Month: October 2021
A serious nomination that doesn’t guarantee success
The Biden Administration has announced its intention to nominate Chris Hill as ambassador in Belgrade. This is a clear break with other recent appointments, which have put career officers still in service in Pristina and Sarajevo. Chris is a career officer who retired more than a decade ago, but he is also someone well-known to President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken from his service as ambassador in Iraq, South Korea, and Poland, if not also Macedonia. Chris is a heavy, that is more akin to a personal or political friend of the President and Secretary of State than all the other ambassadors serving in the Balkans currently or Gabriel Escobar, the recently named Deputy Assistant Secretary for the region. If anything, Belgrade is a step down for Chris from his previous positions.
This nomination signals a serious intention on the part of the Administration to try to resolve the remaining war and peace issues in the Balkans, which I would define as the still not universally recognized sovereignty of Kosovo and the dysfunctionality of governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both quandaries will require Belgrade’s positive contributions.
This won’t be easy. Today’s clash betweeen Serbia and Kosovo at the UN Security Council was awful. The two countries are pointed in different directions.
Serbian Foreign Minister Selakovic repeatedly accused Kosovo President Osmani of lying, claimed she represented no one but herself, and asserted she was somehow affiliated with World War II Albanian Fascists. Serbia has in recent years aligned itself far more with Russia and China than with the US and Europe, including through economic cooperation, arms purchases, increased powers for its president, and reduced space for free media, an independent judiciary, and anything but an ethnic nationalist opposition.
The 39-year-old Osmani displayed a map of Albanian mass graves in Serbia and demanded an apology for the Milosevic-era depradations against Kosovo, during which she was displaced and fled to Montenegro before getting degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. Kosovo has a new Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, committed to cleaning up corruption and maintaining the relatively free media and increasingly independent judiciary that he inherited. Kosovo aligns itself entirely with the US and Europe.
The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is even worse, as the division splits the country internally. The leader of its Serb entity and member of the tripartite Presdency Milorad Dodik is freezing his loyalists’ participation in the country’s institution, trying to nullify its national laws, and threatening to take command of the Serb soldiers in its army. With Russian and Serbian support, he is inching towards the independence he has declared as his goal, hoping not to provoke an effective American or European reaction before the process is irreversible. He remembers what most Americans have forgotten: even during the unipolar moment, it took NATO 3.5 years to intervene in Bosnia and Herzegoina. The international community High Representative in Bosnia, German Christian Schmidt, is doing nothing visible to fulfill his mandate to protect the Dayton accords.
Neither situation is propitious.
But an ambassador who arrives in Belgrade with ready access to the President and Secretary of State has advantages. He can more effectively claim to speak for his bosses. He can far more easily mobilize all the resources of the US government and even the private sector than less weighty appointees. Chris was a protege’ of Dick Holbrooke, who was particularly effective at pulling all the levers of American power in the same direction at the same time. Chris is also well-known in Europe, which can bring far greater civilian resources to bear than the US. And he will have enormous leverage with Kosovo, for which he served as Special Envoy in 1998 and 1999, when the Rambouillet negotiations failed and NATO attacked Serbia.
I’m not predicting success. Chris knows as well as anyone that failure is a real possibility, as he has experienced it not only in the Rambouillet negotiations but also in negotiations with North Korea while he was an Assistant Secretary of State. His tenure in Iraq during a difficult period was not crowned with glory. But if he is able to solve either the Kosovo/Serbia conundrum or the Bosnia and Herzegovina Rubik’s cube, there will be good reason to applaud. Solving both would mean a standing ovation.
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Stevenson’s army, October 15
– Politico has a story about a lobbyist head-hunter.
– Economist says districts with military bases had 8% swing to Democrats in 2020.
– FP is starting a series on UN sanctions.
– Biden’s Turkey policy is complicated by order for F-16s.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Syria: what’s missing is more important than doing what was done before
Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the Secretary of State’s Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS until November 8, 2020, posted the following comment on peacefare.net, responding to my post on Syria yesterday. I am repeating it here, hoping it will be easier to find and more widely read:
Dan, you are right about the statement being the most extensive of the thin gruel we have gotten from Team B on Syria, and what they have announced that they will keep doing, what I will call operational activities “1,2,3….X”, is pretty much what we were doing up to a year ago (and with some minor mods what Kerry was pursuing). But I’m not sure we have a real policy towards Syria, or at least a policy similar to the one Pompeo and Kerry followed.
First, what the statement says is, we are doing all these operational things. Those cited and others we are doing have immediate purposes–help refugees, implement UNSCR 2254, support UN-led negotiating effort, fight ISIS, deal with CW threat, react to Iranian deployments, etc., but there is no clue to how these all fit together into a larger policy, especially one that deals with the underlying reason we have all the above problems to deal with–the Assad regime’s war on its own people supported by Iran and Russia including for their own regional expansionist goals. What the real US policy is in the larger sense remains under question, either it’s still being debated or the White House understands what they have decided on will be so unpopular best to conceal it.
There is thus no known ‘whole’ that is greater than the ‘parts,’ and what we have are just those ‘parts,’ “1,2,3,….X”. To illustrate what I’m driving at let me cite what I think (and drew on when I was doing Syria) is an analogous situation, one where the Biden administration is much clearer: Ukraine. Any policy has various elements (everyone has her/his own, I have four): (1) national interest in play; (2) specific goal to serve the interest, (3) operational strategy to achieve the goal, and (4) specific operational activities in support, i.e., the “1,2,3….X”. The Ukraine specific operational activities are remarkably similar to those being done with Syria: work through an international coalition, push for ceasefire, implement UN resolutions and support negotiations (in Ukraine case Normandie Process), provide arms to local partner, deal with humanitarian fallout.
But with the Ukraine policy there is a superstructure (elements (1)-(3) above) that explains and guides the specific operational activities. The national interest is preventing a major deterioration of European security through a Russian victory over and possible assimilation of Ukraine. The specific goal to advance that interest, given geography, balance of forces, other priorities, is necessarily limited: avoid a complete Russian victory, as opposed to rolling back or defeating the Russians or even the status quo ante. The operational strategy given the interest and the goal in the context of limited means is to create a stalemate, inflict costs on the aggressor with clarity that further aggression will generate more (hopefully counter-balancing) costs, while holding out a compromise resolution. Such a resolution is the best case scenario but a stalemate is ‘good enough.’ The operational activities, the “1,2,3,….X” are fluid, can be dialed up or down to signal resolve, and further the stalemate while holding open the chance for a compromise resolution.
This is essentially what our strategy was with Syria: national interest was preventing an Assad, Iran, Russian victory, the specific goal as our means were limited was to ensure through a stalemate that they could not win, the operational strategy was to increase costs, signal resolve and hold out a compromise solution, and the operational activities were geared to advance that operational strategy. This is what is now missing–we don’t know the larger purpose, i.e, the (1), (2) and (3) of the administration’s approach to Syria. As we have (4) we can through inductive reasoning postulate that they have some (1)-(3) and that it might be like the Trump or late Obama administrations’, but that’s just speculation. Jim
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Syria: no attractive propositions, so Biden is staying the course
Secretary of State Blinken at a press conference with the Israeli and UAE foreign ministers today said more about Syria than I remember since the beginning of the Biden Administration, in response to a question about normalization that other countries are indulging in:
…let me talk about Syria first and then come to the second part of the – the first part of the question second.
First, to put this in focus, these initial nine months of the administration we have been focused on a few things when it comes to Syria: Expanding humanitarian access for people who desperately need that assistance, and we had some success, as you know, with renewing the critical corridor in northwestern Syria to do that; sustaining the campaign that we have with the coalition against ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria; making clear our commitment, our ongoing commitment to demand accountability from the Assad regime and the preservation of basic international norms like promoting human rights and nonproliferation through the imposition of targeted sanctions; and sustaining local ceasefires, which are in place in different parts of the country. So this has been the focus of our action for these last nine months.
As we’re moving forward, in the time ahead, keeping violence down; increasing humanitarian assistance and focusing our military efforts on any terrorist groups that pose a threat to us or to our partners, with the intent and capacity to do that. These are going to be the critical areas of focus for us, and they’re also, I think, important to advancing a broader political settlement to the Syrian conflict consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2254.
What we have not done and what we do not intend to do is to express any support for efforts to normalize relations or rehabilitate Mr. Assad, or lifted [sic] a single sanction on Syria or changed [sic] our position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution, which we believe is necessary and vital.
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-israeli-alternate-prime-minister-and-foreign-minister-yair-lapid-and-united-arab-emirates-foreign-minister-sheikh-abdullah-bin-zayed-al-nahyan-at-a-joint-press-availab/
This is a restatement of well-established US priorities: humanitarian assistance, reduction in violence, counter-terrorism, and irreversible progress toward a political solution before reconstruction or normalization.
So nothing new. What’s missing? should always be the next question.
Tony fails to deal with the threat of a serious military clash between NATO ally Turkey and the Kurdish-led forces that are conducting the campaign against both terrorists and the regime in northeastern Syria, with American support. He is silent on concerns about Iran using Syrian territory to threaten Israel. Nor does he indicate that the United States opposes normalization by others, in particular Jordan and the UAE. And he is silent on brutality-laced Russian and Iranian support for the Syrian regime, which in due course may become capable of challenging the Kurdish presence in the northeast and the Turkish presence inside Syria’s northern border. So yes, continuity of a policy that is silent on important issues and has so far failed to produce substantial results.
Is there a better approach? We could certainly tighten sanctions so that jet-setting scions of the Syrian elite don’t roam Los Angeles in Ferraris, but that won’t change anything in Syria. We could help the Germans mount a “universal jurisdiction” case against President Assad himself, in absentia, but that would set a legal precedent that might boomerang on prominent Americans. We could try harder to mediate some sort of accommodation between the Syrian Kurds and Turkey, as we did once with a modicum of success between the Iraqi Kurds and Turkey. Or we could try to negotiate autonomous status for the Kurds within Syria in return for US withdrawal, though the regime would be no more likely than the Taliban to stick to the terms of a withdrawal agreement. The Kurds would likely revert to attacking inside Turkey as well as Turkish-controlled Syria in order to curry favor with Assad. It suits the Kurds and Turkey to have the Americans remain in Syria.
I won’t even bother with military options against the Russians or the regime. The Americans take some shots against the Iranians and their proxies in Syria, but they aren’t going to risk war with Russia or the civilian casualties that taking on the regime would entail.
So no, there are not a lot of attractive propositions in Syria. Especially after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Administration can ill afford a comparable mess in Syria, never mind an influx into the US of tens of thousands Syrian Kurds and Arabs who helped the US during the past decade and have legitimate claims to asylum. No wonder Biden is staying the course.
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Stevenson’s army, October 13
– Biden is losing Democrats:2
Jonathan Last watched a focus group of “nine Democratic voters in Pennsylvania who ran the gamut—from Bernie-stans to a lady who had voted for Trump in 2016.”
“Every single one of them thought Biden was doing a bad job. But that’s not the bad news.”
“Every single one of them thought things were crappy in America right now. Still not the bad news.”
“Not one of them liked Biden personally. They all viewed him as a normal, lying politician.”
“Now we’re there. Here’s the really bad news: None of them believed that Republicans were to blame for the administration’s failures.”
– China’s ahead on cybersecurity.
– Hypersonic weapons cost too much, DOD says.
Since I’ve often found fault with Sen. Cotton [R-AK], I want to share this news of his good work.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Iraq’s election: a mixed bag is better than a mess
My Middle East Institute colleagues have already elegantly parsed the October 10 Iraqi election results and their implications. It’s a mixed bag: Moqtada al Sadr, who already controls more seats than anyone else in parliament gained, as did former Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki; Shia militia politicians, more moderate Shia, and Sunni Islamists weakened; Sunni secularists, independents, regional advocates, and both the leading Kurdish party and a newish one gained. Turnout was low, due in part to a boycott encouraged by activists who had previously campaigned for the early poll. What it all means for election of the President, Parliament speaker, and Prime Minister won’t be known for weeks if not months.
Just as interesting to me is the process: it came off pretty well, with little violence and intimidation by Iraqi standards. Almost two decades after the American invasion, Iraqis have grown accustomed to something like a democratic regime, albeit more than a little tainted with lack of voter enthusiasm, corruption, patronage, sectarianism, and armed groups only nominally under state control. Politics is a rough sport in Iraq, but not now a deadly one, unless you are a demonstrator fired on by sectarian militias.
The main issues are now economic. The American presence, down to a couple of thousand troops plus contractors, is no more discussed than Iranian influence, exercised in part through the Popular Mobilization Forces and their politicians. Kurdistan’s independence aspirations have faded but still simmer. Even with oil prices at a 7-year peak, the new government will face big challenges in maintaining and growing oil and gas production while steering the economy towards non-hydrocarbon development and adjusting to global warming, which threatens to make parts of the country uninhabitable.
If the next government can even begin to meet those challenges, Iraq could play an important role in a Middle East that is adjusting to the prospect of reduced American attention. As a Shia and Arab majority country with a large Kurdish population and many other smaller minorities, a prosperous Iraq could be a multivalent force for stability and coexistence, helping to bridge divides among Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. The current Prime Minister has made some good but still tentative steps in that direction. It is no secret that the Americans and Europeans will hope he is able again to form a government, unlikely as that may seem in a volatile political environment. They also liked his two predecessors, both of whom are, at least for now, down and out.
It is hard to be optimistic about the prospect of serious economic reform in Iraq, which has so far failed to turn its oil wealth into benefits–or even electricity and water–for ordinary citizens. Moqtada’s minions have not governed in the past in transparent and accountable ways. The country lacks an independent judiciary and much of its press is under the control of major politicians. But if law and order prevail, the next government will have an enormous opportunity both domestically and internationally to enable Iraq to benefit both its own citizens and the region. A mixed bag is better than a mess.
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