Iran reaches out to Central Asia neighbors in bid for regional coalition

NICOSIA — In the latest challenge to the United States, Iran plans to establish a regional military coalition in Central Asia.
Iran has been briefing allies in Central Asia and surrounding regions in an effort to form a military coalition that would draw from Teheran's capabilities. Teheran has garnered interest from such states as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

On Feb. 18, Tajikistan reported an examination of Iran's coalition proposal. Tajik National Security Council secretary Amir Qoli Aazamev said Iran's proposal was important.

"Regional security and stability would be boosted drastically if Iran's regional military coalition proposal would be put to effect," Aazamev said.

The United States has sought to woo Central Asian countries away from Iran and Russia with assistance in military and energy projects. Turkey has also been helping Turkish-speaking republics such as Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

But Azerbaijan has reported increasing defense cooperation with Iran. On Feb. 18, Azeri Defense Minister Safar Abiyev held talks in Teheran with his Iranian counterpart, Mostafa Najar, on new defense and military programs.

So far, officials said, Iran has not formally presented its military coalition proposal. They said Teheran has briefed up to 25 countries on a plan that would enable them to become aligned with Iran while maintaining current cooperation.

In an attempt to woo military cooperation, Iran has won an invitation to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by China and Russia, in the summer of 2008 in Dushanbe. Officials said Iran has sought membership in the organization, which also includes most Central Asian states.

"Since regional security is of great importance today, Iran's proposal can be put forth in the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well," Aazamev said.

Iran plans province-by-province takeover of Iraq using militias

WASHINGTON — A leading U.S. analyst said Iran has been organizing and equipping militias throughout southern Iraq. Iran wants to establish a nine-province Shi'ite enclave in Iraq under the authority of Teheran, he said.
"The level of Iranian activity in the south is very high," Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "The level in Basra is seen as a major threat."

Members of the anti Al Qaida 'Awakening' movement during a joint operation with U.S. soldiers on the outskirts of Baghdad in January. Baghdad's intelligence chief has claimed that Iranian secret service agents are working to "sabotage" the operations of groups fighting Al Qaida in Iraq. AFP/Jewel Samad
Cordesman, a former Defense Department official who returned from a tour in Iraq, said the Iranian threat has become a major concern of the U.S.-led coalition. He said Teheran was supporting all the Shi'ite factions in Basra, which contains the largest crude oil reserves in Iraq.
"It was made repeatedly clear, not simply by our intelligence experts but by those of allied countries, that Iranian influence is still continuing to build up the militias, to provide training, to provide weapons," Cordesman said in the Feb. 14 briefing. "There have been statements about Iran pausing or reducing its capabilities. I think that these have been episodic and cyclical."

Cordesman said he did not envision a flood of Iranian weapons into Iraq or a Shi'ite offensive against the U.S.-led coalition. He said Teheran was supporting both the Sadr militias and the Badr organization on a "target of opportunity basis."

Still, the Iranian effort could eventually spark a war for control by Shi'ite militias in Iraq, particularly that of the Mahdi Army against the Badr group. Cordesman said the Shi'ite war would be larger than the struggle for control within the rival Sunni community.

"The struggle there is probably going to be more serious in the future than the struggle of the Sunnis," Cordesman said. "The Badr organization has had I think much better sort of coherence in training. The question is, does it have the same populist or popular base that the Sadr militia does."

Still, Iran has not yet formed a strategy for Iraq, Cordesman said. He said Iran plans to support a range of Iraqi options before any selection.

"Its ultimate goals, whether they are to have a major level of influence in Iraq, whether they are to create a friendly power, whether they are to create a strategic buffer, I think the answer at this point is possibly all of the above because I don't think Iran has that kind of clear single strategic option," Cordesman said. "And I think it is being very clever in the way that it is trying to exploit all of the Shi'ite factions at the same time and basically find out what it can get."

Unilateral Strike Called a Model For U.S. Operations in Pakistan
By Joby Warrick and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 19, 2008; A01

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government's official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan's national borders: It acts with assistance from well-paid sympathizers inside the country, but without getting the government's formal permission beforehand.

It is an approach that some U.S. officials say could be used more frequently this year, particularly if a power vacuum results from yesterday's election and associated political tumult. The administration also feels an increased sense of urgency about undermining al-Qaeda before President Bush leaves office, making it less hesitant, said one official familiar with the incident.

Independent actions by U.S. military forces on another country's sovereign territory are always controversial, and both U.S. and Pakistani officials have repeatedly sought to obscure operational details that would reveal that key decisions are sometimes made in the United States, not in Islamabad. Some Pentagon operations have been undertaken only after intense disputes with the State Department, which has worried that they might inflame Pakistani public resentment; the CIA itself has sometimes sought to put the brakes on because of anxieties about the consequences for its relationship with Pakistani intelligence officials.

U.S. military officials say, however, that the uneven performance of their Pakistani counterparts increasingly requires that Washington pursue the fight however it can, sometimes following an unorthodox path that leaves in the dark Pakistani military and intelligence officials who at best lack commitment and resolve and at worst lack sympathy for U.S. interests.

Top Bush administration policy officials -- who are increasingly worried about al-Qaeda's use of its sanctuary in remote, tribally ruled areas in northern Pakistan to dispatch trained terrorists to the West -- have quietly begun to accept the military's point of view, according to several sources familiar with the context of the Libi strike.

"In the past, it required getting approval from the highest levels," said one former intelligence official involved in planning for previous strikes. "You may have information that is valid for only 30 minutes. If you wait, the information is no longer valid."

But when the autonomous U.S. military operations in Pakistan succeed, support for them grows in Washington in probably the same proportion as Pakistani resentments increase. Even as U.S. officials ramp up the pressure on Musharraf to do more, Pakistan's embattled president has taken a harder line in public against cooperation in recent months, the sources said. "The posture that was evident two years ago is not evident," said a senior U.S. official who frequently visits the region.

A U.S. military official familiar with operations in the tribal areas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the operations, said: "We'll get these one-off flukes once every eight months or so, but that's still not a strategy -- it's not a plan. Every now and then something will come together. What that serves to do [is] it tamps down discussion about whether there is a better way to do it."

The Target Is Identified
During seven years of searching for Osama bin Laden and his followers, the U.S. government has deployed billions of dollars' worth of surveillance hardware to South Asia, from top-secret spy satellites to sophisticated eavesdropping gear for intercepting text messages and cellphone conversations.

Yet some of the initial clues that led to the Libi strike were decidedly low-tech, according to an account supplied by four officials briefed on the operation. The CIA declined to comment about the strike and neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.

Hours before the attack, multiple sources said, the CIA was alerted to a convoy of vehicles that bore all the signatures of al-Qaeda officers on the move. Local residents -- who two sources said were not connected to the Pakistani army or intelligence service -- began monitoring the cluster of vehicles as it passed through North Waziristan, a rugged, largely lawless province that borders Afghanistan.

Eventually the local sources determined that the convoy carried up to seven al-Qaeda operatives and one individual who appeared to be of high rank. Asked how the local support had been arranged, a U.S. official familiar with the episode said, "All it takes is bags of cash."

Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis for Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence group, said the informants could have been recruits from the Afghanistan side of the border, where the U.S. military operates freely.

"People in this region don't recognize the border, which is very porous," Bokhari said. "It is very likely that our people were in contact with intelligence sources who frequent both sides and could provide some kind of targeting information."

Precisely what U.S. officials knew about the "high-value target" in the al-Qaeda convoy is unclear. Libi, a 41-year-old al-Qaeda commander who had slowly climbed to the No. 5 spot on the CIA's most wanted list, was a hulking figure who stood 6 feet 4 inches tall. He spoke Libyan-accented Arabic and learned to be cautious after narrowly escaping a previous CIA strike. U.S. intelligence officials say he directed several deadly attacks, including a bombing at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan last year that killed 23 people.

Alerted to the suspicious convoy, the CIA used a variety of surveillance techniques to follow its progression through Mir Ali, North Waziristan's second-largest town, and to a walled compound in a village on the town's outskirts.

The stopping place itself was an indication that these were important men: The compound was the home of Abdus Sattar, 45, a local Taliban commander and an associate of Baitullah Mehsud, the man accused by both the CIA and Pakistan of plotting the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27.

With all signs pointing to a unique target, CIA officials ordered the launch of a pilotless MQ-1B Predator aircraft, one of three kept at a secret base that the Pakistani government has allowed to be stationed inside the country. Launches from that base do not require government permission, officials said.

During the early hours of Jan. 29, the slow-moving, 27-foot-long plane circled the village before vectoring in to lock its camera sights on Sattar's compound. Watching intently were CIA and Air Force operators who controlled the aircraft's movements from an operations center at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

On orders from CIA officials in McLean, the operators in Nevada released the Predator's two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles -- 100-pound, rockeS. official who frequently visits the region.

A U.S. military official familiar with operations in the tribal areas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the operations, said: "We'll get these one-off flukes once every eight months or so, but that's still not a strategy -- it's not a plan. Every now and then something will come together. What that serves to do [is] it tamps down discussion about whether there is a better way to do it."

The Target Is Identified
During seven years of searching for Osama bin Laden and his followers, the U.S. government has deployed billions of dollars' worth of surveillance hardware to South Asia, from top-secret spy satellites to sophisticated eavesdropping gear for intercepting text messages and cellphone conversations.

Yet some of the initial clues that led to the Libi strike were decidedly low-tech, according to an account supplied by four officials briefed on the operation. The CIA declined to comment about the strike and neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.

Hours before the attack, multiple sources said, the CIA was alerted to a convoy of vehicles that bore all the signatures of al-Qaeda officers on the move. Local residents -- who two sources said were not connected to the Pakistani army or intelligence service -- began monitoring the cluster of vehicles as it passed through North Waziristan, a rugged, largely lawless province that borders Afghanistan.

Eventually the local sources determined that the convoy carried up to seven al-Qaeda operatives and one individual who appeared to be of high rank. Asked how the local support had been arranged, a U.S. official familiar with the episode said, "All it takes is bags of cash."

Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis for Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence group, said the informants could have been recruits from the Afghanistan side of the border, where the U.S. military operates freely.

"People in this region don't recognize the border, which is very porous," Bokhari said. "It is very likely that our people were in contact with intelligence sources who frequent both sides and could provide some kind of targeting information."

Precisely what U.S. officials knew about the "high-value target" in the al-Qaeda convoy is unclear. Libi, a 41-year-old al-Qaeda commander who had slowly climbed to the No. 5 spot on the CIA's most wanted list, was a hulking figure who stood 6 feet 4 inches tall. He spoke Libyan-accented Arabic and learned to be cautious after narrowly escaping a previous CIA strike. U.S. intelligence officials say he directed several deadly attacks, including a bombing at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan last year that killed 23 people.

Alerted to the suspicious convoy, the CIA used a variety of surveillance techniques to follow its progression through Mir Ali, North Waziristan's second-largest town, and to a walled compound in a village on the town's outskirts.

The stopping place itself was an indication that these were important men: The compound was the home of Abdus Sattar, 45, a local Taliban commander and an associate of Baitullah Mehsud, the man accused by both the CIA and Pakistan of plotting the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27.

With all signs pointing to a unique target, CIA officials ordered the launch of a pilotless MQ-1B Predator aircraft, one of three kept at a secret base that the Pakistani government has allowed to be stationed inside the country. Launches from that base do not require government permission, officials said.

During the early hours of Jan. 29, the slow-moving, 27-foot-long plane circled the village before vectoring in to lock its camera sights on Sattar's compound. Watching intently were CIA and Air Force operators who controlled the aircraft's movements from an operations center at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

On orders from CIA officials in McLean, the operators in Nevada released the Predator's two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles -- 100-pound, rocket-propelled munitions tipped with a high-explosive warhead. The missiles tore into the compound's main building and an adjoining guesthouse where the al-Qaeda officers were believed to be staying.

Even when viewed from computer monitors thousands of miles away, the missiles' impact was stunning. The buildings were destroyed, and as many as 13 inhabitants were killed, U.S. officials said. The pictures captured after the attack were "not pretty," said one knowledgeable source.

Libi's death was confirmed by al-Qaeda, which announced his "martyrdom" on Feb. 1 in messages posted on the Web sites of sympathetic groups. One message hailed Libi as "the father of many lions who now own the land and mountains of jihadi Afghanistan" and said al-Qaeda's struggle "would not be defeated by the death of one person, no matter how important he may be."

A Temporary Impact
Publicly, reaction to the strike among U.S. and Pakistani leaders has been muted, with neither side appearing eager to call attention to an awkward, albeit successful, unilateral U.S. military operation. Some Pakistani government spokesmen have even questioned whether the terrorist leader was killed.

"It's not going to overwhelm their network or break anything up definitively," acknowledged a military official briefed on details of the Libi strike. He added: "We're now in a sit-and-wait mode until someone else pops up."

Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to the Clinton and Bush administrations, said he has been told by those involved that the counterterror effort requires constant pressure on the Pakistani government.

"The United States has gotten into a pattern where it sends a high-level delegation over to beat Musharraf up, and then you find that within a week or two a high-value target has been identified. Then he ignores us for a while until we send over another high-level delegation," Clarke said.

Some officials also emphasized that such airstrikes have a marginal and temporary impact. And they do not yield the kind of intelligence dividends often associated with the live capture of terrorists -- documents, computers, equipment and diaries that could lead to further unraveling the network.

The officials stressed that despite the occasional tactical success against it, such as the Libi strike, the threat posed by al-Qaeda's presence in Pakistan has been growing. As a senior U.S. official briefed on the strike said: "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. But overall, we're in worse shape than we were 18 months ago."

Staying to Help in Iraq
We have finally reached a point where humanitarian assistance, from us and others, can have an impact.
By Angelina Jolie
Thursday, February 28, 2008; 1:15 PM

The request is familiar to American ears: "Bring them home."

But in Iraq, where I've just met with American and Iraqi leaders, the phrase carries a different meaning. It does not refer to the departure of U.S. troops, but to the return of the millions of innocent Iraqis who have been driven out of their homes and, in many cases, out of the country.

In the six months since my previous visit to Iraq with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, this humanitarian crisis has not improved. However, during the last week, the United States, UNHCR and the Iraqi government have begun to work together in new and important ways.

We still don't know exactly how many Iraqis have fled their homes, where they've all gone, or how they're managing to survive. Here is what we do know: More than 2 million people are refugees inside their own country -- without homes, jobs and, to a terrible degree, without medicine, food or clean water. Ethnic cleansing and other acts of unspeakable violence have driven them into a vast and very dangerous no-man's land. Many of the survivors huddle in mosques, in abandoned buildings with no electricity, in tents or in one-room huts made of straw and mud. Fifty-eight percent of these internally displaced people are younger than 12 years old.

An additional 2.5 million Iraqis have sought refuge outside Iraq, mainly in Syria and Jordan. But those host countries have reached their limits. Overwhelmed by the refugees they already have, these countries have essentially closed their borders until the international community provides support.

I'm not a security expert, but it doesn't take one to see that Syria and Jordan are carrying an unsustainable burden. They have been excellent hosts, but we can't expect them to care for millions of poor Iraqis indefinitely and without assistance from the U.S. or others. One-sixth of Jordan's population today is Iraqi refugees. The large burden is already causing tension internally.

The Iraqi families I've met on my trips to the region are proud and resilient. They don't want anything from us other than the chance to return to their homes -- or, where those homes have been bombed to the ground or occupied by squatters, to build new ones and get back to their lives. One thing is certain: It will be quite a while before Iraq is ready to absorb more than 4 million refugees and displaced people. But it is not too early to start working on solutions. And last week, there were signs of progress.

In Baghdad, I spoke with Army Gen. David Petraeus about UNHCR's need for security information and protection for its staff as they re-enter Iraq, and I am pleased that he has offered that support. General Petraeus also told me he would support new efforts to address the humanitarian crisis "to the maximum extent possible" -- which leaves me hopeful that more progress can be made.

UNHCR is certainly committed to that. Last week while in Iraq, High Commissioner António Guterres pledged to increase UNHCR's presence there and to work closely with the Iraqi government, both in assessing the conditions required for return and in providing humanitarian relief.

During my trip I also met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has announced the creation of a new committee to oversee issues related to internally displaced people, and a pledge of $40 million to support the effort.

My visit left me even more deeply convinced that we not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis.

Today's humanitarian crisis in Iraq -- and the potential consequences for our national security -- are great. Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced people, in the heart of Middle East, won't explode in violent desperation, sending the whole region into further disorder?

What we cannot afford, in my view, is to squander the progress that has been made. In fact, we should step up our financial and material assistance. UNHCR has appealed for $261 million this year to provide for refugees and internally displaced persons. That is not a small amount of money -- but it is less than the U.S. spends each day to fight the war in Iraq. I would like to call on each of the presidential candidates and congressional leaders to announce a comprehensive refugee plan with a specific timeline and budget as part of their Iraq strategy.

As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.

It seems to me that now is the moment to address the humanitarian side of this situation. Without the right support, we could miss an opportunity to do some of the good we always stated we intended to do.

Angelina Jolie, an actor, is a UNHCR goodwill ambassador.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2008

A Global, Multi-Civilizational, Multi-Polar Muddle

In “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation, has authored a provocative analysis of international security challenges awaiting the next administration and the US as the new century unfolds. Instead of an ascendant PRC, global Islamic extremism, or a Westphalian state system in decline, Khanna discusses the coming parity of the US, the European Union, and the PRC and the likely competition for confederates around the world. In Khanna’s words, the three poles are the “ultimate ‘Frenemies,’” where each nation dominates its hemisphere, but cannot deter the other two from meddling. The competition among the three is fiercest in the “second world,” a cross-section of countries offering both enormous opportunity and risk whether it is investments, security, or critical support on multilateral matters. The second world is replete with “swing states,” such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, or South Africa, whose fickle affections could alternatively provide or withhold critical support at crucial junctures. Instead of a single United Kingdom balancing against Continental rivals, declaring “no permanent friends or allies… only permanent interests,” the world will endure three global powers endlessly maneuvering against each other with swing states constantly courting and rejecting each against the others. A robust challenge for any strategist, the tri-polar competition would humble the most gifted modern Bismarck and induce permanent paranoia right out of George Orwell’s 1984, a similarity Khanna readily recognizes. Khanna acknowledges the metrics usually cited by American triumphalists – the world’s largest economy and most powerful military – but he breathlessly declares we are witnessing history’s first “global, multi-civilizational, multipolar battle.”

Or maybe we're not.

Such a sweeping assertion merits examination and upon close examination Khanna’s assertion lacks consistency and depth. In particular, Khanna emphasizes the fluidity with which swing states can navigate in today’s global political economy, variously establishing linkages with either the US, Europe, or China. Khanna pointedly declares “globalization is the weapon of choice.” However, in discussing his methodology (two years of travel through 40 countries, an approach to be lauded), Khanna states he has “learned to see countries not as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected, parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while other, often larger, parts might remain in the third.”*

Despite this discovery, Khanna persists in defining the global system as purely state-centric. Khanna continuously depicts the competition in terms befitting 19th Europe rather than multi-dimensional challenge grandly described at the outset. Indeed, in his various descriptions of premiere swing states, Khanna repeatedly returns to the sub-state entities and body publics pushing and pulling the country in various directions, but does not count the content of the regime as an indicator of its likely course.

Khanna identifies how the swing states are navigating the current environment to their advantage, but fails to note the successes are tactical and not strategic, principally because the current leadership in each state is captive to multiple competitive interests within their own country. Russia’s Putin is hailed as Russia’s savior but he cannot undertake the necessary steps to truly empower the economy without upending the delicate balance of factions within the Kremlin oligarchy. Iran’s Ahmadinejad is the stark face of Iranian nuclear nationalism, but dissatisfied hard-line theocrats and pragmatic business types both freely act at odds with his administration. Considerable insights can be made via systemic and state-centric conceptions of international affairs, but in an increasingly globalized world, sub-state and non-state entities must be factored. Khanna admits he “wondered whether globalization would accelerate these nations’ becoming ever more fragmented, or if governments would step up to establish central control.” Khanna comments “it was necessary to assess each country from the inside out,” but never shares what he concluded.

Furthermore, Khanna’s description of a second world in play closely mirrors the contours laid out by Dr. Thomas Barnett, formerly of DOD’s Office of Force Transformation. Substitute “second world” with “new core” and the discussion of new diplomatic-military realities with the emphasis on changing rule-sets and a reader will think he’s reading a knockoff of Barnett’s book, The Pentagon’s New Map. However, Barnett identifies how the US can modify national security organizations and foreign policies to capitalize on opportunities availing themselves in the near- to mid-term. Instead of predicting US difficulties in a heated competition in the second world, Barnett constructively discusses how the US can lead the Old Core to collaborate with the New Core in “closing the gap,” the geographic areas presently disconnected from the global economy and, by no small coincidence, the locus of instability in the world. In the subsequent book, Blueprint for Action, Barnett provides a set of substantial agency reforms and policy prescriptions the US can undertake to address these challenges, far more extensively than Khanna’s call for “channeling JFK” or “Pentagonizing the State Department.” (Dr. Barnett has declined to comment on Khanna’s article on his blog, as he will be reviewing Khanna’s book in an upcoming issue of National Review.)

Europe as a Superpower… Seriously?

For this author, the key defect in Khanna’s analysis is his depiction of a robust European superstate emerging as a pole in this global competition. Khanna’s assessment runs contrary to the well catalogued decline of Europe politically and economically vis-à-vis the United States, China, India, and other rising economies. Khanna argues the European Union has supplanted the US as liberal state par excellence with its “supranational integration model” and the manner in which this inspires second world states, but noted earlier in the essay

While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countries’ state-backed firms either out-hustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second world’s first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.

Place the clause about European priorities at the end of the paragraph and one can readily see the real challenge is posed by the take no prisoners style of East Asian authoritarian capitalism championed by China, not a Europe focused on making sure everyone has enough health care or vacation time. Rising economies do not emulate the leaden bureaucratic and sclerotic economic model of the Eurostate but the dynamic capitalism evident in China, Singapore, and the rest of East Asia.

Recent US foreign policy ventures may have deepened security challenges for the time being and severely aggravated internal fiscal imbalances, but the liberal capitalist model retains its attractiveness. For all the plaudits heaped on PRC’s party leaders and Russia’s oligarchs for overseeing historic economic growth, the gains do not approach the achievements of like countries choosing the liberal route. As Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss point out in their recent Foreign Affairs article, The Myth of the Authoritarian Model; How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back, authoritarian capitalist states are growing, but at a slower and less comprehensive rate than liberal capitalist states. McFaul and Stoner-Weiss demonstrate the correlation between autocracy and economic growth has been spurious, noting sustained high growth under autocracy is the exception, not the rule, around the world -- “For every China, there is an autocratic developmental disaster such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo; for every authoritarian success such as Singapore, there is a resounding failure such as Myanmar; for every South Korea, a North Korea.”

In fact, Europe symbolizes the risk for the US given its emphasis on the first part of the liberal capitalism formulation at the unfortunate expense of the latter component. Confidence in unelected bureaucrats, reliance on sweeping entitlement programs, and espousal of multiculturalism have proven fatal to Europe, resulting in political paralysis, economic malaise, and violent cultural clashes across the continent. America has maintained a robust democracy and achieved a measure of harmony on race and ethnicity, but to remain relevant against authoritarian capitalism, Europe’s choices provide a broken compass, a course not to be followed. America’s current messes may smack of imperial overstretch, but Europe’s performance (and more drastically its demographics) underscore how altruistic overstretch is a state of affairs to be avoided at all cost.

America prospered (unevenly) during the Cold War despite gargantuan defense budgets, but when the threat disappeared, expenditures dropped precipitously. However, the expected “peace dividend” did not materialize immediately. The unprecedented growth experienced in the latter Nineties depended on the subsequent actions balancing the budget, lowering taxes, and reining in the welfare state. If not for 9/11, much needed entitlement reform to some degree or another might have been achieved. With the American dollar in precipitous decline and stagflation on the horizon, dismantling the entitlement state is critical to preserving the national economy and its viability as a model for other nations. (Even some nations in Europe have seen the light.)

US – The Potential of a Competition State

In contrast to Khanna’s global, multi-civilizational, multi-polar muddle is an international political economy increasingly characterized by a plural and composite structure, or “plurilateralism” as defined by Philip G. Cerny, professor of global political economy at Rutgers University. Cerny notes the modern international system centered on the Westphalian nation-state as vehicle for collective civic action, and most recently, as a collaborative (or sometimes competitive) agent in the economy. With the rise of the modern industrial bureaucracies, once hard to attain public goods could be readily be provided by the state. Conversely, the advent of globalization diminishes the sovereign scope of a state and empowers transnational and non-national actors to provide such goods more efficiently. From Cerny’s perspective, states capable of conforming to such conditions will endure and flourish; such “competition states” retreats from the economy and focuses on providing the public goods for resident national assets to enhance their global competitiveness – namely human capital, modern infrastructure, and research and development capacity. Conversely, states unable to adapt will inevitably decline; such “residual states” is marked by sustained intervention in the domestic economy and capturing the rents of the country’s capital for the politically connected segment of the population.

Immediately, the disadvantages of the European and the East Asian approaches become apparent. European countries have achieved political economies of scale by undertaking integration on a continental scale, but on the global stage, the approach – commonality of high taxes, expansive welfare, and protectionism -- has compromised their overall competitiveness. In East Asia, nations have achieved enormous economic growth after undertaking substantial investment in education, standardization, and infrastructure, but the opacity endemic in semi-democratic and neo-authoritarian states has engendered corruption and an inefficient allocation of resources. The Asian financial crisis in 1997 was a harbinger of the fate awaiting the PRC should be unable to complete a rationalization of state-owned enterprises. Even worse, the PRC lacks the democratic institutions necessary to channel popular discontent should growth falter.

The United States has vigorous democratic institutions and a hardy individualist tradition, but its sixty-three year experimentation with entitlement programs is perilously close to jeopardizing the country’s vitality into a near future marked with increasing turbulence. American competitiveness in the geopolitical marketplace will not be achieved by a posture where “less can be more,” in Khanna’s words, but by revitalizing the exceptionalism of the American liberal capitalist model.

* The author acknowledges Khanna produced the essay as an adaptation of his upcoming book, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, to be published by Random House in March. Accordingly, the book may flesh out Khanna’s concepts to a greater extent.

POSTED BY ROBERT JORDAN PRESCOTT AT 5:49 PM