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Kasparov check-mates his own logic

I can understand why Garry Kasparov hearts dissidents, since he's one of Russia's most prominent himself. And he may be able to beat anyone but a computer in chess, but his logic falls seriously short here:

But the Soviet Union used tanks to quash dissent when it could. Dictatorships use force when they can get away with it, not when a U.S. president makes a strong statement.

Okay, agreed. Nothing Barack Obama says or doesn't say about the Iranian "revolution" will affect how the country's leadership, who seem to be pretty desperate to hang on to power, employs violence. But then how does this follow?

President Dwight Eisenhower might have learned that lesson in 1956 when he said nothing and the Soviets sent tanks into Budapest anyway. Likewise, in 1968 the Soviets cracked down in Czechoslovakia even though the West said little. Regardless of what Mr. Obama says, the Iranian leaders will use all the force at their disposal to stay in power.

"That lesson" is not that silence from a U.S. president will cause a dictatorship to send in tanks to quash dissidents; it is, in fact, the opposite, as Kasparov said in the previous paragraph. There is no relationship between what the "leader of the free world" says and what the leader of an unfree country does to his own people. So, contrary to the thrust of this much emulated argument, Barack Obama not issuing his "support" for Iranian dissidents will not "cause" a greater crackdown in Iran. History is being twisted into erroneous causation here, and it's being used for purely political purposes.

(image from flickr user arellis49 under a Creative Commons license)

Another country that we won’t NOT be talking to

No longer will the United States' top Syria hand (whoever that may be) have to pull a Nick Burns and try to work with Syria without actually talking to any Syrian officials. Via Laura Rozen, WaPo reports that the U.S. will be sending an ambassador to Damascus, a position that the Bush Administration recalled four years ago. Sense prevails:

"It did not make any sense to us not to be able to speak with an authoritative voice in Damascus," the senior administration official said. "It was our assessment that total disengagement has not served our interests."

Amazing that no one could come to this conclusion after four years of unproductive non-relations.

Ohhh, so it’s a “cooperative” Arctic strategy you want, eh?

In an article about the increasing diplomatic pressure and military build-up in the melting Arctic Circle, this is the extent of the response that Reuters got from a top U.S. official:

"We will seek cooperative strategies," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg told Reuters during a meeting of Arctic Council foreign ministers in Tromsoe, Norway.

I can't help thinking the obvious: that signing the Law of the Sea treaty is one of the easiest "cooperative strategies" that the United States could already be pursuing. They wouldn't even have to "seek" it; it's right there on the table, open for Senate ratification.

The most clear-cut case I’ve heard for engagement with Iran…

...comes from the mouth of Nick Burns, who was once effectively paid by the U.S. government not to talk to Iran.  Speaking at a fascinating panel discussion currently going on at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Burns, in his own words, was in the "incredibly awkward position" of being the point person for Iran from 2005 to 2008, a period during which he "never met an Iranian government official."

When your lead Iran diplomat (who's a very good one, by the way) does not even speak with a single government official from Iran, that it not diplomacy, and that is not progress.  And Burns is not an unrestrained "talk with your enemies" kind of guy; he doesn't think the Obama Administration should give any undue legitimacy to the Ahmadinejad government by engaging on the nuclear or any other issue as long as there is still any hope for the opposition.  But that someone who sees this kind of realpolitik angle still expresses shock that he was tasked with dealing with Iran without communicating with them only further proves how nonsensical a policy of estrangement and isolation really is.  Iran will not be the same after these most recent elections, and neither, hopefully, will the United States' undiplomatic Iran "diplomacy.

The only person who can argue for war AND diplomacy with a straight face

From the stark-raving mad department...John Bolton targets his Israel's missiles on Iran again. In Boltonland, Iran already has dozens of nuclear weapons pointed at Israel and the United States Chicago, anything short of pre-emptive warfare is "weakness," and the fact that Iran's presidential elections are tomorrow -- and may actually unseat neocons' favorite whipping boy -- is a reason not for nuance, but for publishing a warmongering op-ed sooner rather than later.

In fact, Bolton crookedly argues that a pre-emptive attack on Iran should actually have occurred under the Bush Administration, which at least did not engage in the kind of "apologetic" outreach that just might undo some of the ill will that a good bombing campaign could generate in the Muslim world. (His answer to the problems that a regional attack on Iran would cause? Unsurprisingly, more bombs!) What is truly unfathomable, though, is that Bolton somehow thinks that we can just attach a nice note of diplomacy alongside the missiles that should rain on Tehran.

Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs' regime and plunge the region into political chaos. To the contrary, a strike accompanied by effective public diplomacy could well turn Iran's diverse population against an oppressive regime.

Bomb first, negotiate later.

The other strikingly dense aspect of these two sentences is how utterly -- but unsurprisingly -- Bolton has failed to learn the lessons of Iraq. There is absolutely nothing to back up his blithe assertion that Iranians would most likely "turn against" the regime in the face of an Israeli bombing campaign. The same sort of forecast, equally unsupported by fact, was precipitously used to simply explain away any complicating reactions from Iraqis beyond their relief at the ousting of a tyrant (and one with much, much more blood on his hands than Ahmadinejad). This strategy, of course, proved disastrous in its oversimplification. Millions of Iranians have been rallying during their country's election campaign, but an unprovoked military assault would only sow disorder and antagonism.

CTBT reciprocity from Indonesia?

Matt Yglesias points out that, at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event yesterday, the Foreign Minister of Indonesia essentially said that if the United States walks through the door of ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, his country will follow.

This is a shrewd political maneuver, particularly because a statement at a venue halfway across the world likely won't generate as much attention at home than would one made in Jakarta. Such a commitment would also require a greater lift on the part of the United States, which actually possesses nuclear weapons, than of Indonesia, which does not. Indonesia does, however, have the potential to research and possibly test nuclear material, so it would unquestionably be in U.S. interests to make sure another country did not start along the road of nuclear progression.

For all the reasons Matt lays out -- that ratifying CTBT is relatively low-hanging fruit, a short-term good gesture that would advance the goal of non-proliferation -- convincing the eight other countries who would need to ratify CTBT for it to take effect should be an Obama Administration priority (Vice President Biden is reportedly leading the effort to shepherd the treaty through the Senate). Ratifying this ourselves should be a diplomatic and policy no-brainer, so much more clearly so if Indonesia is ready to follow by example. Granted, China and Russia (let alone Iran and North Korea), also CTBT non-ratifiers, probably wouldn't exactly fall like dominoes from this diplomatic reciprocity, but it would at least remove the hypocrisy from the U.S. stance.

Plus, a move by Indonesia would give commentators another positive development in a Muslim country (the world's largest, in fact) to ascribe to the "Obama Effect" of the Cairo speech.

(image of Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda, under a Creative Commons license)

Kissinger counts to six again

After reading today's Henry Kissinger op-ed in The Washington Post (he does seem to have those rather frequently, does he not?) on North Korea, I seemed to recall another one on the same subject from a couple months ago. Then, he seemed to be urging the Obama Administration to refrain from restarting the six-party talks just yet. A nuclear test and a couple more missile launches later, you'd expect him to sound the same skepticism, his much-ballyhooed talk of "no preconditions" notwithstanding. But, um...I count six here.

A long-term solution to the Korean nuclear problem cannot be achieved by America alone. Nor is it sustainable without the key players of Northeast Asia; that means China, South Korea, the United States and Japan, with an important role for Russia, as well. A wise diplomacy will move urgently to assemble the incentives and pressures to bring about the elimination of nuclear weapons and stockpiles from North Korea. It is not enough to demand unstated pressures from other affected countries, especially China. A concept for the political evolution of Northeast Asia is urgently needed.

I tried not to think that this was the same guy who attempted to engineer the "political evolution" of Southeast Asia 35 years ago. And while the op-ed is strangely wispy in its policy recommendations, full of broad hypotheticals and conditionals, the concluding note is certainly in the right tune:

There could scarcely be an issue more suited to cooperation among the Great Powers than nonproliferation, especially with regard to North Korea, a regime that is run by fanatics; located on the borders of China, Russia and South Korea; and within missile range of Japan. Still, the major countries have been unable to galvanize themselves into action. [emphasis mine]

"Action," of course, is difficult, particularly with such a confounding regional situation, an enigmatic and intransigent regime, and two unjustly imprisoned American journalists, to boot. Kissinger doesn't seem able to acknowledge that we can't go back in time to prevent North Korea from reaching the nuclear stage it is at right now; nonproliferation, even the preferred multilateral kind that Kissinger rightly supports, must proceed from existing realities. Only then can we work on changing them.

(image from flickr user World Economic Forum under a Creative Commons license)

U.S. journalists in North Korea sentenced to 12 years hard labor

The sentence sounds Solzhenitsynian, the trial was certainly Kafkaesque, and whole affair smacks of dangerous Orwellian farce. But this is real life, and North Korea's sham court convicted Laura Ling and Euna Lee, American journalists for Al Gore's Current TV, for "grave crimes" against the Hermit Kingdom.

Whether this brazen sentencing is designed explicitly to challenge the brewing sanctions that the United States and UN are formulating, or whether it is simply a normal outcome of the reigning modus operandi in North Korea, is unclear. But this certainly throws a wrench into the already difficult negotiations over North Korea's equally flagrant defiance of UN resolutions concerning its nuclear program.

North Korea may use the journalists' freedom as a bargaining chip to avoid harsher sanctions, which strikes me as an unconscionable use of hostage-taking as diplomatic strategy. Even before this gambit, though, Pyongyang already seemed pretty resistant to one aspect of the potential new Security Council resolution in particular -- that allowing inspection of suspect cargo coming into the country. And even though the two issues - nuclear proliferation and an egregious violation of press freedom - are nominally unrelated, they are both a matter of North Korean pride, and will therefore be all the trickier for the Obama Administration to deal with them separately.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman describes what Ling and Lee's sentence might look like in practice.

Diplomacy! The Horror!

It's probably no surprise that AEI's Danielle Pletka would dismiss Obama's speech in Cairo yesterday as mere "jawboning." Her implication, though, is much broader: that basically all efforts at negotiations with nefarious or intransigent actors -- the usual suspects of Iran, North Korea, and Palestine -- are not only wasteful and ineffective "jawboning," but provide a near-treasonous benefit to America's adversaries.

The underlying fallacy of Pletka's argument comes exactly here, in the assumption that negotiation -- the entire act of diplomacy -- is a zero-sum game. No one is arguing that negotiations don't come with trade-offs, or setbacks, or, yes, disingenuousness on the part of one's unsavory interlocutors. But continuing to engage in talks despite these problems is not, as Pletka would have it, to allow these problems to win the day. It is simply giving up.

In fact, Pletka seems more exercised by the medium of diplomacy than of the rotten fruit that she sees it begetting. The question she does not answer, though, is what method besides the "negotiation" and "engagement" that she derides -- and beyond simply giving up talking to other counties -- she would have us employ. Recklessly wielding sticks (or bombs) just limits our options -- and will only make the negative outcomes that she disdains all the more likely.

Obama's Cairo speech, moreover, seems a rather awkward hook on which to hang a denunciation of diplomacy. Obama was not involved in negotiations yesterday; he was making a broad outreach to Muslim populations. This use of "smart power" is a very different exercise than that of negotiating with, say, Hamas. When commentators like Pletka shudder at that latter thought, they are merely misunderstanding both the futility of isolation and the point of "smart power." While Hamas may still rail against Obama's outreach, millions of moderate Muslims heard what the U.S. president had to say. And most of them probably liked it a lot more than what extremists on either side had to say.