Avuncular American

Pacific Rim Fireworks: The Kim & Sarah Shows

Definition of narcissistic personality disorder: “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

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I doubt that Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean leader, has much need for a public relations adviser, but his decision to launch a bunch of missiles on the eve of American Independence Day was surely a master move of attention grabbing.

Though it did confuse the message of the month, just when the world was getting used to the kindler, gentler image of a country that dismantled an entire English brewery to make "The Pride of Pyongyang," reputed to be a very decent beer.  Then there was the barbecue diplomacy between North Korea and the US via a New Jersey restaurateur.  All that sacrificed for the sake of some pyrotechnics.

But then we're used to the cognac-swilling dictator (Hennessey's best customer) - who provides junior high school-aged girls to his high-level visitors - acting a bit outrageously.  "He believes his own propaganda," said former CIA psychologist Dr. Jerold Post, in a 2003 CNN interview.  Scary stuff indeed.

Not nearly as scary, perhaps, as the portrait of Sarah Palin provided by Todd Purdum in the current Vanity Fair, many of whose Alaskan interviewees cited the above-mentioned "narcissistic personality disorder" in connection with their soon-to-be-former governor.  Purdum's article provides excellent background reading for anyone still harboring any illusions about Gov. Palin being the incarnation of the wholesome home town girl.

Yesterday Palin launched her own pre-Fourth fireworks: a rambling "Hi Alaska" paean to herself and her accomplishments delivered in high school diction, which was actually a "Bye, Alaska" to announce her resignation.  She, who might want to become the first woman President of the United States, assured her listeners that "America is now, more than ever, looking North to the Future."  Presumably when they look North they'll see Sarah Palin, and yearn for the times when we last had a Republican President who had trouble with coherent speech.

How appropriate, in her July 4th double bill with Kim Jong-Il, that she closed her farewell address with a quote from General Douglas MacArthur, the "American Caesar" who suffered from another type of narcissistic personality disorder: hubris.  Palin's MacArthur inspiration: "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."  In fact, MacArthur's headstrong disregard for his civilian superiors (i.e., President Truman) made a Korean War turn into a war with China.  He was finally dismissed for near insubordination.

MacArthur's replacement in Korea, General Mathew Ridgeway's words about his predecessor...

...the hunger for praise that led him on some occasions to claim or accept credit for deeds he had not performed, or to disclaim responsibility for mistakes that were clearly his own; the love of the limelight that continually prompted him to pose before the public... the headstrong quality...that sometimes led him to persist in a cause in defiance of all logic; [and] a faith in his own judgment that created an aura of infallibility...

... could be applied to Ms. Palin as she begins to stake out ground deserted by more grown up and stable Republicans.

But unlike old soldier MacArthur, don't expect Sarah Palin to "fade away."

(Fireworks photo from OSHA)

Avast, Somali Pirates: Payouts, Prosecution and Projectiles

As soon as you start using the term pirate, unfortunately cute or nostalgic images of Johnny Depp and Long John Silver come to mind - "Avast, me hearties!" ("avast" means to stop or cease) and other lusty lingo.  All that is best relegated to the world of children's stories (image, Playwood Toys).  Today's real-world piracy is, as a Somali pirate phoning the wife of a European hostage said, all about "money, money."

We returned to Brussels over the weekend, as news came out about the liberation of the Belgian ship Pompei, which had been captured in April by Somali pirates operating as far away as the Indian Ocean waters of the Seychelles.  No secret was made of the fact that a ransom had been paid, though the exact amount was not revealed.  Belgian police and military personnel set forth to join up with the liberated crew, part of an investigation in pursuit of the pirates, who violated a 1928 Belgian law which provides for international jurisdiction by Belgian courts in matters of piracy committed against nationals.

Somali pirates may not exactly be quaking in their skiffs at the prospect of Belgian prosecutors dragging them off to Brussels, but Belgium's legal approach is at least novel.  The payment, by the shipping company and/or its insurers, was made under duress, and was motivated as much by wanting to avoid physical harm to the crew as to protect its investment in this very specialized "side stone dumping vessel" (used in port dredging operations).  And how many Somali pirates have simply been released after capture by international forces?  At least the Belgians are setting the stage for prosecution.

Payouts to pirates have been made from time immemorial (see Richard Zacks' The Pirate Coast for an account of early U.S. travails with the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, which included ransoming of hostages), and given NATO and EU naval forces' inability to prevent all such incidents, will likely continue when Somalis successfully pick off unescorted vessels.  La Libre Belgique tells us that recently the pirates have even taken to using Somali refugees as human shields when launching their assaults.

Naval patrols, ransom for hostages and vessels, prosecution in the (unlikely) event that names, fingerprints, and perps are matched up ... all these responses are in the panoply of the world's reactions to this scourge of international shipping (see the ICC's Live Piracy Map for a look at how the Horn of Africa is piracy ground zero).  But how about the "kinetic" response?  As Zacks' quotation of an old Barbary pirate maxim - "Whoever acts like a sheep, the wolf will eat" - a more muscular response - "Blow them out of the water!" - should be an important part of the international community's toolkit.

Classic criminals after "money, money," rather than Johann Hari's description in The Independent of the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia," are nonetheless an outgrowth of the anarchic conditions that have prevailed in Somalia for the better part of two decades.  As Alain Lallemand in Brussels' Le Soir reminds us, it is in the West's interest to prevent Somalia from sinking under the weight of its multiple dysfunctionalities.

Taking the threats from Somalia seriously and using the impressive firepower on board all those naval vessels (Belgium, by the way, has offered to station armed military on board commercial vessels) has to be part of a wider strategy to encourage Somalia to rejoin the community of nations.  And while the West is righteously indignant over piracy's threat to international trade, it must ensure that its own commercial vessels are not using the free-for-all in Somali waters to dump hazardous waste and rape the country's fisheries, as Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, UN envoy Somalia, alleged last year.

No need to give the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia" any patriotic pretexts for its piracy.

Mountaintop Maginot Line - Where It Worked

The past week or so we've been doing some serious hiking in the French Alps, just west of the Italian border and about three hours' driving on twisty roads from Grenoble.  We are in the mountain valley of the Ubaye River - strategic for centuries before the European Union and NATO made war between allies like France, Italy, and Germany unthinkable.

In a museum in our little village, there's a piece of elephant tusk - a reminder that Hannibal's army approached Rome from the unexpected Alpine side.  On the mountaintops overlooking this valley and many others like it, French military engineers working for 17th/18th century Vauban and 20th century Maginot built fortresses that defy the imagination.  "La Route Napoleon" winds through passes and valleys on its way to Italy.

The Maginot Line got its bad reputation because of its northern portion, which guarded the frontier with Germany.  Anyone with a passing knowledge of World War II history knows that the piece that was missing - the Ardennes forest between Belgium, Luxembourg, and France - was the very place that the German blitzkrieg was successful.  The Maginot fortresses with their hardened artillery emplacements and underground railroads were magnificently useless, bypassed by German tanks roaring through the "impenetrable" forest.

Except for here in the French Alps, where the Maginot Line did its job.  In June 1940, Mussolini's troops hopped on Hitler's bandwagon and attacked an overstretched France.  Though outnumbered, the French forts held their ground, but the war was already a lost cause in the north.  After four long years of occupation by Germans and Italians, French and American troops retook the historic fortifications in the cold winter of 1944-45.  Some of the German-held forts only capitulated in the last weeks of the war.

So, back to our June 2009 military tourism.  Imagine our surprise when hiking on a mountain trail (photo top left; altitude approximately 6,000 feet) and seeing a machine gun nest inside a six inch thick steel carapace poking out of its reinforced concrete bunker.  The woods around the lookout are ringed with barbed wire, with trees bulging around their steel embrace for upwards of 75 years (Maginot built his line in the 1930s).  As isolated as this outpost was, it was equipped with an infrared sensor that detected Italian troop movements.

Further back in time, but updated as military technology became ever more sophisticated and lethal, Fort Tournoux (photo, above right) is a remarkable example of "génie militaire," built layer-cake on 2,000 vertical feet of strategic hillside.  Thanks to the collective of local municipalities and an association dedicated to preserving this amazing collection of fortresses, guides take visitors up a hair-raising mule trail to visit "Fort Moyen," the lowest of three Tournoux forts which dominate the confluence of the Ubaye and the Ubayette Rivers.  Though it was built starting 1852, Fort Tournoux's guns only had their baptism of fire in June 1940, when they supported the Maginot forts further up the Ubayette to stop the Italian advance.  The fort was in service in one way or another until the late 1980s.

Up the valley, a testament to an earlier age, the Berwick Redoubt (photo, left) built in the Vauban tradition in the 18th century.  Though its stone construction has withstood the test of time better than its wooden North American counterparts, it is redolent of the frontier forts of the French and Indian War of the same period.

France's mountain military tradition continues, though during our stay a contingent based in another historic fortress lowered its flags for the last time.  A local woman remarked on the imminent closure of another Alpine unit in the valley, at a time when some of Europe's highest mountain passes offer exceptional training opportunities for France's expeditionary missions.  But base closures are never a simple matter for the economies of the communities concerned, and President Sarkozy did promise a major defense realignment last year.  "The cannon recoils; the artilleryman never," the proud insignia etched (click on photo, right) on the high altitude barracks on silent Fort Tournoux.  Ah, but the artilleryman and the chasseur alpin must bow to the new defense realities and the priorities of their civilian masters.

Europe's internal borders are disappearing, and the "chasseurs alpins" are more likely to see action in Afghanistan's rugged mountains than in these parts.  The Schengen Treaty has led to the dismantling of border posts, and EU internal cross-border threats are better handled by customs & immigration "flying patrols" than by the mountaintop Maginot Line.

Settlements, Statehood, Shalom: Israel & Palestine

The clichéd phrase "decision time" comes to mind more than ever when it comes to that other cliché, the Middle East Peace Process.  Ever since 1948, the Middle East War Process has necessitated its peace-making counterpart.  American Presidents from Truman to Obama have had to deal with Arab-Israeli wars or endemic violence.  Some take the job more seriously than others.  President Obama appears to have put it high on the list of his foreign policy priorities.

Yesterday I took part in a discussion sponsored by GRIP (Groupe de Recherche et d'Information sur la Paix et la Sécurité, a Brussels think tank on the moderate left), inspired by the publication of their new book, "Who Arms Israel and Hamas?" (image, left).  Answer: the US arms Israel, of course, but certain EU countries (notably France) remain important suppliers.  As to "who arms Hamas?" the book makes a weak stab (one slim chapter) at describing the homemade nature of their armaments, but it is clear that the authors have paid much more attention to documenting Israel's overwhelming arsenal.  More on this later.

My part of the discussion was a look at the possibilities for change in US Mideast policy under President Obama (my remarks, in French, are here).  Basically I only had to point to the clear engagement of the President from Day One: his first phone call to a foreign leader was to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas; his early appointment of world-class negotiator George Mitchell to restart stalled talks; and his "tough love" talk with Benyamin Netanyahu on Israeli settlements, reinforced with gusto by Secretary of State Clinton two days ago.  As the discussion was taking place yesterday in Brussels, further proof of intensified engagement was going on in Washington, with the visit of Mahmoud Abbas to the White House.

Compare this to the "engagement" of George W. Bush in the Middle East (see Iraq).   As far as the MEPP was concerned, it was a matter of going through the motions.  A lackadaisical eight years, where Bush and Condoleezza Rice temporized on ceasefire calls ("premature") during Israel's 2006 attack on Lebanon, and where Bush ended his Presidency by washing his hands, Pilate-like, while Israel pounded densely-populated Gaza prior to Inauguration Day 2009.

Okay, but now we have a new, engaged President at the helm.  He's made his decision.  But it's now decision time for Israelis.  And also for Palestinians.

Israel must decide whether peace with the Palestinians, and the chance for a long term relationship with all its neighbors, is more important than settlements on cheap (because taken by force) land that rightfully belongs to a future state of Palestine.

Palestinians must decide if having a state of their own in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem is more important than perpetual pining for Haifa and Jaffa, which are Israeli now and will remain so.  And the PA must come to terms with the winners of the 2006 elections - Hamas.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which came about after much investment of time and effort by another American President, Jimmy Carter, and the Camp David Accords.  One of the confidence-building measures, assuring Israelis and Egyptians that there would be no more surprise attacks across their borders, was the creation of the MFO - Multinational Force & Observers - which still carry out their peace enforcement role.  The precedent is crucial, and the mechanisms are there, to be applied at the appropriate time along the Green Line.

In the negotiations that the Obama Administration will broker, this kind of security-conscious confidence-building will be absolutely essential.  It matters, of course, that Israel has a preponderance of weaponry, as the GRIP publication amply documents.  But armament hasn't procured Israel either peace or real security, and the continued occupation/siege of Palestinians makes Israel the equivalent of a garrison state.

It matters too that Israel feels threatened by the Hamas rockets, whether homemade or not.  In that sense, comparisons between sophisticated Israeli arsenals and subterranean Hamas caches are of limited utility.  To cede land, Israel must feel secure.  And if occupation of a hostile population and having the Middle East's most powerful military do not procure that security, then there is an opening for the concerted, rejuvenated MEPP that appears to be in the offing.

But Israelis and Palestinians have to want a peace/statehood settlement as least as much as does President Obama.  If they don't, then it will be more "process" than "peace."

Swords Into Screwdrivers: Surviving War's Aftermath

Well, actually it's bayonets into screwdrivers, gardening tools - anything but their original intended use.  And German helmets, thousands of them, turned into buckets.  Our Memorial Day weekend tour of World War I battlefields in northern France wasn't just a look at the order of battle, but the disorder after battles.

At the Chemin des Dames, which is best known in France for the senseless offensives triggering the 1917 Mutiny (see Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory), the Caverne du Dragon museum has a great temporary exhibit (photo at left) running through December 15, 2009.  "Après la guerre, Aisne 1919," the exhibit shows how this department was 90% destroyed by four long years of war, and only in the early 70s did it again reach its pre-WW I population.

If the housing in northern France has a certain drab uniformity to it - the most solid are pleasant red brick buildings, the most rickety might have questionable asbestos siding - it's in part because they had to rebuild much of it from scratch starting in 1919.  Some people were still living in "temporary" dwellings until after World War II.

To the west of the Aisne is the department of the Somme, best known to the descendants of the British soldiers who died there in there hundreds of thousands.  History-minded tourists making their way by car or by train between Paris, Brussels, or London would do well to stop in the town of Peronne, where probably the definitive museum of World War One - l'Historial de la Grande Guerre - is located.

L'Historial has a permanent collection in ideally-presented conditions - spacious, well-lit, and explained in French, German, and English.  They also have temporary exhibits, and the current one, with dozens of "cartoon" drawings by French artist Jacques Tardi (poster lower right), is crackerjack.  It runs through August 23, 2009.

Taking his inspiration from stories told and retold by his grandparents, Tardi's drawings are an antidote to the kind of generic war commemoration that approaches war glorification, if provided without context.  Now, I'm the first to line up to present a wreath on Memorial Day or Veterans Day, but Tardi reminds us that the soldiers in the mud see no glory in war, and would rather that it all just end right now rather than hope for posthumous honors.

Tardi's modern drawings are well matched by those of German WW I veteran Otto Dix, whose famous sketches of ghostly gas-masked soldiers and rotting corpses capture the horror that was the Western Front in the First World War.

Nope, no glory for these soldiers, who are almost all gone now.

And, in places like the Aisne and the Somme, it will take another 700 years to unearth the unexploded ordnance from the butchery.

Now, that's collateral damage for you.

Maniacal Missionaries, Myanmar to Mideast

Those crazy American citizens who stir up trouble overseas!  The "Swimmer," aka John Yettaw, who got Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi into hot water with the country's dictators, apparently just wanted to give the (Buddhist) woman a (Christian) Bible.  No wonder the US State Department publicly expressed its outrage over the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, while quietly sending consular officials to meet with the "missionary" in jail.

Embassies have to do that, even though the Amcit has single-handedly given the Burmese junta just what it needed to set back the cause of democracy in Myanmar (Burma) another few years.  In some countries (think Mexico), the "arrest/detention of American citizens" requires a considerable investment of Embassy time.  (Image: the US Consular service flag, State Department).

I remember being contacted by Egyptian security officials, who had arrested an American citizen on the steps of Alexandria University.  Actually, the arrest was a way of saving him from physical harm, as he was intent on distributing Bibles to the students.  Even though Egypt has a sizable Christian minority, they know better than to proselytize in the Muslim-majority country.

But in addition to these unofficial freelancers, the US has something far more dangerous: a cadre of people in the Pentagon and in the US military bent on spreading their Christian beliefs, at the point of a gun.  In the Middle Ages, they called that the Crusades.  That is the last thing that the US needs with thousands of troops surrounded by millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, religion is exactly what the region does not need more of.

Today Frank Rich of the New York Times gave readers a tip on an outrageous example of religious infiltration into the Rumsfeld Defense Department: a series of Powerpoint slides put up by GQ Magazine - cover sheets to the Secdef's daily Worldwide Intelligence Update for the President.  "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith," intones Isaiah 26:2, superimposed on a pic of US tanks kicking up the Baghdad dust.

Think that's just some Powerpoint Ranger's innocent fiddling with pixels?  Then read Jeff Sharlet's chilling article in the May Harper's, subtitled "The Crusade For a Christian Military."  I refrain from writing the title, as I don't want search engines to pick out what incendiary stuff "the Faith Element" (a group of Special Forces in Iraq who thought the locals were ready for some Old Time Religion) liked to scrawl on their tanks.

Those consular officers in Burma might get the Swimming American out of jail and on a plane back home.  But it's going to take a huge amount of diplomacy (and a strict secular line from our new administration to its armed forces) to undo the damage caused by the zealots of the previous lot.

Religion - keep it at home, and don't mix it up with defense or diplomacy.

Obama and the Power of Peace

Close to fifty percent of my posts have the category tag "diplomacy," this one included.  Having spent most of my adult life practicing that art, my blogging is a natural outgrowth of my previous calling.  Note my words: "art," "calling."  I might just have easily used "vocation," but my diplomacy was largely secular.  I'll leave the messianic part where it belongs, in the rubbish heap of the Bush era, where War was his middle name (or was it Waterboard?).

Note the symbolism in the Great Seal of the United States: "the olive branch and the arrows 'denote the power of peace & war',” according to the State Department (the keeper of the official US symbol; 18th century image at left from the Library of Congress).

The power of peace...

Today's Roger Cohen piece in the New York Times, "The Mellow Doctrine," nicely sums up where President Obama, in his 100+ day march through foreign capitals, has brought the United States in its relations with the rest of the world:

Call it the mellow doctrine. Neither idealistic nor classic realpolitik, it involves finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgment of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.

There he is again, our Pragmatic President, confusing the opposition by using the non-kinetic weapons of candor and "careful listening."  This is exactly what we need, as both were lacking in a foreign policy that cost the United States much more - in moral terms - than simply the trillions devoted to the Iraq war-of-choice.  It's nice that students - from 4th graders in Washington to Stanford University - remember that, and are putting the torture-enablers on the spot.

Obama can continue to gain much by appearing to "give" in on previously cherished positions (and possessions).  As Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations suggested in yesterday's Washington Post, "Don't Just Close Gitmo. Give It Back."  She reminds us that the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay started out over a century ago as a coaling station, that 19th century military "must" that was a corollary of gunboat diplomacy.

We've given up the battleships, but kept the coaling station.  Just like the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line are now just tourist attractions across the internal EU non-border, sometimes ratcheting down the military must-haves is a positive move for national security.

In what may become the toughest foreign policy challenge of his presidency - safely normalizing relations with Iran, a country whose Islamist government has been on a 30 year collision course with the United States - Barack Obama could do worse than some "careful listening" to Alistair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, profiled over the weekend by Robert F. Worth of the New York Times.  Crooke, a former British intelligence officer, is spending his post-spying career building bridges with political Islam (another one of my subject tags).  Crooke knows how difficult this is:

“George Mitchell once said to me, ‘you don’t even have a political process until you accept that the other side has a legitimate point of view,’ ” Mr. Crooke said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and relating it to the many obstacles between the United States and Iran.

“Does America have the will and the patience for that?” he said. “I’m not sure we’re there yet.”

Diplomacy is all about will and patience.  We are certainly not "there yet," but notice where Obama Middle East envoy George Mitchell has been sent?  The man whose "Mitchell Method" brand of quiet diplomacy brought peace to a centuries-old conflict is now applying his skills to a confrontation that is "merely" decades-old.  Maybe the Obama Method will become known, in Roger Cohen's phrase, as "no-drama diplomacy."

NATO - Still the Best Vehicle for Engaging With Europe?

Note: This article - drafted before the recent Summit - appears in the current issue of the Foreign Service Journal - minus my interrogatory punctuation in the title.  As the article is lengthy, I've made this an "extended entry," so be sure to click below to read through to the end. Image courtesy NATO.

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Informed Americans have never doubted that NATO has always been devoted to the defense of Europe.  The “North Atlantic” in the treaty organization’s name refers to the indispensable presence in the Alliance of the U.S. (and Canada), and the extension into the Cold War era of the trans-Atlantic lifelines thrown to Europe during both World Wars.

Yet among European publics in the post-Cold War present, NATO appears to be mostly about the United States and its continued influence in Europe.  Though it is an alliance based on mutual defense, with decisions reached by consensus of the biggest and the smallest member-states, NATO still translates as “American” in most European minds.  This perception has its ramifications for European efforts to find the proper alignment between their defense posture as NATO members and their plans for a defense role for the European Union.

The number of European uniforms visible at NATO’s sole headquarters in North America, Allied Command Transformation (formerly SACLANT) in Norfolk, was always minimal compared to the thousands of US and Canadian troops stationed in Europe.  During the Cold War, of course, it was Europe that needed boots-on-the-ground protection against the Soviet Union.  Now, despite NATO’s wider horizon, Europe remains the Alliance’s geopolitical epicenter.

Europe’s attitude towards NATO is schizophrenic.  On one hand, the Alliance provides strategic protection for European member-states and lessens their need to spend money on defense.  The flip side is having to deal with American activism, whether nudging NATO’s borders ever closer to Russia’s sensitive frontiers, or taking NATO “out of area,” all the way to Afghanistan.  But, as David Calleo observed in the December 2008 Foreign Service Journal (“NATO’s Future: Taking a Fresh Approach”), the “toolbox” strategy of using NATO as an intervention force risks transforming “a defensive European alliance into an instrument for American intrusions around the world.”

Since the end of the Cold War some two decades ago, almost every NATO summit has been an excuse to rehash op-eds proclaiming “The End of NATO.”  The underlying disagreements usually pit the United States against the Europeans, but are almost always patched up to allow the alliance to carry on.

This is not to minimize what can be existential (in terms of NATO as an organization) questions.  Does the North Atlantic-European quadrant of the globe still require a standing alliance in the face of a diminished threat from the East?  As NATO expands to almost double the number of member states it had during the Cold War, can its decision-making apparatus withstand the increasing difficulty of reaching consensus?  And – for both Europeans and Americans – does an alliance dedicated solely to defense capture the growing complexity of relations between the world’s largest trading partners and densest concentration of democracies?

Membership Means Something

After the Second World War, with the Cold War blasting its Siberian air on a ravaged Western Europe, the wartorn population greeted the creation of NATO in 1949 with relief.  The postwar path of multilateral defense went in hand with cooperation in the economic sphere: the Marshall Plan and its successor, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Coal and Steel Community, the almost-forgotten precursor to today’s European Union.  There was strength in numbers.

In some sense, NATO is a victim of this success.  European member-states – which also tend to belong to the E.U. – no longer see NATO as their primary institution of reference.  Even in the collective security sphere, NATO’s monopoly is over.  The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has responsibilities for early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, as well as a membership that truly extends from “Vancouver to Vladivostok.”

But the OSCE – “the largest regional security organization in the world” – isn’t a NATO competitor.  With its 56-member state Council, including countries as different as Belarus and Belgium, OSCE is a convenient forum but not a defense alliance.  NATO, with its potential membership list of 50 (the “Euro Atlantic Partnership Council,” which combines NATO’s 26 members with its 24 partner countries, has been a way-station to membership), should be wary of going down a similar “talking shop” route.

NATO membership means something, as last summer’s South Ossetia conflict powerfully reminded the world.  In discussions throughout 2008 over Georgian accession hopes, both before and after Russia moved troops in August, NATO countries emphasized the Article V mutual defense clause.  Peter Savodnik, writing in the January 2009 Harper’s (“Georgian Roulette”), posited the dilemma: “The question is whether NATO believes Georgia ... is worth defending.”  He cites Charles Elbinger of the Brookings Institution: “Let’s assume that they had been admitted to NATO.  Do we really believe that NATO would have come to their defense?  I personally do not believe there’s any stomach for a military confrontation with Russia.”  Savodnik believes that should NATO welcome Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia, the Alliance “may not survive a second attack.”

What Europeans Want

In the hierarchy of Europe’s multilateral organizations, neither NATO, OSCE nor OECD attracts the most attention and funding.  The European Union does.  And the E.U. has its own alphabet soup of security-related processes (most can’t be called institutions yet).  Foremost among them are the Common Foreign and Security Policy, which is to dovetail with the European Security and Defense Identity within NATO.

How?  That’s what is all rather confusing, especially to Europeans-on-the-street.  Wags point out that there is no common policy, nor individuals to lead it as long as the Lisbon Treaty remains unratified.  Nor is there an identity for Europeans to assume.  Even so, CFSP reflects a longstanding desire in European countries to have a foreign policy and a military force independent of – but not opposed to – NATO.

NATO Shadow Summit: Moral, Muscular, Multilateral

“NATO is watching us watching them.”

Such was the sentiment - confirmed by the impressive NATO presence, including several Assistant Secretary General (ASG)-level officials - at the end of this week’s two-day “NATO Shadow Summit.” The event, the first of the name, inspired in part by the new organization “NATO Watch” (along with principal partners ISIS-Europe, BASIC, and the Bertelsmann Stiftung), was a perfectly-timed prelude to the real thing about to unfold in Strasbourg.

Officially subtitled “Options for NATO: Pressing the Reset Button on the Strategic Concept,” the conference attracted a wide variety of observers and actors in the security community, garnering the wisdom of an impressive array of speakers, including NATO Policy Planning Director (and better known as former Spokesman of the Alliance) Jamie Shea. But there were contrarians galore, and the list of “what NATO can’t do” (or perhaps “shouldn’t try to do”) was long.

The words Strategic Concept may sound wonky, but need not. Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, put the first strategic concept this way: “Keep the Americans in (Europe), the Soviets out, and the Germans down.” Mind you, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the dawn of the Cold War, things could be as simple as that. If only the world were still as simple.

If there was a single unifying notion to the “Shadow Summit,” it was that NATO had somehow gone astray, that amidst the hoopla over 60th birthday parties, there is a crying need to involve citizens (or at least civil society, represented in part by the self-selected organizations present) in determining what NATO should stand for.

This elaboration of a new direction has taken the form of a “Citizens Declaration on Alliance Security,” which was presented in draft form at the Shadow Summit and will undergo further iterations based on input from participants. It would take NATO in a general moral direction (R2P, “Responsibility to Protect” civilians in conflict zones, best explained here by one of its prime proponents, the International Crisis Group). Muscular, in that NATO’s quasi-monopoly in the world’s political-military alliance game should mean something. And multilateral, well, because after George W. Bush gave unilateral and “coalition of the willing” such bad names, collective security is back in play.

“Tough love” for NATO was the reigning mindset. This was not the “NATO Game Over” collection of pacifists of a few weeks ago, nor the inevitable civil disobedience “Block NATO” movement converging on Strasbourg. Far from it. There were NGO veterans of Afghanistan, who may be against war and who may not appreciate Taliban targeting of soldiers and aid workers alike, but who recognize that organized, civilized peace enforcement is often a necessity.

The conference was rich in content, and this post only gives you a taste. Its organizers promise an annual event; indeed one slide imagined “NATO At Seventy” ten years hence. Still in crisis, still posing existential questions. Now, at least, there is the beginning of a citizens’ forum to help the summiteers along.

ISIS-Europe promises a full report in due course.

(This post first appeared in Euractiv/Blogactiv "Errant European")

Military Industrial Complex, Bollywood Bunduk Wallah

Bunduk or bunduq: From the Persian and Arabic, used in the Raj and throughout the British Army for rifle, as in "Pick up your bunduk, you slovenly soldier!"

Wallah:  Suffix -wallah indicates a person performing an activity, like the tea-serving chai-wallah in Slumdog Millionaire who strikes it rich

Image: Sikh Cyber Museum

A British friend of mine, when he worked at the Ministry of Defence, was assigned to Arms Merchant duties in the Far East for a few years.  He self-deprecatingly referred to his new duties as "bunduk-wallah."

And he probably wasn't called an "arms merchant" either, that epithet being reserved for dark figures like Viktor Bout, the legendary Russian arms smuggler, or the fictional "Yuri Orlov" played by Nicolas Cage in Lord of War.

In official arms-merchant circles, the terminology is so mundane as to put you to sleep: the Pentagon speaks of "acquisition" when it puts in orders for hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of weapons systems.  Its bunduk-wallahs in turn sell American arms overseas, doing their genteel work from the comfort of American Embassies.  Their offices are often labeled "Office Of Military Cooperation (OMC)," which I suppose it is (cooperation, that is) when the weapons sold stay in the hands of properly-constituted militaries.

But arms, like cash, are fungible.  That why "SALW" (Small Arms and Light Weapons) proliferation is such a problem in places from Monrovia to Mexico.  In Africa, leaders used to plead with post-Iraq invasion American envoys to pay attention to "their weapons of mass destruction problem" - small arms, from Kalashnikovs to RPGs, a contributor and enabler of continental-scale instability and mass murder.  My former Pentagon employer, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, even organized seminars to analyze the problem.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to her credit, has recognized that the US often is the problem, at least in the case of arms-for-drug-cartels.  The Obama Administration will "try to get more tools to go after the gun dealers" in the United States, she told Mexican leaders.  Proof of the pudding: Obama is appointing arms critic Ashton Carter to head the Pentagon's arms acquisition program.  Is it becoming difficult to be an arms dealer?

A glance at the 5-year trend of the DFI Amex Defense Index (from the WSJ's MarketWatch site) shows that the arms trade ain't what it used to be.  It used to look like this - ever upward.  So bunduk-wallahs have to be more imaginative, to tailor their product, but more importantly their marketing pitch, to potential buyers.
No more generic one-size-fits-all worldwide PR campaign, but spots tailored to the tastes (or lack thereof) of the arms-buying public.  "Public" may be out of place in this context - these deals are done behind closed doors.

So we have several people to thank for bringing the following gem of missile-marketing to our attention: my old friend (and reader) Dick, for sending me the link; law professor Chris Borgen of St. John's University and his excellent Opinio Juris website; and finally Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. for producing this masterpiece:

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make, other than showing the lengths arms marketers will go to flaunt their midriff... product.  As Chris Borgen says, "Who am I fooling? I don’t have a substantive point here. Just check out the video."  Bet you can't get that refrain out of your brain:

"I need to feel safe and sheltered..."

"I promise to defend you..."

"Dinga Dinga Dee"