Patrikis, without having a staff that is constantly scrutinizing the inner workings of banks. Thousands of employees at Federal Reserve regional banks spend their days examining the nuts and bolts of the financial system. They collect and analyze information on bank holding companies' management structure, business lines, risk controls and vulnerabilities - responsibilities that would be shifted to the new regulator. In his 2007 speech, Bernanke laid out several examples of times when such deep, on-the-ground knowledge has helped the Fed deal with financial crises. For example, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Fed examiners went to the backup sites of large banks affected and immediately reported back to top Fed officials on the damage done to the financial system and how to fix it. After the stock market crash in 1987, the Fed used its relationships with the banks it regulates to encourage the extension of credit to investment firms, helping avert a continued rout and damage to the larger economy. Bernanke also argued that understanding banks helps the Fed better decide how to set interest rates to try to balance strong growth with low inflation. That is because Fed policy operates on the credit system. When it cuts rates, banks make that cheaper money available to ordinary Americans to stimulate the economy. From the Treasury Department's point of view, an overhaul is needed because the system of banking regulation has too much redundancy. With many agencies, firms being regulated face bureaucratic headaches and regulators may feel less need to be accountable. The current patchwork has evolved since the Civil War, offering different rules and different regulators to nationally chartered banks, state-chartered banks, thrifts and credit unions. All these institutions started with different purposes and roles in the financial system but increasingly do similar work. That mix of institutions can create problems because information is compartmentalized in different bureaucracies. It may have contributed to the current financial crisis. Because each agency was focusing on applying a narrowly tailored set of rules, rather than examining the big picture, conflicts of interest among mortgage brokers, banks and the investment firms that package mortgage loans got little attention from regulators. "The problem wasn't necessarily too much regulation or too little," said Ross Levine, a Brown University professor who studies the banking system. "The problem was regulators did not adapt to financial innovation and make sure that information was transparent. No regulator looked broadly at the conflicts of interests being created." In this fragmented system, financial companies can engage in "regulatory arbitrage," expending vast amounts of effort deciding what kind of charter to operate their businesses under, in effect choosing what sort of rules apply to them. There are some advantages to the current system, too. With a mix of regulators, mistakes by one agency can be partly made up for by others. And there is a long history of powerful financial regulators behaving improperly, either through overt corruption or by becoming too beholden to the industry they oversee. Even if Congress approves some version of the Treasury plan, it will be an enormous bureaucratic task to implement it. "It's easy enough to say that the current system doesn't make any sense, that it's a crazy quilt of regulators," said David O. Beim, a finance professor at Columbia Business School. "But it's very difficult to put institutions together. People howl and protest; there is turf to be protected. It is painfully difficult to merge institutions that don't want to merge." Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., is trying to turn the complicated muddle that is the U.S. banking regulatory system into something more coherent. To that end, he would replace a sprawling set of regulators aiming to ensure the soundness of the nation's financial institutions - including the bank-supervision arm of the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration - with a single Prudential Financial Regulatory Agency. The Fed has indicated neither explicit support nor opposition to the Treasury plan, but leaders of the central bank have in the recent past vigorously opposed stripping their institution of its role supervising bank holding companies. "The Fed's ability to deal with diverse and hard-to-predict threats to financial stability depends critically on the information, expertise and powers that it holds by virtue of being both a bank supervisor and a central bank," Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a January 2007 speech |
McCain's Democratic Realism
A departure from the Bush doctrine?
by Joseph Loconte
JOHN MCCAIN'S FIRST MAJOR foreign policy speech as the presumed Republican nominee for president, delivered last week in Los Angeles, was widely viewed as an effort to distance himself from President George W. Bush. The Washington Post said his agenda "contrasts sharply" with the "go-it-alone approach" of the Bush administration. London's Telegraph discerned a "more practical, less ideological approach" to the war on terror. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh accused McCain of rejecting America's superpower status and "pandering to the hate-America crowd." New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed that unlike Bush, McCain wants to "protect the fabric of the international system."
The flabbiness of these critiques, though, becomes apparent when McCain's speech is read carefully and alongside his other foreign policy statements. For starters, McCain shows little interest in the "fabric" of an alleged "international system"--a concept as coherent as tapioca pudding--and even less interest in protecting it.
In fact, McCain seems intent on either shaking up existing international organizations--making sure the G-8 remains a club of market democracies by keeping Russia out, for example--or creating new ones. He calls for the formation of a "new global compact" of democratic nations, a "coalition for peace and freedom." McCain envisions a "League of Democracies" which can "harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interest." In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, he explained that U.S. soldiers are serving in Afghanistan with British, Canadian, Dutch, German, Italian, Lithuanian,
McCain's League of Democracies, to be convened and led by the United States, would function under a new political rubric. In his Foreign Affairs article, he writes that the organization could offer "united democratic action" to confront threats and crises whenever the United Nations failed to do so--failures, of course, as predictable and plentiful as cicadas in summertime. In his speech to the World Affairs Council, McCain notably made no reference to the United Nations or the U.N. Security Council. So much for the delicate fabric of the global community.
In his attention to America's allies, McCain insists he is a realist--the United States simply cannot overcome global challenges on its own. It requires the help of the world's democratic states, including the European Union (most of whose members belong to NATO), India, Japan, South Korea and others. Moreover, he argues, political and military power is no longer concentrated in the United States as it was during the Cold War. "We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to," he said. "We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them." Exhibit A for the McCain doctrine might be Afghanistan. Five years after the United States toppled the Taliban and routed al Qaeda, they remain a dangerous source of instability in the country. American and British forces, wearied and overstretched, are doing most of the fighting because other NATO members have declined to step up. Yes, alliances matter.
Nevertheless, many conservatives balk at McCain's conciliatory tone. His speech was "just pandering to the people who think we're the problem in the world," Limbaugh complained. "The United States is the solution to the problems of the world." The notion, though, that America could happily manage without friends or alliances is not just hubris; it is the well-worn path to decline--political, economic, and moral. "The tyrant is a child of Pride who drinks from his great sickening cup recklessness and vanity," wrote Sophocles, "until from his high crest headlong he plummets to the dust of hope."
Is McCain's democracy agenda a stark departure from the Bush doctrine? In the fall of 2003, Bush announced a new "forward strategy of freedom" for the Middle East: an end to America's Cold War compromise with illiberal Arab regimes for the sake of stability. McCain equally rejects the "realist" bargain; it only helped to produce "a perfect storm of intolerance and hatred." His alternative: "We must help expand the power and reach of freedom" in the Middle East, using every diplomatic tool available. "It is the democracies of the world," he argues, "that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace." In a judgment that is anathema to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, McCain thus binds the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq to America's political destiny. "Whether they eventually become stable democracies themselves, or are allowed to sink back into chaos and extremism, will determine not only the fate of
In this, McCain subscribes to a view of America's national security interests in sync not only with the Bush administration, but also with any honest reading of the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission Report. America faces a global threat from religious extremists determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction to use against civilian populations. They seek the help of rogue nations that share what McCain calls "the same animating hatred for the West." Neither diplomacy nor changes in policy can temper these hatreds. "This is the central threat of our time," he said, "and we must understand the implications of our decisions on all manner of regional and global challenges could have for our success in defeating it."
In other words, the "transcendent challenge" of radical jihadism, as McCain puts it repeatedly, is the lens through which the next U.S. president must view American foreign policy. Any contender for the office who rejects this doctrine, he reasons, "does not deserve to sit in the White House."
It is this view of the world that would send McCain's Euro-friendly diplomacy into a buzz-saw of opposition, just as it has for the Bush administration. True, the horrific and nearly unforgivable blunders in Iraq helped fray relations between the United States and her democratic allies and incite anti-Americanism around the world. Yet there are virtually no European leaders who see the threat of Islamist terrorism in the same existential terms as McCain--a fact that no amount of gentle diplomacy could conceal. Moreover, his League of Democracies would face the same obstacle as Woodrow Wilson's discredited League of Nations: Even America's closest allies usually put their short-term national interests ahead of universal democratic ideals.
On the subject of war, McCain's voice is indeed distinct. If many conservatives cling to naïve beliefs about the role of military power in securing peace, he does not appear to share their faith. His speech at the World Affairs Council offered one of the most sober, poignant, and morally mature perspectives on war by any politician in a generation. It was reminiscent of Winston Churchill, a statesman he clearly admires. "I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description," he said. "When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue." Even so, McCain abhors the appeasing reflex of many political and religious liberals: As detestable as war is, the consequences of inaction may be far worse. Americans must sometimes pay the wages of war, he said, "to avoid paying even higher ones later."
How might the McCain doctrine play itself out on the world stage? Democratic ideals always collide with undemocratic realities abroad and imperfect realities closer to home. Like Churchill, McCain's weaknesses--his reputed stubbornness, self-righteousness, arrogance--seem nearly as large as his strengths. "When Winston's right, he's right," Lord Birkenhead once said of him. "When he's wrong, well, my God."
Still, McCain's family history and life experiences, so unlike those of Clinton or Obama, will likely count for something. He remembers the day when a Navy officer arrived at his house, shouting to his father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor--and of his father quickly packing to return to the submarine base where he was stationed. "Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly," he said. "Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war." Unlike his Democratic rivals, McCain projects a balance of idealism and realism, of tenacity and prudence--forged in part from his own experience in Vietnam--which seems especially relevant for a nation at war. "For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge," wrote Augustine, "and another to tread the road that leads to it."
Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy and a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. He is the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm.
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