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A quick ‘think” post.

It is generally a bad sign for a SECSTATE so early in an administration to have to come out and deny that they have been marginalized by the White House, as Secretary Clinton felt compelld to do the other day. The denial itself serves as confirmation of the fact.

It is tempting to write this off as another example of traditional, politically-motivated, battles between White House staffers, determined to protect the authority of the POTUS over foreign policy and the bureaucracy at State.  We have seen this struggle in the past with Al Haig, Cyrus Vance, William Rogers, Cordell Hull, Robert Lansing and other SECSTATEs who sooner or later found themselves sidelined and excluded from key foreign policy decisions by the president. However, this is not just a case of Obama insiders distrusting and attempting to “box in” the Clintons as political rivals, by using other high profile players ( though that has been done to Clinton).

Nor is it just that State is grossly underfunded relative to its responsibilities by the U.S. Congress, which it most certainly is. I’m pretty critical of State but to do everything they *should* be doing, and to do the job right, requires a sizable budget increase, perhaps upwards of 50 %. This cut off the nose to spite our foreign policy face niggardliness by the legislature is not new. Go back and read the memoirs of diplomats of a century ago. They wrestled with the same budgetary penury as State has to deal with today; even during WWII when you’d have thought money would be no object, Congress stiffed diplomats in hazardous, war-zone, postings on their food allowances. The foreign service was long the preserve of wealthy, well-connected, white men because back in the day, only they could afford to live on a State Department salary.

No, the hidden problem for the State Department is that in an age of failing, failed and fake states, diplomacy means less than it once did and accomplishes less in a greater number of places. You could replace Hillary Clinton with Talleyrand as SECSTATE and give him $ 100 billion to play with and he’d still be stuck with a collection of chaotic Gap states without effective internal governance, eroding sovereignty and multiplying non-state actors freebooting across international borders. The problem for State is the global evironment and their disinclination to adapt effectively to it as an institution. It’s foreign interlocutors frequently cannot deliver on any deals, even if they wanted to do so. When that is the reality, what role does diplomacy have in policy or strategy?

State needs to overhaul its personnel system and FSO culture to embrace the reality that interagency teamwork at the inception of policy planning is the only way the USG will be able to effectively advance its interests and nurture stability. The age of ambassadors or even mano-a-mano superpower summitry is over, even among great powers because State cannot execute policy across the DIME bureaucratic spectrum much less bring in the private sector on its own. It has neither the imagination nor the power to go it alone. For that matter, State is having enough  trouble just managing its core functions plus public diplomacy and development aid ( the last two so poorly they should be hived off immediately).

SECSTATE Clinton would like to be the Mario Andretti of Obama ‘s foreign policy but what she’s driving amounts to an Edsel. State needs an engineer to re-design it, and an advocate who can pull in the funding, not an operator or manager of the status quo. If State does not change its culture and its structures in the next decade, it is just marking time until some catastrophe results in it being retired to the historical graveyard and replaced with a new agency better suited to the conditions of the 21st century.

This is my latest contribution (and part XII) to the Xenophon Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

The Temptation of Xenophon

….Xenophon was a relatively young aristocrat who struck out for the East, for greener pastures because any ambitions were likely to be thwarted at home. Athens was a broken empire,just defeated at the hands of Sparta in classical antiquity’s equivalent to WWI. The opportunities for service abroad in the name of Athens were nonexistent. Chances for leadership within the city itself were likewise grim. Xenophon came from a notorious circle in Athens, the followers of Socrates, who were in disfavor with the ruling democrats, being suspected of “factious” inclinations and oligarchical sympathies. Two of their number, Alcibiades and Critias were reckoned as infamous traitors and usurpers. Furthermore, Socrates’ continued lack of participation in the Assembly and the private symposia held by his aristocratic students, appeared to indicate a latent political opposition to Athenian democracy itself.

From Joseph Fouche at Chicago Boyz.

Xenophon Roundtable: Politics in a Bottle

…..Cyrus, as shown by the spectacles that he repeatedly puts on as motivation exercises for his reluctant mercenaries during the descent to Babylon, is a showman. Many citizens of modern liberal democracies miss the subtlety of manufacturing consent in a traditional hereditary monarchy. Monarchy relies on spectacle as much or in fact more so than a liberal democracy. Masters of the form, whether continent spanning tyrants like Louis XIV or petty princelings of the Holy Roman Empire, rely on symbol, spectacle, and sacralizing as much as the naked violence to which they often resorted. Traditional state violence, whether it be an execution, a military campaign, or jousting, served a theatrical, educational, and propagandizing purpose on top of its pure manifestation of brute force. Cyrus was putting on a performance intended to symbolically and morally knife Artaxerxes almost as much as he was seeking to literally shove eight inches of wrought iron into his own brother’s chest. That Cyrus signally failed in his attempt is no argument against the fundamentally political nature of his warfare. Failure is as much a part of politics as success. If Cyrus failed in his aspiration to become a potent symbol of political success in life, through the freshly rendered pieces of Cyrus meat conspicuously displayed by his brother, Cyrus became a potent symbol of political failure in death.

An excellent post.

Some politics of foreign policy and war… 

An implicit theme of the “no drama” Obama administration is “You can trust Democrats with National Security“.

Until, of course, there is a roll call. Funding the Obama administration’s strategic policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are going to have to pass with Republican and Blue Dog Democrat votes as the graying, liberal,  Boomer Democrats in Congress relive ( for the 1000th vote) the one time they waved an anti-war sign on the quad back in ’69 after toking up a doobie in the dorm hall, and vote in a bloc against the leader of their party. Good. I hope they make an enormous media production out of it featuring the most extreme crazies in their caucus making abrasive, tone-deaf, comments on national television.

In 2010, the GOP ( if they have any political sense – a long shot at this juncture) may be running campaign commercials on how their Republican members stood solidly with the president against al Qaida when their Democratic counterparts did not.

Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

This blog, run by military historian Dr. Mark Grimsley, is one I should have added to the blogroll a long time ago. From perusing Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, there are points of agreement and disagreement that I’d have with Grimsley, but his overall aim to put military history in a broader context or understanding is an effor worthy of enthususiastic support. Historical knowledge is useless unless it is widely disseminated.

Check out a few sample posts below:

The Culture of War

….This is Martin Van Creveld’s eighteenth book, and like most of its predecessors it combines the insightful with the provocative with the merely exasperating.  Van Creveld is both a gifted military historian and a world class gadfly, and he often gives the impression that he cherishes the latter reputation more than the former.  This impression is more unavoidable than ever in The Culture of War, which, the author informs us, he has written with the desire to put “any number of assorted ‘-ists’ – such as relativists, deconstructionists,  deconstructivists, post-modernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists, and feminists firmly in their place.”  (xv)   These “bleeding hearts,” he imagines, scorn the notion of a culture of war.  He also wishes to confront the “neo-realists” who collapse warfare into a supposedly rational instrument of policy – and this is in fact the most interesting aspect of the book – but his swipes at the academic left are so frequent and tiresome that they threaten the integrity of the book.

A Plain Violation of Civilian Control? – Part Trois

….To a particularly tendentious question that was in effect an invitation to criticize the Obama administration, McChrystal replied, “I won’t even touch that.”

At no point in the Q&A did anyone mention Vice President Biden or allude directly to the Biden option.  Many of the questions dealt with such things as the possible role/response of Iran, the legitimacy of the Afghan election, the element of the Taliban that was most dangerous (the questioner told McChrystal what he  regarded as the most dangerous element, then asked if McChrystal agreed), how one might best cut off the flow of Taliban recruits (“jobs,” McChrystal replied), etc.

Having watched the whole Q&A, I was impressed by the general’s poise, his articulateness, his praise for the efforts of the coalition forces, and his repeated endorsement of the Obama administration’s strategy review process.

A Douglas MacArthur type McChrystal decidedly is not.

General McChrystal Versus Vicki Carr

….Modern communications have tempted some presidents to micromanage.  During the disastrous Desert One rescue mission in 1980, Jimmy Carter famously (and problematically) dealt directly with COL Charles Beckwith, the commander on the scene. But the ultimate micro-manager was also the first to have easy access to ground commanders:  President Abraham Lincoln, thanks to the telegraph.  Lincoln constantly bypassed his secretary of war and general in chief to deal directly with army commanders.  Although some historians seem to believe that everything Lincoln did was correct by definition, Lincoln’s interventions were often to ill effect.

In any event, Obama already knows what McChrystal thinks.  At this point McChrystal, in effect, needs to know what Obama thinks.  That is to say, the president needs to give McChrystal a clearly defined national security objective that is the prerequisite for any coherent military strategy.

Amen to that last part.