Drones are a symptom, not a cause

Ben Farley has a solid post up arguing that I’ve overstated the non-game change of drone technology. Read his post, but his arguments can be summed up basically as:

• Drones have much longer mission endurance
• Drones are expendable
• Drones don’t put a pilot in harm’s way
• Policymakers are relying on drones
• Drones make policy makers use force where it is not necessary or counterproductive

These are all interesting points, and I’m almost certain every one of them isn’t significantly relevant to the way drones are used today. This is a contrarian position, to be sure, but let me explain. Before I go on, to give credit where credit is due, everyone reading this ought to read Winslow Wheeler’s five part series on the MQ-9 Reaper.

Drones have longer mission endurance:

In a vacuum, yes, but that’s not where operations occur. In fact, drones are not often used for this very long endurance time, according to Wheeler. Why? Because, as detractors of signature strikes are all too aware, drones are not particularly good at identifying targets from the air, particularly when compared to the plethora of manned platforms that generally supplement drone missions.

Wheeler notes that on the U.S. border, drones often must be supplemented by “Big Miguel” Cessnas with FLIR (that cost multiple times less than Predator or Reaper airframes to operate, and magnitudes less per alien intercepted). Even in the so-called drone wars, manned ISR platforms are frequent features. There is a reason Sean Naylor talks about the use of P-3 ISR platforms off the coast of Somalia, or that U-28 aircraft are flying out of Djibouti. Additionally, Task Force ODIN in Afghanistan has MC-12W Liberty prop-driven aircraft as the cornerstone of ISR missions supporting drone operations there (in addition to the myriad of Air Force and Navy EW and ISR platforms which support AfPak operations). If the drones, even with their long endurance time, must be supplemented with manned ISR, this means that drone endurance capability is likely not a factor that significantly removes constraints on strikes.

Additionally, for drones to provide as much firepower as manned combat aircraft, they must significantly sacrifice their endurance to bring a full-combat load to bear. Manned planes have a very obvious method for improving endurance – in-flight refueling. While this still does not bring them up to match drones, when one considers that in combination with native or additional ISR platforms, more precise and effective strikes are possible. In-flight refueling is a readily available option for a wide variety of manned strike platforms. Indeed, some manned strike platforms are actually based off of refueling variants such as the KC-130 Harvest Hawk and MC-130 Dragon Spear families. The MC-130Ws can be armed with a Bushmaster 30mm gun along with up to dozens of Viper Strike or Griffin munitions. The KC-130 maintains a similar capability. They can carry just as much weaponry as drones, including the gun (often a more useful weapons systems for certain strikes), along with equivalent or superior sensor packages and the ability to in-flight refuel or draw on their internal fuel bladders to provide potent overwatch capabilities.

That drone strikes have to be supplemented by these platforms not simply for ISR but for strike capabilities suggests that drones are not what tips the balance between the choice to use force and the choice not to use force. One must differentiate between the proximate and ultimate determinants of the decision to use force, and while drones might be a proximate decision, as the first strike in Yemen utilized one in 2002, that they were hardly the only platform utilized suggests that that a lack of drones would have prevented the U.S. from conducting standoff strikes against hostile non-state actors in Yemen and Somalia.

Drones are expendable:

If they are, at least in a way that alters the decision to use force in a way manned aircraft does not, it’s not reflected in the way we currently employ them. The so-called drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are all areas where we have tacit agreements which allowed for the violation of foreign air sovereignty – which is precisely why we have used manned platforms in Yemen and Somalia. Even in Pakistan, though published reports only emphasize drone usage, serious Pakistani air defense attempts to intercept drones have never been a serious concern. Diplomatic prohibition of the strikes has been far more problematic than any attempt to shoot down the aircraft, which suggests that the U.S. is sensibly more concerned about losing a multimillion dollar investment -pilot or no – than it is willing to take advantage of the supposed political risk mitigation an unmanned platform offers.

There is one case that we know of where drones have conducted armed strikes in areas where their expendable status might have been put to good use – Libya. So did drones go in first and take the heat for Americans? No, they absolutely didn’t! The first armed drone strikes in Libya did not occur until about a month after the U.S. had deployed manned and cruise missile attacks had neutralized Libyan air defenses and conducted a variety of other strikes. Drones, in fact, were not deployed to attack ground targets until any threat to aircraft of any kind was removed, which is the opposite of what we would expect if drones were really pushing policymakers into the more vigorous use of force.

Drones, in fact, because of their poor survivability, are not very useful in contested airspace, which is why they’ve never been employed in situations where an expendable aircraft might be desirable. In fact, it’s quite difficult to defend them even from man portable guns and air defense missiles. Despite their relatively “cheap” cost, Wheeler notes that Reapers and Predator operators are “reluctant to venture below 10,000 feet.” In fact, in the face of air defenses, the survivaibility record of manned American platforms is so high that the supposedly vulnerable manned aircraft are far more frequently used where actually hitting the target is a mission-critical task.

On paper, drones are expendable. In practice, we have yet to treat them as such. They’re never used in airspace which is military contested, and in airspace that is military contested, it’s manned aircraft that come in first to clear the airspace for the drones. So this factor doesn’t point towards drones increasing American bellicosity in any meaningful way.

Drones don’t put a pilot in harm’s way:

Drones have yet to be used in a situation where a pilot of a manned strike platform would have been at serious risk from something besides a plane crash. In practice, in these kinds of campaigns the most vulnerable people are those operating on the ground to support drone operations, and more of them, not fewer of them, are brought in to support so-called drone wars.

But does the lack of accident threat increase bellicosity? Not really, since again, in virtually all theaters of drone use, drone strikes occur where manned strikes or manned ISR support is also occurring. These aircraft are also at accident risk, yet they are often used alongside drones or to fulfill missions that drones also carry out. While again, on paper, drones remove these risk, in practice the kind of missions policymakers employ drones with does not suggest drones have significantly changed their calculus towards waging standoff strike campaigns.

Policymakers are relying on drones

The United States is only “relying” on drones in Pakistan, and even then, in Pakistan it’s also operating Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams on the ground and other proxy militia forces, and very likely receiving the kind of manned ISR support that drones very frequently do in Afghanistan (along with strike support in that theater, of course). The “unique capabilities” of drones do not change the calculus to actually initiate military action, they just change the relative logistical load of the operation. That’s not a revolution and that’s hardly enough evidence to suggest it significantly effects U.S. bellicosity or the accountability of warmaking by giving policymakers a cost free option for prosecuting strikes.

In Yemen and Somalia, policymakers almost certainly are not relying on drones. The first drone strikes in Somalia did not occur until years after the U.S. had begun using JSOC ground forces, helicopters, gunships, and naval aircraft and ship fires to target the ICU and later al Shabaab. Even then, drones have yet to actually take over the duties of strike missions, as the F-15E squadron in Djibouti suggests. In Yemen, the strikes have generally been a mix of platforms that has ranged from drones, to seaborne fire missions, to manned aircraft.

So it’s certainly not an undisputed fact that policymakers are relying on drones, even if this factor is publicly played up by the media and government alike. If anything, drones are over-emphasized to hide the very many people operating on the ground and in manned supporting strike and ISR platforms that are involved in these wars. It’s absolutely false to suggest that it’s casualty aversion or drone expendability which enables these conflicts, or otherwise policymakers would not be using manned missions in Yemen and Somalia (and they would probably be more willing to conduct high-value strikes when Pakistan clamps down on strikes).

Farley suggests that policymakers are not casualty tolerant of air wars. This is false. In fact, the utter air superiority of U.S. forces has been invoked for the ease of conducting U.S. airpower interventions in the Balkans and Iraq after 1991. There’s significant evidence to suggest that policymakers consider aerial and naval assets writ large, along with deniable and covert SOF assets, more expendable than regular ground troops from the Army and the USMC. The record of U.S. military interventions suggests this. Casualty aversion from ground troops did not prevent the growth of an airpower mystique among policymakers which allowed for interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq between 1991-2003, and later, Libya. The punitive use of aerial and standoff fires is extended to virtually all aerial assets, and in many cases policymakers are more eager to send manned aircraft against enemy air defenses than they are to send unmanned strike aircraft into contested areas. If Farley was arguing, as many other commentators have, that there is a general airpower mystique, that would be a much more plausible argument. But the conduct of U.S. military interventions since 1991 suggests that policymakers are not very worried about pilot casualties (even after the shoot-down of an F-16 in Bosnia and an F-117 in the Kosovo War), and drone strikes rarely occur when there’s a real threat of pilot casualties beyond the accidents that can afflict the manned strike and ISR assets used alongside them.

Drones make policymakers more prone to use force

This is highly unlikely. As I have noted, in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, drone use has been dependent on both militarily and diplomatically permissive environments, and they are generally used alongside manned assets, proxy forces, special operations, and security force assistance to other states. In other words, there are a variety of militarized options which are employed concomitantly which all suggest drone strikes were not the limiting factor in the U.S. choosing to find a variety of direct and indirect methods for covertly and overtly killing foes determined to be hostile to the country.

Secondly, the fact that the U.S. also uses the Pursuit Teams and other covert actors in Pakistan suggests that the U.S. would still be trying to kill its enemies across the borders if drones were not available. In Yemen there isn’t convincing evidence that drones are the reason the U.S. chose to militarize its policy there, as the increase in strikes starting in 2009 came with an increase in manned and naval strikes. In Somalia, drones are definitively not the reason the U.S. chose to militarize its counterterrorism policy there, as U.S. strikes in support of the American-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2006 were all of a  manned variety.

Thirdly, there’s little suggestion that drones are blinding policymakers to the virtues of riskier means of force, an example of which that Farley cites is SOF. But SOCOM has expanded enormously alongside the growth of the drone program, and SOCOM and JSOC are operating on the ground in far far more countries than we use drones! Not only that, but JSOC, CIA SAD operators, and proxy forces such as contractors, militia groups and foreign military forces are all in play in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Standoff strikes are always and everywhere just one prong of the U.S. counterterrorism strategy – even the kinetic aspects.

If anything, the biggest advantage to policymakers of drones, in terms of initiating and continuing use of force, is that they allow policymakers to obscure and misinform the public and the international community – and each other – as to the extent of the military and covert campaign. But that’s not drones eluding accountability and enabling bellicosity, it’s secrecy and the management of public perceptions. The CIA had methods of doing this thing before today’s remotely-operated weapons were invented. Back in the day, when you wanted to avoid the bad publicity of USAF or USN platforms getting formally involved in “shadow wars” (and they often were anyway, as they very obviously are now), you started a secret air force. Former USAF or USN airframes, crewed and often even supported by foreign nationals or deniable covert operators. This was what happened in Cuba and the Congo.

Drones make very little difference in the ability of policymakers to militarize U.S. foreign policy approaches. They are insufficient for action in military impermissive airspace, and they are almost always used alongside manned assets, and they are always used alongside covert ground or proxy forces. This is why I greatly admire the work of national security journalists (the first coming to mind being Jeremy Scahill and Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady) who sketch out not simply the new hotness that is killer robots, but the full spectrum of direct and indirect methods that are by necessity and by preference used along side drone attacks, such as SOF, manned platforms, naval assets, spies, mercenaries, unsavory foreign security services, militias, warlords, and even terrorists previously targeted by the U.S. to attack America’s real and imagined enemies in places like Yemen and Somalia.

Criticism that exalts the mythical capabilities of drones to conduct cost-free, casualty-free campaigns in fact enables to prosecution of unaccountable wars. Why? Because it’s not having the option of drones which make the policymakers responsible for determining the mission and demanding warheads put to foreheads decide to do so. If it was, then we’d see being drones use din the expendable, cost-free ways that our comprehensive strike campaigns and covert wars suggest is not occurring. Instead, the exaltation of these game-changing features of drones, which will be eagerly swallowed by the broader public, if not by critics of the war on terror, is often parroted by the fears of drone critics, which give policymakers the ability to obscure the extent of the “drone wars” and what is really going on.

It’s not drones that decrease accountability or increase bellicosity. It’s secrecy and bureaucratic politics. Drones don’t truly offer any advantages in terms of secrecy or bureaucratic politics that did not already exist or are not being cultivated alongside drones by other branches of the military and intelligence community. Even the much-vaunted ability that drones give the CIA to conduct military-grade “secret wars” was pioneered aerially by the “instant air forces” of the Cold War that it set up, as well as other proxy assets with which the CIA can emply and is now employing in its modern shadow conflicts. The very same compartmentalization and secrecy that protect the drone campaign also protects the activities of manned strike missions, SOCOM, CIA assets, and U.S.-backed proxy forces. Drones only marginally alter the kind of impunity that U.S. air superiority gave American policymakers to launch its airpower interventions of the 1990s and 2000s (themselves, as Carl Schmitt foresaw in the 1950s, an outgrowth of naval technology). What’s at least slightly novel about these campaigns is the way in which bureaucracies and secrecy have been utilized to obscure policymakers use of all manner of overt and covert strike, ground, intelligence and proxy assets from proxy criticism, even though even this was essentially cultivated during the Cold War. Perhaps some day in the future drone capabilities will improve enough that they will actually encourage the lack of accountability and bellicosity that critics blame for them. But the record of drone usage so far suggests that the evasions of accountability and enablings of bellicosity in question are equally available to manned assets, standoff naval assets, and deniable covert assets. Drones have yet to be responsible for a single militarization of a U.S. CT campaign that would not have been militarized by the concomitant use of other assets. They’re a symptom of the post-Iraq decision to conduct comprehensive shadow conflicts against AQAM ( arguably pioneered in the Horn of Africa long before strike drones showed up), not from what we can observe in the conduct of drones so far, a cause of its direction. They are a useful instrument in the toolbox. But it’s the toolbox, not any one tool in it, that’s shaping policy. Giving the drones the kind of hype they receive from critics and proponents alike shifts debate obscures what’s really allowing policymakers to conduct today’s wars.

A Brief Comment on the Drezner-Saunders Debate

Recently, Dan Drezner criticized a post by the Center for the National Interest’s Paul Saunders. Saunders asserted that the Obama administration had failed to demonstrate realism because of its mishandling of the Chen Guangcheng case and inconsistencies in its behavior over the Middle East. Drezner wrote a brief criticism, and Saunders fired back.

There’s merit to the point that the U.S. isn’t pursuing a fully realist policy – and it isn’t – because liberal internationalist ideas do hold strong sway in some quarters of the administration. However, the policies which Saunders criticizes have largely been policies that realists would support.

The Chen Guangcheng example is kind of baffling. Based on what we know from reporting (and we may not know the real story for a long time, if we ever do), the reason Chen couldn’t simply be taken to the U.S. is that he requested to stay in China. Chen’s indecision is not a reflection of the administration’s highest level policymaking frameworks.. Was the administration wrong to try to assure his protection if he stayed in China? Sure, but Chen didn’t ask to leave for the United States until it was too late. The U.S. couldn’t exactly forcibly extradite Chen from China if even he hadn’t decided to leave the country yet. In any case, the specifics of an embassy imbroglio an IR theory determination does not make. Claiming the initial actions of embassy staff are evidence of the President’s entire China policy at the level of the White House isn’t a particularly strong argument.

The irony of the situation is that the administration is trying to do exactly what it would if it was adhering to Saunders’s version of realism – mitigating damage to the U.S.-China relationship without harming American values or undermining American credibility.

Of course, Drezner is correct to point out that a truly realist American foreign policy would not conceive of American values in such a way, and if anything he isn’t hard enough on the claims that credibility matters so much to a realist foreign policy. Saunders insists:

First, it is nonsense to claim, as Drezner does, that realists “don’t give a flying fig about promoting ‘American values’ overseas.” This caricature of realism and realists is routinely peddled by their critics but has little basis in fact. Realists understand well that perceptions are important in shaping international power and influence and, as a result, that policies disconnected from our values diminish the United States and weaken its ability to lead. Moreover, they recognize that such policies are not politically sustainable in America and are therefore impractical and—wait for it!—unrealistic. Ivory-tower academics with no responsibility for formulating or executing policy may think otherwise, but I expect that few involved in actual foreign-policy decisions would agree. The real question, which Drezner ignores, is not whether to advance our values, but how to advance our interests and values most effectively.

The first argument, that perceptions are important in shaping international power, is true in a sense. But it has really nothing to do with connecting our values to our policies. Realists generally choose to shape perceptions by dropping pretensions to morally grandiose visions that stake our influence or credibility on bringing the rest of the world into ideological conformity with the U.S. Realists recognize that our values might not impress other governments. Indeed, policies that seem disconnected from our values, like non-intervention in other countries’ internal affairs, may be the most agreeable to foreign states. But of course, realists do morally justify their decisions – but they do it not by blindly accepting the narrative that the only policies which reflect American values require liberal intervention  or democracy promotion, but by accentuating the values in American politics that have been articulated, say, by Washington, Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams rather than Wilson, Roosevelt or Reagan. Realists recognize that foolish or impractical policies of value promotion do far more damage to its international standards than its failure to be sufficiently liberal overseas, at least in the eyes of foreign powers which very often do not care about or actively oppose the kinds of American values under discussion here.

The second issue is that American politics supposedly demands the promotion of American values is more difficult. I’m not sure if Drezner was being humble or simply forgot, but in any case he should have cited his own excellent work on the subject. In his questioning of public opinion’s hostility to realism, Drezner aggregates a variety of useful research:

Sam McFarland and Melissa Matthews come to a similar conclusion about American attitudes towards human rights promotion. They find that Americans give strong support for abstract human rights principles—but when asked to rank order policy priorities, human rights came in 12th out of 15 possibilities. They conclude that,“although most Americans express agreement with the ideals of human rights, a willingness to commit American resources to promote and defend human rights is much weaker.” In other words, while Americans aspire for liberal policy ends, realist considerations of national interest trump those aspirations.

Saunders dismiss Drezner’s assertion that values don’t matter all that much to realist foreign policy by asserting that “Ivory tower academics” hold the belief that values don’t matter. But Drezner’s research strongly suggests that “folk realism” is pervasive in the American public. The problem, of course, is that it’s actually political and intellectual elites among whom liberal internationalist viewpoints are most popular, and it’s pressure from rival political elites that motivates the realist sense of persecution. Thus, realist eggheads at say, the University of Chicago may, on many issues, have more in common with the foreign policy views of the man in Peoria than do Beltway liberal interventionists (or Ivory Tower academics of an anti-realist persuasion).

Recent public opinion polling supports this trend. Most Americans oppose the idea that America has a responsibility to even “do something” about the situation in Syria, as they did in Libya (and Bosnia, at the time). As for the implications for the Chen case, I suspect that most Americans do not rank his protection as a particularly high priority of American foreign policy, or care about whatever damage critics of its handling continually insist has been done to America’s moral reputation.

If few involved in actual policy decision making agree with Drezner’s conception of realism, it’s because policymakers are under far more direct pressure from political elites and rival policymakers who are more likely to hold non-realist views, just as realist academics feel they are under significant pressure from rival academics and non-realist policymakers. This entire problem is partially exacerbated by realism’s associations with anti-democratic elite theories of politics that reject the influence of the common man, but that’s another story.

Saunders objection here is also confusing:

Second, Drezer’s argument that the Obama administration is “realist” because it is getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan to concentrate on China entirely misses the point. The fact that the administration has decided to “refocus energy” on Asia, as he writes, rather than continuing long wars in the Middle East demonstrates no more than a degree of pragmatism. But pragmatism is only pragmatism when it does not serve a clear strategic goal that neither the administration nor Drezner have been able to articulate—and his description of the administration’s policy in Asia as “its ‘strategic pivot’ or ‘rebalancing’ or whatever they’re calling it this week” only reinforces this.

The withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan do serve a clear strategic goal – ending the massive drain of those wars on the American economy for no strategic gain, and giving the U.S. the ability to reconfigure its force structure on assets that do appear to be useful for the future threat environment. What would not serve a clear strategic goal would be to keep a massive force presence in Iraq or Afghanistan for fear of appearing as if we’re leaving too hastily, and in search of interests that local political and military conditions fundamentally won’t permit us to achieve. While the branding of the Asia pivot ought to be criticized, the realist criticism of the administration’s approach to the Middle East and Central Asia would be not that it’s withdrawn too quickly and aimlessly, but that it hasn’t been faithful enough to realist principles of retrenchment.

Drezner also could have pointed out that in the original article, Saunders’s criticism of the administration’s broader Middle East policy has some issues by realist standards:

In Egypt, Libya and Syria, the lack of a strategic framework integrating U.S. interests and values has produced glaring inconsistencies that undermine America’s political and moral credibility with friends and foes alike. While realists tend to be skeptical of the use of force without a clear benefit to vital U.S. interests, it is difficult to justify intervening in Libya but not Syria. It similarly undermines U.S. leadership when Washington helps to remove its long-term ally Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt but is more restrained in dealing with the considerably less friendly Bashar al-Assad.

Daniel Larison rightly pointed out the flaws with this case:

The unwillingness to plunge into another unnecessary war may be inconsistent with the decision to attack Libya, but that is the sort of inconsistency that should please most realists and most Americans.

It’s also not really accurate that the U.S. has been “more restrained” in its dealings with the Syrian regime than it has been with the Egyptian regime. I don’t recall any U.S. efforts at the U.N. to have the Egyptian government condemned or sanctioned.

Additionally, the notion that American foreign policy should be built around promoting its credibility is, to most realists, hogwash. As Patrick Porter noted, Hans Morgenthau argued that credibility was too often the rallying cry for pursuing an impossible enterprise to the point of diminishing marginal returns. Realists accept inconsistency as an inevitable part of foreign policy, especially moral inconsistency – and recognize the only way to reduce moral inconsistency is to be less sweeping in our moral claims and commitments about events outside our control. Ultimately, a policy based on moral consistency is far more important to liberal internationalist conceptions of power which need countries to buy in to American international order, but to a realist, morally inconsistent treatment of countries is entirely to be expected, because realists do not like to make large amounts of universalist claims.

Bad WWII History: Neutrality Edition

Tom Parker at Amnesty International, in his criticism of John Brennan’s recent speech on the U.S. drone campaigns, offers up a strange argument:

Wars are fought between states in defined theaters of conflict. Brennan drew a comparison with World War II, but World War II was fought on the territories occupied by the parties to the conflict and not just anywhere that was considered expedient.

In World War II the United States and its allies recognized the neutrality of non-combatant states.

A great example of how the Allies operated within these constraints and still managed to protect their citizens, involves the Nazi pocket battleship Graf Spee being scuttled in Montevideo harbor. Look it up, it’s a fantastic story.

Better yet watch the movie, it’s good too.

If we’re going to dig up WWII historical obscurities to make a modern policy argument, I suppose I would offer the blatant counterexample of the Allies’ rather selective respect for neutrality: Operation Fork. In May of 1940, Britain had come to the determination that the loss of Iceland to Germany was an unacceptable political outcome. Consequently, Britain drew up plans for the invasion and occupation of Iceland, a country whose known armed inhabitants numbered perhaps in the dozens. This was, of course, to prevent an invasion by Germany (none was planned) or a coup by Germans living in Iceland to seize control of the country (none were interested). Iceland’s neutrality did not much trouble the British government. As the Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs wrote in his diary at the time:

Home 8. Dined and worked. Planning conquest of Iceland for next week. Shall probably be too late! Saw several broods of ducklings.

British planners intended not just to violate Iceland’s neutrality and round up everyone of German origin – particularly those they erroneously believed to be involving in supporting German U-Boat operations – but also to permanently occupy the country – an act which Roosevelt had no qualms with, as by July of 1941 the U.S. had taken over the duties of occupying the neutral country, despite the fact that the Germans had, by this time, no real capability of invading the country and much bigger preoccupations on their Eastern Front. Roosevelt did this long before the U.S. had formally entered the war and justified it on the basis of protecting the U.S. from an imaginary German invasion that might have threatened Allied shipping, in reality it allowed Britain to direct more troops into its combat operations.

Allied policymakers generally justified violations of neutrality on the grounds that the Germans did not respect neutrality either – and the Germans used justifications for their violations of neutrality in a similar manner. The case of Norway is similarly instructive. Both the Allies and Germany feared the Norwegian port of Narvik would fall into the other sides’ hands, thus seizing effective control of neutral Sweden’s iron ore production. The British also feared Germany could use Norwegian waters to create a hole in their blockade. France’s Paul Reynaud rejected Allied concerns about Norwegian neutrality, and he and several Britons thought a naval expedition to the Baltic was strategically expedient. This plan was later moderated to Operation Wilfred, which entailed the mining of Norwegian waters to force ships into international waters where they could be sunk without legal problem. France and other more hawkish planners in Britain had previously mulled an Allied expedition to Finland to help them fight the USSR, which was then still cooperating with Germany in their division of Eastern Europe. The plan, however, would involve the occupation of Norwegian and Swedish territory. Norway and Sweden had denied transit rights for these troops, however, which made the duplicitous endeavor too risky – and then the conclusion of the Winter War made it entirely impossible, leaving Operation Wilfred as the sole option.

The crisis over Scandinavia was exacerbated by the Altmark incident, in which a British destroyer fired on and boarded German tanker inside neutral Norwegian waters, in violation of neutrality law. The incident gave the Germans cause to increase the priority of their own invasion plans of the country, and indeed Britain and France hoped the provocation of British naval operations would prompt a German counter-reaction that could justify sending troops to the country. Indeed it did, and ultimately, the limited violations of neutrality by the Allies before the invasion were rendered moot issues. Germany’s aggressive violation of European neutral states made the issue of neutrality moot.

There is also, of course, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. Once Germany had launched Barbarossa and the Soviets joined the Allied cause, the Allies were in great need of a way to supply the Soviet war effort. One possible corridor of support would be run through Iran, which was run by the neutral but obviously pro-Axis Reza Shah Pahlavi. They issued an ultimatum to Tehran demanding the expulsion of the limited number of Axis nationals in the country – unlike Iceland, the Anglo-Soviet invasion was not a surprise attack. Yet they did invade neutral Iran anyway. When the Shah protested to Roosevelt on the basis of the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt’s reply was rather telling:

Viewing the question in its entirety involves not only the vital questions to which Your Imperial Majesty refers, but other basic considerations arising from Hitler’s ambition of world conquest. It is certain that movements of conquest by Germany will continue and will extend beyond Europe to Asia, Africa, and even to the Americas, unless they are stopped by military force. It is equally certain that those countries which desire to maintain their independence must engage in a great common effort if they are not to be engulfed one by one as has already happened to a large number of countries in Europe. In recognition of these truths, the Government and people of the United States of America, as is well known, are not only building up the defenses of this country with all possible speed, but they have also entered upon a very extensive program of material assistance to those countries which are actively engaged in resisting German ambition for world domination.

In other words, the enemy had boundless geographical ambitions and no respect for sovereignty, and so any country that truly cared about sovereignty would forfeit its right to it and aid the Allies in their war effort against Germany. If they didn’t, then they were just as liable to military action as the enemy itself. Does this rhetoric sound at all familiar?

The invasion of Iran resulted in the Allies establishing a logistical corridor to the USSR, making use of Iranian oil resources, and Soviet-sponsored breakaway movements among Iran’s Azeri and Kurdish populations. Britain forced the Shah to abdicate and then live in exile, where he died before the war’s end.

The Graf Spee incident makes a better movie than Wilfred, R4, or the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, I suppose. But it is simply false to suggest that the Allies had some kind of high-minded respect for neutrality during World War II. When strategically expedient, neutrality was violated, at times for reasons that were far more legally spurious than U.S. drone strikes against al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, after all, is at least engaged in conflict with the U.S. In the case of Iran, not even the justifications used for planned or actual violations of Norwegian and Scandinavian neutrality – the presence of German naval vessels or personnel supporting them, or German invasion – were present, instead it was done as a naked attempt to secure logistical assets necessary for aiding the Soviet war effort.

The war on terror is obviously not World War II. But what is rather bizarre – and it is a problem that is certainly not limited to Tom Parker, but to those who write about international security issues more broadly – is the casual and ahistorical use of World War II as some kind of moral standard for wartime conduct. This is evident when Parker continues on the subject of torture:

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, another thing we didn’t feel the need to do in World War II was torture people and, lest we forget, the other side in that conflict had death camps, Kamikaze pilots, V1 guided missiles and V2 ballistic rockets.

Was torture of Axis POWs widespread during World War II? No – well, at least by the Western Allies, I’m not about to go to bat for the ethical standards of the NKVD. Did it happen? Yes, absolutely it did. It was certainly not a matter of pride and open flaunting, as the morally reprehensible promotion of enhanced interrogation as some kind of patriotic virtue during the War on Terror mas made it. But it happened. The London Cage was certainly involved in such ugliness:

Among the documents stored at the National Archives at Kew is the manuscript of [Cage commander Lt. Col. Alexander] Scotland’s memoirs. In his first draft he recalled how he would muse, on arriving at the Cage each morning: “‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ For if any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run.” There was pandemonium at the War Office when the book was submitted to be censored in June 1950. Officials begged Scotland to quietly lock the manuscript away, then threatened him with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Special Branch detectives were sent to raid his retirement home at Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. The Foreign Office urged suppression of the book, as it would assist “persons agitating on behalf of war criminals”. An assessment by MI5 pointed out that Scotland had detailed repeated breaches of the Geneva convention, with his admissions that prisoners had been forced to kneel while being beaten about the head; forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours; threatened with execution; or threatened with “an unnecessary operation”.

It is also notable that this sort of treatment continued after the end of the war. As the article notes, when prisoners were transferred to prisons in the British occupation zone of Germany, the treatment they received was far worse. Doubtless there were also many allegations of Allied torture after WWII that were played up to help the legal cases of German war criminals, and in WWII it appears the use of torture was something that was quietly tolerated at certain facilities rather than vigorously advocated for in the public sphere. But it still happened.

And of course, focusing on torture as the one bad thing done to POWs obscures the much bigger moral blemish on Allied conduct during World War II - especially in the Pacific - of executing surrendering troops, or even outright killing of prisoners. Or incidences, in the Pacific, of mutilation of Japanese war dead that would utterly horrify groups such as Amnesty International today. Or the number of Allied actions that would be today considered unacceptable war crimes ranking far worse than torture, such as the firebombing of civilian population centers.

None of this is intended to excuse the use of torture in the War on Terror, a practice even more morally unacceptable than it is practically ineffectual. But it is entirely unnecessary, and often historically inaccurate, to use World War II as a moral cudgel against the military operations of today. World War II was, by and large, a war fought on the basis of strategic expediency. It involved the routine violation of Allied civil liberties and numerous cases of disregard by Roosevelt for America’s own preferred position of neutrality. If the U.S. policies being pursued on the War on Terror are wrong, it is not because they somehow represent a moral descent in American wartime ethics from those days. It’s rarely a useful historical comparison, as Brennan’s own invocation demonstrates, and it’s almost always used in such a way that deliberately obscures or ignores what happened in the war, rather than promoting sound understanding of its events. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill here? Perhaps, but it’s not hard to make a policy arguments without these sorts of analogies.

Update: corrected errors in section describing Altmark incident, thanks to Rex Brynen for the correction.

An Insular Life: Offshore Policy & Posture

There are two interesting pieces worth reading on offshore balancing that have come out recently, both of which deserve a read. First, there is Christopher Layne, a stalwart defender of the policy, writing in The National Interest. He offers one of the more cogent explications of the policy available, though I disagree with him on certain aspects of his explanation, or preferred implementation. Then, read this piece by Bernard Finel, whose criticism reflects an understanding of offshore balancing that is often lost even among proponents of the concept.

Layne’s description of the archetypal offshore balancer, the island empire of Great Britain, is worth noting:

Imperially overstretched and confronting a deteriorating strategic environment, London was forced to adjust its grand strategy and jettison its nineteenth-century policy of “splendid isolation” from entanglements with other countries. Another consideration was the rising threat of Germany, growing in economic dynamism, military might and population. By 1900, Germany had passed Britain in economic power and was beginning to threaten London’s naval supremacy in its home waters by building a large, modern and powerful battle fleet. To concentrate its forces against the German danger, Britain allied with Japan and employed Tokyo to contain German and Russian expansionism in East Asia. It also removed America as a potential rival by ceding to Washington supremacy over the Americas and the Caribbean. Finally, it settled its differences with France and Russia, then formed fateful de facto alliances with each against Germany.

World War I marked the end of Pax Britannica—and the beginning of the end of Europe’s geopolitical dominance.

It is notable here that Britain’s decline was marked not by a transition from empire to offshore balancing, but by an attempt to replace its offshore balancing approach to great power disputes in Europe with domestic renewal at home and the promotion of burden-sharing as a mechanism for dealing with rising powers. Somewhat paradoxically, it was an attempt to reconstruct and consolidate the status quo in the global order which aggravated British decline and contributed to plunging the world into instability.

Offshore balancing is generally one policy choice among many in a great power’s repertoire, which is implemented alongside other, seemingly contradictory policies. Britain’s balancing strategy was directed primarily at areas of great power competition, mainly Europe and the Near East, but later East Asia as great power competition intruded there. Offshore balancing in these areas, and colonial and naval hegemony outside of them, were complementary, not contradictory policies. Firstly, allowing great powers to check one another in Eurasia allowed Britain to reduce the need to enter into continental military commitments or divert resources into strengthening its ground forces. Secondly, it kept rival great powers militaries aimed at each other, and delayed their ability to effectively compete with Britain for colonies and overseas power. The cumulative effect of these policies was that Britain could invest in naval and colonial control, which reinforced British economic supremacy, without seriously needing to fear invasion or even a credible land threat to its colonial holdings, although this threat did drag Britain into a major land conflict during the Crimean War.

In this sense, Finel is correct that offshore balancing required Britain to foster security competition among the great powers – offshore balancing cannot function any other ways. But this was not incompatible with Britain wielding a great deal of influence in fostering and participating in a variety of forms of global order. The European concert system was certainly a significant kind of global order, and British global supremacy outside of zones of great power competition allowed for the promotion of international trade and a variety of shared norms, including the rise of international humanitarian law among other concepts. The issue, of course, is that when coupled with offshore balancing, a concert system requires accepting a degree of disorder and great power disagreement in order to maintain the dialogue necessary to manage it. This is a lesson that Dan Nexon has pointed out may still be relevant for great powers today.

Britain and the End of the Insular Life

Arguably, it was Great Britain’s attempts to consolidate a more firm basis for global order as a method of enabling retrenchment that put it in a more precarious, and much more continent-focused military posture. Britain’s departure from its “Splendid Isolation” was the beginning of a departure from offshore balancing, with its malleable and mutable diplomatic and military partnerships, into a deliberate strategy of restraint that nevertheless begat more permanent and firm diplomatic and military commitments.

While Britain’s partnership with Japan was certainly an attempt at countering Russian influence, its later approaches towards France, Russia, and the United States were essentially acts of appeasement, not balancing. France, Russia, and the U.S. were the greatest threats to Britain’s overseas empire, and maintaining and further integrating that empire were really the only options for maintaining Britain’s global supremacy. Britain essentially chose to throw its lot in with the two largest threats to its global position, France and Russia, and to accommodate itself with the United States. Rather than balancing against the strongest or most threatening powers, Britain ultimately ended up overbalancing the global system against Germany and its Triple Alliance, because, as anti-German policymakers such as Grey presumed, any outreach or accommodation with Germany would threaten the critical understanding Britain held with France and Russia (and indeed fears of aggravating tension with the U.S. also played a role in discouraging warm relations between Berlin and Washington). For the sake of preserving the nascent order Britain was solidifying, Germany was simply an easier threat to manage.

After the bloody and expensive imbroglio Britain suffered in the Boer Wars, it is understandable why Britain wanted to avoid a drawn out conflict in the colonies. The British fears of a Russian assault on India, supposedly made real by Russian gains in Central Asia and railroad expansion, were less credible, but made accommodation with Russia all the more attractive. But it became apparent early on that the price of Franco-Russian accommodation might be a European continental commitment. Consequently plans for an expeditionary force to Europe, while initially extremely unofficial and publicly downplayed, became increasingly frequent.

In essence, Britain’s desires to reduce security competition globally, avoid costly colonial land wars, and create a global order that could help Britain share the burdens of international stabilization ended up having paradoxical effects. It led to German fears of encirclement that increased, not decreased, the likelihood of war in Europe, and made British involvement in that war more likely and more extensive than it might otherwise have been. It increased British commitments in some regions even as it appeared to reduce them in others. While this is a digression, it also never produced the internal reorganization of the British Empire that many of its policymakers and geopolitical thinkers desired, as elite dissension and “King Demos” were not so permissive for grand schemes of reform.

A relative degree of European international order survived the 1848 uprisings, Crimean War, and Franco-Prussian War. It was only when the relative power balance began to turn against Britain that the country began questioning the international free trade regime. Indeed, as in the case of China and many other rising powers today, there are certainly states which would be glad to continue to reap its benefits. The benefit of offshore balancing is that international cooperation, trade, and forms of global order can coexist with a degree of conflict.

A strategy of restraint must be carefully calibrated. Creating or relying on fixed alliance blocs to ensure security is a particularly risky move, as it will end up isolating revisionist or recalcitrant powers. Formal alliances create new diplomatic and military commitments, and ultimately it will be difficult for other states to share America’s burden without creating arms races and security competition in such a context. In other words, rising powers may not see the expansion of military power, the carving out of spheres of interest or influence, or their participation in power projection or punitive raiding as detrimental to the preservation of a liberal, international order. American local partners may also not see the encouragement of U.S. intervention, military buildups, or other potentially provocative behavior as not just benign but essential to upholding the international order. All great powers may share a certain baseline of interest in the international order, but in reality most countries only accept piecemeal aspects of it, and there is always disagreement about what core features of the international order really are. India may agree with liberal trade, but not liberal conceptions of intervention. China may agree with defending the maritime trading system against pirates, but have serious differences about the role its neighbors should play in patrolling and securing the global commons. Russia may support the United Nations, but primarily as a forum to prevent U.S. consolidation of certain aspects of global governance. The U.S., for its part, rejects the ICC and is unwilling to recognize serious international constraints on its ability to use force in perceived self-defense.

For these reasons, a non-hegemonic system is likely to see more security competition than in the past. Alliance systems can check some forms of it, but they cannot eliminate it. In some cases they will gravely exacerbate it, as those formed by the Triple Entente did. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that many of these states will be capable of taking on America’s security burdens without a significant increase in their armaments. This flaw is partially America’s fault. Deliberate discouragement of European security activity outside the U.S.-dominated venue of NATO and the even stricter limitations on Japanese rearmament, combined with U.S. extra-regional hegemony in Western Europe and East Asia, has helped leave them relatively weak in their ability to take up U.S. security burdens today. Europe, for its part, is unlikely to be of significant aid in defending U.S. interests in the Gulf, South or East Asia, considering how much U.S. assistance was necessary just to project power south of the Mediterranean against a militarily stunted regime in Tripoli.

Offshore Balancing and In-Theater Capability

This is ultimately a flaw in the conception of “offshoring” security in the parlance of both advocates and skeptics of offshore balancing. Geography and logistics count for very much, and with a lower onshore – that is, in-theater – presence, U.S. options are severely constrained. Ultimately, what is important about offshore balancing is that the balancing power is offshore. British power was mostly offshore in Europe but this was only possible because Britain itself was close enough to the continent to maintain naval dominance without significant onshore possessions. Even so, as close as the Mediterranean Britain still needed to maintain bases in Gibraltar, Malta, and had its possessions in Egypt to boot. Colonies, or at least friendly ports, were necessary for a fleet and commerce to become useful sea power. For the past few decades, the U.S. has enjoyed, in practice, if not always in theory, unparalleled ease of access in its power projection missions. This is unlikely to persist, as developing capabilities to impede hostile power projection is part of even a defensive buildup against a modern peer competitor.

Offshore air and sea power are not immune to this problem. Somewhere, the U.S. will need to maintain major ports and bases capable of handling America’s massive and sophisticated weapons systems and their crews. Somewhere, the U.S. will need to keep the materiel for its massive logistical tail. Withdrawing these assets over the horizon incurs significant risks, and introduces some perverse incentives. On the one hand, an ally might decide to acquiesce more to a rival power’s security interests. On the other hand, it might choose to rearm regardless of U.S. reassurances. Even worse, it might deliberately provoke tensions to ensure a continued American commitment. These are risks of both offshore balancing and generalized policies of restraint. Even in a strategy of restraint, rearmament would need to be accepted for local capabilities to pick up U.S. slack – or else the U.S. would simply face a more perilous situation where local commitments would require a dwindling amount of U.S. capability in-theater to maintain.

Offshore balancers and other advocates of restraint both often call for withdrawal of U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, while insisting that the U.S. over-the-horizon capability is sufficient to ensure secure sea lines of communication. But Britain in fact held onto its relatively hegemonic position in the Gulf for decades after its empire was in decline, and British naval supremacy anywhere more than often meant a significant onshore presence. Growing Iranian capabilities should not be overstated, but the supremacy of the Fifth Fleet and U.S. assets in the region is predicated on basing and logistical preparedness within the Gulf itself. A forced entry from Diego Garcia would not be pretty, and likely fly in the face of the relatively bloodless naval and aerial campaign record the U.S. has enjoyed for the past few decades. Perhaps that is an acceptable cost, but offshore balancers and others rarely dwell on that possibility. In any case, it should be obvious from the case of Bahrain that naval basing isn’t without its troubles. Insofar as offshore balancing demands avoiding wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, it might reduce the hostility the U.S. faces in the region. But it was the limited, on-base presence of U.S. troops in the region during the 1990s that, in the offshore balancing theory of terrorism, exacerbated terrorist hostility to the U.S. Reducing U.S. presence below that level requires accepting the risk that the next time the U.S. wants to protect its interests in the Gulf, it might have to fight its way in (and the same arguably goes for East Asia, though few worry about blowback from U.S. forces stationed there). Preparing for these eventualities requires accepting a large degree of arms buildups by potential U.S. partners or encouraging states to balance against local threats, or else being able to write off U.S. interests in the area.

Consider further the case of East Asia. As T.X. Hammes has noted in his recent piece, the geographic and logistical difficulties inherent with waging a war against China close to its own access denial capabilities would be dangerous and likely escalatory, as it would require strikes on the Chinese mainland to uncertain effect. Consequently, Hammes devised a strategy of waging essentially a guerre de course against China. One of the problems he sought to overcome in his piece, that of AirSea Battle’s questionable dependence on U.S. allies in the region, is instructive. AirSea Battle cannot be waged without massive amounts of firepower being directed from very close to China. Allied states will be discouraged from aiding the U.S. in a war against China because they will be potentially on the receiving end of Chinese missile and naval power. Overcoming that issue without abandoning any sense of restraint in U.S. deployments in East Asia is impossible, and there is not likely any reasonable amount of cooperation or promises the U.S. can offer East Asian states to reasonably guarantee adequate protection from China during a wartime scenario. Ultimately, the arms buildup dynamics many fear would be preferable to the destabilizing and enervating effect of U.S. attempts to keep up with China in its home waters, and they would allow the U.S. to build the much more credible deterrent that Hammes outlines.

The Optimistic Case for Security Competition 

Ultimately, security competition is going to exist – whether or not it takes an extreme form is another question entirely. The kind of security competition necessary to buttress an East Asian alliance system built on the premise that the U.S. and its allies are going to maintain hegemony in East Asia is absolutely dangerous and fantastical. No sustainable level of U.S. military investment will secure Asia enough to prevent significant Chinese security competition with its neighbors, however. So it will be for the U.S. in many regions of the world. But global order is not an alternative to security competition, it is simply shifting the burden of security competition from individual nations in the region to global partnerships. It is not international trade that prevents security competition, as East Asia makes clear. Nor is it any U.S. upheld international organization. Hegemony prevents local security competition, or rather, it shifts the burden of security competition against perterbateurs onto the U.S. Absent hegemony, the fact of U.S. cost constraints will shift the burden of security competition back onto local states. The U.S. cannot simultaneously restrain itself and restrain its allies from rearming themselves.

However, this isn’t all that gloomy of a scenario. Global governance can continue to exist, so long as it can be recast in a form that recognizes, as it has in previous centuries, that major powers will have potentially violent conflicting interests, and adapts accordingly. Southeast Asia, despite being at the nexus of security competition between India, China, and the U.S., and the recipient of relatively few foreign security guarantees, is economically integrating and developing structures for regional governance. Security competition will not automatically obviate the powers’ interests in trading with one another.

Offshore balancing, of course, will generally only accurately describe relationships with great powers in contested areas of the globe. In many areas, lack of U.S. security presence, hegemony, or a dyadic competition of some kind are likely to remain, depending on the number and kind of rivals present – such was the case for the British Empire, certainly. While unnecessary land invasions and nation-building for its own sake are likely to be discouraged, in some regions land expeditions, covert wars, and other onshore activity will be sensible and even necessary. Security competition in some regions will actually provide a hedge against it in others by preventing the emergence or hostile use of rival power projection capabilities, and reduce the freedom of actions of rival powers from interfering with the U.S. out of their own regional areas.

Balancing and order were not alternatives for Britain during the height of its power. It was when Britain became increasingly preoccupied with codifying an international order that prevented revisionist threats to the Empire that the international balancing system began to unravel, and British attempts to restrain its commitments resulted instead in the proliferation of more dangerous ones. It was not security competition that undid the international order running up to World War I, but the translation of security competition into a rigid alliance system that codified the status quo and had little flexibility for the concerns of a revisionist power. The world today, with its great powers far more geographically dispersed than their European antecedents, is in an even better position to bear security competition. The hegemony which held it at bay, though, is gone. An order without hegemony should not assume it can hold back power political rivalries, but it also should not recognize those rivalries as its own death. The attempt to codify the status quo in alliance systems and partnerships not only risks provoking fears of containment and encouraging counterbalancing by rival states, but would also likely increase U.S. commitments in an attempt to satiate its allies in this undertaking.

Flexibility, in the absence of hegemony, is well suited to dealing with a multipolar environment. Attempting to reconcile a multipolar system with order-preserving alliances can intensify security competition in more dangerous ways, as well as undermine the restraint or offshore distance the U.S. hopes to acquire. The diplomatic complications and logistical difficulties of offshoring U.S. presence while sharing burdens with partners and allies might ultimately be a less effective way of mitigating security competition than simply accepting it and adapting our conceptions of order and security accordingly. Yet any kind of strategy seeking solace in the idea of the offshore balancing must recognize, as Finel points out, that security competition and foreign rearmament is a necessity, not an option. So too, however, should policymakers be cognizant that a genuinely offshore and over-the-horizon force posture cannot come without radical reductions in U.S. commitments – and of how much onshore presence really is required for theoretically “offshore” capabilities such as U.S. aerial and naval supremacy. Ultimately, though, because offshore balancing, whether as practiced by the UK, or even by the 1930s United States, is really just one policy operating alongside many, it is unlikely either to be, as feared, an invitation to global chaos, or, as hoped, a straightforward and simple path to foreign policy restraint.

Drone Panic III: Rolling Stone Edition

They say a poor carpenter blames his tools, but apparently great reporting fixates on them. Nowhere has this more been the case than in the “drone campaign,” the latest phase of ongoing efforts by the CIA and the Defense Department to neutralize – that is, kill, capture, or otherwise incapacitate – members of al Qaeda and their affiliated movements (AQAM). Of course, I’m not going to deny that there are a myriad of legal issues surrounding the use of targeted killings abroad, particularly targeted killings against American citizens. But these are legal issues that have virtually nothing to do with the method of killing employed, and indeed, huge numbers of U.S. programs to track down and kill AQAM, insurgents operating in U.S. warzones, or other enemies of the United States are conducted by manned aircraft (witness the use of cruise missiles in Yemen or AC-130 gunships in Somalia) or by the previous favorite bugbear of national security reporters, JSOC (has Hastings moved on so quickly?). Questions like when it’s appropriate to kill a U.S. citizen, what protocol should be for lethally targeting individuals outside of declared war zones, and so on are legitimate legal questions. Unfortunately, far too much reportage gets hung up on evil, scary, marauding robots, as if that was at all relevant to the vast majority of legal issues being discussed (they’re not).

Gaze upon this latest offering from Michael Hastings. In an article nominally about “killer drones,” Hastings decides to also tackle issues of ISR drones, law enforcement drones, and the legality of targeted killings. However, whatever new or useful information there is is wrapped up in hyperbolic statements that undermine the context necessary to understand it.

Take this:

But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. .

Where to begin here – firstly, in an article that acknowledges and appears to be cognizant of the nature and duties of an organization called the Central Intelligence Agency, Hastings has the gall to claim that drones created the capability for this organization to wage secret wars while maintaining public denials. Actually, this capability was created by something called “deception,” a tactic which covert arms of the military and U.S. intelligence establishment have been employing years – possibly even decades, according to my sources – before the deployment of drones. Secret CIA run air force? Try the one the U.S. sent up during the Congo Crisis, where the U.S. used B-26 bombers and ex-Belgian aircraft operated by Cuban exiles with British mechanics in support of Rhodesian and South African mercenaries in a conflict that the U.S. was nominally not involved in. It should suffice to say that the CIA has been able to “wage war while claiming we’re not at war” in Laos and other countries adjacent to Vietnam, or in Central America, as well as numerous other examples. Drones are merely a quantitative improvement because they allow for more frequent sorties than manned aircraft or naval vessels ordinarily permit. Indeed, many theaters of modern drone campaigns, such as Yemen and Somalia, had many missions conducted by naval vessels, aircraft, or their USAF counterparts before drone strikes increased in tempo.

I’m going to bust this quote out of the previous paragraph:

What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags.

There’s at least two things wrong with this sentence. Firstly, in terms of standoff fire missions, no, drones did not create these capabilities. The U.S. has had the ability to launch strikes on terrorists without putting uniformed personnel in harms way for years. In 1998, the U.S. launched cruise missiles or, wait, sorry – “kamikaze drones” – against al Qaeda targets from naval vessels operating in open waters. Furthermore, the notion that the U.S. was conducting the drone campaign in Pakistan with “no boots on the ground” is even more silly considering that until 2011 the U.S. was flying drones out of a Pakistani airbase.

More importantly, though, the notion that the CIA is conducting drone campaigns with no boots on the ground is just plain ludicrous. The CIA absolutely has people on the ground in Pakistan and it absolutely puts people on the ground in Yemen, Somalia, and other targeted killing theaters.

Jeremy Scahill has excellently documented this in his reporting on those countries. Take the background to the first U.S. drone strike in Yemen:

As construction began on Lemonier, the United States beefed up the presence of military “trainers” inside Yemen. Among the forces inserted alongside the trainers were members of a clandestine military intelligence unit within the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) known as The Activity. While officially in Yemen as trainers, they quickly set out to establish operational capacity to track Al Qaeda suspects in the country, hoping to find and fix their location so that US forces could finish them off. A year after Saleh’s meeting with Bush at the White House, the US “trainers” would set up their first “wet” operation. It wouldn’t be their last.

* * *

In 2002 US intelligence operatives discovered that the man they had fingered as one of the masterminds of the Cole attack, Abu Ali al-Harithi, was in the country. US officials had dubbed him “the godfather of terror in Yemen.” On November 3 the JSOC signals intelligence team in Yemen located Harithi in a compound in Marib province after he used a mobile phone number that US intelligence had traced to him months earlier. “Our special-ops had the compound under surveillance,” recalled Gen. Michael DeLong, at the time deputy commander of US Central Command (Centcom). They were “preparing to storm in when Ali exited with five of his associates. They got into SUVs and took off.”

The “drone campaign” in fact involves large numbers of U.S. military and intelligence personnel operating covertly on the ground. In Somalia, Scahill notes the U.S. has established CIA infrastructure inside of the country, and it is also clear that JSOC and CIA operatives have been on the ground to assist in the targeted killing and capture campaign there. As Joshua Foust noted in a piece taking a holistic look at U.S. covert capabilities:

In Yemen, there are estimates that the number of U.S. troops on the ground (working under JSOC) is in the 300 to 500 range. Some of them train Yemeni counter-terrorism forces and some of them go after terrorists. The CIA, for its part, built up a 3,000-man militia to target militants in northwest Pakistan.

However, for whatever reason Hastings fixates on drones, insisting that “the immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.” As I’ve explained before, if we want to blame a piece of technology for dragging the U.S. into war, it’d have to be the ship, but what should really be the takeaway is that the “secrecy” and “immediacy” drones provide is a mere refinement of prior U.S. covert capabilities, and that drone programs cannot even function effectively independently of these other covert capabilities, which absolutely require CIA and JSOC boots on the ground to gather targeting data, confirm kills, and provide a host of other support capabilities.

Hastings then launches into an overview of not just the targeted killing drone program, but all drones, as he’s established at this point he wants to write about all U.S. drone programs by starting out with the ill-fated RQ-170 which crashed in Iran. Along the way, there are various casual errors or exaggerations, such as this one:

The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is “bug splat,” since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

That may be so, but “bug splat” has been a part of targeteering lingo at least since 2003, as this article on collateral damage avoidance protocols demonstrates, and in fact many aerial crewmembers in manned aircraft view their targets through similar viewscreens. Let’s not pretend that “video game war” is some kind of new phenomena, even if drones present a particularly extreme case.

After detailing the internal battles over drone strikes and the legal issues surrounding them, we get to this:

In the end, it appears, the administration has little reason to worry about any backlash from its decision to kill an American citizen – one who had not even been charged with a crime. A recent poll shows that most Democrats overwhelmingly support the drone program, and Congress passed a law in February that calls for the Federal Aviation Administration to “accelerate the integration of unmanned aerial systems” in the skies over America. Drones, which are already used to fight wildfires out West and keep an eye on the Mexican border, may soon be used to spy on U.S. citizens at home: Police in Miami and Houston have reportedly tested them for domestic use, and their counterparts in New York are also eager to deploy them. Given the NYPD’s record of civil rights abuses, it’s not hard to envision drones buzzing high above Zuccotti Park to provide surveillance on Occupy Wall Street, or being used to surreptitiously monitor the activities of Muslim-American students.

What on earth does domestic use of drones have to do with the targeted killing programs? Virtually nothing. Yes, they both use drones. Why does that matter? Imagine an article which exhaustively details the use of AC-130 gunships in Afghanistan and Somalia, and then starts talking about MAFFS. Or one which talks about the use of helicopter gunships and air cavalry in Vietnam and then starts fretting about the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s UH-1 fleet. Is the implication here that since the government uses drones to kill people overseas, I need to be soiling my pants in fear of what municipal police departments are going to do with drones?

The specific examples Hastings brings up are even more bizarre. It’s unclear why using a drone to conduct surveillance of a public park would be a civil rights abuse, or what kind of abuse drones will enable that police helicopters (frequently present over OWS) and the flesh-and-blood undercover officers and informants don’t already provide. In fact, so far drones have proven to be a much bigger threat to the liberties of right-wing “sovereigntists” living in North Dakota, and the manner in which they were used was largely consistent with prior uses of National Guard, military, or federal aviation assets in other cases involving potential sieges.

Ultimately, such commentary only serves to distort the debate and obscure important issues at stake. Additionally, the fixation on drones clouds our contemplation of the alternatives:

For Nasser al-Awlaki, who lost his teenage grandson to a predator drone, such denials are almost as shocking as the administration’s deliberate decision to wage a remote-control war that would inevitably result in the deaths of innocent civilians. “I could not believe America could do this – especially President Obama, who I liked very much,” he says. “When he was elected, I thought he would solve all the problems of the world.”

We can debate to what extent Obama should be held liable for his failure to “solve all the problems of the world” elsewhere, but what should be clear is that the Obama administration’s targeted killing campaign is actually far less bloody than the approaches it took to counterterrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theaters of the War on Terror. After all, the alternative, but often simultaneous approach of launching U.S. invasions and wholesale counterinsurgency campaigns had its many drawbacks, and when forces were unavailable for that endeavor, the U.S. sponsors foreign imitations, like the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia or its likely assistance with the repeat performance by AMISOM, Kenya, and Ethiopia today.

Should we be capturing AQAM suspects? Perhaps, but that would likely mean a return to some form of rendition, detention, and capture programs, which would use a plethora of CIA, JSOC, and likely private proxies to snatch up suspects. Capturing, say, Anwar al-Awlaki, would mean more U.S. covert presence in Yemen, and could easily have resulted in his death, as many attempted apprehensions do in warzones and in peacetime. Or should the U.S. be working with local governments to capture AQAM suspects? The brutality of our foreign partners’ security services often make CIA and JSOC operatives look like saints. In any case, it should be clear the real legal, moral, and political problems here have far more to do with U.S. counter-terrorism policy generally, not drones in particular.

The most pressing legal issues at stake have to do with targeted killings and covert counter-terrorism operations generally, not drones in particular. Framing the issue as one of “killer robots” vs. civil liberties serves only to confuse the debate and needlessly incite panic about the deployment of similar technology in completely different contexts elsewhere, as well as to egregiously distort the history of U.S. covert operations and even the war on terror. Doubtless other commentators, such as Robert Caruso, can do a better job of dissecting the legal and institutional processes that Hastings discusses than I ever could, but in the mean time, obsessing over evil machines isn’t doing anyone any good. Be afraid of targeted killing campaigns, not the robots which carry them out – and recognize that covert warfare wasn’t something invented in a lab by Lockheed Martin or General Atomic and begun by President Obama.

Drones and the false allure of impunity

CFR’s Micah Zenko has a new piece in the Atlantic looking at what U.S. drone campaigns would look like in the wake of U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan:

Yesterday, Al Jazeerainterviewed Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasool on the prospect of U.S. drone strikes after 2014. He responded:

“Afghan soil will not be used against any country in the region. The presence of the remaining forces in Afghanistan is for training, equipping and securing Afghanistan’s security. It has been mentioned, it is going to be mentioned, that this force is not for use against any neighbors in the region.”

The Afghan government’s final decision on whether to permit U.S. drone strikes and/or special operations raids could change several times over the next twenty months. If Rasool’s statement becomes official Afghan policy, however, it will be extremely difficult for the United States to sustain drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan in the future.

This shift could have serious consequences for CIA drone operations. It is hard to envision the Pakistani government re-permitting drone strikes from its territory. Last summer, Pakistan evictedthe remaining U.S. personnel from Shamsi Airbase in the Balochistan province, where drones were based since as early as 2006. In recent months, the prime minister, foreign minister, and aparliamentary committee on national security have repeatedly condemned U.S. drone strikes as violations of Pakistani sovereignty.

Zenko then assesses alternative basing options for the U.S. drone programs directed against Pakistan, namely India and China. I largely agree with him about why these options are unrealistic, and that the implications of a loss of a neighboring state as a drone base for operations in Pakistan would have a significant impact on the campaign. Contrary to many assertions that drones allow the U.S. to strike with impunity or overcome geographic distance, drones remain dependent on basing in-theater to maintain high operational tempos.

The ability of the United States to conduct drone campaigns and other so-called standoff strikes is in fact heavily constrained by geopolitical and logistical considerations. While the drone aircraft may be unmanned, they are just as dependent on bases, ground crews, and a logistical tail as their manned counterparts. So too are they dependent on permissive airspace. In Kosovo, the United States lost 24 UAVs, including many to Serbian fire. Assuming that Pakistan would idly sit by while America resumes drone strikes in a post-drawdown environment is untenable. Serbia’s air force was able to adapt unconventional platforms, take advantage of their knowledge of drone bases and flight routes, and use relatively primitive Soviet-era air defense systems to inflict casualties on drones, even in the context of an air war where manned platforms were presenting much more pressing threats. U.S. policymakers may be able to countenance the loss of a drone platform more than they would a manned one, but ultimately a downed drone is a drone that has probably not accomplished its mission, and at a potentially large political price.

The use of maritime-deployed drones, aside from the potential provocation that Zenko points out, would only exacerbate the vulnerability of a drone campaign to Pakistani air defenses. Unlike Pakistan’s western border, where Pakistan has for decades now faced an aeriall -incapable and often Pakistan-aligned Afghan state, air defenses in the south are more substantial and, as Zenko notes, on the watch for Indian attacks. Furthermore, armed drones capable of conducting missions from U.S. maritime assets are a ways from maturing, so the old standby of cruise missiles launched from Central Command assets would be the more likely choice anyway.

Strikes against al Qaeda and affiliated targets in Pakistan would need to be reserved for much higher priority targets. The days of conducting an air war with similar numbers of sorties as the drone campaign saw earlier are, logistically and politically speaking, likely over. While the tempo and scale of the campaign was enhanced by drone platforms, the so-called impunity of the drone campaign was a product of guaranteed, unconstrained basing at airfields such as Jalalabad, a Pakistani government that was at times compliant with U.S. operations in Afghanistan, and a robust network of cross-border covert assets which could provide the intelligence necessary to feed targets to drone operators. Drones allowed policymakers to increase the quantity of strikes, but the quality of impunity was maintained by political and logistical arrangements.

Of course, there are ways to preserve or substitute these qualities – but they would require not simply fewer strikes, but a genuinely covert campaign. The drone war, while for legal purposes, is a secret war, the drone campaign itself is hardly shrouded in secrecy. Pakistan and Afghanistan are aware of what bases are involved, and information about the results and frequency of strikes are relatively available to the public. The CIA’s running of a secret air forces is hardly a novel occurrence either:

By the Congo period, however, the men at Langley say they had learned that their earlier instincts to try to solve nasty political problems with money alone had been overtaken by the recognition of the need for far more sophisticated and enduring forms of influence.

“Purchased?” one American commented. “You can’t even these guys for the afternoon.” And so the C.I.A. kept growing in size and scope.

By the time Molse Tshombe had returned to power in the Congo through American acquiescence, it not design — it became apparent that hastily supplied arms and planes, as well as dollars and cars, would be needed to protect the American-sponsored government In Leopoldville.

The CIA used Cuban exiles with foreign mechanics and American contractors to create an aerial capability to serve U.S. interests in the Congo Crisis. These operated alongside South African and Rhodesian mercenaries, eventually employing CIA pilots directly. The Congo model is obviously only a rough guide, but it does demonstrate that there is a historical precedent for using a combination of local or deniable proxies and covert-sponsored and operated air power to conduct combat air missions with a degree of plausible deniability and risk insulation.

In Afghanistan, even if the Afghan government publicly denies compliance in a much more limited aerial campaign against AQAM in Pakistan, a roughly similar model may persist. The U.S. will likely retain the ability to conduct smaller-scaled operations, and the U.S. will also likely play an important role in developing Afghanistan’s light attack aircraft capability.

For example, Raytheon has – with much less fanfare than drones receive – expanded opportunities to employ Griffin missiles with manned platforms such as AT-6B light attack aircraft and C-130 based platforms such as Harvest Hawk and Dragon Spear. Whatever light aircraft Afghanistan actually ends up deploying, they will be capable of conducting precision airstrikes in difficult terrain. Colombia’s use of light aircraft in activities such as Operación Fénix provide a more recent possible model here. C-130 derivative aircraft such as Harvest Hawk and Dragon Spear could also potentially provide support for critical strikes without requiring the more obvious profile of a drone base. Nevertheless, these capabilities would still be need to use sparingly, as would any persisting CIA drone bases in Afghanistan.

All that said, what will likely be critical to maintaining a viable portfolio of covert and overt coercive and intelligence options in Afghanistan will be the use of proxy forces, irregular capabilities and similar assets. After all, even conducting the drone war requires boots on the ground, as Joshua Foust points out:

They require lots of people to make them effective, not just back in the piloting booths in the U.S. but also in the countries where they’re deployed. In Yemen, there are estimates that the number of U.S. troops on the ground (working under JSOC) is in the 300 to 500 range. Some of them train Yemeni counterterrorism forces and some of them go after terrorists. The CIA, for its part, built up a 3,000-man militia to target militants in northwest Pakistan.

Covert assets and proxies are necessary to support a drone campaign, but they can also be used outside the context of one. Indeed, the use of proxies, clandestine officers, and special operations is far more common than drone campaigns, as Foust goes on to note. Indeed, even ensuring the security of these covert bases in an Afghan government that now denies or rejects would require loyal militias or proxy forces capable of defending the bases from terrorist attacks or worse – and again, building secret air bases to support air campaigns and proxy forces, and further enhancing proxy forces to defend those air bases, was something the U.S. pioneered during its wars in Indochina. Airstrikes or not, though, stay-behind forces will be necessary for the U.S. to maintain effective coercive options against high value targets in Pakistan. Even were the U.S. audacious enough to launch a cruise missile barrage from the sea, it is highly doubtful such a strike could offer the same precision as manned or unmanned assets operating from closer bases. The loss-of-strength gradient endures.

The pilots of drones may be able to act with impunity, but the vehicles themselves and the very present human beings who support them on base, gather intelligence for them in the field, and defend the infrastructure which makes this possible from attack cannot. Ultimately even a remotely-operated vehicle requires a direct presence in hostile, or at least potentially vulnerable areas. Particularly as the U.S. cedes additional air sovereignty to Afghanistan, it will need an independent method of defending any lingering counterterrorism assets from being targeted by terrorist groups or their allies and patrons. While al Qaeda may have no interest in returning to Afghanistan, there are a great many actors who would be interested in disrupting the forces that would be staged there to target terrorists in Pakistan. Especially in a scenario where the U.S. wished to retain the ability to conduct strikes in Pakistani safe havens, the U.S. would need to maintain at the very least a very sizable covert and proxy presence in Afghanistan and the border region.

There is no happy medium by which the U.S. can conduct merely a campaign of counterterror with purely offshore assets without getting caught up with the deployment of potentially vulnerable in-theater infrastructure and logistical tails or the messy business of dealing with local politics. Particularly as many question the necessity or value of U.S. deployments in the Gulf or the need for an onshore capability to conduct military and covert counterterror strikes, logistical and diplomatic realities must not escape our notice. Without, at the very least, covert proxy forces in the Afghan-Pakistan border region or drone bases in Afghanistan, there is no practical means for the U.S. to conduct targeted killing campaigns in Pakistan save by the potentially escalatory deployment of major conventional forces in strikes on Pakistani soil. Similarly, even the staging of so-called offshore assets as a deterrent or over-the-horizon capability in fact requires significant local involvement. Even in Yemen, which has – and appears to retain – a government relatively supportive of U.S. counterterrorism policies, the U.S. still needed JSOC and CIA operatives on the ground, and had to train Yemeni military formations to provide additional targeting data.

Maintaining the ability to kill or coerce terrorists, let alone the states which harbor them, from thousands of miles away from one’s homeland is no easy task. A reactive, over-the-horizon force with minimal in-theater footprint can provide only illusory benefits. After all, in most geographic locales, the U.S. will need to still have a significant basing presence and exert diplomatic and military pressure to extract foreign compliance with military and non-military U.S. counterterrorism preferences – whether that means encouraging local forces to crack down against terrorist groups they might otherwise ignore or support, building up partner capacities to combat terrorist groups, developing proxy forces to sidestep local political preferences or support intelligence gathering and direct action campaigns, or attempting to deter or coerce regimes with interests in harboring or supporting hostile non-state actors. I am all for attempting to alleviate the constraints U.S. coercive options will face through more limited political objectives, restrained use of direct action, and the refinement of maritime-centric strategies and covert capabilities. Ultimately, though, even cure-alls such as drones, standoff strikes, and light footprints do not obviate the same geographic and logistical difficulties which dog the old ways of warfare and foreign policy.

Passion isn’t a solution

Fred Hiatt is worried that Obama lacks passion in his commitment to freedom and democracy:

The biggest unpredicted event of Obama’s term has been the Arab Spring. He responded to it, case-by-case and overall, as if it were an unwanted distraction, not a historic opening.

In Egypt, the Obama administration embraced Hosni Mubarak until he was doomed, neglecting the secular democrats Mubarak was jailing, and then re-embraced the military regime that succeeded him,opening the military aid spigot despite many broken promises on democratization. Obama was tugged by the French and British into a military rescue of Libya’s revolutionaries, but offered little help to their Syrian counterparts, despite far greater human devastation. He has shown understanding for Bahrain’s repressions, and Saudi Arabia’s.

More striking than his country-specific hesitancy has been the absence of any high-level, overarching embrace of the strategic opportunity. Two decades ago, as the Iron Curtain shredded, the United States led a Western alliance that jumped at the chance to consolidate democracy from Slovakia to Estonia. The chance to nurture democracy in the heart of the Islamic world has not elicited a comparable response.

Hiatt here is making some obvious and unfavorable comparisons to the reaction of the U.S. and the broader Western world to 1989. Well, let’s look back at the passionate firebrand who was leading the charge when the Iron Curtain fell – George H.W. Bush. The narrative spun here makes it sound as if the U.S. rushed into the fall of the Iron Curtain with open arms and grand designs – in reality, during the fall of the Iron Curtain and later, the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States remained extremely cautious and more careful about preventing chaos and instability than exporting democracy per se. It was only after it was clear that the bipolar system had completely and utterly collapsed that the triumphal, grandiose approach to policymaking was able to fully liberate itself from the diplomatic and institutional considerations which restrained it under the elder Bush.

A survey of Bush’s approach from the Eastern European perspective makes it relatively clear that Bush was hardly passionate about unleashing democracy, and the U.S. was careful to prioritize prudential concerns with the Soviet Union above the remaking of Eastern Europe per se.

As Lawrence Eagleburger argued:

reform in the Soviet bloc and the relaxation of Soviet control over Eastern Europe are bringing long-suppressed ethnic antagonisms and natural rivalries to the surface and putting the German question back on the agenda… it is ultimately the Europeans themselves who have the principal stake in making the transition to a new and undivided Europe a peaceful and orderly one.

Bush reaffirmed commitments to stability at the Malta Conference, where he essentially pledged not to take undue advantage of the dissolution of Soviet client regimes, or the centripedal ethno-nationalist tensions brewing within the USSR itself. While the U.S. did sense a historical opportunity for a “new world order,” it was one that was not going to be foisted upon the world out of a revolutionary fever dream. It was one where maintaining balances of power and the integrity of alliance structures was valued far more highly than the destruction of authoritarianism, and the simultaneous careful U.S. policy towards China at the time demonstrates the President was indeed cautious to manage events on a case-by-case basis. Declassified documents since Tiananmen reveal that Bush saw China’s repression as an unfortunate development for bilateral relations but an internal affair, and recognized the U.S. outrage as passions to be managed for the sake of high diplomacy, not to be nurtured or unleashed on the world.

Had the U.S. pressed harder on the USSR in the midst of the dissolution of its internal and external empires, the potential for Gorbachev to be replaced by a much more odious combination of forces or a more violent and chaotic dissolution of the USSR would likely have been greater. Contra Hiatt, Bush was relatively dispassionate and concerned with high diplomacy and a restrained, pragmatic brand of liberal institutionalism that would likely be rather familiar to the Obama administration. As Hiatt criticizes:

But his stance also reflects his own brand of idealism, which values international law and alliances more than the promotion of freedom. The democrats’ uprising in Iran threatened his hopes of negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran’s rulers. Aid to Syria’s democrats requires approval from the U.N. Security Council, which is unattainable without Russian and Chinese acquiescence.

The value of international law, alliances, and diplomatic concerns over unbridled democratic revisionism? This sounds very much like the administration which dealt with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Gulf War, and Tiananmen Square. Bush’s caution had very little ill effects, indeed, it sometimes seems such ancient history that commentators can easily forget there ever was a period of uncertainty about what looks, in retrospect, like a total and unmitigated triumph for the United States. But Bush was wise to be cautious, and it seems foolish to impugn Obama with essentially taking Bush’s prudential, case-by-case and often reluctant approach to a crisis of legitimacy in the Middle East. After all, whereas Bush only had to worry about preventing our enemies from collapsing more quickly than we could handle, Obama also has to consider the collapse of regimes allied with the U.S.

Ultimately, though, Hiatt offers very few explanations of how U.S. “passion” could solve the difficult dilemmas the U.S. faces. More passion will not make the military realities in Syria’s civil war more amenable to some kind of magic bullet intervention – it’s not as if the UNSC discord is the only thing that makes Syrian intervention a difficult prospect. Nor would the U.S. be able to easily promote democracy in Bahrain without threatening the very partnerships with Gulf states that helped overthrow Libya’s government and would be important in a similar effort in Syria. Nor is it clear at all what kind of support the U.S. could have offered to the Green Revolution that would have allowed it to overcome the institutionalized opposition of the Iranian security services – or why the Green Revolution, a movement which did not fundamentally question the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic or its foreign policy, would have wanted such a degree of U.S. support. Hiatt ponders:

That, in turn, may help explain why many key objectives Obama laid out in his vision statement — peace between Israelis and Palestinians, securing all nuclear materials, a global response to climate change — remain elusive. In the long run, a passion for freedom might do more to shape a world in which such problems can be solved.

How exactly would a passion for freedom solve the problem that Palestinians and Israelis have, for now, apparently irreconcilable visions of what freedom means and requires? How would a passion for freedom in Iran stymie the regime’s demands for independent nuclear energy and freedom from U.S. hegemonic interference, something with reformists and the Green movement have consistently supported? How would a passion for freedom, directed against China’s CCP, make climate negotiations with that rising greenhouse gas emitter any more simple?

I have certainly been critical of some of Obama’s approaches to uprisings in the Arab world, but blaming the inconsistencies and intricacies of managing a foreign policy crisis on a lack of passion is hardly a fair assessment. Particularly when we cut through the hazy triumphalist myth about how the U.S. handled the crisis which beset U.S. international relations from 1989-1991, it is apparent that Obama is acting with much of the same prudence, considerations for international institutions, alliances, and general cooperation and respect for great powers’ interests and internal affairs that Obama has displayed as of late. Whatever faults one can identify with Obama’s approach, a shortfall of passion seems unreasonable in historical comparison and irrelevant in practical terms.