Arms and influence

Treaties and obligations

Before the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration already felt unduly constrained by treaties and international law. Fancying themselves 21st-century Bismarcks, the members of Bush's team with real clout were eager to pursue a kind of vulgar Realpolitik. For them, it wasn't even worth pretending to have respect for the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Geneva Conventions, or other constraints on the full, muscular sovereignty of the world's only superpower. The 9/11 attacks only deepened this antipathy.

Now, the White House is feeling the backlash from this approach. In Iraq, the "coalition of the willing" proved far less enduring than, say, the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. The backlash is also undermining the Administration's Iran policies.

Case in point: several Central Asian countries, including Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and and Turkmenistan, are now defending Iran's nuclear program. While no diplomatic pronouncement from Turkmenistan is likely to stop a US military strike against Iran, the unwillingness to base American forces, or grant overflight permission, is a kink in any serious military campaign against Iran:

No Caspian Sea country should let its territory be used by other countries "for aggressive or military operations against another Caspian state," said Putin, who is attending a meeting in Tehran of the leaders of the five countries that border the inland sea.

The leaders jointly made a similar statement, signaling the opposition of Iran's neighbors to any military action by the United States or its allies.

Imagine now an alternate history in which the United States had used the 9/11 attacks not to dismantle its treaty obligations, but to strengthen them; in which it did not go out of its way to insult the UN, but tried to make it easier for the UN to respond to threats like the Iranian nuclear program. This announcement might never have happened, or it may have stopped at expressing sympathy for Iran. ("You're on your own" would have been the obvious subtext, in that case.)

Now, having said that, I'll tell you that I don't get dewy-eyed over international law. I've known people whose earnestness about the UN and international law has blinded them to the realities of international politics. These true believers (you meet quite a few of them in academia, by the way) didn't notice that, at some point, they crossed the border from pragmatism into idealism. Now, they argue for policies that make perfect sense in a world that does not exist.

My favorite example of this sort  of true believer: the presentation I attended around 1990, in which the speaker argued that the reason why the Israelis had a nuclear weapons program was the US government's lack of enthusiasm for the Test Ban Treaty. Huh? I thought the reason the Israelis wanted nuclear weapons had something to do with the Arab-Israeli wars, not the bad example the United States might be setting.

Still, treaties and obligations have a constructive purpose. Your allies can always bail out of a collective endeavor, such as the first Iraq war, but only at a much higher political cost. Military agreements, such as NATO, give the allies a great deal of experience working with one another, and also increase the understanding about their respective security concerns. And so on.

On the same day that the Central Asian countries made their announcement, our European allies--the Administration's foils before the 2003 invasion of Iraq--are still debating how to deal with Iran. Even though any Iranian nuclear weapon will have a far easier time reaching Berlin or Paris than New York or Washington, the Europeans don't see the threat quite the same way as the Bush Administration does:

Britain and France, which initiated the call for joint European action, back tough new multilateral sanctions outside the U.N. Security Council. But other countries, notably Italy and Austria, want significantly less serious steps. Germany fell somewhere in between, said European and U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate is not public.

The US government can't even get the Europeans to back any sanctions on Iran's meddling in Iraq:

But there are already cracks across the Atlantic. While the United States is considering a package of actions that will effectively punish Iran for its intervention in Iraq as well as for its suspected nuclear program, the Europeans do not want to "confuse" the two issues, said a well-placed European official familiar with the debate.

Bush administration officials, for example, want to designate Iran's elite Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism under a presidential executive order. But in European eyes, the Quds Force is linked mainly to arming, training and funding militant factions in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. "We want to keep our eyes on the nuclear file," said a second European official.

It's easy to understand the Europeans' position. While the sanctions might have merit, they also might bolster the US case for military action. In other words, they don't want 2007 to be a repeat of 2003.

Our wannabe Bismarcks should study the Iron Chancellor a bit more carefully. True, Bismarck did say, "All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence." He also said, "Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war." Another quotable quote has special relevance for the Bush Administration's problems rallying support: "When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice."

The power of indifference

This editorial in Le Figaro caught my eye. There are good reasons to consider giving Libya access to nuclear technology. Among other reasons...

Politically, nothing could be more damaging than the emergence of a nuclear rift between the North and South of the Mediterranean, between "trustworthy" countries and "dubious" countries, at the risk of nurturing the clash of civilizations, which is already doing sufficient damage to the world, as it is.

On the other hand...

Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear, rational arguments have their limits. In the days when friendship with Iraq was at its height, France supplied Saddam Husayn, vaunted then as a modern reformer, with a power plant whose purpose it is frightening to contemplate, if Israeli aviation had not destroyed it in 1981. More recently, the Islamic Republic of Iran proved to the world that a country that has signed the NPT, including the additional protocol, can suddenly exclude inspectors and conjure up the apocalyptic spectre of a military diversion of its programme, which would be technically an easy matter.

However, if the French, British, and Americans had not appeared to believe that the people living on the southern side of the Mediterranean could be trusted with nuclear technology, Libya would not have agreed to the current détente with its former enemies. Diplomacy needs more than sticks: many countries, such as the Japanese in WWII, are willing to sustain a disastrous war effort far past the point when victory was attainable. Other issues--national pride, political gambles that leaders make to stay in power, and the enemy's unwillingness to allow any face-saving exit--matter just as much as how little oil Imperial Japan had left, or how much economic and diplomatic punishment Libya was sustaining.

In other words, in the situation that Western diplomats faced with Libya, they had to appear as impartial or indifferent to Libya in the abstract as possible. The problem, they had to say convincingly, wasn't any special hostility that the Americans and Europeans had for the regime in Tripoli, or the people of Libya. Instead, the real problem was terrorist attacks and a secret nuclear weapons program. Libyans had made these mistakes, and now they had a chance to unmake them. (Qaddafi's own ridiculous ambitions to being a regional power had to exhaust themselves, too.)

At some point, the discussion was likely to reach the question, If you really trust us now, how about a civilian nuclear weapons program? It may be the ultimate test of whether Western leaders are truly willing to trust a non-Western government. The answer may not always be Yes, so the US government has to be ready to handle this extremely delicate question without appearing to say, "We'll always believe that you're less civilized than we are."

The US government has lost some of the perceived impartiality and indifference it needs to make deals like the one in Libya. Too many Middle Easterners conclude, from the Iraq invasion (and, to some extent, the embargo that preceded it), the unprecedented partiality to the Israeli government, and other recent developments, that American leaders are anything but indifferent to the Middle East. Indifference would be far preferable to, behind the enforced handshakes and rehearsed speeches about Islam as a "religion of love," a genuine animus to the people living south and east of the Mediterranean.

Rebuilding the perception of indifference to (if not sympathy, for) Middle Easterners will take time and effort. Meanwhile, it does damage American efforts at muting Iraq's civil war, handling leaders who (like Musharraf) need to prove their independence from Western powers, and other vexing challenges. Traversing the diplomatic razor's edge that Le Figaro described is hard enough already.

Terrorists may not want killer viruses, either

I fully agree with the Armchair Generalist: it's an unjustified leap of faith to assume that terrorist organizations will inevitably try to acquire biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons:

We know that people can buy lab equipment and set up small scale production capable of producing BW agents. And yet... no earth-shattering kaboom.

To avoid repeating myself, here's what I've already written on this subject. I'll add a small coda: in some cases, terrorist groups may want to create the impression that they're about to get some kind of unconventional weapon, even if they're really not doing that. The bluff is cheaper than the actual program, and in some contexts, just as effective.

On the other hand, the bluff can also backfire. Since terrorists have brains, they do think through the pros and cons of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, for real, or as a bluff. Terrorist groups have internal arguments about this topic, and official policy can swing one way or the other.

It's a mistake to assume that, just because a scary weapon exists, terrorists will pursue it with an ant-like intensity and mindlessness. The possibility exists, but the probability is lower than most people think.

Mahan redux, sort of

IN THE NEWS
Traditional naval strategy is a lot like traditional doctrine for ground warfare: the focus is on the equivalent enemy force. For navies, that means anti-ship capability, which in modern times has extended to anti-submarine capability. A tertiary concern, though not far behind the other two, is how to eliminate the threat from land-based aircraft.

Ever since Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote his classic treatise on naval strategy, naval professionals have framed their concern in Mahan-esque terms. In a nutshell, navies either sought to control the seas, permitting complete "freedom of action." Fleets could decide where to go and what to do—protect shipping lanes, support amphibious operations, strike at targets within an ever-increasing radius of attack.

Navies that couldn't win control of the seas weren't necessarily out of the game. They could still pursue a sea denial strategy, in which the enemy's navy never had complete freedom of action. Submarines, aircraft, and surface raiders could attack convoys. Ships moving to strike at ground targets might be vulnerable to attack. Amphibious units were at risk of being sunk before they landed. Sea denial might raise the cost of naval operations high enough where the stronger enemy might not succeed at every operation that it needed to ultimately win the war. In that case, sea denial might force the enemy to reconsider the war effort altogether.

While this Mahanesque worldview might make better sense of past conflicts, such as the WWI naval struggle between Great Britain (sea control) and Germany (sea denial), it seems to have little to do with the world today. Given the US Navy's overwhelming superiority in aircraft carriers, attack submarines, land-based air, anti-submarine assets (destroyers, aircraft, and other submarines), cruise missile-armed surface ships, and sea lift capability, it appears capable of going wherever it wants, and doing whatever it wants. Most adversaries, such as Iran during its brief effort to stop oil tankers from safely moving through the Persian Gulf in the 1980s, seem doomed from the start to lose what few naval and air forces they have, to pursue even the most humble sea denial strategies.

The most obvious exception is China, whose recent naval expansion could seriously complicate US efforts to defend Taiwan in a crisis. China's larger, more modern submarines and frigates certainly raise the risk that the US Navy might actually lose ships in defense of Taiwan—without even factoring the Chinese air force into the equation.

The Chinese sea denial threat is not the only one, however. A conflict with Russia is far less likely, so the concern has less to do with the capabilities of the Russian navy than the political status quo between Russia and the United States. While military planners have to take into account what might happen if international relations were to take drastic, unexpected turns, the Russian navy seems like a very distant threat right now.

There is a far more imminent threat to the US Navy, however, that just increased dramatically in the last few days. Even if the North Koreans fail to develop a short-range or medium-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, they could "deliver" a nuclear weapon in more mundane ways. A nuclear weapon hidden on a boat, or smuggled into South Korea by land, threatens not only targets on the ground, but targets at sea. A nuclear detonation close to an American carrier battle group might spell a catastrophic loss—exactly the kind of "sea denial" scenario that Mahan described.

How could the United States and its allies respond? The logic of this situation inevitably leads to a blockade of North Korean ports. Nothing could exit without being searched—or, perhaps, exit at all. Either way, the US Navy would station what it deems its most valuable assets, the carrier battle groups, far away from where North Korean shipping would be searched or sunk. The "littoral navy," therefore, would be the most important component of the blockade.

Even if North Korea were not thinking in these terms—and it would be amazing if they weren't—Iran certainly is. Faced with a similar risk of a nuke on a boat, the problem of blockading Iranian ports would be even more challenging. The Persian Gulf is more constrained, and more potential targets—oil tankers, other countries, American warships—would be a lot closer at hand. There are a lot more ships moving in and out of Gulf ports, and the sustaining the cooperation of every country along that narrow waterway would be much harder.

Certainly, there's a chance that neither the Iranian nor the North Korean regime would be crazy enough to detonate a nuclear weapon close enough to its own territory that it would suffer some of the damage inflicted. As generations of nuclear strategists can tell you, that's the essence of brinksmanship: convincing the other side that you're just crazy enough to use nuclear weapons, knowing the likely consequences to yourself. Kim Jong Il has successfully built that kind of erratic, dangerous persona. Here's where the DPRK's inability to create a large nuclear weapon isn't necessarily a problem. A smaller bomb would still give naval planners fits, while lowering the risk that North Korean population centers would suffer the shockwaves and radiation from the blast. In other words, a smaller nuclear bomb might make the "nuke on a boat" threat more credible, not less.

We've definitely entered a new era of international relations with the North Korean nuclear test. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, while frightening, raised the risk of war between those two countries reaching catastrophic proportions. The ripple effects of the North Korean test—for example, a potential nuclear arms race among North Korea, China, and Japan, with consequences for the nuclear calculations of India, Russia, and the United States—are more far-reaching. We're back to Mahan's problem of sea denial—but not with the tools Mahan had envisioned to solve it.

Déjà vu all over again

IN THE NEWS
The US government is arguing that the nuclear threat from a Middle Eastern country is greater than the the International Atomic Energy Agency would say. OK, the part of the US government in question is the House Intelligence Committee, not the White House, and the country is Iran, not Iraq.

The nuclear threat this time around is a lot more serious than it was with Iraq. However, the important question is, why is any part of the US government getting into another noisy, public argument with the IAEA? As Steven Taylor at Poliblogger said today:

While I am hardly going to say that UN is perfect, I will say this: despite all the criticism that was levelled at al Baradei and the UN WMD inspectors in the build-up to the Iraq invasion, we have to face facts, the UN guys were right about the Iraq’s WMD capabilities and the administration and their allies were wrong. Indeed, fantastically wrong.

The Iranian freeze

IN THE NEWS
One of the many sad things about the Iranian nuclear program is what it means for the Iranians themselves. Going nuclear helps a government stay in power, no matter how odious it may be. Political upheaval directed against a regime with its finger on the nuclear button is, needless to say, a scary situation that most interested parties would like to avoid. In other words, the internal opposition to the Iranian theocracy now faces a harder time getting support from abroad, on top of some hesitation among some of potential allies within Iran.

North Korea may return to talks

IN THE NEWS
North Korea is murmuring about returning to the six-country talks. After withdrawing from these negotiations, the Pyongyang regime announced that it had nuclear weapons (deliberately boxing itself into a less flexible position), gauged the result, observed the US shoot itself in the foot over lying to its allies, and decided that it's time to return to the negotiation table. Unless we're missing something, the North Koreans must feel they have a stronger hand today than when they withdrew.

Man, do I wish I could have eavesdropped on the backchannel talks that happened in the last several days. They must have been some of the weirdest communications in the history of modern diplomacy.

[Thanks to Warblogging for the link.]

A slight correction

IN THE NEWS
North Korea, as it turns out, did not give uranium hexaflouride directly to Libya. The Qadaffi regime informed the United States during the recent rapprochement efforts that Libya acquired this intermediate component of nuclear weapons production from Pakistan, who had acquired it from the North Koreans.

The Pakistan/North Korea relationship was already well-known. The Pakistan/Libya connection, on the other hand, is news--not only to you and me, Dear Reader, but to China, South Korea, and Japan. The Bush Administration had assured them that the North Koreans were to blame for directly supplying "Daffy Qadaffi" with dangerous materials--an alarming indication, perhaps, of just how dangerous, desperate, and unpredictable the Pyonyang regime had become. North Korea still looks scary in hindsight, but not quite as erratic.

In fact, some of North Korea's actions look quite sane, from a brinksmanship perspective. While their recent announcement of having some nuclear warheads already produced may sound ho-hum, it does have substantial diplomatic significance. If they had continued to withhold this announcement, they could have struck a deal with the United States, directly or through other channels, that would have cost them no prestige. Not having admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, there would have been less embarassment if they had given them up.

The North Koreans have heard a lot of threats from the White House since 2001, but they also know how much strain Iraq has put on our military capabilities elsewhere. Despite his odd interest in the correct socialist haircut, Kim Jong Il is not crazy to think that he can afford to increase the pressure on the United States by reducing his own options. Whatever cost there would be for a Libyan-like arrangement with North Korea, it got higher once the North Korean government said it had nuclear warheads that it would now have to throw away--in the glare of the world's spotlight, with intrusive weapons inspections and all sorts of other embarassments.

Condoleeza Rice may be better at repeating the Administration's talking points than Colin Powell ever was, but that's not the skill she'll need to repair the damage with China, South Korea, and Japan. Maybe, on the plane, she had time to consult a book of Chinese proverbs and found these words to live by: A clever person turns great troubles into  little ones, and little ones into none at all.