Obama’s Nixon Strategy?

In Time magazine, the foreign affairs commentator Peter Beinart sees a Nixonian method to the President’s outreach to Iran and Syria — a way of shrinking the war on terror:

The best precedent for all this is what Nixon did in the late Vietnam years. For roughly two decades, the U.S. had been trying to contain “Communism” — another ominous, elastic noun that encompassed a multitude of movements and regimes. But Vietnam proved that this was impossible: the U.S. didn’t have the money or might to keep Communist movements from taking power anywhere across the globe. So Nixon stopped treating all Communists the same way. Just as Obama sees Iran as a potential partner because it shares a loathing of Al Qaeda, Nixon saw Communist China as a potential partner because it loathed the U.S.S.R.

Nixon didn’t stop there. Even as he reached out to China, he also pursued détente with the Soviet Union. This double outreach — to both Moscow and Beijing — gave Nixon more leverage over each, since each Communist superpower feared that the U.S. would favor the other, leaving it geopolitically isolated. On a smaller scale, that’s what Obama is trying to do with Iran and Syria today. By reaching out to both regimes simultaneously, he’s making each anxious that the U.S. will cut a deal with the other, leaving it out in the cold. It’s too soon to know whether Obama’s game of divide and conquer will work, but by narrowing the post-9/11 struggle, he’s gained the diplomatic flexibility to play the U.S.’s adversaries against each other rather than unifying them against us.

via Reading File – NYTimes.com.

Booklist | The Essence of War – The Chronicle of Higher Education

If you would study peace, it makes sense to start with war.  And if you would study the conflict among nations, you must look at Clausewitz.

Alarmed by war, Clausewitz made two fundamental contributions to its study. First, he insisted on the importance of thinking over doctrine; and second, he believed that such thinking could be taught.

The great military theorist–author of the oft-cited book, On War, recognized that conflict was an essential part of statecraft and inexorably linked to the rise and fall of civilziations.

Clausewitz valued history, taught and wrote about it as something vital for making sense of the world, but never thought history was enough. To study war the Clausewitz way, a warrior must go to war. But I would like to believe that On War makes casualties no longer necessary. What is painfully learned in battle might instead be learned from Clausewitz.

via The Essence of War: Clausewitz as Educator – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Whither Afgahnistan, Part II

What to be done on Afghanistan? (We should care.)   In his Council on Foreign Relations speech this morning, Senate Foreign Affairs chair Senator John Kerry states that we didn’t make a mistake going into Afghanistan–that this was in our national interests. So how to solve the strategic problems faced by the US in Af-Pak?

As Max Boot writes in the NYT, there are two different issues:

Poor governance is an argument for, not against, a troop surge. Only by sending more personnel, military and civilian, can President Obama improve the Afghan government’s performance, reverse the Taliban’s gains and prevent Al Qaeda’s allies from regaining the ground they lost after 9/11.

Assuming you agree that we must, ergo, send more troops in an Af-Pak surge of sorts, then we must decide the tactics.  Zakaria in Newsweek notes:

The crucial judgments that have to be made involve what the troops will do and how much of Afghanistan to cover. One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: “Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?” Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there. Obama should carefully consider all the options before racing to demonstrate how tough he is.

Breaking Ranks with W – Scowcroft in The New Yorker

Brent Scowcroft (middle) with President George H. W. Bush (left) and James Baker (right)

Something to think about for tonight’s lecture:

For Brent Scowcroft, the rhetoric is not matched by reality. “I believe that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history,” he says. “This notion that inside every human being is the burning desire for freedom and liberty, much less democracy, is probably not the case. I don’t think anyone knows what burns inside others. Food, shelter, security, stability. Have you read Erich Fromm, ‘Escape from Freedom’? I don’t agree with him, but some people don’t really want to be free.”

Scowcroft is unmoved by the stirrings of democracy movements in the Middle East. He does not believe, for instance, that the signs of a democratic awakening in Lebanon are related to the Iraq war. He sees the recent evacuation of the Syrian Army from Lebanon not as a victory for self-government but as a foreshadowing of civil war. “I think it’s something we have to worry about—the sectarian emotions that were there when the Syrians went in aren’t gone.”

For Scowcroft, the second Gulf war is a reminder of the unwelcome consequences of radical intervention, especially when it is attempted without sufficient understanding of America’s limitations or of the history of a region. “I believe in the fallibility of human nature,” Scowcroft told me. “We continually step on our best aspirations. We’re humans. Given a chance to screw up, we will.”

Letter from Washington: Breaking Ranks–What turned Brent Scowcroft against the Bush Administration? : The New Yorker or try here.

Book Review – ‘The Hawk and the Dove – Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,’ by Nicholas Thompson – Review – NYTimes.com

Meet two giants in the field of U.S. foreign policy, Nitze and Kennan, or the “Hawk” and the “Dove.”  Herein originated the policy of containment, as well as a vigorous debate:

Who was right? Did the United States put too much stock in military preparedness, unnecessarily antagonizing the Soviets while guaranteeing that the East-West rivalry would play out in the sole arena where Moscow could compete? Or did Americans act sensibly in response to a clear and present danger of Soviet aggression? Nicholas Thompson insists in “The Hawk and the Dove,” his thoroughly engrossing, if not altogether satisfying, dual biography of Nitze and Kennan, that both men had valid points.

“Each was profoundly right at some moments and profoundly wrong at others,” Thompson asserts of their long, inter­twined careers as statesmen, policy makers and public intellectuals. The two men “pulled in different directions” but “complemented each other” and, Thompson suggests, contributed in distinct ways to America’s victory in the cold war. They even managed to remain friends despite their differences.

via Book Review – ‘The Hawk and the Dove – Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,’ by Nicholas Thompson – Review – NYTimes.com.

Knowing You Are Right | Overconfidence, Bluffing, and Strategy

In a short New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell–namer of the famed term “tipping point” and a book to match–draws lessons from Wall Street to the British invasion of Galipoli–noting that overconfidence often plays an important role in the fall of the mighty. (Andrew Sullivan disagrees, seeing a psychological clues as not “mutually exlusive explanation–they are mutually reinforcing.”)

Still, this is a helpful lesson for the Type A leader, who things that things will work out if s/he wills it so.  In fact, from a system viewpoint these decisions become like bullets ricocheting–causing a catastrophe:

From an individual perspective, it is hard to distinguish between the times when excessive optimism is good and the times when it isn’t. All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.” When one opponent bluffs, he can score an easy victory. But when everyone bluffs, Wrangham writes, rivals end up “escalating conflicts that only one can win and suffering higher costs than they should if assessment were accurate.” The British didn’t just think the Turks would lose in Gallipoli; they thought that Belgium would prove to be an obstacle to Germany’s advance, and that the Russians would crush the Germans in the east. The French, for their part, planned to be at the Rhine within six weeks of the start of the war, while the Germans predicted that by that point they would be on the outskirts of Paris. Every side in the First World War was bluffing, with the resolve and skill that only the deluded are capable of, and the results, of course, were catastrophic.

Another insight Gladwell offers is the limits of training devices, models, and simulations.  Using the false comparison of bridge to Wall Street in a critical hiring decision, he quotes Gideon Keren:

In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias. That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.” It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all. Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms. “I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise, that every step taken toward mastery brings with it an increased risk of mastery’s curse. Cayne must have come back from the Spingold bridge tournament fortified in his belief in his own infallibility.

via The psychology of overconfidence : The New Yorker.

Video Game Review – Dawn of Discovery – Ubisoft’s New Strategy Game Fascinates Without Brute Force – NYTimes.com

The idea of simulation is tried and true–a scientific method for the social sciences.  But thanks to geeky-bela games like Civilization and Sim City, redeeming social value can be found whiling away time in front of the screen.  In particular, using sims in negotiation or diplomacy a la Model UN or case studies is a very effective tool, pedagogically speaking.  Enter, a societal sim game that doesn’t preoccupy itself with the “war” part of war and peace.  Consider a new video game, Dawn of Discover, reviewed in NYT:

The other difference that distinguishes Dawn of Discovery is that while combat is the entire foundation of most strategy games, it is almost an afterthought in Dawn of Discovery — a natural, organic, almost ancillary outgrowth of an empire’s growing commercial power and appetite. The game makes it so hypnotically enjoyable to build a settlement from huts to town houses, to build churches and bazaars and spice farms and stone quarries, that it’s easy to forget about the naval skirmishes.

In its intricate and well-drawn story line Dawn of Discovery is anti-colonial. The player begins as a minor noble in what is called an Occidental empire and is soon tasked with establishing relations with and exploring the Orient. The Orient, with its gorgeous Middle Eastern architecture, is basically populated by the good guys. The bad guys are the zealous Crusaders from the Occident who want to exploit the Orient. Ideally the player ends up defeating the bad guys and restoring peace and justice to the Occident.

Ross Explains the Middle East

Whither the Middle East?  In this book, described by the NYTBR as both “analytical and proscriptive,” Dennis Ross helps us out with his take on the big think issues:

“The mother of all myths,” they write, is linkage, the bizarrely resilient idea that once the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved, the dictatorships and ramshackle monarchies that rule the region will transform themselves into friendly liberal democracies and the terrorists will put away their bombs. This, Ross and Makovsky say, is nonsense (as the recent turmoil in Iran illustrates). To buttress their case, they list 10 regional conflicts, like the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, that had no connection with Israel.

A good book for some innovative thinking–and one that no less than President Obama may be considering, since Ross is in the middle of the current administrations’ policy planning.

Update:  For a lot more reading, especially on the peace process, Steven A. Cook at CFR has a nice little would-be syllabus that gives some insight without being too easy.  And a review in Sunday’s NYTBR notes a quirky rereading of the history of the Jewish State, Israel is Real by Rich Cohen–inventive, perhaps to be controversial, but sounds like a compelling tale of the narrative known by many but important to understand the region’s current concerns.

Is History Useful? | Kissinger Learns the Hard Way

If you’re former Secretary of State and diplomatic heavyweight Henry Kissinger, you might be a wee bit concerned about who is writing the personal history of your professional life and how it is portrayed:

Kissinger has always been acutely sensitive to criticism, and he miscalculated by providing Walter Isaacson full access for a 1992 biography, which was supposed to counterbalance Seymour Hersh’s withering 1983 account, “The Price of Power.” It didn’t. Then came Christopher Hitchens’s “Trial of Henry Kissinger” 2001. Turning to two British historians with conservative pedigrees must have seemed the prudent way to restore order: Horne explains that in 2004 he met with Kissinger, whom he has known for almost three decades, and proposed confining himself to 1973, thereby allowing the equally prolific Niall Ferguson, who extolled Kissinger last year in The Times Literary Supplement, to work unmolested on a forthcoming official life. [from NYTBR of Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year by Alstair Horne]

In a similar vein, Margaret MacMillan addresses the larger theme–an important point for all who work in the realm of international relations where the past is always present.  What is the use of history, or as she wonders, the “abuses,” as well?  She concludes:

History’s ultimate utility does not lie in its predictive or even its explanatory value, but in its ability to teach humility, to nurture an appreciation of the limits on our capacity to see the past clearly or to know fully the historical determinants of our own brief passage in time. “If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful,” she writes. A knowledge of history, as the great historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt once wrote, will not make us clever for the next time, but wise forever.

An even better book is the one by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May called Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, where leaders get a useful heuristic for analyzing past events for current concerns.

Thinking Big, as in a few pithy thoughts on “Grand Strategy”

One colleague mentioned recently that we can’t ‘do’ grand strategy—its really only known years after policy has been argued and events played out.  I’m not sure what I think about that, but I do like to think about it…first being exposed to it reviewing the syllabus for John Lewis Gaddis’ application-only course at Yale (co-taught with Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill.)

Gaddis has noted that academics have a hard time doing the big think–listing several reasons. I agree that the lost art of teaching rhetoric has a great deal to do with it (which still survives at BYU, thanks in no small part to people such as Greg Clark and Gideon Burton).

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

A new book by Leslie Gelb, reviewed by historian Michael Beschloss captures the practice of this shall-we-say-not-yet-but-soon-to-be-lost-art, a “plea for greater stragtegic thinking.”

Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, persuasively argues that the most effective presidents try to fashion a coherent strategy, explain it forthrightly to the public and resist the temptation to be distracted by sudden opportunities and crises. Others have made this point before. (See, for instance, John Lewis Gaddis’s landmark history “Strategies of Containment,” which shows how six presidents fought the cold war.) But Gelb’s treatment is distinctive, adorned with astute historical examples and reminiscences from his own high-level service in Johnson’s Pentagon and Carter’s State Department. It is filled with gritty, shrewd, specific advice on foreign policy ends and means that will be especially useful for a new president and secretary of state without deep experience dealing with the world (although the bulk of the book was clearly written before the world economic calamity of the past months).

via Book Review – ‘Power Rules – How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy,’ by Leslie H. Gelb – Review – NYTimes.com.