I spoke with him this evening and he says he does not agree with my view that Obama is incompetent. He accords with Sowell's view that Obama is very competent and has been successful in carrying out his agenda of shrinking America's footprint.
I agreed that his/Sowell's view was worthy of consideration so we decided Obama is both incompetent
and effective or successful.
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Click on this and weep:http://www.youtube.com/embed/
and
click on this and cry: https://www.facebook.com/
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Sowell discusses the narrowness of politics. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile, Tom Friedman lays another "flat" egg. (See 1a below.)
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Toameh sees Abbas' overtures to Hamas as another bait and switch to press America to extrude more concessions from Israel (See 2 below.)
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If Obama only had the desire to stop Iran from nuclear development! (See 3 below.)
Is America now positioned for the wrong war? (See 3a below.)
Several memos ago I mentioned that it would not be long before Putin began to stir up protests in the Ukraine and thereby set up the opportunity for him to claim an invasion of Ukraine was necessary to protect Russians. I also posted articles to that effect. Now my friend, Bret Stephens , has given Putin a road map go ahead that is very worthwhile reading. (See 3b below.)
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Dick
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1)
A Halo for Selfishness
By Thomas SowellThe recent Supreme Court decision over-ruling some Federal Election Commission restrictions on political campaign contributions has provoked angry reactions on the left. That is what often happens whenever the High Court rules that the First Amendment means what it says -- free speech for everybody.
When the Supreme Court declared in 2010 that both unions and corporations had a right to buy political ads, that was considered outrageous by the left. President Obama called the decision "devastating" and said it "will open the floodgates for special interests."
Those unfamiliar with political rhetoric may not know that "special interests" mean people who support your opponents. One's own organized supporters -- such as labor unions supporting President Obama -- are never called "special interests."
All politicians are against "special interests," by definition. They all want their own supporters to have the right to free speech, but not those individuals and groups so benighted as to support their opponents.
Even in an age of polarization and gridlock, the one area in which it is easy to get bipartisan support in Congress is in passing campaign finance laws, restricting how much money can be spent publicizing political candidates. What Congressional Democrats and Republicans have in common is that they are all incumbents, and they all want to keep their jobs.
Publicity is necessary to win elections, and incumbents get millions of dollars' worth of free publicity from the media. Incumbents can all pontificate in Congress and be covered by C-SPAN. They can get interviewed on network television, have their pictures in the newspapers, and send out mail to their constituents back home -- and none of this costs them a dime.
Congressional staffs, paid by the taxpayers, are supposed to help members of Congress with the burdens of their office, but a major part of their staff's work is to help get them re-elected.
That's not just during campaign years. Everything members of Congress do is done with an eye toward re-election.
Any outsider who wants to challenge an incumbent at the next Congressional election has to pay hard cash to buy ads and arrange other forms of publicity, in order just to get some comparable amount of name-recognition, so as to have any serious chance of winning an election against an incumbent.
Few people have the kind of money it takes for such a campaign, so they have to raise money -- in the millions of dollars -- to pay for what incumbents get free of charge.
Campaign finance laws that restrict who can contribute how much money, who can run political ads, etc., are all restrictions on political challengers who have to buy their own publicity.
If truth-in-packaging laws applied to Congress, a campaign finance law would have to be labeled an "Incumbents Protection Act."
The very high rate of incumbent re-elections, even while polls show the public disgusted with Congress in general, shows how well incumbents are protected.
The media are accessories to this scam. So long as the information and opinions that reach the public are selected by mainstream media people, whom polls show to be overwhelmingly on the left, the left's view of the world prevails.
Hence the great alarm in the media, and in equally one-sided academia, over the emergence of conservative talk radio programs and the Fox News Channel on television.
No longer can the three big broadcast television networks determine what the public will and will not see, nor two or three leading newspapers determine what is and is not news. Nobody wants to give up that kind of power.
When businesses that are demonized in the mainstream media, and in academia, can buy ads to present their side of the story, that is regarded in both the media and academia as distortion. At the very least, it can cost the left their self-awarded halo.
It is fascinating to see how some people -- in both politics and the media -- can depict their own narrow self-interest as a holy crusade for the greater good of society. The ability of the human mind to rationalize is one of the wonders of the world.
1a)
Among the lowest forms of political punditry is the meme by which a writer demonizes a political opponent by identifying them as allies of a known evil. So when New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman calls casino mogul Sheldon Adelson “Iran’s Best Friend,” it tells us a lot, but none of it has much to do with the controversial billionaire donor to conservative and Jewish causes.
Such a column is one more indication that Friedman has definitively run out of steam in his decades-long run as one of the Times’s op-ed writers. Since assuming his current perch he has shoveled out an unending stream of mainstream liberal conventional wisdom on a variety of topics not limited to his supposed expertise in foreign affairs, but with a particular interest in depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a latter-day Attila the Hun. Regardless of what you think about Netanyahu, Friedman’s efforts to treat those who support the Jewish state as morally equivalent to those who wish to destroy it is a tired cliché. So, too, is the idea that anyone who supports Netanyahu is doing, albeit unwittingly, the bidding of Iran’s Islamist leadership. Like his deservedly mocked columns in which he used anonymous, and no doubt mythical, cabdrivers, to serve as mouthpieces for his own views, this sort of apposition is predictable and not so much ineptly argued, as not argued at all. Friedman simply assumes that the Times’s readership will make the connection between a leading GOP donor and evil without the heavy lifting of actually proving why Adelson’s insistence that would-be Republican candidates refrain from calling the West Bank “occupied” rather than disputed qualifies.
But the definitive proof that this was just the latest example of Friedman mailing it in rather than wading into a topic and making a coherent argument came from his own newspaper today in the form of a column from Shmuel Rosner, who now writes opinions for its online edition from Israel. In it, Rosner relates the dispute about Adelson’s attempt to acquire the Makor Rishon newspaper to add to a collection that already includes Israel Hayom, the Jewish state’s most-read daily. As Rosner writes, some people are up in arms about the acquisition, but they are exactly the types that Friedman most despises: supporters of the settler movement. Economics Minister Naftali Bennett and others to the right of the prime minister fear that Makor Rishon will become, like Israel Hayom, a strong supporter of Netanyahu rather than a critic. While Bennett’s risible and futile attempt to handicap Adelson’s papers with legislation intended to lower their circulation need not trouble American readers much, what they can glean from this account is that the settlers fear Adelson will use his bully pulpits to back a peace agreement in the event Netanyahu ever signs one. Rosner’s concern is that Adelson may be about to “silence the Israeli right.” Thus, even though I believe Rosner is wrong about there being a danger that anyone in Israel will be silenced, Friedman’s absurd hyperbole about Adelson is not only lazy but also inaccurate.
Like the Israeli left that our Tom Wilson rightly depicted as being stuck in an Oslo time warp, Friedman’s problem is that his predictions of Israeli doom have proved as foolish as his best-selling effort to convince us that technology would trump religion, prejudice, and nationalism in the Arab world. He gives away the game when he concedes, “I don’t know if Israel has a Palestinian partner for a secure withdrawal from the West Bank, or ever will.” He then follows this snippet of realism by claiming that Israel must find a way to get out of the West Bank, peace partner or not. But the reason why the overwhelming majority of Israelis have rejected another willy-nilly withdrawal regardless of consequences is that they have no interest in repeating what happened in Gaza in 2005 when Ariel Sharon did just that.
Friedman has a history of trying to delegitimize supporters of Israel. As I wrote here in 2011, his efforts to depict the ovations that Netanyahu received that year from Congress as being “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” reinforced a central myth of anti-Semitism about Jews and money. To use the same logic employed by Friedman today against Adelson, one could say that by doing so, the columnist was showing himself to be an ally of Hitler’s spiritual descendants. But Friedman’s umbrage at his critics then has not tempered his subsequent writings using the same sort of invective.
The problem here is not just that writer’s hypocrisy and his lack of intellectual integrity. The much-heralded exchange between Adelson and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie about what to call the West Bank was merely an attempt to level the rhetorical playing field on which the Israelis and the Palestinians are located. In doing so, the man whom Friedman denounces as “crude” was actually showing a greater grasp of nuance than the columnist who poses as a Middle East expert.
Israel’s friends in this country have every right to speak up and ask potential candidates to speak clearly about the Middle East, especially when so many, like Christie, clearly have no real grasp of foreign policy or the details of the conflict with the Palestinians. In a political landscape filled with foreign-policy blind men, a one-eyed pundit like Friedman likes to play the king. Having reflexively denounced Netanyahu and all those who support him as enemies of peace for so long, the decision of the Palestinians to walk out of the negotiations—a stance that is, for all intents and purposes, a fourth “no” to peace in the last 15 years—Friedman refuses to draw conclusions from events that have contradicted his past positions. Nor does he recognize any distinctions between those who back Israel’s democratically-elected government and a settler movement that is horrified by Netanyahu’s embrace of the two-state solution. In writing in this manner, Friedman tells us nothing about who is a friend or an enemy of Israel, but a lot about his own lack of intellectual rigor.
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2)What's Behind Abbas's Renewed Courtship of Hamas?
For Abbas, the issue of reconciliation with Hamas is yet another legitimate weapon to scare the Israelis and the US into submitting to his demands and preconditions. It now remains to be seen whether the US Administration will take the bait.
Now that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has succeeded in surprising the US and Israel with his decision to apply for Palestinian membership in 15 international institutions and treaties, he seems to be preparing another surprise for the Americans and Israelis: a unity agreement with Hamas.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, in February 2007, before Hamas seized total control of Gaza. (Image source: MaanImages)
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Earlier this week, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was also surprised to receive a phone call from Azzam al-Ahmed, a close advisor to Abbas.
The purpose of the phone call was to request permission from Haniyeh for a visit from senior Fatah officials to the Gaza Strip to discuss unity and reconciliation between the two rival parties.
Haniyeh's office replied that he would welcome a visit to the Gaza Strip "out of keenness for unity and in order to protect the national interests of the Palestinians."
Abbas's renewed effort to join forces with Hamas came even as U.S. envoy Martin Indyk was busy trying to prevent the breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian talks in wake of Abbas's surprise decision to apply for membership in international organizations and conventions.
The current crisis in the peace talks has prompted many Palestinians, including Abbas's loyalists, to renew calls for unity between Fatah and Hamas as a way of confronting Israeli-American pressure.
Adli Sadek, a columnist affiliated with Abbas, said that the Palestinians "have no other choice but to reunite in order to maintain their national stance and adhere to the goal of independence and freedom."
Sadek and other Palestinians said that the Palestinians were now in need of a "unified and realistic national strategy" to confront Israel and enhance their political power."
Abbas might have been encouraged by Hamas's positive response to his request. Shortly after Abbas announced his plan, Hamas spokesman Ehab al-Ghissin praised him for making a "good decision."
This is not the first time that Abbas is playing the Hamas card as a means of exerting pressure on Israel and the U.S.
Ever since the Israeli-Palestinian talks resumed seven months ago, Abbas has made a number of attempts to show the Israelis and Americans that he has not abandoned his desire to achieve reconciliation with Hamas.
Earlier this year, at the first sign of a crisis in the peace talks, Abbas dispatched a high-level Fatah delegation to the Gaza Strip for talks with Hamas leaders on ways of ending the dispute between them.
Hamas and Fatah representatives have since held a series of meetings in Arab countries with the goal of achieving reconciliation and unity.
More recently, Chief PLO Negotiator Saeb Erekat came out with a proposal that calls for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join the PLO and a Palestinian unity government.
Erekat's proposal is also seen in the context of the Palestinian Authority leadership's attempt to put pressure on Israel and the US.
The Palestinian Authority's message to Israel and the US is: You either give us all that we are asking for or we will join forces with Hamas.
Abbas knows that the Israelis and Americans are strongly opposed to such a move, particularly in light of Hamas's fierce opposition to any peace process and ongoing threats to eliminate Israel.
Any rapprochement between Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas would only facilitate the Islamist movement's dream of extending its control from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.
Hamas, for its part, seems to be suspicious of Abbas's renewed attempts to achieve reconciliation and unity between the two parties.
Hamas representatives say that while Abbas is talking about ending the dispute, his security forces are continuing their crackdown on Hamas's supporters in the West Bank.
"Perhaps Abbas is not satisfied with what his security forces are doing to Hamas cadres in the West Bank," said Hamas operative Ibrahim al-Madhoun. "But he's not doing anything to prevent or limit the crackdown."
Even some of Abbas's Fatah loyalists expressed skepticism regarding the prospects of ending the conflict with Hamas, adding that the gap between the two sides remains as far apart as ever.
"Hamas does not want reconciliation," declared Fatah's Faisal Abu Shahla. "Each time we come close to ending the dispute, Hamas comes up with new excuses."
Abbas is now waging a battle aimed at extracting as many concessions as possible from Israel and the US. He has used the decision to apply for membership in 15 international organizations and treaties as a means to intensify pressure on the Israeli government and US Administration to accept his demands for pursuing the peace talks.
Abbas may not be sincere about achieving reconciliation with Hamas. He knows that such a move would be counterproductive and that Hamas would take advantage of the reconciliation to advance its goal of seizing control over the West Bank.
But for Abbas, the issue of reconciliation with Hamas is yet another legitimate weapon to scare the Israelis and Americans into submitting to his demands and pre-conditions. It now remains to be seen whether the US Administration will take the bait.
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3)
Sending a Bunker-Buster Message to Iran
The U.S. has bombers in storage that Israel needs. A timely loan might get Tehran's attention.
Prussian leader Frederick the Great once lamented, "The ways of negotiation have failed up to the present, and negotiations without arms make as little impression as notes without instruments." The same could be said about nuclear negotiations with Iran. The Obama administration has cut a deeply flawed interim deal, forgone new sanctions, and effectively taken the military option off the table. It's time to increase the pressure on Tehran by boosting Israel's military capacity to cripple Iran's nuclear program.
It's hard to imagine negotiations succeeding. The interim deal has undercut the leverage of the U.S. and its partners. It has triggered a rise in Iran's oil-export revenue, while its nuclear-breakout timing remains unchanged due to increased centrifuge efficiency, as permitted in the deal. Tehran continues to deny inspectors access to key nuclear facilities. Recent tensions with Russia will only create new opportunities for Iran to exploit the U.S. in negotiations.
President Obama has already taken one potential source of leverage off the table by promising to veto legislation that threatens tighter economic sanctions on Iran. This leaves military pressure as the only option. But after the Obama administration's unenforced "red lines" in Syria and Ukraine, Iran is understandably dismissive of the threat of U.S. military action. That leaves Israel.
The U.S. has previously recognized the importance of Israeli military pressure against Iran's nuclear-weapons program, some of which is fortified and buried underground. In 2012, President Obama signed the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act, which called for the delivery of aerial refueling tankers and bunker-buster munitions to Israel.
Israel has 2,000- and 5,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, some of which were delivered by the Obama administration. Iranian planners, however, might hope that these will prove insufficient to do major damage. The U.S. should remove such doubt by providing Israel with the capability to reach and destroy Iran's most deeply buried nuclear sites. The U.S. could do this by providing an appropriate number of GBU-57 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator or MOP, and several B-52 bombers.
The Pentagon has developed the MOP bomb specifically for destroying hardened targets. It can penetrate as deeply as 200 feet underground before detonating, more than enough capability to do significant damage to Iran's nuclear program. There are no legal or policy limitations on selling MOPs to Israel, and with an operational stockpile at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, the U.S. has enough in its arsenal to share.
Israel, however, also lacks the aircraft to carry the MOP. Which means the U.S. would need to provide planes capable of carrying such a heavy payload. Only two can do so: the B-52 and the stealth B-2.
The U.S. has only 20 B-2s and would not share such a core component of nuclear deterrence. Nor is the Pentagon willing to part with active B-52s. Of the 744 built since 1955, all but roughly 80 have been decommissioned, sent to the "boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, and, in compliance with arms-control-treaty obligations, mostly rendered inoperable. With plans for a new long-range bomber delayed by defense-spending cuts and sequestration, current plans call for keeping the active duty B-52s in service for at least another 20 years.
But there are more than a dozen of the relatively "newest" B-52H bombers—built in the early 1960s—in storage. Some of these should be delivered to Israel. There's no legal or policy impediments to their transfer; they would just have to be refurbished and retrofitted to carry the MOP.
By transferring to Israel MOPs and B-52Hs the administration would send a signal that its ally, which already has the will, now has the ability to prevent a nuclear Iran. Once they are delivered—ideally as the current six-month interim deal is set to expire in July—Iran will be put on notice that its nuclear program will come to an end, one way or another.
Mr. Obama pledged in 2012, "We will do what it takes to preserve Israel's qualitative military edge—because Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat." Transferring to Israel MOPs and B-52s would help preserve that pledge as well as put, as Frederick the Great suggested, arms behind the current negotiations and bolster chances for reaching an acceptable final nuclear deal with Iran.
Lt. Gen. Deptula, the retired former chief of Air Force intelligence and air-campaign planner for Operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, is senior adviser to the Gemunder Center at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa). Dr. Makovsky is CEO of Jinsa and a former Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration.
3a)U.S. Defense Policy in the Wake of the Ukrainian Affair
Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been an assumption that conventional warfare between reasonably developed nation-states had been abolished. During the 1990s, it was expected that the primary purpose of the military would be operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and the change of oppressive regimes. After 9/11, many began speaking of asymmetric warfare and "the long war." Under this model, the United States would be engaged in counterterrorism activities in a broad area of the Islamic world for a very long time. Peer-to-peer conflict seemed obsolete.
There was a profoundly radical idea embedded in this line of thought. Wars between nations or dynastic powers had been a constant condition in Europe, and the rest of the world had been no less violent. Every century had had systemic wars in which the entire international system (increasingly dominated by Europe since the 16th century) had participated. In the 20th century, there were the two World Wars, in the 19th century the Napoleonic Wars, in the 18th century the Seven Years' War, and in the 17th century the Thirty Years' War.
Those who argued that U.S. defense policy had to shift its focus away from peer-to-peer and systemic conflict were in effect arguing that the world had entered a new era in which what had been previously commonplace would now be rare or nonexistent. What warfare there was would not involve nations but subnational groups and would not be systemic. The radical nature of this argument was rarely recognized by those who made it, and the evolving American defense policy that followed this reasoning was rarely seen as inappropriate. If the United States was going to be involved primarily in counterterrorism operations in the Islamic world for the next 50 years, we obviously needed a very different military than the one we had.
There were two reasons for this argument. Military planners are always obsessed with the war they are fighting. It is only human to see the immediate task as a permanent task. During the Cold War, it was impossible for anyone to imagine how it would end. During World War I, it was obvious that static warfare dominated by the defense was the new permanent model. That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war. It is, after all, the war that was the culmination of their careers, and imagining other wars when they are fighting this one, and indeed will not be fighting future ones, appeared frivolous.
The second reason was that no nation-state was in a position to challenge the United States militarily. After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States. No matter how benign a leading power is -- and the United States is not uniquely benign -- other nations will fear it, resent it or want to shame it for its behavior. The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent.
Systemic vs. Asymmetric War
It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars. The British fought an asymmetric war in both Ireland and North America in the context of a peer-to-peer war with France. Germany fought an asymmetric war in Yugoslavia at the same time it fought a systemic war from 1939-1945. The United States fought asymmetric wars in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti and other places between 1900-1945.
Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars. They can appear overwhelmingly important at the time. But just as the defeat of Britain by the Americans did not destroy British power, the outcomes of asymmetric wars rarely define long-term national power and hardly ever define the international system. Asymmetric warfare is not a new style of war; it is a permanent dimension of warfare. Peer-to-peer and systemic wars are also constant features but are far less frequent. They are also far more important. For Britain, the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars was much more important than the outcome of the American Revolution. For the United States, the outcome of World Was II was far more important than its intervention in Haiti. There are a lot more asymmetric wars, but a defeat does not shift national power. If you lose a systemic war, the outcome can be catastrophic.
A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important. The war that defines power and the international system can have irreversible and catastrophic results. Asymmetric wars can cause problems and casualties, but that is a lesser mission. Military leaders and defense officials, obsessed with the moment, must bear in mind that the war currently being fought may be little remembered, the peace that is currently at hand is rarely permanent, and harboring the belief that any type of warfare has become obsolete is likely to be in error.
Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.
But the events in Ukraine point to some realities. First, the power of countries shifts, and the Russians had substantially increased their military capabilities since the 1990s. Second, the divergent interests between the two countries, which seemed to disappear in the 1990s, re-emerged. Third, this episode will cause each side to reconsider its military strategy and capabilities, and future crises might well lead to conventional war, nuclear weapons notwithstanding. Ukraine reminds us that peer-to-peer conflict is not inconceivable, and that a strategy and defense policy built on the assumption has little basis in reality. The human condition did not transform itself because of an interregnum in which the United States could not be challenged; the last two decades are an exception to the rule of global affairs defined by war.
U.S. national strategy must be founded on the control of the sea. The oceans protect the United States from everything but terrorism and nuclear missiles. The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises.
U.S. Strategy in Eurasia
The main goal here is to avoid the emergence of a regional hegemon fully secure against land threats and with the economic power to challenge the United States at sea. The U.S. strategy in World War I was to refuse to become involved until it appeared, with the abdication of the czar and increasing German aggression at sea, that the British and French might be defeated or the sea-lanes closed. At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done. Even then, it was only after Hitler's declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Congress approved Roosevelt's plan to intervene militarily in continental Europe. And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.
In order for this strategy, which the U.S. inherited from the British, to work, the United States needs an effective and relevant alliance structure. The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.
If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia. For example, Portugal or Italy adds little weight to the equation. As to effectiveness, the allies must be willing to make major commitments to their own national defense. The American relationship in all alliances is that the outcome of conflicts must matter more to the ally than to the United States.
The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians. Many of the members are not geographically positioned to help, and many are not militarily effective. They cannot balance the Russians. And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.
It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power. Many would point to China. In my view, China's ability to pose a naval threat to the United States is limited, for the time being, by the geography of the South and East China seas. There are a lot of choke points that can be closed. Moreover, a balance of land-based military power is difficult to imagine. But still, the basic principle I have described holds; countries such as South Korea and Japan, which have a more immediate interest in China than the United States does, are supported by the United States to contain China.
In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia. The United States must have force multipliers. In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against. The only thing certain is that it will be far away and take a long time to build up a force. During Desert Storm, it took six months to go on the offensive.
American strategy requires a force that can project overwhelming power without massive delays. In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over. An offensive against the Russians in Ukraine would have been impossible. Therefore, Ukraine poses the strategic problem for the United States.
The Future of U.S. Defense Policy
The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States. Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment. It can take many months to field that force. That could force the United States into an offensive posture far more costly and dangerous than a defensive posture, as it did in World War II. Therefore, it is essential that the time to theater be dramatically reduced, the size of the force reduced, but the lethality, mobility and survivability dramatically increased.
It also follows that the tempo of operations be reduced. The United States has been in constant warfare since 2001. The reasons are understandable, but in a balance-of-power strategy war is the exception, not the rule. The force that could be deployed is seen as overwhelming and therefore does not have to be deployed. The allies of the United States are sufficiently motivated and capable of defending themselves. That fact deters attack by regional hegemons. There need to be layers of options between threat and war.
Defense policy must be built on three things: The United States does not know where it will fight. The United States must use war sparingly. The United States must have sufficient technology to compensate for the fact that Americans are always going to be outnumbered in Eurasia. The force that is delivered must overcome this, and it must get there fast.
Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered. The need to rethink American strategy in the framework of the perpetual possibility of conventional war against enemies fighting on their own terrain is essential, along with an understanding that the exhaustion of the force in asymmetric warfare cannot be sustained. Losing an asymmetric war is unfortunate but tolerable. Losing a systemic war could be catastrophic. Not having to fight a war would be best.
3b)Putin's Moment
The Kremlin has an interest in conquest. The White House makes the taking easier.
By Bret Stephens
Never again will the taking be so easy. Never again will the government in Kiev be so helpless. Never again will the administration in Washington be so inept, its threats so hollow. Never again will the powers in Europe be so feeble and dependent. Never again will Western monetary policy do so much to prop up energy prices.
While Mr. Putin is at it, he might consider invading one of the Baltic states. Barack Obama isn't about to ask Americans to die for Estonia, where a quarter of the population is ethnically Russian. The U.S. president wants "nation-building at home," after all. Let him have at it.
Even now, the West misses the point. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is inherently weak; that its economy would collapse if the price of oil were to fall; that human and financial capital are in flight; that its population is shrinking (and frequently drunk); that the regime has lost the support of an urban middle class disgusted by endemic corruption. And so on.
Seeing his soul? A portrait of the Russian president by George W. Bush. The Bush Center/Grant Miller; Note: Detail
All true. And all the more reason for Mr. Putin to strike. We've come to think of Mr. Putin as the embodiment of ruthlessness. He's that. But he also has a genius for self-reinvention. Agent of Soviet communism turned political patriarch of Russian Orthodoxy. St. Petersburg technocrat turned Moscow strongman. Enemy of the oligarchs turned godfather of the oligarchs. Law-and-order economic modernizer turned old-school Russian revanchist.
Maybe the disguises go with the KGB training. Maybe it's just a well-honed survivor's instinct. Whichever way, Mr. Putin has been frog-like in his ability to jump off his lily-pad the moment it begins to sink under his weight. He's never had trouble landing on another one.
A staple of political commentary since Mr. Putin seized Crimea is that he is making a big mistake. Typical of this view is an op-ed in Monday's New York Times NYT -1.80% by Oxford historian Robert Service, who compares Mr. Putin to Nicholas I, the reactionary 19th century czar who blundered into the disastrous Crimean War. The comparison would be somewhat more apt if NATO were making plans to lay siege to Sevastopol.
Oh, but we'll soon lay siege to Russia's economy, right? Wrong. As the Journal's Paul Sonne and Anton Troianovski reported Monday, Angela Merkel attended an industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, over the weekend where a company named Tavrida Electric was displaying its wares. Tavrida's CEO is one of 33 people sanctioned by theEuropean Union as governor of the new pro-Russian regime in Sevastopol. And yet, the Journal reports, "the impact on Tavrida has been zero so far."
It's true that sanctions could be made a lot tougher. We could impose asset freezes and travel bans on, say, executive suites at Gazprom OGZPY -3.35% and Rosneft and other state-controlled Russian companies. Questionable bank accounts in Switzerland and Cyprus could be frozen. We could subject the Russian economy to the kind of treatment we imposed, briefly, on the Iranian economy. And we could accept the consequences of such sanctions, as the Kremlin responds tit-for-tat by cutting off gas supplies to the Baltics, shipping advanced antiaircraft missiles to Iran, or freezing us out of the International Space Station.
In short, the West could win a sanctions war with Russia, but it would take an iron political stomach. Mr. Putin knows Mr. Obama. He knows that the U.S. president has the digestive fortitude of a tourist in Tijuana.
And that's why Mr. Putin should move quickly. Russia's chokehold on Europe's energy supplies won't last forever. The easy Fed money that jacks up the price of commodities won't last forever. Even Mr. Obama's presidency won't last forever. On present course, Russia will get weaker, which leaves Mr. Putin with two options: liberalize or conquer. The first option would ultimately require him to step down from power and put him at risk of legal prosecution. The second option gives him the chance to re-legitimize his regime by whipping Russians into a nationalist frenzy and stay in power till he dies in bed.
If you were Mr. Putin, which option would you choose?
That's what makes the White House's repeated offers of an "off-ramp" so silly. For the Kremlin, foreign conquest is the off-ramp. And if a Western off-ramp is offered with every fresh Russian insult and assault, why take the first one? Let's take this metaphor to its logical conclusion: If the Obama diplomatic freeway has an off-ramp every few miles, it means Mr. Putin is probably betting he can drive all the way to the state line before he pulls over to fill the tank.
Which, in his case, is a T-72.
Mr. Obama has a habit of underestimating his foes. He thought al Qaeda was on the run. He thought Bashar Assad would be gone by now. He thinks Iran will abandon its nuclear programs in exchange for sanctions relief. He thinks of Vladimir Putin as the kid with the bored expression, slouching in the back of the classroom.
News for the law professor. That kid is smarter than you are. He's bored because you bore him. He's about to eat your lunch.
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