The deal for a state of the art air defense system for Iran has been completed.  Russia is delivering according to the report an S300 system, although the report says the variant is not known.  There is a very broad range of capabilities of the S300 system, but obviously this is yet another indication of Russia’s new effort to rebuilt its status on the world stage.  Russia is an aggrieved (not just dissatisfied) revisionist power and is aligning itself with other revisionist powers in order to undo the current status quo.

Putin is pushing a different Reset Button.  One that is meant to undo the post Cold War world order.  Russia has raised the costs of any attempt to prevent Iranian nuclear breakout.  Russia is able to play Arab off against Persian, Sunni off against Shia, by selling arms to both sides and peel the Arab states from the U. S. sphere of influence.  Russia can’t lose in the scenario.  Russia will have leverage with the Saudi regime, who has held the price of oil down in its conflict with Iran.  Lifting the price of oil fixes all the petrostates’ finances.  Russia would even be in a position to become the nuclear purveyor to Saudi Arabia in the event of an Iranian nuclear breakout.

The status quo, works to the benefit of West against East, North against South, a rising China and an aggrieved Russia pose great challenges.  The Reset Button has been pushed and now its going to take a tremendous amount of coordinated work in the West to prevent the unraveling of the (mostly) benign liberal world order.  Authoritarian states are feeling their oats and doing something about it.

Drudgereport ran a headline Germany Sliding Toward Civil War with a link to an RT.com article with some local politicians claiming that the migrant crisis will lead to civil war in Germany.  Nothing could be more absurd!

First, although Germany is a classic nation-state, a state whose borders are coterminal with the boundaries of a population sharing a common language, culture or ethnicity.  There has been a strong undercurrent of nationalism in Germany since at least Bismarck in the 1860s, who used nationalism as a tool to peel the members of the German confederation out of the orbit of Austria and unite the various German principates with Prussia.  Germany does have a very strict citizenship law.  Naturalization of migrants is possible but arduous.  Der Volkgeist (national spirit) is alive and well in Germany.

This does not mean that there will be civil war.  We have obviously seen a rise in violence against migrants and politicians supporting the open border policy in Germany, but that does not mean a civil war or revolution is coming.

Germany has a federal system and individual states have a lot of autonomy.  The current policy may be creating friction between the federal government and the states, but nobody is raising a militia to take up arms against the federal government.

Drudgereport should know better than to pick up a story from a propaganda arm of the Russian State.  RT is government owned and is the English language mouth piece of the Putin regime.  Russia’s current policy is to undermine NATO and the EU wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself.  The linked article was typical of the propaganda war to break the Western powers’ multilateral institutions.

The foreign policy of the Obama administration has been variously characterized as: ad hoc, lacking strategic vision, naive, courageous, and prioritizing the immediate over the long term. In April Thomas Friedman attempted to explain the coherence of the Obama administration foreign policy, coining the term Obama Doctrine.

To summarize the assumptions of the Obama Doctrine:

• There are no current existential threats to the U.S.
• The U.S. is a declining hegemon and the world is destined for multipolarity
• Diplomatic engagement is a more useful tool to changing hostile state behavior than coercive measures

From these assumptions, flows the following policy choices:

• The U.S. strategic posture viz. Eurasia can be recalibrated to off-shore balancing
• Coercision of U.S. adversaries should be reversed
• U.S. allies need to carry a greater burden in providing global public goods

There is an Obama Doctrine and it is coherent, being based on common strains of thought in the field of international relations. Obama claims to be a realist, and realists get indignant. What Obama really means is that he accepts one underlying premise of contemporary structural realism: that the international states system is characterized by anarchy–i.e., there is no global government to regulate the affairs of state. It is pretty clear that the president is not a proponent of liberal cosmopolitanism that believes that there should be a global government. There have been no major advances towards empowering the UN as you would expect of a cosmopolitan outlook. Instead he is invested in liberal internationalism–states are the main actors and they should not be surrendering their sovereignty to a world government. A better characterization of the administration’s outlook is a combination of several liberal strains of thought: classic commercial pacifism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism.

The administration has, in opposition to the Democrat party’s ideological base, promoted international trade. This is a core tenant of commercial pacifism. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations made the argument that trade ties deter war, because trade ties and the financial ties that go with them raise the cost of international conflict. This tenant was the core of Angellism, named after Norman Angell, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose book The Great Illusion made the argument that war doesn’t pay. The book was an extended polemic on the folly of the Anglo-German arms race that preceded World War I. (The final edition of the book appeared on the eve of war.)

Neoliberal institutionalism (NLI) makes the related claim that interconnectedness in the world makes the cooperation among states more likely than realists claim (because a fundamental tenant of realism is that given anarchy, the states system is a self-help system, and states prioritize security over all other issues). What makes NLI “neo” is that it accepts the structural realist proposition that the international states system is anarchic, contra classical liberalism, which holds that war is caused by either human nature (that is changeable), or the nature of states (democracies don’t go to war). NLI assumes though that existential threats don’t always exist and there is no inherent competition for relative gains among states, particularly when the number of states is above two. There is a whole literature using game theory to prove the proposition. When there are no existential threats, security (and relative gains in power) does not dominate all other issues and states are free to cooperate on global issues. This is a core belief of Davos Man, not that Obama is a member of that species like Bill Clinton.

This brings us to constructivism. Constructivism, is less a theory than it is a methodology. The underlying assumption of constructivism is that states have psyches just like people and that identity is a social construct. In the foundation text of constructivism, Alexander Wendt’s “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” Irving Goffman’s theories about reflexive identity formation are applied at the state level. Wendt reasons analogically that if a state has an identity, that identity can be molded by the behavior of other states towards it. If you are conciliatory to a state, it will have a positive self asteem and be conciliatory toward you. Constructivism underlies the administration’s policy choices.

Is the above correct?

Commercial pacifism by itself is not a solution to the problem of war. It is predicated on the assumption that states are rational economic actors and that every decision is motivated by a cost-benefit that can be measured in currency, not in power. Additionally, today’s wars are actually a new kind of war. Previous wars between states were motivated to power either defensively to prevent a rival from acquiring too much power and threatening a change in the status quo, or to acquire sources of power such as arable land, population, industrial plants, sea ports, etc. The “new wars” as Mary Kaldor calls them in her book New and Old Wars are motivated by identity. Ethnicity and/or religion becomes the motivator for conflict rather than power. It accurately describes the current conflicts across Africa, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the India-Pakistan conflict as well as several conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

NLI is an extremely useful theoretical construct, but it does not really explain what happens when existential threats assert themselves and it doesn’t give useful policy prescription for how status quo powers should handle revisionist powers. Some point to the success of NATO, but that is a very unique historical circumstance. You had a bipolar international order, not a multipolar international order. NATO has begun showing its weakness recently, due to the change in relative power and policy preferences of states in Eurasia.

Constructivism is just plain bunk. It uses manifestly discredited psychological models of the individual in society (for example, there is an underlying assumption that the human psyche is a tabula rasa) to analogically explain state behavior and preferences. It is old wine in a new bottle, which is mainly an attempt to resurrect the progressive assumption that war would be abolished if leaders and/or populaces were just better psychologically adjusted and states felt safe in their international relations. There are too many pregnant ifs to accept policy prescriptions.

Therefore, the return of geopolitics with a vengance in the last year has really challenged this administration, because it doesn’t have the intellectual tools to deal with the new (old) world order. China and Russia, two revisionist powers, one on the rise and one on the decline, are exploiting and disrupting an order constructed at great cost in the immediate years after World War II. It is time for the Obama policy team to brush up on Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.

Applaud the administrations moves regarding Cuba, but lament the decisions in the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Foreign Policy magazine had a good post on the limitations of peacekeeping and the Obama Administration promise for more resources for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).  One particular paragraph struck me as worthy of comment:

Peacekeeping can only deal with symptoms; but a secondary question is whether it can even do that in the kinds of settings that most concern the United States and the West. The scale of the killing and mayhem in the nightmare zones of sub-Saharan Africa — where so much peacekeeping has been concentrated — constitute a pressing moral obligation as well as a genuine, but secondary, national security interest.

Peacekeeping operations are often a balancing act between humanitarian intervention and the desire for stability.  Wars end one of two ways: (1) a decisive victory by one of the parties to the conflict or (2) without a conclusive victory due to exhaustion of the belligerents.  Edward Luttwak published a very controversial article on the premature termination of hostilities by the international community in the interest of humanitarian intervention.  When hostilities are terminated prior to the culmination of violence and either victory of exhaustion, the seeds are sown for the conflict to resume in the future.  His proposal is to foster stability by not intervening prematurely.

There is certainly a place for peacekeeping to provide a secure environment after conflict, and to staff and administer disarmament and demobilization of combatants  as part of peace settlements, but Luttwak is probably right that a forced settlement imposed from outside does just create conditions for future conflict to erupt.  But this leaves the UN stuck with their mandate under Article 1 and Chapter VII of the UN charter.  When pacific settlement of disputes is rejected by the belligerents and under the contemporary principle of responsibility to protect (R2P) what is the UN to do?  The UN must intervene according to the organization’s mandate and the need to protect civilians, even if this means that it exposes peacekeepers to attack by insurgents and the UN peacekeepers may not be equipped to execute the mission.  The promise for a rapid reaction force and more lethal and logistic equipment is a start.  Although the interventions are probably hopeless in creating conditions for a lasting peace.

The Wall Street Journal published a transcript of written responses put to the Chinese President Xi Jinping.  On the issue of Chinese hacking the Chinese President had this response:

China takes cybersecurity very seriously. China is also a victim of hacking. The Chinese government does not engage in theft of commercial secrets in any form, nor does it encourage or support Chinese companies to engage in such practices in any way. Cybertheft of commercial secrets and hacking attacks against government networks are both illegal; such acts are criminal offenses and should be punished according to law and relevant international conventions. China and the United States share common concerns on cybersecurity. We are ready to strengthen cooperation with the U.S. side on this issue.

The key part of the response here is “relevant international conventions.”  There aren’t any!  There is a model set of non-binding international norms released by the UN back in July, 2015.  Those norms include: