Tag Archives: foreign policy

Is Hillary Clinton really a hawk?

Then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton visits American troops in Tripoli in 2011. (US Embassy in Libya)
Then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton visits American troops in Tripoli in 2011. (US Embassy in Libya)

In Vox on Tuesday, Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky argued that, as president, Hillary Clinton would be too focused on her domestic political agenda to be too bothered with foreign policy, whether she’s really a hawk or a dove or [name your bird of prey].USflag

I worry that lets Clinton off the hook for some poor policy decisions over the course of her career, both as a senator from New York and as the nation’s leading diplomat as US secretary of state. After all, it was vice president Joe Biden who proclaimed in Jeffrey Goldberg’s famous piece for The Atlantic earlier this year on the ‘Obama doctrine’ that Hillary ‘Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.’

That same profile gave us the following nugget into Clinton’s mind on international affairs:

Many people, I noted, want the president to be more forceful in confronting China, especially in the South China Sea. Hillary Clinton, for one, has been heard to say in private settings, “I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by the Chinese.”

Suffice it to say that, as the 45th president of the United States, Clinton wouldn’t quite welcome the end of unipolarity just yet.

But I also worry for another reason, summed up in four words by former British prime minister Harold MacMillan: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ George W. Bush, until September 2001, wasn’t supposed to be a foreign policy president, either. You don’t choose your issues in the Oval Office; the issues choose you. (One reason, among many, why Donald Trump remains such a terrifying presidential nominee).

To steal a concept from Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution, who might be the only person left in the United States who’s managed to turn the 2016 general election into an exercise in intellectual growth, I’d like to engage in my own version. I’ll call it  ‘foreign policy hindsight 20/20 for me, but not for thee.’ Continue reading Is Hillary Clinton really a hawk?

Obama’s top two foreign rivals could be vanquished in one week

putinnetanyahuPhoto credit to Kobi Gideon / GPO / Flash90.

It’s still irresponsible chatter to suggest that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s nine-day absence from public view is anything more serious than the flu.USflagRussia Flag IconISrel Flag Icon

But as Julia Ioffe wrote Saturday in The Washington Post, even if Putin’s absence is, as very likely, caused by something as mundane as the influenza epidemic currently sweeping through Moscow, it is becoming a more serious event because of the highly personalized system of Russian government where everything has become so micromanaged by Putin and his close allies. The longer Putin’s absence, the greater the chances of an internal coup or putsch, perhaps by the internal security forces, the siloviki, upon whose support Putin rose to power in the 2000s:

You can see why some in Russia are panicking right now—or veiling their discomfort in humor. It certainly doesn’t help that Putin’s disappearance comes at a particularly nervous time for the country. It is at war in Ukraine, its economy is shuddering under sanctions and historically low oil prices, and the opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was recently gunned down steps from the Kremlin. There is a sense in Moscow that the wheels are coming off. To Moscow’s chattering class, Putin’s disappearance confirms that impression.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, in national elections, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right Likud (הַלִּכּוּד) is set to win fewer seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset (הכנסת) than the center-left Zionist Union (המחנה הציוני‎) of Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and former justice minister Tzipi Livni. Though it’s too soon to write off a third consecutive mandate for Netanyahu, the March 17 vote is the toughest electoral fight for Netanyahu since he lost his first bid for reelection in 2001.

Even if Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, a former Likud speaker in the Knesset, convinces Likud and the Zionist Union to form a national unity coalition, polls show that Herzog, and not Netanyahu, would become prime minister. That would place deadening pressure on Netanyahu’s leadership of Likud, where capable replacements, such as former interior minister Gideon Sa’ar, are waiting in the wings.

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Remarkably, that means that US president Barack Obama’s two most nettlesome rivals in international affairs could be sidelined in the course of the same week — or even the same day. Continue reading Obama’s top two foreign rivals could be vanquished in one week

Photo of the day: Obama meets Modi

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The most incredible thing about US president Barack Obama’s most recent three-day trip to India, which began today, is that Indian prime minister Narendra Modi can pull off such a sincere welcome less than six weeks after citing Russia as India’s top defense partner, even as he and Obama would later announce a new US-India nuclear energy deal.India Flag Icon

Has any world leader had such a strong first nine months in office from a geopolitical strategic perspective?

Keep in mind that Modi, barred from the United States for nearly a decade due to his alleged role in the anti-Muslim riots in his home state of Gujarat, was not always particularly keen on strengthening relationships with the United States. Instead, on the basis of his work promoting Gujarat, it was always more likely that he would look to China, Japan, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, where he wooed investment to his own state. With his emphasis on turfing out the corrupt and ineffective leadership of the Gandhi family, and with relatively little commentary on India’s foreign policy, no one expected Modi to build so many bridges in such little time.

Within just nine months, Modi has been the guest of honor at a state dinner at the White House, and he packed Madison Square Garden, filled with tens of thousands of North Americans of Indian descent thrilled to hear from India’s most powerful leader in three decades. By all accounts, Modi and Obama have developed a strong working relationship, unique for an American president who isn’t particularly known for his chemistry with world leaders.

Today, however, Modi has the grin of a prime minister, who, despite a decade as a pariah throughout much of the West, now revels in being suited by everyone — not just the United States and Russia, but China, Brazil, Japan, Europeans, Africans. In foreign policy, Modi is running a positive-sum game. What other countries in the world could manage to nurture such close relationships, strategic and otherwise, with Russia and the United States simultaneously? (Serbia, maybe? The United Arab Emirates? The list isn’t incredibly long.)

Modi, whose social media use has been nimble, was quick to post a photo of his warm welcome for Obama early Sunday morning. But one look at his Facebook and Twitter feeds, which often border on the campy side, show that he doesn’t just delight in Obama — in 2015 alone, he’s featured shots with German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble,  Israeli agriculture minister Yair Shamir, Astrakhan provincial governor Alexander Zhilkin, Iranian presidential adviser Akbar Torkan, Canadian immigration minister Chris Alexander, Macedonian prime minister Nikola Gruevski, among many (many) others.

What’s becoming clear is that while Modi has taken only a gradual approach to reforming India’s government, slowly introducing changes to make the bureaucracy more efficient, the theme of Indian pride is constant in the Modi approach to both domestic and foreign policy. Continue reading Photo of the day: Obama meets Modi

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

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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.

Andrew Moravcsik, Brookings panel explore US-EU relations in Obama’s second term

I had the opportunity to catch Princeton University’s Andrew Moravcsik (pictured above, middle) at the Brookings Institution yesterday for a brief panel discussion on relations between the United States and the European Union following the reelection of U.S. president Barack Obama.  Moravcsik engaged with Atlantic columnist Clive Crook and other panelists on not only the direction of US-EU relations in Obama’s second term, but also whether US-EU relations are even incredibly relevant at all for an administration likely to have higher priorities. 

It takes a special kind of brass for an American to become one of the fundamental scholars of European integration, but Moravcsik is the father of the liberal intergovernmentalism theory of European integration, which purports that European institutions are essentially the creations of nation-states, and that supranational entities such as the European Union only have as much power as those states unanimously agree to provide them.  It stands in contrast to the competing neofunctionalism theory that purports that institutions like the European Union gather more power through the spillover effects of integration, allowing them to grow and gain additional power as integration deepens, notwithstanding the wishes of nation-states.  It’s a fascinating debate, and it’s especially fascinating to consider the consequences of both theories for the ongoing European response to the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis.

Needless to say, few political scientists — European, American or otherwise — have had as much influence on European integration theory as Moravcsik.  As such, he’s long been one of my favorite scholars since I first studied European integration theory at the European University Institute, so it was somewhat of a pleasure to see him discuss US-EU relations in person — and not less than a 10-minute walk from home at that.

The discussion featured much of the standard debate between intergovernmentalism and functionalism, with Crook arguing in particular that the United Kingdom under prime minister David Cameron was perhaps irretrievably isolating itself from Europe and that it risked geopolitical irrelevance if it did so.  He worried that the European Union, more generally, has failed to adequately provide ‘variable geometry’ for European countries — a so-called ‘multi-speed Europe.’

Moravcsik, however, largely shrugged off those concerns and noted that a multi-speed Europe emerged two decades ago, with some countries participating more fully and others, like the United Kingdom, choosing to participate in some core functions but not others:

There’s a lot of people in Brussels who say a lot of things, but what happens is what member states say.

He pointed to the limited nature of participation in the eurozone — many members, including the United Kingdom, have not acceded to the single currency.  He also pointed to the voluntary nature of opting into any unified European foreign policy (e.g., the ‘coalition of the willing’ that included the United Kingdom, Italy and Poland, but few others, in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003), the flexibility of European competition policy, and the opt-out nature of the Schengen Agreement that establishes the free crossing of borders throughout Europe, to which even some non-EU countries are party.  He added that Turkey and, increasingly, Morocco are both, to some degree, integrated into the European Union, if not in quite a de jure capacity.

I found Moravcsik’s thoughts on US-EU relations more intriguing, however — especially his thoughts on the Obama administration’s much-trumpeted ‘pivot to Asia.’

Moravcsik argued that US-EU relations are far more sanguine than, perhaps, has been reported, and noted the role that German chancellor Angela Merkel and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi played in preventing — or at least delaying — the kind of eurozone crisis that could have endangered Obama’s election.  He added that U.S. and European interests are largely aligned and that when the Obama administration needs to call someone in the world with the will and means to support its goals, it’s still likely to call on Europe.  He noted that the United States and Europe agree more consistently today than they did during the Cold War on issues as wide-ranging as nuclear proliferation, Israeli-Palestinian peace, consequences of the ‘Arab Spring,’ and environmental and climate change policy.

As such, he dismissed the idea of a ‘pivot to Asia’ as nothing so much as overheated rhetoric, comparing it to the talk of the United States as a unilateral ‘hyperpower’ in 2003.  In both cases, he argued that Europeans have (wrongly) taken American rhetoric at far more than face value.  To the contrary, Moravcsik claimed that the ‘pivot to Asia’ talk was ‘drummed up’ as a strategic justification for the United States pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was perhaps a bit starker than I’d imagined.  After all, Obama is headed, of all places, to southeast Asia for his first post-reeelction trip — to Myanmar/Burma, the first trip by a sitting U.S. president to that country in U.S. history.

Broadly speaking, Moravcsik argued that large strategic shifts, like any ‘pivot’ to Asia, are accomplished only gradually over long periods of time.  That strikes me as largely correct, but it nonetheless will be interesting to see what happens between now and 2017 on U.S. Asia/Pacific policy.

Notably, we have a handful of measuring sticks to guide us: Continue reading Andrew Moravcsik, Brookings panel explore US-EU relations in Obama’s second term