Freedom Line Blog

Foreign Policy Initiative’s Abe Greenwald does an excellent riff on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptace speech today on National Review’s website. The upshot: Greenwald wonders whether Obama’s stark articulation of evil’s presence in the world (and its impact on international affairs) shows a president who’s starting to rethink some of the first principles of his foreign policy.

Greenwald sees some promising signs, but still wonders whether Obama can ever fully turn the corner. In one bravura passage:

“Irving Kristol said, almost too memorably, ‘A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’ With that definition in mind, an eminent national-security personage put this perfectly phrased query to me over the summer: ‘Is Obama too arrogant to get mugged by reality?'”

“An excellent question. What the president calls his “philosophy of persistence” looks increasingly like the vice of conceit. The new White House imperiousness explains Obama’s inability to offer full-throated praise for the Iraq War — an undertaking he staunchly opposed. It also explains his devotion to de-fanging Iran through the voodoo of his personal allure (and to his correspondent obtuseness on Iran’s democrats).”

Today’s best piece on foreign policy (apart from this one). Read it here.

The California city of Salinas is ready to give counterinsurgency a try because the gang problem is out of control.

In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.

Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city.

“This is our surge,” said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. “When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas.”

Not quite. But the lessons learned from General David Petraeus’ successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq include the importance of creating trust between citizens and law enforcement. As in Iraq, the people most affected by the violence are suspicious of those charged with protecting them. Changing that dynamic is essential in order to achieve victory. And in order to change the dynamic, Salinas is going to need more boots on the ground so that police can cover more ground while building stronger relationships in the community.

Who knows; maybe if this domestic surge works as well as the one in Iraq, the Obama Administration might stop dithering and go for the win in Afghanistan.

From today’s Washington Post distinguishing the Iraq troop surge from General McChrystal’s request for more ground forces in Afghanistan:

It’s important to remember that the crucial, lasting element of the surge in Iraq was not the influx of troops but getting Sunni tribes to switch sides, by offering them security, money and a place at the table. U.S. troops are now drawing down and yet – despite some violence – the Sunnis have not resumed fighting because Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is courting their support.”

So, according to Zakaria, courting Afghanistan’s Pashtuns will take the same kind of subsidies and sympathy extended to Iraq’s Sunnis. Fair enough. But how about that security thing? Does Zakaria really believe that – all other things being equal – applying only two of the three prongs of the Sunni pacification strategy to the Pashtuns will yeld exactly the same results? Especially when the prong he omits is the one that guarantees the persuasive effect of the other two? If there has been any lesson learned from America’s foreign policy dealings it is that nations – like individuals – need both carrots and sticks to inspire lasting changes.

We’ve seen this sort of reliance on “soft power” yield results before. Former President George W. Bush rode tractors with Vladimir Putin, looked into his soul, and then listened attentively as his buddy invaded and annexed a democratic country in neighboring Georgia. For over a decade State Departments under both Democrats and Republicans shipped consumer goods to North Korea while that country exploded nuclear bombs and fired rockets toward Hawaii. In both cases, the only defense for such subsidies is the active presence of American troops in Eastern Europe and South Korea. Take away the threat of an immediate response from the world’s premier fighting force and suddenly our subsidies become tribute; our sympathy, kowtowing.

Russia and North Korea understand this. So too do Iraq’s Sunni leaders. Are the Pashtuns any different?