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Syria, United States

Did Syria’s Assad regime have a Dr. Strangelove moment?

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January 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick’s dark nuclear war comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

It’s the charming tale of U.S. general Jack Ripper (Get it!?), who’s gone completely off his rocker and launches the world into a nuclear crisis as the United States and the Soviet Union bumble to stop the fallout from the chain of events that the wayward general sets in place.

In the U.S. war room, the meek U.S. president (played brilliantly by Peter Sellers) asks another general, ‘Buck’ Turgidson, why a renegade general somehow found a way to order the use of nuclear weapons outside the chain of command, given that the U.S. president is the only one authorized to launch a nuclear attack.

Turgidson replies, ‘And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.’

It’s starting to look like last week’s horrific chemical warfare attack was a case of someone in the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad exceeding his authority as well.

Did Syria have a ‘Dr. Strangelove’ moment?

And if so, how should the international community ‘punish’ the Assad regime if it turns out that a rogue pro-Assad commander launched the attack and not Assad or his top guard?  Is there some sort of negligence per se standard for crimes against humanity?  Even as British prime minister David Cameron is backing down from the urgency of an immediate Syria strike (at least until the United Nations finishes its initial assessment of the chemical attack in the days ahead) and French president François Hollande is emphasizing a political solution to Syria, the case for an overhasty, unilateral military response from the United States is falling apart in favor of a multilateral, evidence-based approach that would otherwise avoid further internationalizing the two-year, sectarian Syrian conflict.

Late Tuesday, Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution broke the story in Foreign Policy that the United States and its allies are so certain that the Assad regime is responsible for last Wednesday’s attack on the basis of intercepted phone calls that largely show confusion and panic on the part of the Syrian regime:

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they’re certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime — and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.

But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? “It’s unclear where control lies,” one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable. “Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?”

Nor are U.S. analysts sure of the Syrian military’s rationale for launching the strike — if it had a rationale at all. Perhaps it was a lone general putting a long-standing battle plan in motion; perhaps it was a miscalculation by the Assad government. Whatever the reason, the attack has triggered worldwide outrage, and put the Obama administration on the brink of launching a strike of its own in Syria. “We don’t know exactly why it happened,” the intelligence official added. “We just know it was pretty fucking stupid.”

Of course, that calls into question the strident and unequivocal stance of many U.S. and European officials over the weekend and earlier this week, including British foreign minister William Hague and U.S. secretary of state John Kerry.

Today brings further news that top U.S. intelligence officials who have seen the U.S. report on the Assad regime’s culpability believe that it is not a ‘slam dunk’ case, a reference to the allegedly solid intelligence that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency held in 2002 that implicated Iraqi president Saddam Hussein — erroneously — with having a nuclear weapons program:

A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats – including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical weapons use, according to two intelligence officials and two more U.S. officials.

But one senior U.S. official who read the report said Thursday that despite those caveats, the report assesses with “high confidence” that the Syrian government was responsible…. The official conceded that there is no proof listed in the report tying Assad personally to ordering the attack, but the official also said there was no mention in the report of the possibility that a rogue element could have been responsible.

That’s certainly very consistent with Shachtman’s report, and it makes intuitive sense.  With Assad generally winning the war and reclaiming ground against the disparate opposition, it makes no sense for Assad to draw the ire of the world by launching chemical warfare on civilians.  The timing, moreover, has always been suspicious given that United Nations chemical weapons inspectors were sitting in a Damascus hotel when the chemical attack occurred.  We know that the Assad regime has certain access to chemical weapons, and while there’s a possibility that some weapons have fallen into the hands of anti-Assad rebels, this explanation is certainly less harrowing than the alternative possibility that radical opposition elements launched a toxic chemical attack in the hopes of framing Assad and drawing the international community against him.

Although we’re still awaiting the intelligence report that the United States promised to release this week, the public British report released earlier today has been thoroughly panned:

In an echo of the buildup to the Iraq war in 2003, Downing Street took the rare step of releasing the assessment of the JIC to support its case that the Assad regime was responsible.  But the assessment was mainly based on “open source” evidence such as video footage of the victims and a judgment that the opposition does not have the capability to launch such an attack…

The JIC acknowledged that some of its assessment was based on “open source” evidence such as testimony from victims, doctors and video footage. But in a separate letter to Cameron the JIC chairman, Jon Day, said he had seen “highly sensitive” unpublished intelligence that supported their view that the regime had launched the attacks to clear the opposition from strategic parts of Damascus.

But, of course, the British government isn’t providing the unpublished intelligence, so their rationale essentially boils down to, ‘trust us.’  Moreover, as Guardian commentators Ian Black and Ian Sample write, the intelligence reports boasts no scientific evidence and rests on little more than informed speculation:

In one passage the JIC appears to weaken its own conclusions by noting that there was “no obvious political or military trigger for regime use of CW on an apparently larger scale now” – given the presence of the UN inspectors. It wrote that permission to authorise CW had “probably been delegated” by Assad to “senior regime commanders, such as [*]”. It added: “But any deliberate change in the scale and nature of use would require his authorisation.” That language suggests the possibility, as reported in the US, of unauthorised or accidental use of CW munitions.

Syria, United States

On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gives a

Even before the United States has provided any public evidence that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is responsible for what appears to be a craven chemical warfare attack in Ghouta last Wednesday, the United States is preparing to launch missile strikes against Syria and Assad in retaliation as soon as Thursday, with the support of French president François Hollande and British prime minister David Cameron.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

That marks a failure of U.S. president Barack Obama’s foreign policy in at least four senses.

The first is that we still don’t know what happened last Wednesday.  We do know that a chemical attack of some variety ultimately killed many civilians, up to 1300, on the eastern outskirts of Damascus.  But we don’t know which chemical agent caused it (was it sarin? was it concentrated tear gas? was it mustard or chlorine gas?) and, more importantly, we certainly don’t know who launched the attack.  While the U.S., French and British governments assure us that Assad was responsible, the public evidence is far from certain.  While the U.S. state department claims that a full intelligence assessment is coming later this week, it assures us for now that it’s ‘crystal clear’ that Assad is responsible.  But how credible will that assessment be if it’s delivered hours or minutes before a U.S. military strike?  If it’s delivered after the military strike?  Will it contain forensics evidence gathered yesterday by United Nations experts?  No one knows.

While Assad’s certainly a prime suspect, there’s more than enough reason to believe, in the absence of further intelligence or forensic evidence to the contrary, that anti-Assad rebels could well have perpetrated the attack to frame Assad and draw the international community (or at least the United States and Europe) into the kind of response that now seems likely to happen in the next 48 hours.  At a minimum, the United States should wait for U.N. chemical weapons inspectors, who spent at least a short time on the scene of the attack yesterday, to draw what conclusions they can on the basis of hard evidence.  What happens if we learn in one year or five years that radical Sunni elements within the opposition were responsible for the attack?  That will only encourage false-flag attacks in the future designed to provoke the United States into inadvertently taking sides in a civil war.

The second is that it’s an uncharacteristically unilateral, hasty and severe response.  Assume that we had proof that Assad is responsible for the chemical attacks.  The next step would be to determine the appropriate response from the international community, and it is telling that the United States and its British and French allies believe that a military response should be the first step, not the last step.  There’s a panoply of various responses that the United States is ready to bypass, all of which could bear the stamp of legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council.  Those include a U.N. peacekeeping and/or further inspections forces, a NATO-led and UN-approved no-fly zone, a tighter regime of diplomatic and economic sanctions against the Assad regime, and a prosecution against Assad and his military leaders for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.  Moreover, given the current stalemate, Syria is now essentially split into three disparate parts: pro-Assad territory along the coast and the Lebanese border, anti-Assad territory in the north and Kurdish strongholds in the northeast:

Main areas of control in Syria as of 3 June 2013

With Assad regaining ground over the past months, it doesn’t look like the end of the civil war will come from a military triumph but from a political settlement.  That makes an immediate military response (and not a political response) from the United States even more inappropriate.  By all means, use the threat of military action as a negotiating point with Russia and Syria’s other allies on the Security Council.  But by launching a hasty attack just eight days after the incident makes it seem to the rest of the world that the U.S. action is less concerned about punishment for chemical warfare, but rather salvaging the credibility of the Obama administration over an ill-advised ‘red line’ stand that Obama articulated last autumn in the heat of a presidential campaign. Continue reading On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later →

Syria, United States

Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame

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U.S. secretary of state John Kerry this afternoon emerged with some strong remarks about the unfolding international situation with respect to Syria, where chemical weapons were unleashed last Wednesday upon civilians in Ghouta in the eastern outskirts of Damascus and that killed up to 1,300 people.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

Max Fisher at The Washington Post writes that Kerry’s remarks amounted to a ‘war speech,’ that the Obama administration has all but decided to respond to the chemical attack with air strikes.  I don’t disagree with that assessment, but the oddest thing about Kerry’s seven minutes on Syria was how much of it he spent arguing that the attacks were real — consider the following exchange:

Last night, after speaking with foreign ministers from around the world about the gravity of this situation, I went back and I watched the videos — the videos that anybody can watch in the social media, and I watched them one more gut-wrenching time. It is really hard to express in words the the human suffering that they lay out before us.  As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him, the images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound, bodies contorting in spasms, human suffering that we can never ignore or forget. Anyone who could claim that an attack of this staggering scale could be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass.  What is before us today is real, and it is compelling.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of John Kerry (pictured above) — he’s had a strong start at State and that follows a generally impeccable senatorial record of thoughtful engagement on foreign affairs.  But with all due respect, I certainly hope the chief diplomat of the United States of America is spending more time reviewing the intelligence that the U.S., British and French governments allegedly have that implicates the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in the chemical attack than watching shock footage on YouTube.

No one is arguing that the attack was contrived or fabricated — it’s a horrific slaughter that deserves a united and firm response from the international community conveying that the use of chemical weapons to kill civilians, including women and children, is unacceptable.  What remains at issue is determining who was responsible for the attack, and that’s why it was odd to watch Kerry spend more time knocking down a straw-man argument than explaining why the U.S. government is so sure that Assad was responsible for the attack.  Earlier today, Saleh Muslim, head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), who has clashed with both pro-Assad and anti-Assad forces, said that he doesn’t believe Assad is responsible for the attacks.  It’s a real question, and the U.S. media and the rest of the world should demand an answer.

What’s staggering is that, with all signs pointing to U.S. and British military poised to launch some kind of strike against Assad, the Obama administration still hasn’t made the case for why it believes that Assad — and not anti-Assad extremists looking to draw the international community into Syria’s two-year civil war — is to blame.  As many commentators have written, the timing of last week’s attack is incredibly suspicious, given that U.N. weapons inspectors were in Damascus during the attacks and that Assad has generally been gaining ground against the opposition, and there’s plenty of reason why the more radical elements among the anti-Assad opposition want to provoke the world’s ire against Assad.

It’s generally undisputed that Assad has stockpiled chemical weapons in the past, while we don’t know if any rebel group of the opposition now have access to them.  But that’s hardly a smoking gun.

The fact that Assad denied U.N. experts to inspect the scene for five days (and then allowed only 90 minutes of access today) is highly suspicious.  But in a court of law in the United States, that would amount to circumstantial evidence.  Remember that Saddam Hussein hedged over whether he had weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003 mostly because he wanted to deter neighboring Iran.  Moreover, I can think of a half-dozen reasons why the Assad regime might hesitate to allow United Nations inspectors into the affected area.  (If Assad wasn’t actually responsible for the chemical attack, do you think he has enough control to guarantee the safety of U.N. inspectors from anti-Assad rebels?)

The international community deserves more from the United States, given its track record of failed intelligence over the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (notably nuclear weapons) in Iraq in 2003.  That ‘slam dunk’ intelligence justified an eight-year military effort that catalyzed massive amounts of violence in Iraq.  New revelations this morning from Foreign Policy detailing the U.S. government’s complicity and acquiescence in the use of chemical weapons by then-ally Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s only underscore the troublesome record that the United States has accrued on this issue. Continue reading Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame →

Syria, United States

U.S. says ‘very little doubt’ Assad responsible for Syrian chemical warfare, preps possible intervention

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The international response to last Wednesday’s chemical warfare attack on the outskirts of Damascus is fast congealing, with U.S., British and French intelligence all pointing to the regime of Bashar al-Assad as the culprit.USflagfreesyria Syria Flag Icon

An official in the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama said Sunday morning that there’s ‘very little doubt’ that Assad perpetrated the attack.  French president François Hollande said earlier today that there was ‘a body of evidence indicating that the August 21 attack was chemical in nature, and that everything led to the belief that the Syrian regime was responsible for this unspeakable act.’

Obama and U.K. prime minister David Cameron have discussed the possibility of some form of military intervention, according to The Guardian and other news sources.  Meanwhile, the Syrian regime, under pressure from its Russian and Iranian allies, has agreed to allow U.N. weapons experts to inspect the site of the attacks.  In a sour irony, U.N. inspectors were already in Damascus earlier this week when the attack occurred for the purpose of determining the extent of potential chemical warfare earlier this spring.

The outset burden on Western governments is to connect the dots to make clear why they believe Assad is responsible — a decade ago, U.S. and British intelligence claimed they had a ‘slam dunk’ case that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction,  launching a unilateral attack on what turned out to be incorrect intelligence.  If anything, there’s ample evidence in the revelations about PRISM and the Internet snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency that we shouldn’t necessarily take the governments of even liberal democracy at their word.

Remember that the timing of the chemical attacks is incredibly suspicious — Assad’s forces are generally winning via-à-vis the opposition forces in Syria, so it’s not incredibly clear why Assad would order a chemical attack now, especially under the noses of U.N. chemical weapons inspectors.  But given the Obama administration’s position that use of chemical weapons is a ‘red line’ that, if crossed, will merit an international response, there’s every reason for opposition forces to use a small-scale attack to try to draw U.S. and European power against Assad, and other radical Sunni elements sympathetic to both the anti-Assad forces and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are more than happy to bait the West into intervening in the Syrian civil war.   But while it’s generally accepted that Assad has access to chemical weapons, it’s far less clear that any of the disparate rebel groups have them or have access to them.

Even if Assad is guilty of what amounts to a war crime, there’s still reason to tread lightly.  If Assad is responsible, he should face a wide berth of sanction under international law — those might include further tightening economic and diplomatic sanctions against Assad, his inner circle and the Syrian military, action sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons or destroy his ability to deploy them in the future (including a no-fly zone), a fully empowered U.N. peacekeeping force, and an indictment from the International Criminal Court against Assad and the top military or other Syrian officials directly responsible for the chemical attack.

But even though U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel is preparing for ‘all contingencies,’ and U.S. warships in the eastern Mediterranean are already positioning for a potential attack, the international community can still respond in an affirmative way short of immediate U.S.-led military action.  Moreover, if Assad were removed tomorrow, Syria would still face a power vacuum, the potential for even more intense fighting between Shi’a/Alawite and Sunni Muslims within Syria and jockeying among various opposition groups, which range from secular Assad opponents to very conservative Islamic fundamentalists.  Those are just the known potential downsides for Syria — the unknown consequences and the potential adverse reaction in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East are more reason to tread lightly.

The next week is likely to bring even louder calls for the United States and/or the United Nations to act. To do something.

But the challenge for the Obama administration is that foreign policymaking in real time is very difficult, while political soundbytes are as easy as they are worthless.  There’s obviously a role for U.S. and international leadership to register a stand for human rights and against crimes of humanity.  But don’t trust anyone — in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in the Middle East — who has a ‘clear’ answer in mind for how the international community should now respond.

Don’t let hawks like U.S. senator John McCain convince you otherwise — the response to the latest turn in Syria’s conflict is more complicated than the polar choice of ‘doing nothing’ and launching a U.S.-led attack on Syria, guns-a-blazin’.  Given the U.S. history of intervention in the Middle East, and the horrific sectarian violence that followed the U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it would be less controversial for the United Nations — not the United States — to take the lead in the organizing the international response.  Also don’t let liberal interventionists try to convince you that the United States should act immediately in order to avoid a Rwanda-style genocide in the Middle East.  Though the international community largely stood aside while 800,000 Tustis were hacked to death by Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they welcomed the belated French intervention that served to provide relief and refuge to the genocidaires themselves.

Syria, United States

Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack

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In the aftermath of what now seems like a devastating and lethal chemical-weapons attack against thousands of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus early Wednesday, U.S. president Barack Obama is treading lightly on the evolving turn in the Syrian civil war — at least until we know more about the circumstances of the attack.USflagfreesyria Syria Flag Icon

In an interview today with CNN, Obama measured his words very carefully about what action he believes the United States or the international community can or should take in the wake of what amounts to a violation of international law:

Asked about claims by anti-regime activists in Syria that Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons in an attack that was said to have killed more than 1,300 people, Obama responded that officials are “right now gathering information” and that “what we’ve seen indicates that this is clearly a big event of grave concern.”

“It is very troublesome,” the president stressed.  Obama said U.S. officials are pushing “to prompt better action” from the United Nations, and are calling on the Syrian government to allow an investigation of the site of the alleged attack outside Damascus.

“We don’t expect cooperation (from the Syrian government), given their past history,” Obama conceded.  He quickly followed up with a warning, however, that “core national interests” of the U.S. are now involved in Syria’s civil war, “both in terms of us making sure that weapons of mass destruction are not proliferating, as well as needing to protect our allies, our bases in the region.”

His words are certain to disappoint both neoconservatives on the U.S. right and liberal interventionists on the U.S. left (many of which populate key roles within his administration) who see the attack as a clear violation of international law and an invitation for an aggressive response from the international community.  Already, U.S. senator John McCain is renewing calls for U.S. military intervention in Syria.

But there’s good reason for caution, and although it’s politically easier to make bold statements at a time of international crisis, Obama’s statement on Friday wisely reflects the ambiguity that we still know very little about the Syrian civil war, the anti-Assad opposition, the chemical attack itself and the potential unintended consequences of a more muscular U.S. or European response.

No one is comfortable to sit idly by when a thousand civilians have been gassed to death.  But in a world where human rights activists and conservative hawks alike are quick to pass judgment on the Obama administration’s reaction, it’s worth taking a moment to applaud Obama’s restraint.

We still don’t yet know who is responsible for the chemical attack nor do we actually know exactly what the attack agent was (reports indicate it was perhaps sarin, mustard gas or chlorine gas, though we won’t know until soil samples and other evidence is examined).  Although British foreign minister William Hague has gone further than the Obama administration in blaming Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad for the attack, the public evidence does not point to the clear conclusion that Hague has drawn.  It’s widely accepted that Assad has access to chemical weapons, but after nearly two years of open civil war, it is not impossible for some of those weapons to have fallen into opposition hands — or worse. 

The timing, most of all, is incredibly odd, as BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner and others have noted.  If anything, Assad has been winning the civil war and reclaiming ground from the opposition.  The opposition’s repeated attempts to form a unified front against Assad have been mixed at best.  Meanwhile, a United Nations weapons inspection team was in Damascus this week to determine the extent of chemical warfare during the war.  It seems incredibly unlikely that Assad, who’s gained the upper hand, would launch a chemical weapons attack the very week when UN inspectors are merely kilometers away.  Allegations of previous chemical attacks stem from March and April — this is the first chemical attack in four months.

That opens the uncomfortable door to the notion that radical elements within the opposition, which ranges from secular Assad opponents to radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaeda sympathizers, could have unleashed the attack.  Knowing that it is losing, the chemical attack might have been a false-flag gambit designed to inflame international opinion against Assad, especially given the position that Obama has taken that chemical weapon use is a ‘red line’ that will merit international action.  But it could be radical Islamic elements unassociated with the opposition, and it could be rogue elements of the Syrian army.

So far, Assad has refused to allow U.N. inspectors to examine the scene, which is an unacceptable response.  Even Assad’s allies like Russia are calling on him to allow U.N. access, and the longer Assad hesitates, the guiltier his regime looks.

But even if Assad was responsible for the attack — the worst chemical warfare since Iraqi president Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons in the 1980s against his own people and on the battlefield against Iran — there’s still reason to tread lightly. Continue reading Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack →

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Yellen is the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair — and that’s why Obama should pick her

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Financial reporter David Wessel provides a hilarious anecdote about Ben Bernanke, currently the chair of the Federal Reserve, from his days on the Bush administration’s economic team in his 2009 book, In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, that captures in capsule form one of the reasons why Bernanke has made such a great Fed chair: USflag

One day, Bernanke showed up for a monthly Oval Office meeting wearing a dark blue suit and light tan socks.

Bush notices. ‘Ben,’ the president said, according to one participant, ‘where did you get those socks?’

‘Gap,’ replied Bernanke. ‘Three pair for seven dollars.’

The president wouldn’t let it go, mentioning Bernanke’s light tan socks repeatedly during the forty-five-minute meeting.

At the next month’s meeting, Bernanke had convinced nearly the entire staff, as well as U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, to wear tan socks, getting the last laugh on Bush.  Beyond the innocent prank, the implication is clear enough — Bernanke, always a bit of an outsider in Washington, was wearing tan socks in a city of black socks.  That’s perhaps appropriate for a Jewish economist who grew up in South Carolina.

That distance has been one of the understated keys to Bernanke’s success as Fed chair since 2006 — he’s a rare Fed chair who has enough distance from official Washington to be a credibly independent central banker but also sufficient experience to navigate Washington’s politics.  Despite his eight-month stint as chair of the Bush administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, Bernanke had also chaired Princeton University’s economics department for six years and served as a member of the Fed’s seven-person Board of Governors from 2002 to 2005.  He’s not the kind of Washington fixture that Alan Greenspan had increasingly become in his 19 years as Fed chair, nor is Bernanke’s wife a consummate political insider like NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Greenspan’s wife.

As Felix Salmon writes today at Reuters, the Fed chair is one of the two most important officers in the United States.  Bernanke’s successor, who will take office in February 2014, will be even more important to world politics, in at least an indirect capacity for his role in global markets, than U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, U.S. treasury secretary Jacob Lew or U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel.

Right now, there are two frontrunners:

  • Lawrence Summers, treasury secretary in the Clinton administration from 1999 to 2001, Harvard University president from 2001 to 2006 and the hard-charging director of the Obama administration’s National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010; and
  • Janet Yellen, vice chair of the Federal Reserve since 2010, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, and the chair of the Clinton administration’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999.

The conventional wisdom is that Summers has an edge, because Obama knows him so well, and trusts him, on the basis of his role earlier in the administration.  So Obama therefore prefers to appoint Summers, as do all of the top economic policymakers close to Obama, such as Lew, former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC director Gene Sperling.

The conventional wisdom is also that while Summers is a exceedingly brilliant and talented economist, he is not someone who values collaboration, a key trait for someone whose goal is to lead the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee that is comprised of the seven members of the Board of Governors and a rotating slate of five of the 12 regional Federal Bank presidents.  The substantive knocks on Summers are even greater.  He supported deregulation within the financial industry during the Clinton administration that allowed for the proliferation of new financial derivatives markets, and he opposed the ‘Volcker Rule’ in the 2010 Dodd-Frank package of financial reforms that restricts banks from using deposits in riskier trading.  That’s not counting his controversial turn at Harvard, when he was forced to resign over comments suggesting that men have a greater natural aptitude for the sciences nor does it take into account the conflicts of his post-government employment with private-sector Wall Street firms like Citigroup and hedge fund D.E. Shaw or his lack of actual experience within the Federal Reserve system.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution argues that Summers is preferable to Yellen because Summers has more ‘right-wing street cred,’ and therefore might work more easily with the current Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and a potential future Republican presidential administration, both because he’s taken more criticism from the left than Yellen and because of Yellen’s background at Berkeley.

But Salmon argues that Yellen would be a better chair on the day-to-day matters that are crucial to stabilizing the U.S. and global economy (noting that any Fed chair would respond to a financial crisis guns-a-blazin’).  Ezra Klein, at The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, argues that we don’t know which candidate would be stronger on financial regulation, another key Fed role.  Paul Krugman argues that Yellen’s detractors are motivated by rampant sexism:

Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome.

In the grand scheme of things, both Yellen and Summers are likely to pursue similar policies.  Even though Yellen has been labeled an inflation ‘dove,’ there’s no indication that either Yellen or Summers will abandon Bernanke’s January 2012 decision to set an explicit 2% inflation rate target for the first time in Fed history.  But the next Fed chair will most certainly wind down the Fed’s extraordinary ‘quantitative easing’ actions of the past five years whereby the Fed has purchased assets, bonds and other securities at an unprecedented rate, thereby boosting liquidity in the global financial system.

The reason to appoint Yellen is not because she is a woman, because she’s an inflationary ‘dove,’ because we think she might be a stronger advocate of financial regulation or even because she has more experience within the Fed.  It’s because she will be seen to have more independence  at a time when central bank independence will be crucial to the Fed’s success — that makes Yellen the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair, and it’s the key reason why Yellen’s nomination should be a slam-dunk case for Obama. Continue reading Yellen is the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair — and that’s why Obama should pick her →

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Clarke’s British reform failures a lesson as Holder pushes for historic turn on U.S. crime

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As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder makes a serious push for prison and justice reform in the United States, he would do well to look at a similar push across the Atlantic — Kenneth Clarke’s attempt to reverse decades of tough criminal law policies in the United Kingdom provides a cautionary tale.USflagUnited Kingdom Flag Icon

Holder announced yesterday in a speech to the American Bar Association that the U.S. justice department will seek to avoid mandatory sentences for non-violent, low-level drug-related offenses, and justice reform advocates largely cheered a welcome pivot from the ‘tough-on-crime’ approach to justice that’s marked U.S. policy for the past four decades throughout much of the ‘War on Drugs’ — drug-related offenses have largely fueled the explosion in the U.S. prison population.  Holder will instruct prosecutors in federal cases not to list the amount of drugs in indictments for such non-violent drug offenses, thereby evading the mandatory sentences judges would otherwise be forced to administer under federal sentencing guidelines.  That’s only a small number of prisoners because 86% of the U.S. prison population is incarcerated by state government and not by the federal government.

Holder called for ‘sweeping, systemic changes’ to the American justice system yesterday and attacked mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders, which he said caused ‘too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason.’

That approach has left the United States with a prison population of nearly 2.5 million people (though the absolute number has declined slightly after peaking in 2008) and the world’s highest incarceration rate of 716 prisoners per 100,000 .  That’s more than Russia (484), Brazil (274) the People’s Republic of China (170) or England and Wales (148) and as Holder noted yesterday, the United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Particularly damning to the United States is that 39.4% of all U.S. inmates are black and 20.6% are Latino, despite the fact that black Americans comprise just 13% of the U.S. population and Latinos comprise just 16%.  Holder yesterday cited a report showing that black convicts receive prison sentences that are around 20% longer than white convicts who commit the same crime.  Holder denounced mandatory minimums as ‘draconian,’ and made an eloquent case that U.S. enforcement priorities have had ‘a destabilizing effect on particular communities, largely poor and of color,’ that have been counterproductive in many cases.  Holder also made that case that in an era of budget cuts, America’s incarceration rate is a financial burden of up to $80 billion a year, and that reducing the U.S. prisoner population could shore up the country’s finances as well.

But Holder — and prison reform advocates that have emerged on both the American left and right — face a heavy task in reversing nearly a half-century of crime legislation that has largely ratcheted up, not down.

Just ask Kenneth Clarke, who until last September was the justice minister in UK prime minister David Cameron’s coalition government, who as one of the longest-serving and most effective Tories in government for the past four decades, faced a tough road in enacting prison reform in England and Wales.

Though its prison population and incarceration rate pales in comparison to that of the United States, the British justice system imprisons more offenders than many other countries in the European Union, such as France (101 prisoners per 100,000) or Germany (80).

Cameron faced a delicate task in finding a role for Clarke in his government back in mid-2010.  Clarke, a self-proclaimed ‘big beast’ of Tory politics got his start under ‘one nation Tory’ prime minister Edward Heath and found his stride under Heath’s successor, Margaret Thatcher.  He became John Major’s chancellor of the exchequer, guiding No. 11 from the dark days of the 1992 ‘Black Wednesday’ sterling crisis to a more robust financial position.  When Labour swept to power in May 1997 under Tony Blair, Clarke immediately became the most popular Conservative in the country, even though the significantly more right-wing and increasingly euroskpetic party thrice denied the pro-Europe Clarke its leadership.  While Clarke may have passed his glory days in government, his appointment as justice minister reflected that Clarke could still be useful in government.

Clarke’s biggest target as justice minister?  Reducing the number of offenders in English prisons and attacking what Clarke memorably called the ‘Victorian bang-’em-up prison culture’ in a landmark June 2010 speech: Continue reading Clarke’s British reform failures a lesson as Holder pushes for historic turn on U.S. crime →

New York, United States

Is Michael Bloomberg the Silvio Berlusconi of U.S. politics?

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bloomberg

If you’re not familiar with U.S. politics, you may not have realized the huge decision that came down on Monday from the federal Southern District of New York declaring that the ‘stop-and-frisk’ approach of the New York Police Department is unconstitutional.newyorkUSflag

But the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” as it increased the number of stops in minority communities. That has led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

The judge called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms, including the use of body-worn cameras for some patrol officers, though she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk.”  In her 195-page decision, Judge Scheindlin concluded that the stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

It’s a landmark decision, as far as trial court decisions go, that acknowledges the inherent racism of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program, which took off in 2002 under the Bloomberg administration.  Essentially, the practice allows the police to stop hundreds of thousands pedestrians annually, the majority of which are African-Americans and Latinos, and to frisk them for weapons (or, of course, drugs) without probable cause — or, under a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case from 1968, Terry v. Ohio, ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person to be frisked is armed and dangerous.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was decidedly not pleased, and he lashed out in a press conference that was more befitting a toddler than the mayor of the largest city in the United States:

To one journalist — but really to all of them and any critic of stop-and-frisk, however moderate — Bloomberg exclaimed, “You couldn’t be more wrong!”

Bloomberg, who will leave office in January 2014 after 12 years as mayor of New York City, argued fiercely for the benefits of stop-and-frisk, downplayed the concerns over civil liberties, refused to make any changes in the NYPD operating procedures anytime in the near future and even implicitly accused the ruling of leading to future citywide deaths at the hands of criminals who would otherwise slip through the NYPD crucible.  Bloomberg also pointed to a 30% reduction in violent crime since he took office, though the fact of the matter is that New York’s crime dropped even more precipitously in the 1990s under Giuliani, who had his own civil liberties controversies, including the NYPD’s high-profile sodomizing and assault of Abner Louima and the fatal shootings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.

But Bloomberg’s performance on Monday afternoon, however, was less reminiscent of Giuliani than another longtime player in world politics — former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.  And not just because they are apparently summer neighbors on ‘millionaire’s row’ in Bermuda. Continue reading Is Michael Bloomberg the Silvio Berlusconi of U.S. politics? →

United States

Chris Christie, Rand Paul and the coming Republican fight over U.S. foreign policy

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christieclinton

I argue this morning in The National Interest that the recent spat between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and U.S. senator Rand Paul from Kentucky over foreign policy is a lot more complex than the ‘pro-security hawk’ versus ‘libertarian isolationist’ paradigm.USflag

Rather, the coming fight over foreign policy in the Republican Party as we approach the 2014 midterm elections and the pre-primary phase of the 2016 election will take place on three planes:

  • the familiar security/liberty fight over PRISM, whistleblowers, homeland security and other civil liberties matters;
  • unilateralists (in the mould of former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton) versus multilateralists like former World Bank president Robert Zoelick; and
  • the traditional IR theory fight between realists (who are often in line with Paul and other libertarians) and liberals (including hawkish neoconservatives as well as liberal interventionists).

While they may be on opposite sides of the liberty/security spectrum, we don’t know where any of the 2016 hopefuls may ultimately land, including Christie himself, to say nothing of U.S. senators Ted Cruz of Texas or Marco Rubio of Florida or U.S. congressman Paul Ryan:

We still don’t know where Christie’s ultimate views on international-relations theory lie because that’s not exactly one of the key concerns of a U.S. state governor. But given that the battle for the future of Republican foreign policy is actually three interconnected fights, it could well be that, despite their other disagreements, he and Paul find common cause against more aggressive neoconservative voices.

The bottom line is that we likely know where the Democrats will fall on all of these fights, especially if their nominee is former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton.  That makes the Republican Party an interesting laboratory these days for new ideas and original thinking in American foreign policy.

United States

‘VIPR’ squads are now protecting American rodeos as TSA expands beyond airports

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2011043011_TCB5497a

You can’t make this up.  From a story in today’s New York Times on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s expansion beyond airports:USflag

As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds.  The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States….

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

Later in the article:

The auditors also said that VIPR teams might not have “the skills and information to perform successfully in the mass transit environment.”

And all of this in the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, which was supposed to mark a 180-degree turn from the Republican administration of George W. Bush, and in an era of budget sequestration at that.  Good luck to whomever succeeds Janet Napolitano as the next secretary of homeland security — it would be just desserts for Obama to appoint former Democratic/independent/national security senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, seeming that the creation of the sprawling department was his legislative accomplishment back in 2002.

Notch up one victory for Sir Humphrey, self-perpetuating bureaucracy and path determination.

United States, Vietnam

Photo of the Day: Kerry meets with Truong Tan Sang

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Truong Tan Sang

From the U.S. Department of State comes this photo of U.S. secretary of state John Kerry toasting Vietnamese president Truong Tan Sang, who is visiting Washington, D.C. and met earlier today with U.S. president Barack Obama.USflagvietnam

For Americans (and Vietnamese) of a certain era, the fact that Vietnam’s president, who was a member of Vietnam’s ruling Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam (Vietnamese Communist Party) in the late 1960s during the U.S. military intervention to support allied South Vietnam against the Communist North Vietnam, and Kerry, a veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam, would be standing side by side toasting one another in Washington, D.C., is incredible.

Kerry, a former Democratic senator from Massachusetts, along with fellow Republican senator and former Vietnam veteran John McCain, was instrumental in normalizing U.S. relations with Vietnam in 1995, over 20 years after the U.S. withdrew from the region.  The North Vietnamese quickly overwhelmed the South Vietnamese resistance and consolidated Communist Party rule in Vietnam’s entirety by 1976.

In recent years, Vietnam has emerged as one of southeast Asia’s leading economic performers.

I wrote last week about the Vietnamese government’s promising moves toward becoming potentially the first country in Asia to enact same-sex marriage.

Truong Tan Sang, who was jailed by the South Vietnamese government between 1971 and 1973, has been a leading member of the Vietnamese Communist Party since the 1990s, and formally became leader of the party and the Vietnamese president in summer 2011.

European Union, United States

Goodbye WTO, hello TTIP — United States and Europe hope to create world’s largest free trade zone

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Guest post by Michael J. Geary

The United States and the European Union expect to begin negotiations next month on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in Washington, DC.  Their ambitious aim is to create the world’s largest trade and investment bloc that covers a combined consumer population of over 800 million people.  If the U.S.-E.U. talks prove successful, TTIP will become the biggest trade deal in history.USflagEuropean_Union

U.S. president Barack Obama announced, to mild surprise, in his February 2013 state of the union address before the U.S. Congress that the United States would begin TTIP talks with the European Union.  His announcement followed the publication of a report from the High Level Working Group, which had spent a year examining  various options for expanding transatlantic trade and investment.  The HLWG concluded that any deal between the United States and the European Union, in order to capture the most gains, would have to be comprehensive and include sensitive issues such as government procurement, a reduction in non-tariff barriers (NTBs), intellectual property rights, and employment and labour sectors.  In May, Obama nominated his close economic advisor and free trade proponent, Michael Froman, to become the next U.S. trade representative.  Froman’s selection was, therefore, an important sign that the Obama administration is serious about completing not only TTIP, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as quickly as possible.

The trade and investment pact features a number of ambitious goals.  At the most fundamental level, U.S. and European leaders hope to reduce the existing transatlantic tariffs and other barriers that amount to approximately 3.5%or less on a range of goods.  That will be by far the easiest element of TTIP to negotiate.  A recent report from the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that a 3.5% reduction in tariffs would increase German exports to the United States by 1.13% and increase German imports, respectively, by 1.65%.  Deeper trade liberalisation, including a reduction in NTBs would lead to even greater economic benefits in for U.S.-German trade.  That, in turn, will significantly affect traditional intra-European trade flows, such that trade between Germany and other member states will decline significantly upon the completion of a comprehensive TTIP accord. The Bertelsmann report showed that, in the long term, French exports to Germany would fall by 23%, Italian exports to Germany would decline by 30% and British exports to Germany would drop by fully 41%. Such a comprehensive transatlantic deal would therefore mark a major realignment of traditional European trading patterns, offset by access to a wider US market.  That pattern, moreover, is likewise is reflected in Bertelsmann’s assessment.  For example, exports from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain to the U.S. increase by an average of 86%, which presents a major boost to those European countries most adversely affected by the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. Aside from the potential boost to transatlantic trade, the European Commission argues that TTIP will generate close to 2 million additional jobs, half of which would be created in the United States.

Securing a comprehensive transatlantic trade agreement, however, will not be easy.   Continue reading Goodbye WTO, hello TTIP — United States and Europe hope to create world’s largest free trade zone →

Lebanon, Syria, United States

U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability

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Hassan Nasrallah

The United States doesn’t typically like to hand gifts to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, the Shi’a militia that remains a key player not only in the domestic politics of Lebanon, but throughout the Middle East. freesyriaUSflagSyria Flag IconLebanon

But when news broke last Friday that U.S. president Barack Obama was preparing U.S. assistance to arm Syrian rebels in their fight against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, that’s in effect what the United States has done by broadening the two-year civil war in Syria, a conflict that neighboring, vulnerable Lebanon has largely managed to avoid in the past two years.

Hezbollah’s recent military mobilization against the mostly Sunni rebels, however, in support of Assad, was already rupturing the national Lebanese determination to stay out of the conflict.  The U.S. announcement of support for the rebels, however tentative, gives Hezbollah a belated justification for having expanded its own military support to Assad, and risks further internationalizing what began as an internal Syrian revolt against the Assad regime.

The U.S. decision to support anti-Assad rebels

The United States is signaling that it will provide small arms and ammunition to only the most ‘moderate’ of Syria’s rebels, though not the heavier anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry that rebel leaders have said would make a difference.  But even if the Obama administration changed its mind tomorrow, the damage will have already been done in the decision to back the largely Sunni rebels.  No matter what happens, Hezbollah will now be able to posture that it’s fighting on behalf of the entire Muslim world against Western intruders rather than taking sides in a violent sectarian conflagration between two branches of Islam.

Supporters of U.S. intervention credibly argue that Hezbollah’s decisive intervention earlier in May and in June in Qusayr, a town in western Syria, led to an Assad victory that will inevitably make Syria’s civil war longer and deadlier.  Hezbollah’s decision to intervene on behalf of Assad was a key turning point that marked a switch from indirect and clandestine support to becoming an outright pro-Assad belligerent in Syria, which brings tensions ever closer to exploding in Lebanon.  Furthermore, Russian support for Assad, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly strident opposition to Assad, as well as implicit Iranian support for Hezbollah, means that Syria is already a proxy for geopolitical positioning, whether U.S. policymakers like it or not.

But that doesn’t mean that the active support of the United States will suddenly make things better in Syria — after all, the United States has a controversial track record over the past decade in the Middle East.  It’s winding down a 12-year war in Afghanistan that, though it pushed the Taliban from power within weeks in 2001, has done little to establish lasting security or foster a truly national government.  Its 2003 invasion of Iraq, which toppled one of the two Ba’athist regimes in the Middle East in removing Saddam Hussein from power, and the subsequent U.S. occupation still failed to prevent vicious Shi’a-Sunni sectarian fighting that approached the level of civil war between 2006 and 2008 and that still simmers today.

It’s the same familiar kind of bloody sectarian violence that now features in Syria, the remaining Ba’athist regime in the Middle East.

Moreover, the risks to Lebanon are now even more staggering.  Lebanon, which had been set to hold national elections last weekend on June 16, has instead postponed those elections indefinitely, because negotiations among Lebanon’s various religious confessional groups to draft a new election law have taken a backseat to the more pressing task of keeping the country together.

The U.S. came to its decision in light of a determination that Assad had used chemical weapons against at least a small segment of the rebels, thereby crossing a ‘red line’ that Obama established in August 2012 in the heat of the U.S. presidential campaign last year.  But as The Washington Post‘s Ernesto Londoño reported last week, U.S. advisers had already been working quietly with Jordanian officials for months in order to reduce the chances that Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons will fall into misuse by either the Assad regime or by the opposition.

It still remains unclear just what the Obama administration believes is the overwhelming U.S. national interest in regard of Syria — though the Assad regime is brutal, repressive and now likely guilty of war crimes, there’s not necessarily any guarantee that a Sunni-dominated Syria would be any better.  Last Friday, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon indicated that he opposes the U.S. intervention in Syria because it risks doing more harm than good.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in a scathing commentary last week, the forces that oppose Assad are a mixed bunch, and there’s no way to know who exactly the United States is proposing to arm:

More staggeringly, [Obama] is planning to put arms into the hands of forces that are increasingly indistinguishable from hardcore Jihadists and al Qaeda – another brutal betrayal of this country’s interests, and his core campaign promise not to start dumb wars. Yep: he is intending to provide arms to elements close to al Qaeda. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane….

Do we really want to hand over Syria’s chemical arsenal to al Qaeda? Do we really want to pour fuel on the brushfire in the sectarian bloodbath in the larger Middle East? And can you imagine the anger and bitterness against the US that this will entail regardless? We are not just in danger of arming al Qaeda, we are painting a bulls-eye on every city in this country, for some party in that religious struggle to target.

I understand why the Saudis and Jordanians, Sunni bigots and theocrats, want to leverage us into their own sectarian warfare against the Shiites and Alawites. But why should America take sides in such an ancient sectarian conflict? What interest do we possibly have in who wins a Sunni-Shiite war in Arabia?

The ‘rebels’ are, of course, a far from monolithic unit — the anti-Assad forces include all stripes of characters, including the Free Syria Army, a front of former Syrian army commanders dismayed at Assad’s willingness to commit such widespread violence against the Syrian people, but also including more radical Islamist groups such as the Syria Islamic Front, the Syria Liberation Front and even groups with non-Syrian leaders with global links to al-Qaeda, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which is comprised of radical Salafists who want to transform Syria into an Islamist state.

Liberal interventionism strikes again

When Obama announced earlier this month that he was promoting Susan Rice as his new national security adviser and Samantha Power as his nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I argued that it was a victory for liberal interventionists within Obama’s administration and that it could mean that the United States takes a stronger humanitarian interest in Syria.  Many other commentators, such as Wonkblog‘s Max Fisher, downplayed that possibility, arguing that their promotions meant ‘not much’ for U.S. policy on Syria, and that ‘there is good reason to believe that Power and Rice are not about to change U.S. policy in Syria.’

That, of course, turned out to be a miscalculation.  Less than 10 days after the Rice/Power announcement, the Obama administration is now ratcheting up its involvement in the Levant on a largely humanitarian, liberal interventionist basis, with the plausible possibility that a U.S.-supported no-fly-zone could soon follow.

The key fear is that the Obama administration’s ‘humanitarian’ response may result in an even more destabilizing effect on Lebanon. Continue reading U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability →

Spain, United States

Costos nomination to Madrid shows why the U.S. system of appointing top ambassadors is flawed

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james-costos

Late last Friday afternoon, U.S. president Barack Obama announced six new ambassadors to a wide list of countries — Spain, Denmark, the Vatican, Brazil, Ethiopia and Germany.USflagSpain_Flag_Icon

Of the six new ambassadors, however, only two are career diplomats.  The new ambassador to Spain is James Costos (pictured above), an HBO executive and a top donor whose partner happens to be Michael Smith, who has served as the interior decorator of the White House.  The high-profile gay couple raised millions of dollars for Obama’s reelection.  That Costos and Rufus Gifford, Obama’s 2012 fundraising chairman and nominee for the Danish post, are both openly gay highlights the wide progress of LGBT equality since the troubled 1999 nomination of James Hormel as the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg.

As Joshua Green and Hans Nicholas explained in December 2012 in BusinessWeek after Obama’s reelection, around 31% of the U.S. ambassadorships are currently held by political donors rather than by career diplomats.  Though the arrangement gives an opportunity for a president to reward his donors, there’s a bona fide economic reason for appointing wealthy supporters to some of the world’s most poshest embassies — the costs run much higher than the U.S. government provides to conduct the wide array of social and diplomatic events that are expected:

The funds embassies receive from the U.S. Department of State don’t begin to cover the high costs of the frequent parties and dinners ambassadors are expected to host. Some wind up paying more than $1 million a year out of their own pockets, according to one of the president’s top donors who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to discuss private conversations.

But does that necessarily make sense?

The bipartisan tradition of appointing top donors as ambassadors is relatively novel, going back to the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan around three decades ago.  In the days leading up to Obama’s inauguration, The New York Times even published a sort-of guide to the etiquette of making the transformation from donor to ambassador:

Interviews with more than a dozen donors, Democratic officials and advisers involved in the discussions revealed some unspoken rules: Volunteer for more than one country. Be prepared to serve for only two years, so that a second round of envoys can be appointed before Mr. Obama leaves office. Don’t mention how much money you raised for the campaign (but don’t expect much if you didn’t raise at least a million dollars). Let it be known where you want to go, but don’t publicly campaign for the job.

Appointing donors instead of professional diplomats comes at a cost — diplomats have spent decades learning their craft, whereas political appointees may not always understand the nuances of ambassadorial life.  Seattle philanthropist Cynthia Stroum learned that the hard way when, in 2011, she resigned as the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg after a U.S. state department report found Stroum to have had a negative and confrontation management style and, possibly, that Stroum may have misspent U.S. funds for personal use while ambassador.

Luxembourg, in the grand scheme of things, is a minor country vis-a-vis the United States, but how long before another Cynthia Stroum is appointed as a political donor to a G20 country?

Costos is an HBO executive in charge of global licensing and retail, and he’s certainly proven himself as a successful businessman.  CNN reports that he gave over $67,000 in total last year to boost Obama’s reelection and the Democratic Party, he’s a previous donor to former New York senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Vermont governor Howard Dean, and he has also given to Newark mayor Cory Booker, who is running to become New Jersey senator.  The White House announcement states that he’s also a former vice president for Hermes in New York and he serves on the Board of Directors of The Humane Society.

That may, as the tireless pro-LGBT group Human Rights Campaign noted Friday in a statement, make Costos a ‘true citizen of the world,’ but does it makes Costos the most qualified candidate to represent the United States in Spain?

It’s not clear if Costos even speaks Spanish.

Moreover, Costos’s appointment on Friday was covered more by Hollywood media than by the political media in the United States, and he’s expected to take a forceful line with the Spanish government on piracy, not an unexpected view from a Hollywood executive.  His appointment is viewed as a reward not only to Costos individually, and also to Obama’s Hollywood donors and to the LGBT community as well, but those are not necessarily incredibly strong qualifications for U.S.-Spanish relations.

While bilateral relations with Spain aren’t as tricky as, say, relations with China, they’re still important. Spain, a country with nearly 50 million citizens, has the world’s 13th largest economy, and is the fifth-largest economy in Europe.  Its unemployment rate is 26.7%, and the economy is, by far, in the worst shape at any time since the end of the Francoist dictatorship in the 1970s.  As if that weren’t enough, the next ambassador to Spain will bear witness to what will likely be an fraught battle over regional autonomy and Catalan independence.

Costos has already stepped into one difficult issue — as a Humane Society activist, he has taken a dim view of bullfighting, a controversial issue in Spain in recent years, with animal rights activists and other alleging the sport’s cruelty.  But a move by the nationalist regional government of Catalonia to ban bullfighting in 2011 means that the issue is loaded with broader tensions over the growing rift between Spain’s central government in Madrid and regional Catalan leaders, who have pushed for greater autonomy or even independence.  Indeed, Catalan regional president Artur Mas seems likely to proceed with a controversial plan to schedule a referendum in 2014 for Catalan independence, despite the disapproval of prime minister Mariano Rajoy.  Costos’s anti-bullfighting views already inadvertently puts him firmly on one side of what’s likely to be the trickiest political battle he’ll face while in Madrid.  Continue reading Costos nomination to Madrid shows why the U.S. system of appointing top ambassadors is flawed →

European Union, United States

Spying on the Europeans — PRISM repercussions as Obama heads to Europe

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stasi 2.0

Michael J. Geary and I argue in The National Interest this morning that the repercussions of reports of the PRISM program within the U.S. National Security Agency mean that U.S. president Barack Obama will face tough questions when he goes to Europe for the G8 summit in Northern Ireland and additional meetings in Berlin. USflagEuropean_Union

At a time when Europeans are already concerned about the extent of their own governments’ intrusion into their private online lives, the revelations of the voluntary cooperation of service providers like Facebook and the like in allowing U.S. surveillance of foreign communications are already being met with skepticism from top U.S. allies at a crucial and ambitious time for the Obama administration’s European agenda:

The timing of the scandal could not have come at a worse time in EU-United States relations, with both sides set to embark on negotiations for what would be a landmark free-trade compact, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Above all, German chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to seek assurances from Obama in their one-on-one meetings in Berlin.  But with Germany having this week agreed to TTIP negotiations (leaving France as the remaining obstacle), and with the eurozone crisis still not fully over, certainly the Obama-Merkel meeting should have more important business than PRISM.

Ironically, the NSA gathered more pieces of intelligence within Germany during the month of March than any other EU country.  A spokesman for Merkel, the first chancellor from the former East Germany, where memories of Stasi surveillance are still fresh, said she would raise the issue with Obama. Her justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger stressed, “the suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the US administration itself is paramount at this point. All facts must be put on the table.”

Ultimately, the Obama administration and the NSA will be less vulnerable to the wrath of European regulators than the companies participating in PRISM themselves.

But Microsoft, Google and other service providers, including Facebook, YouTube, Apple and AOL, could face even more blowback than the U.S. government or the Obama administration. Their apparently voluntary participation in U.S. government’s PRISM program could open them to European lawsuits or otherwise subject them to additional regulatory scrutiny. Significant elements of their businesses are already subject to restrictions within Europe—Google faces strict restrictions on its StreetView program and Facebook’s facial-recognition capability is banned altogether. As PRISM continues to dominate world headlines, Facebook on Wednesday opened its first servers outside of the United States in northern Sweden—its presence there, which like much of Scandinavia is a bastion of government transparency and personal freedom, will come increasingly under the thumb of EU regulators.

I argued yesterday that Sweden is unlikely to come to the rescue anytime soon with respect to Facebook and PRISM.  More likely is that the European Parliament will work to pass the new data protection directive that it’s been considering for the past two years and that would place additional restrictions on the processing of personal data, though time is quickly running short with European elections set for May 2014.

Photo above is a popular graffiti slogan in Germany, showing former interior minister (and now finance minister) Wolfgang Schäuble — critics claimed Schäuble’s focus on counterterrorism measures approached levels of civil liberties intrusion similar to the East German secret police and intelligence force, the Stasi.