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Last week's focus on South and Southwest Asia, the nexus of the war on terror, described the most immediate challenges to the new administration, but those are not necessarily the most intractable.
In the realm of national security, the new administration will have to deal with issues other than the immediate difficulties of the war against the extremist enemies of our security. Foremost among international problems is Russia. It has been asserted before, but it bears repeating: the euphoria that surrounded the demise of the old Soviet Union ignored the reality that has been Russia for a millennium. Whether the region has been ruled by chieftains, tsars, communists or oligarchs, the effect has been pretty much the same. The Russian world view has nearly always been one of uncertainty, paranoia and regional instability, and that complicates its relationships with both its neighbors and us.
The ill-advised rush to assimilate former Russian satellites into the American orbit has merely increased Russian bellicosity and subverted the otherwise splendid idea of defending Europe against possible attack from missiles launched from Iran or elsewhere in that region. On the election of President-elect Obama, Medvedev took the opportunity to fire the first salvo across the new administration's bow by warning that Russia would not stand for any of the policies pursued by George W. Bush, and he mentioned specifically the positioning of missiles in Poland. All this will be further complicated by Putin's return to the forefront, and by the rapidly deteriorating economic situation in Russia.
China has been adversely affected by the world's economic downturn. While Russia's problems revolve around the precipitous drop in prices for commodities like oil, China's reliance on manufacturing has caused it no end of trouble. As worldwide demand for Chinese products plummets, previously booming factories are being shuttered, and there will be large dislocations as a result. A decade or two ago, increasing prosperity and opportunity in the cities triggered the largest migration in human history, as hundreds of millions of rural Chinese flocked to manufacturing centers. What will result from the current unpleasantness, especially when it gets even worse, is anybody's guess, but it won't be pretty. In history, when China has been internally weak, it has withdrawn from the world stage---but that was long before nuclear weapons and China's prominence in world business.
The strength of western Europe as a consolidated economic entity and as a strong American partner in the pursuit of mutual strategic objectives is weakening rapidly. The concept that economic strength could be forged among a very, very loose confederation of sovereign powers was excessively idealistic from the beginning, but the current economic mess shows the idea to great disadvantage. For one thing, when times get tough, sovereigns tend to go their own ways, and in any event, the European Union will never have complete control of the policies among its members. For another, the demographics of the continent are changing dramatically: statistically, ethnic Europeans will be minorities in their own nations in just a few decades, and old alliances may break unless they are expertly managed.
There are other political and strategic difficulties that must be addressed right now, including the changing face of our own hemisphere, but planning for anything must begin with serious internal discussion of the objectives that the new administration wants to reach. There are two things that Obama and his advisors need to keep in mind during this process.
The first is that the achievement of some objectives---say, the elimination of al-Qaeda as a threat---will require different resources than others, like deterring more conventional adversaries, but this nation needs both. We require tactical and strategic aircraft and ships, but we also need more special operations forces, intelligence production assets and mobile training teams. In an era of severely constrained resources, acquiring and maintaining most of what we need to protect ourselves will require sacrifice from the American people. And it will also demand intelligent, practical decisions, free of self-aggrandizement, from the elected leadership in both branches of government, something that has been seen in America only when we are faced with a crisis.
Second, and this is another thing that has been mentioned many times before but bears repeating, diplomacy needs to be used in conjunction with the other instruments of policy, and in any case must be exercised with care and delicacy, but also from strength and in secret. Public pronouncements about negotiating stances and the successes that our strategies will produce are wholly dysfunctional, and history is replete with events that prove it.
Next week will feature some of the tougher domestic objectives of the new administration.
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
