Saturday, March 8, 2014

The Inevitability of Hillary

The 2016 US presidential campaign has begun -- we just don't realize it yet.  The candidacy announcements, campaign stops, and debates are still a ways in the future, but the campaign is nonetheless in a crucial phase as we speak because candidates are involved in the relatively invisible process of deciding whether or not they stand a reasonable chance of winning the highest office in the land.  For Democratic contenders, this decision is going to be a particularly difficult one to make due to the looming presence of Hillary Clinton.  The former first lady, senator, and secretary of state is not an announced candidate.  Not unlike many other former presidential candidates, Mrs. Clinton has sought to discourage speculation as to any possible candidacy and dampen expectations.  Nonetheless, she is widely expected to seek the Democratic nomination.  Given her early poll numbers, name recognition, and distinguished resume, she has all the markings of a front-runner. This puts other potential Democratic candidates in a difficult position.  Is it worth challenging such a strong candidate?  Is it counterproductive to the party to expose internal divisions when a juggernaut like Hillary could just romp to an easy election win?

Would-be candidates face a similar quandary whenever an incumbent president is seeking reelection.  It is widely considered to be bad form to primary an incumbent and, judging purely from past electoral results, there is good reason for partisans to frown on such challenges.  After all, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush all proceeded to lose in general elections after they'd been forced to fight for the nominations of their party against determined opposition.  However, in my view, these candidates didn't really lose because they were challenged -- they were challenged (and ended up losing in the general election) due to their perceived vulnerabilities.  That's really what the primary season does: it exposes weaknesses as well as strengths.  While we're talking about history, I'd like to mention Al Gore and his candidacy in 2000.  He was also an anointed candidate; he had the name recognition and the resume, and his position of vice president offered him the ideal launching pad for the presidency.  He was challenged, weakly, for the Democratic nomination by Bill Bradley as other prominent Democrats refrained from throwing their hats in the ring.  Gore made short work of his challenger but proceeded to lose the general election (even if the end result is still disputed by many, there is no question that the election was extremely close).  Would the Democratic Party really have been hurt if other candidates had emerged to challenge for the nomination?  Even if the end result for the nomination did not change, might Gore have emerged stronger if he'd had to fight harder?  I certainly think it's possible.  Denying Mrs. Clinton her "baptism by fire" in the primaries may not prepare her very well for the rigors of the general election.  

When it comes to Hillary Clinton's possible nomination, I think the Democratic Party should also be wary of an ideology I like to call "Yourturnism."  Hillary is the favorite of Yourturnists for a few reasons.  First, she's the most prominent Democrat likely to run in 2016 -- thus, it's seemingly "her turn" to win.  She's next in the batting order.  Secondly, Secretary of State Clinton was the losing Democrat in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries.  Given that there is a degree of disappointment with President Obama's performance as president in some quarters, some think Clinton should have won that nomination back in 2008 and think it's her turn now to run again and fix an error of history by winning.  Thirdly, Hillary Clinton would be the first female American president were she to win the election, a momentous event in the history of the United States, and an impressive follow-up to the election of the first African American president.  The trouble with Yourturnism is that it ignores the fickleness of politics.  The zeitgeist candidate is not the candidate who looks the best on paper -- it's the candidate who will connect with the public and gets the result at that moment in time.  Barack Obama's willingness to challenge the more established Hillary Clinton in 2008 set off a chain of events that led to Obama winning two presidential elections as a Democrat.  Assuming that Senator Clinton would have achieved the same end result is an unreasonable leap of faith.  Martha Coakley, though a prominent Democratic politician in a Democratic state, still could not convince the voters to give her her turn as Massachusetts senator rather than elect the unlikely Republican Scott Brown.  Mitt Romney's second chance at the presidency was, ultimately, no more successful than his first.  Hillary Clinton's prominence and resume won't win her an election on their own.  Perhaps even more insidiously, a successful unchallenged Clinton nomination could lead to more Yourturnist candidates in the future.  Imagine a string of uninspired candidates, convinced that it is their time to be handed the presidency because of their position in their party, their resumes, or their demographic, dominating spiritless nomination contests and proceeding to sink like a bag of rocks in the general election.  That doesn't sound so bad...for Republicans!  Ultimately, I think Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic party, and the electorate as a whole would be best-served by a true primary season with multiple top-tier contenders, especially considering we're almost certain to have an interesting contest on the Republican side of things.                       

Monday, March 3, 2014

Preventing Putin

There is an "Amerocentric" view of foreign policy that inhabits American political thinking and comes in two different strains.  The liberal strain looks on the problems of the world and connects them to harmful acts past and present committed by America; for instance, Iran's government is repressive today because the United States government played a role in overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.  This attitude can be summarized simply as, "Other countries do bad things because America has done and continues to do bad things."  The conservative strain looks on the problems of the world and connects them to American inaction and hesitancy; for instance, Kim Jong-un is a threat to the world because the US has not been forceful enough with North Korea.  This attitude can be summarized simply as, "Other countries do bad things because America hasn't acted with sufficient strength to make them behave."  What connects the two strains is the position of the United States: both viewpoints assume that anything that happens anywhere in the world has something to do with America.  I don't think that's REALLY true -- other countries are independent actors who have their own unique objectives and fears.  While they are certainly affected by America given the political and military strength of the United States and the connected nature of the global economy, American decision making is also affected by the actions and attitudes of other countries.  Still, there is a seductive quality about Amerocentrism; it suggests that the world could be different and could be better than it is today if only the United States had acted differently.  To a limited extent, I think that really is true.  With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to consider if the United States through its foreign policy really could have prevented the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What got me thinking along these lines was an article I read which quoted Senator Corker as essentially blaming President Obama for the Crimean crisis because Obama had backed down from attacking Syria after evidence emerged of Bashar al-Assad's forces having used chemical weapons against Syrian rebels.  Russian president Vladimir Putin of course ended up brokering a deal in which Syria agreed to turn over its chemical weapons for destruction to prevent the US from directly entering the war.  Seemingly, this worked out well for everyone apart from the Syrians rebels: the United States achieved its goal of preventing chemical weapons from being used in the Syrian conflict while avoiding having to commit forces to yet another conflict in the Middle East, Syria avoided a direct US military intervention, and Russia played the unusual role of peacemaker and scored diplomatic points.  According to Corker, however, this willingness to shy away from military force even after verbal threats had been made to dissuade Assad from using chemical weapons made Obama seem weak in Putin's eyes, emboldening Putin to attack Ukraine with no fears of an effective response.  Of course, all this begs the question as to whether or not Putin would have invaded Ukraine had the US been more forceful in Syria.  Personally, I don't think it would have made a difference.  Intervening in a small country like Syria is far less risky than fighting any type of war against a major power.  Any leader would have been extremely reluctant to go to war with Russia over Ukraine simply because Russia has a large and powerful military, not to mention nuclear weapons.  Putin is well aware of this, and his calculations probably would not have changed even if the US had attacked Syria.  Additionally, Putin has now wasted all of the diplomatic capital he earned by brokering the Syrian deal -- he and Russia will simply be viewed as expansionists for decades to come, particularly by Russia's direct neighbors.  I doubt the United States expected Russia to be so willing to injure its position on the world stage so quickly after a triumph; indeed, I suspect the Obama administration felt that a Russian diplomatic "win" would if anything encourage Russia towards a more active but peaceable diplomatic role in the world.  While that view proved not be correct, I think it COULD have been had Russia had different leadership...it was not inherently unreasonable.  Another point I would add is that President Obama WAS willing to intervene, albeit a little gingerly, in Libya, so Russia could hardly have assumed there was a 0% chance of an American military response because Obama was so adamantly opposed to entering new conflicts.  Syria or no Syria, Putin knew the likelihood of American military involvement was low because of Russian military strength.

President Obama could also have been accused of emboldening Moscow by backing away from the proposed missile defense shield President Bush had agreed to help build in Poland and the Czech Republic.  Ostensibly, the whole thing was about protecting Europe from Iranian missiles, but it doesn't take a hardened realist to see that it could also be used to protect Europe against Russian missiles if needed as well.  Obama backed away from the deal in no small part due to continued Russian objections.  Seemingly, the US gambled that a more conciliatory attitude towards Russia would build trust and help relations.  It's hard to argue that now.  Although it would be naive to not recognize that defensive weapons can also be useful in an offensive war, the US never had any compelling reason to make it any easier for Russia to strike Europe militarily.  Given that it is now clear that Russia is on an expansionistic course, I consider this to be one of President Obama's largest foreign policy blunders.  However, for now Russia has just attacked Ukraine, and it has done so by pouring in troops rather than missiles.  Missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic would not have protected Ukraine per se, though had Obama not wavered I think Russia might have been more reluctant to invade.

So, if we decide not to blame Obama for this mess, perhaps we can blame President Bush.  After all, he was president when Russia fought a war with Georgia; there was no US military intervention in that conflict, either.  Undoubtedly, Russia's successful war with Georgia enhanced its military morale and played a role in Russia's current willingness to commit its forces in Ukraine.  Could, then, the Ukraine crisis have been prevented by a forceful response to the attack on Georgia?  Here we have a situation where there is no good scenario.  The world is reluctant to engage Russia militarily now because Russia is a great (and a nuclear) power.  The world was equally reluctant to engage Russia in 2008 because Russia was a great (and a nuclear) power then too.  Fighting World War III in 2008 would, if successful, have indeed prevented Russia from invading another country in 2014 in all probability, but at tremendous cost.  Short of war, could Russia have been so punished that it would not invade Ukraine?  That's a more interesting question and I don't know the answer to it.  Perhaps President Bush and the rest of the world did let Putin get off too lightly.  The Georgian situation was very different, though, in that the Georgian military did make a move to recapture South Ossetia, a separatist region backed by Russia.  It's impossible to find a single virtuous actor in the whole conflict.  The Ossetians and Abkhaz have treated Georgians abominably in the breakway areas, the Georgians have failed to respect the Abkhaz and the Ossetians' rights to self-determination, and the Russians have played the whole situation to their own advantage time and time again.  From what I've read, I think there is something to the notion that Russia goaded Georgia into an attack through repeated provocations and pretty much planned the whole thing exactly as it unfolded.  Be that as it may, Russia had some justification for going to war -- Georgia may have been manipulated, but it still acted foolishly and aggressively.  Under the circumstances, it's not surprising Russia was not more isolated as a result of its military action in Georgia.     

There's one other reason to tweak Bush: the Iraq war.  What does that have to do with Russia or Ukraine?  Perhaps more than one would expect.  What really stands out to me as being unusual is the complete lack of casus belli in the Ukraine conflict.  In retrospect, we can see the war in Iraq was also waged without a real casus belli -- the promised weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration warned the world about never materialized in Iraq.  Thus, there doesn't seem to have been any immediate reason to strike at Iraq when we did.  Admittedly, the concept of casus belli exists in our minds -- Saddam Hussein's past invasions and massacres were perhaps in and of themselves reasons for deposing him, and it makes no sense to have a "statute of limitations" for mass murder -- but the United States and its allies did not claim to be attacking Iraq because of Hussein's past misdeeds.  A clear and present danger was claimed...falsely.  For domestic consumption, Russia is currently claiming that it needs to "defend" Russians (really Russian-speaking Ukrainians) in Crimea and perhaps in eastern Ukraine as well.  The problem is there are no dead Russians in the streets of Sevastopol, no Russians being rounded up into camps, and in general no signs of persecution or abuse of Russians.  Crimea is already autonomous, and Russian speakers are in fact the majority in Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine rather than a persecuted minority.  What needs to be defended then?  Russia has pointed to legislative efforts to make Ukrainian the only official language of the country.  The trouble is this effort failed -- nutty legislation gets proposed and then rejected all over the world all the time.  Russia has also claimed that fascists have taken over Ukraine and evidently want to hurt the inherently non-Fascistic Russian residents of Ukraine.  This plays well with how Russians view Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who opposed the Soviets and showed a willingness to work with the Nazis against their common enemy for a time.  Bandera, though, was really just a nationalist -- he was as uninterested in being ruled by the Nazis as he was in being ruled by the Soviets, and he ended up a prisoner in Germany.  To me, Bandera is reminiscent of Dabrowski and the other Poles who fought for Napoleon in the hopes that it would lead to an independent Poland as well as Aung San who was willing to collaborate with the Japanese to throw the British out of Burma (like Bandera, Aung San's nationalism made him ultimately turn against his former sponsors).  In all these cases, nationalists were willing to collaborate with evil to further their nationalistic aims.  That's certainly not praiseworthy, but the notion of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" remains a cornerstone of modern foreign relations so it's hardly surprising behavior.  In truth, the new government in Ukraine is diverse and I can't see how it could be called fascist in any serious sense.  There is much concern over the Ukrainian nationalist party Svoboda having fascist leanings, but it doesn't control the government.  I can remember well how much alarm the Russian "ultra-nationalist" Vladimir Zhirinovsky used to inspire in the United States.  Despite playing a prominent role in Russian politics for many years, neither he nor his party have ever taken over the country.  There's no reason to assume Svoboda will ever be able to take control over Ukraine -- at any rate, they certainly aren't running the country now.  Russia has no reasonable pretext for acting as it has in Ukraine.  In a sense, the US did establish a precedence for this in Iraq, and those countries that did oppose the Iraq invasion did so rather ineffectively, making it seem that major powers can get away with invading smaller countries for any reason they want.  Putin no doubt expects the world's response to his invasion to be equally as weak and ineffective. 

In conclusion, I doubt that the United States could have prevented Russia from invading Ukraine by doing any ONE thing.  However, I think the invasion might not have happened had the US not invaded Iraq but had punished Russia more severely for its actions in Georgia, had stayed the course with regards to missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, and had ignored Russian overtures in Syria (I would suggest that perhaps the US could have brokered its own deal with Syria without Russian involvement as an alternative to going to war).  It's this chain of events -- the Iraq War making it seem that great powers can get away with anything combined with American weakness in response to Russian expressions of strength -- that has helped get us where we are today.  Unlike the Amerocentric thinkers, however, I don't think the story ends there.  Other countries have been too complacent as well...Putin's war machine is partly funded from the coffers of a fossil fuel hungry Europe after all.  And perhaps there's no greater culprit overall than the failure of the international system that I mentioned in my previous post.  Great powers simply can get away with too much in the current geopolitical environment.  That's dangerous and has a tendency to lead to more and more war.  If Putin isn't stopped in Ukraine, I wonder where he will be stopped...and who else will be tempted to follow in his footsteps.                                             

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Obama and Putin in a Post-Foreign Policy Era

The Cold War was an extraordinary period in American history in that the perceived ideological threat posed by Communism and the perceived existential threat posed by the Soviet Union actually made foreign policy a driving concern of the American voter as well as the government.  In more normal times, Americans tend to be more insular and self-absorbed -- that certainly seems to be true today following the interventionist presidency of George W. Bush.  The recession and lingering unemployment have also given cause for Americans to look more inwards.  However, the rest of the world continues to move regardless of who is watching.  Even as we speak, troops are moving...Russian troops pouring into Ukraine, intent on wresting control of at the very least the Crimea.  Should Americans care?  Should the US government do anything?

What Russia's actions illustrate to me above all else is the broken state of the international system.  The United Nations can hardly deter war when China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with veto powers.  The very powers likely to be involved in wars are empowered to prevent the rest of the world from uniting against them.  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is perhaps a more effective alliance, but its very name indicates its provincial outlook -- it was not intended to be a truly global alliance and it is not.  The only thing that seems to be saving us from global war is restraint and smaller alliances between countries.  When a major power stops showing restraint, as Russia has done, and it attacks a country that is not a member of an effective alliance such as Ukraine, the major power can seemingly do whatever it wants.

What I find so galling about the Ukraine War is how Russia's naked self-interest and lust for territory are its only real motivations for invading Crimea.  That Crimea has a large proportion of Russian speakers is irrelevant -- they could have a referendum on joining Russia if that's what they truly want and no Russian troops would have needed to be involved.  Indeed, I would gladly have supported such a referendum; why shouldn't the residents of the Crimea determine their own fate without compulsion?  Let there be an orderly and fair political process, and let everyone have a seat at the table, including the Tatars and Ukrainians who live in Crimea.  Now, though, there can be no genuine political solution free of compulsion because the Russian military has involved itself.  Any so-called Russian patriots in Crimea at this point may just be regular people who don't want to be killed.  There seems to be little to no evidence that the Ukrainian central government is oppressing Russians in Crimea either -- Crimea is already autonomous within Ukraine, and the chaos in Ukraine after the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych has left a transitional government preoccupied with simply functioning at a basic level at this point.  Russia merely has taken the opportunity to grab territory because it saw its neighbor was weak and vulnerable.  Whether Russia outright annexes Crimea or creates a vassal state as it has done in Transdniestria makes little difference; this is an old-fashioned war waged for an old-fashioned reason: greed.

I don't expect American voters to demand action against Russia any time soon.  The consequences of two major powers going to war with each other are potentially devastating.  For the same reason, I expect President Obama and the US government to act with caution as well, merely cutting some economic and political ties to Russia.  No doubt many other countries will do the same.  The problem, though, is that none of this seems good enough.  Russia knew the world would have a reaction of some sort, but it didn't care -- there is no effective deterrent to military actions by the great powers at this point.  When war isn't punished, I fear there will be more of it.  That's certainly been the lesson of history, learned painfully over and over again. In hindsight, President Obama's conciliatory gestures towards Russian president Vladimir Putin seem indefensible.  Scrapping the United States' negotiated missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic because of Russian objectives seems particularly foolish -- beefing up the defenses of our allies unfortunately located near Russia may be the only way to curb Russian expansionism and prevent much bloodshed in the future.  It's a sad state of affairs all around.  It seems that American preoccupation with foreign policy, as in the Bush years, as well as American indifference towards foreign policy, as we have under the Obama administration especially with regards to the non-Islamic world, lead equally to catastrophe.