the russian bear likes a good bargain.

President Obama’s not so secret letter to his counterpart in Russia, President Medvedev, seems like a strong beginning to a new, more robust and directed diplomacy. Applying an unspoken quid pro quo that the serious application of pressure by Russia on Iran to stem Tehran’s nuclear ambitions could mean the removal of the US nuclear shield in Eastern Europe draws a big lesson from history. During the missile crisis, Khruschev seriously overreached when he planted missiles in Cuba. Kennedy didn’t back down, but instead offered to give up some obsolete missiles in Turkey in order to save the world from Armageddon.

Okay, we’re not quite on the edge of the nuclear abyss just yet, but Obama’s clearly done his homework on dealing with the Russians. He shrewdly realizes how important ’saving face’ is to in the machismo world of Moscow foreign policy, rightly regards the missile shield as an expensive boondoggle, and understands why Moscow is less than enamoured of Bush’s feeble remonstrations that the shield was primarily in place to protect against Iranian missiles headed for the US or Europe (about a thousand times less likely than a briefcase bomb which would bypass the shield altogether). Add to that the very strong likelihood that the shield won’t work even if challenged and the prospect of canning it isn’t exactly a stretch.

The President is also fully aware that America’s decision to remove the planned shield from Poland and the Czech Republic will play very well on the Russian Street, allowing the Kremlin to do its little nationalistic strut to ameliorate the lament that the motherland’s sphere of influence is shrinking fast. In short, Obama’s giving away nothing and getting in return an assurance that Russia will do what’s in its interests anyway, which is to prevent a potentially hostile nuclear power from developing on its Southern border.

This notion is a good example of a neo-liberal response to a diplomatic issue. Neo-liberalism is about America gaining influence by showing largesse where possible. It looks like we’re taking the hit here, but actually Obama’s letter sets up a win-win for the US. First, we get a very good reason to bargain away the useless missile shield, and divert the freed-up resources into solving America’s most challenging problems at home. Second, we build a new and more honest relationship with Russia, based not on Bush “I see into his soul” nonsense, but on a strong and negotiated diplomatic basis, just like in the good old days. Putin and Medvedev want two things. To make Russia look good, and to get a good deal. A positive response to Obama’s diplomatic foray gets them both.

But the core of the diplomatic move is dealing with the seemingly intractable issue of Iran. All this may come to nothing and the collision course with Tehran that we appear to be on may yet become critical, but Washington is taking a much more proactive and frankly intelligent approach, searching for serious alternatives to military confrontation either by the US or by Israel seeking to remove Iran’s nuclear weapons as an existential threat. Obama is asking Moscow to rethink its frankly reckless stance on helping Iran build its nuclear infrastructure with a solid diplomatic overture. Both sides get to put the heat on Iran, increasing the chance that China will be the only Permanent Member of the Security Council abstaining or voting against meaningful United Nations-driven sanctions against Iran, if and when the time comes for a resistant Iran to face the music. And finally, as the pressure on Tehran grows, the US gets more traction for its peace offensive with the world’s most noisy theocracy. US overtures to Syria further increase pressure on Iran to negotiate.

As of early this morning, Moscow has yet to respond to the American overtures. That is a very good sign. If they didn’t like it, they would have got back to us by now. And the response wouldn’t even have feighned secrecy. It would have been very, very public indeed.

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peace will once again come to the taj

“Rogue Elements” is a big word du jour right now. The idea that within an organization there’s often a fifth column conjures up all sorts of conspiracy theories about CIA spooks with their own twisted agendas. Usually, this stuff is confined to fiction or the far reachs of the blogosphere. But what happens when the lunatics truly have taken over the asylum?

The strong suspicion that Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group of jihadists once nurtured by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, ISI, is behind the horrific massacre in Mumbai a few days ago has turned the simmering distrust between India and Pakistan into a potential supernova.

There’s been an awful lot of talk about the ISI over the years, primarily because of their role in developing and protecting the Taliban as a way to stabilize their Afghan neighbor. But its the ISI’s link to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, that have pushed it to the forefront of world attention.

The ISI is a multi-tentacled state within a state, created by the military just after the Partition, that trusts and has the trust of no-one, probably including its own members. Its not surprising that the ISI became truly powerful during the military rule of General Zia al Huq, and was fiercely protected by General Pervez Musharraf, in power until very recently. Its clumsy, anachronistic approach to statecraft feeds off Pakistan’s inferiority complex with a blustering nationalism that has led it into a multitude of miscalculations. Its latest excess has led us squarely to the tinderbox moment India and Pakistan face now.

Perhaps it would take a conspiracy theorist to surmise that the timing of the the Mumbai attacks is not a coincidence. The slow-moving negotiations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir had recently begun bearing fruit. The longstanding mutual distrust between the two nations was just beginning to dissipate when the Mumbai attacks took place. There is no way that preparations for the attacks by Lakshar’s former benefactors could have taken place without ISI’s knowledge. It’s well within the bounds of possibility to suggest that it probably could have stopped the attacks had it wanted to. The ISI feeds off fear. If fear begins to evaporate, the ISI’s raison d’etre is reduced, and the glue that holds it together might start to weaken. The prevailing wind was towards better relations between India and Pakistan, and perhaps the ISI wanted that wind reversed. Even if that is remotely true, it calls for serious action.

A report prepared for the British Ministry of Defence in 2006 cut to the chase. It stated that it’s time for the ISI to be disbanded. Musharraf’s response at the time was perhaps a little too categorical. “I totally, 200% reject it. I reject it from anybody – MoD or anyone who tells me to dismantle ISI.” Reading between the lines, it’s clear the the ISI had become too powerful to mess with, even for the Head of the Army and Pakistan’s then President.

Musharraf is now gone, and the faint hope that the ISI’s freedom to act could be at least resisted by pressure from the Army hierarchy has gone with him. But at least Musharraf’s departure has clarified the landscape of the Pakistani internal power struggle. The internal politics of Pakistan have been the world’s business ever since 9/11. And it’s pretty complex stuff. The Army is the enforcer, the civilian democratic apparatus is the cover, and the ISI makes sure everyone behaves in accordance with its old school nationalistic values.

The new civilian leadership of President Zardari is very weak, and can only sit by and watch as the ISI, a child of the military, the elephant in the room, goes about its business of creating ever more disastrous crises for Pakistan. It’s really no surprise that Zardari bounces from sympathy to bluster. The former is the moral response, the latter is the response the ISI require. But now we have reached crunch time. The course that the ISI could conceivably set Pakistan and India on is very dangerous and could develop its own unstoppable logic.

Is there any good news in all of this? Perhaps.

It often takes a crisis to focus the mind. If we’re going to change the dynamic in Pakistan and dramatically ease tensions with India, the logic of that prescient UK Ministry of Defence report should be examined again. The ISI needs to be replaced by a newer, more transparent intelligence organization. That’s not going to happen by force of arms. The Pakistani army would never take the chance, and the Zardari administration couldn’t engineer the ISI’s replacement in their wildest dreams. It has to be a peaceful process.

The best and perhaps only way to weaken the ISI to the point that it can be reorganized is to make it less relevant, an outmoded organization that is publicly seen as a brake on Pakistan’s progress. To do that means building up the one commodity that the ISI loathes more than any other. Trust. In a sense, the speculation that the ISI triggered the Mumbai attacks because of the growing trust between the two historical adversaries needs to be tested again. The United States must lead the charge for a strong and lasting relationship between Pakistan and India, not just for the good of each nation, but for our own national security and the future health of mankind. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. It’s time for some serious shuttle diplomacy that makes the India/Pakistan relationship the top State Department priority. These two already have their two-state solution. It’s time that we helped them be good neighbors.

The US must put pressure on India to continue its restrained response to the Mumbai attacks and build renewed trust with its neighbor. If India is seen as magnanimous at its darkest hour, its goodwill with the Pakistani people, will rise dramatically. A new spirit of tolerance and cooperation could develop. India could aid Pakistan’s ailing economy. New power-sharing arrangements for Kashmir might emerge. And as for New Delhi’s internal logic in all this, India’s recent economic transformation would be put into screeching reverse if a hot and potentially nuclear war with Pakistan broke out. Such a conflict is simply not in India’s interest. The US must take full advantage of that fact.

The US must also offer to build the fabric of the Pakistani economy as part of Pakistan’s reward for restraint, trust and its government’s effort to isolate the ISI. The US must encourage the Pakistani authorities to talk openly about their concerns about the ISI, and privately offer aid, expertise and support in the building of a replacement. Pakistan is a poor country with few resources. A war with its larger neighbor could break it, and the nightmare of potential nuclear escalation is too awful for any to contemplate. Not just for Islamabad, but for anyone.

The stakes are very high.

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has china really changed that much?

Sometimes it takes an aging rock band to make a great point. Take Guns n’ Roses new album, its first for seventeen years. The band’s insightful leader created a fabulous oxymoron, bringing together the words “Chinese” and “Democracy” for it’s title. Now that’s comedy.

The Chinese authorities did what they always do in these situations and censored everything about the album they could get away with at the same time as lashing out at the band for its insulting stance on the People’s Republic. How dare some old rock stars attack China’s non-democracy?

But does the vast plastic toy police state protesteth just a little too much? The irony seems completely lost on most of the world’s leaders, who are busy toadying to the Chinese to keep them buying the mountain of freshly issued Western debt. The British have backtracked on their decades-long fudge about Chinese control of Tibet to appease Beijing, and America, which has been pushing democracy like Avon pushes makeup is simply too scared to issue any kind of statement about censorship or human rights abuses in China. We allowed them into the World Trade Organization even though they brazenly broke its rules before and after they joined. Slowly but surely, we seem to be handing China superpower status on a plate. Another word for it is appeasement. And just like back in Munich in 1938, it strikes me as a very bad idea.

The West has to end this sorry, unspoken policy of appeasement to China. China is not our friend. It is our adversary. It does not have our interests at heart. It is a wilful, nationalistic, unscrupulous behemoth that believes solely in preserving and expanding its power. It will soon be a greenhouse gas disaster and the world will suffer as a result. Our debt to China has serious national security implications, and it has mercilessly exploited it. China does not play on a level playing field with the rest of their global trading partners, on currency or import/export terms. Oh, yeah, and they are very undemocratic.

When you introduce economic freedom, political progress is sure to follow. Up until Deng Xiaoping opened up China in the late eighties that was the golden rule. But to suggest that China’s profoundly bucking the mantra is only half true. Firstly, China is a very big place where historical change happens slowly, and it hasn’t been that long from a historical standpoint since the Communists went into the cheap crap business. And secondly, the world needs China right now in a variety of unpleasant ways. But there’s going to come a time, in the not too distant future, when the Communist Party’s ability to prevent social unrest will be compromised. Another Tiananmen, another over-reaction by the Party and the unreast could take hold. And the Chinese Communist party fear internal unrest more than anything else. That’s why they always overreact to those minor slights – from aging rock stars among others.

All over backwoods China, outside the seething economic speical districts unrest is already brewing. And large scale social upheaval in China is very, very possible. The threat of it is the West’s unseen trump card in its dealings with Beijing. In the next twenty years, increasingly scarce energy resources are going to cause massive inflation within China and reduce the labor and manufacturing cost differential with the West. We’re already seeing a move towards manufacturing in Cambodia and Vietnam because of this. To feed its economic beast and prevent economic distress China might start doing what Japan did in World War Two and try to control energy supplies.

Flashpoints of civil disobedience will be crushed with standard Chinese heavyhandedness. And the more the Party crushes dissent, the more pops up. That’s the “whack-a-mole” golden rule. The more you whack, the more you get. And as for censorship, it doesn’t really work. When you give people the internet, they find a way to use it. Rabid Chinese nationalism which is seen as a stabilizing force could also backfire. The Chinese love of Country could easily turn into a weapon against the corrupt and self-serving Communist Party. Just think of the recent melamine crisis.

China does not as yet present a serious military threat, but if it sees the need for militarism to create a diversion from shattered domestic expectations, this might change. Already the Chinese are investing in at least one aircraft carrier, and it’s probably not for show. The US needs to focus on preventing the expansion of Chinese influence throughout the world. In Africa, China is embarking on a virtual recolonization of weak, resource-rich African countries, and we just sit and watch. Bad mistake.

The irony is that Russia is much more of a thorn in the West’s side because of the size of its nuclear arsenal, proximity to the Middle East and its petro-authoritarian ways. And yet China seems to be the nation we fear most, despite the fact that it isn’t yet a major military threat. Sure they’re too big to fight with guns and ammunition, but guns and ammunition are outmoded.

We are entering the age of Economic warfare and the best way to combat China is economically. They need to keep growing to feed domestic demand, and the only way we get leverage over them is to find a way to hit them in the wallet. My guess is that the dollar is the most important strut of their plan to prevent social unrest. In short they need us to protect the Party from being weakened or even toppled.

We pull the plug on them, and they might begin to realize they need us. Economic warfare might sound like a very tall order, but a good dose of, shall we say, targeted protectionism could help. For example, we could re-import jobs to the US to build our economy merely by saying that we demand fairness in our dealings with China or we’ll institute import controls of our own. Sure, US business might scream, but the American public will love the idea that we could develop a manufacturing sector again.

And we might see real concessions from China.

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Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke

Holbrooke is the only person to have held Assistant SOS positions for two different world regions and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven times. He is highly respected on the diplomatic scene and has been involved in some of the most successful and delicate negotiations in recent memory. He’s thoughtful, highly intellligent and probably the single most experienced diplomat of the Clinton era, with hands on experience unlike any other. Perhaps his one mistake was to hitch his wagon to the wrong team during the Presidential contest. He was an advisor to Clinton’s campaign during the primary season. He’s a professor at Brown, and while that’s a great place to be, it’s a huge waste of his talents.

Bill Richardson

Bill Richardson

Bill Richardson has the perfect resume for State. He has been Energy Secretary and UN Ambassador. He publicly broke from the Clintons to endorse Obama after he dropped out of the Presidential race, when it was by no means certain Obama would prevail, and as a result would be a proven ally to the new President, who keeps his own ambitions studiously hidden. Richardson is engaging, forthright, and very savvy. His Hispanic (“brown”) roots will help him with connect with many leading developing nations as global power begins to drift in that direction. His reward for his loyalty for Obama, not to mention delivering New Mexico to the Democratic column for decades to come? The Commerce Department. Not even sure if the appointment comes with a limo.

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton

Former First Lady and vanquished Democratic candidate for President 2008, Hillary Clinton is heavily associated with an outmoded brand. Her own. She most certainly doesn’t shout out ‘change’, while her ‘no bull’ approach might rankle in more sensitive negotiations with adversaries. To make matters worse, she clearly has her own agenda, so it will never be certain she’s acting solely on the wishes of the President. She has no experience of day-to-day diplomacy. It’s not certain how “knowing world leaders on first name terms” qualifies her over others. Finally, the appointment is going to be seen as political by the world, and may undermine Obama’s diplomatic influence in international eyes.

Most of Obama’s cabinet choices have been cautious and pragmatic, but the apparent decision to nominate Hillary Clinton seems fraught with political considerations at a time when we need to rebuild America’s diplomatic credentials. It may be a decision he will come to regret.

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