By Arul Louis
NEW YORK, Jul 20 2015 (IPS)

The Vienna agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council acting in concert with Germany has the potential to remake international relations beyond the immediate goal of stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Courtesy of Arul Louis/ICFJ

Its impact could be felt at various levels, from United States engagement in the Middle East to the interaction of the competitive global powers, and from the economics of natural resources to the dynamics of Iranian society and politics.

President Barack Obama has invested an inordinate amount of political capital on the deal, challenging many in the United States political arena and Washington’s key allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia in hopes that a breakthrough on Iran would be his presidency’s international legacy along with his Cuba opening.

Obama is gambling on the nation’s war-weariness after the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that took a total toll of 6,855 casualties and, according to a Harvard researcher, is costing the nation at least $4 trillion. He presented the nation with a stark choice: War or Peace.

“There really are only two alternatives here,” he said, “either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically, through a negotiation, or it’s resolved through force, through war.”Even if Washington and Tehran don't recapture the closeness of the Pahlevi era, the U.S. will increase its options in the Middle East, a region posing a growing to the world threat from the Sunni-based Islamic State or ISIL.

Though the deal has been denounced by Republicans and some Democrats, and, earlier, the opponents had taken the unprecedented step of inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make their case before Congress, Obama expects to carry the day. Even if Congress votes against the agreement, Obama reckons the opposition will not be able to able to get the two-thirds majority to override his threatened veto.

Obama’s Iran legacy, if it works according to plan, will not have the impact of Richard Nixon’s opening to China, but it still could mark the end of 36 years of virulent hostilities. Even if Washington and Tehran don’t recapture the closeness of the Pahlevi era, the U.S. will increase its options in the Middle East, a region posing a growing to the world threat from the Sunni-based Islamic State or ISIL. Right now Washington is hamstrung by unsure Sunni allies in the region.

Already in Iraq, the U.S. and Iran have been working with different elements on parallel tracks against ISIL. Obama has been blamed for pulling out U.S. troops from Iraq, although it was largely in keeping with his predecessor George W. Bush’s timetable, and for failing to reach an agreement with Baghdad on stationing some troops beyond the pullout deadline. These have been mentioned as factors leading to the rise of ISIL.

Now, there is a chance for Obama to redeem himself through the cooperation of Iran, even if they will not go to the extent of a formal agreement.

In the other ISIL flashpoint to the west of Iraq, there seems to be implacable differences on Syria. Tehran stands firmly by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Washington considers the irreconcilable foe of peace in that civil war ravaged country. Bridging this gap even if by face-saving measures would be the true test of a diplomatic shift.

The Iran nuclear issue takes the inevitable colour of a Shia-Sunni conflict. In the first place, the unspoken impetus for Tehran’s nuclear ambitions was Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and the threat from its Sunni fundamentalists against Shias.

Now Pakistan’s stock will rise in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations as hedge, a Sunni-dominated nuclear power ranged against Iran, which they mistrust.

Add to this mix Israel, which has developed an unlikely alliance with Saudi Arabia. For Israel, the threat comes from fears of the millenarian trends among some Shia Muslims that could cancel out the insurance that Jerusalem, sacred to the Muslims, provides and Teheran’s venomous, ant-Semitic rhetoric.

But a more immediate issue for Israel is Tehran’s support for the Palestinian Hamas and the Lebanese Shia Hezbollah. The sanctions against Iran limited its potential financial and material backing for these organisations and the flow of funds after sanctions are lifted could boost Tehran’s adventurism, directly and through proxies, Israel fears.

On the global diplomatic front, the Iran deal is a break from the incessant U.N. Security Council squabbles that have hobbled it as issues like Ukraine, Syria, the South China Sea and assorted hotspots in Africa burn. Russia and China showed they could work intensively with the West. Moscow even earned plaudits from Obama for its role in facilitating the deal.

Russia and Iran share some common interests in places like Syria, Central Asia and the caucuses. An unbridled Tehran could more effectively cooperate with Moscow in these areas.

Economically, Russia, like other oil producers, may be hit by falling oil prices, but the diplomatic congruence and future arms sales could compensate.

For the European Union and China, the deal opens up business opportunities in a nation with tremendous economic potential along with lower oil prices.

Iran has the fourth largest known reserves of oil and its current production of 1.1 million barrels could soar to four million within a year. For most of the developing world, further reduction in oil prices will be a great help, even as it increases political and social pressures in some oil-producers.

The picture for India is mixed . It has been paying for Iranian oil imports in rupees while it has been exporting limited amounts of machinery and chemicals. The bilateral trade is in Iran’s favor and is estimated at about 14 billion dollars, with Indian imports at about 10 billion and exports at about 4 billion.

Now India may be able to buy more oil, but it will have to pay in rupees and its exports will have to compete with the rest of the world. With the prospects sanctions going away, India is already facing Tehran’s truculence in oil and gas and railway projects they had agreed on.

The Chabahar port project remains the strategic cornerstone of India’s ambitious engagement with Iran The port on the Gulf of Oman would give India access to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan.

Chabahar is also a counterweight to Beijing’s Gawadhar project in Pakistan that would provide another sea outlet for China, Afghanistan and Central Asian countries.

On the nuclear nonproliferation front, the Iranian agreement chalks up a small victory after North Korean blatantly developed nuclear weapons. The world has been unable to confront Pyongyang diplomatically or militarily because of its mercurial nature leadership that borders on the insane.

For the Iranians themselves, the deal could ease up their lives and bringing back some normalcy. The bigger question is how it would play in the dynamics of Iranian politics. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved the deal, but he has since expressed mistrust of the West in keeping its end of the bargain. That may be rein euphoria and send a message to the moderates.

Would the deal lead to a lessening of the paranoia among the religious and nationalist elements in Iran and in turn strengthen the moderates and push the present day heirs of the ancient Persian civilisation towards a relatively liberal modernity? If that were to happen Iran would have truly emerged from the shadows of international isolation.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Women are running some of the United States’ most prominent foreign policy focused think tanks, leading U.S. diplomatic initiatives, and reporting from the front lines of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones.

But there’s a dearth when it comes to women’s voices in U.S. media coverage of foreign policy issues, according to the founders of a new organisation that aims to amplify women’s voices in the media.“Those who say that they make an effort to include women but cannot find any are pushing a load of BS.” -- Suzanne Dimaggio

“There is a disparity between the number of women [and men] we see commenting on foreign policy issues,” said Foreign Policy Interrupted co-founder Elmira Bayrasli to a packed room of women (and a few men) Feb 4. at the Washington-based New America, a non-profit public policy institute and think tank.

While some well-known female commentators are called upon by major media outlets to “check the box,” added Bayrasli, “Every six months there’s still an uproar about ‘where are the women?’”

Absent or overshadowed?

According to data compiled by U.S. foreign policy analysts Tamara Coffman Wittes and Marc Lynch, 65 percent of last year’s Middle East events at six influential think tanks in Washington included no female speakers.

Women are also “systematically cited less than their male peers,” wrote Wittes and Lynch in a recent Washington Post op-ed discussing the gap between the considerable number of senior women in the field and their notable absence from public discourse.

With women comprising roughly half of the U.S. population, the question becomes: Is the dearth due to a lack of qualified women for media outlets to reach out to when covering foreign policy issues?

“Those who say that they make an effort to include women, but cannot find any are pushing a load of BS,” said Suzanne Dimaggio, who has been directing Track II diplomatic initiatives with several countries in the Middle East and Asia throughout her career.

“Today we see an ever-growing cadre of women with expertise on every aspect of foreign policy—from the traditional to the non-traditional and emerging issues,” Dimaggio told IPS during a telephone interview.

Bayrasli and co-founder Lauren Bohn—both commentators on international affairs—argue that women are underrepresented in media coverage of U.S. foreign policy because mainstream media has traditionally relied on male commentators and because women hold themselves to extremely high standards, which can hold them back.

“The reality is that what bookers, producers and editors know is a rolodex of white men and that needs to change, but we also need to help them change that,” she said.

“I do think there’s this sense [among women that what they send to editors] has got to be really, really good, and honestly there’s a point when the best is the enemy of the ho good,” added moderator and New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter, the director of policy planning at the State Department from 2009-11.

Beyond checking the box

Dimaggio, a leader in facilitating U.S.-Iran policy dialogues, has a long resume of achievements in her field. But she acknowledged that especially earlier in her career, there were occasions when her abilities were underestimated because she is a woman.

“It was assumed that I would take a secondary role and men were given the last word,” said Dimaggio, an expert dialogue practitioner who runs New America’s Iran programme from New York. “But that’s not to say that I accepted playing a secondary role.”

She added that if major media outlets overlook qualified women when seeking expert commentary on foreign policy issues they should be held accountable, but more needs to be done by women as well.

“This problem won’t be resolved by only pressing those in positions of power to include more women. That certainly is a big piece of this. But, we, as women, must [also] change our own behaviour,” said Dimaggio.

“Things are getting better, but we still have a long way to go,” she said.

While Foreign Policy Interrupted, though still in its launch phase, exists to help women increase and improve their media presence, at least one well-known U.S. media publication has meanwhile been actively incorporating more women into its overall operation.

In the last three years Foreign Policy Magazine, a division of the Graham Holdings company, has gone from having one to 11 female regular columnists—half of its regular roster of 22—and its editorial staff is roughly 50/50.

“We realised that the magazine needed to be better, that there were too many of the same voices, and that our publication, which covers the ‘big tent’ of foreign policy, would not be adequately representative if it didn’t include women’s voices,” Executive Editor Ben Pauker told IPS.

Although the magazine now features an equal balance of female and male columnists, the male columnists write more frequently than the women. That could be for a number of reasons.

“It’s a function of getting some of our new columnists, both male and female, up to speed,” said Pauker.

Pauker told IPS that the magazine’s equity initiative, which will extend beyond the gender issue, is still a work in progress, but said at least anecdotally the response from readers has been “enormously positive.”

“It just makes us a better publication,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Hillary Clinton "is positioning herself to the right of the (Barack) Obama administration on foreign policy issues,” the report notes. Credit: Brett Weinstein/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

Despite the public’s persistent war weariness, the U.S. defence budget – the world’s biggest by far – may be set to rise again, according to a new study released here this week by the Center for International Policy (CIP).

The 41-page study, “Something in the Air: ‘Isolationism,’ Defense Spending, and the U.S. Public Mood,” concludes that the current political moment appears similar to those between 1978 and 1982 and between 1998 to 2001 when defence spending spiked upwards after periods of substantial declines.Even if the defence budget does indeed increase over the next few years, it should not be taken as a popular mandate for military activism, particularly for protracted military commitments of large numbers of ground troops.

Like today, the then-incumbent presidents (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively) appeared politically weakened by domestic troubles; the foreign-policy debate was dominated by perceptions that the U.S. was failing to deal effectively with new challenges overseas; and Democratic incumbents in Congress facing re-election assumed more hawkish positions.

“Already the leading Democratic contender for the presidency is positioning herself to the right of the [Barack] Obama administration on foreign policy issues,” wrote the study’s author, Carl Conetta, in a reference to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “This will move media and expert discourse in a more hawkish direction.”

While these factors, as well as warnings by military leaders and their supporters in Congress of a “hollowing” of the country’s armed forces, are consistent with historical precedent, the public may still resist higher military budgets due to the slowness of the economic recovery, according to Conetta, a veteran defence analyst who heads CIP’s Project for Defence Alternatives.

But even if the defence budget does indeed increase over the next few years, it should not be taken as a popular mandate for military activism, particularly for protracted military commitments of large numbers of ground troops given the persistent public disillusionment with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Conetta. He noted that some 15 years elapsed between the end of the Vietnam War and the public’s rallying behind a major military operation: the first Gulf War in 1991.

The study, which includes an extensive analysis of polling data over the last few decades, as well as trends in defence spending, comes less than a month before mid-term Congressional elections. The Republicans, who have become markedly more hawkish than just a year ago when many of them opposed U.S. military retaliation for Syria’s use of chemical weapons, are expected to gain control of the Senate, as well as retain their majority in the House of Representatives.

It also comes as the Obama administration struggles to cope with a number of difficult foreign-policy challenges – most recently, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and, more spectacularly, the alarming gains by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria and its well-publicised brutality against minorities and western captives (notably, the beheadings of U.S. reporters and aid workers) — against which a reluctant president has felt compelled to react with air strikes and the dispatch of hundreds of U.S. advisers.

In addition, the growing anxiety about the Ebola pandemic in West Africa and its possible spread here have contributed to an apparent decline in public confidence in Obama’s leadership.

These events have emboldened neo-conservatives and other hawks – mostly Republicans – who have long criticised Obama for “leading from behind”, weakness, and “appeasement” in dealing with alleged adversaries, and even “isolationism” – to amplify those charges in advance of the November elections.

They have also encouraged former senior military officers, especially those employed by big military contractors, to call for restoring recent cuts in defence.

While defence spending is currently down about 21.5 percent in real terms from its 2008 high of nearly 800 billion dollars, it still accounts for almost 40 percent of global military spending and four percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), about twice the country average for the rest of the world’s nations.

Polls have suggested for decades that the public is conflicted about Washington’s global role: on the one hand, enduring majorities have long supported the notion that the U.S. should be the world’s leading military power; on the other hand, strong majorities have also strongly rejected the role of “world’s policeman”, preferring instead a co-operative, multilateral approach to foreign-policy issues in which military power and unilateral action should be used only as a “last resort”.

According to Conetta, these views are not mutually contradictory and have been relatively consistent over time. “(T)he public views military superiority as a deterrent and an insurance policy, not a blank check for military activism,” Conetta noted.

Detailed polling conducted over many years by the Pew Research Center, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Gallup, among others, have shown that the U.S. public will reliably rally in support of a forceful response to violent attacks on citizens or perceived U.S. vital interests and, at least theoretically, in cases of mass killings or genocide.

On the other hand, they have shown that the public generally opposes intervention in most third-party inter-state or civil wars. And despite initial – but fast-waning — enthusiasm for “regime change” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the public has come to oppose such efforts or “armed nation-building”, especially if they are conducted unilaterally, according to Conetta.

“Current support for bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria is consistent with (those) limits,” his study noted, adding that that support is almost certain to waver “if the mission grows or fails to show real progress.”

In contrast to the public’s views, however, foreign-policy elites have consistently expressed support for U.S. military dominance, or “primacy,” and greater military activism, according to Conetta. This has created a gap between the public and the national leadership which, in the post-Cold War era, narrowed only in the years immediately following the first Gulf War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but which has since grown wider than ever in the past decade, despite the strong support for U.S. attacks on ISIL.

While the most recent polling shows a plurality in favour of continuing to reduce Pentagon spending, according to the study, “this may soon change”, especially in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, given the ease with which hawkish political actors have historically framed public debate, according to the study.

“A common stratagem is to frame discussion of budget issues in terms of averting a ‘hollow military’. Another is to use Second World War metaphors – references to Hitler, Munich, and isolationism – to frame current security challenges and higher levels of defense spending,” Conetta wrote.

Such themes, he added, “are now fully in play – casting (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin as Hitler, warning against a replay of “Munich-like appeasement, and tarring non-interventionary sentiment as ‘isolationist’.”

Still, it’s not certain they will prevail given the persistent economic worries of most U.S. voters and if the electorate perceives the foreign-policy elite as overreaching again, as they have in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Jeoffrey Keever is bathed in blue light as he writes the status of each aircraft on the status board in the Carrier Air Traffic Controller Center aboard the USS John F Kennedy (CV 67) during flight operations on April 15, 2005. Credit: public domain

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 15 2014 (IPS)

Despite elite concerns about growing “isolationism” in the U.S. electorate, nearly six in 10 citizens believe Washington should “take an active part in world affairs,” according to the latest in a biennial series of major surveys of U.S. foreign-policy attitudes.

Nonetheless, the number of citizens who believe that the U.S. should “stay out of world affairs” is clearly on the rise, according to the survey, which was conducted in May by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and released here Monday.It’s clear that Americans are fatigued by a decade of war, but describing them as isolationist is misleading." -- Chicago Council President Ivo Daalder

Forty-one percent – the highest percentage since World War II — of the more than 2,000 adults polled chose the “stay-out” option, including 40 percent of self-identified Republicans and 48 percent of independents.

“For the first time ever, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the U.S. should stay out of world affairs,” said Dina Smeltz, the Council’s chief pollster and co-author of an accompanying report, “Foreign Policy in the Age of Retrenchment”. She noted that the proportion of Republicans who say they want the U.S. to stay out of world affairs has nearly doubled since 2006.

Nonetheless, her co-author, Council president Ivo Daalder, insisted that the public was not turning away from global engagement. “It’s clear that Americans are fatigued by a decade of war, but describing them as isolationist is misleading,” he said.

“They understand that we live in a dangerous world and that our safety and security will at times require a resort to arms. When that clearly is the case, Americans will support using force,” according to Daalder, who served U.S. ambassador to NATO during President Barack Obama’s first term.

Indeed, the survey suggested the public accords a high priority to military power.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) said they believed current defence spending – which makes up almost 40 percent of the world’s total military expenditures – should remain the same or be increased, and nearly six in 10 (71 percent) said they want to maintain or increase the number of as many long-term U.S. bases overseas as there are now, the highest level ever recorded since the Council first asked the question in 1974.

More than half (52 percent) said “maintaining U.S. superior military power” was a “very important” foreign policy goal – lower than the 68 percent who took that position in 2002, but on a par with the findings of the mid-1990’s.

In addition, 69 percent said they would favour military action, including the use of U.S. troops, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, although support for military engagement was considerably less strong (around 45 percent) for other specific cases, such as defending Israel or South Korea against attack or even the Baltic states – despite their NATO membership — against a Russian invasion.

In other findings, the Council’s survey, which has long been considered among the most authoritative on U.S. foreign policy attitudes, found that, by a margin of more than three to one (77 to 23 percent), respondents believe that economic power is more important than military power; and that public support for economic globalisation – particularly among Democrats – has reached a record high.

It also found that that about four in 10 respondents believe China poses a “critical threat” to the U.S. That was down substantially from the mid-50-percent range that prevailed during the 1990s until 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

At the same time, anti-Russian sentiment has returned to Cold-War levels, according to Daalder, who noted the poll was conducted when Russian actions against Crimea dominated the headlines.

The new survey’s release comes amidst renewed concerns here over the threat posed by Islamist extremism, as represented by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) whose sweep from its stronghold in eastern Syria into central and northern Iraq earlier this summer triggered the first direct intervention by U.S. military forces in Iraq since 2011.

Several major polls released over the last two weeks – and especially following the video-taped beheadings by ISIS of two U.S. reporters — have shown strong public support for U.S. air strikes against ISIS, particularly among Republicans who, as the Council’s survey demonstrated, had previously appeared increasingly divided between its dominant interventionist wing and an ascendant libertarian faction led by Kentucky Sen. Ron Paul.

But the current rallying behind military action may be short-lived, according to Daalder. “It would be a mistake to think that the current public mood will last forever,” he cautioned. “That support [for military action] is highly conditional … on success.”

Nonetheless, the Council’s survey found strong support for air strikes against alleged terrorists already in May when respondents were interviewed.

Seven in 10 respondents said they supported air strikes against terrorist training camps and other facilities, as well as the assassination of terrorist leaders. And 56 percent said they supported attacks by U.S. ground troops against terrorist targets.

The notion that the public has become increasingly isolationist has been stoked by a series of surveys over the past year, notably a Pew Research Center poll from last year that, for the first time, found a majority (52 percent) of respondents who agreed with the proposition that “the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best then can on their own.”

But that finding was not surprising to Steven Kull, long-time director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), who sees it as an expression of public frustration with a “leadership [that] is more invested in American [global dominance] than most Americans are,” especially in the wake of Washington’s experience in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It may also help explain the sharp rise in the percentage of Republicans who now believe the U.S. should “stay out of world affairs.”

In 2007, 85 percent and 73 percent of Republicans said the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, were worth fighting. Seven years later, the respective percentages have fallen to 34 percent and 40 percent. Independents and Democrats, by contrast, have been consistently more sceptical about both wars.

The Council poll also found a more general convergence in foreign-policy views between members of the two parties, particularly with respect to their approaches to China, Iran, and Syria, although Republicans tended to be more hawkish on the use of force, while Democrats were more likely to favour more U.S. support for the U.N. and peacekeeping activities.

The sharpest partisan differences, on the other hand, were on immigration and U.S. policy in the Middle East, with Republicans consistently showing more support for Israel.

Asked to choose among 18 possible “critical threats” against the U.S., cyber-warfare was cited most often (69 percent), followed by “international terrorism” (63 percent), “the possibility of unfriendly countries becoming nuclear powers” (50 percent), and “Iran’s nuclear program” (58 percent).

Among 15 possible “very important” foreign-policy goals, about three of four respondents cited protecting U.S. jobs, reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

“Helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations” was the least favoured; only 17 percent of respondents cited that as a “very important goal.” That was half the level recorded in 2002 — after Washington succeeded in ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan and just before its invasion of Iraq.

Asked what circumstances might justify using U.S. troops abroad, 71 percent of respondents cited “to deal with humanitarian crises” and “to stop a government from committing genocide and killing large numbers of its own people.” Sixty-nine percent cited “to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” Fifty-four percent cited “to ensure the oil supply.”

Strengthening the United Nations has declined as a “very important goal” for U.S. foreign policy from a high of 57 percent in 2002 to 37 percent in this year’s survey. Half of Democrats rated it as a “very important goal,” but only 27 percent of Republicans agreed.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

National Security Adviser Susan Rice was interrupted by a protester who shouted “End the siege on Gaza." Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2014 (IPS)

Pro-Israel activists assembled a huge crowd and a long list of congressional leaders and diplomats to declare their unconditional support for Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip on Monday, largely downplaying  tensions between Jerusalem and Washington.

Key congressional figures from both the Republican and Democratic Parties echoed similar views: that Israel was exercising its inherent right of self-defence, that the entire blame for the hostilities lies with Hamas, and reminding the audience, in a thinly veiled message to U.S. President Barack Obama, that Hamas is backed by Iran.Many of the speakers brought up Iranian sponsorship of Hamas, despite the fact that the relationship between them splintered after Hamas declared its support for the rebels in Syria.

Obama was represented at the event here, dubbed the National Leadership Assembly for Israel, by his national security adviser, Susan Rice.

Her address was interrupted by a protester, Tighe Berry, who shouted “End the siege on Gaza,” and held up a sign with the same words. Berry was joined by a handful of protesters outside the building from the pro-peace activist group, Code Pink.

After the protester was removed by force, Rice delivered the White House view that a ceasefire was of the utmost urgency in Gaza and Israel.

“The United States supports an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire,” Rice said. “That humanitarian ceasefire should lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities based on the agreement of November 2012.”

That statement was distinct from the Israeli stance and that of almost all of the speakers at this event. Although Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire several weeks ago along similar lines, it is now insisting on first eliminating any tunnels in Gaza which lead into Israel and taking steps to disarm Hamas before halting its operations.

Robert Sugarman, the chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which spearheaded this gathering, set the tone with his opening remarks to the overflow crowd.

“We must continue to support the decisions of the government [of Israel], whatever our personal views may be,” Sugarman said. “And we must continue to urge our government to support [the decisions of the Israeli government] as well.”

While most of the speakers did not state any direct opposition to the Obama administration’s policy, virtually all of them stressed the view that Hamas must be disarmed and that the Netanyahu government must have unqualified U.S. support.

John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and one of President Obama’s leading political opponents, came closest to squarely criticising the president, by tying the crisis in Gaza to Iran.

“We will continue to push this administration to address root cause of conflict in the Middle East,” Boehner said. “What we’re seeing in Gaza is a direct result of Iran sponsored terrorism in the region. This is part of Iran’s long history of providing weapons to Gaza-based terror organizations, which must come to an end. Israel’s enemies are our enemies. As long as I’m Speaker, this will be our cause.”

Many of the speakers brought up Iranian sponsorship of Hamas, despite the fact that the relationship between them splintered after Hamas declared its support for the rebels in Syria, fighting against Iran’s key ally in the region, Bashar al-Assad.

Nonetheless, for many of the speakers, the connection provided a bridge to connect the fighting in Gaza to Congress’ scepticism about diplomacy with Iran over the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme.

But ongoing tensions between the Obama administration and the government of Israel inevitably made their way into the room.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Dermer tried to balance a conciliatory tone with Israel’s determination to continue its operations in Gaza despite calls from the United States and most of the international community for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

“Israel has uncovered dozens of tunnels whose sole purpose is to facilitate attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel will continue to destroy these tunnels and I’m sure the Obama administration understands this,” Dermer said.

“Everyone understands that leaving these tunnels is like seizing 10,000 missiles and handing them back to Hamas. That is not going to happen. We will not stop until that job is done. Israel believes that a sustainable solution is one where Gaza is demilitarized, rockets are removed, and the tunnels destroyed so Hamas cannot rearm in another year or two. We appreciate that all U.S. leaders have supported us.”

But Dermer also delivered a message of moderate conciliation in the wake of very harsh criticism in Israel of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry after the alleged text of a ceasefire proposal from Kerry was leaked to the Israeli media.

“I am speaking now for my prime minister,” Dermer said. “The criticism of Secretary Kerry for his good faith efforts to advance a ceasefire is unwarranted. We look forward to working with the United States to advance goal of a ceasefire that is durable.”

Rice also addressed the criticism of Kerry. “We’ve been dismayed by some press reports in Israel mischaracterising [Secretary Kerry’s] efforts. We know these misleading reports have raised concerns here at home as well.

“The reality is that John Kerry, on behalf of the United States, has been working with Israel every step of the way to support our shared interests. Both in public and private, we have strongly supported Israel’s right to defend itself. We will continue to do so and continue to set the record straight when anyone distorts facts.”

Rice’s defence of Kerry did not seem to ruffle many feathers in the audience. But the next day, a new controversy arose in Israel when several Israeli radio stations reported on a leaked transcript of a phone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. Israel’s Channel 1 reported that Obama “behaved in a rude, condescending and hostile manner” toward Netanyahu in the call.

Both the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office flatly denied the reports.

“[It is] shocking and disappointing [that] someone would sink to misrepresenting a private conversation between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister in fabrications to the Israeli press,” said an official statement from the Prime Minister’s Twitter account.

Identical language was employed by the United States National Security Council over their own Twitter account. “The…report is totally false,” added White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

Editing by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at plitnickm@gmail.com

While Republicans and other right-wingers claim that President Barack Obama has inflicted unprecedented damage on Washington’s global reputation, a major new global survey suggests that the image of the U.S. remains generally positive.

The survey, which was based on nearly 50,000 interviews of respondents in 44 countries, found that the U.S. remains substantially more popular than China, widely considered Washington nearest geopolitical rival, in every major region except the Middle East.

A global median of 65 percent respondents said they held a positive view about the U.S., with majorities in 30 of 43 nations (not including the U.S. itself) expressing a favourable opinion.

By contrast, a median of 49 percent said they felt positively about China, while 55 percent said they had an unfavourable view of the Asian giant. The most negative opinions were expressed in Europe and among some of Asia’s closest neighbours, particularly those which are contesting Beijing’s increasingly assertive territorial claims.

As for Obama himself, the first U.S. African-American president remains broadly popular, with a median approval rating of 56 percent – about 15 percentage points higher than in the U.S. itself — with half or more of the public in 28 of the 44 countries expressing confidence that he will “do the right thing” in world affairs.

But, like the U.S. itself, Obama’s image remains poorest in Arab countries, Turkey, and Pakistan. By contrast, Obama’s approval ratings climbed some 10 percentage points (to 71 percent) in Israel between 2013 and 2014.

Indeed, Israel was the only country of 21 nations surveyed in 2009, when he became president and expectations for his tenure were highest around the world, where Obama’s approval ratings improved over the five-year period.

The latest survey, however, also found major plunges in his popularity in Germany and Brazil, compared to 2013, which Pew analysts attributed to revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting major spying operations on the phone conversations of the two countries’ leaders.

It also found a sharp drop in positive assessments of Obama in Russia – down to only 15 percent of respondents – which Pew said was most likely related to the sharp uptick in bilateral tensions over ongoing crisis over Ukraine and Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

The Pew poll, which was conducted between mid-March and early June, is the latest in an annual series that the organisation’s “Global Attitudes Project” has carried out since 2002. The surveys have covered public opinion on a broad range of international issues in as few as nine and as many as 47 each year over that period.

The survey is quite comprehensive in scope, and its results are released in instalments over the summer. Last week, for example, Pew released findings regarding Russia’s global image, which, according to the survey, had suffered in every region of the world over the past year, particularly in Europe and the U.S. where nearly three in four respondents reported unfavourable views of Moscow.

The 44 countries polled in the latest survey, for which full results will be released in stages over the coming weeks and months, included nine European countries – France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, the UK, and Ukraine; seven countries in the Greater Middle East – Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey; and 11 Asian nations – Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.

In Latin America, the survey included Argentina, Brazil. Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela; while seven sub-Saharan countries were surveyed – Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The U.S. itself was included in the survey.

In addition to comparing perceptions and images of the U.S. and China, the latest showed focused on international reaction to disclosures by former NSA employee Edward Snowden about Washington’s use of electronic surveillance of foreign leaders and citizens, as well as Washington’s reliance on drone aircraft to kill alleged terrorists in foreign countries.

The survey found strong opposition nearly across the board – except in the U.S. itself — to both activities, although it also found little evidence in most countries that they had significantly harmed Washington’s image.

In 37 of the 44 countries, half or more of respondents said they disapproved of drones strikes against suspected terrorists. In 26 countries, more than seven of 10 respondents said they opposed the practice.

As important, perhaps, the survey found that opposition to drones strikes has grown steadily – and significantly in a number of countries, particularly Senegal, Uganda, France, Germany, the Philippines, Mexico, Japan, and even within the U.S. itself – compared to 2013, when Pew asked the same question.

Overall, opposition was found to be strongest in Latin America, the Greater Middle East, Greece, Senegal, Spain, and Japan. On the other hand, pluralities and majorities in Israel, the U.S., Nigeria, and Kenya said they approved of Washington’s use of drone strikes.

As to the NSA’s monitoring activities, majorities in most countries said they approved of efforts to spy on terrorists. At the same time, majorities in nearly all of the countries said they opposed U.S. monitoring of emails and phone calls of foreign leaders, and particularly average citizens. That latter sentiment was particularly strong in Greece, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, according to the survey.

On China’s image, pluralities or majorities in all Latin American and sub-Saharan African countries covered by the survey held positive views. In other regions, however, impressions were far more mixed.

Majorities in the U.S., France, Spain, Poland, Germany, and Italy held said their overall views were negative, while in Ukraine and Russia, nearly two thirds of respondents said they had a positive image of China. The Greater Middle East was similarly split, with the most positive views found in Tunisia and Palestine, while Jordan and Turkey were strongly negative.

Majorities in six of the 10 Asian countries (not including China itself) of up to 78 percent (Pakistan) expressed favourable views, while respondents in the three countries with which China has ongoing maritime disputes – Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan – were strongly negative. In India, where the land border with China remains in contention, a plurality of respondents voiced negative view of their northern neighbour.

The survey found a growing belief — compared to 2008 when Pew asked the same question — that China will eventually replace the U.S. as the world’s greatest superpower or has already done so.

A global median of 49 percent of respondents agreed with that proposition, compared to 32 percent who disagreed. In 2008, just before the global financial crisis that broke out with the collapse of the U.S. investment firm Lehman Brothers, the split was 41 percent who agreed that China would surpass the U.S. and 39 percent who disagreed.

The latest poll found that the view that Beijing will indeed replace Washington as the pre-eminent global power was strongest in Europe (60 percent) and weakest in Asia (42 percent).

The poll also found significant generation gaps on several issues. Younger respondents were found to hold significantly more favourable views of the U.S. than their older fellow-citizens in more than half of the countries, particularly in Asia (including China), Latin America, and Africa.

Similarly, younger respondents also held significantly more favourable views of China than their older counterparts, particularly in Western Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

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

The events unraveling in the Middle East have proved that the vaunted “Arab Spring” has turned into a searing summer of wildfires exploding unpredictably in diverse Islamic fronts without competent firemen to hose down the unmanageable conflagration.

It confirms that Washington has lost its grip on managing and/or directing global politics according to its agenda.The world is lurching from crisis to crisis because U.S.-led interventions are making bad situations worse.

Global events spinning out of its control is another sign of declining U.S. power. Its shrinking power has manifested in two main ways.

On the one hand, the U.S. has lost its way in the flowery rhetoric of President Obama. His grandstanding speech at Cairo University has ended in producing two extremes in Egypt : 1. the democracy of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Mohammed Morsi and 2. the military coup that overthrew the Morsi government elected by Egyptians.

Both situations have placed Washington in a dilemma: it could  not act against  the democratically elected government of Morsi nor could it act against the illegal  coup of Gen. Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Action against Morsi would have been condemned as betraying Washington’s commitment to democratic principles.

And action against Sisi would have been against U.S. self-interests. Its power and options are so limited that it is left watching while Egypt slides into virtual chaos.

On the other hand, and more damagingly, the U.S. is sinking in a bottomless debt hole running into trillions, inhibiting its power to act as  freely as it did in its hegemonic days.

In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that the Iraqi war has cost three trillion dollars. Quoting Prof. Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard University, it said that “if anything, it [that number] is too low”.

Mark Thompson of Time reported that the real cost of the war on terror, since 9/11 ( including the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) is five trillion dollars. And counting.

A report by Brown University’s Watson Institute of International Studies put the total deaths “at an “extremely conservative estimate” to be 225,000 with 365,000 wounded.

These grim statistics lead to the ineluctable  question: after investing human capital, money and material, what has the U.S. got in return – other than an incurable cancer eating into its body politic?

Its advertised role in Iraq was to restore democracy and stabilise the divided nation. The strategy was to train and equip an Iraqi force to take on the responsibilities after the U.S. leaves Iraq.

According to estimates, the U.S. invested 25 billion dollars in building up the Iraqi forces alone. But when the armed forces of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) / Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) attacked Mosul and Tikrit the American-trained Iraqi soldiers shed their military uniforms and fled.

Having withdrawn earlier, President Obama is dithering  not knowing whether to send troops again or not. Unable to face the reality of the total failure of U.S. policy, President Obama and the State Department are blaming Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister who was handpicked and planted in Baghdad by Washington as their man.

It’s Vietnam all over again.

Planting a Shiite Prime Minister in the midst of Sunnis is like planting a Roman Catholic Din Diem in a majority Buddhist country, assuming that he was the answer to the deteriorating situation in Vietnam.

But the U.S. cure was worse  than the Vietnamese disease. In the end CIA moved in swiftly to assassinate him because their solution proved to the problem.

With a few exceptions, the failure of Big  Powers to fix internal affairs of other troubled nations has been a recurring feature. Big Powers assume that they know the answer and when their interventions fail they blame the victims of their misguided meddlesome politics.

Right now Washington is blaming Maliki for the rise ISIS forces advancing  towards Baghdad.

In the Middle East, in particular, the interventions had undoubtedly exacerbated the ground situation, leading to a post-interventionist period of chaos.

Eventually, the burden of restoring  normalcy falls in the laps of local regimes taking over from the foreign interventionists.

The legacy of the failed policies of the interventionists gathers a momentum of its own, adding to the burdens of the victims of interventionists.

The unbearable part of the post-interventionist period is the callous disregard of the interventionists for the consequences they leave behind.

At this point they disown total responsibility and gang up to accuse the victims of their follies, as if they had no hand in it. They pretend as if they have been the misunderstood do-gooders who were not allowed to fulfill their constructive role.

This is the ruse they adopt in the post-interventionist phase to absolve themselves and divert attention away from their responsibilities arising from misguided roles. They come in on the principle  of Responsibility to Protect.

When they leave there is none to take on the “Responsibility for the Destruction and Chaos” they leave behind. Overnight they turn into Pontius Pilates passing  the buck to victims of their destruction.

This washing  of  hands, coupled with the tactic of blaming their victims, is absolutely hypocritical and counterproductive for their own domestic stability and that of the world at large.

Washington’s prescriptions for global cures are no better than the blankets offered to the Native American Indians – the blankets were infected with smallpox to wipe out the helpless Indians.

These days they don’t offer infected blankets to their helpless victims. These days they send drones to wipe out those human beings they don’t like. It’s the same old death-dealing policy of human extermination but with different tools.

The world is lurching  from crisis to crisis because the U.S.-led interventions are making bad situations worse.

*H.L.D. Mahindapala is a senior Sri Lankan journalist residing in Australia.

U.S. soldiers in Basra, Iraq. Credit: PEOSoldier/CC-BY-2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 21 2014 (IPS)

Despite their ubiquity on television talk shows and newspaper op-ed pages, neo-conservatives and other hawks who propelled the U.S. into war in Iraq 11 years ago are falling short in their efforts to persuade the public and Congress that Washington needs to return.

Indeed, in contrast to the uncritical position taken by virtually all of the country’s media in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, a number of mainstream outlets are openly questioning the advice now being dispensed by the hawks about what to do about the dramatic advances by radical Sunni Islamists across northern and central Iraq over the last ten days.

The most stunning example – if, for no other reason that it took place on the hawks’ favourite news channel – came this week when Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly introduced former Vice President Dick Cheney as “the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place.”

“It’s a lonely job being an interventionist these days.” -- Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank
“You said (former Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” she said. “You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the (Sunni) insurgency was in the last throes, back in 2005. And you said after our intervention that extremists would have to ‘rethink their strategy of jihad.’ Now, with almost one trillion dollars spend there, with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say, ‘You were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many’?”

“Well,” Cheney, who had just co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with his daughter, Liz Cheney, in which they had used the same phrase to describe President Barack Obama’s policy, replied. “I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan – uh, Megyn.”

Similarly, the normally staid and respectful New York Times published what could only be described as a mocking profile of Bush’s former U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, for his tirades against Obama’s policies. The article referred to the “homecoming week for the Bush administration” featuring a “cavalcade of neoconservatives newly emerged on cable television and in hawkish policy seminars to say ‘We told you so’ on Iraq.”

And when Republican Sen. John McCain, perhaps the strongest voice in Congress for intervention in Syria, called on the Senate floor for “immediate action” against the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to prevent their further advance toward Baghdad, Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank asked simply, “When John McCain makes a case for war, does anyone hear him?”

Indeed, the scepticism that has greeted the Iraq war hawks over the past week has been so strong that Michael Rubin, a colleague of Bolton’s at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – the neo-conservative think tank that played a leading role in both planning and cheerleading the 2003 invasion — felt compelled to complain about “Media McCarthyites” who are allegedly stifling legitimate policy debate.

But, as Milbank pointed out, “It’s a lonely job being an interventionist these days.” Polls over the past several years have consistently shown a public that is more than war-weary. Disillusionment has grown not only with Washington’s military interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but also with the effectiveness of U.S. military power in general.

A poll conducted by Ipsos/Reuters last week found that 55 percent of respondents opposed U.S. military intervention of any kind, while only 20 percent supported it, and that there was little difference between self-identified Republicans and Democrats.

Those trends have clearly damaged the political standing and credibility of the hawks, especially those – such as Cheney, Bolton, former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol – who played such prominent roles in promoting the Iraq war and are now calling for renewed intervention, at least in the form of air strikes, if not re-introducing U.S. combat forces.

Their diminished influence was made clear already nine months ago when they failed to rally lawmakers – even most Republicans – behind air strikes against military and other government targets in Syria after Obama accused Damascus of carrying out a chemical-weapons attack that killed hundreds of civilians.

The hawks now face a similar problem on Iraq. Thus far, even the Republican leadership in Congress appears satisfied with the steps announced by Obama Thursday – enhanced aerial surveillance by U.S. drones and aircraft and the dispatch of up to 300 military advisers to help reverse ISIL’s advance, possibly in preparation for air strikes against targets deemed threatening to U.S. national-security interests.

Washington is also pressing Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, whom virtually all observers here blame for systematically alienating Iraq’s Sunni population, to renounce a third term or agree to share power in a way that can swing major sectors in the Sunni opposition to the government’s side.

While most Iraq specialists here have insisted that air strikes or any additional U.S. military commitment be conditioned on Maliki’s agreement to these terms, as well as a major diplomatic effort designed to enlist the help of Iraq’s neighbours – most importantly Iran and Saudi Arabia – in stabilising the country, the hawks have argued that Washington lacks the military leverage (meaning tens of thousands of U.S. troops) to bring about such a solution.

For this, they blame Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in 2011 after the Iraqi parliament declined to act on a deeply unpopular Status of Forces agreement (SOFA) that would have provided legal immunity to any remaining U.S. forces.

Indeed, consistent with their more general efforts at depicting Obama’s foreign policy as one of weakness and retreat, the hawks have focused most of their commentary on the withdrawal decision as the cause of the current crisis – as opposed to their own responsibility for the 2003 invasion and its consequences, including the destruction of the Iraqi state and the rise of sectarianism – than on what the U.S. should do now in the face of ISIL’s offensive.

Israel-centred neo-conservatives are especially worried about the administration’s interest in engaging Iran on Iraq, a development that began last week with a high-level – albeit brief – meeting alongside ongoing international talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

When a prominent Republican hawk, Sen. Lindsey Graham, endorsed the notion that Tehran, which, like Washington, has supported the Maliki government, could play a key role in dealing with ISIL – thus giving the administration political cover for pursuing the option – neo-conservatives objected vehemently.

“The idea that the United States, a nation bent on defending democracy and safeguarding stability, shares a common interest with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a revolutionary theocracy that is the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism in the world, is as fanciful a notion that Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler could work together for the good of Europe,” wrote neo-conservatives Michael Doran, a top Bush Middle East aide, and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the Washington Post.

That theme was picked up by the Cheneys who wrote that “only a fool” would engage Iran on Iraq, ignoring the “reality” – as former Secretary of State James Baker (and Dick Cheney’s colleague in the Bush I administration) – put it, “that Iran is already the most influential external player in Iraq and so any effort without Iranian participation will likely fail.”

Of course, one of the many unintended consequences of the 2003 invasion and the Shi’a ascendancy during the U.S. occupation was to move Iraq much closer to Iran.

(END)

Amidst a roiling and mostly partisan debate over Washington’s global role, a survey released here Thursday suggests that President Barack Obama’s preference for relative restraint and multilateral – over unilateral – action very much reflects the mood of the voting public.

The survey, which was conducted by prominent pollsters for both major political parties, confirmed a decade-long trend in favour of reducing active U.S. involvement in global affairs and focusing more on domestic issues.“It’s not that ‘leadership’ is seen as a negative term, but what people object to is putting the U.S. out front while others are hanging back.” -- Steven Kull

At the same time, however, it found strong support for working cooperatively with other countries to address international issues, including and especially through the United Nations about which, remarkably, twice as many respondents (59 percent) said they felt favourably than they felt about the U.S. Congress (29 percent).

Indeed, a whopping 86 percent of the 800 voters contacted randomly by the poll said that it was either “very” (61 percent) or “somewhat” (25 percent) important “for the United States to maintain an active role within the United Nations.”

“This not about apathy to foreign policy or assistance – to the contrary, the poll shows voters feel a strong, vested interest in global affairs,” said Peter Yeo, executive director of the Better World Campaign, which commissioned the survey.

The survey, which was conducted in mid-April as the crisis over Crimea and Ukraine dominated the news, comes amidst strong criticism of Obama by neo-conservatives and other hawks over what they allege is his passivity in reacting to Russian aggression, as well as China’s assertion of territorial claims in the East and South China seas and advances by government forces against western- and Gulf Arab-backed rebels in Syria, among other presumed setbacks.

In their view, Obama’s restraint, or what they increasingly call “retreat”, has fed “isolationist” tendencies that have grown steadily stronger as a result of the continuing effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure to achieve “victories” – attributed largely to Obama’s lack of political will – in Bush-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the administration has angrily rejected these charges, noting, for example, that it has upheld all of Washington’s treaty commitments; that it is deeply engaged in rallying regional and international opposition to moves by Russia and China; and that it is Republican hawks who, for example, have slashed foreign aid, attacked the U.N. and other multilateral forums, and promoted unilateral military measures that proved ineffective, if not counter-productive, especially during the Bush years.

The hawks have tried to conflate “military restraint with isolationism, but that’s really a ploy to tar people who have a more critical stance because of the experience of the past 13 years,” Carl Conetta, director the Project for Defense Alternatives (PDA), told IPS.

Indeed, recent polls have shown a clear public desire to reduce Washington’s international commitments. Most famously perhaps, a major Pew survey published last December found that 52 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

It was the first time in the nearly 50-year history of the question that a majority agreed with its proposition.

But, according to Conetta and other analysts, that result has much more to do with Washington’s unilateral military adventures – and the disappointments that resulted from those in Iraq and Afghanistan – than other forms of international engagement support for which has been remarkably steady for many years.

“All the polls show that there’s reduced enthusiasm for international engagement, but they also show that that doesn’t apply to all forms of engagement,” Conetta said. “We see that people are quite supportive of cooperative engagement.”

Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), agreed. “Overall, this poll and others show that during a period of economic downturn, there’s a strengthening of a feeling that we need to deal with problems at home. But that doesn’t mean that people want to disengage from the world, but rather that there’s a stronger interest in collaborative approaches where the United States isn’t out front so much.

“As we can see from this (Better World) poll, support for multilateral forms of engagement are just as strong as ever,” he told IPS.

Indeed, asked to choose up to two out of ten different international policy approaches the U.S. should pursue, the single most popular choice (40 percent) was “America working with global partners around the world and letting our partners take more of the lead.”

And while the second-most popular choice (34 percent) was “letting other countries solve their own problems without American involvement,” it was virtually tied with “international cooperation” (33 percent).

Significantly, the least popular choices were “America going it alone in resolving international issues” (2 percent) and “Isolationism” (4 percent), and “America taking the lead in preventing and resolving deadly conflict around the world” (12 percent).

“All of these answers show a cooperative orientation on the part of the public,” noted Kull. “It’s not that ‘leadership’ is seen as a negative term, but what people object to is putting the U.S. out front while others are hanging back.”

As to the U.N. itself, while respondents were split on the actual effectiveness of the world body, 85 percent said it should be made “more effective”; only 13 percent disagreed.

More than 70 percent agreed with the statements that “working through [the U.N.] improves America’s image around the world” and that the “U.S. needs needs the U.N. now more than ever because we cannot bear all the burden and cannot afford to pay to go it alone around the world.”

Two-thirds of respondents – including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents – said Washington should pay its peacekeeping dues to the U.N. on time and in full, while 31 percent opposed payment.

Due to Congressional cuts to requests by the administration, Washington currently owes the U.N. peacekeeping account for 2014 more than 350 million dollars.

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

The 2013 tornado season was in the top six stories. Here, members of the Oklahoma National Guard's 63rd Civil Support Team conduct search and rescue operations in response to the May 20, 2013, EF-5 tornado that ripped through the centre of Moore, Oklahoma. Credit: National Guard/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 11 2014 (IPS)

If people outside the United States are looking for answers why Americans often seem so clueless about the world outside their borders, they could start with what the three major U.S. television networks offered their viewers in the way of news during 2013.

Syria and celebrities dominated foreign coverage by ABC, NBC, and CBS – whose combined evening news broadcasts are the single most important media source of information about national and international events for most Americans. Vast portions of the globe went almost entirely ignored, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.“Palestine has virtually disappeared from the news agenda." -- Andrew Tyndall

Latin America, most of Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia apart from Afghanistan, and virtually all of East Asia – despite growing tensions between China and Washington’s closest regional ally, Japan – were virtually absent from weeknight news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS last year, according to the report, which has tracked the three networks’ evening news coverage continuously since 1988.

Out of nearly 15,000 minutes of Monday-through-Friday evening news coverage by the three networks, the Syrian civil war and the debate over possible U.S. intervention claimed 519 minutes, or about 3.5 percent of total air time, according to the report.

That made the Syrian conflict and the U.S. policy response the year’s single-most-covered event. It was followed by coverage of the terrorist bombing by two Chechnya-born brothers that killed three people at the finish line of last April’s Boston Marathon (432 minutes); the debate over the federal budget (405 minutes); and the flawed rollout of the healthcare reform law, or Obamacare (338 minutes).

The next biggest international story was the death in December of former South African President Nelson Mandela (186 minutes); the July ouster of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and its aftermath; the coverage of Pope Francis I (157 minutes, not including an additional 121 minutes devoted to Pope Benedict’s retirement and the Cardinals’ conclave that resulted in Francis’ succession); and the birth of Prince George, the latest addition to the British royal family (131 minutes).

The continued fighting in Afghanistan came in just behind the new prince at 121 minutes for the entire year.

The strong showings by the papal succession, Mandela’s death, and Prince George’s birth all demonstrated the rise of “celebrity journalism” in news coverage, Andrew Tyndall, the report’s publisher, told IPS. He added that “a minor celebrity like Oscar Pistorius (the South African so-called “Bladerunner” track star accused of murdering his girlfriend) attracted more coverage [by the TV networks – 51 minutes] than all the rest of sub-Saharan Africa in the [11] months before Mandela’s death.”

Surveys by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, among other polling and research groups, show that about two-thirds of the general public cite television as their main source for national and international news, more than twice the number of people who rely on newspapers, and about one-third more than the growing number of individuals whose primary source is the internet.

An average of about 21 million U.S. residents watch the network news on any given evening. While the cable news channels – CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC – often get more public attention, their audience is actually many times smaller, according to media-watchers.

“In 2012, more than four times as many people watched the three network newscasts than watched the highest-rated show on the three cable channels during prime time,” Emily Guskin, a research analyst for the Pew Research Centre’s Journalism Project, told IPS.

As in other recent years, news about the weather – especially its extremes and the damage they wrought – received a lot of attention on the network news, although, also consistent with past performance, the possible relationship between extreme weather and climate change was rarely, if ever, drawn by reporters or anchors.

Last year’s tornado season, severe winter weather, drought and wild forest fires in the western states constituted three of the top six stories of the year, according to the report. Along with the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, those four topics reaped nearly 900 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about six percent of the entire year’s coverage.

“A major flaw in the television news journalism is its inability to translate anecdotes of extreme weather into the overarching concept of climate change,” noted Tyndall. “As long as these events are presented as meteorological and not climatic, then they will be covered as local and domestic, not global.

“An exception in 2013 was Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines,” he noted. That event captured 83 minutes of coverage among the three networks, making it the single biggest story by far out of Asia for the year.

By comparison, the growing tensions between Japan and China in the East China Sea – which many foreign-policy analysts here rate as one of the most alarming events of the past year if, for no other reason, than the U.S. is committed by treaty to militarily defend Japan’s territory – received a mere eight minutes of coverage.

Two other major U.S. foreign policy challenges received more coverage. North Korea and the volatile tenure of its young leader, Kim Jong-un, received a total of 87 minutes, including 10 minutes to visiting basketball veteran Dennis Rodman, of coverage during 2013.

Events in Iran, including the election of President Hassan Rouhani and negotiations over its nuclear programme, received a total of 104 minutes of coverage between the three networks over the course of the year, nearly as much attention as was given the British royals.

Libya received 64 minutes of coverage, but virtually all of it was devoted to the domestic controversy over responsibility for the September 2012 killings of the U.S. ambassador and three other officials there. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and the civil war and humanitarian disaster in the Central African Republic received no coverage at all.

As for the Israel-Palestinian conflict which Secretary of State John Kerry has made a top priority along with a nuclear deal with Iran, it received only 16 minutes of coverage in 2013. “Palestine has virtually disappeared from the news agenda,” noted Tyndall.

As has Latin America, which received virtually no attention, according to Tyndall who suggested that the lack of coverage may be due to the growth of Spanish-language networks here. “The assumption seems to be that anyone interested in Latin American coverage would likely speak Spanish and find it in that language.”

Altogether, the three networks devoted just under 4,000 minutes, or about 27 percent of total air time, to coverage of overseas stories or U.S. foreign policy. That was somewhat under the average amount of 25-year average. Indeed, the 1,302 minutes’ worth of stories focused on U.S. foreign policy marked a nearly 50-percent reduction from the average.

“In general, foreign policy coverage has risen when the president is bellicose,” according to Tyndall, who noted that such coverage had risen sharply as a result of armed conflicts during the administrations of the two Presidents Bush and fallen under Presidents Clinton and Obama.

But the collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) of “metadata” on U.S. citizens and of private conversations and email of foreign leaders as disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden – a story with both domestic and international repercussions – also placed among the top 10 stories of the year with 210 minutes of coverage.

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

President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, attends a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Dec. 12, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 3 2014 (IPS)

If U.S. President Barack Obama conceived his foreign policy prospects for 2014 as a popular child’s board game, the snakes he will have to jump over significantly outnumber the ladders that can propel him to success.

As they have since he took office five years ago, the most dangerous “snakes” lie in the Middle East, the region from which Obama has been trying desperately to climb out of the many holes dug by George W. Bush so that he could focus Washington’s attention more on Asia and, specifically, dealing with the rise of China.Navigating the increasingly rocky shoals of interstate relations in Asia is also likely to become more slippery in the New Year.

And while he successfully avoided (with the improbable help of Russian President Vladimir Putin) direct military engagement in Syria in 2013, the spill-over from the civil war there into Iraq and Lebanon – not to mention growing instability and violence in Egypt and the possibility and implications of a breakdown in nuclear negotiations with Iran – poses major new risks in 2014.

But navigating the increasingly rocky shoals of interstate relations in Asia is also likely to become more slippery in the New Year.

In contrast to the Middle East, where sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims increasingly transcends national borders, nationalism appears all too alive and well in Asia.

Beijing’s increasingly assertive territorial claims, which have generally worked to Washington’s advantage as less powerful nations have sought a counter-balance to China’s growing power, have nonetheless also increased the risk of an incident that could, if unchecked, escalate into a conflict involving U.S. forces.

In addition, they have also triggered a backlash that, among other things, appears to have emboldened Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to accelerate his country’s move away from its post-World War II pacifism.

Abe’s defence of Japanese actions in World War II – as demonstrated most provocatively by his recent visit to the notorious Yasukuni shrine – has in turn angered South Korea. As a result, Washington’s efforts to coordinate policy on both China and an increasingly unpredictable nuclear-armed North Korea with its two closest allies in Northeast Asia have come to naught.

Of course, if Obama can patch up relations between Tokyo and Seoul and make progress in gaining Chinese agreement on “rules of the road” in contested zones, his standing would rise. But, given the nationalist passions that are roiling the region, that task will not be easy, and the downside risks there are steadily growing.

The overriding importance accorded by the administration to both the Greater Middle East and Asia means that Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are likely to continue to get relatively much less attention from Washington during 2014, as they have for the past five years.

However, specific crises – most recently, the violence and possibility of civil war in South Sudan – can rise to the top of the foreign policy agenda.

But Obama has little to gain from the situation – even if his diplomats succeed in helping prevent the worst. On the other hand, if the world’s youngest nation self-destructs, the president stands to lose, not only because of his personal investment in helping to gain Juba’s independence, but also because he would be compared unfavourably with Bush, one of whose few foreign-policy achievements was the negotiation of the 2005 peace agreement between Sudan and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) that laid the groundwork for independence.

While the greatest number of overseas “snakes” facing Obama in 2014 remain in the broader Middle East, it’s also the region where a couple of “ladders” – both singled out by Obama himself in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September – could ensure his place in history as a successful foreign policy president.

The most spectacular would be the successful conclusion of a comprehensive nuclear accord with Iran in the context of the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany) negotiations that could effectively reverse recent advances made by Tehran in building a break-out capacity and still permit it to enrich uranium at low levels.

Negotiating such an agreement would not only go far in ending 35 years of hostility between the two nations. It could also facilitate their cooperation in both tamping down the Sunni-Shia conflict that threatens the entire region and stabilising Afghanistan, from which virtually all U.S. combat troops are supposed to withdraw by the end of 2014.

While its strategic significance would not rise to that of Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s, an Iran accord could presage major realignments stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and deep into Central Asia.

To achieve it, however, Obama faces formidable opposition, primarily from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby that wields considerable influence in Congress, as well as from Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf states which fear Tehran will regain the regional primacy it enjoyed under the Shah in the 1970s. Like the Israel lobby here, hard-liners in Iran also oppose an accord.

If these forces succeed, the consequences, as Obama himself has warned, could very likely include yet another U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.

That in turn would not only put paid to Obama’s hopes of reducing Washington’s military presence in the region and “pivoting” toward Asia. Lacking U.N. Security Council authorisation, such an action would also almost certainly provoke a major international crisis that could shatter cooperation with Russia and China on a host of issues, as well as strain U.S. relations with its NATO allies.

For Obama, war with Iran – even more than the escalating Sunni-Shia conflict in Syria and its neighbours — is probably the most dangerous “snake” on the 2014 board.

The other obvious “ladder” that could earn Obama a favourable place in the annals of foreign policy is negotiating a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the elusive holy grail of U.S. Mideast policy for more than a generation.

While most analysts express doubt over whether this goal is possible – and is most unlikely to be achieved in 2014 in any case – the energy with which Secretary of State John Kerry has pursued the effort has impressed some sceptics, and the fact that he is now offering bridging proposals for a permanent status agreement marks a potentially significant advance.

Still, the balance of opinion here is that such an accord is a bridge too far, especially so if Obama succeeds in getting a nuclear agreement with Iran.

Meanwhile, however, the “snakes” in the region that threaten Obama are considerably more numerous, ranging from an escalating cycle of violence between the military regime in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood or more radical forces, to the resurgence of sectarian violence in Iraq to 2006-07 levels; from the intensification of the war in Syria or its export to Lebanon, to the strengthening of Al Qaeda-linked forces across the region from Yemen to North Africa and the Sahel, to name a few.

And, with 2014 the year in which NATO is to withdraw all but a small remnant from Afghanistan, the site of Washington’s longest war, a rapid collapse of security could prove similarly deadly, recalling the Vietnam debacle nearly 40 years ago.

Any and all of these distinctly possible events will no doubt be used by Obama’s political foes here to paint him as a failed foreign policy president.

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

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.

While much of the foreign policy elite here sees the tide of public opposition to U.S. air strikes against Syria that swept over Washington during the past two weeks as evidence of a growing isolationism, veteran pollsters and other analysts say other factors were more relevant.

A variety of surveys have shown that the public has become generally more inward-looking in recent years, especially since the 2008 financial crisis and the widespread disillusionment over U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."The key division between the public and the elites is not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s the different kinds of internationalists.” -- Political scientist Jonathan Monten

However, the Barack Obama administration’s failure to muster multilateral support for his plan to punish the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons played a key role, according to some experts.

In addition, demands by more-hawkish forces in Congress and much of the foreign policy elite that any U.S. military attack aim at weakening the regime on the battlefield – and the administration’s somewhat incoherent efforts to appease them – raised public concerns that Washington would soon find itself in the middle of yet another Middle Eastern civil war.

“The administration’s best chance to get public support was to stick to the normative argument [that it was necessary to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons] and not to get involved in affecting the course of the civil war,” said Stephen Kull, director of worldpublicopinion.org.

“But the normative argument got muddied by more talk about trying to affect the outcome of the war and that – combined with the fact that there was no U.N. Security Council approval – clearly bothered people.”

Moreover, by asking the Congress to authorise military action when most of its members were in their home constituencies for the August recess, rather than in the “Beltway bubble” where the foreign policy elite — Washington officialdom, highly paid lobbyists, the Congressional leadership, and think tank analysts — dominate the debate, Obama effectively exposed them to more grassroots pressure than usual.

The foreign policy elite “is generally more sceptical of multilateralism, more supportive of America playing a dominant role in world affairs, and more wary of constraints on U.S. freedom of action than the public is,” Kull, who also heads the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes, told IPS.

Surveys of both elite and public attitudes on foreign policy and the U.S. role in the world that have been conducted over decades tend to support that assessment.

“The public is often eager for other countries to take their share – if not take the lead – in dealing with international problems… while the elite or people, who are much more knowledgeable about American power and the role it plays in the world, are more willing to play the role of first among equals in pushing for international action,” said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press which conducted the most recent major survey of elite-public opinion in late 2009.

“A lot of people in the international affairs world say, ‘If America doesn’t take the lead, no one will feel they should or have’,” he told IPS.

Indeed, in the 2009 survey, only a third of respondents from the general public said Washington should either act as the “single world leader” or the “most active” among major powers. By contrast, nearly seven of 10 elite respondents – taken from the membership of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – took that position.

“When it comes to military engagements, the public perception is high risk, low reward, while there are many in the elite who see the balance or risk to reward in a different light,” Dimock told IPS.

Few experts deny that the public has turned more inward in recent years, although they generally avoid the qualifier “isolationist”, a pejorative term which is associated – by neo-conservative hawks, in particular — with (mainly Republican) opposition to Washington’s intervention in World War II before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.

“One of the things that has really jumped out in this debate is that the key division between the public and the elites is not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s the different kinds of internationalists,” said Jonathan Monten, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of a number of academic articles on elite foreign policy views with Joshua Busby of the University of Texas.

“Are you the kind of internationalist who favours a very muscular, hawkish forward-leaning foreign policy or one who favours working through multilateral means, using more soft-power elements of foreign policy? What the Syria debate reveals is that there are both types of internationalists on both sides of the aisle,” he told IPS.

Until recently, the major media looked almost exclusively to Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham to act as spokesmen for their party’s foreign policy views. However, the Syria debate witnessed the emergence of non-interventionist figures in the party, with virtually all of the lawmakers considered likely 2016 presidential candidates coming out in opposition to military action.

“Before the debate shifted to Congress, it wasn’t really clear how powerful the anti-interventionist bloc was within the Republican caucus,” according to Monton, who said the breakdown in the elite Republican consensus encouraged opposition.

“Ten years ago, they wouldn’t be caught dead opposing the use of military power in the world once it had been proposed. It was interesting how quickly the cascade happened.”

“The growing split in the Republican Party between neoconservative interventionists like McCain and the anti-intervention ‘isolationist’ [Senator] Rand Paul groups forces rank and file Republicans to have to grapple more with issues and possibly choose,” added Busby in an email exchange.

While Obama’s failure to muster multilateral support for military action played a not insignificant part in the public’s opposition to strikes, Dina Smeltz, the senior fellow on Public Opinion and Foreign Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), told IPS, “war weariness [was] the major point”.

“Two in three Americans say the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth the cost, and I think those conflicts were probably perceived to be more of a direct [U.S. national] interest than Syria,” she said.

Indeed, a New York Times/CBS News poll taken last weekend found that two-thirds of respondents were particularly concerned that military action in Syria would result in a “long and costly involvement”.

Asked in the same poll whether the U.S. should take “the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solve international conflicts,” 62 percent said it should not.

Remarkably, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion 10 years ago when the U.S. was being compared to the Roman and British Empires in its mastery of world affairs, 43 percent said it should not, compared with a plurality of 48 percent who said it should.

But Kull said the war-weariness factor, like “isolationism”, is overplayed and that both the major media and the foreign policy elite itself tend to underestimate how much the public favours multilateral and cooperative approaches to international affairs.

Indeed, a 2004 CCGA poll of elite and public opinion in which elite respondents were asked to estimate how the public would react to specific issues, found that the opinion leaders significantly underestimated public support for, among other things, U.S. participation in U.N. peace-keeping operations, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse gas emission, giving the U.N. the power to tax, and accepting collective decisions by the U.N.’s governing bodies.

“The more multilateral cooperation and support we get, the more comfortable people are,” noted Kull. “In this case, that support was not forthcoming – even the British weren’t there – and that definitely undermines support here.”

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

Publication this month of Vali Nasr’s “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat” is well-timed.

The U.S. and the NATO allies are disengaging from Afghanistan, without clarity about the West’s continuing interests or how to secure them.

The Syrian civil war continues, without apparent U.S. efforts to fit that conflagration within regional developments as a whole. President Barack Obama has visited the Near East, but there is as yet no promise that serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will resume.

The standoff with Iran and its nuclear programme continues, without a viable U.S. strategy to resolve it short of war. And there is widespread questioning about future U.S. commitments toward the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

For some observers, including Vali Nasr, all this raises profound questions about U.S. foreign policy and leads him to judge: “retreat.”

The author, now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, has had a special vantage point. From January 2009 until 2011, he was special advisor to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (who died in December 2010), the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan – “Afpak.”

Dr. Nasr’s brief but intense experience in the U.S. government at a high level was both disappointing and disillusioning.

His principal conclusions are that the Obama White House failed to take seriously the diplomatic opportunities afforded the U.S.; that it tolerated excessive militarisation of U.S. policies, at the expense of a proper role for diplomatic instruments; that the president himself was long on language but short on action, thus failing to come to grips with a number of regional developments; that the best efforts by the State Department, including by Secretary Hillary Clinton, to intervene in critical policy-making, were often rebuffed or ignored by “the White House;” and that the U.S. thus failed in its essential leadership role.

What Nasr says about the way in which the White House dominated and controlled foreign policy in Obama’s first term and made it subservient to domestic politics is a damning indictment – even if only partly true, and at this point in history, no outsider can judge.

This helps explain why a pre-publication book has gained so much attention, along with the Washington parlor game of welcoming “kiss and tell,” merged with a desire to see the sitting president stub his toe or worse.

Thus “Dispensable Nation” is a compelling read. And while Nasr is not part of the new cottage industry of “declinists”, he does warn that, without radical changes to the making and carrying out of U.S. foreign policy, this nation can do itself and its role in the world serious injury, not least to its reputation and others’ willingness to rely on us.

So far, so good. But some other facets of this book present a somewhat different perspective. One might be called an “old school” approach to government service: that someone who willingly “takes the King’s shilling” assumes a burden not to tell tales out of school, at least not until all the narrative’s senior players have left the stage. Breaking with that unwritten practice makes for a juicier read, but it does make one ponder.

A more serious question is raised by the assumption running throughout the book that if a different approach had been taken to X or Y — in particular a greater reliance on diplomacy and, even more so, diplomatic approaches advanced by the Special Negotiator, Ambassador Holbrooke — very different and positive things would almost surely have come about.

But with regard to the Middle East/Southwest Asia and its long history of complexities and imponderables, one must be chary of drawing straight-line conclusions about the impact of policies different from those pursed.

It is hard to believe that U.S. leadership on its own would have transformed Arab-Israeli peacemaking; that a different U.S. approach to Egypt and other Arab countries would necessarily have produced a better course for the Arab Spring; that earlier intervention (but just what?) would have stopped the slaughter in Syria; that following the negotiating strategy and tactics advocated by Ambassador Holbrooke would have brought the Afghanistan war to a successful conclusion — without taking us all back to Square One, with the Taliban in full control – and with U.S. relations with Pakistan on a better footing and the region stable.

In short, in addition to highly-relevant and well-argued analysis of the Obama administration’s shortcomings, most of the author’s suggestions for alternative approaches are more wishful thinking than the product of a depth of knowledge about the region and seasoned judgment concerning the limits of power.

Perhaps that conclusion is unfair, given that his role in Afpak has so far been the author’s only venture into government, but that argues for being doubly cautious about making sweeping predictions about the putative success of alternative strategies.

It might also have been useful if Vali had drawn upon his experience to discuss whether using special representatives instead of regular diplomacy is good or bad.

In some cases, appointing a U.S. special negotiator has proved to be good — like Arab-Israeli peacemaking, thus relieving a secretary of state from having to deal virtually full time with these demanding partners; or lengthy arms control negotiations, where having experts at the table is essential.

But in general, creating special representatives as substitutes for regular practices of the U.S. government is asking for trouble. This was certainly true regarding the plethora of special representatives appointed during the first Obama administration, such that the expertise and experience needed for effective policies was often missing or sidelined.

Certainly, balancing contending (and legitimate) points of view within the bureaucracy (e.g., state, defence, CIA, NSC staff) was regularly lost, to the detriment of coherent policy.

Add to this the appointment of a special representative for Afpak who had achieved almost superstar status, with personal ambitions to match and a well-deserved sobriquet of “bulldozer,” and it would be surprising if all had gone smoothly — not least because Holbrooke had no experience in the region and no prior knowledge either of the issues or the local political cultures.

Indeed, it did not go smoothly, predictably so given Amb. Holbrooke’s career-long disdain for anyone who got in his way (along with his methods for eliminating competitors for either position or limelight), his lack of capacity for genuine strategic thinking as opposed to short-term tactical fixes, plus his most undiplomatic approach to both friend and foe.

In fact, from the moment of his highly publicised spat with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, Holbrooke’s usefulness ended.

In sum, Nasr has given us not just a good read but also judgments about what happens when a U.S. administration does not place a high enough priority on getting right the U.S. role in the world; does not assess adequately what the nation truly needs to do abroad; that inserts domestic political judgments at the start of the process instead of (as is indeed necessary) after due consideration of foreign policy choices; that permits a continuing imbalance between military and non-military instruments of power and influence; and that fails to “think strategically” about the future, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War made such strategic rethinking imperative.

One conclusion, not in the book but flowing from its argument, is that a second-rate team appointed by the president and secretary of state cannot produce first-rate foreign policy, an outcome that Nasr argues forcefully.

*Robert E. Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, was director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council Staff in the Carter Administration and in 2011-12 was Director of Transatlantic Security Studies at the National Defense University.

Amidst growing tensions with North Korea and, to a lesser extent, China, the White House Monday insisted that its “re-balancing” toward the Asia/Pacific remained on track and that Washington is fully committed to its allies there, especially Japan and South Korea.

In a major policy address to the Asia Society in New York City, National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon offered an overview of U.S. strategy in the region, stressing that the “re-balancing” – sometimes referred to as the “pivot” – will be comprehensive, focusing at least as much attention on Washington’s economic role there as its military posture.

While much of the speech echoed previous administration policy statements, Donilon, President Barack Obama’s closest foreign policy aide, also announced new U.S. sanctions against the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea, a step that some analysts said could make trade by third countries with Pyongyang more difficult.

He did not explicitly link the move to recent North Korean threats to pre-emptively strike the U.S. and South Korea with nuclear weapons or to its announcement Monday that it will no longer abide by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.

But he suggested in the clearest terms to date that Washington would respond to any aggressive move by Pyongyang with military force.

“North Korea’s claims may be hyperbolic – but as to the policy of the United States, there should be no doubt: we will draw upon the full range of our capabilities to protect against, and to respond to, the threat posed to us and to our allies by North Korea,” he declared.

He also called on China to deepen its military-to-military dialogue with the U.S. and to take “serious steps” to end the hacking of U.S. government and private-business computer networks – a practice which he said “has become a key point of concern and discussion with China at all levels of our governments”.

His remarks on the latter subject, which included a call for the two countries to hold a “direct dialogue to establish acceptable norms of behaviour in cyberspace”, marked the first time a top-ranking U.S. official has accused China by name of carrying out such attacks many of which, according to a recent New York Times investigation, have been launched by a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit based in a 12-story Shanghai office tower. Beijing has strongly denied it is responsible.

“(T)his is not solely a national security concern or a concern of the U.S. government,” he said. “Increasingly, U.S. businesses are speaking out about the serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale. The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country.”

Donilon’s speech came amidst threats and counter-threats between North and South Korea in the wake of last month’s underground nuclear test by Pyongyang, the inauguration of the South’s new president, Park Geun-hye, and Monday’s launch of a major joint U.S.-South Korean military exercise which purportedly provoked the North’s announcement to renounce the 60-year-old armistice and disconnect its “hotline” with Seoul.

The rapid build-up in tensions between the two Koreas has reportedly spurred growing demands within the South to consider developing a nuclear weapon itself, just as renewed tensions between Beijing and Tokyo over a group of islands in the East China Sea has provoked a somewhat similar reaction in Japan.

The hawkish reactions in both Seoul and Tokyo – where doubts are growing about whether Washington can actually follow through on its military re-balancing when the Pentagon budget appears headed for decline – are clearly of concern to the Obama administration. Donilon went out of his way to reaffirm its goal of moving 60 percent of the U.S. naval fleet to the Asia-Pacific by 2020 and expanding radar and missile defence systems to protect U.S. allies from the “dangerous, destabilising behaviour of North Korea”.

“In these difficult fiscal times, I know that some have questioned whether this rebalance is sustainable,” he said. “But make no mistake: President Obama has clearly stated that we will maintain our security presence and engagement in the Asia-Pacific.”

In addition to reassuring Tokyo and Seoul, Monday’s speech also appeared intended in part to dispel any doubts about the region’s priority in its global strategy, particularly given Secretary of State John Kerry’s choice to make Europe and the Middle East the site of his maiden overseas tour and Obama’s decision to make his first second-term trip also to the Middle East.

“There have been a number of people in the region looking at Kerry’s trip and saying maybe they’re looking to re-balance the re-balance,” noted Alan Romberg, the head of East Asia programmes at the Stimson Center here.

In addition, the State Department’s top Asia strategist, former assistant secretary for Asian affairs Kurt Campbell, just stepped down, and no one has yet been nominated to take his place.

But Donilon noted that Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was one of the first foreign leaders to visit the White House this year and announced that Park would be coming to Washington for talks in May. Obama, he said, had determined that the U.S. will participate every year in the East Asia Summit at the head-of-state level.

Donilon also stressed the importance of Southeast Asia in the U.S. re-balancing effort and of including India, whose “look East” policies he praised, as an integral part of that strategy.

“The United States is not only re-balancing to the Asia-Pacific, we are re-balancing within Asia to recognise the growing importance of Southeast,” he said. “Just as we found that the United States was underweighted in East Asia, we found that the Untied States was especially underweighted in Southeast Asia. And we are correcting that,” he noted. He specifically cited Indonesia, like India, as a potential “global partner”.

In defining re-balancing, Donilon stressed that it will not mean “diminishing ties to important partners in any other region”, nor will it mean “containing China or seeking to dictate terms to Asia. And it isn’t just a matter of our military presence,” he insisted, noting the importance of Washington’s economic engagement, particularly through the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In addition to U.S. concerns about Chinese cyber-spying, Donilon stressed the importance of a mutual understanding between the militaries of the two nations, particularly as Beijing expands its presence in Asia, “drawing our forces into closer contact and raising the risk that an accident or miscalculation could destabilise the broader relationship.”

He also praised China’s cooperation at the U.N. Security Council in imposing new sanctions on North Korea, which depends almost exclusively on Beijing for its supply of fuel and other basic commodities.

Despite its support for those sanctions and its evident frustration with the North for engaging in provocations, such as last month’s nuclear test, Beijing has made clear that it will not use that dependence to risk the regime’s collapse.

While Donilon said Washington must co-operate closely with Beijing in dealing with Pyongyang, he stressed that “no country, including China, should conduct ‘business as usual’ with a North Korea that threatens its neighbours.”

Robert Manning, an Asia specialist at the Atlantic Council here, said the speech, while mainly a re-statement of policy, would “keep the momentum on Asia-Pacific” and came at a useful moment.

On China, he told IPS, he would have “liked to see more focus on the need for the U.S. and China to work out an understanding of our respective roles in East Asia”, in part because the “level of strategic distrust” between has appeared to be on the rise.

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

Senator Charles T. Hagel smiles with Senator John Warner, retired, (left) and Senator Sam Nunn, retired, (right). Credit: DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

Ending a long and controversial battle, the U.S. Senate Tuesday voted 58-41 to confirm former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defence.

The confirmation, which followed a more-lopsided 71-27 vote to end a Republican-led filibuster against the decorated Vietnam War veteran, broke mainly along party lines, with four Republican senators joining the 52 Democrats and two independents in the chambre in voting to approve the nomination.

The vote marked a major defeat for hard-line neo-conservatives, notably the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, whose “Weekly Standard” magazine and website published a constant stream of charges against the former Nebraska senator, ranging from anti-Semitism to deep hostility toward Israel, since word that Hagel was Obama’s preferred candidate for the post in mid-December.

It was an unprecedented, multi-million-dollar effort to defeat a cabinet nominee that included expensive, full-page, 11th-hour ads in the Wall Street Journal – whose editorial page also featured a series of attacks on Hagel – and other publications, as well as anti-Hagel TV spots in key states.

ECI and several other well-funded “astro-turf” groups tried first to pre-empt the nomination, which came in January, and then to derail it by promoting a filibuster by Republicans and persuading – albeit unsuccessfully — key Democratic senators considered susceptible to pressure by more-mainstream Israel lobby groups to defect.

In grueling eight-hour testimony late last month, as well as one-on-one meetings with senators, however, Hagel, who served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009, reassured doubters that he was both a strong supporter of Israel’s security and, despite a number of previous public statements suggesting that military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be grave mistake, he would indeed recommend such a course of action if all diplomatic efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme fell short.

In a statement issued after the vote, Kristol in insisted that ECI was “proud” of its role during the confirmation battle, adding that, “We are heartened that that the overwhelming majority of senators from one of the major parties voted against confirming Mr. Hagel.

“We take some comfort in Mr. Hagel’s confirmation conversions on the issues of Israel and Iran, and do believe that, as a result of this battle, Mr. Hagel will be less free to pursue dangerous policies at the Defense Department and less inclined to advocate them within the administration,” he added.

Hagel will now join his fellow-Vietnam War veteran, Secretary of State John Kerry, as one of the three top national-security officials in the cabinet, along with Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, White House Chief of Staff and former deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, Vice President Joe Biden, as well as U.N. Amb. Susan Rice, as the president’s key foreign-policy advisers.

Yet to be confirmed is Obama’s choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Brennan, the top counter-terrorism official in the White House during most of Obama’s first term.

While Hagel is the only Republican among the top national-security officials, he is widely seen as generally sharing their worldview on key foreign-policy and defence issues – notably, the desirability of maintaining a “light military footprint”, especially in the Middle East; “engaging” actual and potential geo-political foes through diplomacy; using military power only as a last resort; and relying more on multilateral institutions, such as the U.N. and NATO, and regional actors, to address key crisis situations, sometimes derisively referred to by neo-conservatives and other hawks as “leading from behind”.

One basic tenet of their beliefs was expressed by former Pentagon chief Robert Gates two years ago when he told Army cadets: “Any future defence secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. (Douglas) MacCarthur so delicately put it.”

As Vietnam veterans who came to believe that the war in Indochina was a major strategic error – as well as a waste of U.S. blood and treasure – Hagel and Kerry are regarded as particularly sceptical of the effectiveness of military action and of “nation-building” and counter-insurgency strategy – a scepticism also shared by Biden, whose influence on foreign policy is seen as having risen over the past two years.

Biden’s top foreign-policy aide for many years, Tony Blinken, has now taken McDonough’s place as deputy national security adviser.

Indeed, in a column published over the weekend, foreign-policy insider par excellence, David Ignatius, warned that Obama’s second-term team is so unified in their general foreign-policy outlook that Obama “is perilously close to groupthink”.

While both Kerry, who hails from the liberal-international wing of the Democratic Party, and Hagel, who is close to the rapidly disappearing “realist” wing of the Republican Party (of which Gates was also a part), both voted in 2002 to give George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq, they did so with considerable reservations at the time and, within a year of the invasion, began criticising what Obama himself called a “dumb” war.

Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq war – as well as his neutrality in the 2008 race between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain – has been cited as a major reason why most Republicans opposed his nomination, although not to the extent of supporting an indefinite filibuster against it.

But most political analysts here believe most Republican senators would have gone along with the nomination – as is customary for most presidential cabinet appointees – had the neo-conservatives and their funders, as well as elements of the more-mainstream Israel lobby, not mounted such a vigorous and expensive effort to defeat him.

Unlike most members of Congress, for whom the influence of the Israel lobby looms very large, Hagel spoke out publicly about what he believed were Israel’s poor treatment of Palestinians, the urgent necessity of a two-state solution, the importance of engaging Hamas in a peace process, and the potentially catastrophic dangers of an Israeli or U.S. military attack on Iran.

In at least one interview, he also spoke out against the “intimidate(ing)” influence of what he called the “Jewish lobby” – a phrase for which he was later accused of anti-semitism, and for which he subsequently apologised. (A major component of the Israel lobby consists of evangelical Christians, a core Republican constituency.)

Indeed, during his grueling and less-than-impressive eight-hour confirmation hearing, Republicans focused their questioning almost exclusively on his views regarding Israel and Iran.

Indeed, “Israel” was mentioned 179 times (Iran 171) – more often than Iraq (30), Afghanistan (27), Russia (23), Palestine or Palestinian (22), Syria (18), North Korea (11), Pakistan (10), Egypt (9), China (5), NATO (5), Libya (2), Bahrain (2), Somalia (2), Al-Qaeda (2), and Mali, Jordan, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea (once each) combined.

The questioning was so Israel-centred that the popular satirical weekly television programme, Saturday Night Live, even devoted a skit broadcast over the web depicting Hagel’s Republican inquisitors competing to avow their devotion to the Jewish state.

But whether Hagel will indeed play a key role in determining U.S. policy toward Israel remains to be seen. For now, the much bigger challenge he faces is the implications of the so-called budget sequestration that appears certain to take effect Mar. 1 and as a result of which the Pentagon could face as much as 600 billion dollars in cuts to its budget over the next 10 years in addition to the almost-500 billion dollars in cuts that have already been mandated.

Ironically, the impact of the sequestration on the Pentagon’s budget is also seen as potentially disastrous to the neo-conservatives who opposed Hagel.

Given their strong conviction that Israeli security and global stability rests primarily on U.S. military power, they have spoken out strongly against growing Republican complacency about the effects of sequestration on the Pentagon, fearing that it heralds a resurgence of isolationist sentiment in the party. But instead of focusing primarily on rallying Republicans to compromise with Obama on the budget, they spent significantly more time and resources on defeating Hagel.

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

Women walk past destroyed shops in Al Qusayr, Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS

By Robert E. Hunter
WASHINGTON, Feb 8 2013 (IPS)

Every U.S. president since Harry Truman has sought to disentangle the United States from the Middle East, and all have been sucked back into the region and its problems.

So will it be in President Barack Obama’s second term. Last year, his team launched the “tilt” – or “rebalancing” – to Asia. But first they will have to deal with the immediacy of the Middle East, from one end to the other.

The United States has mostly withdrawn from Iraq, but it is still far from stable. In Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan, the prospects for “success” are hardly a good bet. Syria’s civil war is intensifying, but no one seems to know what to do, either now or after President Assad departs, with risks of Lebanon-like threats to Israel (and Turkey). There may even be a slow-burning civil war across the region, pitting Sunni states against Shi’ites.

Then there is Iran. During the U.S. political campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extracted pledges from both candidates Obama and Mitt Romney that “containment” of a potential nuclear-armed Iran would be unacceptable. Unfortunately, this puts the U.S. president in a place where no president should ever go: where being able to decide, in the U.S. national interest, whether to go to war depends on the “good behaviour” of two other countries – in this case, Iran and Israel.

Meanwhile, the bloom is off the rose of the Arab Spring. Egypt is in incipient turmoil, unemployment is endemic among young people across the region, with its deficit in representative governance. And then there is continuing Islamist militancy – although how much (and where) that really matters to U.S. security is an open question, except in the unlikely event that a terrorist gets a nuclear weapon.

Then there is Palestine. Secretary of State John Kerry says that not moving to resolve that problem would be a catastrophe, and President Obama will visit Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan this spring. Indeed, creating positive change somehow engages America’s regional reputation.

Lastly, as the world’s “indispensable nation”, the U.S. must show it can lead and be seen as responsible for its own and others’ security. It must also get on with its most important national security challenge: to strengthen the U.S. economy, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, improve education and health care, and deal with budget and debt questions.

Some ideas:

First, the U.S. needs to understand that we can’t let go of the Middle East, as much as we are tired of war. We still have national security interests in the region that others will not just pick up.

Second, the administration needs to start seeing the entire region as an integrated whole, rather than as a series of individual crises. There can be no progress on Israel-Palestine so long as Israel is terrified of Iran, worried about Egypt and Syria, and isolates Gaza. A quieting down of the terrorist/Islamist threat cannot even begin so long as rich people in Saudi Arabia continue supporting doctrines and bankrolling fighters that spread instability and fear.

Afghanistan will continue as a source of concern until all relevant external countries agree on some framework for its future, if only to be proof against excessive external meddling; and the U.S. must return to its practice after 9/11 of seeking common ground there with Iran.

Third, the U.S. needs to understand that security in this region must be a combination of military forces, appropriately applied (and appropriately limited), and governance-reconstruction-development.

Yet U.S. agencies are still “stove-piped”, sufficient money for non-military activities is lacking, and we continue to judge contributions by our European allies to shared security in terms of defense budgets rather than in what they do to help societies progress. And we need to develop a long-term plan for a potentially all-inclusive security structure for the Persian Gulf.

Fourth, we need finally to see Iran with clear eyes. The issue is not just nuclear weapons. Deep and long-lasting regional competitions for influence are the heart of the matter. The last three administrations have been unwilling to advance a negotiating position with a chance to succeed, by recognising that the security interests of the U.S., Israel, and Iran must all be considered.

No country can negotiate seriously under military threat, facing sanctions (which may do more to strengthen the regime domestically than to produce acquiescence), and without serious proposals on the “plus” side.

Ironically, those who most talk about going to war with Iran also tend most to oppose the U.S.’s dealing directly with Iran and advancing realistic proposals. We should also pursue areas of common interest, such as freedom of the seas, an Incidents at Sea Convention – like that with the Soviet Union during the Cold War – and formal Iranian membership in counter-piracy cooperation.

Fifth, we need to prioritise and be clear about what really matters to us – to the U.S. – and develop some “strategic patience”, while remembering that others look to us for leadership and steadfastness.

Most important, 22 years after the Cold War ended, we must relearn how to “think strategically” about new circumstances and abandon reflexive, outdated approaches. We have become sclerotic in our methodology, while too many of our think tanks and “policy planning staffs” produce brilliant tactical suggestions but little strategic wisdom or “actionable” policy guidance.

Thus President Obama and his team must search for, engage, and listen to those Americans – some in relatively junior positions in the government, most outside – who know the Middle East and Southwest Asia region from one end to the other, who think strategically, who can make intelligent tradeoffs, and who can embed choices and decisions in U.S. domestic politics – which need to come second, not first.

The last-named task is most immediate and probably most consequential: “Hire good people and listen to them.” If the administration gets that right – which will be determined in the next few weeks – success for U.S. interests in the Middle East will still not be guaranteed. But if the administration gets that wrong, failure is assured.

*Robert E. Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, was director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council Staff in the Carter Administration and in 2011-12 was Director of Transatlantic Security Studies at the National Defense University.

Sen. John Kerry received a warm reception from his colleagues on both sides of the aisle during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee here Thursday, virtually assuring his approval as President Barack Obama’s second-term secretary of state as soon as next week.

Kerry rated Iran’s nuclear programme at the top of a list of “immediate, dangerous challenges”. Credit: WEF/cc by 2.0

“My sense is your confirmation will go very, very quickly,” Sen. Bob Corker, the right-wing ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the nominee at the outset of a four-hour hearing in which Kerry defended the administration’s existing policies, ranging from the “Arab Spring” to Obama’s “reset” with Russia and the administration’s “pivot” to the Asia/Pacific.

Kerry, who will replace Hillary Clinton, is the first and least controversial of the three key nominees to top foreign-policy posts in Obama’s second term.

The other two, Defence Secretary-designate Chuck Hagel and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director-designate John Brennan, are likely to face tougher questioning, if not outright opposition.

Indeed, the goodwill directed toward Kerry at Thursday’s hearing will likely mark a sharp contrast to the reception Republicans are expected to accord Hagel when his confirmation hearings begin before the Senate Armed Services Committee late next week.

While Hagel, himself a former Republican senator from Nebraska, is currently expected to win confirmation, his nomination has provoked vocal opposition, particularly among neo-conservatives and those Republicans committed to a staunchly pro-Israel foreign policy.

Indeed, Corker himself has already voiced strong reservations about Hagel, while another half a dozen senators have committed themselves to vote no, accusing the nominee of being insufficiently supportive of Israel’s right-wing government and too dovish toward Iran.

Hagel, however, has spent much of the time since his formal nomination two weeks ago reassuring senators, as well as leaders of various Jewish organisations that have also expressed concerns, that his views on both Israel and Iran are identical to those of Obama himself.

He appears to have made important headway, initially gaining the blessing of New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, who is closely allied with the Israel lobby, and subsequently in holding a “frank and candid” conversation “between friends” with one of his most influential Republican critics, Sen. John McCain.

More important, however, it appears that a pre-nomination campaign against Hagel by prominent neo-conservatives, who, among other charges, accused the prospective nominee of anti-Semitism, provoked a strong backlash from former top Republican and Democratic national-security officials who published letters – both in support of Hagel and denouncing the tactics of his foes.

Once Obama formally nominated him, leaders of mainstream Jewish organisations, some of whom had initially joined the neo-conservative campaign, declared their neutrality.

Moreover, the poor performance by the right-wing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is closely allied to the neo-conservatives opposed to Hagel, in the Israeli elections Monday may also reduce resistance to his nomination among right-wing forces here.

Brennan is also expected to encounter flak, although, in his case, it may be bipartisan.

Republicans have accused him of selectively leaking classified information, including about the successful hunt for Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, to the news media as the White House’s head of counter-terrorism during Obama’s first term.

Some Democrats, as well as a handful of Republicans, notably McCain, have also expressed concern that Brennan, previously a career CIA official, went along with the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques against suspected terrorists that human-rights groups have denounced as torture.

While Brennan, who also played a key role in the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen over the past four years, denied that he supported enhanced interrogation, the charges about his role under Bush persuaded him to withdraw his name when Obama considered nominating him to the CIA post in 2009.

In his testimony Thursday, Kerry broke no new policy ground, stressing instead the necessity for both parties to work together both in getting Washington’s fiscal house in order and in providing resources necessary to back up policy commitments.

In his prepared remarks, he suggested that the country risked losing its “indispensable” status if it could not show “people in the rest of the world that we can get our business done in an effective and timely way.”

Elaborating on Obama’s desire to end more than decade of war, he also stressed the importance that “American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployment alone. We cannot allow the extraordinary good that we do to save and change lives to be eclipsed entirely by the role that we have had to play since September 11th, a role that was thrust upon us,” he added.

He rated Iran’s nuclear programme at the top of a list of “immediate, dangerous challenges”, repeating the administration’s position that “we will do what we must do to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

He suggested that the U.S. would be satisfied if Tehran “proves” its programme is peaceful and subjects it to “intrusive inspections” but failed to say under what circumstances Washington would ease sanctions aimed at “crippling” Iran’s economy.

Given the uncertainty surrounding any new Israeli government emerging from this week’s elections, Kerry said his “prayer is that …perhaps this can be a moment to renew” discussions between Israel and the Palestinians.

“…If we can’t be successful, the door, window, whatever you want to call it, to the possibility of a two-state solution could shut on everybody and that would be disastrous in my judgment,” he noted, adding that many of the problems faced by the U.S. throughout the larger region was linked to that conflict.

“(S)o much of what we aspire to achieve and what we need to do globally, what we need to do in the Maghreb and South Asia, South Central Asia, throughout the Gulf – all of this is tied to what can or doesn’t happen with respect to Israel-Palestine,” he said, echoing past assertions by Hagel of the kind to which neo-conservatives and the Israel lobby have taken strong exception.

He also pledged several times to sustain Clinton’s efforts to put women’s rights at the forefront of U.S. policy, especially in Afghanistan, and defended continued co-operation with Pakistan despite its sheltering of the Taliban.

The strongest challenges to his testimony came from McCain urged him to press for greater U.S. support for rebels in Syria – and who also endorsed his nomination “without reservation” — and from rising Republican star Sen. Marco Rubio, who, in a broader critique of Obama’s policies, particularly in the Arab world, suggested that the administration had not been sufficiently assertive in promoting U.S. interests and values.

In each case, Kerry, who had himself carried out informal diplomatic missions for the administration as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, defended Obama’s performance, politely objecting at one point to the notion that a more forceful U.S. role in the Libyan rebellion that ousted Muammar Gadhafi would have produced a more stable government.

“We need to be sort of thoughtful about the history and the culture and the nature of the places that we’re dealing with,” Kerry said. “And you can’t just take an American concept and plunk it down …and say, ‘This is going to work.’”

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

Sen. Chuck Hagel arrives at Camp Ramadi in Iraq for a short visit with U.S. servicemen in July 2008. Credit: Lance Cpl. Casey Jones/public domain

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 19 2012 (IPS)

Neo-conservatives and leaders of the powerful Israel lobby are mobilising their forces in what looks like an all-out campaign to pre-empt the nomination by President Barack Obama of an outspoken former Republican senator and decorated Vietnam War hero to replace Leon Panetta as secretary of defence.

The campaign was launched last week after senior White House officials leaked word that Chuck Hagel, who also co-chairs the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), was likely to get the nomination whenever, as expected any time, Panetta formally announces his retirement.

It gathered steam in the last few days with prominent neo-cons leading the charge against the former Nebraska senator.

If Obama goes ahead with the nomination, it could signal a key shift in U.S. Middle East policy, if only because Hagel, a Republican realist in the tradition of former President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State James Baker, has been a forthright critic of some of Israel’s policies and a consistent advocate of diplomatic engagement with Iran.

In fact, some observers would see his nomination as “payback” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who clashed repeatedly with Obama during his first term over Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and his repeated threats to attack Iran. Netanyahu also made little secret of his preference for Republican Gov. Mitt Romney in last month’s presidential election.

Indeed, fears among neo-conservatives and the more mainstream Israel lobby here that Obama intends to exert real pressure on Israel in his second term appear to be motivating the burgeoning campaign against Hagel’s possible nomination.

Their goal, therefore, is to convince Obama that he will pay an excessively high political cost if he goes through with Hagel’s nomination. If the nomination goes forward, most observers believe it will be very difficult to defeat given the reluctance many Senate Republicans would feel about rejecting one of their own (despite the fact that Hagel endorsed Obama for the presidency in 2008).

The main charge leveled so far against Hagel, who also chairs the influential Atlantic Council think tank, is that he is “anti-Israel” – some go so far as to call him “anti-Semitic” – and that he has repeatedly expressed scepticism about carrying out a military attack against Iran if it fails to bow to Western demands that it curb – or, preferably, in Israel’s view – abandon its nuclear programme.

“Hagel certainly does have anti-Israel, pro-appeasement-of-Iran bona fides,” wrote William Kristol, editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, in the magazine’s lead editorial this week.

“While still a senator, Hagel said that ‘a military strike against Iran, a military option, is not a viable, feasible, responsible option,’” noted Kristol, a co-founder of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which played a key role in beating the drums for war against Iraq one decade ago, and, more recently, the controversial Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI).

He was joined Tuesday by two other prominent neo-conservatives known for their strong support of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party – Elliott Abrams, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as George W. Bush’s top Middle East aide; and Bret Stephens, who writes the “Global View” column in the Wall Street Journal.

Noting that Hagel had once explained to a friendly interviewer that “the Jewish Lobby intimidates a lot of people up here (in Congress),” Stephens suggested that the use of that expression smelled of anti-Semitism, particularly in light of his criticisms of Israel during the second Palestinian intifada and its 2006 war in Lebanon, and his opposition to various sanctions imposed on Iran.

“…Mr. Hagel’s Jewish lobby remark, was well in keeping with the broader pattern of his thinking,” wrote Stephens, who went on to quote from an interview Hagel conducted with a retired U.S. Mideast diplomat in 2006, as alleged evidence of the former senator’s anti-Semitism or hostility to Israel.

“I’m a United States senator, not an Israeli senator,” Hagel told Aaron David Miller. “I’m a United States senator. I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not a party. Not to Israel.”

While such a statement would appear uncontroversial on its face, Stephens’ charges were nonetheless echoed by Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pillar of the more-conventional Israel lobby.

“Chuck Hagel would not be the first, second, or third choice for the American Jewish community’s friends in Israel,” Foxman told neo-conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin.

“His record relating to Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship is, at best, disturbing, and, at worst, very troubling,” said Foxman who added that Hagel’s sentiments …about the Jewish lobby border on anti-Semitism.”

Still, Foxman, who, unlike the neo-conservatives, tries to remain scrupulously non-partisan, told The Times of Israel he would not oppose the nomination if it went forward.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential pro-Israel lobby group, has so far kept a discreet silence, although a former longstanding spokesman, Josh Block, who now heads The Israel Project, strongly denounced Hagel for his opposition to sanctions against Iran and his refusal to sign various letters and resolutions against Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas that were favoured, if not drafted, by AIPAC.

In some ways, the latest campaign is reminiscent of that carried out against Chas Freeman, a highly decorated retired ambassador, who was appointed to chair the National Intelligence Council early in Obama’s administration, only to withdraw from consideration after an intense campaign by leading neo-conservatives and the Israel lobby oppose him.

In that case, however, they focused less on Freeman’s criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel than on his allegedly close ties to the Chinese leadership.

With Hagel, of course, the stakes would be much higher given the importance of the Pentagon in policy-making, particularly in the Middle East where Obama, consistent with Hagel’s own views, is trying hard to lighten the U.S. footprint in order to “pivot” U.S. military forces more towards the Asia/Pacific.

Also, unlike the Freedman case, Hagel’s foes will find it difficult to use other non-Mideast issues to mobilise opposition to his possible nomination. Frank Gaffney, head of the hardline neo-conservative Center for Security Policy (CSP), denounced Hagel in a Washington Times op-ed Tuesday for his early scepticism about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his belief that the Pentagon was “bloated”, and his support, along with other Republican realists, for gradual nuclear disarmament.

Another emerging argument is that if, as expected, Obama nominates Sen. John Kerry as secretary of state, putting another older white male at the top in the Pentagon would defeat the president’s belief that his cabinet should be demographically diverse.

In the very short time since the Hagel controversy has erupted, a number of prominent Jewish voices have spoken in his support, including Miller who told the Daily Beast’s “Open Zion” blog, “Hagel is a strong supporter of Israel…”

In addition, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer told ‘Politico’ that the criticism directed against Hagel was “terribly misguided”, while the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” J Street lobby group said Hagel “would be an outstanding choice” to head the Pentagon.

Most observers believe much now depends on whether prominent senators closely tied to the Israel lobby on either side of the aisle speak out against Hagel.

So far, Republican Senators McCain and Lindsay Graham, whose views generally reflect those of the neo-conservatives and who played a key role in rallying opposition to Obama’s possible nomination as secretary of state U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, have promised to grill Hagel on his “Jewish lobby” remarks if he is nominated but have not said they would necessarily oppose him, as they did with Rice.

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

Obama will be constrained by certain political realities, most notably the fact Republicans will still hold a solid majority in the House of Representatives and 45 seats in the Senate, enabling them to effectively block any legislation to which they are strongly opposed. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

With President Barack Obama winning re-election, foreign policy analysts here are pondering whether his victory will translate into major changes from the rather cautious approach he followed overseas in his first term.

For now, speculation is focused primarily on the Middle East, the region that has dominated the international agenda since 9/11, much to the frustration of those in the Obama administration who are hoping to accelerate Washington’s “pivot” to the Asia/Pacific, especially in light of growing tensions between China and Japan and the ongoing political transition in Beijing.

Others are hoping that Obama will be willing to invest a fair amount of whatever additional political capital he gained from his victory on reviving international efforts to curb global warming, a challenge that thrust itself back into public consciousness here with hurricane-force winds as “Super-Storm Sandy” tore up much of the northeastern coast, including lower Manhattan.

Indeed, long-frustrated environmental groups seized on Obama’s allusion to the “destructive power of a warming planet” in his Chicago victory speech early Wednesday’s morning as a hopeful sign that the president, who hardly mentioned the problem during the campaign for fear of key coal-producing swing states, notably Ohio, may make climate change one of his “legacy” issues.

“President Obama’s legacy will be shaped by his ability to take on big challenges, including climate change, clean energy, environmental protection, and sustainability,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI).

As with climate change and other issues with major domestic implications, however, Obama will be constrained by certain political realities, most notably the fact Republicans will still hold a solid majority in the House of Representatives and 45 seats in the Senate, enabling them to effectively block any legislation to which they are strongly opposed.

“You’ve had an election that more or less preserves the status quo in the House,” noted Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At a time when Obama’s top priority is getting the economy going, I’m not sure we’ll see a major initiative on climate change.”

And, while Obama won a sturdy majority of the electoral vote, his margin in the national vote is unlikely to exceed three percent when all the votes are counted. As a result, the institutional and partisan balance of power remains much the same as before the election.

Moreover, the fact that foreign policy did not play much of a role in a campaign dominated by the economy – only five percent of voters told pollsters as they left the voting booth that foreign affairs was the most important issue facing the country – suggests that Obama cannot claim a clear mandate for major policy changes.

Still, the fact that his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, dropped his earlier hawkish, neo-conservative rhetoric as the election approached and essentially embraced Obama’s general policy approach, including even in the Middle East, in the closing weeks of the campaign was taken by some as a green light, if not a mandate, to pursue the president’s instincts.

“The election campaign, and not only the outcome, should be seen as the rout of the neo-conservatism of the disastrous 2001-2006 period of the Bush administration and the consolidation of a broad, bipartisan foreign policy consensus,” wrote Middle East analyst and occasional White House adviser Marc Lynch on his foreignpolicy.com blog Wednesday.

He predicted that what he called Obama’s “caution and pragmatism” in the region, particularly with respect to generally supporting democratic transitions, seeking ways to convene Israelis and Palestinians, engaging moderate Islamists, and pursuing Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, is unlikely to change, although he suggested that bolder approaches in some areas were called for.

In particular, the administration should begin “serious efforts at real talks with Iran” on its nuclear programme and “be prepared to take yes for an answer,” he wrote, echoing a consensus among realists in the foreign policy establishment that Obama will have greater flexibility to strike a deal with Tehran now than at any time in the last two years.

Reports of back-channel talks between the U.S. and Iran in preparation for a new round of negotiations between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 powers after the election have been circulating for two weeks.

Lynch also called for Washington to get behind a major push to unify the two main Palestinian factions and “encourage the renewal of a peace camp in the upcoming Israeli election” in hopes reviving serious efforts to achieve a two-state solution – a recommendation that also been urged by many analysts disappointed by Obama’s failure over the last two years to apply real pressure on Israel to halt the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since 2010, Obama and his fellow Democrats have avoided confronting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who made little secret of his support for Romney – on either issue in major part because they felt their re-election chances depended heavily on the neutrality, if not the goodwill of the powerful Israel lobby.

Remarkably, however, those fears appear to have proved largely unfounded. Despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars in swing states on ads by the hard-line neo-conservative Republican Jewish Coalition and the Emergency Committee for Israel, as well as repeated charges by Romney that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus,” 70 percent of Jewish voters opted for the president – a result that suggested that at least those hard-line neo-conservative elements of the lobby most closely tied to Netanyahu and the settler movement were not nearly as powerful as generally believed.

If so, Obama may have more room for manoeuvre on both Israel-Palestine and Iran, if he chooses to exercise it, than he himself previously thought.

Indeed, the election results were greeted with some considerable anxiety by Netanyahu’s supporters both here and in Israel.

“(R)emember that Obama is deeply committed to three things: global nuclear disarmament, rapprochement with the Islamic world, and Palestinian statehood,” wrote David Weinberg Wednesday in Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper funded by U.S. casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a major Netanyahu backer who also funded the election ads against Obama.

“I believe that he will forcefully act to progress on all three fronts, and this could bring him into conflict with Israel,” he added. “So start filling your sandbags. We’re in for a rough ride.”

Moreover, surveys of Jewish voters nationwide and in the swing states of Ohio and Florida commissioned by J Street, a “pro-peace” Zionist group, found that Obama’s tally among Jewish voters was only four percent less than in 2008 – roughly the same proportionate loss he suffered among virtually all demographic groups, except Latinos, who increased their support for the president significantly compared to four years ago.

The surveys also found overwhelming (79 percent) support for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, 76 percent support for an active U.S. role in negotiating a settlement, as well as a significant plurality for continuing diplomacy with Iran.

Still Kupchan believes Obama is unlikely to aggressively challenge Netanyahu, especially on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

“I think the chances of a major push on the peace process are slim,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That would happen only if there is an opening of sorts in the region or if it comes primarily from within Israel and a shift in the electoral landscape there that gives it Netanyahu an incentive to do something bold.”

But he, too, predicted that Obama will try harder to reach some agreement with Iran in the coming months while continuing to resist intervention – especially military intervention – amid the continuing turmoil in the Arab world.

“The one place you’ll see a growing footprint and presence and growing activism,” he said, will be in Asia, especially if “things heat up more over territorial disputes between China and its neighbours. And the new Chinese leadership may pursue a more confrontational stance which could in turn invite an American response in kind.”

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

The figures signify the number of times each country was mentioned in the Oct. 22 presidential debate. Credit: Zachary Fleischmann/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 23 2012 (IPS)

U.S. strategy in the Greater Middle East, which has dominated foreign policy-making since the 9/11 attacks more than 11 years ago, similarly dominated the third and last debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney Monday night.

The biggest surprise of the debate, which was supposed to be devoted exclusively to foreign policy and national security, was how much Romney agreed with Obama’s approach to the region.

His apparent embrace of the president’s policies appeared consistent with his recent efforts to reassure centrist voters that he is not as far right in his views as his primary campaign or his choice for vice president, Rep. Joe Ryan, would suggest.

The focus on the Greater Middle East, which took up roughly two-thirds of the 90-minute debate, reflected a number of factors in addition to the perception that the region is the main source of threats to U.S. security, a notion that Romney tried hard to foster during the debate.

“It’s partly because all candidates have to pander to Israel’s supporters here in the United States, but also four decades of misconduct have made the U.S. deeply unpopular in much of the Arab and Islamic world,” Stephen Walt, a Harvard international relations professor who blogs on foreignpolicy.com, told IPS.

“Add to that the mess Obama inherited from (George W.) Bush, and you can see why both candidates had to keep talking about the region,” he said.

But the region’s domination in the debate also came largely at the expense of other key regions, countries and global issues – testimony to the degree to which Bush’s legacy, particularly from his first term when neo-conservatives and other hawks ruled the foreign-policy roost, continues to define Washington’s relationship to the world.

Of all the countries cited by the moderator and the two candidates, China was the only one outside the Middle East that evoked any substantial discussion, albeit limited to trade and currency issues.

Romney re-iterated his pledge to label Beijing a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office, while Obama for the first time described Beijing as an “adversary” as well as a “partner” – a reflection of how China-bashing has become a predictable feature of presidential races since the end of the Cold War.

With the exception of one very short reference (by Romney) to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and another to trade with Latin America, Washington’s southern neighbours were completely ignored by the two candidates, as was Canada and all of sub-Saharan Africa, except Somalia and Mali where Romney charged that “al Qaeda-type individuals” had taken over the northern part of the country.

Not even the long-running financial crisis in the European Union (EU) – arguably, one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security and economic recovery – came up, although Romney warned several times that the U.S. could become “Greece” if it fails to tackle its debt problems.

Similarly, the big emerging democracies, including India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia – all of which have been wooed by the Obama administration – went entirely unmentioned, although at least one commentator, Tanvi Madan, head of the Indian Project at the Brookings Institution, said Indians should “breathe a sigh of relief” over its omission since it signaled a lack of controversy over Washington’s relations with New Delhi.

Another key emerging democracy, Turkey, was mentioned several times, but only in relation to the civil war in Syria.

And climate change or global warming, which has been considered a national-security threat by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon for almost a decade, was a no-show at the debate.

“There was no serious discussion of climate change, the Euro crisis, the failed drug war, or the long-term strategic consequences of drone wars, cyberwar, and an increasingly ineffective set of global institutions,” noted Walt.

“Neither candidate offered a convincing diagnosis of the challenges we face in a globalised world, or the best way for the U.S. to advance its interests and values in a world it no longer dominates.”

Romney, whose top foreign-policy advisers include key neo-conservatives who were major promoters of Bush’s misadventures in the region, spent much of the debate repeatedly assuring the audience that he would be the un-Bush when it came to foreign policy.

“We don’t want another Iraq,” he said at one point in an apparent endorsement of Obama’s drone strategy. “We don’t want another Afghanistan. That’s not the right course for us.”

“I want to see peace,” he asserted somewhat awkwardly as he began his summation, suggesting that it was a talking point his coaches told him he must impress upon his audience before he left the hall in Boca Raton, Florida.

“Romney clearly decided he needed to head off perceptions of himself as a throwback to George W. Bush-era foreign policy adventurism, repeatedly stressing his desire for a peaceful world,” wrote Greg Sargent, a Washington Post blogger.

So strongly did he affirm most of Obama’s policies that, for those who hadn’t been paying close attention to Romney’s previous stands, the president’s charge that his rival’s foreign policy was “wrong and reckless” must have sounded somewhat puzzling.

As Obama was forced to remind the audience repeatedly, Romney’s positions on these issues have been “all over the map” since he launched his candidacy more than two years ago.

“I found it confusing, because he has spent much of the campaign season in some ways recycling Bush’s foreign policy, and, at least for one night, he seemed to throw the neo-cons under the bus,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Whether it was accepting the withdrawal timetable in Afghanistan, walking back a more aggressive stance on Syria, or basically agreeing with Obama’s approach on Iran, he seems to be stepping away from a lot of the positions he was taking just a few weeks ago,” he noted. “At this point, it’s impossible for voters to actually know what he thinks because he spent most of the campaign embracing a platform that was much further to the right.”

That Obama, who took the offensive from the outset and retained it for the next 90 minutes, won the debate was conceded by virtually all but the most partisan Republican commentators, with some analysts calling the president’s performance as decisive a victory as that which Romney achieved in the first debate earlier this month and which reversed his then-fading fortunes.

A CBS/Knowledge Networks poll of undecided voters taken immediately after the debate found that 53 percent of respondents thought Obama had won; only 23 percent saw Romney as the victor.

Whether that will be sufficient to reverse Romney’s recent gains in the polls – national surveys currently show a virtual tie among likely voters – remains to be seen.

Foreign policy remains a relatively minor issue in the minds of the vast majority of voters concerned mostly about the economy and jobs – one reason why, at every opportunity, Romney Monday tried, with some success, to steer the debate back toward those problems.

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

The colours are retired during a ceremony marking the end of the U.S. mission in Iraq in Baghdad on Dec. 15, 2011. Credit: U.S. Defence Department photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 10 2012 (IPS)

Disillusioned by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. public is becoming increasingly comfortable with a more modest and less militarised global role for the nation, according to the latest in a biennial series of major surveys.

That attitude is particularly pronounced in the so-called Millennial Generation, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the poll. They are generally much less worried about international terrorism, immigration, and the rise of China and are far less supportive of an activist U.S. approach to foreign affairs than older groups, it found.

Political independents, who will likely play a decisive role in the outcome of November’s presidential election, also tend more than either Republicans or Democrats to oppose interventionist policies in world affairs, according to the survey, which was released at the Wilson Center for International Scholars here Monday by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA).

The survey results suggest that more aggressive and militaristic policies adopted by Republicans at their convention last month may be out of step with both independents and younger voters.

“If you read the whole report,” noted Daniel Drezner, an international relations professor who blogs at foreignpolicy.com, “what’s striking is how much the majority view on foreign policy jibes with what the Obama administration has been doing in the world: military retrenchment from the Middle East, a reliance on diplomacy and sanctions to deal with rogue states, a refocusing on East Asia, and prudent cuts in defence spending.”

For the first time since the Council posed the question in 1994, a majority of its nearly 1,900 adult respondents said they believe that Asia is more important to the United States than Europe.

Reflecting perhaps the so-called “pivot” by the administration of President Barack Obama from the Middle East to Asia, 52 percent of respondents said Asia was more important, a 10-percent increase over the Council’s 2010 survey result. The Pew Research Center found a similar change in its own survey earlier this year.

The survey, which was conducted in late May and early June, also found strong resistance by the public to becoming more deeply involved – especially militarily – in the Middle East, despite the perception by seven in 10 respondents that the region is more threatening to U.S. security than any other.

For the first time since 9/11, majorities said they opposed the retention or establishment of long-term U.S. military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan.

At the same time, 70 percent of respondents said they opposed a unilateral U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and almost as many (59 percent) said the U.S. should not ally itself militarily with Israel if the Jewish state attacks Iran.

The survey, which was released on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Pentagon, suggested that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the continuing hardships of the 2008 global financial crisis, have soured much of the public on foreign intervention, especially military intervention.

“Ten years after 9/11, we see that Americans are in the process of recalibrating their views on international engagement and searching for less costly ways to project positive U.S. influence and protect American interests around the world,” said Marshall Bouton, CCFR’s long-time president.

“Now, with a strong sense that the wars have over-stretched our military and strained our economic resources, they prefer to avoid the use of military force if at all possible,” he noted.

Indeed, the survey found that a record 67 percent of the public now believes the war in Iraq was “not worth it”, while seven of 10 respondents agreed that “the experience of the Iraq war should make nations more cautious about using military force.”

Sixty-nine percent said the war in Afghanistan either made “no difference” to U.S. security (51 percent) or that it made the country “less safe” (18 percent).

The degree of disillusion with foreign affairs in light of the past decade was perhaps most starkly illustrated by the answers to the binary question of whether respondents thought it best for the U.S. to “take an active part in world affairs” or “stay out of world affairs”.

Led by the Millenials (52 percent), 38 percent of all respondents opted for the latter – the highest percentage since just after World War II and seven points higher than in 2010, according to the Council’s analysis. A majority of 61 percent said Washington should take an “active part” – the smallest majority since 1998.

Nearly eight in 10 respondents (78 percent) said they believe the U.S. is playing the role of world policeman more than it should – a figure that has been constant since 2004, a year after the Iraq invasion.

“While they see leadership as desirable,” according to the Council analysis, “Americans clearly reject the role of the United States as a hyperpower and want to take a more cooperative stance.”

Indeed 56 percent now agree with the proposition that Washington should be “more willing to make decisions within the United Nations” even if such decisions are not its first choice. That is a marked increase from a historic low of 50 percent in 2010.

Most respondents said they were not concerned about the growing influence of emerging nations in Asia and elsewhere. Asked for their reaction to increased foreign policy independence of countries like Turkey and Brazil, nearly seven in 10 respondents (69 percent) agreed that it was “mostly good” because of their reduced reliance on the U.S. rather than that it was “mostly bad because then they are likely to do things the U.S. does not support”.

The survey found persistent support for a large military – 53 percent said they believed “maintaining superior military power” is a “very important” foreign policy goal. But that was down from 67 percent in 2002, shortly after 9/11.

Contrary to Republican demands that the defence budget should be increased, two-thirds of respondents said it should be cut, and half of those said it should be cut the same or more than other government programmes.

And while Republicans continue to attack Obama for “leading from behind” during last year’s intervention in Libya, Bouton said his survey results found that the public was quite comfortable with the low-key role.

Only seven percent said Washington should have taken the “leading role” in the military campaign; 72 percent said it should have taken “a minor role” (31 percent) or “a major but not leading role” (41 percent). Nineteen percent said the U.S. should not have participated at all.

Republican politicans have also mocked Obama for offering to negotiate directly with hostile states. But more than two-thirds of respondents said Washington should be ready to hold talks with the leaders of Cuba (73 percent), North Korea (69 percent) and Iran (67 percent).

The survey found that self-described Republicans generally see the world as more hostile and threatening than Democrats.

The most striking differences between members of the two parties were found over immigration, climate change, and the Middle East, particularly on Israel-related issues, with Republicans siding much more strongly with Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran.

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

With less than three months to go before the U.S. presidential election, over the weekend Barack Obama’s Republican challenger for the presidency, Mitt Romney, finally announced his vice-presidential running mate, a young member of Congress named Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington D.C. on Feb. 10, 2011. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC BY 3.0

At the announcement, on Saturday, Ryan promised that he and Romney wouldn’t “duck the tough issues”, but some have since pointed out that the Republican ticket is now characterised by a notable lack of foreign policy experience. Romney made his mark as a financier and one-term governor, while Ryan is a congressman known for his hawkish views on domestic fiscal constraint.

“This makes this year’s GOP ticket something fairly unprecedented in modern presidential politics: a pair in which neither the (vice-presidential) nor the presidential nominee has any substantial foreign policy experience on their resume,” associate editor Joshua Keating wrote on ForeignPolicy.com following the Ryan announcement.

Indeed, while Obama weathered similar criticism during his run in 2008, his choice of vice president – Joseph Biden – brought a seasoned foreign policy expert onto the ticket. The two previous U.S. presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, both of whom lacked foreign policy experience, followed similar routes.

The move comes just weeks after Romney made his international debut as presidential contender, in a three-country trip beset by missteps and widely derided as amateurish.

“Whatever impact the pick has on Romney’s campaign, one thing is clear: the GOP ticket is not running on foreign policy this year,” Keating notes.

The decision to downplay foreign policy may eventually prove to be politically savvy, given a recent national poll that found that just four percent of U.S. citizens considered the issue to be of particular importance in the upcoming election. Yet it leaves unattended a significant hole in the national and international understanding of how this potential commander in chief would act in office.

Neoconservative win?

Throughout the first half of this year, Romney fought a long and brutal battle to win the Republican nomination, which is set to become official at the party’s convention later this month.

Yet despite being the only remaining contender for the position, Romney had failed to excite broad swaths of the Republican Party, including both its intellectual elite and its socially and fiscally conservative grassroots.

While the latter remained suspicious of the candidate’s adherence to conservative values, the former became increasingly vocal over Romney’s failure to detail his vision for a United States under his presidency.

The choice of Ryan, a 42-year-old, seven-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, appears aimed at cooling both concerns.

Not only is Ryan a beloved figure among members of the conservative so-called Tea Party movement – which has gained particularly strength in recent years around calls to massively cut back on the size of the U.S. government and its debt – but he is most well known for being an ideologue on fiscal issues.

The choice of Ryan as a running mate has now received glowing praise from notable Republican corners, including the Foreign Policy Initiative and the American Enterprise Institute, both prominent neoconservative think tanks here.

Currently, Ryan chairs the House Budget Committee, a position from which he played a significant part in fashioning what are today seen as his signature legislative proposals, the Republican Party’s budget proposals for 2012 and 2013. These are most well known for moving to severely cut and partially privatise some of the United States’ most important health-related social safety nets, aimed at slicing away some 5.3 trillion dollars of spending over a decade.

While he was president, George W. Bush is reported to have called Ryan’s proposals too extreme, in part for the latter’s suggestion that the U.S. move towards privatising social security. More recently, Barack Obama has likened the Ryan plan to “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that would create a fight between rich and poor.

For many political pundits, the vice-presidential pick now inevitably binds Romney to Ryan’s budget proposals, at least in spirit.

Certainly that has been President Obama’s latest campaign approach. In the swing state of Iowa on Monday, the president called Ryan “an articulate spokesman for Governor Romney’s vision”, though some analysts suggest that dynamic could be the other way around.

Cutting diplomacy

To date, Paul Ryan is known almost exclusively for his stance on U.S. domestic issues, but he has weighed in on subjects of international interest.

On issues of human rights, for instance, he has been relatively more outspoken than some Republicans. A socially conservative, devout Catholic, on Saturday he stated, “Our rights come from nature and God, not government.”

Of particular interest is the most recent of the Ryan budgets, released in March, a 99-page document called “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal”. Although concerned primarily with cutting the United States’ federal budget, the proposal maintains that national security should be the government’s foremost priority.

How exactly to attain that security, however, appears in part to be ideologically driven.

In his only major foreign policy-focused speech, in mid-2011, Ryan painted himself as a firm believer in U.S. exceptionalism and, more recently, as a proponent of military intervention. According to media reports, he is currently being advised by Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative former advisor to George W. Bush.

The Ryan budget would allow U.S. military spending to grow by some 90 billion dollars over the coming decade while, at the same time, drastically reducing other overseas tools.

According to a May 2012 report released by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank here, Ryan’s budget would cut around 31.6 billion dollars from the foreign affairs accounts in four years, including slashing budgets for the State Department and USAID, the foreign-development office.

“By any reasonable estimation, such an approach would decimate our nation’s ability to effectively advance our interests overseas,” the report warns, “and such budget calculations cannot be justified based on a deliberate analysis of our needs and foreign policy priorities as a nation.”

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence currently with CAP, told IPS: “Ryan’s budget undermines our national security by providing funds to the military that it leaders say are unnecessary, while taking away money from diplomacy and development activities which can prevent crises.”

Romney accused Obama of abandoning U.S. allies, particularly Israel. Credit: Mark Taylor/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 25 2012 (IPS)

Reprising the neo-conservative rhetoric of the primary election campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney Tuesday harshly criticised Barack Obama’s foreign policy but offered few clues as to specific changes he would make if he defeats the president in November.

Speaking before the traditionally hawkish Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Romney accused Obama of “abandon(ing)” U.S. allies, particularly Israel, and described the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran as “the most severe security threat facing America and our friends”.

He also called the alleged leaking by the administration of details of highly secret operations, such as last year’s killing by U.S. Special Forces of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, “contemptible” and charged that Obama was putting the country in danger by pursuing “radical cuts in the military”.

“The president’s policies have made it harder to recover from the deepest recession in 70 years, exposed the military to cuts that no one can justify, compromised our national-security secrets, and, in dealing with other nations, given trust where it is not earned, insult where it is not deserved, and apology where it is not due,” Romney asserted in what was one of his biggest applause lines.

But critics said they were struck by the absence of specifics and, in some cases, the failure to draw clear differences between him and the president on specific policy issues.

“Both Republicans and Democrats have been waiting for this speech for a long time, calling on him to be policy-specific,” noted Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a think tank close to the Democratic Party. “What he offered was a lot of neo-conservative rhetoric and still few or no policy specifics.”

The speech, delivered on the eve of what is almost certain to be his campaign’s only overseas trip, comes amidst growing speculation over which faction in the Republican Party foreign policy establishment enjoys greater influence over a presidential candidate whose international expertise has been limited largely to his overseas financial investments and running the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

While Republican realists, such as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and George Shultz, are listed among his senior advisers, the most active members of his foreign policy team are identified more with the party’s staunchly pro-Israel neo-conservative and aggressive nationalist wing that dominated George W. Bush’s first term in office.

Judging from the rhetorical flourishes, tone, and some of the policy positions, especially regarding Israel and Iran, it appears clear that the more-hawkish wing of the party remains dominant, with some commentators noting that the speech appeared directed more at the party’s right-wing base than at independents who are likely to decide the election outcome.

Indeed, toward the beginning of his remarks, he reprised the main theme of the major foreign policy address he delivered at a military academy last October in the heat of the primary campaign: “This century must be an American Century,” in which “…we have the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world.”

The “American Century” phrase, which he repeated seven times, harks back to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a mainly neo-conservative group whose charter members in 1997 included, among others, Bush’s future vice president, Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Middle East aide Elliott Abrams, as well as its two co-founders, Robert Kagan and William Kristol.

While PNAC, which played a key role in mobilising support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, faded away by 2005, Kagan and Kristol created a new group, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) shortly after Obama’s inauguration, and at least two of its five directors – former Pentagon undersecretary Eric Edelman and the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Dan Senor – have taken prominent public roles in the Romney campaign.

Similarly, the choice of Romney’s foreign destinations over the next week – Britain, Poland, and Israel, where he will celebrate the breaking of the fast for Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house – also suggested a strong neo-conservative influence.

In Poland, he will meet with the leader of the Solidarity movement, former President Lech Walesa, long a neo-conservative favourite for his hostility to both the Soviet Union and Russia.

In his remarks Tuesday, Romney said that he would not attack Obama’s policy during his trip abroad but decried what he called the administration’s “shabby treatment” of Israel, accusing Obama of joining “the chorus of accusations, threats and insults at the United Nations” inflicted on the Jewish state.

He assailed Obama’s “re-set” with Russia, noting that Moscow rewarded the gesture by defending Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

Remarkably, however, he had nothing more to say about what policies he would pursue with Russia, which he described as the U.S.’s “number one geo-political foe” only three months ago. Nor did he say anything more about Syria, currently the hottest foreign policy topic in Washington, with FPI and other neo-conservatives arguing with growing urgency for the U.S. to intervene militarily.

On the other hand, Romney focused a lot of his rhetorical fire on Iran, which he described as a “catastrophic threat”, insisting “(t)here is no greater danger in the world today than the prospect of the ayatollahs in Tehran possessing nuclear weapons capability.”

But, aside from calling for full enforcement of sanctions “without exception”, his policy recommendations regarding negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme appeared somewhat ambiguous.

“Negotiations must secure full and unhindered access for inspections,” he said, adding that “(t)here must be a full suspension of any enrichment, period.”

Both the notion of future inspections and the use of the word “suspension”, as opposed to permanent abandonment, to describe an acceptable negotiated outcome suggested that Romney may be open to a settlement that would not preclude limited future enrichment – a position consistent with that of the Obama administration.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Romney said, the U.S. “cannot be neutral in the outcome there”, adding, “We must clearly stand for the values of representative government, economic opportunity, and human rights. And we must stand against the extension of Iranian or jihadist influence.”

But the only specific example he cited was Egypt, which he described as “at the centre of this historical drama”. He said he would condition U.S. assistance on the country’s commitment to representative government and peace with Israel and throughout the region. He did not explain, however, how this differs from current U.S. policy.

He criticised China’s alleged disregard for the rights of its people, as well as its trade and currency policies, but noted that “it is in our mutual interest for China to be a partner for a stable and secure world.” One commentator, Daniel Drezner of foreignpolicy.com, noted that the latter phrase was “the nicest thing Romney has said about China during the campaign.”

While he did not repeat his threat to declare China a currency manipulator on his first day on his office, he stressed that “the cheating must finally be brought to a stop. President Obama hasn’t done it and won’t do it. I will,” he said.

Besides U.S. policy toward the civil war in Syria, Hurlburt noted, Romney failed to address several key foreign policy issues, including the ongoing European economic crisis and Obama’s “pivot” of U.S. global strategy from the Greater Middle East to the Asia/Pacific region. “These are major challenges,” she said, “and he had nothing to say about them.”

Africa went entirely unmentioned, and his only nod to Latin America was a reference to the Middle East – mocking Obama’s recent assertion that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had not had a serious national security impact on the U.S. “In my view, inviting (Lebanon’s) Hezbollah into our hemisphere is severe, serious, and a threat,” he said.

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