Thinking Global

CHICAGO — As measured from President Obama’s re-election campaign perspective – the White House’s litmus test for foreign policy issues through November – last weekend’s G-8 and NATO Summits were bell ringers.  Obama campaign strategists couldn’t have scripted their outcomes better – perhaps because they did script them.

Given the potential for dissent, President Obama could be satisfied that his guests adhered (mostly) to the desired story line. At Camp David, President Obama was the jobs-and-growth champion. In hometown Chicago, with leaders of some 60 countries arrayed around him, he was the president who would wind down an unpopular war. (That his Chicago White Sox trounced the Cubs during NATO Night at Wrigley Field, in a game that opened with an honor guard carrying flags from the 50 countries engaged in Afghanistan, was an added benefit.)

The only problem with this pretty picture is that getting the campaign message right is a long way from getting the world right. What really connected the G-8 and NATO meetings was a growing realization that the biggest threat to the alliance – and, for that matter, to Obama’s re-election hopes – is the euro zone crisis. That risk comes at a time when U.S. debt and political dysfunction makes the West far less resilient. So for all the talk in Chicago about common purpose in Afghanistan, NATO’s most existential danger now comes from within, and its root causes are economic.

When NATO strategists weigh the many threats facing them, they tend to focus first on their founding treaty’s Article 5, which requires all members to defend a single ally against an external security threat. Insiders also often discuss Article 4, which allows for a member country like Turkey to seek urgent alliance consultations when it foresees new dangers, as was the case during the Iraq war and is now again the case concerning Syria.

Yet it’s time for NATO to dust off its long-forgotten Article 2, known at the treaty’s writing in 1949 as “the Canadian article,” because of that ally’s early insistence that military strength couldn’t be separated from economic health. It committed all NATO members to “strengthening their free institutions” and “promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any and all of them.”

That article was put forward by then-Canadian Foreign Minister Lester Pearson, and was enthusiastically supported by the U.S., because both countries feared NATO would become too much of a military assistance program without sufficient economic cooperation or benefit. Under the logic of Article 2, ambitious free trade and investment agreements – of the sort the Obama administration is currently postponing with Europe – are as strategically important as defense programs.

Some have argued that NATO need not consider such matters, since they have become the domain of the European Union. Indeed, as part of NATO’s recent reforms, it got rid of its economic directorate altogether. Yet now that the EU itself is under threat, it’s time for the alliance to consider the security implications of financial and economic shifts – and how they could alter the strategic balance of power.

According to Article 2, it is also a NATO matter whether Greece leaves the euro zone, given its European, transatlantic and global repercussions. How France and Germany settle their dispute over the policies of growth versus austerity, again, is an issue of deepest concern to the alliance. The growing divide that the euro crisis is creating between the north and south of Europe has significant implications for the future solidarity of NATO members that goes far beyond, but also includes, the sharp decline of defense budgets.

The wider implications of the euro crisis go right to the heart of the geopolitical and security issues that concern NATO. The problems stem both from the European Union’s flagging energy for external engagement and its eroding attractiveness to the outside world as the model of prosperity and stability – to be emulated and, when possible, joined.

A weak, introverted Europe and a debt-laden and distracted United States are encouraging Russia to reassert its influence, in part through its new Eurasian Union, which would be far less attractive were it not for the EU’s troubles. In the Balkans, recent Serbian elections that favored a more nationalist candidate, who represents an anti-EU party, were influenced by the euro crisis. Across the Middle East and North Africa, a battle for hearts and minds is under way: Less attractive influences emerge when the U.S. and Europe are no-shows.

“As more crises may develop, the danger is that we will be so introspective we won’t address them,” says Michael Clarke, director general of the Royal United Services Institute in London. “Europe is losing the ability to be an actor even in its own continent, let alone in world politics.”

NATO leaders can rightly congratulate themselves for coming away from Chicago with a good amount of agreement on the three major agenda items: ending combat engagement in Afghanistan by 2014, pooling more defense capabilities in the face of austerity, and deepening relationships with their most capable partners.

Yet they didn’t begin to address this far more fundamental threat. It’s time for the North Atlantic Council of allied leaders to convene, as provided for under Article 2, to address economic issues that have become matters of strategic consequence.

PHOTO: President Barack Obama holds a news conference on the second day of the NATO Summit in Chicago, May 21, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Young

White House reporters can be forgiven their collective shrug when they received the readout from President Obama’s meeting last week with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in advance of the alliance’s Chicago summit this weekend. Laced with the usual, mind-numbing NATO-speak, the dry listing of the summit’s three areas of focus – Afghanistan, defense capabilities, and partnerships – didn’t sound like the stuff of history.

However, beneath the third agenda item – partnerships – lies a potential revolution in how the world’s most important security alliance may operate globally in the future beside other regional organizations – and at the request of the United Nations. At a time of euro zone crisis, U.S. political polarization and global uncertainty, it provides a possible road map for “enlarging the West” and its community of common values and purpose. “NATO is now a hub for a global network of security partners which have served alongside NATO forces in Afghanistan, Libya and Kosovo,” Obama and Rasmussen agreed.

As America’s willingness and capability to act unilaterally declines, any U.S. president will find himself increasingly drawn to NATO as an even more vital tool for foreign and defense policy – against a host of global threats ranging from Syrian upheavals and North Korean nuclear weapons to cyber attacks and piracy. The problem, however, is that NATO members more often than not won’t be located where they are most needed. Or due to lack of political will or inadequate military muscle, many NATO members may not have the capability to intervene. That means regional partners will be increasingly necessary to provide both the credibility and resources for the most likely future operations.

Although many experts, including then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, opposed NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, the operation’s ultimate success provides something of a model for this sort of future. NATO operated alongside key regional and European non-alliance partners within NATO structures – with the blessing of the Arab League and the United Nations Security Council. The alliance – and by extension the United States – achieved its objectives with no allied casualties, minor collateral damage and limited U.S. engagement. The war lasted seven months and cost the alliance just $1.2 billion, the equivalent of one week of operations in Afghanistan.

Such situations never repeat themselves precisely. Should NATO ultimately be involved in Syria, for example, regional engagement would likely be far greater. In a North Korean scenario, it is hard to imagine any response that wouldn’t be coordinated with America’s Asia-Pacific allies and China. Regarding maritime security, the NATO countries involved and local partners would shift given the threat, whether off the Gulf of Guinea or the Straits of Hormuz. What’s clear is that for the model of NATO at the hub of a global security network, the alliance will need to become more flexible and adaptable – and to build a broader and deeper array of global partnerships.

The expected discussions of NATO leaders this weekend about how best to wind down their decade-long Afghan military operation and about how to maintain sufficient defense capabilities, despite growing budget cuts, risk leaving the impression of an alliance in retrenchment or decline. That’s hardly an inspiring or helpful message for a U.S. president heading home to Chicago at the beginning of his re-election campaign.

By contrast, NATO’s efforts to broaden and deepen cooperation with capable partner nations can be rolled out as a pro-active, forward-looking initiative that has NATO going on offense for a new era. So that no one misses his notion of NATO at the core of a global security network, President Obama and his allies will stage an unprecedented summit meeting with 13 partner nations – from South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia in Asia-Pacific to Jordan, Morocco, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East and North Africa. Also present will be five European states that aren’t members of the alliance but routinely contribute to alliance activities – Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.

What they’ll be trying to do is give teeth to an agenda for NATO that I first saw discussed in detail by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in a major Foreign Affairs article in October 2009. He argued against those who wished to expand NATO into a global alliance of democracies. He said that would dilute the crucial importance of the U.S.-European connection, which still accounts for half of the world’s economy, and that none of the world’s rising powers would be likely to accept membership in a global NATO. An ideologically defined democratic alliance would needlessly draw institutional lines between the U.S. and, for example, China.

“NATO, however, has the experience, the institutions, and the means to eventually become the hub of a globe-spanning web of various regional cooperative-security undertakings among states with the growing power to act,” he wrote. “In pursuing that strategic mission, NATO would not only be preserving transatlantic political unity; it would also be responding to the twenty-first century’s novel and increasingly urgent security agenda.”

It would also rescue the alliance from geostrategic irrelevance.

PHOTO: NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen addresses a news conference in Brussels, May 11, 2012. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

Imagine that an American intelligence agency organizes an “exercise,” as one occasionally does, on how to manage an unwanted but inescapable Washington role in a Chinese leadership struggle. Throw in the following scene-setting facts:

• With the Chinese Communist Party confronting a decisive leadership transition, a provincial police chief takes refuge in a U.S. consulate and spills the beans on a corruption and murder story swirling around Bo Xilai, whose populist, Maoist campaign threatens the establishment.
• Just a week before the visit to Washington of Vice-President Xi Jianping, who is in line to become paramount leader this autumn, President Obama takes sides. Although Bo’s forces are circling the consulate, the U.S. releases the police chief to Beijing’s leaders.
• With that crisis solved and Chinese leaders indebted to Obama, a blind human rights activist dramatically escapes house arrest and takes refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. With Secretary Hillary Clinton arriving for a high-level Sino-U.S. summit, both sides enter crisis management mode.

It’s no wonder that the intellectual salons of Washington have grown a bit bored with the ongoing U.S. election campaign and have shifted their interest instead to Chinese domestic politics. The reasons are obvious: The details are juicier, the drama is more immediate and the historic stakes are considerably more significant.

That’s because any U.S. president, whether named Obama or Romney, will operate within a well-established constitutional framework and democratic habits. While the U.S. has managed 43 peaceful transitions of power over the past 223 years, Communist-led China has managed a smooth handoff only once since its 1949 revolution, and that was in 2002, when Deng Xiaoping engineered the rise of the current premier, Hu Jintao.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft believes China has entered its most decisive domestic political period since the weeks preceding the government crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which resulted in the arrest and purge of Deng Xiaoping’s presumptive heir, Zhao Ziyang, along with a large-scale removal of other officials sympathetic to the protesters. Tiananmen’s immediate aftermath strengthened the hand of hardliners, until Deng, with difficulty, reasserted himself and market reforms in 1992.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley regards the current split within the Chinese leadership to be the most severe since 1971. It was then that Defense Minister Lin Biao, in an apparent attempt to defect to the Soviet Union, died in a plane crash in Mongolia while trying to flee the country after a failed attempt to assassinate Mao Tse Tung. The Communist Party branded him a traitor posthumously.

The global stakes, however, are far greater now than either in 1971 or 1989.

China remains the world’s most important engine for economic growth, it has become the biggest owner of U.S. debt, and it has vastly expanded its global reach through investments and trade. China is likely to surpass the U.S. in the next decade as the world’s largest economy – and its political influence and military capabilities grow apace. Domestic uncertainties now make China the most crucial wild card for the global future.

Beyond that, the country’s leaders in the coming years will face a set of new strains that defy easy solution: Growth will inevitably slow, a rising middle class will make increased political demands, growing wages will make export markets more difficult to win, and the demographics of an aging society and its single-child policy will produce new social and financial pressures.

Thus, the fifth generation of Communist leaders, who will be installed at the 18th Party Congress this autumn, will inherit a China whose unreformed political structure isn’t equipped to manage the demands of its increasingly complex, modern state. They also will face a public angered by widening reports of official corruption amid growing gaps in income.

The seven new individuals who this autumn will be appointed to the nine-member Central Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, the country’s highest decision-making authority, have been bred during the country’s meteoric economic rise. If the current scandal has revealed anything, it is a seething unrest among party leaders over how to manage a country that has moved so far beyond communist ideology.

The conventional wisdom is that the battle lines have been drawn between those who advocate liberal constitutional and political reforms – most prominently represented by Premier Wen Jiabao – that would bring greater pluralism and more powerful rule-of-law, versus those who favor greater state and party controls. Yet lines are far messier and opaque than that: China’s factions, personal rivalries and underlying ideologies defy Western categories.

To sort out the plot, watch closely to see which shoes drop next. That may indicate how much support Bo had at senior leadership levels both for himself and his populist approach, which was laced with Maoist nostalgia and “red culture,” emphasizing large public works, state company ownership and a brutal (if ultimately hypocritical) crime and corruption crackdown.

The standing committee removed Bo, but it’s not yet clear what party disciplinary or criminal actions he will face – or how transparent they will be for the public. In particular, how might party leaders handle the powerful Chinese interior minister Zhou Yangkang, a Bo ally, whose seat on the standing committee is the one Bo had sought? Will military heads roll, as it is rumored that Bo has enjoyed a following as well among uniformed brass.

Most analysts still believe the party congress will produce its forecast personnel outcome: the elevation of Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping. Indeed, the Bo scandal may have guaranteed that outcome as leaders circle their wagons. But watch as well who takes the other leadership seats, in particular Wang Yang of Guangdong province, the leading next-generation reformist leader, who had been Bo’s predecessor in Chongqing.

China’s leaders seem to agree that the status quo is unsustainable. What’s at stake is who will change it – and in which direction.

For President Obama, this exercise provides just one policy course: Do no harm, avoid providing hardliners a scapegoat, and pray for the best.

PHOTO: China’s former Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai (L) and former Deputy Mayor of Chongqing Wang Lijun (R) attend a session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) of the Chongqing Municipal Committee, in Chongqing municipality, January 7, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer