The Case for Hypocrisy

One of my favourite all-time quotes about world politics is Alan Taylor’s:

‘Powers will be Powers.’

You will be shocked to know that states often say one thing and do another. They are inconsistent. They are morally maneuverable. They apply standards to others that they exempt themselves from.

So when militarily adventurous states like the US preach that others should abide by a ‘rules-based’ order, an eyebrow or two is raised. When France complains of unilateralism and arrogance, we might recall their own record of testing nukes in the Pacific without asking anyone. When a Sudanese envoy turns up to lament the ruins of the carnage in Syria, its tempting to cry ‘tu quoque.’

Speaking of Syria, what should we make of the drive within the British Government to ban Syrian diplomats from the upcoming Olympic Games?

The Deputy Prime Minister puts it this way:

“If there is evidence that you have abused human rights and that is independently shown to be the case, you will not be able to come into this country.”

Well now. The obvious, low-ball, easy response is that this principle is absurd, either because it is impossible to apply consistently, or if it were, would make diplomacy impossible. Applied consistently, it would be a very large net indeed. Imagine how many figures known to be linked to atrocious regimes would be denied access to the big track meet in London.

China? Russia? Israel? Libya (where our allies in this great moral victory are still torturing detainees)?  Saudi Arabia? And isn’t Guantanamo still open for business?

But hold on: if we follow that logic to its conclusion, we would make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Maybe we should accept a little hypocrisy in our statecraft. We can’t responsibly arrest or embargo or deny entry to every Chinese or Saudi diplomat who wants to visit. There are too many serious – morally serious- things on the table to destroy those relationships: on trade, on global issues like nuclear proliferation or climate change, on the flow of oil, on industrial policy.

But there are weaker atrocious states who we do have the power to punish. Like, say, Syria, which is firebombing cities and reportedly slaughtering children.

Readers of OSB will know that this is not the shop for interventionism or armed liberalism. I’m normally against joining in the civil wars of others on many grounds, part prudential and part principle. There’s enough to do out there, resources are thin, and protecting one side normally results in abetting counter-atrocities.

But we can take a principled stance of hypocrisy here. We can shut out Syria’s envoys from the Olympics. It would be a meaningful gesture – just remember Syria’s outraged reaction to the mere idea of denying their man a visa. The Olympics does confer legitimacy and recognition on sovereign states.

So if we won’t use force to intervene, and if we won’t take an absolute firm stance every time a bad regime’s diplomats arrive, we can at least say to Damascus: ‘Not only are you atrocious, you are also weak. You might continue your bestial assault on civilians. But your man will not sit back with caviar and tea while the world celebrates the brotherhood of man. Not on our watch.’

How do you like them apples?

We are at War with Pakistan

Or so I argue, in this short piece today, in the Australian Age.

 

Anzac Day

The tragic amphibious assault on the Dardanelles entered Australian mythology so quickly, becoming its main creation myth for modern time.

So maybe Peter Weir’s film clip is as good a memorial as any.

Iran: its 60/40, not 90/10

The issue of whether and under what circumstances to use military force to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme is a 60/40, not a 90/10. In other words, it is a more marginal decision than polemicists on either side often recognise.

Which is the greater evil? An Iranian bomb, or a preventative war against Iran?

A view, for what its worth: military action is probably a greater evil than Tehran’s uranium enrichment programme. But an actual weaponised nuclear capability is probably a greater evil than war.

This is an important distinction: having a latent, breakout capability and an actual deliverable bomb are distinct states that have different implications. From what we know, it seems Iran has embraced the former, but not yet the latter. Attacking while it is enriching uranium, perversely, might persuade Tehran to go for weaponisation. 

We don’t yet know whether intensifying economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure will successfully persuade the Iranian regime to abandon uranium enrichment, or at least agree to a bargain, in which the international community agrees for it to enrich towards civilian nuclear power in exchange for a continuous inspection and verification.

But what if it doesn’t, and Iran keeps enriching to weapons-grade level? What if it then overtly or covertly begins a weapons programme? 

The ‘worst case’ scenarios must be considered. It is way too convenient for supporters of military action to presume that military strikes will succeed without serious blowback. Against that, it is way too convenient of opponents to assume that an Iranian nuclear weapon will be something we’ll just have to live with, or even that it would be ‘no biggy’ because deterrence works, or because we’ve got greater stockpiles than them, or any other comforting, ahistorical view of the stability of nuclear diplomacy. The Cold War, one of the most carefully managed antagonisms in history, could have broken out into hot nuclear war on a number of occasions.

So what would be at stake in attacking or not attacking? 

A military strike against Iran has a decent chance of bleak and unintended consequences. These include, but are not limited to, the undermining of the Iranian opposition and dissident movement in a siege atmosphere; retaliation such as a blockade of the Straits of Hormuz and/or through Iran’s paramilitary proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas; the further radicalisation of the country, motivating its leaders to accelerate their nuclear programme while ensuring that it is a hostile radical in power when it finally nuclearises. Military action itself, in the fog of war and mutual uncertainty, would probably not be confined to ‘surgical’ strikes against hardened nuclear facilities, but could well escalate into a much more severe conflict. It would probably re-energise militant global Islamists, such as Al Qaeda who in terms of capability and charisma are mostly on the ropes. It would make the whole region a place Westerners dare not enter without great fear. It could sour domestic politics at home. In some combination, it would be bloody bad.

But an Iranian bomb would also be bleak for the region and the world. In many ways it is rational for Iran, and for Iranians across the political spectrum, to desire some kind of nuclear capability. They are encircled, they have seen what happens to America’s adversaries who lack or who have renounced their programmes (remember the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi). They have become the dominant regional power since we did them the favour of creating a vacuum in Iraq, generating a drive towards nuclear-status ‘prestige.’

But the fact remains that this is a regime that has made death threats to Israel, hosted Holocaust-denial conferences, its frequent street chant is ‘death to Israel.’ We cannot be sure whether a nuclear Iran would moderate its behaviour, like Mao’s China did, or whether its rabid ideology would effect its behaviour as a nuclear state. We do know that it is locked in a protracted geopolitical struggle with America and its clients such as Saudi Arabia. A nuclearised Iran, at minimum, would increase general insecurity in the region, leading to increased tension and confrontation, probably some kind of renewed arms race, even reactive proliferation from states such as Saudi Arabia, or at least a demand for even more Western military presence and security guarantees. A prolonged project of containment and deterrence would be on the West’s shoulders for decades at least.  An era of dangerous new confrontation would arrive. Even if Iran was governed by restrained and reasonable people, the history of nuclear antagonism suggests that we  could not rule out accident, miscalculation and tragedy.

Bottom Line: a war would be so awful in its costs and consequences, that if we are to draw a red line, it should be at weaponisation, not uranium enrichment. 

But: if that is the case, the US and its allies should regard military force with a clear-eyed conservatism: mindfully restrained about the limits and dangers of the military instrument, but when using it, doing so decisively and overwhelmingly. The use of force is so tragic, so blunt and so chaotic that it should not be mistaken for performing surgery with a scalpel. It will kill innocents and unleash forces we can hardly anticipate. Iran is not a case for half-measures. The threshold for war should be high (I think weaponisation meets that threshold, though I could be wrong). There are plenty of other things that should be tried short of war (including taking steps to reduce the existential threat feared by the regime). But if the evil hour arrives, it is vital to consider what force should entail.

It should entail a devastating blow against Iran’s military capabilities. Not just a few punitive strikes against selected targets, ordered by nervous politicians keen to solve a diplomatic problem on the cheap while no bystanders get hurt. It should not be a tame, high minded policing action, to tweak the world with a few forensic blows back into order. It would have to involve knocking Iran to the floor. Setting its naval and air power back by decades. War will inflame Iranian politics and intentions. To make that ‘worth it’, its capabilities should be seriously degraded. Bluntly, they will hate us -even more- so the resort to force, if it comes, had better make them fear us. 

So proponents, and opponents of war should honestly confront what they are advocating, and what it could cost. Its a difficult marginal decision, a 60/40, which we will be living with for years to come. 

     

The Neocons Made Me Do It: Iraq and the Alibi of Liberal Hawks

Looking back on the disaster (or extremely Pyhrric Victory) that was the Iraq War, Stephen Walt reflects:

‘The remarkable thing about the Iraq war is how few people it took to engineer. It wasn’t promoted by the U.S. military, the CIA, the State Department, or oil companies. Instead, the main architects were a group of well-connected neoconservatives, who began openly lobbying for war during the Clinton administration…

As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman told Ha’aretz in May 2003: ‘Iraq was the war neoconservatives wanted… the war the neoconservatives marketed…. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.’

For the record, Thomas Friedman also supported war in 2003. Nevertheless, he is pleased to suggest that Other People, an inner bloc of power figures, made war happen. Well, its not as though he exercises any influence among policymakers. He doesn’t have a powerful platform to legitimise or promote ideas. He’s only a columnist for the New York Times.

The Neocons were central actors in supplying the Bush II Administration to war in Iraq. Who knows? Applying the counterfactual, it may be that without the organised, persistent and networked influence exerted by well-connected figures such as Richard Perle, David Frum or Paul Wolfowitz, America would be trillions of dollars, thousands of soldiers and nine years of fatigue better off, that hundreds of thousands would not be dead, and Iran would not be the dominant regional power in the Gulf.

But that doesn’t diminish the responsibility of those who backed it.

An open acknowledgement: for what its worth, some time after the toppling of Saddam and in a rather naive time of life, I was won over for a time by the hawkish idealism of those who hoped it would liberate and thereby make the world more secure. It was damned foolish. But its not to be denied. And its not to be blamed on Douglas Feith.

So what to make of the focus on neoconservatives? Its apparent that the word is often thrown about by Liberal Hawks who initially supported the war and then became embarrassed about the whole fiasco. It has become a sinister alibi. It amounts to a denial of responsibility.

The Bush Administration did not wage war in Iraq. The United States did. After a vote in Congress that authorised force by decisive margins. Measured by votes, Gulf War ‘Two’ attracted more support from Democrats than did the Gulf War of 1991. Democrat supporters included then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who after voting for the worst military adventure in our time, went on to advise Americans that they should exercise ‘smart power.’

The usual defence here is that they voted on false evidence. But, as Paul Pillar reminds us, most Democrats in Congress were remarkably incurious about the intelligence estimate on Iraq before they voted. Only six senators and a few representatives consulted it, according to the staff who kept custody of it.

Its almost as if they weren’t primarily moved by the evidence, but voted because they shared the underlying assumptions of the war proponents, and/or because they thought it was politically wise, to support a then-popular war president in a conflict they presumed would succeed at acceptable cost.

The case for war against Saddam was made strongly and influentially not just by neoconservatives, but by the likes of Kenneth Pollack, President Clinton’s former regional specialist on the National Security Council.

Had Bush not been President, and if the Democrat Candidate of 2000 Al Gore had been, the Oval Office would have been occupied by a man with a consistent record of hawkishness, who ran as muscular interventionist against the-then foreign policy ‘humility’ candidate in Bush, who bought in to the notion that Saddam was a lurking danger, with ties to Terrorism, who had to be overthrown somehow or other.

Then again, maybe becoming President of the world’s most militarily powerful nation – in a post 9/11 political culture where it pays to look tough – would have dampened down his predispositions.

A ‘neocon’ alibi gets the likes of Anne-Marie Slaughter off the hook too lightly. Having supported war in Iraq, and routinely supporting American military action from Rwanda to Libya to Syria, Slaughter would prefer us all to move on, and focus on the real issues of how to rebuild from the rubble created by the wars she endorses in the first place.

We can’t say with certainty than subtract neocons, and the war would have happened anyway. But we can say that a lot of non-neocon Liberal Hawks worked very hard indeed to support it, and to be seen to support it.

By trying to sequester blame onto a score or so of reviled individuals, the rest of the warlike idealists would like the interrogation to be about something other than them.

By isolating the blame to neocons, it is also an attempt to protect their stubborn and dubious world view, that we should still accept, as Glenn Greenwald describes it, that ‘we can fix other countries by controlling and ruling over them, that we’re going to spread human rights around the world like magic fairy dust by occupying and bombing them with our military, that wise and magnanimous American political leaders are both able and eager to navigate complex, foreign ethnic and religious conflicts and impose our will on other countries in order to bring Good to the world.’

On the whole, it really would be better if the Liberal Hawks who backed Bush in 2003 took some responsibility for once.

The Tyranny of Distance

We live in a small world. How many times have you heard that? How often have you heard that we are hopelessly bound together in a globalised and interconnected village?

In all its different incantations, how much have you been told that twitter, the internet, cheap travel, digitised finance or pandemics mean that we now inhabit a borderless globe, where there is no ‘over here’ or ‘over there’?

And, most importantly of all, how often have we been told that our intervention abroad, especially our armed intervention, is crucial because of the new proximity of security threats, and possible because we have the technology to return fire?

I’ve long distrusted this idea. Partly because it has led to so much mischief. Preventative wars like Iraq, the expansion of the Euro-Atlantic alliance and the resulting confrontation with Moscow, the wearing down of our overstretched military forces, and more deeply, the way an undifferentiated kind of ‘globalism’ damages our ability to think strategically, to separate the vital from the peripheral, to rank our interests and husband our resources.

But above all, it is a minor personal experience that also leaves me doubtful. Once every so often, I fly to Australia to visit my family. I love seeing them. But the flight on both legs always leaves me exhausted. Twenty hours across time zones, in all weathers, takes its toll. Our capacity to cross space may be faster than ever. But distance still exerts its depleting effects. Geography, it seems, always finds a way to get its revenge. Historian Geoffrey Blainey was so taken by distance that he organised his interpretation of Australian history around it – the Tyranny of Distance.

As trendy as it sounds, the obliteration of distance and the ‘shrunken world’  is in fact an old idea. Franklin Roosevelt  invoked it to justify America’s war against the Axis. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor showed that Americans could not afford to measure their security by miles on a map anymore. The coming of new tools, such as the aircraft carrier, and predatory ideologies of endless expansion such as fascism, meant that American security could not be territorial. It had to become universalist.

As it happened, World War Two saw the revenge of geography. It turned out that airplanes could be a shield as well as a sword, used to defend as well as attack urban targets. Strategic bombers could met out horrific violence, but took grievous losses in the process of striking thickly defended cities.  It turned out that despite some predictions, water still had a stopping power if defenders could project force over it. General Keitel announced that invading Britain would just be a ‘large river crossing.’ With Britain’s surface fleet, it turned out to be an unpassable moat, even for the new revisionist Germany and its bid to create its version of ‘One World.’

Getting close to Japan in order to break its will was a hard task indeed. Hopes that China could be a staging post were dashed because of terrain, weather and vastness. Getting real estate for forward air bases required bloody battles over islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, costing America casualties that it could not repeatedly sustain. As for Operation Barbarossa, it turned out that the dynamic package of armoured forces, high tempo and Auftragstaktik could not conquer freezing temperatures, vastness, hopeless roads and the strain on logistics, not to mention the iron indefatigability of Russians who wouldn’t yield.

Nevertheless, the idea of a shrunken world lived on. Roosevelt was continuing a strategic tradition embodied by Woodrow Wilson, and it was handed on to the architects of American grand strategy in the Cold War and beyond.

The interconnectedness of everything was at the heart of what became of the containment strategy, it underpinned the domino theory, it led to internal inquests into fifth column menaces at home. It lies at the foundation of the Bush doctrine, and the notion that classical strategic doctrines like deterrence and containment are no good in the dangerous planetary neighborhood. In short, it has helped turn the West from a watchful guardian into a wandering vigilante. Its latest battlesite is the cyber-realm, which supposedly is ageographical and all the more deadly for it. And it is the intellectual basis for what seems like the unquenchable appetite of Republican politicians for war, both threatening it and lowering the threshold for it.

As well as writing something on US strategic thinkers, I’m writing an argument about globalism and distance, and the confusion that the doctrine of globalism and the forgetting of distance has wrought on our collective mind. To be sure, technology has a shrinking effect of sorts. But it has in other ways expanded the world strategically. Nuclear weapons, new tools and techniques of access denial (such as long-range anti-ship missiles) and the diffusion of wealth and technology amongst growing states means that we might be able to fire a long way, but its much harder to expand and subjugate.

Even the cyber-realm is a trickier beast than often assumed. It relies on a very physical property: the network of oceanic cables without which it would vanish. The internet is not a dark portal that enables easy and quick offensives. Against prepared defenders, it is more like the ocean – a deadly medium or highway where the aggressor can be identified, watched and targeted. Consider twitter, whose revolutionary and shrinking effect is so wildly overblown by its fans.

As Evgeny Morozov has shown, most of the tweeting about Iran during the Green uprising was taking place abroad. Its significance was overstated by internet commentators who…are twitterers, for whom self-absorption is not unknown. More fundamentally, it became part of the apparatus of the state, that targeted and hunted down twitterers and their sympathisers. Just as the printing press was harnessed by the counter-reformationists as well as Protestants, so too is our shiny wondrous gadgetry being exploited by regimes that are not about to be shown the door by the generation of internet chatterboxes.

In the field of economics and international politics, there are good critiques to be read, showing that globalisation (the circulation of people, things, capital and ideas around the world) is as much a choice as a fact. It is reversible, fragile and partial. Most people stay where they were born. Most people trade regionally or locally. Nationalism has not died out, not has the state surrendered its jealous hold over sovereignty. The return of walls in Baghdad, the US-Mexico border, or in Israel shows that many of the most powerful actors do not act as though the world is borderless. Emigration is now harder than it was in the nineteenth century, and illegal emigration is getting more and more dangerous. A similar revision is needed in the field of strategic studies.

Closer to home, it remains true that the Falklands islands are almost 8000 miles from London. Geography is not fixed, exactly – land does erode, drift, burn, and flood. And mediating between us and the world are the ideas we select and use or abuse to map that world. Nevertheless, the islands are a long way away from its ‘metropole’ by any decent measure. This brute fact conditions Britain’s strategic situation and debate. And indeed, the perceived legitimacy of this asset. The remoteness of the contested islands poses an awkward question for Britons: to liquidate the commitment, to reinforce its garrison and defence, or to take a risk by holding on to the status quo in the face of other locals getting more and more displeased.

My rough argument is this: to restore coherence to our strategy (and lets face it, something has gone wrong: a debt-deficit crisis, disastrous peripheral wars, national defences groaning under overextension, inflation and attrition), we need to restore some conception of distance to our thinking. We might be able to traverse space faster – but it still exacts its tolls. Physically, militarily, economically, psychologically. Just think about the difficulties and costs of supplying ISAF forces in Afghanistan over the long grinding route from Karachi into the interior, and the double-dealing entrepreneurs they must bribe just to get their supplies over land.

Of course, there is change. But its not the seismic change of geography disappearing. Its the shifting ways in which it reimposes limits on our power.

Futurists and prophets of ‘new wars’ characterised Osama Bin Laden as a guerrilla of the information age, orchestrating a shadowy network of Islamist militants, the terrorist mastermind without borders who could export his  mayhem at the click of a mouse or a tap of his encrypted software. But when US troops finally stormed his compound, we found out something surprising and embarrassingly unfashionable. He didn’t dare use the internet himself. It was too dangerous. He relied on couriers. Warfare always has been a hard slog. Its time to pause our twittering, and draw bigger maps in our minds.

Enough war for now

We must remember also that we have only just recovered in some measure from a great plague and a great war, and are beginning to make up our losses in men and money. It is our duty to expend our new resources upon ourselves at home, and not upon begging exiles who have an interest in successful lies; who find it expedient only to contribute words, and let others fight their battles; and who, if saved, prove ungrateful; if they fail, as they very likely may, only involve their friends in a common ruin…

Nicias, speaking in the Athenian Ekklesia against the Sicilian expedition in 415 BC.

On Security Dilemmas and the Absurdity of Newt Gingrich

On Security Dilemmas and The Absurdity of Newt Gingrich

When he isn’t comparing himself to Ronald Reagan (whose withdrawal of troops from Lebanon, arms control negotiations with Gorbachev, nuclear abolitionist visions and moderation on immigration, and general sunny persona suggest they aren’t politically identical), Newt Gingrich says things like this:

<blockquote>I would say that the most dangerous thing — which, by the way, Barack Obama just did — the Iranians are practicing closing the Strait of Hormuz, actively taunting us, so he cancels a military exercise with the Israelis so as not to be provocative?

“Dictatorships respond to strength, they don’t respond to weakness,” Gingrich continued, “and I think there’s very grave danger that the Iranians think this president is so weak that they could close the Strait of Hormuz and not suffer substantial consequences.</blockquote>

Its already pointed out that his claim about the cancelled exercise is factually false.

More deeply, its simply untrue to claim that dictatorships (or any regime type, actually) only respond to ‘strength’, which is Gingrich’s shorthand for bellicose escalation.

It shouldn’t take a degree in political science (or indeed, in Gingrich’s case, a Phd in History), to ponder why this might be ever so slightly misleading. For a start, talk of ‘being strong’ because its the only way to change your enemy’s behaviour is exactly how Iran’s Supreme Leader is reported to talk about America. How would a President Gingrich react to equivalent Iranian posturing?

Surprisingly enough, history suggests that regimes which are highly motivated to survive might respond badly to threats, sabre rattling, and confrontation.

A really important case of this happened between 1937-1941, which despite the obsession with that era amongst Gingrich and his fans, is often neglected. President Franklin Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions on Imperial Japan (including oil, tin and rubber) which would virtually destroy its ability to operate. He did so to pressure Japan to abandon its brutal expansionism in China. He was confident that the presence of the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii would act as a deterrent against retaliation.

Seeking to avoid a war in the Pacific, Roosevelt’s twin approach of coercion and deterrence had perverse
results. Given the choice between abandoning its imperial ambitions in continental Asia, and challenging the US directly, Japan’s rulers chose Door Number 2.This unleashed a Pacific war of unimaginable suffering that neither country actually wanted.

Had Gingrich been advising President John Kennedy in 1962, would he, like the Joint Chiefs, have been muttering about Munich and warning the President to look strong by escalating against an opponent, we now know, armed with nuclear-tipped ground-to-ground missiles and authorised to use them?

Kennedy, fortunately, was mindful of other Western strategic history, when escalation resulted not in bloodless climbdowns but in the war of 1914-1918, with the horrors it bequethed to the twentieth century.

Most important of all, Gingrich falls prey to the false binaries of what passes for foreign policy ‘debate’ amongst those who call themselves Reaganites (and who conveniently forget how disappointed they were by the actual Reagan in the mid-1980′s). He characterises strategic choices as a matter of strength versus weakness.

For Gingrich, there is no middle ground of prudence and restraint. Reagan sometimes escalated, and sometimes backed off. We can debate how well or badly he did so, and whether it was part of a conscious design or an erratic indecision. But there was a sense that diplomatic behaviour, and the mix of deterrence and talks, could be calibrated and measured.

Not so with Newt, who simply won’t recognise that his own talk of threats, sanctions, regime change and military strikes might make Tehran want a deterrent (or even just a latent capability) even more, thereby making Newt a potential co-creator of the very monster that he warns against.

I yearn for his political implosion, and return to the outer darkness of the political fringe.

Obama’s Offshore Dominance

Its a little late in coming, but I wanted to post some thoughts on Peter Beinart’s thoughtful recent description of President Obama’s evolving approach to US grand strategy as ‘offshore balancing.’

Stephen Walt has already responded, and there have already been some great posts on the broader issue of what really counts as offshore balancing, here, and here.

One of the difficulties in the endless debate over how to taxonomise US strategic behaviour is that many folk naturally emphasise techniques or goals (or means and ends) at the other’s expense. Perhaps this reflects a deeper reflex in Washington foreign policy debate, where the overriding goals of American diplomacy are debated far less intensively than the means. Muscular liberals might agree with Neoconservatives that the ultimate goal is American benevolent primacy in the world, which in turn would advance American and global security, but they disagree at times over how to get there (consensual multilateralism and institution-building or hawkish unilateral action, etc). At times this can lead to a certain ‘narcissism of small differences.’ So there is a temptation to stress the ‘offshore’ aspect and downplay ‘balancing.’ As Peter Beinart characterises it:

One way of understanding America’s shifting policy in the Middle East is that we’re moving offshore. Instead of directly occupying Islamic lands, we’re trying to secure our interests from the sea, the air and by equipping our allies. That’s in large measure what the Obama administration is trying to do in East Asia, too.The central message of Obama’s trip last week to Australia was that the U.S. finally is focused on restraining China’s rise in the Pacific. And how will the U.S. do that? A token deployment of Marines in northern Australia notwithstanding, the Obama administration’s strategy will be to buttress America’s naval presence in the Pacific and aid those nations on China’s periphery that fear its hegemonic ambitions.

This echoes the approach of the likes of Robert Pape, who argues (especially in the context of how to reduce anti-American terrorism) for a lighter footprint and a more naval-oriented military posture. And to be sure, it is important to consider that a big part of driving down the costs of American strategy could be moving offshore and avoiding large-scale expeditionary land commitments.

But offshore balancing, at least as it has been formulated since the first generation of post World War Two realists all the way to contemporaries such as Barry Posen, Christopher Preble and Christopher Layne, is a bigger and more demanding creature than that.

It isn’t just an alternative path to maintaining American hegemony abroad, or to making hegemony cheaper. It proposes a substantively new role for the U.S. in the world. As Brian C. Schmidt argues observantly in a paper he gave a while back, it is an argument that the US abandon the pursuit of unipolar primacy in the world. Its about ‘ends’ as well as ‘means’, or at least, it argues that America’ security interests are better served by accommodating what is inevitable, the return of mulitpolarity.

Take Obama’s recent Defence Strategic Guidance, and the stance he articulated recently, orienting the US strategically towards East Asia while scaling back its onshore commitments, de-emphasising prolonged counter-insurgency and nation-building missions and ramping up investment in drones and cyber capabilities.

While it may be tempting to define this – as some of Obama’s defenders and supporters do- as a fundamental grand strategic shift, it really isn’t. Its an attempt to pursue the existing, inherited grand strategic goal (the preservation of American primacy) while adjusting the ever-shifting mix of military supremacy, deterrence, reassurance, democratisation and liberalisation, in an apparently increasing important part of the world where the economic weight and political ambition is moving. (It is also, incidentally, a softly expressed but unmistakable confirmation that America is drawing down its military protectorate in Europe).

The title of Obama’s Defence Strategic Guidance gives the game away: ‘Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership.’ Which is a polished, euphemistic way of saying that America is not abandoning its role as No. 1, the guardian of world order. Offshore Balancers who go beyond tactics and techniques and methods do not usually share this ambition. In fact, they regard the pursuit of primacy and the vehicle to pursue it -a vast, forward-leaning military-strategic presence, a set of permanent formal alliances, and the attempt to remake the world in America’s image – as pernicious, exhausting, prone to inviting ‘free riding’ from others and creating security dilemmas unintentionally, as well as damaging American democracy at home. If America isn’t to embrace an amoral cynicism in place of the Pax Americana, they argue that it can better embody and repair its values at home, as an example to the world.

The main challenge for offshore balancing, in trying to navigate a mid-point between isolation and hegemony, is how to operationalise such a role, and how to give it geopolitical shape. In other words, precisely where would US forces be parked if they aren’t just to pack up and go home, and how should the US prepare for the possibility of competitive balancing or even bandwagoning if its onshore presence its reduced? On that note, I’m writing a little pamphlet that will be published later in 2012, all being well.

The suspense must be killing you.

Ron Paul: how he can help and hurt the case for restraint abroad

In 2008, President Barack Obama’s watchword and promise was ‘change.’  But in 2012, if there is one significant change visionary offering a real departure from the status quo, it is Ron Paul.

In the realm of strategy, Obama has introduced some change. He is reshaping the US military away from major expeditionary land wars and towards standoff capabilities, such as drones, naval/air strikes, different forms of war such as cyber, and a renewed emphasis on burden shifting through training up allies and proxies.

But as Stephen Walt points out, while he is (sensibly, I think, given the austerity of the times) altering the ‘means’, his aim is fixed and indistinguishable from his predecessor and from US grand strategy in the past few decades – unchallengeable primacy:

 …the “leaner” military budget revealed yesterday does not herald a fundamental change in our overall approach to the rest of the world. The United States will still be spending several times more on national security than any other single country, and more than the top ten or so nations combined.

Our strategic attention will shift toward Asia and away from protracted counter-insurgency efforts (decisions that I applaud), but the United States will still be a preponderant power, will still maintain an extensive array of military bases around the world, and will still be strongly disposed to interfere in other nation’s affairs.

We may be using somewhat different tools (i.e., drones and special forces rather than large occupying armies), but these are tactical rather than strategic adjustments.

By contrast, Ron Paul advocates withdrawal, retrenchment, demilitarisation of foreign policy, non-interference and even the end of foreign aid.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is both good and bad for the debate. Good, because at least a non-trivial candidate is arguing the case for greater restraint:

 Unlike most foreign policy “experts” in both parties, Paul believes the United States is an extraordinarily secure country, with a robust nuclear deterrent, no powerful enemies nearby, and at present no major power rivals of much significance. He instinctively rejects the paranoia and worst-casing that has convinced Americans that we need to roam around the world trying to remake it in our image (a task, by the way, that we’re not very good at). He believes that excessive interventionism and other failed policies are a primary cause of anti-Americanism around the world, and that the United States would be more popular and safer if we focused more attention on trade and diplomacy and domestic issues instead of emphasizing military dominance and overseas meddling. He believes that a bloated national security state and a quasi-imperial foreign policy inevitably fosters greater government secrecy and erodes traditional restraints on executive power. And like former president (and five-star general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, he thinks the current military-industrial complex wields excessive influence on our politics and has become a self-perpetuating engine for counter-productive meddling abroad.

But it is also bad, not only because his inflammatory record on other issue (apparently including race) could taint the case for restraint with the accusation of provincial isolationism, but because Paul is essentially an isolationist. This is bad news, because it makes it harder than ever to distinguish other more restrained strategies (such as Concert/Balance ones, which look for a middle ground between dominance and isolation) from the kind of insularity that Paul is accused of.