American Jackass: John Bolton and the OPWC

Bernard at Moon of Alabama has a most timely and interesting post on the fate of Jose Bustani, the Brazilian diplomat who ran the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , recently awarded the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.

Bernard relates how Bustani was subjected to the unwelcome attentions of John Bolton, the abusive ass in charge of bending international institutions to the will of the neocons in the runup to the Iraq war, when Iraq and Libya sought to remove a US casus belli pretext by acceding to the chemical weapons regime.

The Bush administration was determined to block any efforts by Iraq to reduce its peril by engaging with the international community on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and forced Bustani from his post in 2002.  The injustice of this action was confirmed by an ILO judgment that awarded Bustani wages for the uncompleted years of his term.

I did not know that.  I was aware of Bolton’s unsuccessful efforts to purge ElBaradei from the IAEA, but not the issue of Bustani and the OPCW.  Thanks again to Bernard for shining a light on this dismal episode in American unilateralism.

By coincidence, today the Guardian gave Bolton space on its Comment is Free page to tout his alternative to multilateral engagement through international institutions for dealing with Iran: a military attack.  I would like to think we’ve learned enough to ignore John Bolton, but apparently that’s not the case.

AP Thinks China is “An Unreliable American Ally”

Putting Korean Lipstick on the “Pivot” Pig

[revised and expanded April 9, 2013]

This piece appeared in somewhat different and more decorous, somewhat desnarked form at Asia Times Online on April 10, 2013 as "China: Pivot Partner or Pinata?".  

For readers outside the Americas who are unfamiliar with what a pinata is, the ATOl editors included a helpful description.  To explain further, a pinata is a diversion frequently rolled out at birthday parties for children of Latin American ancestry.  It's a hollow papier-mache figure of a burro, a seven-pointed star-ball, or some cartoon character (often reproduced with a deplorable disregard for licensing obligations) that is filled with candy.  The pinata is suspended by a rope from a convenient tree limb and children, starting with the birthday kid, take a whack at it with a bat, broom handle, stick, or whatever in an attempt to break it open as the other children scream encouragement and instructions--or just scream.  The kids take turns whacking the pinata until it bursts, releasing a shower of candy and triggering a mad rush of kids scooping up whatever they can.  

In the realm of metaphor to call someone or something a "pinata" is to indicate that it is a relatively helpless or passive target of enthusiastic abuse whose destruction will (hopefully) unleash a flood of benefits.  In the context of this article, it means that China, in the US strategic pivot to Asia, serves the role of a convenient object of US hostility, not a partner.

Here, Grandma Sandoval demonstrates proper technique for dealing with an unreliable panda pinata.  Git 'im, Grandma!

 

For your daily dose of  I didn't know that Wikipedia tells us that the pinata possibly originated in China, as a new year's ritual in which an effigy of a cow containing seeds was broken open in order to ensure agricultural success.  I suspect it developed as a practical alternative to the sacrifice of a real, expensive cow, just as the first Qin emperor broke with Zhou tradition and decided to protect his tomb with terracotta warriors instead of real, dead soldiers.

There is speculation that Marco Polo brought the pinata concept to Europe, where it became a Lent tradition in the 14th century.  When the conquistadors came to Mexico, they discovered that the Aztecs performed a similar ritual to give offerings to one of their gods, Huitzilopochtli, in December.  The Spanish co-opted the local tradition and added that special Roman Catholic secret sauce, creating a complex mid-December allegory of the battle against temptation (which included rotating the blindfolded pinata-whacker 33 times, once for each year of Christ's life).  However, the pinata survived this grim catechistic interlude to flourish as a celebratory activity and useful metaphor.

Somewhere in Beijing, Chinese foreign policy strategists are laughing…and also cringing at AP National Security Correspondent Lara Jakes’ current piece on North Korea.

Cringing because Jakes or her editors dropped a few clangers like this characterization of the pivot:

Much of the policy has centered on China — both in strengthening diplomatic ties and economic trade. But China is an unreliable American ally and has been suspicious about the U.S. entreaty, which it sees as economic competition on its own turf.

I’m sure China is disappointed to learn that it has been downgraded from global power to “unreliable American ally”.  

And does anybody seriously believe that US Asian strategy—which includes the China-excluding Trans Pacific Partnership trade pact initiative, US injection into Chinese territorial disputes with its neighbors, and a full-court press on alleged Chinese cyberespionage transgressions—constitutes “strengthening diplomatic ties and economic trade”?

I think this factually and logically counterintuitive effort to package the US and PRC as "pivot partners" is something of a first in US media.

Does this risible effort at rebranding hint at anxiety in pivot-land as the North Korean crisis lumbers on and the US pivot strategy is unable to offer any hope of meaningful leadership, consensus, or resolution?

I detect the fine Italian hand of ex-East Asia honcho at the State Department, pivot architect, and, I suspect,  would-be exploiter of the managerial vacuum at John Kerry’s State Department (no Asst Sec’y for East Asia yet) Kurt Campbell in Jakes’ coverage.

Campbell's pivot has turned into little more than an exercise in pissing off China by promoting a US-backed security and norm narrative that encourages East Asian countries to challenge the PRC’s regional pretensions...and encourages China to push back. 

Pissing off China is perhaps a noble cause but a rather alarming geopolitical strategy, so Campbell is on call to reassure us that his beloved pivot is not a strategic cock-up.

When North Korean bellicosity elicits pivot-worthy and China-irritating reactions from the United States—such as big joint military exercises with Japan and South Korea meant further integrate the security coordination between the three nations-- Campbell goes the extra mile to shoehorn China into the “everybody loves the pivot”--or at least "North Korean brinksmanship is a bigger issue for China than the US pivot" narrative.

"They, I think, recognize that the actions that North Korea has taken in recent months and years are in fact antithetical to their own national security interests," former Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a panel Thursday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

"There is a subtle shift in Chinese foreign policy" toward North Korea, said Campbell, who retired in February as the administration's top diplomat in East Asia and the Pacific region. "I don't think that provocative path can be lost on Pyongyang. ... I think that they have succeeded in undermining trust and confidence in Beijing."

Actually, to paraphrase David St. Hubbins, there is a thin line between “subtle shift” and “bullshit”...

I don’t think “trust and confidence” has ever characterized the relationship between the CCP and the prickly, independent-minded DPRK leadership, which has been equally obsessed with developing its own nuclear deterrent and looking for alternatives to Chinese domination since it lost its cherished status as a Soviet ally in 1989.  And the PRC’s North Korea policy has always been about exploiting and, when desirable, punishing a vulnerable, troublesome, and resentful neighbor.

So I think what we’re looking at here is not a “subtle shift”; it is wishful thinking and ref-working by Kurt Campbell.

Campbell’s theme was further developed by Josh Rogin in his coverage of Campbell's remarks over at Foreign Policy magazine's The Cable blog.

As Rogin reported:

China has long considered North Korea a useful check against a united, pro-American Korean Peninsula. But Chinese frustration with Beijing could eventually lead to a more dramatic shift in Chinese foreign policy that would change the state of play in Northeast Asia, according to Campbell.
 
"It's very clear [to China]: If this is a buffer state, what is it good for?" he said.


For his US audience, Campbell seems to be promoting the idea that the North Korean nuclear tensions are, in a way, a good thing because that allows the US to buttress its military pivot into East Asia, thereby reassuring our allies and discombobulating the Chinese (if not the greedy and ambitious PRC military establishment), thereby making the case that North Korea is China's strategic liability (while, I think, willfully ignoring the significant value of the DPRK to China as an exclusive economic zone beyond its buffer status), thereby increasing the pressure on China to relieve its DPRK-exacerbated regional security stress by strongarming North Korea to America's satisfaction.

For the Chinese audience, Campbell may be dangling the possibility that, if China plays ball on North Korea, the PRC will attain the privileged position of pivot partner instead of pivot pinata.

But I don't think the PRC leadership will bite.

The best outcome that China can expect from knuckling under to the US and compelling North Korea to denuclearize is the undying hatred of the North Korean leadership if the DPRK survives...and a nasty security crisis if the regime implodes.


In the big picture, it would be geopolitical suicide for the PRC to make concessions in response to a US military buildup in Asia, because any concessions by the Chinese will not usher China into a G2 nirvana; it will simply reward and further encourage the US military buildup in Asia and adventurism by China's resentful neighbors.

In my opinion, the pivot to Asia will be met by asymmetric Chinese counterprogramming, not discreet surrender to the superior diplomatic and military might of the United States and abandonment of North Korea.


I will be pretty surprised if the Chinese took a genuine step toward modifying the behavior of North Korea, like issuing an ultimatum to Pyongyang to cease nuclear and missile tests or else face an across-the-board Chinese embargo.

I will, on the other hand, not be surprised if the whole crisis fizzles out, leaving North Korea with an enhanced portfolio of nuclear material, in a stable if not particularly affectionate relationship with China, and the PRC with an increased suspicion of US intentions in Asia.

And if the pivot can't exact desirable PRC behavior on North Korea--the biggest headache/most conspicuous piece of low-hanging fruit in the whole East Asian rebalance equation--then what good is the pivot?

But this interpretation is anathema to Campbell, whose pivot strategy relies on the assumption that a heightened military presence and more inflexible diplomatic stance vis a vis China will yield concrete dividends that justify the tensions and unpleasantness.

So it is a matter of some importance for Campbell to demonstrate to the US foreign policy establishment, journalists, and the interested public that the pivot, in the case of the North Korean crisis, is yielding genuine benefits by compelling China to pressure North Korea into discarding its irritating and destabilizing nuclear program in response to US saber-rattling.

Case unproven, in my opinion.

Bernard over at Moon of Alabama has a good, derisive take on the wishful thinking that passes for tea-leaf reading by Western journalists (probably abetted by Obama administration officials anxious to assert that the US strategy on North Korea is not driving US-Chinese relations into a ditch) on Xi Jinping's Boao speech and the PRC's putative urge to dump North Korea.

The best geopolitical play by the United States has nothing to do with the atmospherics of the pivot and, indeed, is well known to everybody in the foreign policy establishment: rapprochement a la Burma with North Korea while somehow finessing the DPRK's determination to retain its nuclear weapon and missile assets.  

North Korea gets a big new friend, China keeps its useful regional buffer minus the nuclear provocation and starvation headaches, and Japan and South Korea can move on to other regional economic and security preoccupations.  That’s pretty close to a universal win-win, though the miserable North Korean people might not share the regional powers’ enthusiasm for a newly revitalized DPRK regime.

The PRC leadership is probably slightly bemused that the United States, in order to advance its security-heavy pivot concept, is pushing the DPRK away instead and forcing it back into the arms of China—a place where North Korea really doesn’t want to be.

It would be nice to think that US hostility toward North Korea is a profoundly subtle strategy of ensuring the regime's continued survival and hostility so that it can serve as a reliable pretext for the US security presence in North Asia.

Unfortunately, I don't think so.  I think our North Korea policy is a reflection of general strategic drift and an inability to square the circle between our interest in rapprochement, US non-proliferation policy, and the anxieties of our allies.

Absent a viable strategy to denuclearize or engage North Korea, in public media the US punts to China—which lacks the standing to influence North Korea on this issue and has no interest in imploding the regime.  That’s just meaningless PR kabuki.  And China makes disapproving noises at Pyongyang in order to placate the West.  More meaningless PR kabuki.

At the same time, the US—rather shortsightedly, in my opinion—exploits Pyongyang’s antics to move more military assets into the region to bolster the pivot narrative of US indispensability to regional security, thereby further pissing off China.

A clever plan—not—IMHO.  

Under the momentum of its own dubious logic, in response to the mission and budget creep imperatives of the US security establishment, driven by the separate political and military imperatives of Japan and other anxious and more-or-less ambitious regional players, and seduced by the easy opportunities presented by North Korean bellicosity,  the “pivot” increasingly walks, talks, and quacks like “China containment”.  

I don’t think the Obama administration is fooling the PRC leadership...and I don't think China is blaming North Korean nukes or China's dysfunctional relationship with Pyongyang for the eagerness of much of the US security establishment to promote the pivot into Asia.

But maybe American analysts are deluding themselves with the vision of the pivot panacea for the problem of rising China and its attendant discontents.

To me, the North Korean impasse demonstrates that the pivot is counterproductive because it simply demands that the PRC conform to US interests doubling as universal norms.  In other words, it's zero sum.  There's no win-win for China in just doing what Barack Obama wants.

A serious underlying problem for the pivot is that the US is increasingly boxed into zero-sum options for China as allies are becoming more independent and refractory (and US leadership, as demonstrated in the cases of Egypt, Libya, and Syria, becomes more hands-off and dilatory), and the list of win-win scenarios that the US can unilaterally deliver to the PRC is shrinking.

We're not offering carrots; just less of the human rights/intellectual property/cyberwar/freedom of navigation stick until time, circumstance, principle, and the priorities and opportunism of our allies combine to demand return to the China-bashing status quo ante.

By this reading, the pivot is a second-best, default strategy by a superpower with limited resources--primarily the ability to project power across the Pacific--at its disposal.  It is instability without an endgame.

By the most generous reading, the pivot is an optimistic relaunch of the Star Wars/arms race strategy and economic stress test under Reagan that allegedly drove the USSR to spend itself into oblivion. But 2013 isn't 1976, China after thirty years of economic reform isn't Russia, and the current CCP leadership lineup is conspicuously devoid of gullible Gorbachevs.

As the Obama administration rather desperately finesses the pivot and tries to keep US-China relations ticking along despite its self-created problems, the PRC will look for the right opportunity to challenge the “pivot” through pressure on local US allies and demonstrate that the US lacks the military will (and disregard for economic damage) to pick up the military gauntlet thrown down by an increasingly assertive and suspicious PRC.

Absent a US willingness to fight World War III over the scraggly reefs and islets of the East and South China Seas, the pivot has no viable endgame except anticipating PRC regime collapse and the attainment of US hegemony in the Western Pacific by default.  If that doesn’t happen,I would not like to be a small US ally with overoptimistic plans of relying on the pivot to counter overbearing Chinese economic, military, and diplomatic pressure (I’m looking at you, Philippines).

So, when one hears hopeful noises about Chinese reasonableness on North Korea, it means little more than the fact that the US has dug itself into a hole with its Asia policy and needs to pretend that the pivot narrative of the indispensable US security role in Asia is doing something more than accelerating the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program and generating Chinese anxiety and anger.

Lipstick on a pig, in other words.

Saudi Arabia vs. Qatar, Redux

My post on the competing strategies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar received a considerable amount of thoughtful comment and pushback by e-mail and on the Web, more than I’m accustomed to receive for a non-China post from somebody who has only an informed layman’s interest in the Middle East.

Maybe I came up with something worth thinking about.  Well, even a blind hog finds a truffle every once in a while.  [see note below]

More to the point, I think my post contributed to a crystallizing sense in the foreign policy realm that Saudi and Qatari differences are probably central to what has become the nagging Syrian conundrum, namely, why have the Western regimes, Turkey, and the Gulf Cooperation Council been unable to club together and crater the Assad regime?

From the moral imperative side of the equation, consider Libya.  We interrupted Gaddafi in what the midst of what was much less than a counterinsurgency and more of a police action in pursuit of the armed rabble of eastern Libya.  When the NATO no-fly zone was launched, only two or three thousand people had died, about a quarter of them in Gaddafi’s forces.  At the time, correspondents in Washington were given a bullsh*t backgrounder claiming that intervention was required because of an impending massacre of up to 50,000 innocents in Benghazi.  Post-war, there has been an embarrassing dearth of evidence concerning Gaddafi’s genocidal rage; Libya’s Deputy Minister of Martyrs announced that the current count was 4700 rebel dead and 2100 missing, something of a drop from the 2011 estimate of 25,000.

Contrast this with Syria.

No matter who does the counting, there are tens of thousands dead in Syria, hundreds of thousands of IDPs and refugees shivering miserably through the winter, and if there was ever a case for getting off one’s ass and doing a humanitarian intervention, Syria is now it.

If the grim mechanics of regime subversion rather than humanitarian intervention are one’s cup of tea, on the other hand, all the elements are in place to implode the Assad regime: widespread popular dissatisfaction, a collapsed economy, a weary army, international sanctions, covert financial and material support of the rebels, an influx of hardened fighters, and safe havens in Turkey.

Despite the solidarity of the ruling elite, support from Iran, China, and Russia, and Assad’s bloody and successful obstinacy in repressing his domestic opponents, after close to two years of the baleful attention of Assad’s enemies in the West, the Gulf, and Turkey, Syria is a basket case.  

But nobody has stepped up to say (to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel) Let’s turn it up to 11, pour in the money, arms, and fighters, maybe set up a no-fly zone and erase Assad’s air assets, and end this thing.

Instead, the Syrian crisis lurches on, absent the external political will to finish the job or shortcircuit the insurrection with a negotiated transition.

Bernard at Moon of Alabama kindly excerpted my post and took issue with it.  He is of the opinion that even the Saudis are losing their appetite for further butchery in Syria, and Assad may be able to cut a deal to get the Saudis and everybody else off his back (as he’s been trying to do for two years) and weather the storm.

I dunno.  Bernard knows a lot more about the Middle East than I do and his post is detailed and quite persuasive.  But…

I look at what the various players are saying (and not saying) and doing (and not doing) as reported in the Western language press, and I conclude the problem is that the get-Assad coalition can’t get on the same page with Saudi Arabia or find a way to finesse a political settlement out of the bloodbath.

Looking at the political calculus, I find it hard to believe that the United States, after having spent over a year building up Assad as the latest monster of the century, is willing to suffer the loss of face that is involved in having him stay on as part of a deal.  That, to me, is just not how the US operates.  A key element of US foreign policy is the idea of credibility and being perceived as a reliable ally, one that does not stake out positions and then abandon them.  US credibility took a hit in the Gulf countries thanks to the Obama administration’s equivocal response to the Egyptian revolution (first trying to bolster Mubarak and then pulling the plug), and from the plainly stated US desire to pivot to Asia and its riches (and away from the Middle East and its headaches).  I don’t think the US is going to get out in front of the anti-Assad coalition and insist on a negotiated settlement.

Unless there is a united call from Turkey and the GCC, in other words, to let bygones be bygones and work with Assad or through Assad’s circle to end Syria’s misery, the US can’t moderate its Syria position until Assad is driven out of Damascus.

Also, I’m afraid that the key foreign players are reaching the conclusion that the Syrian toothpaste is pretty much out of the tube and a negotiated settlement is just going to be Act I of years of chaos, violence, and misery.  Putting Humpty Dumpty together again, in other words, is not a job for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.  It’s a long-term project for Victor Frankenstein, and nobody’s going to be very happy with the outcome.  The overall feeling seems to be to let ‘er drift (while occasionally berating the Russians and Chinese for not stepping in to fix the mess) and turn to other concerns.

To my mind, Saudi Arabia has looked at this state of affairs and decided that the best policy is one of obstinately supporting the insurrection until Assad is driven out, no matter how protracted and nasty the process is.

I think Saudi Arabia is reacting to the US abdication of leadership to assert its own bloody-minded realist strategy for the Middle East (and, in the process, discredit Qatar as amateur soft power enthusiasts without the belly to do the dirty work needed to neutralize the Iranian challenge).

Perhaps Saudi Arabia is living the neo-con Clean Break dream in reverse.  Instead of carrying the fight from Iraq to Syria, and then Iran, as Dick Cheney dreamed, militant Islamists backed by Saudi Arabia (or powerful elements within Saudi Arabia) are closing in on the overthrow of the Assad regime and creating the social, political, and military conditions for an anti-Maliki insurrection in Iraq’s Sunni heartland.

People whose memories of the Iraq debacle go back a few years will not be too surprised to learn that Fallujah—the bloody and unbeaten heart of the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation—is back in the news.

Take it away, BBC:

Thousands of mourners gathered in the Iraqi city of Fallujah on Saturday at the funerals of Sunni protesters killed by army troops a day earlier.

The funeral processions were followed by renewed protests against Iraq's Shia-led government.

On Friday, five people were shot dead and dozens more were wounded when the army opened fire on a protest.

…

The army had withdrawn from the city for the funerals, fearing further violence.

But in an apparent revenge attack, gunmen killed two soldiers and abducted three more on the outskirts of the city. 

Sunni leaders in Anbar province, where Fallujah is located, had earlier told the BBC that they would attack army positions in the province if the government failed to bring the soldiers responsible for the protester shootings "to justice".

One must, of course, insert the caveat that local Sunni elites displayed a visceral hostility to Saudi-backed AQ types by teaming with the United States during the famed "Anbar Awakening".  However, it should also be remembered that before partnering with the Americans, local Sunnis had had originally teamed with foreign jihadis in order to stick it to a hostile central administration, a pattern that they might revert to in this situation.

SCMP ran a Reuters picture of the funeral procession that gives an idea of the magnitude of the unrest in Fallujah.

In case one needs a reminder of how the whole cycle of demonstration/repression/martyr/funeral rinse-and-repeat that drove the news cycle in Syria two years ago, Al Jazeera reports:

At the protest, the latest in a series of demonstrations against the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, shouts of "Listen Maliki, we are free people" were followed by "Take your lesson from Bashar," a reference to Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria.

Did I mention, by the way, that a suicide bomber killed 42 people in a Shi’ite mosque inside Iraq yesterday?

With the prospect of the chaos in Syria slopping over into Iraq and endangering Maliki’s pro-Iranian administration, I don’t think Saudi Arabia is going to be too interested in putting the brakes on Syria’s headlong rush into collapse.

N.B. In the past I shrank from using the earthy metaphor “even a blind hog finds a truffle once in awhile” since it didn’t seem to make any sense.  Pigs, after all, are employed because of their ability to detect truffles underground by smell.  Sight has nothing to do with it.  However, TIL that truffles rely on mammals detecting them, eating them, and defecating them in order to spread and reproduce.  Therefore, evolution (or the Creator, exercising His/Her/Its prerogative of making everything as bizarre and complicated as possible) selected truffles that emitted smells attractive to animals.  Specifically, the truffles valued by gourmets emit an odor analogous to that of the male pig a.k.a. hog sex pheromone, making them an object of interest and pursuit for female pigs a.k.a. sows.  That is why truffle pigs are sows.  A blind hog (at least one of heterosexual bent) would be doubly disadvantaged in the search for truffles and it would be proper to describe him as uniquely fortunate if he were able to stumble upon one.