CIAO DATE: 03/2011
Volume: 34, Issue: 1
Winter 2011
Coping with a Conflicted China (PDF)
David Shambaugh
2009-2010 will be remembered as the years in which China became difficult for the world to deal with, as Beijing exhibited increasingly tough and truculent behavior toward many of its neighbors in Asia, as well as the United States and the European Union. Even its ties in Africa and Latin America became somewhat strained, adding to its declining global image since 2007. Beijing’s disturbing behavior has many observers wondering how long its new toughness will last. Is it a temporary or secular trend? If it is a longer-term and qualitative shift toward greater assertiveness and arrogance, how should other nations respond? What the world is witnessing in China’s new posture is in part the product of an ongoing intensive internal debate, and represents a current consensus among the more conservative and nationalist elements to toughen its policies and selectively throw China’s weight around. Although there seems to be domestic agreement at present, China remains a deeply conflicted rising power with a series of competing international identities. Many new voices and actors are now part of an unprecedentedly complex foreign-policymaking process. Consequently, China’s foreign policy often exhibits diverse and contradictory emphases. Understanding these competing identities is crucial to anticipating how Beijing’s increasingly contradictory and multidimensional behavior will play out on the world stage. Each orientation carries different policy implications for the United States and other nations.
The Emergent Security Threats Reshaping China's Rise (PDF)
Ely Ratner
A steady stream of research and analysis over the last two decades has flowed from the near consensus in the U.S. foreign policy community that, in the words of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, ‘‘few countries are poised to have more impact on the world over the next 15-20 years than China.’’ Yet many of these efforts to foretell China’s future behavior have paid disproportionate attention to divining Beijing’s ‘‘strategic intentions.’’ This approach offers only limited insight into the factors that will ultimately determine how China pursues its interests and exerts global influence. It profoundly overestimates the importance of present intentions as a guide to future behavior, and severely underestimates the constraints that China’s security environment will place upon Beijing’s decisionmakers. Gaining a handle on the likely trajectories of China’s rise will instead require a deeper understanding of the emergent threats to which Beijing will be forced to respond, regardless of its own designs. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policies of privileging economic growth and noninterference are engendering a new set of potential security threats that include: 1) international terrorism; 2) foreign instability and state failure overseas; and 3) overtly anti-Chinese regimes. The result will be a refashioning of China’s foreign policy agenda beyond its traditional security concerns. Beijing is undoubtedly amassing the means to exert influence in international politics, but regardless of its strategic intentions today, its rapidly evolving threat environment will play a decisive role in determining how China brings these resources to bear. Confronted with serious questions about China’s impending effect on international security—where it will fight wars, who will be its future allies and adversaries, and whether it will jettison its current policy of non-intervention—it is necessary to look beyond intentions and toward China’s future threat environment.
The Militarization of Post-Khomeini Iran: Praetorianism 2.0 (PDF)
Elliot Hen-Tov, Nathan Gonzalez
On June 4th of every year since 1989, the Islamic Republic of Iran holds a grand memorial to honor the passing of its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2010, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) organized and managed the memorial for the first time. As Khomeini’s grandson Hassan Khomeini, himself a cleric, stepped up to deliver a sermon, government supporters chanted in protest and booed him off the stage. The humiliation of Khomeini’s family vividly illustrates how Iran’s power structure has fundamentally changed, away from its unique clerical model toward a type of military dictatorship. In other words, the Islamic Republic is no longer a semiautocratic, clergy-led state which allows some form of citizen participation. The mass protests following the hotly contested June 12, 2009 election were indeed proof that the Islamic Republic has a vibrant civil society and that many Iranians still expect some level of electoral fairness. But Iran is now a military-led system or, in political-science terms, a ‘‘praetorian’’ state. From this perspective, one may interpret the June 12 election fiasco not as a struggle for power between reformist and hard-liner camps, but rather as an assertion of influence and a de facto coup by the emerging militant class and its preferred candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against the clerical oligarchy that came to power through the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution.
India's Relations with Iran: Much Ado about Nothing (PDF)
Harsh V. Pant
In the last few years, India’s policy toward the Middle East has often been viewed through the prism of Indian-Iranian relations. The international community, and the West in particular, has been obsessed with New Delhi’s ties to Tehran, which are actually largely underdeveloped, while missing India’s much more substantive simultaneous engagement with Arab Gulf states and Israel. India’s relationship with the Middle East as a region is dramatically different than a generation ago. From 1947-1986, as at least one academic has argued, India was too ideological toward the region, paying insufficient attention to Indian national interests, particularly in its subdued ties with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Today, however, India is developing its new Middle Eastern strategy around these three states, with New Delhi recently taking special care to nurture all these relationships and pursue its substantial regional interests.
Is China Playing a Dual Game in Iran? (PDF)
John W. Garver
One aspect of China’s Iran policy suggests a sincere effort to uphold the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime in cooperation with the United States. Another suggests that Beijing believes a nuclear-armed or nuclear-armed-capable Iran would serve China’s geopolitical interests in the Persian Gulf region. Is China playing a dual game toward Iran? This question cannot be answered with certainty, but given its importance, a tentative and necessarily somewhat speculative effort to think through the matter is in order.
A Climate Coalition of the Willing (PDF)
Thomas Hale
Intergovernmental efforts to limit the gases that cause climate change have all but failed. After the unsuccessful 2009 Copenhagen summit, and with little progress at the 2010 Cancun meeting, it is hard to see how major emitters will agree any time soon on mutual emissions reductions that are sufficiently ambitious to prevent a substantial (greater than two degree Celsius) increase in average global temperatures. It is not hard to see why. No deal excluding the United States and China, which together emit more than 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs), is worth the paper it is written on. But domestic politics in both countries effectively block ‘‘G-2’’ leadership on climate. In the United States, the Obama administration has basically given up on national cap-and-trade legislation. Even the relatively modest Kerry-Lieberman-Graham energy bill remains dead in the Senate. The Chinese government, in turn, faces an even harsher constraint. Although the nation has adopted important energy efficiency goals, the Chinese Communist Party has staked its legitimacy and political survival on raising the living standard of average Chinese. Accepting international commitments that stand even a small chance of reducing the country’s GDP growth rate below a crucial threshold poses an unacceptable risk to the stability of the regime. Although the G-2 present the largest and most obvious barrier to a global treaty, they also provide a convenient excuse for other governments to avoid aggressive action. Therefore, the international community should not expect to negotiate a worthwhile successor to the Kyoto Protocol, at least not in the near future. This, however, does not mean the world must resign itself to the dangerous ramifications of climate change, nor accept the limitations imposed by domestic politics in Beijing and Washington. By constructing a coalition of willing actors, the international community can make second-best, but still worthwhile, progress toward mitigating climate change without a multilateral treaty.
Turkey's Eurasian Agenda (PDF)
F. Stephen Larrabee
In the last two decades, Eurasia has emerged as an area of growing strategic importance for Turkey. Much media attention has been driven by Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East, with Turkey’s rapprochement with Iran and Syria, its close ties to Hamas, and the growing strains in Ankara’s relations with Israel prompting concerns in various Western capitals, including Washington, that Turkey is reorienting its ties away from the West and toward the East. Yet, Turkey has also pursued important foreign policy initiatives toward Central Asia and the Caucasus. Turkey’s growing engagement with Eurasia raises important issues for U.S. policy and Turkey’s relations with the West. The key question is whether Ankara’s new activism in Eurasia complements, or conflicts with,Western efforts to stabilize the region. Does the intensification of Turkey’s ties to Russia represent a natural attempt to exploit the new diplomatic flexibility afforded by the end of the Cold War? Or are these ties part of a new strategic realignment of Turkish foreign policy? Ankara’s initiatives in Central Asia and the South Caucasus raise similar concerns: do they enhance Western efforts to strengthen the sovereignty and independence of the countries in the regions, as Turkish officials claim? Or are they part of a broader ‘‘anti-Western’’ reorientation of Turkish foreign policy, as some critics charge?
Plan A-Minus for Afghanistan
Bruce Riedel, Michael O'Hanlon
The strategy in Afghanistan, as outlined by President Obama in his December 2009 West Point speech and earlier March 2009 policy review, still has a good chance to succeed. Described here as ‘‘Plan A,’’ it is a relatively comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy, albeit one with a geographic focus on about one-third of Afghanistan’s districts. Directed at defeating the insurgency or at least substantially weakening it, while building up Afghan institutions, it has reasonable prospects of achieving these goals well enough to hold together the Afghan state and prevent the establishment of major al Qaeda or other extremist sanctuaries on Afghan soil. Nevertheless, the strategy is not guaranteed to succeed, for reasons having little to do with its own flaws and more to do with the inherent challenge of the problem. Critics of the current strategy are right to begin a discussion of what a backup strategy, or a ‘‘Plan B,’’ might be. The most popular alternative to date emphasizes targeted counterterrorism operations, rather than comprehensive counterinsurgency—especially in the country’s Pashtun south and east where the insurgencies are strongest. The United States should have a debate over Plan B, but the above version is highly problematic. Its proponents are serious people motivated by serious considerations—they worry that the current war is not winnable, or at least that it is not winnable at costs commensurate with the strategic stakes they perceive in Afghanistan. Yet, it would be troubling if the U.S. debate in 2011 was forced to choose effectively between this kind of backup plan and the current robust counterinsurgency approach. There is a better way if a fallback option is needed. Rather than conceding at least one-third of the country to extremists and reducing NATO forces quickly, the United States should tie its force drawdown to the growth and maturation of Afghan security forces. Under this plan, described here as ‘‘Plan A-,’’ U.S. and other foreign forces would have to keep fighting hard in Afghanistan for 2-4 more years, even as they gradually passed the baton to Afghan forces, but the United States would not need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, and would not tie its downsizing to the stabilization of all key terrain.
Caught in the Muddle: America's Pakistan Strategy (PDF)
Paul Stanilan
President Obama has placed Pakistan at the center of his administration’s foreign policy agenda. Islamabad is a pivotal player in Afghanistan and its decisions will have much to do with whether and how U.S. forces can leave that country. Al Qaeda and linked militant groups have used Pakistan as a sanctuary and recruiting ground, with the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas becoming, in President Obama’s words, ‘‘the most dangerous place in the world.’’ Recurrent tensions between India and Pakistan frustrate and complicate U.S. initiatives in the region, where nuclear proliferation, insurgency, terrorism, and grand strategic goals in Asia intersect. Despite significant effort and expense, the strategy pursued by the Obama administration since the spring of 2009 has not delivered on its ambitious goals in Pakistan and the broader region. Pakistani security policy remains dominated by the military, the country’s economic performance and political stability are both troubling, and the broader region has become even less secure. The United States risks becoming caught in a set of interlocking dependencies that undermine its influence—tightly linked to a troubled Karzai regime in Kabul, painfully reliant on the Pakistani army for logistics and intelligence, and reactive to an Indian security elite which expects to influence U.S. policy without providing much in return. Although there have been valuable initiatives on a variety of issues, U.S. policy toward Pakistan remains locked in an uncomfortable limbo awaiting further movement on U.S. commitments to Afghanistan, India-Pakistan relations, and domestic Pakistani politics. Washington faces a set of dilemmas: how to manage long-term goals when short-term imperatives undermine them, and how to navigate conflicting international objectives in the region. There are no easy solutions to these problems, but stasis is not a strategy.
Pakistan's Counterterrorism Strategy: Separating Friends from Enemies (PDF)
Ayesha Siddiqa
On October 1, 2010, the government of Pakistan shut down the supply route for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) after an incursion into Pakistan’s territory by NATO forces, killing 16 Pakistanis in collateral damage. Two days later, militants torched 28 NATO supply trucks near Shikarpur in the southern province of Sindh. These events reflect the inherent tension both in Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy and in its relationship with the United States and its allies in fighting the war in Afghanistan. The future of U.S. military operations in South Asia depends on the convergence of policies between the United States and Pakistan, but since the war began in 2001, interpreting Islamabad’s counterterrorism policy has been difficult. Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan is rife with inherent contradictions, caught between an inclination to fight militant forces and yet having to partner with some to strengthen its future bargaining position. The policy flows out of Pakistan’s multiple strategic requirements: its need to remain engaged with the United States, to save itself from the Taliban attacking the Pakistani state, and to fight India’s growing presence in Afghanistan. Caught between these three issues, Islamabad’s counterterrorism policy and objectives continue to lack clarity. At best, the policy illustrates the tension between Islamabad’s need to protect itself against an internal enemy and its sensitivity toward the external threat from India. The primary flaw of Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy, however, is that it is defined and driven by the military and that institution’s strategic objectives. It is easier to use the military option than to address the problem of changing the basic narrative and socioeconomic conditions that drive militancy in the first place. The need to create an alternative political narrative and change the mindset in Pakistan to address those socioeconomic conditions is a far more critical issue, which receives less attention than it deserves.