Tag: United States
Arm twisting
Pristina daily Koha Ditore published this interview over the weekend. Fitim Gashi asked questions; I replied:
>Below you can find the question for the interview that Agron mentioned to you.
Q: How do you see the historical role of the United States in the creation of the state of Kosovo and current politics?
A: The US was vital to the independence and sovereignty of Kosovo, which had the good fortune to fight its devastating war with Serbia during the unipolar moment when Washington could do almost anything it liked in the world without serious opposition. It was also a moment in which liberal democracy, based on human rights for all, was the dominant paradigm.
The situation today is quite different. Washington has been withdrawing from overseas commitments, the Trump Administration is an ethnic nationalist one, and Russia and China are challenging US hegemony in various parts of the world.
Q: What is the impact that the US has on political decision-making in Kosovo, and why is this impact so great?
A: Partly because of its leadership role in 1999 and thereafter, the US is still first among equals in the diplomatic sphere in Pristina. The impact is great because Kosovo remains heavily dependent on US military, diplomatic, and political support. It is also great because Kosovars want it that way. When I urge them to diversify their support, they reject the notion.
Q: How do you see the role of the United States in the final phase of the dialogue. Is there any attempt to get this process out of the hands of Brussels?
A: Trump has no use for the EU and Grenell as no use for Germany, which is the most important of the European countries from Kosovo’s perspective. That said, the EU and Germany have much bigger problems today than Kosovo, which they seem glad to leave to the Americans, who are desperate for some sort of diplomatic triumph in the leadup to November’s elections. My advice: keep Germany involved. It is today the strongest defender of the liberal democratic ideals on which Kosovo was founded.
Q: Who should mediate the dialogue and where should the agreement be signed?
A: I’d prefer to see the US and EU working together in tandem, since that is a formula that has consistently brought good results in the Balkans. I couldn’t care less where the agreement is signed. Does anyone remember where the Dayton agreements were signed? The Trump Administration has promised the White House Rose Garden. I would guess he will get his way if there is to be an agreement.
Q: What compromises can be delivered by the parties in the final agreement and can they be painful for Kosovo?
A: Kosovo should be willing to compromise on ensuring the safety and security of Serbs and Serb monuments and other property throughout Kosovo, consistent with its constitution. Serbia should be expected to offer whatever it gets on those issues to Albanians living in Serbia. That’s called reciprocity.
Diplomatic recognition of sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as exchange of representatives at the ambassadorial level should also be reciprocal. All the existing bilateral technical agreements should be implemented.
Q: Has US policy on Kosovo changed with the Trump administration? If so, in what sense?
A: Yes, it has changed. The Administration has made it clear in public it would accept a territorial and population exchange that previous Administrations ruled out. Grenell and Palmer are committed to that formula, even if it has been rejected on its merits by Pristina and Belgrade. I also think Washington has shifted from expecting a reciprocal agreement on tariffs and an end to the de-recognition campaign to insisting on unilateral concessions by Kosovo. It is easier for Washington to twist the arm of a friend than twist the arm of an adversary.
Q: Prime Minister Kurti’s plan for partial and conditional lifting of tax on goods from Serbia was rejected by the US Envoy for Dialogue, Richard Grenell. Can the prime minister face sanctions if his decision-making is not in line with the Trump administration’s stance?
A: I might not apply the word “sanctions,” but he should certainly expect to suffer a cold diplomatic shoulder and possibly more concrete consequences. Welcome to the world of sovereign states. Trump is particularly vindictive and Grenell will imitate him.
Q: There has been criticism that Kosovo’s leaders are making decisions under pressure. Is Kosovo ready to take its own decisions, not to be subject of any international pressure?
A: We are all subject to pressures. The key is to make good decisions even under pressure. I wouldn’t yield on anything vital before the American election in November.
Q: Should Kosovo hurry to dialogue and reach the agreement?
A: No. Kosovo has to be ready to walk away from a bad agreement, even one supported by the US, in order to get a good one.
Q: So far, Kosovo has suffered from a lack of consensus in dialogue with Serbia, this was also confirmed by recent actions, where the president was part of reaching some agreements, while Prime Minister Kurti appeared uninformed. How much can this approach affect Kosovo getting into a bad deal with Serbia?
A: Only unity saves the Serbs, and only unity will save the Kosovars. The Americans are exploiting political divisions in Kosovo and pressuring their friends because it is easier than pressuring their adversaries. My advice: don’t fall for it. Those who cave on issues of sovereignty and territorial integrity will not be remembered well.
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Botched
The Trump Administration reaction to the corona virus outbreak is a classic case of government failure. The President has downplayed the risks from the first, hoping to limit damage to stock markets and the economy in the run-up to his re-election campaign. He is claiming anyone can get tested, which isn’t even close to being true. The number of test kits available at the end of the week was just 75,000, after the Vice President had promised one million.
Part of the problem lies at the Centers for Disease Control, which at the start of this debacle shipped test kits that did not work properly while barring others from providing them. No wonder its leadership tries to look on benevolently as the President lies blatantly:
The chronicle of the inconsistencies in US government messaging is getting biblical. No one should be surprised. It is hard to keep a straight story when you are not telling the truth. That is the trick to many police interrogations: get the suspect to contradict himself, then hammer away at the contradiction. Real infectious disease experts will stand up to that sort of interrogation. President Trump and Vice President Pence will not, because they have a tale to tell that aims at political results, not scientific ones. That’s why they’ve channeled all questioning to the White House.
There is still a great deal of uncertainty about Covid-19: when during the course of the disease is it contagious? can you be reinfected? how lethal is it? what is the best protection for the older people who are succumbing in higher percentages? will the virus attenuate as spring rolls around? But some things are already clear: stay off cruise boats and out of nursing homes. Our friend Toby Edelman had this to say yesterday on NPR about the latter:
The other advice we are getting also makes sense: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, self-quarantine if in doubt, avoid contact with people who are ill. But really we haven’t got much idea how much of this will work. It’s just common sense for any infectious disease.
What we do know is that Trump and his administration have botched their first real crisis. Unable to tell the truth, unable to fix things that go wrong, unable to listen to sound advice, they have instead politicized an epidemic and made it much worse than it might have been.
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Asymmetric warfare and the great powers
I spoke last night at the Alexander Hamilton Society at Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus. Here is what I said:
I have two points to make: the first concerns proxy forces, which are becoming the rule rather than the exception; the second concerns asymmetric or hybrid warfare, which is taking on new guises. But none of it is really new—warriors have always sought to strike an enemy where he is weak and to remove their own forces from danger.
Increased use of proxy military forces to enable great powers to duel with each other without engaging directly with their own military forces is already happening in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Ukraine. Iranian-trained and equipped militias, Turkey’s Turkoman and Islamist allies, America’s Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Lebanese Hizbollah, the Houthis, Haftar’s forces, and Russia’s mercenaries and Ukrainian proxies are playing central roles in contests that the U.S. or its Gulf allies are engaged in, mostly as adversaries against Russia or Iran.
In an era of great power competition, the inclination will be not to worry too much about our own proxies’ internal governance or abuse of human rights any more than we did during the Cold War. Realists and would-be autocrats will see that as idealistic claptrap. But governance matters to some of us. Let me remind you of what Alexander Hamilton said, in a strikingly different context, in the Federalist Papers:
Vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.
It is hard to support Ukraine to win a military confrontation with Russia if Ukraine is a kleptocracy, which is why it was right for Joe Biden to back firing of a corrupt prosecutor and wrong for the Trump Administration to regret his firing, while still claiming to be against corruption. It is also hard to support UAE and Saudi forces that have committed crimes of war in Yemen, or switch to support Khalifa Haftar in Libya or Bashar al Assad in Syria. Domestic and international support for odious allies is difficult to muster. One of the reasons the Americans have backed the Syrian Democratic Forces is the Kurds’ relatively decent governance, but of course we ignore their PKK credentials and the PKK’s terrorist acts inside Turkey.
Let me turn to asymmetric warfare. Adversaries have agency. Asymmetric warfare is the product of their ingenuity. America is hard to fight on land or sea. Since the purpose of warfare is political, better to fight it where expensive armor and submarines count for less: among the people.
War amongst the people is taking on new meaning with the rise of geopolitical challengers. In Bosnia and Kosovo, we saw the use of human shields, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We are now seeing the weaponizing of masses of people on a giant scale: Assad’s effort to drive one million IDPs from Idlib to the Turkish border and beyond with Russian backing is intended to rid his territory of people he thinks are opponents and break Turkey’s will in occupying parts of Syria. Human shields have become human spears. Turkey is using people as well, though in a less deadly way: by allowing refugees to cross into Greece, it is pressuring the Europe Union for more humanitarian assistance.
The Russian satellite states South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia as well as Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine likewise aim at political results: to make the parent states ungovernable and block their progress towards the West.
Hybrid warfare using other means other than population movements and puppet states is also on the rise. In the Balkans, the Russians are aiming at destabilization without spending much. They’ve tried assassination, cyberattacks, mass mobilization, illicit political financing, and social media. The U.S. is not above using all those tools as well. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Stuxnet, the color revolutions, financing of NGOs and political training, and the State Department’s more than 120 acknowledged Twitter accounts (not to mention the covert ones) may look to you and me like good causes, but they look like potent weapons to America’s adversaries.
We may not be headed into a Cold War with any single adversary, but we are certainly heading towards a geopolitical competition that will entail use of all the means available in an environment of shifting alliances and uncertain outcomes.
But in the end, it may not be state adversaries that bring us down via proxies, weaponizing people, and hybrid warfare. Something much smaller may put on display our own inadequate government services. It shouldn’t escape notice that Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, and Donald Trump are all at risk from the political and economic consequences of a virus. Defending populations from epidemics is not a new governance requirement, but rather a longstanding one. This, too, is war amongst the people, who might just demand some minimal competence and truthfulness in their governance.
Remember, again, Hamilton:
Vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.
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The Pakistan rollercoaster
Pakistan is in a period of neither high promise nor crisis. An expert group of independent academics, policy analysts, and retired government has taken the opportunity to lay out a range of concrete proposals for US policymakers to shape the bilateral relations. On March 3, the Middle East Institute hosted a panel discussion with some of the participants on “Pathways to a Stable and Sustainable Relationship between Pakistan and the United States.” The discussion featured eight speakers:
Syed Mohammed Ali: Adjunct professor, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities
Ambassador (ret.) Gerald M. Feierstein: Senior Vice President, MEI
Ambassador Ali Jehangir Siddiqui: Pakistani Ambassador at Large for Foreign Investment
Marvin G. Weinbaum: Director of Afghanistan and Pakistan studies, MEI
William Milam: Former US Ambassador to Pakistan
Touqir Hussain: Visiting professor at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities
Dana Marshall: President, Transnational Strategy Group
Polly Nayak: Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Institute
Pakistan-US relations
Feierstein described US-Pakistan relations as a mistrust-driven roller coaster while Siddiqui emphasized economic cooperation, culture exchange, and regional development, following a period of security focus in the 2000s. Weinbaum thinks relations have been unstable, waxing and waning, climbing to heights of interdependence and sinking to mutual recrimination. Hussain attributed the unsustainability to contradictions in strategic interests, which led to the 1998-2001 US sanctions on Pakistan.
Why now?
Weinbaum noted that today is a period of calm without major crises in the region. It’s an opportune moment to improve cooperation and put the relationship on a solid footing. We should seek better understanding as well as awareness of differences. Pakistan is critical to US regional interests in terms of eradicating ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliates, achieving a stable Afghanistan, and alleviating the threat of nuclear proliferation. Hussain added that while the US is withdrawing from Afghanistan, it should continue its proactive engagement with South Asia, maintaining good relations with both India and Pakistan in the long run. Both Nayak and Milam believe the period before the upcoming election is an opportunity to address key issues in specific areas.
What the proposals are about?
Ali said the proposals focusing on Pakistan-US strategic interests, including recommendations on intelligence sharing between US and Pakistan, counterterrorism cooperation, peace between Pakistan and India, the US role in crisis management, China’s investments in Pakistan, clean energy, US investments, etc. The proposals aim to balance security with civil society and human rights, which can increase US diplomatic status in the region.
Nayak believes nuclear weapons should not be the heart of rebuilding relations. Normalization should rely on strategic economic cooperation because Pakistan faces deficits and underemployment. The proposals attempt to expand business and navigate differences in corporate and social culture.
Marshall stated that Pakistan needs more commercial and economic opportunities. Establishing a reconstruction zone could incentivize investment on border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US can leverage its strategic relations with Pakistan by tying trade to security.
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Age matters
I’ve enjoyed testifying many times in front of Joe Biden, who was a stalwart of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before he became Vice President to Barack Obama. He is well-informed and judicious, even if I have disagreed with him on issues like calling Macedonia Macedonia and whether Serbia merited candidacy for accession to the European Union. Senator Biden was genuinely interested in hearing from witnesses at Senate hearings and treated them with respect.
It is now more than ten years since our last encounter. Neither the Vice President nor I are the same people we were before 2008. He has had the extraordinary experience of governing with Barack Obama, whom I admire even if I think he made terrible mistakes, especially in Syria and Libya. I have become a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a great international affairs school that allows me to learn every day as much as I teach my students. The world has moved on too. The unipolar moment has ended, the war on terror has failed, and geopolitical competition is intensifying.
Is Joe Biden the right person to install in the White House today?
I was ready for someone a lot younger. It seemed to me that a candidate in their 40s or 50s would appeal more to Gen Xers. My baby boomer generation seems exhausted, not to mention Biden’s “post-war cohort.” But amazingly the competition came down to people who are all in their 70s: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bloomberg in addition to Biden. Warren and Bloomberg (he dropped out while I was writing this post) aren’t really contenders, but they were still in the race last night.
I don’t really know what to make of this, but the implications need to be examined. Both Sanders (78) and Biden (77) are doubtful for a second term. So the question of who gets the vice presidential nod is more important than usual. In either case it will likely be a woman. Kamala Harris (55) is one obvious choice. Though she didn’t do brilliantly in the race for the nomination, a woman who is smart, an experienced prosecutor, black and (east) Indian, and from California touches a lot of appealing demographics. Amy Klobuchar (59) is another smart, experienced prosecutor from a state that, unlike California, will be in contention, Minnesota.
Another implication is the need for renewal in the Democratic Party. Its flag bearers in the House and Senate are Nancy Pelosi (79) and Charles Schumer (a relatively youthful 69). I admire their experience and skill in managing President Trump, even if the successful impeachment failed in the Senate to lead to remove him from office. Pelosi in particular has repeatedly made the President look like the fool he is. Schumer has also had his moments, especially when he let Trump take responsibility for closing down the US government. But no matter how good a competitor is, passing the baton is a crucial part of any relay race. The older Ds need to make sure it is done well.
There is no lack of youthful talent among the Democrats. The campaign for the nomination showcased not only Harris and Klobuchar, but also their fellow Senator Cory Booker, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Secretary Julian Castro. Andrew Yang, Deval Patrick, and Michael Bennett are also potential future notables, judging from their performances on the campaign trail and in debates. There are lots of others in Congress: Senator Chris Murphy stands out in my mind as someone all but destined for Secretary of State.
On the Republican side of the equation, it is harder to know what to say. There was no lack of younger, truly conservative talent running for the nomination against Donald Trump in 2016, but they split the primary votes, allowing him to win. The conservatives have now mostly thrown in the towel and reconciled themselves to his peculiar brand of egotistical would-be authoritarianism. I can hope Mitt Romney will find the will and the means to rescue the Republican party from the racist and xenophobic cesspool into which it has fallen, but the odds are not good. Now Senator Romney is not a youngster either: 72. It could take a decade or more for the Republicans to recover from Trump, if they recover at all.
Age matters. I’m allowed to say it. I’m 74.
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Missing in action
2020 marks the ninth year after Gadhafi’s ouster. On February 24, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion on “Solving the Civil War in Libya.” The discussion featured two speakers: Federica Saini Fasanotti, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Karim Mezran, director of the North Africa Initiative and a resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center at the Atlantic Council. Michael E. O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at Brookings, moderated.
Today’s Libya
Fasanotti described the situation in Libya as bad. Khalifa Haftar and his Tripoli headquartered forces are attacking Tripoli, headquarters of the internationally legitimized Government of National Accord (GNA). Egypt and Russia are supporting Haftar with arms. Even in colonial times, Egypt posed a threat to Italy’s control over Libya due to insurgents’ mobility along the border. Fighters still pass easily over the border, which has allowed Egypt to help Haftar conquer the eastern part of Libya.
Mezran added that the mujahideen fighters believe Muslims are obliged to keep infidels out of the area. But religious narratives are misleading. Haftar is neither an Islamist militia nor a secularist, but rather a creation of foreign powers. The issues are political and difficult to resolve.
Remedies?
Fasanotti attributed the difficulty to solving the Libyan civil war to four factors.
- Media coverage on different narratives is disruptive.
- A variety of militias in Tripoli makes it hard to start a conversation with Haftar.
- Haftar is accused of murder and torture in Benghazi.
- The Berlin Conference and peace talks failed.
Both Haftar and the GNA have become stronger because of their external backers. Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey all have different economic and political interests in Libya. This spoils the chance to bring peace.
Mezran believes that peace plans don’t work because situations keep changing on the ground. Bombardments against civilians induce continued struggles and attempts at negotiation. Mezran suggests neighboring states, such as Egypt and Algeria, can do much more than the Berlin Conference.
Fasanotti is disappointed that the US is missing in action in Libya. She called for President Trump to expand bilateral relations and encourage the Secretary of Defense to resolve conflicts with Libya. Mezran argues that Libya is not important in comparison with other US geopolitical interests in the region, which make it unlikely the US will restrain the states that support Haftar.
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