Princeton Project -- From Big Ideas to Policy Proposals
We are having a lively debate here at TPMCafe over the Princeton Project on National Security report – and we are most thankful to all the participants for their comments. We agree with the view of many of you that, ultimately, the worth of big ideas is the extent to which they can drive more specific ideas and proposals. The second half of the Princeton Project report does just that.
So we would like to see if we can move the debate to these more specific proposals, policy recommendations that respond to the array of 21st century threats, challenges, and opportunities. These proposals focus on the Middle East, terrorist networks, proliferation of nuclear weapons, the rise of China and order in East Asia, global pandemics, energy, and the building of a protective infrastructure.
The Middle East: Preventing the cradle of civilizations from becoming the cradle of global conflict must be a top priority. Any long-term solution in the Middle East must include a comprehensive two-state solution in Israel and Palestine; the United States should take the lead in doing everything possible to advance this goal or get caught trying. This push for peace should be accompanied by a steady process of institution building to establish a framework of liberty under law among Middle Eastern nations. In an effort to combat radicalization in Middle Eastern states, the United States should make every effort to work with Islamic governments and Islamic/Islamist movements, including fundamentalists, as long as they disavow terrorism and other forms of civic violence.
America must take considerable risks to ensure that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapons capacity. However, we must also be prepared to offer Iran assurances that assuage its legitimate fears, such as a negative security assurance, the reliable provision to it of peaceful fissile materials, and international influence commensurate with its position. On the other hand, the United States should make it clear that life as a nuclear weapons power, if it came to pass, would be a thoroughly miserable experience for Iran.
The United States should make it clear to Iraqis that we remain willing and ready to do everything we can to rebuild Iraq and to train and support a government that is up to PAR, but that this will not be sustainable in the context of a full-scale civil war. In cooperation with the Iraqi government America should establish a series of benchmarks that would allow U.S. forces to redeploy inside Iraq—to places where they can be useful in building order and avoid becoming entangled in internecine civil conflict—and outside Iraq. The United States must also work with the European Union and Russia to prevent a spillover of the Iraqi conflict into the rest of the region; this effort should include the provision of incentives to regional powers to behave responsibly and the imposition of costs on those countries that exacerbate the crisis.
Global Terror Networks: Framing the struggle against terrorism as a war similar to World War II or the Cold War lends legitimacy and respect to an enemy that deserves neither; the result is to strengthen, not degrade, our adversary. Labeling terrorists as Islamic warriors has a similar effect. Terror networks represent a global insurgency with a criminal core; our response must take the form of a global counterinsurgency that utilizes a range of tools, particularly law enforcement, intelligence, and surgical military tools, such as special forces. Our priorities must be to prevent the formation of a nexus between terror networks and nuclear weapons, to destroy the hard core of terrorists, and to peel away terrorist supporters and sympathizers. The ability of terror networks to dictate the agenda of the world’s leading powers is a crucial source of their strength; the United States must not dance to this tune. In the longer run, building a world of liberty under law will make it harder for specific grievances and fanatical ideologies to take root and grow into global violence.
The Proliferation and Transfer of Nuclear Weapons: The world is on the cusp of a new era of nuclear danger. Life in a nuclear crowd promises to be unstable and fraught with peril, from the risk of the collapse of a nuclear state to the potential failure of deterrence in a sea of uncertainty. These problems are not separate but part of a general breakdown of the global non-proliferation regime. Thus, we must reform and revive the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by revising Article IV to allow non-nuclear weapons states nuclear energy but not nuclear capacity and by taking concrete steps to live up to our commitment under Article VI to reduce our dependence on nuclear weapons. We should also use aggressive counter-proliferation measures, including locking down all insecure nuclear weapons and materials, building on the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to interdict the trade in nuclear materials, and developing plans to intervene effectively if a nuclear weapons state like Pakistan or North Korea collapses.
The Rise of China and Order in East Asia: The rise of China is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. America’s goal should not be to block or contain China, but rather to help it achieve its legitimate ambitions within the current international order and to become a responsible stakeholder in Asian and international politics. In Asia more broadly, America should aim to build a trans-Pacific, rather than pan-Asian, regional order—that is, one in which the United States plays a full part. The U.S.-Japan alliance should remain the bedrock of American strategy in East Asia, but the United States should also seek the creation of an East Asian security institution that brings together the major powers—China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and America—for ongoing discussions about regional issues. At the same time, we should continue to strengthen ties with Asia's other emerging power, India, and should formulate policies throughout the region based on the principle that sustained economic growth in Asian countries other than China is the key to managing China's rise.
A Global Pandemic: Highly infectious diseases represent a national security threat of the first order—even though they are not guided by a human hand. Health experts currently warn of the apocalyptic danger of an avian influenza pandemic, which has the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people. To combat the threat of a global pandemic, we must invest more in our public health system, provide adequate resources and training to our first responders, build the capacity of foreign governments that are least equipped to deal with disease outbreaks, and create an incentive structure in at-risk countries to ensure that they take necessary public health measures in a timely fashion.
Energy: Massive U.S. consumption of oil threatens American security by transferring an enormous amount of wealth from Americans to autocratic regimes and by contributing to climate change and degradation of the environment. The only solution to these problems is to decrease our dependence on oil and provide incentives for investments in energy alternatives. Toward this end the United States should adopt a national gasoline tax that would start at fifty cents per gallon and increase by twenty cents per year for each of the next ten years. This measure should be accompanied by stricter automobile fuel efficiency standards. The United States should also lead international efforts to deal with climate change, seeking a third way between the Kyoto Protocol's requirements for emission reductions and opposition to any binding constraints.
Building a Protective Infrastructure: The United States must build a stronger protective infrastructure—throughout our society, our government, and the wider world—that helps prevent threats and limits the damage once they materialize. In our society, we must strengthen our public health system, repair a broken communications system, and reform public education so that students attain the skill sets required to achieve our national security objectives. In our government, we need to create “joined-up government;” de-politicize threat assessment; integrate relevant but neglected portfolios, such as economics and health, into the national security policy-making process; and reach out to the private sector. In the wider world, we must work through networks of security officials to contain immediate threats before they reach our shores and should consider defining our border protections beyond our actual physical borders.
If a visitor from another planet came to Earth, and developed only some superficial familiarity with the contemporary conflicts among the Earthlings, and with Earth conflicts of the recent past, one of the first questions they would surely ask us is "Why is there such a dispropotionate amount of attention paid to that hot, sandy and largely inhospitable territory to the east of the Mediterranean, northeast of Africa and south of the Black Sea? Why have their been so many wars there? Why are so many different governments around the world eager to develop relationships, supply the locals with weaponry, and keep their rivals out.
You can understand their puzzlement. Still, even a typical high school student could probably answer their question: "That's easy! Everbody's got their nose stuck in the Middle East because it sits on top of world's major remaining petroleum reserves. Petroleum is absolutely vital to all the developed world's economies. If any of these economies lost their access to a steady stream of petroleum, their economies would quickly slide into depression and ruin. Everybody's security depends on what happens there, and people will fight if they see their vital resource interests threatened"
Some even more informed observers might add that conflict and strategic competition in the Middle East is only part of a new "Great Game" that includes the Caspian region and much of central Asia. For example, the United States alone has recently been building a string of "lily-pad" bases across this vital region, which it views as an "arc of instability". The Chinese and Russians have been working to develop a countervaling organization in Asia, that will help them compete more effectively for clients there.
And yet Mr. Ikenberry gives us an extended section from the Princeton Project report entitled "The Middle East" - in fact, the entirety of the portion of the Executive Summary dealing with the region - which doesn't see fit to mention this stupendously important factor at all.
I almost couldn't believe my eyes, and thought maybe the Executive Summary left out a crucial passage on resource strategy in relation to Middle East conflict from the main body of the report. So I re-read the relevant Middle East section of the report (pages 33 through 37) and found only this passing one-word reference:
The mixture of oil, religion, ethnicity, historic grievances, non-state actors, nuclear weapons, and great power interests is so volatile that the Middle East rivals the Balkans at the turn of the last century in explosiveness.
And in the subsection on security partnerships in the Middle East, the authors blithely and totally ignore almost all of our existing security partnerships in the region, not coincidentally clustered up and down the Arabian Gulf through which much of the regions oil is transported. Should we continue these partnerships? Terminate or alter some of them? The authors appear not to have the slightest awareness of or interest in this question.
That the authors of this report could produce a major section devoted to the relationship of the Middle East to US security, and take no notice of this huge and dazzlingly obvious geostrategic FACT about the region, is .. well ... weird.
The authors do address the general energy issue, with some reference to the Middle East, in a later section entitled "Energy". But the two security dimensions of the petroleum consumption and trade issue that stand out for them are the fact that oil purchases transfer wealth to an "axis of vice" in the Middle East, and oil consumption leads to environmental degradation. There is some quick, passing recognition that our dependence on oil leads to vulnerability to price shocks and Middle East instability. But the recommendations that conclude the section all deal with emissions restrictions and climate change.
Now surely the issues of climate change and the petrodollar funding of Middle East monarchies and autocracies are important issues related to energy. But what about the fact that our country is engaged up to its eyeballs in an intensifying global struggle for strategic control of energy resources; that the world's major developed and developing powers are already busy arranging their pieces and building partnerships on the global chessboard in the pursuit of these resources; that we have military forces stationed around the world to protect our resource interests and needs; that our military commitments are themselves dependent on the petroleum that fuels our armed forces; that various kinds of disruption in petroleum supply could deal a catastrophic blow to our economic security; and that the most likely instigators of hot global conflict in the coming decades are likely to be energy and resource related.
The authors mention, in brief, the growing Chinese and Indian demand for oil and the fact that these countries will be "competing" for oil in a way that will play out on a global scale, but rather than pursue the worrisome consequences for US security of this competition - which they apparently find too unseemly and embarrassing to discuss - they immediately change the subject back to the impact of this increased consumption on climate change. They return to the oil competition issue once again in the section that deals with the rise of China, only to pass over it quickly without concentrated discussion. And yet right now, the US is engaged in an increasingly energetic competition with China for strategic influence in Africa, east and central Asia and the Middle East - places where their happens to be a lot of oil to be harvested. None of their bulleted proposals for dealing with China broach the question of whether we should engage with China and other oil producers and consumers right now to address this gathering storm, and prevent what is now a cold commercial competition from evolving into a hot military one.
So overall, the report exhibits a puzzling aloofness from and disinterest in what many would regard as the defining geostrategic determinant of our era. The authors do recommend limiting US dependence on oil; but fail to address the fact that the prospects for significant reductions in the near term are limited. They also fail to connect our dependence on oil with the potential for war over the stuff - big, major wars with big, major states and thus seem to miss the most crucial matter.
I believe this is only one area in which the authors of the report show a certain disdain for vigorous engagement with economic issues. This seems to be one of the things that distinguishes the interests of many contemporary centrist liberals from the traditional concerns of the left. The left was known historically for its emphasis on the material conditions of human life, and showed a preference for an economic analysis of human affairs. They believed in following the money. The sort of liberalism represented by the Princeton Project is preoccupied with loftier matters.
Truly an ivory tower endeavor, the Princeton Project soars in a chaste and ethereal Olympian reverie over the cloud-covered and grubby world below of commerce, greed, competition, material need and the jealous protection of wealth and property. Yet it is down here in anxious rat race where the struggles that lead to violence and war are born.
October 18, 2006 7:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
John
To pick up on DanK's point wouldn't the two best policies toward the Middle East be an all out effort to reduce the use of fossil fuels and the effort to draw the various Muslim nations into the various global economic institutions?
Daniel A. Greenbaum
October 19, 2006 6:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think that a fundamental point should be made on the concert of liberal democracies concept. In order to become a vital functional asset of the international society assuming and enforcing the responsibility to protect as a core duty of a rule based international order/ or a constitutional international order, the treaty establishing this concert should adopt also a formal clause of structured cooperation similar to the one incorporated in the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, Art.I-40:”those Member States whose military capabilities fulfill higher criteria and which have made more binding commitments to one another in this area with a view to the most demanding missions shall establish structured cooperation within the Union framework.”
This will mean not only creating standby multinational capacities capable of assuming the whole operational complexities of the Petersberg tasks or even the most demanding scenario that of expeditionary war as the NRF (NATO Response Force) is tailored for but also developing an infrastructure for operational planning, joint training and clear standards of interoperability. The Concert of Liberal Democracies should become an enforcement community, a crisis response community focused on developing high readiness capabilities around the European concept of multinational battle groups-some small speedy projectable units prepared for rapid insertion in some very demanding security circumstances. The Concert of Liberal Democracies should be focused on developing a pool of standby and high-readiness capabilities and assets in order to provide to the international society a critical mass of crisis response forces.
Octavian Manea
October 22, 2006 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
John:
I like your willingness to push the debate toward more concrete policy proposals, and I think the discipline it provides is helpful.
But the real value of a project like the PPNS is less the particular details of energy policy or defense policy, and more the potential capacity to link broad policy precepts - law and liberty, partnerships, multiple foci but careful integration, - with the particular substantive topics.
So if we think of the PPNS precepts as level one, what is the link between level one and level two (identifying and clarifying the mix of big policy areas), and not jumping to level 4 or 5 and determining which fuels should be introduced into the American transportation market in which order, or the exact details of a regional policy toward Africa...
October 24, 2006 7:29 AM | Reply | Permalink