International cooperation on key global challenges declined in 2013, according to a new “report card” released here Friday by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Particularly disappointing were international efforts in dealing with terrorism, nuclear non-proliferation and global finance, according to the report which, however, found some gains in two areas – dealing with or preventing armed conflict and improving global health.

The report also found that cooperation on climate change, which last year’s report card found to be worth the lowest grade – a “D” – of all the major issues on which the report card focused, was neither better nor worse than the previous four years assessed by the 50-some experts who constituted the jury.

“The report card confirms a clear trend,” said Stewart Patrick, director of CFR’s International Institutions and Global Governance (IIGG) programme, which issued the report. “Around the world, leaders are less willing to compromise and cooperate in global institutions – even when their interests align.”

U.S. leadership in mobilising other governments and international institutions to address these critical issues also seemed to falter during 2013, he added.

“The United States appears to be losing interest or capacity to marshal collective action to fight trans-national threats and or promote global goods,” according to Patrick.

The new report used last year’s inaugural report, which assessed progress in global governance in the six critical trans-national challenges over the period 2008 through 2012, as a benchmark.

It awarded grades based on the assessments of more than 50 experts – almost all of them from Washington- or New York-based academic institutions and think tanks, including CFR itself, as well as other mainstream organisations, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Brookings Institution. In that respect, the assessments appear to reflect very much a U.S.-centred perspective.

In addition to the “D” on climate change, last year’s edition awarded “Bs” to global cooperation in combating terrorism and global finance, a “C+” on dealing with armed conflict, a “C” on non-proliferation and global health. To the extent the grades either rose or fell in this year’s report, they did so only fractionally; for global finance, for example, the grade fell from “B” to “B-“.

Nonetheless, the overall assessment was negative. “Despite a steady if uneven global economic recovery, multilateral efforts to mitigate global risks and threats were at best lackluster,” according to the report. “In virtually every issue area, the dearth of effective global leadership proved a major stumbling block to more effective international cooperation.”

In addition to assigning grades, the report card, consistent with its schooling metaphor, identified class “leaders”, “laggards”, “truants,” and “detentions”, and awarded stand-outs with “gold stars” and “most improved” prizes in each issue area.

On climate change, for example, it named the European Union (EU) and the Pacific Islands as the class “leaders” in 2013.

This was due to the former’s advocacy for a strong successor to the Kyoto agreement and commitment to spend as much as 180 billion euros on climate-related projects in both the EU and developing countries over seven years. And the Islands were recognised for the Majuro Declaration for Climate Leadership that commits member states to a speedy transition to low-carbon economies.

China and the U.S., on the other hand, were given the “laggard” label for their failure, despite their status as the world’s top two emitters of carbon dioxide, to produce ambitious plans to curb their emissions. And Australia and Russia were deemed “truants” for repealing anti-pollution taxes and stymieing negotiations for a Kyoto successor, respectively.

At the same time, Canada was placed in “detention” for its government’s continuing reversals on its goals for reducing emissions.

While levels of cooperation on global finance were deemed “respectable” in 2013, some collaborative efforts faded, according to the report. It praised the leadership of the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the U.S. Federal Reserve, but noted how little progress has been made in strengthening the EU’s financial governance and the failure of the Group of 20 (G20) to coordinate policy more closely.

It also assessed as “poor” the progress – or lack of progress – in reforming the governance of international financial institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to give a stronger voice to emerging economies. It blamed the U.S. Congress – named as “truant” – for failing to approve the pending reforms.

On nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, the report card cited little or no progress on key issues, including ratifications by major players of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the reduction of existing nuclear arsenals.

On the plus side, the report praised the agreement reached last November between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) on curbing Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Significantly, the report failed to name any “leader” and awarded a gold star to the P5+1 and “most improved” to Iran and Myanmar. Pakistan and Russia, on the other hand, were deemed “laggards” for their “obstinate positions” on disarmament and “worrying modernisation activities.”

Israel and India were identified as “truants” for failing to take steps to join the NPT, while detention was given to North Korea for testing another nuclear device and explicitly incorporating nuclear weapons into its national security strategy.

On dealing with armed conflict, the report card noted that U.N. and regional peacekeeping efforts improved markedly in 2013, in part due to the strong mandates given operations in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

But these improvements could not overcome the pall cast by the ongoing civil war in Syria and the flare-up of armed conflicts in several African states, notably in South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR).

The report also complained that the international community needed to focus more on preventive measures, such as mediation, peace-building and state-building.

It praised France and the U.N. Department for Peacekeeping Operations as class “leaders” and awarded a gold star to the U.N. Department of Political Affairs.

The Economic Community of West African States and the African Union were deemed “most improved,” while laggards included the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has failed to address impunity in other regions besides Africa, the U.N. Peace-building Commission, and the U.N. Security Council due primarily to its failure to approve meaningful resolutions to halt the violence in Syria.

On global health, the report card praised the cooperation by both state and non-state actors in dealing with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and in expanding vaccinations for other infectious diseases. On the other hand, the report said the international community has fallen short on dealing with non-communicable diseases and in strengthening national health systems.

The U.S. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest source of non-governmental funding to global health initiatives by far, continue to be class “leaders”, according to the report which awarded gold stars to the World Bank for a new focus on health; India for its successful eradication of polio; and Rwanda for achieving the steepest drop in child mortality in recorded history.

“Most improved” was given to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria for major reforms that it carried out in its management.

Pakistan, however, was deemed truant due to the sharp rise in the number of polio cases and the government’s failure to protect vaccination officials from attacks by the Pakistani Taliban, the report card also suggested that the U.S. effort to track Osama bin Laden by mounting a fake vaccination campaign contributed to that failure.

New studies argue that mobile technologies can be more effective than microcredit in promoting entrepreneurship and fighting poverty in developing countries, like Mauritania. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Farangis Abdurazokzoda
WASHINGTON , May 31 2014 (IPS)

Mobile-finance and direct cash grants are revolutionary tools that can substitute for under-developed financial sectors and help reduce poverty and promote entrepreneurship in developing countries, according to researchers here.

Rodger Voorhies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Christopher Blattman, a Columbia University political scientist, say these two potentially empowering mechanisms can help global efforts to provide needed assistance to vulnerable and poor populations.

In a teleconference hosted by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the country’s most influential think tanks, the two men argued that mobile technologies can help poor people in developing countries manage their personal finances, including savings, insurance, credit, and cash transfers that many in the developed world take for granted.

Mobile technologies can help fill the gap by providing easy and free access to financial tools, according to an article published in CFR’s journal, ‘Foreign Affairs’, co-written by Voorhies and Jake Kendall, who also works at the Gates Foundation.

The article, ‘The Mobile Finance Revolution’, cites World Bank statistics showing that, on average, nearly nine out of every ten people living in a developing country have a cell-phone account, although some users may, of course, have multiple accounts.

Mobile technologies are more effective than much-lauded microcredit programmes in promoting entrepreneurship and fighting poverty, according to the article.

Among other advantages, they eliminate the bureaucracy and routine banking costs associated with in-person and cash transactions. In addition, mobile-finance clients generate data that can be further used by banks and investors as an alternative for the traditional credit scores, according to Voorhies and Kendall.

In a second article titled ‘Show Them the Money’, Blattman and Paul Niehaus, who teaches economics at the University of California San Diego, detail recent studies that show the effectiveness of cash grants and outline the comparative disadvantages of microloans and related programmes, such as donating money to buy cows, goats, seeds, beans, tools, and other agricultural inputs, as well as schoolbooks and clothing for poor families.

Not everybody wants a cow

Despite the fact that the microcredit movement brought significant positive results – recognised in 2006 when the Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were awarded with a Nobel Peace Prize – a series of more recent studies on the effects of microloans have put their success into question, according to Blattman and Niehaus.

In one study, the economist Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a number of collaborators examined the case of the Indian non-profit Spandana that provided 250 dollar loans to women in Hyderabad at low-interest rates. Over three years, they found no measurable improvements in the education, health, poverty, or women’s empowerment among the recipients.

After collecting an additional 20 years of data on Spandana’s lending and their borrowers, Banerjee found “no evidence of large sustained consumption or income gains as a result of access to microcredit.”

As for the effectiveness of training programmes, economists David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff reviewed the outcomes of the International Labour Organisation’s ‘Start and Improve your Business Programme’ that has provided training to over 4.5 million people in over 100 countries since 1977. They found that there was little lasting effect on the sales or profits of the business owners in the recipient countries.

“No wonder people in developing countries, when given the choice, don’t necessarily choose to invest in skills training,” write Blattman and Niehaus.

The two authors argue that providing cash grants to poor people directly is also preferable to supplying goods that will presumably be used by recipients to increase their income or skills.

They argue that poor people in developing countries often use the cash to buy the same things that aid organisations would provide, such as livestock, tools, or training, in any event, but giving people cash directly provides them with more flexibility.

“Not everyone, after all, wants a cow,” the authors write.

Blattman and Niehaus do not deny the benefits of aid, training programmes, and microloans but insist that significant improvements are possible depending on how the money is allocated.

In a study conducted in Uganda, 250 groups of 15-25 young adults were each given 400 dollars in cash to spend as they wished, so long as the purpose was to enhance their livelihood.

The study found that most of the money was spent on acquiring the physical tools and materials they needed to start working, and only ten percent was used for training. It turned out that over four years, the participants’ incomes rose by an average of 40 percent.

A similar study was conducted in Liberia, where unconditional 200 dollar grants were given to drug addicts and petty criminals. The recipients “did not waste the money,” but used it to fund legitimate enterprises.

“Fears that poor people waste cash are simply not borne out by the available data,” the authors write.

Cash or cell phones?

Blattman and Niehaus outline the benefits of cash transfers over traditional aid programmes. They emphasise the importance of money transfers in places where the population has been hit by unexpected crises – conflicts, natural disasters, or extended periods of political uncertainty.

“Think of Southeast Asia after [the] tsunami or the Middle East flooded with Syrian refugees, where the returns on capital after a recovery period are likely to be unusually high and the challenge of making smart investments without localised knowledge unusually large,” the authors write.

Further, cash transfers are essential to emerging markets that have relatively stable economies but where few firms offer jobs and where most workers, by necessity, are self-employed.

More specifically, the authors suggest that cash transfers better enable entrepreneurs to start businesses in countries where banks and other credit institutions are weak or under-developed.

Just as Blattman and Niehaus argue that cash transfers can be particularly helpful in emergency situations, Kendall and Voorhies insist that cell phones may actually prove more effective.

“A study in Niger by a researcher from Tufts University found that during a drought, allowing people to request emergency government support through their cell phones resulted in better diets for those people, compared with the diets of those who received cash handouts,” according to the authors.

In addition, studies have shown that cell phones encourage financial discipline and savings. In Malawi, for example, farmers were offered an option to have their harvest proceeds directly deposited into savings accounts. Those farmers who chose this option ended up investing 30 percent more in farm inputs and had a 22 percent increase in revenues compared to those who chose not to participate.

But while both articles articulate valid criticisms of how aid and microloan organisations operate, they fail to address important aspects. The most obvious are literacy rates, especially low financial literacy that is often prevalent in developing countries. The issues that need to be considered with mobile-finance are the access of affordable network providers as well as a very basic one – electricity.

For the first time since the end of the Vietnam War, both the U.S. public and the foreign policy elite see Washington as playing a less important and powerful role in the world than it did a decade before, according to the latest quadrennial survey released here Tuesday by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Pew Research Centre.

A majority of 53 percent of adult respondents in the latest edition of America’s Place in the World said the U.S. was less important and powerful in global affairs than in 2004, which was shortly after Washington invaded Iraq. That event had much of the commentariat here comparing the country’s dominance to the Roman and British empires.

Sixty-two percent of a representative sample of CFR’s membership agreed that Washington is less powerful today than in 2004. CFR’s members, who consist mainly of current and former policy-makers, academics, business executives, journalists, columnists, and other elite professionals who are invited to join, is generally seen as the U.S. foreign policy “establishment”.

The new survey found a strong public ambivalence about Washington’s global role today.

On the one hand, 52 percent of the public agreed with the notion that “the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other nations get along the best they can on their own.” That was the highest percentage since the question was first asked by pollsters nearly a half century ago and nine percent higher than in the waning days of the Vietnam War.

Similarly, a record 80 percent agreed that Washington should “concentrate more on our national problems” than on its international activities, and 11 percent higher than in 2004.

On the other hand, two-thirds of the 2,003 respondents in the public survey, which was carried out between Oct. 30 and Nov. 6, said greater U.S. involvement in the global economy was a good thing, and 56 percent rejected the notion that the U.S. “should go our own way in international matters” (although that was the highest percentage who took that position since 1964).

“Americans are conflicted about the U.S. role in the world,” noted James Lindsay, CFR’s senior vice president, commenting on the survey. “(A)s frustrated as the public is with foreign policy, it isn’t ready to abandon internationalism or to embrace unilateralism.”

The latest survey, which asked respondents scores of detailed questions, showed, as it has in other years, significant gaps between the public and elite on a number of key foreign policy issues.

On Washington’s role in the world, 12 percent of both groups agreed that the U.S. should be “the single world leader,” while 72 percent of the public and 86 percent of CFR members, respectively, disagreed, insisting instead that it “should play a shared leadership role.”

But of those large majorities who opted for “shared leadership,” 55 percent of elite respondents said the U.S. should be “the most assertive” of the world powers, while only 20 percent of the public agreed. A 51-percent majority of the public said Washington should be “no more or less assertive” than other powers.

The same majority said the U.S. was doing “too much” in addressing global problems, as opposed to “too little” or “the right amount.” By contrast, only 21 percent of the elite said “too much.”

Asked to identify to top foreign policy priorities, the two groups both rated “protecting the U.S. from terrorist attacks” and “preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction” at or near the top.

But there were major differences on other issues; for example, 81 percent of the public respondents identified “protecting jobs of American workers” as a top priority, but only 29 percent of CFR members did so. Similarly, 57 percent of the public named combating international drug trafficking, while only 17 percent of elite respondents agreed.

The public also gave reducing illegal immigration (48-11 percent) and “strengthening the United Nations (37-17 percent) a much higher priority, while the elite rated “dealing with global climate change” as its third highest priority (57 percent), compared to only 37 percent of the public who agreed.

On more specific issues, CFR members (69 percent) and the public respondents (56 percent) believed that Washington made the right decision in using military force in Afghanistan (although 87 percent of the elite respondents took that position in 2009).

On the other hand, only 14 percent of elite respondents said they believed the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the right decision, while a 49-percent plurality of the public said it was correct.

Asked which was more important to the U.S. in Middle Eastern politics – democracy or stability — the two groups were generally agreed. Just under a third of respondents in both polls opted for “democratic governments,” even if that results in less stability. Almost two-thirds opted for “stable government” at the expense of democracy.

Although CFR members were often quite critical of President Barack Obama’s performance on specific foreign policy issues, they were markedly more approving of his general performance than the public – by a margin of 60 percent to 41 percent.

On specific foreign-p licy issues, majorities of elite respondents also gave him much higher marks than the general public – by 20 percent or more on his handling of Afghanistan (56-34 percent); Iran (72-37 percent, although more recently conducted polls have shown majority public approval for his Iran policy); China (69-30 percent); terrorism (73-51 percent), immigration (67-32 percent); and international trade issues (66-38 percent).

On these and other issues, the survey found major partisan differences, with Democrats naturally tending to be considerably more supportive of Obama’s policies than Republicans.

Nonetheless, a 52-percent majority of elite respondents said Obama has “not (been) assertive enough” in his approach to foreign policy. Fifty-one percent of the public agreed. At the same time, a majority of elite respondents, in contrast to the public, said they favoured reductions in the defence budget.

For elite respondents, Obama’s handling of Syria – notably his failure to follow through on his threats of military action in retaliation for Damascus’s use of chemical weapons — was particularly disappointing and contributed importantly to the impression that U.S. power is declining. Nearly three out of four CFR respondents said the episode had left the U.S. weaker, and 59 percent of them disapproved of his actions.

More than four in 10 elite respondents attributed the public’s growing disenchantment with an active U.S. role in the world – as shown by their answers to with “war fatigue”; 28 percent cited the costs to the U.S. economy; and another 19 percent to the impression that recent U.S. initiatives have been ineffective.

Despite the perception that U.S. power and influence has declined, more than two-thirds of the public believe that Washington remains the world’s leading military power. However, consistent with the polling since the 2008 financial crisis, a strong plurality of public respondents believe that China has become the world’s leading economic power.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Three days into the partial shutdown of the federal government, foreign policy mavens are voicing growing concern about the closure’s impact on U.S. credibility overseas.

“This sends a message to allies that they’re somewhat on their own,” according to Richard Haass, a former senior diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the New York-based think tank which has long been considered the leading institution of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

“It sends a message to adversaries, or would-be adversaries, that you’ve got a more unpredictable America,” he said in an interview featured on the CFR’s website in which he noted that the timing of the budgetary crisis, “coming on the heels of what happened and didn’t happen around Syria …reinforces the sense of American unpredictability.”

“Imagine if you had grown up anywhere else and knew America only from a distance,” sighed David Rothkopf, CEO of foreignpolicy.com in a long, woeful essay. “You may have heard of the country that led its allies to victories in two world wars. Or you may have heard of a country that was a Cold War adversary, an imperialist manipulator, a source of aid, a bully, but nonetheless a source of strength.

“Whatever the America you imagined,” he went on, “it was almost certainly not the one you see via the headlines today, a laughingstock a subject of scorn, and the inspiration not for hopes as before, but for such doubts as have never existed before.”

The immediate cause of this teeth-gnashing, of course, was the manoeuvre by a minority of Republicans in the House of Representatives associated with the extreme right-wing “Tea Party” movement – and the refusal thus far by the party’s leadership to rein them in — to hold hostage the funding of the federal government to their demands to delay or repeal a major health-care law, sometimes called “Obamacare”, approved by Congress three years ago.

The immediate result is that nearly a million “non-essential” federal workers are being furloughed pending passage of a “continuing resolution” that funds the government.

Among other things, that means the country’s national parks and museums are closed, while administrative and support services for most federal agencies, ranging from those that provide poor families with supplemental food allowances to others that work on national security, are severely short-staffed.

While active-duty members of the military are not affected, many of the Pentagon’s civilian employees have been sent home. Nearly three out of four of the vast intelligence community’s civilian workforce have also been furloughed, the director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, told Congress Wednesday, prompting the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair, Dianne Feinstein to call the shutdown “the biggest gift that we could possibly give our enemies.”

In strictly foreign-policy terms, the budget impasse is already having an impact. The State Department announced Wednesday that some U.S. contributions to U.N. and other international organisations, as well as peacekeeping operations, have been suspended. Similarly, the disbursement of funds used to buy military equipment and training for U.S. allies, including Israel, will be delayed.

The crisis is also disrupting the administration’s much-touted strategic “pivot” toward Asia.

The White House announced Wednesday that Malaysia and the Philippines – whose growing tensions with China over conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea have given Washington a major opening – will be dropped from President Barack Obama’s scheduled trip to Southeast Asia next week. Just 12 hours later, it cancelled the rest of his trip – to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bali, Indonesia, and the East Asia Summit in Brunei – and sent Secretary of State John Kerry in his place.

That marks the third time in as many years that domestic problems have prevented presidential visits to Asia.

“The U.S. government shutdown and President Obama’s decision to truncate his trip to Asia will not change facts on the ground overnight,” according to Michael Mazza, an Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), writing on the ‘National Interest’ website Thursday before the surviving two legs of the trip were cancelled.

“They will, however, reinforce two related narratives that have gained purchase in the region: that the pivot is a slogan more than a policy and that the United States is becoming the ‘paper tiger’ that Mao Zedong once described. Those narratives may not be accurate, but in the realm of geopolitics, perceptions matter.”

While the shutdown is already disrupting normal government operations, and particularly the lives of the “non-essential” and their families, of greater concern is the possibility that the ongoing stand-off could continue through Oct. 17, the date on which, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the federal government will run out of cash, possibly sending the country into default for the first time in its history.

“In the event that a debt limit impasse were to lead to a default, it could have a catastrophic effect on not just financial markets, but also on job creation, consumer spending and economic growth,” according to a Treasury report issued Thursday, which said the impact “could last for more than a generation.”

That concern was echoed a few blocks away by the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde. “The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy,” she warned.

Just the fact that such a possibility looms larger each day the shutdown continues is harming Washington’s credibility as a “great power”, according to the CFR’s Haass.

“We’ve reached the point now where the greatest threat to our national security, for the immediate and the foreseeable future, is not some other country or organisation; it’s increasingly our own political dysfunction,” he said.

That assessment was echoed in part by Rothkopf who put the “great lion’s share” of the blame for the current crisis on the Republican Party that most observers now see as increasingly incoherent and hostage to its most radical elements.

The “watching world doesn’t see the details…. How can they think anything but that this is a political system in extremis, a country likely in decline?” he asked, complaining of an absence of leadership on virtually every level, including the administration’s and Congress’ recent fumbling over whether to take military action against Syria.

Indeed, the current budget impasse and the great risks it carries if it continues too long should be instructive to those hawks who have long identified Washington’s “credibility” overseas with its readiness to use military force, according to Micah Zenko, a senior CFR fellow.

“For those who claimed that attacking Syria with cruise missiles was required to maintain U.S. credibility in the eyes of Iran’s Supreme Leader, doesn’t Capitol Hill’s behaviour over the past week do more to demonstrate America’s incompetence?” he noted this week on the cfr.org site.

“If the foundations of functioning governance are impossible at home, shouldn’t U.S. allies question America’s commitments to their security thousands of miles away?”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Some analysts suggest that Obama’s failure to line up support from more G20 leaders suggests that the U.S.-created global order is no longer sustainable. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 6 2013 (IPS)

With a week of intense lobbying behind him, U.S. President Barack Obama looks increasingly beleaguered – both at home and abroad – in his effort to rally support for a military strike against Syria to punish its government for its alleged Aug. 21 chemical-weapons attack outside Damascus.

At home, most political observers say Obama faces a particularly difficult task in bringing a majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives, which begins debating his proposed Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) next week on return from its August recess, over to his side.“The lack of consensus within G20 is confirmation of what we already knew, which is that there is limited support for military action in Syria within the international community." -- Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations

Congressional offices, even those whose bosses favour Obama’s position, are reporting overwhelming opposition in telephone calls and emails from their constituents, while public meetings held by lawmakers in their home districts have been dominated by anti-intervention forces from both the right and the left.

And polls released over the past week suggest that the administration has made little headway in moving public opinion its way.

A new Gallup poll taken at mid-week and released Friday found that support for U.S. military action “to reduce Syria’s ability to use chemical weapons” – 36 percent – was the lowest on the eve of any military intervention Washington has undertaken in the last 20 years. Fifty-one percent of respondents opposed a strike.

In a reflection of White House concern over opposition to military action, Obama himself announced Friday that he will address the nation about his intentions Tuesday. At a press conference at the Group of 20 (G20) meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, he acknowledged that getting both house of Congress to approve an authorisation was “going to be a heavy lift”.

He spoke just after his deputy national security adviser, Tony Blinken, told National Public Radio (NPR) that, even though Obama retained the constitutional authority to strike Syria without Congressional authorisation, “it’s neither his desire nor intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him.”

Meanwhile, on the international front, Obama also appeared to be faring poorly in his bid to gain support for military action.

In St. Petersburg, The White House released a “joint statement” signed by the leaders of only 10 members, including the U.S., of the G20 plus Spain voicing “support efforts undertaken by the United States and other countries to reinforce the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons” and calling for “those who perpetrated these crimes (to be) held accountable.” The statement stopped short, however, of endorsing military action.

The signatories included the leaders of Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, as well as the U.S. Absent from the list, however, were all members of the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – as well as Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, and Germany.

The European Union (EU), a G20 member in its own right, also did not sign due to a lack of consensus among its membership.

Independent observers described the statement as a serious setback not only to Washington’s efforts to rally international support.

“It seems to have been a remarkable investment of American diplomatic energy not to have achieved the support of even a majority of the G20, and they tried to give the appearance of half plus one through sleight of hand,” noted Daniel Levy, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), who pointed to larger problems caused by the way the administration has acted over the Syria issue.

“Look at the institutions they’ve weakened in this process: the U.N. Security Council itself; the European Union by implicitly underlining its failure to gain consensus; the Arab League where the three most populous Arab states – Egypt, Iraq and Algeria – have all come out against military action; and even the G20 – all in order to achieve a statement that is far from an unequivocal endorsement of American military action,” he told IPS.

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), also suggested that the administration’s latest diplomatic move underscored its weakness on the issue.

“The lack of consensus within G20 is confirmation of what we already knew, which is that there is limited support for military action in Syria within the international community,” he said.

Back at home, advocates of military action, the most vocal of whom are pro-Israel activists and organisations worried that Congress’ failure to back up Obama’s threats against Syria will embolden Iran and its regional allies, are increasingly making the argument that both the president’s and Washington’s international credibility is at stake.

“This is not longer just about the conflict in Syria or even the Middle East,” wrote former Sens. Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl, co-chairmen of the American Internationalism Project of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-conservative think tank that played a leading role in championing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“It is about American credibility. Are we a country that our friends can trust and our enemies fear? Or are we perceived as a divided and dysfunctional superpower in retreat, whose words and warnings are no longer meaningful?” they asked in an op-ed entitled “Inaction on Syria Threatens U.S. Security” published by the Wall Street Journal Friday.

Failure to authorise a strike will be a “green light” for Iran to “speed toward nuclear weapons” and “confirm the worst fears of our ally, Israel, and moderate Arab states like Jordan that the U.S. cannot be relied upon to stand by its commitments. This will dramatically raise the risks of a regional war that could upend the global economy,” they stressed.

But others have argued that the credibility argument is overdrawn in this case.

“We heard this argument many, many times before, and always when the objective case for war was weak,” according to Stephen Walt, a prominent international relations expert at Harvard University. “To refrain from using force when vital interests are not at stake and when bombing could make things worse is not weakness; it is good sense.

“The United States has fought five wars since the Cold War ended and is using drones and special forces in several countries already,” he told IPS. “Nobody is going to question U.S. credibility when its interests are genuinely engaged and it has a clear objective in mind.”

Some liberal interventionists, notably Secretary of State John Kerry in his various public remarks, have also stressed the credibility argument, arguing that Washington’s failure to act could have profound implications for world order.

“For better or worse…” William Galston of the Brookings Institution argued in the Journal earlier this week, “the United States is the guarantor of the global order, which we took the lead in creating.

“Mr. Obama will need to convey this idea to the American people …from the Oval office,” he wrote.  “He must be prepared to go all-in to win what is shaping up as a tough fight on Capitol Hill. One thing is clear: A loss would shatter his presidency, and a lot more.”

But Kupchan said Obama’s failure to line up support from more G20 leaders suggested that the U.S.-created global order was no longer sustainable in any case.

“It’s clear confirmation of the degree to which there is a fundamental difference in geopolitical perspective between developed and emerging powers,” he told IPS.

“That the BRICS countries voted as a bloc is a sign of how difficult it’s going to be to fashion international consensus as global power continues to diffuse.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The United States is debating whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Above, Syrian rebel forces. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.

On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility is at stake, especially now that Secretary of State John Kerry has publicly endorsed the case that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad must have been responsible for the alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that was reported to have killed hundreds of people.

Just one year ago, Obama warned that the regime’s use of such weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game-changer” that would force Washington to reassess its policy of not providing direct military aid to rebels and of avoiding military action of its own.

After U.S. intelligence confirmed earlier this year that government forces had on several occasions used limited quantities of chemical weapons against insurgents, the administration said it would begin providing arms to opposition forces, although rebels complain that nothing has yet materialised.

The hawks have further argued that U.S. military action is also necessary to demonstrate that the most deadly use of chemical weapons since the 1988 Halabja massacre by Iraqi forces against the Kurdish population there – a use of which the US. was fully aware but did not denounce at the time – will not go unpunished.

Military action should be “sufficiently large that it would underscore the message that chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction simply cannot be used with impunity,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “The audience here is not just the Syrian government.”

While the hawks, whose position is strongly backed by the governments of Britain, France, Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel, clearly have the wind at their backs, the doves have not given up.

Remembering Iraq

Recalling the mistakes and distortions of U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, some argue that the administration is being too hasty in blaming the Syrian government. "The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends."
-- Eliot Cohen

If it waits until United Nations inspectors, who visited the site of the alleged attack Monday, complete their work, the United States could at least persuade other governments that Washington is not short-circuiting a multilateral process as it did in Iraq.

Many also note that military action could launch an escalation that Washington will not necessarily be able to control, as noted by a prominent neo-conservative hawk, Eliot Cohen, in Monday’s Washington Post.

“Chess players who think one move ahead usually lose; so do presidents who think they can launch a day or two of strikes and then walk away with a win,” wrote Cohen, who served as counsellor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends.”

“What if [Obama] hurls cruise missiles at a few key targets, and Assad does nothing and says, ‘I’m still winning.’ What do you then?” asked Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served for 16 years as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Do you automatically escalate and go up to a no-fly zone and the challenges that entails, and what then if that doesn’t get [Assad’s] attention?

“This is fraught with tar-babiness,” he told IPS in a reference to an African-American folk fable about how Br’er Rabbit becomes stuck to a doll made of tar. “You stick in your hand, and you can’t get it out, so you then you stick in your other hand, and pretty soon you’re all tangled up all this mess – and for what?”

“Certainly there are more vital interests in Iran than in Syria,” he added. “You can’t negotiate with Iran if you start bombing Syria,” he said, a point echoed by the head of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi.

“There is a real opportunity for successful diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue, but that opportunity will either be completely spoiled or undermined if the U.S. intervention in Syria puts the U.S. and Iran in direct combat with each other,” he told IPS. Humanitarian concerns and U.S. credibility should also be taken into account when considering intervention, he said.

Remembering Kosovo

Still, the likelihood of military action – almost certainly through the use of airpower since even the most aggressive hawks, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have ruled out the commitment of ground troops – is being increasingly taken for granted here.

Lingering questions include whether Washington will first ask the United Nations Security Council to approve military action, despite the strong belief here that Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter and arms supplier, and China would veto such a resolution.

“Every time we bypass the council for fear of a Russian or Chinese veto, we drive a stake into the heart of collective security,” noted Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Long-term, that’s not in our interest.”

But the hawks, both inside the administration and out, are urging Obama to follow the precedent of NATO’s air campaign in 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo War. In that case, President Bill Clinton ignored the U.N. and persuaded his NATO allies to endorse military intervention on humanitarian grounds.

The 78-day air war ultimately persuaded Yugoslav President Milosovic to withdraw his troops from most of Kosovo province, but not before NATO forces threatened to deploy ground troops, a threat that the Obama administration would very much like to avoid in the case of Syria.

While the administration is considered most likely to carry out “stand-off” strikes by cruise missiles launched from outside Syria’s territory to avoid its more formidable air-defence system and thus minimise the risk to U.S. pilots, there remains considerable debate as to what should be included in the target list.

Some hawks, including McCain and Graham, have called not only for Washington to bomb Syrian airfields and destroy its fleet of warplanes and helicopter and ballistic capabilities, but also to establish no-fly zones and safe areas for civilians and rebel forces to tilt the balance of power decisively against the Assad government. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, have urged the same.

But others oppose such far-reaching measures, noting that the armed opposition appears increasingly dominated by radical Islamists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that the aim of any military intervention should be not only to deter the future use of chemical weapons but also to prod Assad and the more moderate opposition forces into negotiations, as jointly proposed this spring by Moscow and Washington. In their view, any intervention should be more limited so as not to provoke Assad into escalating the conflict.

Child brides in rural Senegal at work. Marriage before the age of 18 is a generally common practice in Senegal. Credit: Issa Sikiti da Silva/IPS

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Aug 1 2013 (IPS)

Advocacy groups are urging for partnerships between governmental organisations and private sector businesses to better prevent child marriage and combat the economic, development and health problems it causes.

A recently released report by Rachel Vogelstein, a fellow at the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the non-partisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations, highlights strategic and moral reasons for U.S. involvement in the issue.

“Child marriages are a form of gender-based violence,” said Vogelstein at a discussion on her study on Wednesday. “It curtails education for young girls, which in turn stifles their economic progress.”

According to the United Nations, in 2011 almost 70 million women—or one in three women between the ages of 20 and 24—had been married under the age of 18. In South Asia, 46 percent of women aged 20 to 24 were married before 18 and 18 percent were married by age 15. India accounts for 40 percent of all child marriages worldwide.

“This is often just seen as the norm in many countries. That’s just how life has been,” Lakshmi Sundaram, global coordinator of a London-based advocacy group, Girls Not Brides, told IPS."Marrying your daughter off means you have one less mouth to feed."
-- Lakshmi Sundaram

He pointed to economic reasons for early marriages, noting, “In most countries there are dowry systems in place, and marrying your daughter off means you have one less mouth to feed.”

The majority of the 25 countries with the highest child marriage rates have fragile governments or face a high risk of natural disaster, such as Syria, Afghanistan and Niger. In Syrian refugee camps, there is evidence that girls are married off at a very young age.

“Marriage is viewed almost as a form of security,” Sundaram told IPS. “In places where there is insecurity or conflict, parents may actually feel the best thing they can do for their daughter is marry her off because they believe she will be safe.”

In actuality, the opposite is true. Girls married as teenagers in India reported three times as many incidences of rape than girls married as adults. Ninety-five percent of those girls did not know their husbands prior to marriage and 81 percent said their first sexual experience was forced, Vogelstein said during Wednesday’s talk.

According to the study, brides aged 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than brides in their twenties, while the baby of a teenage bride is 60 percent more likely to die in its first year than the child of a mother in her twenties.

“The marriages often have very strong power dynamics, which are controlled usually by the much older husbands,” Sundaram told IPS. “The girls are under huge pressure to prove their fertility, so they often become pregnant very young and very often.”

Tough solutions

All but four countries have a minimum age of legal marriage, ranging from 15 to 18. Several countries have a provision allowing younger children to be married with the consent of the parent.

According to the director of gender, population and development at the International Centre for Research on Women, Suzanne Petroni, such a provision makes preventing child marriage a difficult task.

“In the majority of these countries, you can get the consent of parents. They are the ones making the decision to have the daughter married off,” Petroni told IPS. “In most cases, it is not her decision at all.”

According to the study, in several countries the implementation of child marriage laws are violently resisted, leading several advocacy groups to suggest trying to change the culture of these societies rather than changing laws. Because many countries do not have a birth or marriage registrar set up, proving a girl is too young to be married, or is even married at all, is a challenge.

A strategic move

According to the study, eliminating child marriages offers economic and developmental benefits to both individual countries and the United States.

“The United States spends billions of dollars to reduce maternal child mortality, prevent the transmission of HIV, improve education attainment, stimulate economic growth, and promote the rule of law, and has vital interest in the stability of many countries where child marriage is pervasive,” stated the study.

The United States has typically combatted child marriage through smaller scale developmental efforts. In 2012, the Department of State required reporting on child marriage in its annual country reports on human rights practises. In March, as part of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress mandated that the United States develop a strategy to prevent child marriage globally.

The study called for the U.S. government to acknowledge that child marriage is a barrier to security and to encourage the efforts of other countries to tackle this issue internally.

“The U.S. government had adopted a recognition that reducing gaps that exist between men and women, and empowering women to lead, [are] the central core to effective development,” said Caren Grown, the senior coordinator of gender equality and women’s empowerment at the governmental organisation United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“We can’t achieve our other economic goals, whether it’s food security or a peaceful society, without understanding the harmful inequalities that disadvantage women. Child marriage is one of them.”

Susan Rice at the United Nations. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Jim Lobe and Thalif Deen
WASHINGTON/UNITED NATIONS, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

In a reshuffle of top foreign policy posts in his second term, U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday announced that his controversial and blunt-spoken U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, will replace Tom Donilon as his national security adviser.

He also announced that another longtime aide on the National Security Council staff who began working with Obama when he was still a freshman senator from Illinois, Samantha Power, will replace Rice as Washington’s U.N. envoy, a cabinet position."Power and Rice are smart, tough, and experienced. But both are firmly in the interventionist consensus." -- Harvard University’s Stephen Walt

The moves, which had been anticipated but whose precise timing was uncertain, are considered unlikely to signal major changes in U.S. policy, despite the fact that both Power and Rice have been associated with the more-interventionist tendencies within the Democratic Party.

“I don’t think this change in personnel marks a turning point in policy,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“From the get-go, foreign policy under Obama has been run from the (White House) Oval Office, and Obama’s brain trust has included primarily a small inner circle of folks that cut their teeth on the (2008 presidential) campaign. Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been part of that inner circle all along.”

“I see the move as a confident second-term president promoting people who will be more visible,” noted Heather Hurlburt, director of the National Security Network (NSN), a think tank considered close to the administration.

“Donilon’s great strength was his managerial skill and willingness to work behind the scenes. Rice’s public persona is one of her great strengths, and I’m sure the White House will use it.

“Power will be one of the people most knowledgeable about the UN that the U.S. has ever sent to represent us there, and that’s quite a statement about the U.S. commitment to that organisation’s potential,” she added, noting that Power’s knowledge is based on her years as a journalist and author covering the world body and some of its most controversial and difficult missions.

Late last year, Rice was considered Obama’s first choice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state but withdrew from consideration after Republicans accused her of deliberately misleading the public about events surrounding the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. personnel in last September in Benghazi.

She will be Obama’s third national security adviser. Unlike secretary of state or U.N. ambassador, the national security adviser is not subject to Senate confirmation.

Unlike Rice, Donilon, or Power, the first national security, Gen. James Jones (ret.), was never close to Obama and tended to see his work primarily as coordinating the advice of the other top national-security officials, notably the secretaries of defence and state and the director of national intelligence.

After two years, Donilon, Jones’ deputy and a Democratic political heavyweight, replaced him, moving quickly to concentrate foreign policy making in the White House and greatly increasing the size and workload of the NSC staff.

A top aide to Secretary of State Warren Christopher during President Bill Clinton’s first term, Donilon is given credit for a number of major strategic initiatives – most recently, promoting this week’s informal and potentially historic California summit between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Indeed, one prominent NSC historian, David Rothkopf, wrote on foreignpolicy.com Wednesday that his “greatest contribution was his strategic mindset” that led to “…a restoration of balance to the U.S. national security agenda, a move away from the conflict-dominated view of the years right after 9/11 to one that is more global and has room to consider opportunities, new alliances, and new challenges more effectively.”

If Donilon was more inclined to the more non-interventionist stance of his mentor, Christopher, Rice is best seen as the protégée of Clinton’s second-term and more-interventionist Madeleine Albright whom she has known since childhood and served as assistant secretary of state for African Affairs.

Haunted by Washington’s refusal to act during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (when she worked on Clinton’s NSC), Rice, as well as Power, has been a leading exponent of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the doctrine that the international community has a responsibility to intervene in order to prevent genocide or mass atrocities if the otherwise sovereign state is unwilling or unable to do so.

“Power and Rice are smart, tough, and experienced. But both are firmly in the interventionist consensus that has guided U.S. foreign policy for many years, and neither is going to go outside the mainstream on any controversial issues,” Stephen Walt, a prominent international-relations professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told IPS in an email message.
Citing R2P, both Rice and Power reportedly played an important role in persuading Obama to intervene in the civil war in Libya, although, significantly, Rice sided with Donilon against other cabinet officials and CIA director Gen. David Petraeus who recommended a limited military intervention on behalf of rebels in the Syrian civil war late last year, according to numerous published reports.

“Everyone knows there have been disagreements on the team, and the person who resolves them is Barack Hussein Obama. People debate this as if Obama had no opinions on these issues,” noted Hurlburt. “But second-term presidents evolve and get more active (in foreign policy). If that happens, that will be primarily because Obama wants to go there.”

One area in which there could be a major difference is managerial. While concentrating power in the White House, Donilon, a high-priced lawyer outside government, consistently ensured that relevant cabinet secretaries were continually consulted and their policy recommendations presented to the president.

Known for driving his staff particularly hard and making little secret of his unhappiness if in his judgement they failed to perform, he also maintained a deliberately low profile and a carefully calculated demeanour.

While a loyal team player – and the graceful manner in which she withdrew from consideration as secretary of state gained wide admiration and no doubt clinched her claim to her new post – Rice is flamboyant and impulsive by comparison, particularly in her preference for blunt, if colourful — sometimes even scatological — language, a habit that many of her U.N. colleagues found off-putting or difficult to get used to (see sidebar).

“She can be quite charming and likeable, and she is awfully smart,” CFR’s emeritus president Leslie Gelb wrote in the Daily Beast Wednesday. “And unlike Donilon, she often rushes to judgment, and then digs in. She’ll have to learn to count to 100, I mean 1000, before making up her mind, and meantime, listen to different views carefully.” He also noted that “she has a temper that needs tempering.”

Indeed, some sources who asked not to be named predicted that she faced major challenges in working out collegial relationships with Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry – both of whom are also new to their jobs and would be expected to make life difficult for her if they felt she was hogging the media spotlight or failing to consult adequately with their departments in formulating options for the president.

“No shrinking violet is she,” one insider told IPS.

In that respect, according to Rothkopf, she could be greatly aided by Donilon’s former deputy and Obama’s new chief of staff, Denis McDonough, a foreign policy wonk in his own right and one of the very few people who are considered as personally close to Obama as Rice herself.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.