Center for a New American Security

Richard K. Betts, writing in the National Interest:

Ikenberry faults Bush for rejecting the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the “Germ Weapons Ban” (Ikenberry must mean the compliance protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, not the treaty itself, which Washington ratified in the 1970s). Yet although Clinton signed the ICC treaty, he immediately thought worse of it and recommended against ratification. Clinton also refused to sign the Mine Ban Treaty, a favorite of global-governance enthusiasts—although not because, as Ikenberry suggests, “unipolarity leads to demands by the lead state to be treated differently.” Rather, it is because states with serious national-security policies keep the military capabilities they believe they need. The land-mine treaty is a perfect example of an institution that looks strong on the surface, but weaker in substance. It is a perfect example too of how governments pick and choose which rules they want to accept (and reject) in the vaunted rule-based international system. Indeed, the treaty includes more than 120 signatories. But most of this membership consists of countries without pressing military concerns. The smaller number of states that have not participated are ones that do have such concerns (various vulnerable actors like Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Vietnam, Georgia, Cuba and the two Koreas) and most major powers (China, Russia and India as well as the United States). The nonsignatories represent the most important countries, and more than half the population of the world.

 

Ikenberry compliments Obama for returning to norms of liberal order after the Bush defection, yet the difference for national-security policy is far from dramatic. Obama too rejected all the accords just mentioned.

Obviously enough, what Betts writes here pertains to the somewhat controversial post that kicked off the week. But you should read the entire review essay, because Betts makes a number of other good points and raises many other questions in what is a courteous if brutal review of John Ikenberry's Liberal Leviathan. Among the criticisms of the book advanced by Betts, I find it interesting how even some of the most internationally minded Americans more or less assume U.S. interests to be the same as the interests of the world at large. (This leads to all kinds of problems, you might have read, in third-party military interventions where we assume our interests match up with those of the host nation.)

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Speaking of the National Interest, the staff there have really outdone themselves in putting together a marvelous May-June issue. As my followers on Twitter are aware, I spent last night and much of this morning reading and digesting some of the essays, including Jacob Heilbrunn's essay on Samantha Power and liberal internationalism. Heilbrunn chastises Power for "dramatizing history through people rather than considering broader forces," and ironically, I think he might be guilty of doing the same here in choosing to focus so exclusively on the words and texts of Power in the context of our military intervention in Libya. But he deserves much credit for taking exception to the content of an individual's arguments without ever resorting to argumentum ad hominem, and his broader criticism of humanitarian intervention is a good one.

Elsewhere in the National Interest is an essay by Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs: A History, on the revolutions of 2011. Rogan focuses on the region-wide variables that have led to uprisings, so his essay should be read in tandem with Lisa Anderson's brief essay in the new Foreign Affairs parsing the differences between what has thus far transpired in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. (In light of yesterday's discussion of quantitative methods in conflict analysis, by the way, Anderson remains a living, breathing advertisement for the continued value of area studies in political science: how many other scholars out there have such deep knowledge of not just Libya, Tunisia or Egypt but all three countries?)

Many thanks to the reader of this blog who pointed me toward this moving video of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia set to Carl Sagan reading from "Earth: The Pale Blue Dot." This is amazing and beautiful.

What I am reading today:

1. I just finished the very solid new Crisis Group report on Egypt. The first 15 pages read like a thriller, and the analysis on the Egyptian military strikes me as solid.

2. Max Rodenbeck on Tunisia and Egypt in the New York Review of Books.

3. And speaking of Rodenbeck, the Economist on Libya.

(Update II: 4. Be sure to read Michael Knights talking an incredible amount of sense about no-fly zones here.)

What am I not reading? (Okay, I actually read this.)

1. Joan Juliet Buck's breathless profile of Asma al-Assad, "A Rose in the Desert". Probably should have spiked this one, Vogue! The only thing worse than Buck's prose -- "Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand" -- is seeing the skills of a fine photographer like James Nachtwey applied to taking cuddly shots of Bashar al-Assad playing with his kids. Gross. What's next, Vogue? At Home with Kim Jong-il? Dining with Grace Mugabe?

Update:

2. Gah! I have to add another one nicely illustrating that fact that the difference between the neoconservative fantasy in the efficacy of military power is really no different than the same liberal interventionist fantasy.

There are various ways in which the horror can be brought to an end. Is a no-fly zone really too complicated to negotiate? Then let NATO planes fly over Tripoli to shoot down any Libyan aircraft that make war on the Libyan population. Is the United States really prevented by its past from deploying the small number of troops that would be required to rescue Tripoli from Qaddafi’s bloody grip? Then let a multilateral expeditionary force be raised and a humanitarian intervention be launched to free Libya from its tyrant and then leave Libya to the Libyans.

We are now paying the price for having waged two very difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that far too few Americans have participated in or been made to sacrifice for. I sometimes get accused of being a hawk because I have argued that resource-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns have represented our best chance to salvage bad situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but my experiences in both countries also taught me that a) force has its limits and b) we should all be very cautious about committing U.S. troops to combat operations in the first place. I'm horrified to read liberal interventionists continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional conflicts can be solved by the application of military power. To speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of contemporary military operations. And then there is this:

I do not see a Middle East rising up in anger at the prospect of American intervention.

Hoo boy. Have I read that before?

As has already been discussed, I have little of use to add to the conversation on Tunisia. But Shadi Hamid has a lot of smart things to say about democratization in the Arabic-speaking world, and my old friend Issandr el-Amrani is one of the very first people to whom I would turn for thoughts on the politics of North Africa. (I would probably solicit the thoughts of our mutual pal Elijah Zarwan first, actually, since he did some very good work on internet freedom in Tunisia for Human Rights Watch a few years back.) Issandr and Shadi discuss Tunisia here:

Can I just say, though, that Issandr's argument that the United States should try to "not be evil" more or less takes all the fun out of foreign policy?

Like many of this blog's readers, I was unable to stop watching al-Jazeera today. The scenes from Tunis have been incredible. Alas, despite a little time spent in Morocco and Egypt, I know very little about North Africa and nothing at all about Tunisia. So you'll have to go elsewhere for analysis. For those who can read or otherwise understand French or Arabic, your options are better than the options for those who do not. Al-Jazeera, al-Jazeera English, and Le Monde may be worth checking out.