The Post-Modern Praetorians
“The Post-Modern Praetorians” (TPMR) contains Alex Olteanu’s reflections and comments on topics touching on his “War in the Modern World” M.A. studies at King’s College, London, UKArchive for USA
“The Road Not Taken”: Reassessing the Cold War In light of NSC-68 and the Korean War
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
David Frost, The Road Not Taken
“A détente is beginning. a modus vivendi. It started already in Korea. The dangers of war at present are less and less. The decisive point in Korea was the quarrel between MacArthur and Truman. This showed that the United States did not want war. After Truman said no to MacArthur’s proposal to attack China, [world] war was excluded… These are the imponderables that make for a modus vivendi…; it is an armed peace.”
General Charles De Gaulle
I. The Critical ‘Conjoncture’ of the Cold War and Resulting Pathway Dependencies
NSC-68 and the Korean War combined to create a critical ‘conjoncture ’ in the early Cold War that crystallized the terms of debate, the means of confrontation and the rules and arenas of engagement of the global, militarized conflict which constituted the central dynamic of the bi-polar world system of the next four decades. Most importantly, it militarized the Cold War, transformed Asia into the central military battlefield between the two camps, and created a US foreign policy consensus in aggressively opposing communism by any means necessary not only in Europe, but throughout the emerging Third World.
The analytic part of this paper concentrates neither on the ‘macro’ (structural/systemic) nor on the ‘micro’ (individual/agency) levels of social analysis, but rather on the ‘mezo’ level, where various institutionalized epistemic communities interact and create ‘path dependencies’ which open up specific avenues of inquiry, decision-making, action and development whilst simultaneously closing off others . Thus, we will focus on the evolving paradigms and interactions of the US, Communist bloc, and Western European foreign policy networks before and during the Korean War.
The explanatory part will then examine the consequences of the ‘conjoncture’ analyzed above, in both space and time. We will briefly highlight its effects and the path dependencies it generated in the central, secondary and peripheral arenas of the Cold War over the short, medium and long term.
II. Dynamics of Foreign Policy Networks Before the Outbreak of the Korean War
Three critical foreign policy networks dominated the first decade after the end of World War II: one centered in Washington, DC, the second in Moscow, and the third in key West European capitals. The internal dynamics of each of these networks, and the interaction between them, provide us with a better understanding of both the origins and the consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War.
1. Western Europe: Always Fighting the Last War
Although the Marshall Plan was coming to an end, a true Western European economic recovery had not yet taken place by 1950; the threat of powerful Communist parties capable of exploiting this situation with the help of the Soviet Union was therefore still very real, especially in Italy and France. In addition, the three major European powers seemed unwilling to coordinate their foreign policy aims and strategies. NATO remained a paper alliance; the French proposal for a European Defense Community was designed to preclude West Germany from joining NATO and re-establishing its own armed forces ; West Germany under Adenauer insisted to join NATO as an equal partner and be allowed control of its own Army ; while Great Britain, slowly recovering from the post-war slump, still dreamt of re-shaping the British Empire into a “Third Force” comparable, if not equal, to the USA and USSR .
2. The Communist Bloc: “Team Stalin”
All national communist party leaders of the Communist bloc (Yugoslavia’s Tito excepted) acknowledged Joseph Stalin’s unquestioned leadership, particularly in foreign policy matters. Throughout his rule, Soviet foreign policy approaches had been defined by two variables: an ideological one, gravitating between a national/imperialist pole and a communist / revolutionary pole ; and an administrative one, oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state. Unlike in the USA, however, there were no factional divisions between “Team Stalin”’s members: only the Boss himself could decide what the right mix of the four resulting paradigms would be the correct one at any given time and accordingly, which members of his team would belong to his inner circle -and which would not .
New documentary evidence shows us, however, that relations between “The Boss”, China’s Mao and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung were rather more complex by 1950 . Despite Stalin’s reluctance to engage in a war that might lead to an unwanted direct confrontation with the USA, Mao’s military romanticism and Kim’s impatiently aggressive nationalist push to reunite the Koreas into a viable state under his rule played decisive roles in the former’s final acquiescence to direct logistical and indirect military support of the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea . In turn, Mao’s promise to assist Kim should he require military support after the start of hostilities was motivated by his fear of encirclement by the USA from its Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese bases , by internal Chinese political reasons aiming to radicalize and thus consolidate the still young Chinese Communist revolution ; and by his desire to finally obtain Stalin’s approval as the leader of a true Communist revolution and Party – and not be thought of as potentially “just another Tito” .
3. USA: “The Great Debate” and the Korean War
By 1950, the “Great Debate” splitting asunder the US foreign policy establishment combined two sets of dichotomies -between “American Exceptionalism” and the fear of its replacement by a “Garrison State”; and between the “Welfare State” and the “Warfare State” . This resulted in four foreign policy approaches –each with its own supporters and detractors:
Until 1947, the majority US foreign policy view was that of cooperative multilateralism, based on three pillars: an effective UNO; collaboration with the USSR; and reliance on Britain to manage the international system as an equal partner . By 1948, these pillars were failing. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, National Security Act and NATO laid out the political and institutional foundations of a new US foreign policy. However, President Truman opposed for both political and ideological reasons the substantial increases in the US Defense Budget which would give the United States the means to implement its professed policies.
The 1949 Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and Mao’s Communist victory in mainland China convinced Truman that a re-examination of US national strategy was required . The ascendant State Department foreign policy team led by Secretary Acheson and Office of Policy and Planning Director Nitze drafted NSC-68 and submitted it to the President on April 14, 1950. However, because of its dramatic budgetary implications, as well as anticipated opposition in Congress, President Truman did not act on these recommendations, asking instead for further details and specifications.
After June 25, 1950 NSC-68 provided President Truman with a legitimating intellectual lens though which to view and understand what he considered North Korea’s unprovoked and unexpected aggression on South Korea , and with a means to both build up support for his multilateral containment foreign policy and discredit its main competitors: traditional isolationism and aggressive unilateralism.
The MacArthur-Truman conflict personified, internally, a clash between the very notion of civilian control over the US armed forces and the rise of a true Garrison State ruled by a military elite ; and externally, a conflict between Truman’s policy of multilateral containment and a likely direct confrontation between the USA and the USSR combined with a probable disintegration of the US-European alliance network. The confrontation reached its peak then faded away after Truman relieved MacArthur of all his commands in April 1951. The presidential election, in 1952, of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who essentially pursued the policy of multilateral containment embodied in NSC-68, established a cross-party foreign policy consensus in the USA that was to last virtually until the end of the Cold War.
III. Consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War
The aggregate impact of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the three foreign policy networks discussed above, and hence on the conduct of the Cold War, was not only dramatic in the short term, but also significant in the medium- and long-term.
Although the Cold War had started since at least 1948, by 1950 the European, Soviet bloc and US foreign policy networks were still largely turned inward, focusing primarily on issues deeply embedded in the historical experiences of their own states and regions. The Korean War propelled them together and connected them for the very first time in a truly global adversarial governance network articulated by the Manichean conflict between freedom and tyranny as described in NSC-68.
The three key short-term consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War were a massive militarization of the Cold War, not only in the United States but also in Western European countries; the jumpstarting of West European and Japanese economies as they scrambled to supply the vast needs of the UN-sponsored troops fighting up and down the Korean Peninsula; and the establishment of a wide network of US-centered alliance systems designed to contain and perhaps even roll back the communist threat: General Eisenhower was appointed NATO’s first SACEUR and given as mandate to transform the alliance into the world’s first truly multinational military organization; a peace treaty was signed with Japan in 1951, just as ANZUS was being ratified; and SEATO and the Baghdad Pact were established in 1955. Perhaps most remarkable, France decided to abandon its historical enmity with Germany and acquiesce, however reluctantly, to its rearmament and entry into NATO as an equal partner.
In the medium term, drawing on the lessons learned in Korea that nuclear weapons could hardly be used as offensive weapons on the battlefield, but only as a means of deterring larger conflicts between the two super-powers , the US adopted a dual strategy of a global nuclear arms race with its main rival, whilst fighting low-intensity wars in Asia designed, in its view, to “free (its peoples) from age-old forms of social and ideological oppression” . From Korea though Indo-China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam, Asia became the central battlefield of the Cold War for the next two decades.
Within the Soviet Bloc, although the Korean War cemented in the short-term the sino-soviet alliance, China’s ability to stand up militarily to the United States during this conflict had the dual effect of solidifying the Communist regime in China and establishing its reputation internationally, especially among the existing and emerging Third World states, thus sawing the seeds both of the sino-soviet split and confrontation of the 1960s and 1970s, and of the proliferation of revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America -which the US saw it as its duty to confront by both direct and covert means.
Finally, in the long term, “[t]he Cold War provided an extreme answer to a question that had been at the center of US foreign policy since the late eighteenth century: in what situations should ideological sympathies be followed by intervention? The extension of the Cold War into the Third World was defined by the answer: everywhere where Communism could be construed as a threat” . Korea was its first true battlefield –and the military, political, economic and ideological competition whose nature and rules of engagement it largely defined would play no small part in Ronald Reagan’s view of the “Evil Empire” and his “Star Wars” program, in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and, finally, in the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the peaceful implosion of the USSR two years later.
New US Intelligence Reports Highlight Key Strategic Issues of the 21st Century
Over the past two weeks, three key reports highlighting the changing strategic nature of the 21st Century world and making recommendations to meet the most likely threats, were released in the USA.
The first report, entitled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, was released by the National Intelligence Council on October 20, 2008. In the Council’s words, “Global Trends 2025 is the fourth unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view if the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events”.
The second report, entitled Forging A New Shield, was submitted to President Bush on November 26, 2008 by the Project on National Security Reform, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization working to modernize and improve the U.S. national security system to better protect the American people against 21st century dangers. The project expects to prepare draft presidential directives and a new National Security Act to replace many of the provisions of the one enacted in 1947. The Project’s Executive Director, James R. Locher III, was interviewed by the reputed Foreign Policy magazine regarding the findings of the report, and his comments have been published on the magazine’s website and made available to the public. The 830-page report thankfully also makes available an Executive Summary for those who wish to familiarize themselves with its main arguments, conclusions and recommendations.
The third report was submitted today to the US Congress by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism, and is entitled World at Risk. The Commission, set up in accordance with the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007, had as mandate to assess “any and all f the nation’s activities, initiatives, and programs to prevent weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism. … [and] to provide concrete recommendations—a road map, if you will—to address these threats”.
World At Risk
The Commission chose to focus its findings on several areas where it found that the risks to the United States are increasing: the cross roads of terrorism and proliferation in the poorly governed parts of Pakistan, the prevention of biological and nuclear terrorism, and the potential erosion of international nuclear security, treaties and norms in an era of nuclear energy renaissance. Its key conclusion was that “…the risks that confront us today are evolving faster than our multilayered responses. Many thousands of dedicated people across all agencies of our government are working hard to protect this country, and their efforts have had a positive impact. But the terrorists have been active, too—and in our judgment America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing.”
In order to meet these challenges in a proactive, timely and effective manner, the Commission puts forwards thirteen recommendations:
Biological Proliferation and Terrorism:
RECOMMENDATION 1: The United States should undertake a series of mutually reinforcing domestic measures to prevent bioterrorism: (1) conduct a comprehensive review of the domestic program to secure dangerous pathogens, (2) develop a national strategy for advancing bioforensic capabilities, (3) tighten government oversight of high-containment laboratories, (4) promote a culture of security awareness in the life sciences community, and (5) enhance the nation’s capabilities for rapid response to prevent biological attacks from inflicting mass casualties.
RECOMMENDATION 2: The United States should undertake a series of mutually reinforcing measures at the international level to prevent biological weapons proliferation and terrorism: (1) press for an international conference of countries with major biotechnology industries to promote biosecurity, (2) conduct a global assessment of biosecurity risks, (3) strengthen global disease surveillance networks, and (4) propose a new action plan for achieving universal adherence to and effective national implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention, for adoption at the next review conference in 2011.
Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism:
RECOMMENDATION 3: The United States should work internationally toward strengthening the nonproliferation regime, reaffirming the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons by (1) imposing a range of penalties for NPT violations and withdrawal from the NPT that shift the burden of proof to the state under review for noncompliance; (2) ensuring access to nuclear fuel, at market prices to the extent possible, for non-nuclear states that agree not to develop sensitive fuel cycle capabilities and are in full compliance with international obligations; (3) strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency, to include identifying the limitations to its safeguarding capabilities, and providing the agency with the resources and authorities needed to meet its current and expanding mandate; (4) promoting the further development and effective implementation of counterproliferation initiatives such as the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism; (5) orchestrating consensus that there will be no new states, including Iran and North Korea, possessing uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capability; (6) working in concert with others to do everything possible to promote and maintain a moratorium on nuclear testing; (7) working toward a global agreement on the definition of “appropriate” and “effective” nuclear security and accounting systems as legally obligated under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540; and (8) discouraging, to the extent possible, the use of financial incentives in the promotion of civil nuclear power.
RECOMMENDATION 4: The new President should undertake a comprehensive review of cooperative nuclear security programs, and should develop a global strategy that accounts for the worldwide expansion of the threat and the restructuring of our relationship with Russia from that of donor and recipient to a cooperative partnership.
RECOMMENDATION 5: As a top priority, the next administration must stop the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. In the case of Iran, this requires the permanent cessation of all of Iran’s nuclear weapons–related efforts. In the case of North Korea, this requires the complete abandonment and dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs. If, as appears likely, the next administration seeks to stop these programs through direct diplomatic engagement with the Iranian and North Korean governments, it must do so from a position of strength, emphasizing both the benefits to both the benefits to them of abandoning their nuclear weapons programs and the enormous costs of failing to do so. Such engagement must be backed by the credible threat of direct action in the event that diplomacy fails.
Pakistan: The Intersection of Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism:
RECOMMENDATION 6: The next President and Congress should implement a comprehensive policy toward Pakistan that works with Pakistan and other countries to (1) eliminate terrorist safe havens through military, economic, and diplomatic means; (2) secure nuclear and biological materials in Pakistan; (3) counter and defeat extremist ideology; and (4) constrain a nascent nuclear arms race in Asia.
Russia and the United States:
RECOMMENDATION 7: The next U.S. administration should work with the Russian government on initiatives to jointly reduce the danger of the use of nuclear and biological weapons, including by (1) extending some of the essential verification and monitoring provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that are scheduled to expire in 2009; (2) advancing cooperation programs such as the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, and the Proliferation Security Initiative; (3) sustaining security upgrades at sensitive sites in Russia and elsewhere, while finding common ground on further reductions in stockpiles of excess highly enriched uranium; (4) jointly encouraging China, Pakistan, and India to announce a moratorium on the further production of nuclear fissile materials for nuclear weapons and to reduce existing nuclear military deployments and stockpiles; and (5) offering assistance to other nations, such as Pakistan and India, in achieving nuclear confidence-building measures similar to those that the United States and the USSR followed for most of the Cold War.
Government Organization and Culture:
RECOMMENDATION 8: The President should create a more efficient and effective policy coordination structure by designating a White House principal advisor for WMD proliferation and terrorism and restructuring the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.
RECOMMENDATION 9: Congress should reform its oversight both structurally and substantively to better address intelligence, homeland security, and crosscutting 21st-century national security missions such as the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism.
RECOMMENDATION 10: Accelerate integration of effort among the counterproliferation, counterterrorism, and law enforcement communities to address WMD proliferation and terrorism issues; strengthen expertise in the nuclear and biological fields; prioritize pre-service and in-service training and retention of people with critical scientific, language, and foreign area skills; and ensure that the threat posed by biological weapons remains among the highest national intelligence priorities for collection and analysis.
RECOMMENDATION 11: The United States must build a national security workforce for the 21st century.
RECOMMENDATION 12: U.S. counterterrorism strategy must more effectively counter the ideology behind WMD terrorism. The United States should develop a more coherent and sustained strategy and capabilities for global ideological engagement to prevent future recruits, supporters, and facilitators.
RECOMMENDATION 13: The next administration must work to openly and honestly engage the American citizen, encouraging a participatory approach to meeting the challenges of the new century.
Global Trends 2025
The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 Report takes a broader view of how world developments could evolve over the next two decades. Its main conclusion is that “[t]he international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors. By 2025, the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power2 continuing to narrow between developed and developing countries. Concurrent with the shift in power among nation-states, the relative power of various nonstate actors—including businesses, tribes, religious organizations, and criminal networks—is increasing. The players are changing, but so too are the scope and breadth of transnational issues important for continued global prosperity. Aging populations in the developed world; growing energy, food, and water constraints; and worries about climate change will limit and diminish what will still be an historically unprecedented age of prosperity”.
The Council’s conclusions regarding the future trajectory of terrorism does not dispute the findings of World at Risk, but points to a possible course of action that could diminish such threats: “Terrorism, proliferation, and conflict will remain key concerns even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism is unlikely to disappear by 2025, but its appeal could diminish if economic growth continues and youth unemployment is mitigated in the Middle East. Economic opportunities for youth and greater political pluralism probably would dissuade some from joining terrorists’ ranks, but others—motivated by a variety of factors, such as a desire for revenge or to become “martyrs”—will continue to turn to violence to pursue their objectives”.
In addition, the Global Trends 2025 Report puts forward four fictionalized scenarios highlighting “new challenges that could emerge as a result of the ongoing global transformation. They present new situations, dilemmas, or predicaments that represent departures from recent developments. As a set, they do not cover all possible futures. None of these is inevitable or even necessarily likely; but, as with many other uncertainties, the scenarios are potential game-changers”:
* In A World Without the West, the new powers supplant the West as the leaders on the world stage;
* October Surprise illustrates the impact of inattention to global climate change; unexpected major impacts narrow the world’s range of options;
* In BRICs’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China) Bust-Up, disputes over vital resources emerge as a source of conflict between major powers—in this case two emerging heavyweights—India and China;
* In Politics is Not Always Local, nonstate networks emerge to set the international agenda on the environment, eclipsing governments.
Forging a New Shield
Finally, the Project on National Security Reform’s Forging a New Shield finds that a new concept of national security is urgently needed in the USA: “we must learn to think differently about national security and devise new means to ensure it. The Cold War-era concept of national security has broadened as new categories of issues have pushed their way onto the national security agenda; yet others are bound to arrive in coming years, too, without neat labels or instructions for assembly and operation. This means that the operative definition of security itself must change from an essentially static concept to a dynamic one.”
The Report argues hat “…national security must be conceived as the capacity of the United States to define, defend, and advance its interests and principles in the world. The objectives of national security policy, in the world as it now is, therefore are”:
1. to maintain security from aggression against the nation by means of a national capacity to shape the strategic environment;
2. to anticipate and prevent threats;
3. to respond to attacks by defeating enemies;
4. to recover from the effects of attack; and to sustain the costs of defense To maintain security against massive societal disruption as a result of natural forces, including pandemics, natural disasters, and climate change To maintain security against the failure of major national infrastructure systems by means of building up and defending robust and resilient capacities and investing in the ability to recover from damage done to them.
In light of these objectives, the Reports identifies five key problems wih the current US national security system:
1. The system is grossly imbalanced. It supports strong departmental capabilities at the expense of integrating mechanisms;
2. Resources allocated to departments and agencies are shaped by their
3. narrowly defined core mandates rather than broader national missions.
The need for presidential integration to compensate for the systemic inability to adequately integrate or resource missions overly centralizes issue management and overburdens the White House.
4. A burdened White House cannot manage the national security system as a whole to be agile and collaborative at any time, but it is particularly vulnerable to breakdown during the protracted transition periods between administrations; and
5. Congress provides resources and conducts oversight in ways that reinforce the first four problems and make improving performance extremely difficult.
The report concludes that when “[t]aken together, the basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed, and complexity of emerging security issues prevent the White House from effectively controlling the system.
Consequently, the Report’s authors believe that a new National Security System must:
1. Mobilize and marshal the full panoply of the instruments of national power to achieve national security objectives;
2. Create and sustain an environment conducive to the exercise of effective leadership, optimal decision-making, and capable management ;
3. Devise a more constructive relationship between the executive branch and Congress appropriate for tackling the expanded national security agenda successfully;
4. Generate a sustainable capacity for the practice of stewardship—defined as the long-term ability to nurture the underlying assets of American power in human capital, social trust and institutional coherence—throughout all domains of American statecraft.
Finally, the Report puts forwards a series of recommendations designed to meet the objectives described above and which, if implemented, “…would constitute the most far-reaching governmental design innovation in national security since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947″, grouped under the following six rubrics:
1. adopting new approaches to national security system design focused on
national missions and outcomes, emphasizing integrated effort, collaboration, and agility;
2. focusing the Executive Office of the President on strategy and strategic
management;
3. decentralizing the modalities of policy implementation by creating interagency teams and interagency crisis task forces, even as strategy formulationis are centralized;
4. linking resources to goals through national security mission analysis and mission budgeting;
5. aligning personnel incentives, personnel preparation, and organizational culture with strategic objectives;
6. greatly improving the flow of knowledge and information; and
7. building a better executive-legislative branch partnership.
Together, these three reports constitute the most up-to-date strategic thinking of the US intelligence and strategic epistemic community regarding the threats and opportunities facing the world in general, and the USA in particular, over the next two decades. Its conclusions and recommendations will undoubtedly constitute the starting point from which President-Elect Barak Obama and his National Security Team, led by his Secretary of State nominee, Sen. Hillary Clinton, will develop the foreign policy of the United States over the next four years. As such, they constitute essential reading not only for students of strategy and international politics, but for all global citizens who intend to take a proactive part in shaping our common future over the coming years.
Israel’s October Surprise? (Part 1)
Today on CNN, Fareed Zakaria, host of the Fareed Zakaria GPS show and former editor of Foreign Affairs, raised the issue of the possibility of an “October Surprise” in the Middle East -an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities with his guests: Irshad Manji, an award-winning journalist, human rights advocate and author of the international bestseller, The Trouble With Islam Today: A WAke-Up CAll for Honesty and Change; Bret Stephens, a writer and news commentator for the Wall Street Journal and former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post; and Gideon Rose, the current Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs.
Bret Stephens, familiar with the Israeli political scene and with poppular Israeli attitudes and fears towards the Iranian mullah regime, opined that if there were to be such a surprise, it would rather be a “November surprise”, close on the heels of the US Presidential elections -and that it would only take place if Senator Obama were to become President-Elect. He stated that while neither the Israeli political class nor the Israeli citizens as a whole would passively acquiesce to Iran’s acquistion of nuclear capabilities, they would trust a President McCain to deal decisively with such a threat and eliminate it by force, if necessary; whereas they believed that a President Obama would finally accomodate himself with the reality of Iran as a nuclear power and attempt to negotiate some kind of “grand bargain” with Iranian President Ahmedinejad. Should Senator Obama win in November, the Israelis would only have a three-month window of opportunity to attack Iran and eliminate an existential nuclear threat whilst still benefitting from a friendly US government in the Bush White House and strike then, if at all.
Irshad Manji focused on the volatile Israeli political scene, where the recent resignation of Prime Minister Omert, deeply wounded by the disastrous Lebanon campaign of 2006 as well as by corruption investigations in his fun-raising practices, led to his replacement by Tzipi Livni, his former Foreign Affairs Minister and the first woman to hold that post since Golda Meir. In order to consolidate her position, Ms. Livni would have to first run and win the leadership of her own party, Kadima, then prepare herself for a tough election against two former Prime Ministers, Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Labour’s Ehud Barak. In these circumstances, Ms. Nanji thought it rather imporbable that an acting Prime Minister facing two tough elections would take the risk of engaging in a military action against Iran with potentially global consequences.
Gideon Rose, finally, made a connection between such a possiblity and Georgia’s recent conflict with Russia, where the US failed to restrain Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in “annoying” its powerful neighbour and triggering a conflict which brought US-Russian elections to its worst moment since the end of the Cold War. Mr. Rose commented that the Bush government could not afford to have a second major geopolitical crisis triggered by one of its close allies within six months without appearing not only incompetent, but increasingly powerless to reign in its surrogates, and would therefore do its outmost to dissuade Israel to take such a step and potentially engage the US in a third major conflict in the Middle East for which it would not be prepared either militarily or politically.
Bret Stephens is in all likelihood closest to the mark. A lame-duck President Bush would hardly have the ability to reign in a determined acting Prime Minister Livni, convinced not only of the existential and immediate threat a nuclear Iran would pose to the continued survival of Israel and of its citizens, but also of the fact that any sign of weakness or hesitation on her part to agressively devend Israel’s vital national interests and security would open the door wide to the Prime Ministership to either Barak or, more likely, Netanyahu. Whereas a McCain victory would offer her enough political cover to justify delaying any strike against Iran, Senator Obama’s election would have the opposite effect and leave her little choice other than attacking during the remaining months of the Bush Administration. From here to make the argument that an Obama victory in November would likely trigger an Israeli-Iranian conflagration with explosive geopolitical consequences there is but a very small step. As Mearsheimer and Walt recently noted, Israel’s perspective is that “Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Israel would like Washington to solve this problem, but Israeli leaders do not rule out the possibility that the Israeli Defense Forces might try to do the job if the Americans got cold feet” (J.J. Mearsheimer and S.M. Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Penguin, 2007, at p. 284).
Lost in this conversation is any in-depth analysis of the extent to which the Israeli Defense Forces are at all prepared to carry out, in the wake of the significant setback of the Lebanon campaign of 2006, such a momentous strike, compared to which the June 1981 attack against Iraq’s Osirak Nuclear plant would seem a simple weekend exercise; and whether the US military, already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, could either support Israel in case of an Iranian / Arab counterattack or actually carry out the Iranian strike itself in return for an Israeli promise of non-interference similar to that given (and kept) in the First Iraqi War of 1990-1991.
(To be continued)
