Matt Yglesias

Diplomacy At Work In Sudan

Until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that a pro-independence referendum for southern Sudan was overwhelmingly likely to end in massive bloodshed. Now it looks like things may work out fairly happily. How’d it happen? Elizabeth Dickinson explains the American diplomacy at work:

In short, all the carrots that U.S. diplomats are offering the Sudanese president seem to be working. Among the prizes for Khartoum are a U.S. promise to remove Sudan from its list of terrorism-supporting states and a possible visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the Sudan Tribune. Earlier this month, U.S. State Department officials also signaled that they would be ready to begin normalization following Sudan’s acceptance of the vote.

That’s great news for the south; as FP contributor Maggie Fick recently explained, normalization with Washington holds great appeal for Bashir — in fact, it’s a big part of his international agenda. So he’s likely to yield to U.S. pressure if it pays off. Bashir’s speech today gets Southern Sudan over one big hurdle toward declaring independence, which it is expected to formally do this July. The next test for U.S. pressure and Sudanese diplomacy is whether an equally congenial atmosphere will accompany talks over tricky issues such as border delineation and the sharing of Sudan’s oil.

The punchline here, sadly, is that normalization is a carrot that can really only be deployed once and so if we use it on behalf of Southern Sudan, our leverage over Darfur runs very thin.

Still, I think there’s a general lesson here. People sometimes look at something like the DPRK’s nuclear proliferation and conclude that there’s little the US can do to influence the behavior of other states short of threatening war. But while North Korea certainly highlights the limits of diplomacy in terms of coercing a profoundly determined actor, the right conclusion to draw is that most national leaders—even “bad guy” ones—don’t want their country to end up like North Korea.

Across the Sea

Suppose Hu Jintao stood before the National People’s Congress last night and delivered a long speech about national priorities that was overwhelmingly dedicated to domestic issues. Basically, Hu is talking about things that he believes will enhance China’s economic growth great—ideas about better schools, better roads, scientific research, tweaking the tax code, etc. It’s all pretty benign. Except there’s something weird about the speech. Instead of saying that the main reason to do this is that it will slightly increase the rate at which Chinese people improve their material living standards, he says that “the global competition for jobs is real” and the purpose of school reform is to “win the future,” topple American hegemony, and overawe India despite the latter’s larger and faster growing population.

The Great Hall of the People

Hu then observes that historically China has been the world’s most powerful state, that he looks on the past 150 years of non-dominance as an essentially transient phenomenon when you take the broad view. He says that the Han people are exceptional and through the same grit and determination that they used to shake off the Japanese yoke and tame the wild west of Tibet will continue their upward march. Then he briefly pivots to an overview of China’s main national security objectives—reunification with Taiwan, etc.

People would find that . . . odd . . . right? And kind of distressing.

I was at an event this morning with Anne-Marie Slaughter, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department who assured me that the US government doesn’t see the world in terms of 19th century power politics, but does worry that some elements of some foreign governments do see the world in those outmoded terms.

Transition Shock

Ezra Klein says America should feel okay about the looming specter of China’s economy being larger than ours:

A decent future includes China’s GDP passing ours. They have many, many more people than we do. It’s bad for both us and them if the country stays poor. A world in which China becomes rich enough to buy from us and educated enough to invent things that improve our lives is a better world than one in which they merely become competitive enough to take low-wage jobs from us — and that’s to say nothing of the welfare of the Chinese themselves.

But perhaps it’s better to think of it in terms of Britain rather than China. Was the economic rise of the United States, in the end, bad for Britain? Or France? I don’t think so. We’ve invented a host of products, medicines and technologies that have made their lives immeasurably better, not to mention measurably longer. We’re a huge and important trading partner for all of those countries. They’re no longer even arguably No. 1, it’s true. But they’re better off for it.

I think that’s all too, but that this is also a bit too complacent. One can make too much of the idea of a “special relationship” between the US and the UK, but there’s obviously a very real sense in which the deep cultural linkages between England and the formerly-English settler-states mean we relate to one another in an unusual way. You can see this in part by the fact that Australian, Canadian, and English (but not necessarily Scottish!) nationalists are very friendly to American nationalism. It’s with good reason that John Howard was George W Bush’s special friend among world leaders. Winston Churchill was able to write a History of the English Speaking Peoples that basically argues that the cause of human freedom was first carried by England, then by the British Empire, and then the torch was passed to the United States of America. The ability of English nationalists to accept and promote that kind of discourse was vital to making the transition so peaceful.

After Jeb Bush completes his second term in 2020, the transition to China as number one will be well under way. Can you imagine him spending his retirement years publishing a similar argument about China? I can’t. Our nationalist discourse is just way too different from and incompatible with China’s. Effecting a peaceful and mutually beneficial transition would require a substantial weakening of nationalist sentiment in both countries. I certainly hope it happens, but it’ll be a much thornier situation than the US-British transition.

The Trouble With Summits

This week’s column for TAP argues that the precedent of high-profile US-China bilateral “summits” is a bad one:

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington this week is being widely billed in the media as a “summit” with Barack Obama, and that fact may be more important — and more disturbing — than anything that transpires.

It’s great that Hu is visiting, of course. But the precedent that such visits should be big-time summits in the style of U.S.-Soviet meetings in their heyday and that major issues should be primarily addressed in bilateral fora is a bad one. Embracing “the summit” may seem appealing in the short term, but Sino-American bilateralism is a poor strategy for a world in which China will all but inevitably amass an economy larger than the United States’ in the near future. Our long-term interests are much better served by almost any conceivable decision-making process other than so-called G2 summits with China. The short-term frustrations of pursuing a policy of robust multilateralism should not distract attention from the urgent need to do the hard work.

The core issue, to be a bit flip, is that the United States of America has a posse.

Read the whole thing.

Tradeoffs in South Asia

Barack Obama’s administration has, quite sensibly, continued the Bush administration’s efforts to deepen ties with India. Indeed, the Obama administration has gone beyond what its predecessors have done and, again quite sensibly, endorsed a UN Security Council seat for India. Unsurprisingly, they don’t love this plan in Pakistan (via my colleague Colin Cookman):

These apprehensions, which were conveyed by Army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to President Barack Obama, included the perceived US interest in transactional nature of ties with Pakistan; that war on terror had been imposed on Pakistan; alleged violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty by the US; supposed US disrespect for Islam; much-touted American inner desire to defang and destabilise Pakistan; and its supposed indifference to Pakistan’s strategic concerns particularly vis-à-vis India.

A senior official in a background briefing on Saturday pointed to Mr Obama’s security strategy envisioning a greater role for India and Japan for Asian security and stability, and the growing support for Indian bid for UN Security Council’s permanent seat as an indicator of a major shift in the dynamics of world order.

I think this points to one of the more underrated problems with US policy in the region. There’s no reason for the United States to side with India over Pakistan or try to “defang” Pakistan, but I do think it’s quite important for us to grow closer to India and to support perfectly legitimate Indian diplomatic aspirations. This seems to me to be clearly more important to our long-term interests than is the question of who controls which village in southern Afghanistan. But we’re making a short-term commitment of money and American lives to a project in Afghanistan that’s really premised on us doing whatever we can to obtain enthusiastic Pakistani backing.

The Seduction of the Secret

A smart observation from Spencer Ackerman:

It’s always fun to catch up with people about six months to a year after they go to work in the national-security apparatus. Some enter with visions of new worlds of secret information suddenly exposed to them, like the briefcase opening in Pulp Fiction. More often than not, it’s an endless stream of banality, reported in minute, picayune detail, telling you what you already knew from a halfway attentive scan of your RSS feed.

This is something I’ve talked about before, but in a world drowning with information it’s remarkably easy to get too caught up in the idea of finding out secrets. Just think of all the banal, publicly available factual information that’s relevant to foreign policy and that most of us can’t rattle off the top of our heads. What’s the age structure of the population of Egypt? Is the Christian population growing faster or slower than average? Because of differential birth rates or differential emigration rates? Does Okun’s law hold up there like in Canada, or has it broken down like in the United States? But if you tried to write an article about this in the popular press, nobody would care. A scoop about a “secret report” on Egypt would, by contrast, be a kind of news even if it didn’t amount to much more than embassy gossip or slightly informed speculation.

The Symbolic Power of Nuclear Deterrents

I once made a French diplomat really angry by suggesting that the persistence of the modest-sized British and French nuclear arsenals sent a really bad message about nuclear proliferation to regional powers all around the world. This interesting WikiLeaked cable from London about British thinking on the Trident and the French reaction to it offers some evidence in this regard.

Charli Carpenter explains:

The French reaction is very interesting indeed; the French appear to have understood a decision to reduce or eliminate the UK’s nuclear force as a danger to France’s own nuclear capabilities. Presumably, the threat would come from activists and political actors within France, who would leverage British de-nuclearization in arguments against the maintenance of France’s own deterrent.

This suggests that France and the UK, even prior to their recent defense agreement, understood their nuclear deterrents to be symbiotic rather than competitive, even in a symbolic sense. The British and French nuclear arsenals have never threatened each other in anything other than a symbolic sense; the sole possession of nuclear weapons could conceivably suggest military and political leadership of Europe. I had long believed that the persistence of the French nuclear arsenal was the most important reason that Britain would not de-nuclearize, but I had assumed that this was because giving up Britain’s nukes might be perceived as a concession of French military and political predominance. What I didn’t expect was that the French would put direct (if discreet) diplomatic pressure on the United Kingdom out of fear that they might lose the rationale for their own arsenal.

This suggests that British nuclear disarmament might indeed send a powerful diplomatic message. Of course, France and the UK are the most similar of the nuclear powers, and it would be a reach to suggest that India, China, etc. would feel the same pressure to disarm as France. Nevertheless, that the French take the symbolic power of the message so seriously is very interesting indeed.

I would say that the issue here isn’t so much the Indias and Chinas of the world as the Brazils and South Africas. Whether public opinion in non-nuclear third world democracies is more inclined to believe “responsible liberal democracies are moving toward disarmament” or else “important countries each need an independent nuclear deterrent” is relevant to the long-run trajectory of policies in these countries. And the posture of the British and French governments is a big boost to option number two, in a way that’s bad for the world.

Freak Yourself Out About North Korea Day

As I’ve said before, the relevant leaders in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the USA deserve some credit and recognition for the fact that over the past 4-5 years the very dicey situation with North Korea and a not-so-cooperative China has been managed without anything disastrous happening. But even as Bill Richardson, New Mexico governor and sporadic DPRK envoy, arrived in Pyongyang to try to calm things down, there are new spouts of conflict. And the really sobering thing about the North Korea situation is that even relatively optimistic scenarios that have the conflict successfully managed without war until the Kim Regime implodes aren’t all that optimistic.

And if you want to darken your thoughts on this matter even more, I’d highly recommend reading Colonel David Maxwell’s brief paper (PDF) on “Irregular Warfare on the Korean Peninsula” for the Small Wars Journal. I would reconstruct Maxwell’s argument by saying that people normally think of the possibility of DPRK collapse primarily through a Central European frame. You’re implicitly assuming something like the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and its reintegration into the Federal Republic of Germany. And then from that starting point you’re observing that it’ll be much more problematic than even that problematic undertaking was.

Maxwell looks instead through more of an Iraq/Afghanistan lens. Why assume, he asks, that incoming foreign soldiers will be greeted as liberators? Because the Kim regime was nasty? Well, the Taliban’s nasty too. Saddam was nasty. What if a significant proportion of the population is hostile to incoming outsiders, and what if remnants of the DPRK security apparatus actively resist the new order? He notes that this is especially plausible since the official DPRK ideology is heavily oriented around (often mythical) feats of irregular resistance to Japanese occupation in World War II.

Beyond being alarming, Maxwell argues that we need better and broader planning for these collapse scenarios. That seems wise and all (planning is good), but part of the difficulty is that the political management of the situation would get much, much worse if there were high profile planning sessions about DPRK collapse. What’s more, the government of China seems unlikely to be interested in participating in any such planning, and yet some kind of political coordination with Beijing is crucial.

Civilian Sidekicks

My contribution to the “Richard Holbrooke is dead” genre:

More disturbing — because it’s presumably better considered — is Gen. David Petraeus’ decision to pen a postmortem homage to Holbrooke that includes the line “I used to note to him and to various audiences, with affection and respect, that he was my ‘diplomatic wingman.’”

The affection and respect Petraeus expressed were doubtlessly both genuine, but the sentiment is mistaken. It reverses the proper relationship between civilian and military authorities — generals and their troops are supposed to serve political objectives outlined by civilians, not view civilians as adjuncts to military campaigns. Holbrooke, though, likely would not have been offended. When told he was to be Petraeus’ civilian counterpart in the region, he told Der Spiegel that he laughed in response: “He has more airplanes than I have telephones.”

It’s funny because it’s true, but it’s also a huge problem for America.

Credit Where Due: Korean Peninsula Edition

One structural problem in the world is that they don’t hand out medals for the wars you don’t fight, and the terrible potential consequences of roads you don’t travel down don’t wind up making the headlines. Consequently, policymakers who manage to face-down tricky situations without getting huge numbers of people killed end up overrated.

So I’d like to say that best on what I’ve read in recent news coverage and also what I’ve seen in the WikiLeaks cables, the governments of South Korea and the United States of America seem to have been doing a bang-up job for the past several years of managing a difficult situation. It’s not as emotionally satisfying as being John McCain and randomly musing about “regime change” and it’s not going to “solve” the problem, but it’s protecting the relevant interests at a reasonable cost. And that, at the end of the day, is the job policymakers are supposed to do. It would be nice if the North Koreans weren’t so bizarre and it would be nice if the PRC were more cooperative and it would be nice if the Bush administration hadn’t blundered so badly in its first four years in office. But you have to work in the real people, and people dealt a bunch of bad options seem to me to be making the best of it.

Transparency and Diplomacy

It’s easy to see how an inability to keep secrets can hamper diplomacy. But it’s also worth considering the ways in which the ability to keep secrets can hinder diplomacy. Consider Iran. Suppose Ayatollah Khameini has a spiritual awakening and decides he doesn’t want nuclear weapons. But he thinks that for Iran to sign away its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be a national humiliation too far. Why should Iran be treated any differently than Germany or South Korea?

Obviously it would be in the interests of the West to strike a bargain around these terms. But equally obviously, if the Iranian government were to propose these terms there’d immediately be a problem of credibility. The West would insist on credible, verifiable disarmament which is a different thing and might require steps that Iran won’t agree to. In part, inability to strike this bargain is part of the price Iran needs to pay for past bad acts. But in part it’s a price Iran is paying precisely because Iran can keep secrets. If WikiLeaks were constantly publishing Iranian diplomatic cables, it would in some ways be easier to do a bargain. Or on the flipside you sometimes hear that the United States can or should offer “security guarantees” as part of a deal. Actual guarantees from the US should be quite valuable. But talk is cheap. And the fact that we’re able to keep secrets tends to turn our potentially valuable guarantees into cheap talk.

Indeed, as John Ikenberry has written in some ways it’s the degraded secrecy capabilities of democracies that makes it possible for us to collaborate so intensively. One reason the peaceful US/Canadian relationship works is that clearly in practice there’d be no way to mobilize the country for an invasion without it leaking. The fact that there are no such leaks gives the Canadians confidence that we’re not secretly planning to invade, which means they don’t spend their time plotting for an asymmetric war with the United States. And since they’re not doing that, we’re not constantly worried about Canadian terrorist financing and WMD programs and drawing up plans to invade.

Long Term Consequences of Leaked Diplomatic Cables

Kevin Drum asks:

[A]ll governments have a legitimate need for a certain amount of secrecy. In particular, embassy officials need to be able to report candidly to their superiors about what’s going on in their sphere of responsibility. So what’s the most likely consequence of the Wikileaks document dump? That governments around the world realize the error of their ways and become more open about their dealings with the rest of the world? Or that governments around the world — and in particular the United States government — clamp down hard on classified information and restrict its distribution even more than they have in the past?

In part number two, but in part I think we’re going to be looking at something even more dastardly than tightly controlled dissemination of information. We’re going to be looking at telephone calls! One of the lessons of the Presidential Records Act should be that it’s really really hard to force transparency. Basically the main way people have responded to PRA in practice is that folks who you might have emailed with back before they joined the Obama administration now only want to talk on the phone. We’ll have more oral briefings via telephone (and face to face), and “candid assessments” will come to even more closely resemble high school gossip.

Whatever you think the bounds are of “legitimate” secrecy (read Henry Farrell on diplomacy and hypocrisy), there’s no question that the kind of bid for global hegemony that the United States is currently engaged in requires quite a lot of at least semi-secret goings on. And I don’t find it remotely plausible that attacking the logistical basis of the secrecy is going to alter the structural features of US and international politics that drive the bid for hegemony. So there’ll be a redoubling of efforts—more phone calls, more compartmentalization, more expenditure of resources on tracking Julian Assange down—and life will go on.

When Ethnic Lobbies Clash

The main thing that really powerful political lobbies have in common is the absence of any kind of coherent opposition. But Ben Smith gives us a glimpse at what happens when an unexpected clash emerges:

Israeli leaders reacted warmly to an unexpected defense of Jews and Israel, and criticism of Iran, from Cuban leader Fidel Castro in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Castro’s “deep understanding” and President Shimon Peres wrote in a warm letter to Castro that the comments were “a surprising bridge between the hard reality and a new horizon.” Israeli officials, I’m told, saw the moment as an opportunity to widen a fissure in the hostility of the global left for Israel.

But Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — a key player because of her position on Foreign Affairs, and a longtime supporter of Israel — was less pleased by the opening. A Cuban exile and fierce Castro foe, she made her displeasure known to the Israelis — and even received an apologetic call from Netanyahu, which appears effectively to have squelched the unlikely dialogue with Cuba.

Jeffrey Goldberg snarks, “Could you remind again which lobby is so powerful?”

The answer, of course, is that they’re both powerful! But what’s extraordinary here is how much quicker Netanyahu is to react to a Cuba-related brushback from Ros-Lehtinen than he is to pushes from the President of the United States. The difference is credibility. When a Cuban exile representing a South Florida district complains that someone is being soft on Castro, she’s very credibly going to stick to her guns. And suddenly the patron-client dynamic between the mightiest empire the world has ever known and a small Mediterranean country snaps into place.

New START

The idea of voting down the New START treaty seems like either a classic of politics over principle, or else a fundamental failure to understand the idea of agenda setting. Suppose the various conservative whines about the treaty are being offered in earnest. This adds up, at most, to an argument (surely a correct one) that had John McCain won the 2008 presidential election his administration would have negotiated a treaty with somewhat different contours in the details.

But that’s not what happened, so we got an Obamaish version of the treaty instead. But what’s the treaty? Well, it safely reduces the quantity of Russian nuclear weapons while preserving America’s ability to verify what’s happening with the remaining weapons. In exchange, the US will dismantle some weapons but still have more than enough to preserve our deterrent. Extra nukes over and beyond what’s needed to deter credibly don’t do anything for the country—they don’t add inches to our national penis or anything—it’s just an income stream for certain firms and bureaucrats who deal with the nukes. Basically in exchange for giving up nothing, we’re reducing the possibility of something terrible happening with Russia’s stockpile. And the people who want to vote the treaty down will kill that. Their stockpile will stay big, and our ability to verify what’s happening with it will go away since the old treaty has declined.

Meanwhile, foreigners will wonder wtf has happened with US foreign policy and would-be proliferators will find their efforts somewhat boosted by the collapsing credibility of the disarmament process. And all for what? A cheap political talking point on a fourth-tier issue? A bit of extra pork?

Peace in Our Time

I was up at Yale talking international law and global governance. When folks like me start waxing eloquent about world peace and cooperation, it’s easy to dismiss us as utopian. Look how far we are from that end-state! It’s unimaginable. And I point them to this point about France and Germany:

Yes. Let us give thanks that the most brutal and blood-soaked border in the world is quiet–a border inhabited on both sides by those bloodthirsty peoples who have been numbers one and two in terms of the most effective killers of foreigners for centuries.

Who am I talking about? The Germans and the French, of course

It is now 65 years and 9 months since an army crossed the Rhine River bearing fire and sword. This is the longest period of peace on the Rhine since the second century B.C.E., before the Cimbri and the Teutones appeared to challenge the armies of the consul Gaius Marius in the Rhone Valley.

The story behind why worrying about a “big blowup in Europe” now is a worry about bank defaults rather than the wholesale destruction of major cities is a long and complicated one. But what’s clear is that it couldn’t have happened without the rise of liberal sentiments on the continent and the construction of liberal institutions to go along with them. France is still France, Germany is still Germany, and the continent still has various problems. But the problem of war has been abolished, just as it has on the US-Canadian border, between the United States and Japan, and in other portions of the globe. The trend worldwide has been toward fewer cross-border wars and fewer and less deadly internal conflicts as well. Working toward further reductions—toward peace—is by no means futile.

Walking Away

Spencer Ackerman considers a few cases of Obama foreign policy initiatives gone awry:

The Obama team came in operating from a sensible-enough presumption: the U.S. has built up enough goodwill and sacrificed enough resources, financial and human, into allied or proxy countries that those allies will be willing to make concessions when the U.S. requires. In each of these cases, Obama figured he asking for things these allies consider fundamental. He needed Iraqi Kurds to make a little institutional room for Iraqi Sunnis; for Israelis to hold off on settlement construction so a two-state solution wouldn’t be stillborn; for, say, Hamid Karzai not to steal an election.

From my perspective, a robust case can be made for each of these courses of action. But what Obama (and favorably-inclined people like myself) didn’t sufficiently appreciate is that each of these allies thinks the U.S. is always on the verge of selling it out. For a new president to start off with the medicine and not the sugar — by figuring he could pocket the gains of his predecessors — is clear in retrospect to have been the wrong move. From there, reluctance by the client gets met with insistence by the patron, and then all of a sudden a dynamic sets in that casts a pall over the whole relationship. We asked for sex before dinner.

I think this is an uncharacteristically wrongheaded argument from a good friend of mine. The whole framing seems wrong. If the Obama take was “we’ve done so much for you, now can’t you please help me out” and it didn’t work, Ackerman seems to think we should have done even more and then they’d really owe us. From where I sit, though, the problem in all three cases is that Obama’s interlocutors correctly calculated that the tail wags the dog. Obama had no intention of at any point saying “Netanyahu’s an asshole—,” “COIN only works if you have a viable partner—,” “Kurdistan needs America more than America needs Kurdistan—” and following it up with “—so I’m going to walk away from that situation and put more money into mosquito nets or American preschools or whatever.”

The American national security establishment is hooked on Afghanistan. They won’t walk away. Not in response to Karzai stealing an election, not in response to their own 2011 deadline, and most likely not in 2014 either. You can tell from the Obama administration’s messaging around this point that the team contains people who are uncomfortable with this strategy, much as it clearly contains people who are not pleased with Israeli settlement activity. But at the end of the day the President seems overwhelmingly inclined to basically go along with the status quo once everyone’s called his bluff. I’m not really sure I understand why the American military is determined to stay in Afghanistan forever, but the combination of their determination and Obama’s acquiescence means we have very little practical leverage over anyone.

Obama Backs Security Council Seat for India

I’m glad to see Barack Obama announce support for giving India a Security Council seat. Reform of the UN Security Council is something of a doomed endeavor, but in my view that’s all the more reason for the United States to play the role of good guy rather than protector of the status quo. India and Japan should have permanent Security Council seats. Brazil too. We should work something out with Africa. The EU should have some kind of consolidate seat instead of separate ones for France and the UK. There shouldn’t be unilateral vetos of UNSC resolutions. The “Forging a World of Liberty Under Law” report from John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter (currently at the State Department) had a lot of good ideas along these lines.

Will it happen? Not in the short-term, that’s for sure. But let China and France be the spoilers here.

Over the long run, either these structures will shift or else they’ll become decreasingly relevant. The former would be clearly preferable to the latter, but in either case it makes sense for the United States to try to get ahead of the curve.

Iranian Bribes? They Gonna Come Talk to Me About Iranian Bribes? In Afghanistan?

Hamid Karzai responds to allegations that his chief of staff is the beneficiary of large Iranian bribes:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Monday that once or twice a year Iran gives his office $700,000 to $975,000 for official presidential expenses – and that Washington also provides “bags of money” because his office lacks funds. Karzai’s comments come a day after The New York Times reported that Iran was giving bags of cash to the Afghan president’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, to buy his loyalty and promote Iranian interests in Afghanistan.

On a serious note, Iran and Afghanistan are adjacent to one another and a large number of Afghans—including Hamid Karzai—speak a version of the Persian language. The United States and Iran have a decades-long grudge match mostly over events that transpired in the Carter and Eisenhower administrations. It would be exceptionally foolish for the government of Afghanistan to deal with Teheran primarily through the lens of that dispute.

The Problem With Pakistan: They Want Different Stuff Than We Do

I don’t share Joshua Foust’s semi-personal level of animus toward Zalmay Khalilzad but I think Foust’s critique of Khalilzad’s latest offering makes some extremely valuable general points. Khalilzad starts out with a banal point masquerading as insight derived from on-the-ground experience:

When I visited Kabul a few weeks ago, President Hamid Karzai told me that the United States has yet to offer a credible strategy for how to resolve a critical issue: Pakistan’s role in the war in Afghanistan.

But of course everyone knows this and the problem is that it’s hard! The rest of the piece doesn’t really offer any particularly compelling ideas.

Foust:

Most of Khalilzad’s ideas are not ideas at all, but rather an advocacy for the continuation of the status quo. That is not in and of itself a bad thing, but his ideas for “tweaking” the current state of affairs–more unilateral strikes on Pakistani territory, a general tone of “forcing” Pakistan to do something that is clearly against its interests, and so on–simply don’t make any sense. The last nine years of U.S.-Pakistani relations have been variations on that same theme: forcing Pakistan to do things it is not otherwise inclined to do. The result is a strained relationship and deep, perhaps permanent opposition to the U.S. in domestic Pakistani politics. We are worse off because of it.

It seems to me that oftentimes it’s useful to just go look at a map. Afghanistan is right there next to Pakistan. And it always will be. The United States of America is way over on a different continent. And it always will be. Then there’s India on the other side of Pakistan. So Pakistan is always going to care more about the details of what’s happening in Afghanistan than America does. And Pakistan is always going to care more about India than it does about the United States. We’re not impotent to shape Pakistan’s dealings with all this, but it’s foolish to think we can somehow play a dominant role in determining what the Pakistani government wants to do in the immediate vicinity of Pakistan.

What I think we need to think harder about is what do we care about. It seems kind of perverse to me to look at this whole region and decide to make Afghanistan the pivot around which all our priorities turn. It’s one thing to have a short-term region-wide (indeed, global) focus on Afghanistan for the purposes of a “get Osama” mission. But does anyone think that in 2060 America’s relationship with Afghanistan will be more important than our relationship with India? That Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan will be the centerpiece of the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship?

Cuba Embargo Turns 50

Ian Vasquez observes that this is the fiftieth anniversary of America’s ridiculous embargo of Cuba:

It is time to lift the embargo. Doing so will not save communism from its inherent flaws; that system collapsed spectacularly elsewhere around the world in places where the West maintained or established trade. Keeping the sanctions will only further allow the dictatorship and its sympathizers to explain away the regime’s own failings. It would be better for Cubans and the world to see the unraveling of Cuban communism without U.S. intervention. When a free Cuba is eventually born, it will more easily flourish if enemies of the open society cannot rely on a false narrative about how the colossus of the North finally killed off the island’s socialist experiment.

A good way to start would be by lifting the travel portion of the embargo. That measure would expose ordinary Cubans to hundreds of thousands of American citizens, thus inevitably expanding Cuba’s informal economy and establishing innumerable relationships that would make Cuban citizens more independent of the state. The regime may try to reap the benefits of increased revenues, but it will have unleashed a social dynamic that will be difficult to control.

To add a few other points, Cuba aside it’s simply preposterous for the government of a democracy to be restricting which countries its own citizens are allowed to visit. What’s more, it’s worth emphasizing that insofar as a relaxed embargo would present new economic opportunities to the Cuban regime the way for them to maximize those opportunities is to walk further down the China/Vietnam path and relax their grip on the economy. Consequently, the impact of relaxing the embargo on Cuban freedom is necessarily going to lie somewhere in the positive range.