foreignaffairs

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On January 24, 2012, "Qasf Al-Ru&#039;ood," who is a member of the jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam, posted the second installment in his jihadi comic strip. The installment, titled "The Fleeing Enemy" depicts the journey of a non-Muslim enemy ...<br>

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Note to media and government: For a full copy of this report, send an email with the title of the report in the subject line to media@memri.org. Please include your name, title, andorganization in your email. The following is a list of top ...<br>

In a recent article, noted Bangladeshi academic Dr. Anish Mondal examined the history of the popular movement in Bangladesh in favor of establishing a secular democratic state. In 1971, Bangladesh, formerly known as East Pakistan, became ...<br>

Note to media and government: For a full copy of this report, send an email with the title of the report in the subject line to media@memri.org. Please include your name, title, andorganization in your email. On January 23, 2012, the pro-Syrian ...<br>

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My recent post on the overstatement of American decline has probably been my most popular single non-zombie item since moving the blog to Foreign Policy.  It has also attracted some useful observations on Michael Beckley's International Security essay in particular -- see Phil Arena and Erik Voeten for some trenchant criticisms. 

My FP co-blogger Steve Walt has also weighed in, however, arguing that obsessing about the Sino-American comparison misses some larger points about the decline of American influence: 

The United States remains very powerful -- especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran -- but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America's image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment -- which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region -- and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world's strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.

All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there's an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who's bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home.

I disagree with Steve on multiple points here, so let's be thorough and go through them one at at time. 

First, I'd argue that developing accurate assessments about the power balance between China and the United States is actually super-important.  Miserceptions about a rising China or a declining United States can lead to a) toxic political rhetoric in Washington, which leads to b) rhetorical blowback, which leads to c) stupid foreign policy miscalculations.  As I wrote about a year ago: 

Exaggerating Chinese power has consequences. Inside the Beltway, attitudes about American hegemony have shifted from complacency to panic. Fearful politicians representing scared voters have an incentive to scapegoat or lash out against a rising power -- to the detriment of all. Hysteria about Chinese power also provokes confusion and anger in China as Beijing is being asked to accept a burden it is not yet prepared to shoulder. China, after all, ranks 89th in the 2010 U.N. Human Development Index just behind Turkmenistan and the Dominican Republic (the United States is fourth). Treating Beijing as more powerful than it is feeds Chinese bravado and insecurity at the same time. That is almost as dangerous a political cocktail as fear and panic.

The discussion of China in the GOP presidential campaign, as well as Obama's mercantilist State of the Union address, strongly suggest that political assessments and political rhetoric about Chinese power need a strong jolt of sobriety.  Walt is concerned that an overestimation of American power will lead to stupid foreign policy decisions, but I'd wager that an overestimation of Chinese power would lead to equally stupid foreign policy decisions. 

As for Walt's assertions about the decline of American influence... well, I must take issue with several of them.  First, the notion that the United States was able to exercise power more easily during the Cold War seems a bit off.  As Robert Kagan points out in The New Republic:

And of course it is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and, as the political scientist Stephen M. Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”

If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize that this image of the past is an illusion. There never was such a time. We tend to think back on the early years of the Cold War as a moment of complete American global dominance. They were nothing of the sort. The United States did accomplish extraordinary things in that era: the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods economic system all shaped the world we know today. Yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War, there was at least one equally monumental setback.

During the Truman years, there was the triumph of the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, which American officials regarded as a disaster for American interests in the region and which did indeed prove costly; if nothing else, it was a major factor in spurring North Korea to attack the South in 1950. But as Dean Acheson concluded, “the ominous result of the civil war in China” had proved “beyond the control of the ... United States,” the product of “forces which this country tried to influence but could not.” A year later came the unanticipated and unprepared-for North Korean attack on South Korea, and America’s intervention, which, after more than 35,000 American dead and almost 100,000 wounded, left the situation almost exactly as it had been before the war. In 1949, there came perhaps the worst news of all: the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb and the end of the nuclear monopoly on which American military strategy and defense budgeting had been predicated.

Kagan's essay is getting some attention in high places, so I'll be very curious to hear Walt's take on it. 

It Walt overestimates America's influence during the Cold War, he also underestimates American influence now.  The funny thing about the "stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere" is that they're siding with the United States on multiple important issues.  Coordination between Turkey and the United States on the Arab Spring has increased over time, and their policy positions on Iran are converging more than diverging.  Brazil has turned a cold shoulder to Iran and has been warier about China's currency manipulation and rising influence in Latin America.  India seems perfectly comfortable to be a partner in America's Pacific Rim pivot, as are Australia, Japan and South Korea. 

This is perfectly consistent with Walt's own balance-of-threat theory, by the way.  The actors that seem to be generating the most anxiety among the rising developing countries are the ones that seem to be exhibiting the most aggressive regional intentions -- namely, China and Iran.  Indeed, even countries with strong historical resentments against the United States are now trying to find creative ways to bind themselves to Washington.  Will these countries always march in lockstep with the United States?  Of course not -- but as Walt would surely acknowledge, America's NATO allies were not always on the same page with the United States on myriad Cold War issues. 

It seems that Walt's primary concern is that without better domestic policies, the United States might fritter away its great power advantages.  I'm sympathetic to that argument -- I'd also take the bold position that I'd like to see improvements in American education and infrastructure as well.  One of the points I was making in my original post, however was that even absent grand initiatives from Washington, the United States economy was finding ways to heal itself.  Indeed, compared to either Europe or China, one could argue that the United States has adjusted to the post-2008 environment the best.  This is not so much praise for Washington as an indictment of rigidities in Brussels and Beijing.  Still, power and influence are relative measures, and I see little evidence to support Walt's pessimism. 

Am I missing anything? 

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The Republican candidates for president once again tried to out-do the Likud Party in their devotion to the doctrine of the Iron Wall and their attempt to erase the Palestinian people from history and justify their being kept in a condition of statelessness and lack of citizenship in any state.

(The first thing the National Socialists in Germany did to the Jews was to strip them of citizenship, understanding that a stateless people is “flotsam” that no one wants and which lacks any legal standing).

Israel is in a race with time. The 11 million Palestinians are not going to go away, and those in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon have gained powerful new friends because of the Arab uprisings of 2011. Israel can only survive in some recognizable form if it achieves peace with the Palestinian people and with their supporters in the Muslim world, which means making arrangements for Palestinians to have citizenship in a state. Israel caught a break during its first 60 years because its Arab neighbors were largely peasant societies with low literacy, few modern organizational skills, and a significant technology gap.

That advantage is evaporating as Middle Easterners become more and more sophisticated. In the 2006 Lebanon War, Hizbullah and its backers (Iran and Syria) cracked Israeli communications encryption and so knew everything the Israeli army planned to do as soon as the orders were radioed. Hizbullah used micro-war techniques, including small rockets, the emplacements of which could not be easily found and destroyed, to force 1/4 of Israelis from their homes. Toward the end of the war Hizbullah was threatening to hit toxic gas storage areas in Haifa and it wasn’t clear that the Dimona nuclear facility was safe. Tiny Hizbullah, with only about 5,000 fighters, drawn from a religious group with only about 1.5 million members in Lebanon, is a harbinger of things to come. Arabs and Muslims are no longer push-overs, and will become less so over time.

It is unrealistic to think that little Israel, with about 7.5 million people (20% of them Palestinian-Israelis), can forever dominate militarily some 400 million Muslims in its neighborhood–Muslims who overwhelmingly side with the Palestinians.

The alternative is to make peace, and peace requires a settlement of the issue of Palestinian statelessness and a drawing of final boundaries in Israel’s land disputes with neighbors. (The firmest boundary is already that with Egypt, precisely because Egypt is the most militarily powerful of the neighbors).

Palestine was recognized as a Class A mandate after WW I by the League of Nations, and, like Syria and Iraq, was scheduled for statehood. League of Nations members France and Italy consistently pushed back against Lord Balfour’s attempts to interpret the Mandate as permitting the expropriation of the Palestinian majority. As late as the British White Paper of the late 1930s, the British envisaged a Palestinian state in ten years. Palestinian statehood was forestalled when the Jewish settlers (brought into Palestine by the British colonial authorities) engaged in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1947-1948 that left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians homeless and stateless.

As Hannah Arendt and SCOTUS chief Justice Earl Warren recognized, citizenship is the right to have rights. Without citizenship in a state, Palestinians never really own property or have any other civil or human rights, since if someone steals from them they have no state to back their claims. In almost all legal proceedings, they lack standing. Palestinians once given Jordanian citizenship have sometimes recently had it withdrawn. Palestinians in Lebanon cannot own property, vote, in most cases cannot get work permits or business licenses, and mostly are not permitted by other states to travel to them, since Palestinians don’t have a home country or proper passports and so are seen as an illegal immigration risk. Far from being “Arabs,” many Lebanese Christians reject that identity and they are not going to give citizenship to Sunni Arabs expelled from Mandate Palestine by the Israelis, since that would weaken the Christians’ own position in Lebanese politics. The Israeli supreme court even just declared that Palestinians married to Israeli citizens can never achieve Israeli citizenship. The stigma of being a stateless Palestinian can never be removed, and Palestinian families have no more right to stay together in Israel than the families of black slaves in the Old South (where Newt Gingrich still thinks he lives) had a right to stay together.

So here is what Romney said in the debate:

“(UNKNOWN): Abraham Hass[an] (ph) from Jacksonville, Florida.

How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian-American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist.

BLITZER: All right. Let’s ask Governor Romney, first of all.

What would you say to Abraham?

ROMNEY: Well, the reason that there’s not peace between the Palestinians and Israel is because there is — in the leadership of the Palestinian people are Hamas and others who think like Hamas, who have as their intent the elimination of Israel. And whether it’s in school books that teach how to kill Jews, or whether it’s in the political discourse that is spoken either from Fatah or from Hamas, there is a belief that the Jewish people do not have a right to have a Jewish state.

There are some people who say, should we have a two-state solution? And the Israelis would be happy to have a two-state solution. It’s the Palestinians who don’t want a two-state solution. They want to eliminate the state of Israel.

And I believe America must say — and the best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.

This president went before the United Nations and castigated Israel for building settlements. He said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip. This president threw –

(APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: I think he threw Israel under the bus with regards to defining the ’67 borders as a starting point of negotiations. I think he disrespected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I think he has time and time again shown distance from Israel, and that has created, in my view, a greater sense of aggression on the part of the Palestinians. I will stand with our friend, Israel.

BLITZER: Thank you, Governor.

(APPLAUSE)”

As Ron Kampea points out at a blog of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Obama has in fact complained about Gaza rockets hitting Israel.

And, Hamas is not the leader of the Palestinian people. The PLO has the presidency of the Palestine Authority, and it recognized Israel long ago in return for an agreement that the Israelis would stop stealing Palestinian land and allow Palestinians finally to have a state and escape the chattel-like estate of statelessness. The Israelis took the recognition but reneged on the other promises, which hasn’t encouraged other Palestinian parties to give away the bargaining chip of recognizing Israel before there are even serious negotiations.

At least, as Kampea points out, Romney got the nuance right when speaking of Obama’s statement that 1967 borders should be the basis for negotiations.

But the Republican Party now seems to have a Greater Israel position that would bestow all the West Bank on Israel, including East Jerusalem, but without saying what should be done with the millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Alan Grayson once said that the Republican health care plan is, “Don’t get sick. If you get sick, die quickly.” The Republican plan for 11 million Palestinians is shorter. It is just, “Die quickly.”

Then Newt Gingrich weighed in (and I do mean weigh):

“BLITZER: Speaker Gingrich, you got into a little hot water when you said the Palestinians were an invented people. GINGRICH: It was technically an invention of the late 1970s, and it was clearly so. Prior to that, they were Arabs. Many of them were either Syrian, Lebanese, or Egyptian, or Jordanian.

There are a couple of simple things here. There were 11 rockets fired into Israel in November. Now, imagine in Duvall County that 11 rockets hit from your neighbor. How many of you would be for a peace process and how many of you would say, you know, that looks like an act of war.

You have leadership unequivocally, and Governor Romney is exactly right, the leadership of Hamas says, not a single Jew will remain. We aren’t having a peace negotiation then. This is war by another form.

My goal for the Palestinian people would be to live in peace, to live in prosperity, to have the dignity of a state, to have freedom. and they can achieve it any morning they are prepared to say Israel has a right to exist, we give up the right to return, and we recognize that we’re going to live side-by-side, now let’s work together to create mutual prosperity.

And you could in five years dramatically improve the quality of life of every Palestinian. But the political leadership would never tolerate that. And that’s why we’re in a continuous state of war where Obama undermines the Israelis.

On the first day that I’m president, if I do become president, I will sign an executive order directing the State Department to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to send the signal we’re with Israel.

(APPLAUSE)”

Gingrich implies that Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, is responsible for the eleven rockets. Gaza is a mess, reduced by Israeli occupation to a 1.6-million person slum, where people are not even permitted by Tel Avivi to export 99% of what they make or produce, where unemployment is astronomical, and where 55% of the population is food insecure. It is a congeries of refugee camps where the families expelled by the Zionist forces in 1948 live in squalor and once-flourishing towns and villages now cut off from their markets by Israeli malevolence. Hamas doesn’t control Gaza, and radical groups, fostered by the concentration camp-like conditions of the Strip, are the ones who fire little home made rockets over the border sometimes. Since Israel has 200 nuclear warheads, you’d think it might survive somebody’s high school chemistry set and some taunts.

Gingrich asks what would happen if 11 rockets fell on Duvall County. But he doesn’t ask what would happen if Venezuelan troops pushed Floridians into Duvall County from a neighboring county, stripped them of US citizenship, then surrounded Duvall County and refused to let the people there export most of their products or import more than basic needs. What would the people of Duvall County do to those Venezuelan troops, do you think?

As for Palestinians being recently invented, Gingrich may want to consult the medieval Islamic coins inscribed with the word “Palestine,” referring to the place that the medieval Palestinians lived.

There are tens of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and they are 35% of the Israeli-created district of Jerusalem, and the status of Jerusalem is a matter to be settled in final status negotiations. For Gingrich to forestall peace negotiations by unilaterally giving all of Jerusalem permanently to Israel would not lead to peace, but to further generations of conflict. Americans, who keep telling the Palestinians that unilateral actions at the UN cannot lead to peace, nevertheless favor Likud Party unilateral actions when it comes to Israel.

Everyone knows that Newt Gingrich is in the back pocket of casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who worships Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party like a golden calf, and that Gingrich is playing for the vote of the Christian Zionists among southern evangelicals. He isn’t interested in peace or the welfare of Palestinians. Indeed, it seems unlikely he is interested in Israeli welfare, since the advice he gives Tel Aviv (yes) is likely to dig the state’s grave over the long term.

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Seven years ago, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.The Tom Lantos Archives on Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial, launched in 2009, is the world&#039;s foremost resource on this ...<br>

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Military tensions in the Persian Gulf shot up again Thursday, Jan. 26, after Dubai police commander Gen. Dhahi Khalfan said an imminent Gulf war cannot be ruled out and first signs are already apparent. "The world will not let Iran block Hormuz, but Tehran can narrow the strait to the maximum," he said.  Saudi Arabia and Dubai doubt  the US Navy and Gulf forces can keep Hormuz open at all times. A war of attrition is therefore expected to unfold from February to July.

On January 24, 2012, "Qasf Al-Ru&#039;ood," who is a member of the jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam, posted the second installment in his jihadi comic strip. The installment, titled "The Fleeing Enemy" depicts the journey of a non-Muslim enemy ...<br>

...<br>

Egypt's immediate future is up in the air over unanswerable questions about its form of government, the nature of its leadership and the lack of clarity about its new constitution. The country is meanwhile on the brink of economic collapse.

The Syrian ruler is still fully in control in Damascus, contrary to the reports propagated by the opposition. He is still backed by the high army command and supported by Iran and Russia. The Assad regime will be in danger only if two of those three backers turn against him.

A Digest of debkafile Round-the-Clock Exclusives in Week Ending January 26, 2012

By early March, the US will have amassed 100,000 troops within reach of Iran, roughly equal to the 2003 Iraq invasion force, and enough to back up Barack Obama's pledge to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb with military force.