CIAO DATE: 06/05

Survival

 

 

Spring 2005 (Vol. 47 No. 1)

Articles

• Five Bad Options for Iraq

  Daniel Byman

  The current US approach towards Iraq is fundamentally flawed and increasingly difficult to sustain. There five options: continuing to muddle through with the current approach; expanding the size of the deployed military forces; shifting towards counterinsurgency operations; drawing down the overall force size and using the remainder for a more limited mission; and complete withdrawal. Of these, expansion is not feasible, and a withdrawal could prove disastrous. Shifting toward counterinsurgency offers many benefits, but it is highly unlikely that the United States would do it properly. By default, a limited drawdown represents the 'least bad' option. It would enable the United States to preserve some influence and continue to target the jihadists, but reduce the tremendous costs of continued operations.

• The Limits and Temptations of America's Conventional Military Primacy

  Jeffrey Record

  The United States today enjoys a measure of conventional military primacy unprecedented in world history. However, the obvious advantages of that primacy, including deterrence of conventional attack, must be weighed against its accumulating disadvantages. Primacy has accelerated enemy investment in asymmetric responses; renewed US interest in preventive war; and heightened Pentagon insensitivity to the difficulties of converting easy military victories into lasting political successes. Current US difficulties in Iraq are rooted in these unintended consequences of primacy. This is not an argument for abandoning primacy; rather, it is a call to appreciate its costs and risks as well as its benefits and opportunities.

• A Dubious Template for US Foreign Policy

  Chester A. Crocker

  The global war on terror is a dubious template for the security challenges faced by the United States because it distorts the focus of policy and exaggerates the effectiveness of military power. A grand strategy cannot rest solely on the idea of 'taking out' specific sets of bad guys and fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It is essential, as the Iran case demonstrates, to get at intractable political tensions and frozen geopolitical divisions that foster dangerous security conditions in much of the globe. Strategic debate should focus less on unilateral versus multilateral approaches or hard power versus soft power, and recognise the real missing ingredient in recent policy-smart statecraft using leverage in all its forms for engaging the world's zones of turbulence.

• Three Circles of Threat

  Gareth Evans

  The main objective of al-Qaeda and other global jihadists is to federate while decentralising, and to place an ideology that was once marginal in the heart of the Muslim and Arab world. Our main objective must be to divide and marginalise; but this is also our main difficulty, because many of our actions have had the opposite result. This is particularly true of the Bush administration's 'global war on terror'. Some European policies have also inadvertently reinforced Bin Laden's claim to represent all Muslim grievances. To be effective, our policies must deal in a differentiated manner with three different circles: al-Qaeda in its 11 September incarnation; terrorist movements which, though permeable to global Islamist ideology, nevertheless have local objectives and roots; all those in the Muslim and Arab world who may feel increasingly attracted to jihadist ideology and feel compelled to transform their discontent into action.

• Washington's Troubling Obsession with Public Diplomacy

  David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs

  'Public diplomacy' has become the holy grail of American foreign policy. In a Washington polarised by sharp partisan divisions, few issues have generated as much consensus. Numerous recent reports from think tanks, blue-ribbon commissions and government advisory groups offer recommendations for how the United States could improve its efforts to sway public opinion abroad, but public diplomacy is the object of a neverending, ultimately futile quest. While the tone and style of US foreign policy could stand improvement, the rest of the world is far more troubled by its substance. Rather than fixating on public diplomacy, pundits and policy makers alike should recognise that America's power and policies are the problem, not its inability to communicate.

• Europe and America in the Age of Bush

  Marta Dassù and Roberto Menotti

  George W. Bush won the November 2004 US elections against the overwhelming sentiment of Europe's citizenry. In theory, this could reinforce the sense of alienation across the Atlantic, pushing Europe increasingly to define itself in opposition to America. In practice, Bush's second term offers the chance of a transatlantic new deal: a more pragmatic relationship, based upon a reassessment of common interests in the post-bipolar world. Such a new deal would require Washington once more to embrace the assumption that European unity is in the American national interest. It would also require the European Union to concentrate on managing security in and around the European space, being ready and able to use military force as necessary. America would take the lead elsewhere, with Europeans offering military and other support where they could achieve a European consensus for action.

• The Tsunami and Security: Asia's 9/11?

  Tim Huxley

  Despite its huge human cost and notwithstanding the recent panglossian predictions of some observers of Asian politics and international relations, the tsunami disaster has not affected the security outlooks of even the most severely affected states in any fundamental way. The tsunami's huge human toll should encourage South and Southeast Asian states and their regional groupings to pay greater attention to human security issues. But deep-rooted ways of looking at security and embedded inter-state rivalry suggest that security priorities and policies of regional states are no more likely to undergo sea-change than those of the industrial states which continue to dominate the region militarily.

• The Myth of the 'German Way': German Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Relations

  Peter Rudolf

  Those critics who warn of a new German unilateralism have read too much into the Iraq crisis. The core components of Germany's traditional foreign policy conception include a general strategic preference for embedding German foreign policy into multilateral frameworks; the goal of a civilised international order; and a preference for non-military means and strong aversion to the use of military force. German policies regarding the Iraq war may have been at odds with one or more of these core components; however, there were cross-cutting pressures that made it very difficult to be entirely faithful to those traditions. Neither the foreign-policy discourse in Germany with respect to the transatlantic relationship nor actual policies in the wake of the Iraq crisis indicate a profound change in the orientation of German foreign policy. But we can expect the strains of further adjustment and non-adjustment to a changing transatlantic framework.

• Germany's Defence Choices

  Franz-Josef Meiers

• Dilemmas of Liberal Realism

  David P. Calleo

• What's Wrong with the Arab World?

  Joseph A. Kéchichian

• The Temptations of Polemic

  Robin Frost