issue: Foreign Policy & Defense

Despots Mourn Chavez

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sean Penn lamented that he “lost a friend” when Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez died yesterday. Sean, you’re not alone: So did the world’s dictators.

Hugo Chávez championed Venezuela’s poor and America’s adversaries – an irresistible combination in the eyes of what’s left of the Cold War left. Chávez , in fact, seemed positively nostalgic for the old East-West conflict.

When democracy spread across Latin America and Cuba looked like a communist relic, Chávez  cast himself as Fidel Castro’s understudy and kept his creaking regime afloat with Venezuelan petrodollars. When most of the rest of the world had tossed socialism into history’s dustbin, Chávez proclaimed a “Bolivarian” socialism as he nationalized industries and expropriated assets held by foreign investors.

And it wasn’t just Castro; Chávez made a habit of personally befriending the world’s worst dictators, presumably because they were the enemy of his enemy – the United States. Or maybe he simply admired them for brooking no domestic opposition, while he had to put up with an independent media, elections and the other tedious trappings of democracy. Whatever the reason, it was incongruous to see this self-styled tribune of the people getting chummy with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and his “brother” Muammar Qaddafi.

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Don’t Let Hamas Win

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sensing a rising Islamic tide in the Middle East, Hamas has picked a fight with Israel it can’t win militarily, but could win politically.  That’s something Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should prevent as she works to make a fragile cease fire hold.

No one wants to see Israeli forces go back into Gaza. A lot of Palestinians will be killed, many of them civilians.  A ground incursion also would highlight the asymmetry of power between the two sides, allowing Hamas to win sympathy by playing the victim. That’s why Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is holding back, for now.

Nothing new here. Yasser Arafat and the PLO pioneered the cynical tactic of using terror attacks to provoke harsh Israeli reprisals, hoping that the resulting death and destruction among Palestinians would turn world opinion against the “occupation.”

What’s different now, of course, is the regional political landscape. Democratic elections have brought Islamic parties to power in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. Secular dictators like Hosni Mubarak held no brief for Hamas, but his successor, Mohammed Morsi can’t disavow a kind of kinship with Hamas, which considers itself a branch of his party, the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Slippery Mitt Evades KO

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall questions whether Romney’s rope-a-dope strategy on foreign policy may actually work despite Obama’s superior performance in the debate in Foreign Policy:

Mitt Romney is a candidate of protean principles. When his positions on issues become inconvenient, he simply throws them overboard, sometimes even denying he took them in the first place. So it was in Monday night’s foreign policy debate, when the ferocious Rottweiler of the previous two debates unexpectedly morphed into “Me-Too Mitt.”

It was a tactically shrewd performance that made a virtue of necessity. Romney clearly hasn’t mastered the complexities of defense and security policy, and at several points last night seemed uncomfortably out of his depth. Rather than mount a vigorous challenge to Barack Obama’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy, Romney dropped previous lines of attack and wound up agreeing with the president’s handling of conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and even Iran.

By stressing continuity rather than radical change in U.S. foreign policy, Romney sought to reassure voters that he is ready to take over as commander in chief. Although post-debate insta-polls showed that he “lost” the debate, he probably achieved this crucial goal. And the appearance of a kinder, gentler Romney blunted Obama’s aggressive attempts to portray him as a “reckless” throwback to the bellicose policies of George W. Bush.

Read the entire article at Foreign Policy.

Will Marshall on Romney’s Mistaken Foreign Policy Ideas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall discusses Obama’s foreign policy advantages in Politico’s Arena:

Twice Mitt Romney has tried to capitalize politically on the murder of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, and twice the issue has blown up in his face. First, as the tragedy was unfolding, he rushed out a statement falsely accusing the administration of apologizing for the video that sparked violent protests in Benghazi and elsewhere. And in the last debate, moderator Candy Crowley had to correct Romney’s erroneous claim that it took President Obama weeks to call the attack an act of terrorism.

These misfires show that Romney, though surefooted when it comes to critiquing the president’s economic record, has anything but a deft touch on defense and foreign policy. The president has a golden opportunity tonight to contrast his experience and grasp of global complexities with Romney’s vague and simplistic invocations of American strength and exceptional virtue.

Lacking a global outlook of his own, Romney probably will try again tonight to make the Libya episode a parable of weak presidential leadership.  In Romney’s retro world, it’s 1979 all over again, with Obama in the role of Jimmy Carter and Libya standing in for Iran. But even as he tries to channel Ronald Reagan, Romney often sounds more like George W. Bush, especially when he claims that bold assertions of American power and leadership will bring our enemies to heel and cause the rest of the world to fall in line. To which Obama has a compelling answer: Been there, done that.

Obama’s job tonight is to expose the unreality of Romney’s glib criticisms and force him to explain what he would actually do differently if he becomes Commander in Chief. With the spotlight momentarily off the economy, it’s the president’s turn to take the offensive.

Read it at Politico

Renewing America’s Fighting Faith

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI’s Will Marshall writes for Foreign Policy on why Barack Obama’s correction to the excesses of the George W. Bush years was necessary, and why a cold-blooded realism is not enough to safeguard America interests and promote its values.

One of the most striking aspects of the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign has been Barack Obama’s ability to neutralize the Republican Party’s traditional advantage on national security. Voters see Obama as a better commander in chief than Mitt Romney and have more confidence in his ability to handle foreign policy.

How much this will matter in an election dominated by economic anxiety remains to be seen. But closing the national security confidence gap that has dogged Democrats for nearly 50 years is no mean accomplishment — if it lasts.

Republicans, meanwhile, have splintered into rival camps. Centrist internationalists like Dick Lugar are out of favor, leaving realists, neocons, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-isolationists to battle it out for the party’s soul. Romney hasn’t even tried to weave a coherent story about America’s global role from such incongruous strands, confining himself instead to scattershot criticisms of Obama’s polices and hackneyed slogans about “American exceptionalism” and “peace through strength.”

Read the entire article.

Think tank seeks new federal office to counter extremist ideology

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI’s Will Marshall is quoted in Government Executive on why anti-Islamic extremism has no home port in the U.S., speaking on a panel of foreign policy specialists at the Hudson Institute:

Will Marshall, founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, speculated on why anti-Islamic extremism “has no home port in the U.S. government.” He said Americans are skeptical that Islamic extremism would catch on inside the United States and are uneasy attacking an ideology that has a religious provenance.

“There’s a consoling myth that it’s just a handful of fanatics, but it has spread to places like Sinai and Mali,” Marshall said. “We also may lack confidence in our own story” and hence fall back on “moral relativism” on such issues as the Palestinian-Israel conflict. He said the office would target moderate Arab populations to help send a message of economic opportunity and “rewrite the rules of war” so that U.S.-based Muslims would no longer conclude that jihad is somehow not as bad as terrorism.

Read the entire article here.

 

Mitt Romney’s Vapid Foreign Policy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI’s Will Marshall detailed Mitt Romney’s recent adventure in the world of foreign policy over at The American Interest.  Romney was able to stumble his way through a trip to Britain, Israel, and Poland all while offering very little in the form of substantive policies focusing more on criticisms of President Obama’s foreign policy.

Mitt Romney’s midsummer foray into foreign policy has left Democrats giddy with schadenfreude. More than his stumbling performance abroad, however, it’s the substance of Romney’s views that ought to really give voters pause.

Or, more precisely, lack of substance. With less than 100 days to go, Romney has yet to develop a coherent outlook on U.S. security and leadership in a networked world. What we get instead is GOP boilerplate about American greatness and exceptionalism, and a pastiche of spaghetti-against-the wall criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy.

Romney, of course, wants the election to center on the economy, and he’s offering himself, in effect, as a more experienced and capable CEO. His missteps over the past week, however, raise doubts about his ability to take over as Commander in Chief.

The sequence began with his first major foreign policy address, to the Veterans of Foreign Affairs. It was a pedestrian affair that left even conservative commentators underwhelmed, when they bothered to comment on it at all. Next, Romney embarked on his Grand Tour of three U.S. allies—Britain, Israel and Poland—supposedly dissed by Obama. The point of the exercise was to show that Romney knows how to treat America’s best friends.

Read the entire article HERE 

Photo Credit: Austen Hufford

Election Watch: Ad War Heats Up, Romney Goes Abroad

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The last week has continued the earlier pattern of daily fireworks in the presidential contest (excepting a brief pause in hostilities immediately after the Aurora massacre), but little if any significant movement in the polls. As anyone near a battleground state television can attest, the Obama campaign (and the Priorities USA super PAC) has continued harsh personal attacks on Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch rich man with no emotional connection with the middle class or interest in its aspirations, who is furthermore determined to cut taxes for people like him. The Romney campaign (which is now beginning to get advertising reinforcement from the very deep pockets of conservative super PACs) has responded harshly with a battery of ads and campaign speeches focusing on a clip from an Obama speech in Roanoke wherein he supposedly disrespected the personal contributions to the economy of entrepreneurs (in fact he was paraphrasing a well-known litany by Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren about the reliance of private businesses on public services and investments). It’s not entirely clear whether this intense barrage is intended simply to reinforce the general and long-standing Republican critique of Obama as someone who does not understand how the economy works and believes government is the source of all good things, or is more narrowly targeted at undermining Obama’s relatively strong standing with upscale, college-educated voters.

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Top 10 Mistakes Candidates Make on National Security

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Editor’s note: This item is cross-posted from Truman’s Doctrine Blog.

With the Fourth of July coming up there are a lot of politicians talking about national security. These are the top ten mistakes they make. Next week we will have the top ten ways to win on national security.

10. Holocaust comparison.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re Glenn Beck or a human rights advocate. As soon as you’ve made the Holocaust / Hitler / Nazi comparison, your audience has stopped listening.

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Should Germany focus less on austerity and more on reforms?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall discusses Germany’s role in solving the European crisis over at CNN:

“Despite all the attention lavished on the Greek election, the outcome barely registered in Europe’s financial markets. Everyone knows the eurozone’s fate won’t be decided by the shimmering Aegean Sea, but in drizzly Berlin.

Germany is the key, but it’s torn by conflicting impulses. As the main engine of European economic integration, Germany is determined to preserve the 17-nation eurozone. But as Europe’s lender of last resort, it’s loath to bail out countries that took advantage of the euro to borrow extravagantly and live beyond their means.

To avoid such “moral hazard,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel sternly insists that Greece and other debt-ridden nations, notably Spain and Italy, commit to stringent fiscal discipline in return for the loans they need to service their enormous debts and pay their bills. Greek voters were incensed by these Teutonic demands for spending cuts and tax hikes, but they narrowly chose to stick with the euro rather than risking a “Grexit” from the eurozone.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Photo Credit: European Council

The Forgotten Communitarian

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshal explains why Bill Clinton’s contributions to restoring the language of civic obligation are so frequently overlooked over at Democracy:

“In “Restoring the Language of Obligation,” [Issue #24] James Kloppenberg laments “the ignorance of most Americans about the centrality of the concept of obligation in American history.” Yet there’s a gaping hole in his own synopsis of that history—the 1990s, when civic themes re-entered the nation’s political discourse in a big way”

“Invocations of civic duty and the disinterested pursuit of the common good were touchstones of American politics from colonial days until around the 1970s, says Kloppenberg, when liberals “traded the language of duties for the language of rights.” He argues persuasively that the ensuing fixation with rights talk and identity politics sped the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, and, by eroding more expansive notions of social solidarity, abetted the rise of Ronald Reagan’s anti-government populism.”

“But there his recap ends, skipping the striking period of civic ferment that followed. In politics, for example, Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” consciously sought to reclaim the civic-republican tradition. Concepts like mutual obligation, community, and national service, and balancing citizens’ rights with their responsibilities, were central to the nation’s political conversation in the 1990s, and even migrated abroad via the “third way” dialogue between Clinton, Tony Blair, and other center-left political leaders.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Will Marshall on Syria

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall explains why the U.S. should stop temporizing on Syria at Real Clear World:

“The tenuous ceasefire in Syria is a relief, but it also carries the risk that Bashar al Assad will manipulate the UN-sponsored truce to extend his lease on power. Russia, China and Iran favor that outcome; America shouldn’t. ”

“Yet Washington seems mired in ambivalence. On one hand, the Obama administration has called on Assad to step down. On the other, it has ruled out U.S. intervention and backed Kofi Annan’s UN-Arab League plan, which does not envision Assad’s departure, calling instead for regime-led negotiations with the resistance.”

“While Assad’s forces have stopped firing, they haven’t pulled back from population centers, as the Annan plan also demands. Resistance groups are planning street protests to test Assad’s supposed conversion to talks and reconciliation.”

Read the entire article here

Yes, We Can Contain Iran

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In Foreign Policy, PPI President Will Marshall explains how President Obama is needlessly increasing the risks of a ruinous war by ruling out the possibility of deterring a nuclear Iran.

U.S. President Barack Obama, under pressure from Israel and American conservatives to take a harder line on Iran, keeps insisting that “all options are on the table.” That’s a diplomatic way of saying that the United States is willing to use force to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

To buttress this thinly veiled threat, however, Obama recently took one important option off the table: deterrence. In an interview with the Atlantic, he ruled out “containing” a nuclear Iran in the same way the United States has contained other unfriendly nuclear powers — by threatening the country with massive retaliation if it attacks us or our allies.

This is a significant — and needless — change in U.S. foreign policy. It raises the likelihood of war with Iran, despite Obama’s preference for a diplomatic solution. And launching air strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities would undercut America’s ability to play the long game in Iran by abetting a “Persian Spring” that could eventually topple the Islamic Republic.

Read the entire piece at Foreign Policy.

How Standing Up For Chinese Workers Helps America’s Economy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

China may look like an unstoppable economic juggernaut, but it is increasingly beset at home by worker protests and strikes. Last June, for example, security officials in Zengcheng, a manufacturing city in southern China, fired tear gas at hundreds of migrant workers who smashed windows and overturned police cars after hearing the rumor that authorities had pushed a pregnant migrant street vendor to the ground.

Spreading labor unrest in China has large economic as well as political implications for Sino-American relations. Put simply, stronger rights for Chinese workers is good for America’s bottom line. By explaining our economic interest in empowering China’s workers, U.S. leaders could galvanize broad public support behind a more insistent push for individual and civil liberties in China. Too often, however, they fail to make that connection. They may deplore the way China arbitrarily limits speech and imprisons lawyers,
human rights watchdogs, religious leaders, and worker advocates. But they rarely note that empowering China’s workers would likely lead to higher wages and benefits, and therefore a shrinking labor cost advantage over U.S. competitors.

In this paper, I explore the vital link between the rights of Chinese workers and the competitive health of the American economy. If a nation has lax labor laws, or has good ones but doesn’t enforce them, local employers can keep wages down and produce goods at much cheaper cost. Moreover, if workers are unable to strike or effectively petition their employers because the legal system doesn’t guarantee freedom of speech and association, then their country is essentially subsidizing its companies, giving them an unfair advantage in the global economy.

Indeed, inconsistent labor law enforcement, inattention to workplace safety, and violations of binding legal contracts (such as wage agreements) have enabled Chinese manufacturers to hold down the price of Chinese labor. The labor cost differential, of course, is the main reason Chinese goods are significantly cheaper, even after they have been shipped to the United States. Raising labor standards in China will inevitably lead to raising the price of Chinese-produced goods, making goods produced by U.S. workers more competitive. That’s why strong U.S. support for the rights of China’s workers should be an integral part of Washington’s strategy of constructive engagement with Beijing. Not only is it the right thing to do from a human rights standpoint, it is also clearly in America’s economic interests as we seek a more balanced commercial relationship
with China.

More specifically, let me offer seven recommendations for U.S. policymakers:

  1. Put human and worker rights at the center of U.S. diplomacy toward China.
  2. Raise public awareness of the link between workers’ rights in China, and economic benefits for Americans.
  3. Work closely with other liberal democracies to demand China’s adherence to its own labor laws and international standards.
  4. Expand bilateral working groups on labor rights, so that these issues come up routinely in Sino-American relations.
  5. Fund civil society groups that promote and defend workers’ rights.
  6. Use trade as leverage to achieve progress on workers’ rights.
  7. Ratify two key International Labour Organization protocols: the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention (1948), and the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention (1949). In advocating rights and liberties around the world, the U.S. must also lead by example.

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