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The Dirty Fight Against Koh

The invaluable David Weigle exposes a conspiracy afoot by the forces of darkness to obstruct the nomination of Harold Koh as the State Department's top legal advisor.  According to a letter obtained by Weigle, groups like the Frank Gaffney-fronted Coalition for American Sovereignty (which was founded to oppose the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) and the Center for Security Policy are attempting to portray Koh's legal views as somehow outside the mainstream.  They planned on circulating the letter in advance of his nomination hearing, though far right commentators like Glenn Beck of Fox News have already begun a concerted smear campaign against the Yale Law School dean.

Back on planet earth it is Koh's detractors -- not Koh himself -- who hold fringe views on international law and sovereignty.   Take the debate over the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea:  Most Democrats and Republicans support ratification. President Bush supported ratification as does President Obama. The United States military supports ratification and peace groups support ratification.  Environmentalists and the mineral extractive industry too support support ratification.  But Frank Gaffney?  He thinks UNCLOS is a full frontal assault on American sovereignty!

Short-Sighted Cuts to International Affairs Budget Prove Short-Lived

Passing a $3.5 trillion budget in the midst of a recession is no small feat, and so perhaps legislators can be forgiven for trying to make a few cuts here and there to the proposal that President Obama had put in front of them. At least one such proposed cut, though -- Senator Kent Conrad's attempt to strip over $4 billion in funding for international affairs -- would have so undermined U.S. interests that the Senate did away with it in a "voice vote," since it wasn't even close enough to count.

On Tuesday afternoon, an amendment proposed by Senators Kerry and Lugar passed overwhelmingly, restoring international affairs funding that will pay for causes like diplomacy, peacekeeping, and humanitarian assistance. As the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senators Kerry and Lugar know a thing or two about why supporting these initiatives is so important.

Part of the reason is to rehabilitate America's relationship with the rest of the world. By paying for more foreign service officers, by investing in the world's collective fight against climate change, and by demonstrating that foreign affairs are not simply an afterthought in American politics, the new U.S. Congress can strongly back President Obama's renewed commitment to improving relations and reinvigorating U.S. leadership. Senator Kerry's words bear repetition: "We cannot try to be a world leader on the cheap."

Another reason for the need to increase foreign affairs funding, though, is purely pragmatic. By enhancing our diplomatic presence, we make it less likely to need to resort to the military. By increasing foreign aid, we make it less likely that the poor will turn to radical actors using aid as bait. And by pooling our anti-terrorism resources with other countries', we make it less likely that terrorists will be able to go around ad hoc, unilateral defenses. These kinds of arguments comprised the bulk of Senator Kerry's floor statement on Tuesday:

And it is clear to all that meeting these global challenges will require far more than our military: it will require a strengthened commitment to diplomacy and development.

To put this as simply and bluntly as possible, that’s why passing a robust foreign affairs budget is a matter not just of America’s world leadership, but also of our national security.

And America just got a little bit $4 billion safer.

(image from flickr user cliff1066 under a Creative Commons license)

How the UN Figures in the Obama’s Af-Pak Strategy

For the United Nations, this is the money quote from President Obama's much anticipated Af-Pak speech:
My Administration is committed to strengthening international organizations and collective action, and that will be my message next week in Europe. As America does more, we will ask others to join us in doing their part. From our partners and NATO allies, we seek not simply troops, but rather clearly defined capabilities: supporting the Afghan elections, training Afghan Security Forces, and a greater civilian commitment to the Afghan people. For the United Nations, we seek greater progress for its mandate to coordinate international action and assistance, and to strengthen Afghan institutions.
Now what does that mean? And how can the UN deliver? Can the UN deliver?

Straw Men at the Foreign Policy Initiative

Newly in the minority, conservative heavyweights Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol have started up a new advocacy group, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), to combat the specter of isolationism they see looming in the United States. The problem is, the worldview that they have set out to oppose is just that -- a specter. According to the comments of another of the group's co-founders, Dan Senor, to FP's Laura Rozen, the Foreign Policy Initiative's mission seems to be relying on a whole bunch of straw men:
"We believe America is the indispensable nation, as President Clinton said," Senor, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Foreign Policy. "And we believe it's the exactly wrong time to demote America's role in the world. And we are seeing an emerging bipartisan consensus on a range of issues from cutting the defense budget to a minimalist approach in Afghanistan to the importance of currying favor with the Russian government at the expense of democratic allies Ukraine and Georgia. We think there needs to be consensus on the other side of these issues." [emphasis mine]
They're right -- America is an "indispensable nation." What's disturbing about this critique is the suggestion that, by engaging in more multilateral efforts, by emphasizing diplomacy over confrontation, the United States is somehow "demoting" its role. Foreign affairs is not a zero-sum game -- just the opposite, in fact. By enhancing relationships and improving cooperation between countries, everybody wins; America's role -- not as bully, but as leading partner -- is validated, its alliances are strengthened, and its objectives are more easily achieved. In my eyes, this is a promotion of America's role in the world. As for the "emerging bipartisan consensus" that Senor alludes to, I'm not exactly sure what government he is observing. The Obama Administration actually plans on increasing the defense budget (and Republicans are certainly on board for this as well), and the President's Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy being unveiled this morning certainly does not curtail current U.S. presence in the former. And again, the beauty of a more open foreign policy is that the United States can both replace saber-rattling with Russia with rapprochement and retain good relations with its democratic neighbors. A good foreign policy think tank from the minority is a very healthy part of American democracy; hopefully FPI will begin by contesting policies that actually exist. (image from flickr user Ian Haycox under a Creative Commons license)

A Victory for a White House Victory Garden*

It seems that the stars have finally aligned and the Obamas will plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn this spring.
ABC News' Ann Compton and Sunlen Miller report that the new White House vegetable garden will be dug up and planted on the South grounds of the White House -- near the fountain but out of view of the main house.
[snip]
In the April issue of [O Magazine], Mrs. Obama tells Winfrey, "We want to use it as a point of education, to talk about health and how delicious it is to eat fresh food, and how you can take that food and make it part of a healthy diet."
Regular readers know this is an idea we have been pushing ever since Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International won the On Day One contest with this very idea, which he calls Eat the View. Here is statement from Roger on today's news.
Launched in February 2008 under the rallying cry “Eat the View”, the campaign used viral videos and social networking technologies like Facebook to grow a large support base, attract international media attention, and help inspire similar grassroots efforts. The campaign’s proposal that the Obamas replant a White House Victory Garden with part of the produce going to local food pantries won the “On Day One” contest sponsored by the United Nations Foundation in January 2009, beating out 4000 other entries.
While the Obamas’ garden and the online technologies that helped lead to it might be new, the idea of an edible landscape at the White House is not. Throughout its history, the White House has been home to food gardens of different shapes and sizes and even to a lawn-mowing herd of sheep in 1918. The appeal of the White House garden project, Doiron asserts, is that it serves as a bridge between the country’s past and its future. “The last time food was grown on the White House lawn was in 1943 when the country was at war, the economy was struggling and people were looking to the First Family for leadership. It made sense before and it makes sense again as we try to live within our own means and those of the planet.”
I caught up with Doiron a couple of weeks ago and we chatted about this idea...where else, but in front of the White House. *UPDATE: The planting has begun!

UN About to Get A Boost in Afghanistan

Via the excellent Spencer Ackerman, pretty big news that President Obama will tap Peter W Galbraith as a deputy in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). For the uninitiated, Galbraith is a diplomatic heavy weight. As a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer in the 1980s he uncovered Saddam Hussein's genocide of the Kurds, and for that emerges as a hero in Samatha Power's A Problem From Hell: American in the Age of Genocide. He is also known as a trouble-shooter. When Yugoslavia dissolved in the 1990s, President Clinton appointed him as the first United States ambassador to Croatia. The point is, he is a star in the diplomatic world. And now President Obama has seen fit to send that expertise in support of a United Nations mission. The obvious deduction here is that the much heralded Afghanistan/Pakistan policy review, due very soon, will spell out an important role for the United Nations in the region.

New U.S. Envoy to Sudan Named

Via Enough Said, the United States has finally appointed a Special Envoy to Sudan, something that Obama had hinted would be a priority of his early presidency. The Envoy, whose name had remained curiously un-leaked as late as yesterday afternoon, will be Scott Gration, a former Air Force General and high-ranking member of Obama's national security team during the campaign. This accomplishes two goals for Obama: naming a Special Envoy, and finding a job for Scott Gration. This is no give-a-supporter-an-ambassadorship-to-Ireland position, though (no offense to Ireland, of course, or, begrudgingly, to the Steelers). This post will be an extremely challenging one, forcing Gration to navigate between politics and humanitarianism, hawkishness and diplomacy, and between a country with a vocal domestic constituency to pressure Sudan and one with hardened leaders willing to literally starve their own population to death. It is interesting that Obama tapped a military official to do this job, rather than a career diplomat, as was Gration's predecessor, Rich Williamson. This is not to say that Gration won't necessarily bring a diplomatic verve to the gig, only that he also must be looking at Darfur through a military/national security lens, as well. And as a testament of how important Sudan is to American foreign policy, not only in a moral sense, but in a fundamentally interest-based one, this is an appreciable development. Here's Gration's speech before the Democratic National Convention last August, and here's an interesting snippet from a New Yorker article on American foreign policy, written last October by Nicholas Lemann:
"We’ve screwed up,” [Gration] told me. “We don’t really fix these things.” He mentioned the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the Israel-Palestine dispute, and the tension between Russia and Georgia. “What I’d hope we learn from that is: ‘Yep, we’ve got to fix the basic issues here.’ ” He went on, “What doesn’t work, in Gration’s mind, is forcing a solution. Create an environment, give people the opportunity to air their differences, and see if they can come together. We don’t tell them what the solution is, but we do have an obligation—let’s get people in here, find out the needs, see if you can come up with a plan. Don’t try to freeze conflicts! [emphasis mine]"
Somehow, I don't think he has to worry about Sudan's conflicts freezing any time soon. (image of Gration, November 2007, from flickr user Barack Obama under a Creative Commons license)

What Matters is Not the Secretary General’s Word Choice

In a meeting with congressional leaders yesterday, the Secretary General, apparently used the term "deadbeat" in a discussion of America's arrears to the United Nations. He later clarified by saying that although “the United States is the most generous contributor to the United Nations, it is also the largest debtor.” The House Committee on Foreign Affairs' ranking member Ileana Ros-Lehtinen "took umbrage," to the comment, saying, "We certainly contribute a whole lot of U.S. taxpayer dollars to that organization. We do not deserve such a phrase." No doubt more partisan opportunism will follow. Here are the facts: The United States is the UN's single biggest donor and is assessed for dues that amount to 22% of the UN's regular budget and 26% of the UN's Peacekeeping budget. These percentages are not arbitrary. American delegates at the United Nations came up with those figures themselves and agree to them bi-annually. The problem is, the United States is perennially late in paying up. This, in part, is due to prior restrictions on UN funding imposed by the pre-2006 Congresses (which had Republican majorities.) Over time, this has led to the accumulation of significant American arrears to the United Nations to the point where the United States owes the organization about $1 billion. That's a whole lot of money. Even more so when you consider the UN's regular budget (which excludes peacekeeping) is under $5 billion annually. These are funds that keep the lights on at UN headquarters, pays the salaries of translators, buys paper for the photocopy machines, etc. Most of America's current arrears are toward UN Peacekeeping, which fields 17 missions around the world at a cost of about $8 billion. These missions are in places that the United States (by virtue of its position on the Security Council) decides are worthy of foreign intervention but is not willing to send American troops. Now, $1 billion is not a trivial sum in US budget terms, but it is not exactly bank-breaking either. I personally think the United States congress can be doing a much better job of settling its debt with the United Nations. And frankly, considering what the United States gets in return -- like the entire edifice of international cooperation post World War II -- the UN is well worth the modest outlay. Congressman Bill Delahunt, who chairs the International Organizations subcommittee framed the issue nicely.
"Clearly they have an interest in the United States meeting its responsibility. In terms of peacekeeping, we're about $670 million behind, and I think the argument is well-stated," Delahunt said.
He noted America backs U.N. peacekeeping operations — and said it loses credibility if it doesn't provide financial support. "And at the same time, we have to recognize that there are no American troops involved in the 17 different venues where there are peacekeeping operations," Delahunt said.
The issue here is not the Secretary General's word choice (which he regrets) but whether the United States will meet its obligations to the United Nations. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe