The Republicans and Foreign Policy

About a month or two ago--I never saved the article--Real Clear World ran an article on the foreign policy experts advising the candidates. The only one to have many names I recognized was then frontrunner and establishment favorite Mitt Romney. He had three names I recognized: Richard Haass, Stephen Hadley, and Mitchell Reiss. Richard Haass was/is an expert on regional conflicts especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and Northern Ireland. He served as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the George H W Bush administration. For Dubya he served as the first American envoy to Northern Ireland, where he played a major role in convincing Gerry Adams that the IRA was actually disarm. Upon leaving there he took up a position with the Council on Foreign Relations that puts out the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine. Stephen Hadley served as Condi Rice's assistant at the National Security Council and then took over during Dubya's second term as National Security Advisor to George Bush. Mitchell Reiss was an expert on nuclear proliferation and a country expert on North Korea. When Haass left Belfast for New York, Reiss became his successor as American envoy. Reiss recently wrote a book exploring the question of when terrorist movements should be co-opted by negotiation and power sharing and when they should be shunned.

Perry relies on figures that he met while serving as governor of Texas. I did not recognize any names. The other candidate who had some recognizable names is Ron Paul. Paul has Leon Hadar, a former journalist working for the Jerusalem Post and the author of two books on American policy in the region, Sandstorm and Quagmire. He advocates an American military and political disengagement from the region. The opinion would be considered mainstream in the Democratic Party but is unsaleable to the Republicans. Because Paul is a libertarian running in a conservative party--a square peg in a round hole--he has no chance of being nominated.

Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and American ambassador to China, basically serves as his own foreign policy advisor. He was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan as a young man, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is quite knowledgeable about trade matters and economic policy. But he registers at about two percent in the polls and is betting his whole future on New Hampshire, where he will have to compete with Romney, the other Mormon.

So far foreign policy, as distinct from immigration, has hardly registered in the Republican debates. The party is agitated by economic and social policies: abortion, immigration, health care, tax levels and debt. By slowly withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to oversee the assassination of leading Al Qaeda figures around the Middle East, Obama has effectively removed terrorism as a major political issue. Democrats still debate the American presence in Afghanistan; Republicans do not. It is almost a repeat of Vietnam forty years ago, but with the roles of the two parties reversed. The Democrats got us involved in Vietnam and then Nixon oversaw the withdrawal and the GOP spent twenty years talking about the Democrats as the party that was unreliable on national security. Maybe the Democrats can do the same about the Republicans for the next twenty years.

Should Perry or someone else other than Romney end up as the nominee, he (or she) can inherit the establishment foreign policy advisors by default. After all, Kissinger was never a Nixon advisor in the 1960s. He was a Nelson Rockefeller advisor whom Nixon inherited after he won the election in 1968. Obama inherited Clinton's stable of foreign policy advisors once he named her as his secretary of state. But he could have done so even without naming her--anyone who wanted to serve in government in a senior position had nowhere else to go in the short term. 

In American politics the conservatives determine who the Republican nominee is; the progressives determine who the Democratic nominee is. It is then up to the independents, who rarely vote based on foreign affairs, to determine which party's foreign policy establishment serves in office.

As a postscript let me add that on Friday Oct. 7, 2011 Romney gave his first foreign policy address of the race. Here is a link to a commentary on it. (See the article by  James Joyner in the Atlantic on the Sat. Oct. 8 panel.)                        )

Learning from the Masters

Few people realize that Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize and it was not a Nobel Peace Prize--rather, it was the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was awarded the prize for his historical writings over decades--his histories of World War I, World War II and his multi volume biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill earned his living before being elected to parliament and between the world wars as a writer. There are two writers that I would compare to Winston Churchill in both having been skilled statesmen and skilled writers: Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher.

I read Kissinger's three volumes of memoirs, which must amount to more than 2,000 pages altogether, when I was a graduate student and after receiving my doctorate. The first volume, The White House Years, deals with his period as national security advisor to Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973 during Nixon's first term as president. Most of it concerns detente, the opening to China, the arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War. It was published in 1979. Three years later the second volume, Years of Upheaval, appeared dealing with the period from Nixon's second inauguration in January 1973 to his resignation in August 1974. During this period Kissinger wore two hats: as national security advisor and as secretary of state. The book deals with detente, the opening of the SALT II arms control negotiations, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 and the start of the Middle East peace process from October 1973 to May 1974 with Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and Damascus. I read this volume before I started graduate school and it was an education in itself about mediation, negotiations, and power politics. Kissinger explained in detail his motivations behind his policies and why they worked or did not work in practice. His third volume, Years of Renewal, covering his period as secretary of state under President Gerald Ford did not appear until 1999. I found this disappointing. It covered among other topics his involvement in the Angolan civil war in 1974-95, the negotiation of the Sinai II agreement between Egypt and Israel of September 1975 that served as a foundation for the later Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, and his mediation in Rhodesia in October 1976. I had written about Rhodesia in my doctoral dissertation and had read of Kissinger's involvement in many journalistic accounts. I found his explanations unrevealing compared to his earlier discussions of his Middle Eastern mediation.

Kissinger wrote a history of diplomacy entitled simply Diplomacy, which appeared in 1994. It is a brilliant discussion of the techniques of diplomacy used by master practioneers of realpolitik  such as Richelieu, Metternich, Cavour, Disraeli, Bismarck, Churchill, Helmut Kohl, and Margaret Thatcher. I recommend it for anyone interested in this subject. In 2001 he wrote a book entitled Does America Need a Foreign Policy? that he answered decidedly in the affirmative. It is a good short work. He also wrote essays on foreign policy for Newsweek in the 1970s and 1980s after he had left office.

Richard Nixon between the appearance of his memoirs in 1978 and his death in 1994 wrote a series of books dealing with foreign policy that were aimed at rehabilitating his image as an elder statesman of the Republican Party. In seven books he discussed the Cold War, Vietnam, Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders, and American interests. In my opinion the best of these was Leaders, which dealt with various foreign leaders that Nixon had dealt with during his career in politics. The book is well written and offers genuine insights into the figures and their policies. His other books are good for those interested in the general subject, but not as well written as Kissinger's writings and suffering from Nixon's attempt to dumb them down for a general audience. He also lifted and repeated entire sections from earlier books--something much easier done in the computer age than earlier.

Thatcher, the longest-ruling British prime minister in the twentieth century, was also the most controversial and, after Churchill, the most important. She wrote two volumes of memoirs, the first dealing with her period as prime minister and the second with her life before Downing St. In 2002 she published  Statecraft, her primer on international affairs and foreign policy from a British perspective at the start of the twenty first century. In it she covers the end of the Cold War and America's role in ending it victoriously, the Middle East and terrorism, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Asia, Russia, and Europe. This is a tour de horizon or overview of international affairs during the end of the Cold War and the New World Order by a realist and Euroskeptic. I find it to be both eloquent and convincing. In terms of British politics if I were British I would probably be a floating voter between being a "wet" Tory and a Liberal Democrat. So I'm not a Thatcherite at all.

What has changed in thirty years?

I recently finished reading Yehuda Avner's memoir, The Prime Ministers, which was published last year to some positive reviews. It is a hefty volume of 703 pages not including notes and index.  Avner was a British Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1947 and after the 1948 War of Independence worked briefly on a religious kibbutz in the Galilee before he joined the Israeli foreign service. Eventually, because of his native English, he ended up serving as a wordsmith to four Israeli prime ministers from 1963 to 1983 before he finally became Israel's ambassador to his native country. The years covered in this book were important ones in Israeli history: they included four major wars (1967, 1969-70, 1973, 1982), the peace process between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s and the change in alliance by Israel from France to the United States.

Clearly the peace process was not a theme that Avner considered important. He has a chapter on it in his section on Rabin (which only covers Rabin's first term as prime minister from 1974 to 1977) and a couple of chapters on it in the half of the book that he devotes to Menahem Begin. The book's major themes are the relationship with Washington and the individual personalities of the prime ministers. Whereas I felt that I did learn something about Levi Eshkol, the first prime minister to follow David Ben-Gurion in 1963 and about whom little has been written, I cannot say the same about Golda Meir. A long chapter is devoted to an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Yet of President Sadat's peace initiative of February 1971 that Meir abruptly rejected we hear nothing. So we have no way of knowing whether or not it was genuine in his opinion. Likewise, Henry Kissinger's separation-of-forces agreements of 1974 are just mentioned in a single sentence in passing.

The real revelation in the book is the story of a meeting between Avner and a childhood friend of Kissinger's who became a noted psycho-analyst. The latter diagnosed Kissinger as suffering from severe problems from his abrupt exile from Germany at age 15 during the Nazi period. Avner illustrates this with an incident where the man calls out to Kissinger using his original German name Heinz. Kissinger pretends to ignore him but with a look of disgust on his face--for the painful memories that the name has dredged up. The psycho-analyst tells Avner that Kissinger is ashamed of his Jewish background and will compensate for it in his shuttle diplomacy by bending over backwards to appease Israel's enemies. Avner advised Rabin of this diagnosis. But it never affected Rabin's personal friendship with Kissinger and Rabin continued to visit him every time he visited Washington. And the two were quite friendly during the signing ceremony for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at the White House in March 1979.

Fully half the book is devoted to Begin's premiership. Avner relates many telling incidents of Begin's personality that paints the man as friendly with traditional Jews but prickly with both foreign Jews and some secular Israeli Jews. Avner relates several incidents of Begin telling of figures whose government's are sympathetic to Israel such as Margaret Thatcher and her foreign minister, Lord Carrington, as well as Ronald Reagan and Casper Weinberger. Nothing here is really new--there is little of real novelty to reveal about Begin after the wave of biographies that appeared in the late 1970s, after he was elected, and after 1983, when he resigned from office in a severe depression.

Avner relates in great detail the ceremonies that accompanied the start of Sadat's 1977 peace initiative from his reception in Jerusalem to the breakdown of talks in Tel Aviv in January. But then he just relates that the talks broke down and he doesn't take up the story again until the ceremony on the White House lawn in late March 1979. He skips over the trip to Ismailiya in December 1977, the Leeds Castle talks in July 1978 and the Camp David Summit in September 1978 as well as Carter's summit diplomacy in March 1979.

The only topic that is really adequately covered is the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. But the treatment is again not analytical but rather personal and anecdotal. He relates a summit at Johnson's Texas ranch in early 1968, a White House dinner for Rabin in September 1974 when Rabin told a white lie about it being Avner's birthday to cover up the fact that the dinner wasn't kosher (in accordance with Jewish dietary laws).

One gets the feeling that if Avner's career been a couple of decades later he could have happily related the exploits of Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon. But the book would have been much longer because he would have been writing about three Likud premiers and only one Labor premier. It's a pity--Shamir still lacks a biography in either English or Hebrew. Today Netanyahu allows his foreign minister to do his insulting for him. Begin and Meir did it themselves.

If Avner's publisher had possibly been willing, he could have fleshed out the section on Meir and released the book in two volumes about six months or a year apart.  But usually authors are the servants of publishers, not the other way around. This book is recommended for Americans who want anecdotes about the Israeli premiers of this period, but not for Americans interested in the peace process.