John Kerry and the Willingness to Take Risks

If you read political journalism (and I do), 2013 has been a very successful year for Secretary of State John Kerry.  He is credited with restarting moribund Israeli/Palestinian peace talks, orchestrating a potential breakthrough with Iran on its efforts to pursue nuclear weapons, and reached an accord to destroy Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons.

I am cautiously optimistic.  U.S. policy makers have been trying to untie the Gordian Knot of Israel and Palestine for decades.  Netanyahu  does not strike me a peace maker even if a deal is in the best interest of Israel.  On Iran, there is a real chance to change the calculus in the broader Middle East.  Iran as something other than belligerent could alter the trajectory of American foreign policy in the region from what it has been for the past 30 years.  However, I have my doubts that the power structure in Iran is willing to pursue some form of true reconciliation. Most significant to me is the elimination of the chemical weapons in Syria.  Unfortunately, this success will probably be overshadowed by the continued Syrian civil war.  As a result, a true achievement will be forgotten in the shadow of this conflict.

As interesting as the substance (or lack thereof) of Kerry's accomplishments, what interests me more is the discussion of Kerry's willingness to gamble on peace initiatives.  The prevailing narrative is that Kerry has no further political ambitions and thus can try and fail at diplomatic initiatives (unlike his predecessor, Hillary Clinton who may well seek the presidency).  Maybe this narrative is correct.  If so, I am troubled by it.  Is U.S. foreign policy really so constrained by a fear of failure?  What counts as failure?

The idea that failing to get Israelis and Palestinians to sit for peace talks constitutes a failure of American foreign policy is ridiculous.  It might be a sign over our lack of influence over the parties but I cannot view it as a failure.  To me, the U.S. should simply be advocating for a peaceful resolution of the dispute at all times, not engaging in occasional efforts to restart the process.  If Israelis and Palestinians can not or will not reach agreement, that is not evidence that America has failed.  America fails only when it fails to keep pushing the parties toward a solution.  Similarly, the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.  Failure is not failing to come to an agreement on Iran's nuclear program.  Failure is armed conflict over Iran's nuclear program.  The U.S. should be pushing Iran to reach an accord on its ability to build nuclear weapons, via sanctions and diplomacy.  Because an accord has yet to be reached is not evidence of failure. 

Perhaps we need to think more carefully about what diplomatic failure looks like.  America's foreign policy goals are moving targets.  Trying to reach those goals through diplomatic means is progress even if the U.S. fails to get all it wants.  Perhaps the problem is that foreign policy is being viewed through a more political lens by the media resulting in a winners and losers narrative.  To me, foreign policy is a long game.  To win that game requires persistence as well as a willingness to take risks.  Hopefully Kerry will tune out this win/loss narrative and continue to gamble on the possibility of a better world.

Rising Power

The United States Senate conducted hearings for President Obama's nominee for the United States Ambassador to the United Nations today.  That nominee, Samantha Power, is one of the more interesting figures to rise to a level of power in the foreign policy apparatus in years.  She also happens to be one of those people that foreign policy nerds like me fantasize about having having stop by for cocktail hour to have length policy debates with about obscure parts of the globe.

Power made her mark in a very different way then most foreign policy hands.  She started as a journalist.  If memory serves me right, she started covering baseball.  Images of the war in the former Yugoslavia prompted her to take a job as a freelance reporter in Bosnia.  This, in turn, resulted in Power having a front-row seat for a modern genocide.  Power later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide based, in part, on this experience.

A Problem from Hell is an excellent book.  While the book does a fine job on educating the reader about genocide and debunking the myth that policy makers lacked an understanding of what was happening when confronted with instances of genocide, what stuck with me from the book was Power's sense of outrage.  Power does a very effective job of distilling the question of whether we (both the public and policy makers) have learned anything from events like the Holocaust.  If we have, how is that we keep allowing genocides to happen?

As good as A Problem from Hell is, Power's second book, a biography of  Sergio Vieira de Mello is even better. Vieira de Mello was a diplomat with the United Nations who had a reputation for trouble-shooting, especially in areas of failed states.  He was killed in 2003 while serving as the U.N. envoy in Iraq.  Power traces his career while noting Vieira de Mello's evolving views on international intervention.  In many ways, I feel like Power herself is trying to work though the justifications and dangers attendant in international interventions by tracing Vieira de Mello's own struggles with the subject. 

The evolution of an academic's views on international intervention would be a lot less interesting except Power's career trajectory took a sharp turn.    Power went to work for then Senator Obama shortly after writing Chasing the Flame.   When Senator Obama became President Obama, Power got a job on the National Security Council.  Now, she is Obama's nominee to replace Susan Rice at the United Nations.

There has been much speculation about Power's role in persuading President Obama to intervene in Libya.  Certainly there are many echoes between Power's writings and the rhetoric employed at the time of the U.S. intervention into Libya.  I am inclined to think that the reports of Gaddafi's troops poised to being a massacre in Benghazi was enough to prompt Power to argue forcefully that President Obama needed to do more than watch a new genocide unfold in Libya. It is my hope that we will get a fuller accounting of the decision making that went into the Libya intervention from both Power and Obama when this administration ends.  In the meantime, Power's story is clearly not done.

It will be very interesting to see someone as passionate as Power wrestling with the inertia of the United Nations and the gamesmanship of international politics.  In fact, Power will have a test case of sorts immediately - the Syrian civil war.  Other than peace in the Middle East, there seems to be no more intractable problem on the international stage than Syria.  Can Power persuade the international community to do something about Syria?  Can anything productive be done via foreign intervention?  Would President Obama agree to some form of intervention on humanitarian grounds?

I don't know.  I would love to hear Power's unvarnished views on the subject.  Even better, perhaps she can read Can Intervention Work? and then stop by to debate the subject with Rory Stewart.  I promise to provide absolute confidentiality (perhaps in exchange for an autograph), a chess board, and cocktails of her and Mr. Stewart's choice.

Diplomacy Without Walls, Part 2

I have been pleased to see several stories making the same point that I did in my previous post on the killing of Ambassador Stevens - that American diplomacy cannot function with a bunker mentality.  The New York Times Magazine ran a longer piece making this point.  A similar post ran on The Daily Beast as part of an interview of former Secretary of State Albright and Ambassador Crocker.  In the Daily Beast piece Ambassador Crocker gave some good quotes like "If it's risk avoidance, there is no point in being there."  He also said "We have to be prepared as a foreign service to take those risks . . . and if some of us pay the ultimate price that's simply part of the life."

I wholeheartedly agree.  Obviously, it is easy for me to agree as the likelihood of me deploying overseas, especially to a dangerous part of the world, is next to zero. However, someone like Ambassador Crocker has run that risk and knows what it means to say that the foreign service must be prepared to take the risks.

It would be my hope that whomever President Obama chooses to succeed Secretary Clinton is aware of this problem and makes it a priority.  I have my doubts that this will happen.  The easy path is to ramp up security and rhetoric about the protection of our brave diplomats.  It is much harder to have a reasoned discussion about how foreign service officers need to connect with the countries they are posted to and how excessive security makes that task harder.  It is even harder to acknowledge that dialing back the security for our diplomats raises the likelihood that more of them will likely die in the service of that outreach.  Given the current political outrage that is still burning following the death of Ambassador Stevens, it seems unlikely that any President or Secretary of State will willingly pay the political price necessary to state openly that the risk of more American deaths is a necessary price to pay.

Our democracy does not do well with admitting that sometimes sacrifices are made in the service of a higher goal.  I do not see that changing any time soon.

My Grandparents' Things, Part Two

We cleaned out grandma and grandpa's house over Thanksgiving.  It was hard and surreal.  Tempers flared a few times and I think feelings were hurt.  At the time, it seemed a lot more dramatic and contentious but several months after the fact I believe that the disagreements have diminished.

The plan was for the siblings to work on the home and get it ready for an estate sale.  Basically, this meant going through everything, deciding what people wanted and then dividing up the items.  I was there to help with the hauling and to help dad road trip back to Minnesota in the rental truck.  Admittedly, my ulterior motive was to see if I could get some of the African art.  I knew going down that my grandfather's bar was mine if I wanted it.  Apparently, everyone in the family knew that I coveted the bar and were kind enough to let me have it.

The paintings and orisha oko had been devised by my grandparents.  Some of the masks and statues had similarly been bequeathed.  Still, a large amount of masks, statutes and other items remained up for grabs.  As a consequence, my modest home library now has a decent African art collection.  My favorite is probably the esu elegbara, a fantastic cowry-covered, statue with a huge curved crest.  I love it. I look forward to the day when one of my kids asks about it.

In addition to the African art, I came back with a helm, axe and shield from Afghanistan.  They are decorated, probably ceremonial and not functional. Perhaps even manufactured for tourists.  I have no idea.  To my eye they look Mogul.  Hopefully I can bring them in to Antiques Roadshow the next time it is in town and get some more information.

I also brought back about fifty books.  The majority of them are on African art.  Even though I came away with several boxes of books it bothered me immensely to see the remainder left on the shelves.  Grandpa had carefully catalogued his books via his own form of a card catalogue.  Had I more room I would loved to have kept them all.  As it was, I was only able to keep a tiny fraction.

Still, the most meaningful thing that came out of the house was a cd-rom with some old WordPerfect files.  I knew that grandma and grandpa had spent some time putting together some recollections.  Grandma had read some of them to me but I did not know how extensive they were. I had to go buy a copy of WordPerfect to resurrect them off the cd-rom and preserve the photos that had been embedded into the narratives.  I put them on the web to share them with the family and, hopefully, help in their preservation.  They are here: http://wigginmemories.wordpress.com/

While I wish there was more, the written recollections are a wonderful glimpse at the lives my grandparents lived.  Those are the stories I wanted for my kids.  I look forward to sharing them.  Maybe I will even get a chance to share a cocktail and a story over my grandfather's bar with them some day.

Diplomacy Without Walls

Last week the United States Ambassador to Libya was killed in Benghazi, Libya.  His death, along with the death of another foreign service officer and two other Americans, was apparently linked to a YouTube video deemed blasphemous.  Even now, more than a week after the deaths, there a number of unanswered questions about what actually happened and who is responsible.

What has become clear in the days immediately after the attack are the voices calling for a pull back in U.S. diplomatic resources.  This article, in the Washington Post, quotes an unnamed administration source as saying that the number of civilians deployed overseas in support of administration outreach needed to be reduced.  I believe that this is precisely the wrong reaction.

The United States has been reducing its overseas outreach even as the world has become more globalized.  Of even greater concern, the United States has adopted a bunker mentality for its diplomats.  Following the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, the U.S. implemented new designs for its embassies and consulates.  The new design focused on security as the paramount concern.

Combined with new, bunker designs for its diplomatic facilities, foreign service officers increasingly labour under onerous security procedures that hamper and often prevent them from having interaction with the citizens of the countries in which they are serving.  Finally, the duty rotation schedules for foreign service officers results in officers remaining in any one country for a shorter period of time.  This necessarily results in reduced familiarity with the language and culture of the host country and fewer long-term contacts and friendships with people in the host country.

I fear that the killing of Ambassador Stevens will only exacerbate the United States pullback. Fewer people will be posted overseas, under tighter security restriction in increasingly isolated diplomatic compounds.  I believe that the long-term consequences of such a shift will have much worse ramifications than the killing itself.

The United States must continue to present itself to the world through its diplomatic outreach.  If the world sees more militarized compounds and fewer Americans, what message does that send about the United States' interest in the host country?  It is certainly not a message of friendship or partnership.  At worst, it may reinforce the impression of an occupying, imperial power.  At a time when the United States is dealing with the return to a multi-polar world order, I believe that an image of a militarized and scared superpower is the wrong image to project to the rest of the world.  The United States becomes a target to be driven out and not a friend to call upon in an hour of need.

If the United States wants to advance its economic and geopolitical interests it must do so in partnership with others.  To do so, it must build long-term relationships with other countries based upon trust, shared values and mutual interest.  I firmly believe that such relationships can only be built with sustained diplomatic outreach.  To do such outreach effectively, the United States cannot retreat behind walls and further curtail its interactions with others.  Yes, sending out more civilians to foreign countries and easing restrictions on security puts American diplomats at great risk.  Most likely, it will result in more tragedies like what happened in Benghazi.  Yet the risk is necessary.

The United States has played a critical role in expanding peace and security throughout the world.  However, the world remains a dangerous place.  A retreat from the world will make it a more dangerous place and not less dangerous.  Sooner or later, that danger will show up on our doorstep - likely with far more dire consequences than if we had confronted early before it had a chance to fester.  The United States should mourn its loss and redouble the outreach efforts that Ambassador Stevens represented.  Our security and prosperity depend on it.

Challenging Obama

With the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in the books it seems very likely that the 2012 presidential election will be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama.

I have been underwhelmed by the Republican race to date.  Based upon the polls and commentary it seems like a lot of other people are underwhelmed too.  Romney seems singularly unfit for our times.  He is a politician running in a party that appears bent on angry confrontation.  Romney tries to echo this anger by calling Obama a failure and criticizing his record, principally on the economy and the health care reform act.

The problem is that I believe that Romney is smart enough to know that the economy is being driven by factors largely out of Obama's control.  With respect to his health care reform criticisms, Romney is stuck trying to draw distinctions between what he passed in Massachusetts with what was passed on a national level.  Those differences are minute and largely inconsequential to the broader issues relating to health care reform.  The bottom line is that I do not believe that Romney truly believes that Obama is the failure that he tries to project him to be on the stump. As a consequence, Romney comes across as phoney and disingenuous.

Besides the issue of Romney's authenticity, I believe that Romney has a real problem with his aristocratic background.  Romney is the child of wealth and power who has expanded that wealth and power by working (probably quite well) in the arcane world of private equity. As America slowly recovers from the most significant economic disruption since the Great Depression, the idea of electing a man who made his fortune on buying, selling, liquidating, and rehabilitating corporations using vast amounts of privately held wealth strikes me as something that will rub the American people the wrong way. While the average American voter may not be able to explain how a credit swap agreement or a derivative contract caused a major financial crisis, I do believe that Americans understand that the banking world ended up playing poker with other people's money and was taking some long odds on its bets.  I have a hard time thinking that America will reward someone who profited so greatly from this system when so many are still holding the bag.

At one level the inadequacies of Romney are great from my perspective - I supported Obama in 2008 and was unlikely to support anyone else regardless of who the Republican nominee was this year.  Yet - I believe in the benefit of the adversarial system.  A good opponent makes you better and a bad opponent makes you worse.  I wonder how much better Obama would be if he were able to have a debate with a real opponent with genuinely thought out alternatives to the status quo.  Jon Huntsman would have been such an opponent in my opinion.  Unfortunately, I believe his 3rd place showing in New Hampshire is his high water mark and he is unlikely to remain in the race beyond South Carolina and Florida.

Obama is going to end up debating a hollow idea of what American should be and not a genuine alternative.  I hope that he can rise above the lack of a genuine opponent and rise to the level of leadership we need.

Open Spaces

Yesterday we buried my grandparents at a small graveyard in Canton, South Dakota.  They now lie near generations of their forebearers atop a small, windswept hill surrounded by farm fields. Two people who lived and worked in some of the remotest and far flung corners of the globe have returned to rest beneath the blue sky and broad vistas of the prairie.  It fits perfectly.

 I love the prairie.  It is harvest time and the fields are golden and tan.  Traveling beneath a bright cobalt sky dotted by swiftly rolling clouds conveys a sense of timelessness.  I find it hard to feel sad as I think of my grandparents lying quietly year after year as the seasons march over top.  Maybe I would feel different if I stood atop the hill in the dead of winter but yesterday it was golden and it felt inevitable and right.

The prairie always feels inevitable.  It can be easy to forget just how vast this country is when you live in a city.  The prairie and its open horizons are a necessary correction.  After 9/11 I remember scanning the horizon thinking about a hijacked plane flying toward the building I was standing in.  Those fears drained away a few weeks later as I was driving west.   These plains are too large.  No act of terrorism or war endangers them.  They cannot be destroyed by anything short of a global catastrophe. That recognition brings me peace.  My grandparents will lie undisturbed for all time.

Peace is acceptance.  I have struggled to accept the loss of my grandparents.  While they were by no means young, the loss of each seemed premature when the time came.  Despite that longing, I felt peace yesterday.  Not because I have come to terms with their departure but because the land has welcomed them home.  They have come full circle back to the endless horizons that watched the beginning of a great journey and now watch over a well-earned rest.  I believe they are at peace.  I am.