America and the World After Bush: Diplomacy and Security
James Joyner | January 21, 2009
Barack Obama has been president for more than 24 hours now. America is once again beloved by one and all. Hubris and overreach are things of the past, as the inmates of Gitmo have been freed and the troops are all home from Iraq, participating in rebuilding the infrastructure at home. Or, certainly, change is in the air.
As we wait for the Obama administration to settle in and finish whatever remains of the above tasks, we continue our look at the post-Bush era and Thomas Barnett's forthcoming Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. Rather than continuing a chapter-by-chapter treatment, today's installment will look at Chapter 5: "The Diplomatic Realignment: Rebranding the Team of Rivals" and Chapter 6, "The Security Realignment: Rediscovering Diplomacy, Defense, and Development" as an interwoven thread.
We need a rethink our grand strategy, which Barnett defines as a "diplomatic approach to shaping this age." Because of our role as the global Leviathan, it should be "mostly about trying to shape every other state's grand strategy." Our main problem at the moment is "unreasonable expectations for immediate success."
Rather than obsessing about nuclear proliferation, we should remember how effective nuclear deterrence has been. As Thomas Schelling reminds us, "no state armed with nuclear weapons has ever attacked another state similarly armed." Therefore, a nuclear Iran might actually be a good thing. Historically — US v. USSR, China v. USSR, India v Pakistan, etc. — nuclear arms stabilized "highly unstable two state standoffs."
Speaking of Iran, it's time to leverage their help in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian conflict. This means abandoning Stephen "Hadley's Rules" of stupidly refusing to give anything in return for help from states we considered bad actors.
Abandon the ridiculous notion of "energy independence." Not only is it not achievable in the short run but "it makes zero sense. Why America, right at the dawning of the most intensely integrating period our model of globalization has ever seen, considers autarky on energy to be an ideal is truly bizarre."
We must embrace Russia's potential as a "cruelly utilitarian partner" in "pushing globalization's advance." They're a major power with regional interests that we need to respect. At the same time, they have overlapping interests in promoting good behavior and enforcing international trade rules.
He invokes Colonel Joseph Nunez' maxim that "one NATO is not enough," arguing "there should be one that corresponds to every American regional combatant command (Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, East Asia) meaning we're at least four short and probably could use two more beyond that (South Asia, Central Asia)." Similarly, we need to "ramp up dramatically our military-to-military cooperation" with new powers, especially the BRIC quartet of China, India, Russia, and Brazil, as well as at least a dozen other rising states.
We must resist with every fiber of our being our historical urge to "reset" our military force after a major war. Rather than treating Iraq as a never-to-be-repeated one-off event, we must embrace the skill sets developed there as the primary model for force planning. Barnett notes that the Army and Marine Corps have already done that in terms of its officer training and doctrine but that we must beat back the forces that want to go back to a major wars mentality.
Relatedly, the Army will have to embrace the same force posture mentality that has long been the norm in the Navy: keeping "a significant portion of its force deployed overseas continuously."
Our military's "big war" planning scenarios — a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a North Korean-South Korean war, or a U.S.-Iran war — will all "evaporate well before 2020." In particular, planning for a major war with China could become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a totally unnecessary one. We must embrace China's capitalistic growth and do what we can to encourage them to evolve in the right direction. By treating them as a potential enemy, we'll ensure their resistance.
Realizing the above means a radical rethink of defense procurement. We need "more training, better guns, more maintenance, more linguists, no Future Combat System, less Navy power projection but more minesweepers, less stealth aircraft and more electronic countermeasures platforms, more close-air support, a whole lot more helicopters and a lot more unmanned aerial vehicles for real-time surveillance."
We need a Department of Everything Else, a concept Barnett has touted for years. Our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have only made this more clear, as the State Department is virtually immune to change and the Defense Department is the wrong place to put civilian reconstruction efforts. Instead, a cabinet level agency dedicated to doing international development right should be allowed to evolve organically out of several ongoing efforts, notably the AFRICOM project. To be sure, a cabinet department doesn't solve everything, as Homeland Security aptly demonstrates. But we need "institutional integrity" if we are to attract allies and private NGOs into the effort. "By performing badly, America advertises its incompetence" and puts off those who might otherwise help.
James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council.
Thomas Barnett Series at New Atlanticist:
- America and the World After Bush: A Look Back (Monday, January 19)
- America and the World After Bush: 12 Step Recovery Plan (Tuesday, January 20)
- America and the World After Bush: Diplomacy and Security (Wednesday, January 21)
- America and the World After Bush: Economics and Globalization (Thursday, January 22)
- Great Powers: Reflections (Friday, January 23)
- 5 Questions for Thomas Barnett (Friday, January 23)
Comments
How soon they forget! SEATO collapsed under the weight of the war in Viet Nam. I'd say that kind of dampened enthusiasm for additional NATOs.
I don't object to a nuclear-armed Iran. I object to the present Iranian regime armed with nuclear weapons because it's different from the other nuclear regimes: it's apocalyptic. Note there's no conflict between the current intelligence assessment of the Iranian regime's rationality and being apocalyptic. Their reasons are just different from ours.
Good point on SEATO. I'd prefer figuring out how to motivate NATO to do better in out of area operations. I differ with Barnett, though, in being much less ambitious for the use of force around the world.
How does he plan to create all these "new NATOs" if he's switching the US military over to an Iraq-style Counter-Insurgency Army? Unless he wants to guarantee the US's nuclear shield to everyone (i.e., "We'll nuke anyone who nukes first"), he's going to need a lot of conventional firepower to back all those up.
I think he contradicts himself in this chapter. Plus, to be blunt, NATO operations haven't exactly been a sterling success for the most part in his conflicts of choice, namely Afghanistan.
Why? This only makes sense if you're planning to do a lot of Iraq-style nation-building exercises requiring tens or even hundreds of thousands of troops at one time. I don't see Barnett arguing for the US to get into another one of these, and one of our two such exercises (Iraq) is slowly winding down in terms of our commitment. Perhaps he thinks we're going to end up invading Iran?
Never mind that you can't even do the above is you have an out-of-date conventional military - the costs of getting into those situations (like invading Iraq) will be too high.
Although he's right in that it is the wrong thing to do (or if we want to do it, the better way would be to tax oil consumption and promote electrically-powered alternatives), I don't think the motivation for energy independence is bizarre in the slightest. After all, a significant chunk of the world's key energy resources are in the hands of a cartel that can effectively set prices on oil, and they have used that power as a political weapon in the past, on two occasions.
Moreover, there has been some effort to spread that type of cartel to other venues. Putin has, without success, been trying to form a cartel around natural gas production.
Like a Secretary of Nation-Building?
It's not a bad idea, but Barnett also thinks China is a major rising power (if not the new #1 economic power). We don't really want to end up with a situation like in the early 20th century, when you had a declining hegemon and world economic powerhouse (Great Britain) trying to hold the international system together while the new power sits on its hands.
How long does he think this will last? It's dependent on US economic and military power.
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