The Devil’s Dictionary of International Relations and Foreign Affairs, Part II

P art II:

 

COUP D'ETAT, n: In civil-military relations, the replacement of an abhorrent government with a well-armed abhorrent government.

STRATEGIC, adj. Used to declare the importance of an object or place whereas its uselessness was previously self-evident.

POST-COLD WAR, n: The point in time that marks the beginning of recorded history.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, n: In international relations, an anonymous group of nations linked only by the assumption that they wholeheartedly agree with the person using the term. The United States is not a member.

———. In rhetoric, a device used by undergraduates, politicians, journalists and other intellectuals as a substitute for actual inquiry or to avoid prattling off a list of irrelevant nations that would otherwise come across as considerably less forbidding.

STRATEGY, n. A new plan that will fail for reasons obvious at a later point in time. 

FOREIGN AID, n. A bribe that masquerades as charity.

REFUGEE CRISIS, n: The unwelcome intrusion of poor peoples into their neighbor’s territory.

The First Image Problem and Understanding Iran

W hile following developments in U.S.-Iran relations in recent months, I have been struck by the contrasting depictions of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the impact of his personality and beliefs on Tehran’s policy towards the United States.

It seems every scholar, analyst, expert, and journalist offers a slightly different take on Khamenei’s personality, beliefs, and influence. 

It’s strange that such opposing assessments exist of the same individual (let alone someone as prominent as Khamenei). Moreover, I find it interesting why Khamenei’s personality and worldview—studied by outsiders by dissecting his mountain of writings and speeches—are rarely, if ever, compared to his actual political conduct and policies.

If indeed Khamenei is an idiosyncratic revolutionary hardliner, how can this image be reconciled with the evidence that suggests he is also a pragmatist? If Khamenei is believes that the United States and Israel are truly evil, why would he allow his government to strike a deal with the devil? How can Khamenei be an iron-fisted ruler who wields immutable authority, while it is known he has faced many domestic challengers to his position and influence? If Khamenei is Iran’s ultimate decision maker, why does he so rarely make decisions? If Khamenei’s word is law, why does he more often than not obfuscate his views to such an extent that even other Iranian leaders are puzzled as to where he stands?      

These competing images of Khamenei and the questions surrounding the impact of his beliefs on Tehran’s foreign policy are hardly unique. Rather, it raises broader questions about why political scientists still have so few answers when it comes to understanding the influence of individuals in international relations (which Kenneth Waltz referred to as the first image).

The Devil’s Dictionary of International Relations and Foreign Affairs, Part I

I n a homage to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (one of my favorite books), I’ve decided to provide my own satirical take on the peculiar phrases, nonsense euphemisms, and infuriating catchwords that comprise much of the ontology of international relations and foreign affairs. 

My goal is to post a weekly installment of a few words in addition to my normal posts.

So here's Part I:

CHARM OFFENSIVE: In international relations, a cunning strategy adapted from the behavior of young children which entails acting civil towards one’s adversaries in order to gain advantage. The most agreeable form of offensive.

ATMOSPHERICS, n.: In diplomacy, phenomena of unknown origins which govern the success or failure of international negotiations.

AMBASSADOR, n. In American politics, a diplomat in name only. One who in exchange for raising large sums of campaign money for the Administration is rewarded with an archaic title and an extended overseas vacation to an inconsequential destination.

SENIOR OFFICIAL: A member of a noble tribe of unnamed peoples whose natural habitat is in the corridors of high political office. Members are known to worship an elected official as their deity in order to meet their most basic survival instinct to bask in the political power of others.

LOW-LEVEL OFFICIAL: A member of a lesser tribe of unnamed peoples who inhabit the soul-crushing machinery of government.  They exist principally to provide misleading or erroneous information to the press.

The U.S.-Iran Nuclear Deal—What Took So Long?

  I have been doing some reading on the history of U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations this week and stumbled across an interesting piece by Dan Joyner.   

Joyner argues out that none of the concessions Iran made at Geneva in November were new or represented a major shift in Iranian policy. He notes, “…none of them, and not even their sum, is beyond what Iran had already offered in past negotiations, going back at least to 2005.” 

Indeed, the Arms Control Association has an excellent timeline of diplomatic efforts regarding Iran’s nuclear program and another listing all of the past proposals from the parties over the years that supports his point. It seems like the general parameters of an U.S.-Iran nuclear deal have been sitting on the table for nearly a decade, which begs the question of what exactly took so long for the sides to sign off on it?

Yousaf Butt, a scientist from the Federation of American Scientists, attributes the recent breakthrough to “improved atmospherics” which made the deal suddenly doable. I think what Butt really means by “improved atmospherics” is a change in the domestic politics in Washington and Tehran. 

From my perspective, the domestic political calendars in both Washington and Tehran have been unfortunately timed for many years (if not decades) which has made moving towards cooperation politically tedious at home for each nation’s leadership until very recently.

This has left me with a few additional questions, thoughts and observations worth considering:

(1)   While Iran’s nuclear policy was often fluctuating and opaque, U.S. policy towards Iran seems to have undergone clear shifts from “no nuclear weapons” to “zero enrichment” to “no nuclear weapons” again which align nicely with the U.S. election cycle. Iran, of course, has never been willing to accept a zero enrichment deal. This was partly because Iran does have the legal right to enrich uranium as part of a peaceful nuclear energy program under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and partly because enrichment became a hotly debated political issue between Tehran’s hawks and doves.

(2)  Did the latest U.S. and international economic sanctions have the affect everyone seems to think they did and brought Tehran to its knees and caused a major shift in Iran’s position? Or were sanctions domestic political cover for the Obama administration to please hawks in Congress while subtly shifting U.S. policy from “zero enrichment” to “no nuclear weapons” while claiming the sanctions worked?

(3)  Did Hassan Rouhani’s election really make the difference? Or was it Obama’s reelection and the quick onset of being second-term lame duck president with a hostile Congress that won’t move his domestic agenda forward an inch? (Or was it both?)

In Afghanistan, Congress Proves the Unsustainable Will Not Be Sustained

  T he economist Herbert Stein once famously quipped that, “The unsustainable will not be sustained.” 

I’ve always thought that Stein’s Law, as economists refer to it, applied just as well to unsustainable economic policies as it did the foreign policy arena. Specifically, I think it is an apt description for what is happening to America’s more than decade-long war in Afghanistan that has cost the nation a considerable expenditure of blood and treasure.

The size and scope of the U.S. military, political and economic commitments to Afghanistan have always unsustainable, but not in terms of material power as it is often suggested. The United States, of course, is a superpower and if determined could dispatch troops and bags of money to Afghanistan probably indefinitely. 

Hell, a ten cent war tax on café lattes might just defray the costs.

Rather, I mean the Afghan War is unsustainable in terms of the political will at home to continue the war among political leaders (notice how I did not say the American public, who long ago soured on the venture.)  It has always been a matter of time before war fatigue set in and the political and electoral headwinds on U.S. policy towards Afghanistan turned against the hawks and towards the doves.

As it turns out, Congress is beginning to seriously tighten the purse strings over U.S. aid to Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reports: “With no perceptible opposition from the Obama administration, Congress has quietly downscaled Washington’s ambitions for the final year of the Afghan war, substantially curtailing development aid and military assistance plans ahead of the U.S. troop pullout.”

Apart from the budget trimming by Congress, the Obama administration is now seriously considering the zero option—which would leave no American troops in Afghanistan after this year—an idea dismissed by analysts as a diplomatic bluff rather than a genuine policy option as recently as this past summer. (See my previous post on this)

These developments should come as a surprise to officials in the Pentagon, the State Department, the Intelligence Community, and outside analysts and experts. Most folks have long operated on the expectation that a large residual force of American troops would need to remain in Afghanistan far beyond 2014 in order to continue training the Afghan military and support counterterrorism operations. Furthermore, the expectations of a residual force were coupled with projections that the United States would continue funding the Afghan government and the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to the tune of several billion dollars a year indefinitely.

Such reasonable expectations of a strategically sound approach to U.S. foreign policy was, quite predictably, far removed from the political realities of policymaking in the United States.

Officials in the Pentagon, the State Department, and elsewhere in the government can plan and project different troop and aid levels for Afghanistan all they want. Senior officials can pledge to continue support to Kabul forever. Ultimately, however, it is Congress that controls the purse strings and the constant rhythms of the election cycle makes legislators fickle creatures.

The political will in Congress to sustain the U.S. mission in Afghanistan has waned over the last year as the rhetorical momentum has steadily turned against the hawks. Besides the continued stalemate on the battlefield, the actions of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in particular have made U.S. involvement beyond 2014 far more difficult for Congressional hawks to justify.

Karzai’s intransigence at signing the recently negotiated security agreement between Kabul and Washington, his repeated public insults aimed at the United States, and his sympathetic nods to the Taliban have made it politically toxic for hawks to drape him in the flag and demand that Washington to support his government.

Karzai’s actions have likewise given credence to the doves’ arguments that it is time for the United States to disengage from the conflict and lessen its commitment to support such a corrupt and ineffective government in Kabul. (To be fair, I have no doubt that Karzai’s moves are largely motivated by Afghan domestic politics as distancing himself from the United States only helps his handpicked successor in the presidential election scheduled for April.) 

I believe that Obama, electorally secure in his second term and fed up with a war he never wanted to fight in the first place, will probably allow the zero option to come to pass in Afghanistan as he did in Iraq. Meanwhile, doves in Congress will continue to hack away at funding levels for Afghanistan in midst of budget battles at home ahead of the midterms in November and the political jockeying ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

What does this mean for Afghanistan’s fate?

It appears there will be a very painful course correction in the works. For the past decade, the United States has built up the ANSF to an enormous size to fight the Taliban in place of U.S. combat forces which are scheduled to withdrawal this year. Yet the enormous size of the ANSF has also made it enormously expensive.

The annual cost of the ANSF is roughly $10-13 billion dollars. By comparison, the core budget of the Afghan government in 2011 (the most recent year I can find figures for) was a paltry $4.78 billion. Even more worrying is that grants from international donors, largely the United States and its allies, accounted for roughly two-thirds of the Afghan government’s core budget.

See the problem?

The sheer cost of the ANSF far outstrips the Afghan government’s ability to pay for it without significant assistance from the United States. As a striking GAO report concluded:

“Even if the Afghan government committed 100 percent of its projected domestic revenues to funding ANSF, this amount would cover only about 75 percent of the cost of supporting security forces in fiscal year 2015 and would leave the Afghan government no revenues to cover any non-security-related programs, such as public health.”

The United States essentially pays the wages of Afghan soldiers and policemen and even keeps the lights on in Kabul. As Congress tightens the purse strings, the complete collapse of the ANSF and along with it the Afghan government in the coming years are very realistic prospects.

I sincerely hope that all the sacrifices the United States has made in Afghanistan since 2001 does not unravel because of Congressional penny-pinching.

Yet as elections and troop withdrawal deadlines approaches on the political calendar, Washington seems more and more determined to head for the exits this time. Once again, political expediency trumps sound policy.