misreading Obama

President Obama's inaugural address barely mentions foreign policy. He has nominated two long-time Senators who gained fame opposing foreign military interventions after military service where they were wounded in battle. The foreign policy punditocracy is now bemoaning expected "retrenchment" despite continued overseas threats.

I think that is a misreading of presidential policy and likely outcomes. Obama has dropped crusading rhetoric but has shown ample willingness to use force. He intervened in Libya but has shown admirable caution regarding Syria ... and Mali. His advisers are understandably reluctant to endorse military action against Iran, but the president's own statements make it much harder for him to backtrack if diplomacy fails.

I welcome Obama's caution and pragmatism. Yet I also believe that "events, dear boy, events" will arise in the next few years and sometimes lead to involvement and actions not now envisioned. In short, neither the hawks nor the doves should feel that their viewpoint has been embraced or ruled out.

Linking tactics and strategy

The inauguration has stirred up a wave of punditry on Obama's foreign policy. Anne-Marie Slaughter cites the grand themes of three new think tank studies. While the rhetoric sounds persuasive, I suspect that the reports lack operational details that would make them truly useful to policymakers.

Fouad Ajami tries to label the president and his nominees for State and Defense "champions of retrenchment" who won't assert American power and will leave people in distress around the globe.  I guess he's most concerned about intervening in Syria, despite the chaos and uncertainty there, but I think he's right in suggesting that the administration's hesitance may be based on these ideas:

We are flat broke, with pressing priorities at home. Foreign engagements begin well and end in futility. We don’t know enough about the inner workings of these distant places to help more than harm. And besides, our embrace can suffocate those whose causes we might take up.

Are those points invalid? Not to me. Being cautious is far from being isolationists.

Then there's Jim Hoagland, longtime foreign correspondent whose views I usually find persuasive. Today, however, he's worried about a "loss of alliance cohesion" because of U.S. hesitations regarding Syria and the terrorism in North Africa. He says:

But I am increasingly worried by the lack of a strategic relationship between the individual tactical decisions, which often seem based largely on Obama’s needs, ambitions and/or prejudices (see “pivot to Asia”).
Worse: The problem may be even larger and more insidious. Interlocking modern revolutions in instantaneous global communications, social media, trade and means of warfare have created a world that increasingly grants neither the time nor the space leaders need to develop and implement coherent strategic options.

Hoagland is half right. There should be linkage and consistency with strategy and modern terrorism is still a threat to America and its interests. But we shouldn't be doing things mainly to make others feel good ["cohesive"]. We should do them because they are practical and make sense and can be accomplished. My biggest gripe with U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades isn't that the intentions were bad or the various policies inconsistent, but that we acted too often for symbolic reasons and without long term follow-through and revisions.

We don't need better bumper stickers with new strategic slogans. We need better engineers and mechanics and drivers to get the policy machinery to where we want it to go.

Oversight of drone attacks

I have long been concerned about Pentagon efforts -- pushed especially by former Secretary Rumsfeld -- to create paramilitary forces that could avoid the processes used to assure accountability of CIA-run covert actions. Thanks to a process created to implement a law I helped write many years ago, the President must personally authorize CIA-run covert actions and must then inform Congress, at least the senior leadership and eventually the intelligence committees. For the most part, so far as I've heard, people in both branches of government involved in this process believe it has worked well to assume accountability and good policies.

The rapid expansion of U.S. drone operations, some of which are conducted by the military, some by the intelligence community, have created an oversight gap. Lawyers want to know whether an action is "under Title 10 or Title 50 authority," referring to the sections of the U.S. Code dealing with the Defense Department and the intelligence community and war powers, respectively. This had led to calls for a "Title 60" covering both.

I support that idea and have some practical suggestions. Congress doesn't need to know everything about every military operation that might have some broader purposes or consequences, but it should be told about actions that could be significant -- if they succeed, if they fail, or if they are publicly disclosed. The test of significance, in my view, should be whether the Executive Branch itself  requires presidential involvement. If the matter is important or worrisome enough that cabinet officers want to be sure the president knows and supports it, it's the sort of activity that Congress needs to be notified about.

The Washington Post reports today that the administration is drawing up a "playbook" for handling drone operations beyond those involving the CIA in Pakistan.

The playbook has adopted that tighter standard and imposes other more stringent rules. Among them are requirements for White House approval of drone strikes and the involvement of multiple agencies — including the State Department — in nominating new names for kill lists.

That's a clear example of where Congress ought to be included in the loop -- when there has to be White House approval.

our binary nation

Eli Saslow has a poignant story in the Washington Post about two families, each with a parent employed at the same factory for 23 years, who live in quite separate political worlds. One is a Republican who believes that Obama is destroying America, the other a Democrat who is hopeful and supportive of the President. They even gravitate to separate break rooms off the factory floor to avoid political discussions. The reporter notes that we are a 50/50 nation politically, that Ohio and the community he visited, divided almost exactly evenly in the presidential election.

What makes half of us see black and anger and the other half white and hope? Isn't there some common ground, some shared consensus on reality? Maybe we have segmented ourselves into media echo chambers. Maybe we are extrapolating from one concern or grievance into an all-encompassing world view.

It's not good. We need to reach out, and listen to people with differing views, and offer our own views with less certitude and more humility. And no, that's not easy.

Congress's self-imposed ignorance

Lorelei Kelly of the New America Foundation has an excellent paper lamenting Congress's lack of expertise to sort through the tsunami of information sweeping over Capitol Hill. She notes that lawmakers themselves are to blame because of cutbacks since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.

"It was not always such: less than 20 years ago, Congress operated one of
the world’s premier scientific advisory bodies.  It maintained an
extensive network of shared expert staff--individuals and entities that
comprised deep pools of both subject matter and legislative process
expertise.  Importantly, most of these human resources worked for
Congress as a whole and provided symmetrical access and assistance to
staff and Members tasked with complex policy decision-making.  Before
1995, committee staffs were also larger and more often shared.  Joint
hearings between committees and between the House and Senate were more
common as well. While this former system stands in stark contrast to the
one that exists today, it also offers encouragement that we can rebuild
an expert knowledge system for Congress--one with even greater
capabilities-- by harnessing the technology tools now at hand."

When the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, Speaker Gingrich deliberately sought to dismantle the "legislative service organizations" that offered independent advice, one of the best of which was the Office of Technology Assessment. The leadership also cut back on staff sizes and constrained the remaining organizations like CRS and GAO.  This paper says that the result has been less expertise in Congress, and thus more influence by powerful outside advocates.

Among other things, Kelly recommends reestablishing OTA, filling senior positions at CRS, and making it easier for legislative service organizations to operate. I agree. If Congress hears only from strident advocates, it will find it harder to craft smart, nonpartisan policies.

who pays the piper calls the tune

The National Rifle Association [NRA] is probably the most powerful lobby group in Washington, and perhaps in our states and local communities as well. It achieved that status in perfectly legal ways: recruiting members, advancing a simple and clear agenda, and making political campaign contributions.

With the President's new proposals to reducer gun violence, it's payback time. The Washington Post has a series of charts that documents how the NRA has targeted members of Congress and, implicitly, why it will probably call the tune on any new legislation. The basic facts are that last year the NRA gave money to 261 congressional candidates, mostly Republicans. Over 80% of those candidates won. So the new 113th Congress has 213 members [of 535 total] who got NRA money in the past year.

what works versus what looks good?

I'm a strong supporter of a large and diverse foreign aid program, both military and economic , but I hope somebody has good answers to the questions Walter Pincus raises about our apparently failed counter terrorism programs in Mali. He lists a series of efforts over the past decade to prevent what is now occurring in that troubled land. The titles of the programs sound good  --"Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership," "Pan Sahel Initiative", each with its own acronym -- and the purposes behind them were important. Money was spent and programs run -- but with what results? A military coup, triggering a cutoff of aid, and an ever more powerful insurgency.

U.S. officials need more follow through, more attention to how good sounding proposals actually work in the field, and greater willingness to change course when the promised results aren't achieved.