(Courtesy: Google Images; Times of London)

Multilateralism has been a key feature of Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision since he first entered the political arena.  The recent National Security Strategy correctly characterizes NATO as “the pre-eminent security alliance in the world today”,  and in order to maintain this designation, the Obama Administration states its intention to use NATO’s Strategic Concept Review as an opportunity to “revitalize and reform” the alliance.  In politics, we have grown accustomed to the word “reform” being used to mean “rooting out corruption from“, which is distinctly not how it is meant here.  Rather, a slighter version of the literal deconstruction meaning “to form again” is the goal.

NATO, it must be remembered, was custom-built for meeting the challenge posed by Soviet expansionism at the end of World War II.  It presented a two-part counter to the USSR: First, in establishing a defensive alliance, it created an unambiguous boundary that the Soviets were not to violate.  Second, it set up a “tripwire” that would lead to military consequences should the Soviets attempt to cross this boundary, and it backed up this threat with the power of the U.S. military.  This tripwire was enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which states that an attack against any of the Parties in Europe or North America is an attack against the entire alliance, authorizing collective action consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Although it was often an alliance of foul-weather friends, the existence of NATO neutralized the possibility of a hot war in Europe.  Instead, Cold War conflicts would be fought in third countries elsewhere around the world where the results were traumatic, but at least less likely to result in a nuclear exchange than a European one.  It was a classic demonstration of collective security.

NATO’s success was ultimately owed to its well-tailored Cold War strategy, but when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, it was generally left without a coherent purpose since it no longer had its existential enemy.  Critically, it succeeded in helping the former Warsaw Pact countries transition back into Europe; this was an important and positive development.  However, it did not, and has not, adapted to the challenges facing its members in the post-Cold War world.

The problem is that NATO members now face challenges that collective security cannot check.  It failed to deter terrorists on 9/11, 7/7 and other occasions, and it is largely irrelevant to the challenges posed by failing states.  Moreover, NATO expansion without a genuine mission redefinition is perceived as a threat by Russia, which has complicated relations between NATO members and that country.

The Group of Experts committee chartered by NATO to make recommendations for the improvement of the alliance recently completed and published its findings.  Many regard these findings as too vague.  They don’t provide a new mission for the alliance or clearly delineate what the non-Article 5 animating terms will be, but it may just be that those terms will be less clear in the post-Cold War world.  Making this most important alliance work is going to be a critical test of the Obama Administration’s commitment to multilateralism.

Any restructuring of NATO will need strong leadership by an American president, as NATO is essentially built around the U.S. military, especially in the Afghanistan campaign.  Key questions for thought must include:

• What unites NATO, and what is its mission?  Is NATO still a defensive alliance, or is it a more formalized “coalition of the willing” that will take on a variety of generally accepted threats like radical Islam on an ad hoc basis?
• Now that the Soviet Union is gone, what is NATO’s Russia policy?  Is it a friend?  A foe?  A member?  An associate?  How and where will cooperation work?  Which leads to the next question…
• What are the limits of NATO expansion?  Membership for Ukraine and Georgia appears to have stalled out for the moment, but is there a better reason for this than to avoid poking the Russian Bear?  How should expansion be connected to the new mission?
• What responsibilities come with NATO membership?  For what missions could members - especially European members - contribute treasure and manpower?

These questions need to be answered with a maximum degree of honesty.  NATO was held together during the Cold War by the threat of instant, global annihilation.  Now that this threat has largely passed, NATO needs a new unifying objective to define what it is and what it will do, or Afghanistan might be its last big stand.

This past weekend, President Obama delivered the commencement address to West Point’s graduating class of 2010. In it, he stressed to the cadets the importance of diplomatic engagement in addition to military might as part of U.S. national security, saying, “America’s armed forces are adapting to changing times, but your efforts have to be complemented. We will need the renewed engagement of our diplomats, from grand capitals to dangerous outposts.”

Distinctions have already been drawn between President Obama’s speech on Saturday and Former President George W. Bush’s West Point graduation speech given in 2002. Bush’s speech focused heavily on one of the key pillars of the “Bush Doctrine” - the occasional necessity of unilateral, pre-emptive military action:

“We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long — Our security will require transforming the military you will lead — a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world.”

In contrast, Obama said in his address:

“We are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation — we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don’t.”

Obama also put a heavy focus on non-military efforts for peace:

“You, and all who wear America’s uniform, remain the cornerstone of our national defense, the anchor of global security. And through a period when too many of our institutions have acted irresponsibly, the American military has set a standard of service and sacrifice that is as great as any in this nation’s history.

Now the rest of us — the rest of us must do our part. And to do so, we must first recognize that our strength and influence abroad begins with steps we take at home. We must educate our children to compete in an age where knowledge is capital, and the marketplace is global. We must develop clean energy that can power new industry and unbound us from foreign oil and preserve our planet. We have to pursue science and research that unlocks wonders as unforeseen to us today as the microchip and the surface of the moon were a century ago.

Simply put, American innovation must be the foundation of American power — because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy. And so that means that the civilians among us, as parents and community leaders, elected officials, business leaders, we have a role to play. We cannot leave it to those in uniform to defend this country — we have to make sure that America is building on its strengths.”

The full transcript can be found here.

Interesting commentary by the Atlantic Council’s James Joyner on what the UK election results will mean for the Anglo-American “Special Relationship” here.

Courtesy of the London Daily Mail and Google Images

Joyner believes the abundance of common interests in the U.S.-UK relationship will ultimately prevent it from fraying too much, and history suggests that he is right.  In addition to those interests, the “Special Relationship” (as it is often called) is unique because the two governments have achieved a deep level of integration that makes it highly resistant to harm from political disagreements and change.

While the U.S. emerged from the Second World War a superpower, it is sometimes forgotten that it was not one when it entered the war.  It had a much smaller military and lacked many of the capabilities it needed to match its Axis enemies.  During the Great Mobilization, these capabilities were often developed in conjunction with the UK, notably in the areas of intelligence and atomic weaponry development, and cooperation with the British continued in these and other areas even after the war as matters of custom and course.  At war’s end, the U.S. emerged as a superpower with a national security apparatus that had a high degree of interoperability with its British counterparts and a tradition of information-sharing and policy coordination.

These ties, and the economic, philosophical and cultural ties derived from America’s conception as a network of British colonies, continue and have made the U.S.-UK relationship a durable one capable of weathering even strong disagreements over policy differences like the U.S. conflict in Vietnam and the British-French-Israeli bid to reclaim the Suez Canal.  How does it manage this?  Well, mostly because integration in other areas is simply too deep already to be affected by temporary rows.  The incentives to institute a meaningful separation simply aren’t there, and, despite Prime Minister Cameron’s suggestion, rising powers are just no substitute.  In other words, the relationship is “special” because the shared history between the two countries and the ways they do business virtually guarantee that they will remain uncommonly tight no matter who occupies 10 Downing Street or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Last week, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I - Conn) introduced the “Terrorist Expatriation Act” -  legislation that would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of Americans who provide support to a foreign terrorist organization. Yesterday morning, Attorney General Eric Holder and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani discussed last week’s attempted terrorist attack in Times Square and Lieberman’s suggested legislation on “This Week.”

Holder on the Lieberman bill:

“There are potential constitutional issues with it, as I’ve seen some critics discuss. I’ve not had a chance, as I said, to review it in any great detail, but I think what people have to understand is that the system we presently have in place takes terrorists and can put them in jail for extended periods of time. We can put people in jail for the rest of their lives. We can even execute people under the law as it presently exists, and one has to wonder whether we need to go further than that.”

Find the complete transcript of the interview here.

On April 27, a little-noticed hearing took place on Capitol Hill regarding an important and controversial issue that has been a sore spot in U.S.-Russian relations for some time: the status of the historic Jackson-Vanik Amendment.  Not only is this issue worth examining for its effect on the Obama Administration’s “Russian Reset” agenda, it is also an interesting demonstration of how different executive and legislative branch agendas can fragment U.S. diplomatic policy.

The Jackson-Vanik Amendment was an attachment to the Trade Act of 1974 that denied Most Favored Nation trade status to countries that restricted emigration and were not deemed to be “market economies”.  The principal object of this amendment was the Soviet Union, which had begun preventing many of its citizens, especially Soviet Jews, from leaving the USSR for freer countries.  However, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the successor Russian state inherited the violator status of the Soviet Union because Congress never ended the amendment’s application (known as “graduation”) to Russia.

Courtesy: Google Images and CUNY-Brooklyn

The Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations have all found Russia to be in compliance with Jackson-Vanik.  Unfortunately for them, this policy has to be undone by the legislative branch, not the executive branch.  All administration officials can do is lobby Congress to graduate Russia from the amendment, and this has not happened due to congressional concerns about Russian policy on a variety of issues, including market access for American chicken exporters and intellectual property rights enforcement.  Some in Congress want these issues addressed first before the relationship is normalized.

In his testimony at the hearing, U.S.-Russia Business Council President Ed Verona noted that by continuing to hold Jackson-Vanik over Russia’s head in the hopes of gaining further concessions in other areas, Congress is giving Russia the impression of “shifting goalposts” - that is to say, a perception that nothing they do will ever be enough to graduate from the amendment; new hurdles will simply be put up.

It’s not hard to understand the threat that such a perception poses to the “Reset” agenda.  Moreover, former Soviet republic Ukraine has already been graduated from Jackson-Vanik, and China - the world’s leading intellectual property rights offender and a country whose government is still (at least nominally) communist - was granted Permanent Normalized Trade Relations (PNTR) status back in 2000.  The appearance is that Russia is being singled out for rough treatment.

This is unfortunate because it is not a completely fair appraisal of the situation; it isn’t personal, it’s institutional.  The U.S. has not graduated Russia from Jackson-Vanik because its policy apparatus is fragmented on this issue along the fault between the executive and legislative branches of government.  Both branches have a role in U.S. foreign policy, and they are just not on the same page about how to execute Russia’s graduation.  Foreign governments do not always appreciate that this can happen, and they often do not trust it because there is no way to determine if a given administration is sincere when it expresses its frustration with an uncooperative legislature.  This fragmentation can lead to a good deal of confusion, and it is a challenge the Obama administration, like its predecessors, will have to tackle as it pursues its Russian agenda.

The 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons begins in New York today. All of the statements given will be published on the official website.

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad was notably not invited to President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit last month, but he will be attending this conference, speaking during this morning’s session. (For more on the Summit in April, see this previous FPA post.) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will offer her remarks later this afternoon.

Speculation over the likely fraudulent results of Sudan’s April 11-15 elections continues, with a particular focus on what the re-election of incumbent President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir will mean for southern Sudan’s upcoming referendum on independence.

Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that mandated these elections also includes the condition that in January 2011, southern Sudan will hold a referendum on splitting from Khartoum, which, if passed, could create the first new nation in Africa since Eritrea declared independence from Ethiopia in 1993.

Though some argue that Sudan’s first multi-party elections in almost 25 years election signal important progress for the country, there is also concern regarding the possibility that a re-elected Bashir will not allow the referendum to actually take place, placing Sudan on the path to civil war once again.

While southern Sudan has no power grid, no agriculture, no industry, no public transit, and only a few buildings, it does include most of the country’s oil fields, an asset Bashir is unlikely to want to readily relinquish.

And what should be the role of the United States? This is surely a question that will continue to be raised with increasing urgency. For one, U.S. Envoy to Sudan, General Scott Gration, has urged the administration to “redouble” efforts towards preparing southern Sudan to be an independent country. He stressed, “we in America are looking at a surge,” adding,  “I don’t think [the United States] can avoid having a leadership role.”

Thoughts?

The Washington Diplomat gets D.C.-based foreign diplomats to talk in a surprising amount of detail about how Facebook and Twitter fit into their public diplomacy strategies here.

An article in today’s New York Times describes the electricity woes of Pakistanis, who are becoming increasingly frustrated with frequent power outages and restrictive new energy-saving measures.

Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has assured Pakistan that the United States “will continue to [put more emphasis on energy issues] up to absolute limits of what Congress will fund.” He has also pointed to the six new energy projects announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her last visit to Pakistan.

The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, otherwise known as the Kerry-Lugar Bill, allocates up to $1.5 billion per year in non-military assistance to Pakistan through 2014. Authors of the bill mention “investments in energy and water, including energy generation” in particular as deserving of some of these funds. I am not certain of the level of U.S. funding that has gone to dealing with electricity shortages specifically, but perhaps now is the time for the United States to increase it, making visible (pun intended) our commitment to solving the energy crisis.

Veteran advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations, Aaron David Miller, details in a Foreign Policy article why he has lost his once-steadfast faith in America’s ability to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Comparing the peace process to a “false religion,” Miller reflects on the fact that each U.S. president since the October 1973 war - most recently President Obama - has made Arab-Israeli peace a priority, even as the situation has become “nastier” and “more complex.”

Although Miller has spent the past 30 years arguing the importance of Arab-Israeli peace, he now believes that other issues must take priority, saying:

” U.S. priorities and interests, too, have changed. The notion that there’s a single or simple fix to protecting those interests, let alone that Arab-Israeli peace would, like some magic potion, bullet, or elixir, make it all better, is just flat wrong.”

While Miller maintains that the “unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is still a big problem for America and its friends,” he cites the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s battle with terrorism, and the growing nuclear capabilities of Iran as three foreign policy issues to which the Obama Administration should perhaps give precedence; “the believers need to re-examine their faith, especially at a moment when America is so stretched and overextended.”

He ultimately concludes:

“Governing is about choosing; it’s about setting priorities, managing your politics, thinking strategically, picking your spots, and looking for genuine opportunities that can be exploited — not tilting at windmills. And these days, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is a pretty big windmill.”