Tag: Ukraine
Let’s enjoy this election evening!
I’m doing a press briefing on the implications of the American election for foreign policy in a few hours. Here are the speaking notes I’ve prepared for myself:
- It is a pleasure to be with you tonight, as America concludes an ugly election campaign and decides on its 45th president.
- I won’t pretend to be neutral: I have supported Hillary Clinton with words, money, and even knocking on doors in West Philadelphia.
- But in these opening remarks, I would like to focus first not on the candidates but rather on the process, which is a complicated one.
- One consequence is that there is little uniformity: as you’ll see tonight, the states will close their polls at different times, starting in just a few minutes at 7 pm with Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia.
- The initial results will likely favor Trump, but swing states North Carolina and Ohio close their polls at 7:30 pm and by 8 pm lots of Clinton states close their polls.
- Key then will be Florida and Pennsylvania, and at 9 pm Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Clinton could be in trouble if she doesn’t win there.
- In the meanwhile, you’ll be getting exit polling from many of the “swing” states, those that might go one way or the other. Exit polls in my view are not terribly reliable: sampling errors can be significant, and in many states a significant percentage of people have already voted.
- Not only are rules and procedures decided by the states, but the vote in each state determines that state’s votes in the electoral college that meets in state capitals on December 19.
- Each state has a number of electoral votes equal to its number of Representatives and Senators. Because each state has two senators, this favors less populous (more Republican) states, but the reliably Democratic District of Columbia, which has no senators, gets three votes as well.
- As a result, an election can be close in the popular vote (polling suggests Trump and Clinton are within 3 or 4 percentage points of each other), but the electoral college difference can be big.
- If Trump were to get fewer than 200 electoral votes (and Clinton the remaining 338 plus), that might be considered a landslide, even if the popular vote is close.
- It is also possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote and win in the electoral college. That happened with George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. I went to bed convinced Gore had won.
- By morning, the Florida controversy had erupted and the election was eventually decided in the Supreme Court, which allowed Florida’s determination of the winner to stand and Bush to become President without a popular vote majority.
- The lesson here is don’t go to bed too early tonight. It may be late before the outcome is clear and unequivocal. In the last three elections it was past 11 pm.
- What does it all mean for foreign policy?
- First, I think an uncontested and clear outcome is highly desirable. The world does not need another month of uncertainty about who will be the 45th president.
- Second, there are dramatic differences between Trump, who prides himself on unpredictability, and Clinton, who has a long track record well within the post-911 foreign policy consensus.
- Trump is erratic, inconsistent, and hyperbolic. He wants to put America first, which he has defined not only as ignoring others, blocking immigrants, and doubting America’s alliances but also destroying the existing international trading system and illogically pursuing a bromance with Vladimir Putin.
- Clinton is committed, studious, internationalist, all perhaps to a fault. She once pursued a reset with Putin that failed. She wants to maintain the stability of the international system and restore American authority some think President Obama surrendered in his retrenchment.
- A word or two about what this all means in some important parts of the world.
- In the Middle East and Europe, including the Baltics and Ukraine, Clinton is far more likely to push back on Russian aggressiveness than Trump.
- In Asia, Trump has occasionally talked tough about China’s trade policy and suggested that South Korea and Japan might want to get their own nuclear weapons.
- Clinton would certainly not want that but might also be tough with China on trade. She would likely want to continue to build up American alliances in Asia, including with India and Vietnam.
- Both Clinton and Trump oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), but Clinton would likely want to renegotiate parts of it and proceed while Trump would scrap it entirely.
- Presidents do not always get to decide which issues they focus on. I would expect Moscow and Beijing, and perhaps others, to take an early opportunity to test the new president.
- An incident involving China in the South China Sea? North Korean launch of a missile that could reach the US? A new push by Russian-supported insurgents in Donbas? An incident with Iranian ships or missiles in the Gulf? A massive cyberattack?
- Clinton understands the capabilities and limits of American power, as well as the need for allied support. Trump does not. He mistakes bravado for strength and unpredictability for leverage.
- Most of the world understands this and favors Clinton. Moscow may not be alone in favoring Trump, but it is certainly lonely.
- Those of us who enjoy foreign policy for a living—Republicans as well as Democrats like me—will likewise be almost universally relieved if she, not he, becomes president.
- But the evening is young. Let’s enjoy it with some questions!
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What the election means for the Balkans
I did this interview for Filip Raunic of the Croatian website Telegram about a week ago. They published it today.
Q: The situation in the Balkans, especially Bosnia and Hercegovina with separatist tendencies of its entity “Republika Srpska (RS),” is tense. Do you think US will regain its focus on Balkans any time soon? And should it?
A: It is difficult for Washington to focus on the Balkans. Apart from the election, the Americans have a lot of other things they are dealing with: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Ukraine, Afghanistan, the South China Sea, just to mention a few. Washington long ago transferred the main responsibility in the Balkans to Europe. Still, the US will not accept an RS declaration of independence or other moves that threaten peace and stability in Southeast Europe.
Q: How do you see Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton with respect to foreign policy towards Europe and Balkans?
A: I think Hillary Clinton would be good for all those who look to the EU and NATO as anchors of their foreign policy. She understands the region and will want to see progress by those countries who seek membership in these organizations. Donald Trump appears to know nothing about the Balkans and likely cares less, except when it comes to collecting a few Serb or Croat votes in Ohio. I’ve seen no sign his wife has given him any instruction on Slovenia.
Q: Croatia is considered as the main US ally in the region. If so, would President Clinton because of her interventionist policy be better for Croatia and its political role in the region than president Trump?
A: It takes two to influence. Russia is a declining regional power with a GNP less than that of Spain, an aging and shrinking population, an imploding economy, and a petty autocratic as president. Anyone who wants Russia’s influence can have it so far as I am concerned, but I expect most people in the Balkans understand that the EU has a great deal more to offer, especially as it begins to recover from a deep recession.
Turkey, like Russia, has a long history in the Balkans, and its companies have done well there. But it too suffers from a burgeoning autocracy. Sure Ankara will have some influence wherever it plants its commercial activities, but I don’t think it today a very good model of how to administer rule of law or allow a free press.
The US will continue to be diplomatically present and influential in the region, but it will also expect the sovereign states that are allies and friends to handle as much of their own affairs as possible. That, after all, was the purpose of creating the independent states from former Yugoslavia: so that they could manage their own issues and enjoy the benefits of free democratic states.
Today, Milena Pejic of the Belgrade daily Blic asked another question about the election, and I answered:
Q: I was just hoping that you can give us some final predictions and thoughts about he US election? Who do you think is going to win and who would be the better choice for the rest of the world, particularly Serbia?
A: I have long supported Hillary Clinton and believe she will win: Go vote! – peacefare.net
Neither Clinton nor Trump is likely to give much priority to the Balkans, but Clinton would certainly be committed to stability and democracy there, including the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Kosovo.
With respect to Serbia, it seems to me recent events suggest it faces a serious political and criminal threat to its democracy and stability from Russian and Russia-aligned forces within Serbia. Trump’s “bromance” with Putin could lead to an increase in this threat. The safest place for Serbian democracy is inside the EU, not straddling between the EU and Moscow.
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In the box can be good too
I enjoyed 90 minutes today with SAIS’s Mike Lampton and CSIS’s Michael Green commenting on Amitai Etzioni’s Foreign Policy: Thinking Outside the Box, a recent Chatham House publication. Here are my speaking notes, though I should note much of the event focused on China, which was not within my remit:
- First let me say it has been a privilege to be required to read this book. It is a model of precision and intelligibility. Professor Ezioni says what he means clearly and concisely, marshaling the evidence with skill and erudition.
- My doubts have to do mainly with the title: it advertises thinking outside the box, but much of the book is devoted to ideas I would regard as well inside the box, even if some of them might be labeled “new normal.”
- Take, for example, the chapter on “defining down sovereignty.” A good deal of it is spent pooh-poohing the Westphalian notion of sovereignty and arguing in favor of a more contemporary alternative: sovereignty as entailing rights as well as responsibilities.
- This leads naturally to Responsibility to Protect, which is well within the box these days, and another, new to me notion, “responsibility to counter terrorism.” If states fail or refuse to do this, intervention might be justified, Professor Etzioni says.
- It’s an interesting idea that even explains some current behavior, in particular the anti-ISIL intervention in Syria, which the host government has not unauthorized.
- The downsides are all too clear: the slippery slope that leads to an unjustified excuse for invasion or other intervention, as in George W.
- The chapter on spheres of influence is not so much outside the box as it is outside the realm of academic discussion, as Professor Etzioni himself documents. Spheres of influence are a well-established practice in international affairs, even if the concept has not attracted much scholarly attention.
- Professor Etzioni sees spheres of influence, Russia’s “near-abroad” for example or Iran’s influence in Iraq, as providing space for rising regional powers and buffer zones that bolster a feeling of security.
- The trouble with that notion is that it discounts the will of those who live in these buffer states. The limits of his approach are all to evident in Ukraine, where Etzioni admits Russia used force to try to prevent the Ukrainians from choosing their alignment with Europe.
- People just aren’t always content to serve the purposes of other powers.
- When it comes to self-determination, I would quibble with Amitai’s characterization of Kurdistan as more democratic than the rest of Iraq, but more importantly he ignores the negative regional and internal political contexts for any independence move by the Iraqi Kurds. I doubt it will happen, or that it will be democratizing if it does.
- I would agree however with Amitai’s main conclusion: decentralization rather than secession is far more likely to produce positive outcomes in democratic societies like Spain, where unfortunately the central government has been unwilling to concede even that. That however is a conclusion well inside the box, not outside it.
- One concluding thought: Professor Etzioni repeatedly doubts the applicability of liberal democratic notions outside the family of liberal democratic states.
- As an American, I feel condemned to believe in universal rights, as our founding documents are all too clear on this subject.
- But I would also say that I’ve virtually never met someone outside the liberal democratic world who didn’t aspire to those rights.
- We don’t need to export the notion that all people are created equal. We only need to help people find ways of institutionalizing equal rights in ways that are appropriate to their particular contexts.
- All in all, a good and interesting read, even if the novelty is overblown.
I made two points in the discussion period worth recalling:
- Liberal democracy is not congruent with secularism, since we have liberal democratic states (where rights are in principle equal) like Italy and the UK with established churches (not to mention the penetration of religion into government in the US).
- Russia’s behavior in Ukraine cannot properly be attributed to NATO expansion. Putin has made it clear that he is trying to re-establish Moscow’s hegemony in what he considers Russia’s near-abroad. That is not a reaction to NATO expansion but rather an aggressive program vital to his view of Russia’s historic and cultural role, as well as to his domestic political standing.
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The company he keeps
Donald Trump yesterday overhauled for the umpteenth time his campaign apparatus, bringing in Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon, promoting pollster Kellyanne Conway, adding former Fox News chief Roger Ailes as an advisor, and sidelining campaign chair Paul Manafort. He already had on board Walid Phares, who appeared last night on the PBS Newshour paired with top Clinton surrogate Wendy Sherman.
There is no better way to understand a candidate than from the company he keeps.
Breitbart News Network is an unabashed Trump supporter with a record of misleading, inaccurate and mistaken coverage aimed at embarrassing its political enemies on the left. Fox News is the leading right-wing news outlet, with no concern for anything resembling balance in its own coverage. Ailes has resigned as its chief, accused of sexual harassment that he denies. Manafort is listed as a recipient of millions in cash in the black book of Ukraine’s erstwhile pro-Russian rulers. Walid Phares is a former spokesman and leader of a Christian militia in Lebanon thought to have committed war crimes.
Conway is the only one in this lineup I would consider even remotely respectable. She is a Republican pollster who claims to have predicted correctly the outcomes of the major 2012 races. All have ridden the Trump wave and will likely be well paid for their services, but they are not folks I would want to sit down to dinner with.
Where are the Republicans who would make respectable dinner companions? Not supporting Trump is the short answer. Some say they will vote for Clinton. Others won’t go that far. But Trump has definitely made enemies of my Republican colleagues and friends.
Last night’s performance in West Bend, Wisconsin says something more about the company Trump keeps. Advertised as a “law and order” speech, Trump addressed the nearly all-white group in a 95% white community repeatedly as if he were in Milwaukee, which is two-thirds black. I have no idea why he thinks this subterfuge will get him any black votes. It is well known that he has avoided predominantly black audiences. He made an important point last night: black people are principal victims of street violence of all sorts. They know that well, but they also know that West Bend is not Milwaukee.
This kind of smoke and mirrors offends, but it was not the only offensive part of last night’s performance. Trump apparently has no more to say about law and order than he said about national security: he wants to use “extreme vetting” to make immigration more difficult and renegotiate trade deals. He had a few positive words for the police and promised more of them, but there was little more “law and order” substance than that, along with his usual promise to create lots of jobs. His recitation of statistics showing increases in crime was cherry-picked. While recently ticking up in some places, overall violent crime in the US is dramatically and pretty steadily down for more than 20 years:
Clearly Trump and his friends don’t keep company with the facts any more than they do with black people or objectivity in the media.
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Don’t blame the international organizations
Maria-Alexandra Martin, a SAIS Conflict Management graduate active in post-conflict reconstruction and recovery, contributed this post. A native of Romania, she previously served as an Operations Officer with the European Union in Georgia.
A year ago I was in Kiev’s railway station embarking on a train to Dnipropetrovsk. That was the closest to the frontline in Eastern Ukraine I could safely get. I had thought of other options, such as getting a press ID to enable me to go to the contact line to observe the war. But I quickly changed my mind when I realized I would put myself in danger, my family and friends under tremendous pressure and risk diplomatic turmoil for my country.
The train was packed with an array of colors and nuanced military uniforms, men and women of all ages, exchanging salutes, smiles and hopes. I sat quietly, trying to identify each badge and catch bits and pieces of their conversation with my poor Russian. I admired the Ukrainians’ patriotic drive.
I reached Dnipropetrovsk five hours later and found a noisy train station, hundreds of people coming and going. The faces were tired and somber, yet hiding a smile of hope, the smile of someone who will see loved ones again. The day I arrived, a massive rotation of one of Ukraine’s territorial battalions had taken place.
Since the beginning of conflict in Eastern Ukraine around 10,000 people have lost their lives. More than three million are in need of humanitarian assistance. The plethora of international organizations present in the country work continuously to improve the life of the people affected by war. But as in every conflict and post-conflict setting, planning is one thing, while the reality is different. Regardless of how well one plans, how much money and personnel one allocates, the resources will always be too scarce to cover all needs. The permanent threat of violence is a variable with tremendous implications for the way any organization carries out its business.
The largest international field presence in the country is the OSCE monitoring mission (OSCE SMM). These unarmed civilians were deployed at the Ukrainian’s government request after the Russian annexation of Crimea. The mandate of the mission is to
gather information on the situation in Ukraine in an impartial and transparent manner, to document incidents as well as violations of OSCE principles and commitments, and to report on its observations on a daily basis.
The SMM is further charged with monitoring the ceasefire agreements and the withdrawal of heavy weapons, as well as observing the withdrawal of all foreign armed forces, military equipment and mercenaries from Ukraine. Due to access restrictions and the often volatile security situation, the SMM can only monitor withdrawal on a limited basis.
Like any other international mission abroad, the OSCE SMM has a framework for operational purposes (its mandate), agreed in advance by all OSCE members, including Ukraine and Russia. The mandate of a mission represents its core, the source of international legitimization and basic guidelines for doing or not doing something in the field.
But the situation in Eastern Ukraine remains volatile, active fighting is gaining periodic momentum and jeopardizes the fragile ceasefire in place. The few hundred scattered OSCE monitors, unarmed and limited in their freedom of movement, try to perform their obligations according to the agreed mandate. But they perform under threats at gun point, shelling, and detentions, with no means of protection.
When things go south, international organizations get blamed for not being able to prevent it. Yesterday, this already familiar story came again to the surface. The New York Times published Andrew Kramer’s “Keeping Bankers’ Hours, European Observers Miss Most of Ukraine War”. He notes the monitors are patrolling only during daytime for security reasons, while the heavy fighting occurs at night. If unarmed civilians were to patrol during nighttime when shelling occurs, they would clearly be at risk.
Even during daytime, the OSCE SMM lacks freedom of movement and faces serious obstructions that hinder its patrols. These events are reported on a daily basis, but the political negotiations are not done by OSCE monitors. The people in the field are one component of a larger negotiation agenda, agreed at much higher levels, and based on a multitude of national interests. Blaming people on the ground for not doing more connotes a skewed understanding of how the work of international personnel is actually carried out. It also deepens resentments and prolongs conflict.
I am a fierce promoter of better rules of engagement, improved effectiveness and greater capabilities for international missions abroad. Many faults and misbehavior mar the conduct and credibility of global and regional organizations. But too little is said and published about the good things these missions do. They have given millions of people around the world a chance to live, resettle, access basic services like healthcare, education and justice, and regain their dignity. Things would be much worse without the international missions we are so quick to criticize.
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Don’t forget Hezbollah
Here is the draft of the State Department dissent message on Syria, on which the New York Times based its coverage yesterday. So far as I can tell the final version is not publicly available, but this draft is polished. The argument is basically that the US has sufficient moral and strategic reason to attack Syrian government forces with stand-off weapons with the goal of getting President Asad to abide by the internationally mandated cessation of hostilities and initiate serious negotiations on a political transition, as required by the Geneva I communique and numerous subsequent international decisions. The dissent memo admits some downsides: a deterioration of relations with Russia and possible “second order” effects.
Those downsides require more consideration. There is no international mandate to attack Syrian government forces. Intervention in this case would in that sense have even less multilateral sanction than the NATO attack on Qaddafi’s forces in Libya, where there was a UN Security Council mandate, albeit one that authorized “all necessary means” to save civilians rather than to change the regime. Asad has not directly attacked the US, even if his reaction to Syria’s internal rebellion has created conditions that are inimical to US interests by attracting extremists and undermining stability in neighboring countries.
The Russia angle is also daunting. Moscow may well react by intensifying its attacks on the opposition forces the US supports, who are already targeted by Russian warplanes. Unilateral US intervention against Syrian government forces would also help Moscow to argue it is doing no worse in Ukraine, where it supports opposition forces behind a thin veil of denials that its forces are directly involved. The US is not ready to respond in kind to Russian escalation in Ukraine, if only because the European allies would not want it. Kiev might be the unintended victim of US escalation in Syria.
Second order effects could also include loss of European, Turkish and Jordanian support, because of an increased refugee flow out of Syria, as well as increased Iranian support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, destabilization of Bahrain and Shia militias in Iraq. Greater chaos in Syria could also help ISIS to revive its flagging fortunes and al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra to pursue its fight against the Syrian government.
These downsides are all too real, but so is the current situation: Russia, the Syrian government, Iran and Hezbollah are making mincemeat of the US-supported Syrian opposition while more extremist forces are gaining momentum. President Obama is reluctant to attack sovereign states that have not attacked the US directly without an international mandate of some sort. That is understandable. But doing nothing military to respond to a deteriorating situation is a decision too, one with real and unfortunately burgeoning negative consequences for US interests.
Hezbollah is the way out of this quandary. It is not a state. It is a designated terrorist group that has killed hundreds of Americans, and many others as well. The Americans say they are fighting terrorist groups in Syria. Why not Hezbollah? Its ground forces there have become increasingly important to the Syrian government’s cause. Getting Hezbollah out of the fight would arguably have as much impact on the military balance as strikes on the Syrian army, which is already a declining and demoralized force.
Washington need not start with military action. It could lead with diplomacy, telling Moscow and Tehran that we want Hezbollah to leave Syria tout de suite. If it fails to leave by a date certain, we could then strip it of its immunity and treat it like the other terrorist groups in Syria. Moscow might even welcome such a move, since Hezbollah efforts in Syria strengthen Iran’s hold, not Russia’s.
Tehran would be furious, claiming Hezbollah is in Syria at the request of its legitimate government. Hezbollah would likely try to strike US, Israeli or even Jewish targets in the region or beyond. It has managed in the past to murder Jews as far away as Argentina. Doing so would confirm the thesis that Hezbollah is a terrorist group and redouble the need to act decisively against it.
No suggestions for what to do or not do in Syria are simple. The situation has gotten so fraught that any proposition will have complicated and unpredictable consequences. But the State Department dissenters missed an opportunity to duck some of the President’s objections and strengthen their own argument by focusing on a terrorist group, rather than the regime’s own forces. Don’t forget Hezbollah.
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