Lincoln Mitchell

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This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Posted in: Foreign Policy

The KSM Trial and Republican Attacks →

The recent attacks on the decision by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), one of the masterminds of the September 11th terrorist attacks, constitute one of those political moments where partisan sniping dominates everything else. For many Americans where KSM is tried is something of a non-issue a technicality that has little bearing on their lives, so long as justice is served. However, for many Republicans, none more so than former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani it is an opportunity to get some media attention and take a cheap shot at the president.

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The Two Futures of U.S. China Policy

While these are probably wise guidelines, they overlook another very real possibility. What if things move in a different direction in China? What happens if an overheated economy, rising domestic instability and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which tens of millions of Chinese toil combine render China’s current rate of growth unsustainable. From the outside China continues to look like an unequivocal success story, but this is to a great extent a triumph of media repression over reality. Many of those glittering skyscrapers remain largely devoid of tenants. China’s authoritarian system is fraying as numerous demonstrations occur annually in both Han and non-Han parts of China. China’sworkers are among the most oppressed workers on the planet, living in dormitories, seeing their children once a year and in many cases, poorly paid and forced to move illegally from city to city to find work. If Karl Marx came back to life and took a global tour he would almost certainly conclude that China is currently the country in the world most ready for Communist revolution.

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Woody Allen and America's Declining Power to Persuade

The ability to persuade foreign leaders, particularly those who are allies, to support the U.S., both in big issues such as the war in Iraq, and more specific issues such as combating terrorism in one place or not initiating conflict, is a key piece of U.S. foreign policy. The ability to persuade rests on the critical assumption that there are benefits to helping the U.S. and costs to not doing that. These costs and benefits, however, need to be moderate in nature. A foreign policy that, for example, sought to cut off all assistance to countries that did not support the U.S. on everything would be bullying and ineffective. Similarly, it is essential to recognize that sometimes allies will have legitimate interests that differ from those of the U.S.

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Eastern Europe and the Obama Administration

Citizens and leaders in Eastern Europe cannot be faulted for being worried about Russian policy in the region, particularly given the aftermath of the Russia-Georgia War of 2008. However, there is a danger of several issues being conflated with this fear. The serious concerns about Russia often contribute to a somewhat unfounded fear that the US is going to abandon its allies and principles in Eastern Europe as part of its goal of “resetting” relations with Russia. This fear is not always rational and has not been assuaged by anything President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton or others in the administration have said about the refusal of the U.S. to make any tradeoffs of this kind.

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The Downside to the Runoff in Afghanistan

The runoff, on the surface, seems like a good idea because it will give Karzai’s government another chance to run the election fairly and confer greater legitimacy on the eventual winner, who presumably, at least according to the U.S. Secretary of State will be Hamid Karzai. The argument for the runoff is that if Karzai is perceived as being elected fairly in this second round, as opposed to under a strong shadow of doubt in the first round, it will make him more able to govern effectively and strengthen Afghanistan’s democratic credentials.

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Maybe the US-Russia Reset Isn't About Iran

The Obama administration’s relations with Russia are still a work in progress, but there is some reason to be encouraged, and some suggestions that Biden’s views lie at the core of the administration’s views as well. Thus far, the administration has avoided trading off anything important to the US, such as support for Georgia or recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The administration has conceded things to Russia that they either they did not have, such as a realistic chance of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, or things they did not want, such as missile defense in Eastern Europe. This reflects the understanding of relative power of the two countries suggested by Biden’s comments.

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Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, How We Misremember the Cold War

The Cold War was the organizing principle of American foreign policy, and had a strong influence on domestic policy as well, for almost half a century. Today, less than two decades after its end, the Cold War is poorly remembered. The equivalence which some have suggested between the threat of Jihadist terror and that represented by the USSR, and the almost ubiquitous comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Stalin from those trying to drum up support for the Iraq war are just some examples of this. These comparisons are not so much wildly inaccurate, Jihadist terror represents a real threat to the U.S., and Hussein was much worse than your garden variety dictator, but they betray an intellectual laziness and failure to understand the true nature, and, for quite a long time, power of the Soviet regime.

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Obama's Missed Opportunity in Afghanistan

In fairness, sending more troops to Afghanistan has a certain logic to it because it is apparent that we cannot achieve our mission there at the current troop level. However, sending more troops is also something of the right answer to the wrong question. While it is clear that staying the course in Afghanistan is not going to lead to swift victory and soon to troop reduction, it is far from obvious that increasing the number of troops there will achieve this goal either. Instead both these options will almost certainly lead to a commitment to U.S. involvement in the region that has no clear end, and which very likely means an expansion of our role and presence beyond Afghanistan in ways, and with implications, that we cannot fully anticipate.

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Does the UN Report on the Gaza War Accomplish Anything

These nature of the findings of these reports do, however, raise the question of what the real purpose of the reports were. The stated purpose of the reports was simply to determine the truth about the origins of one war and the conduct of another, but it is hard to take this entirely at face value. It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that a major purpose of the both reports was to provide a rationale for both institutions to pursue policies to which they had largely already committed. This is more true of the EU report because the UN doesn’t usually pursue policies in that sense.

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Seinfeld Elections: Why Democracy Needs Conflict

Democracy works best when people in society disagree on a range of issues. If one issue, an obvious example of this would be ethnicity, dominates in a country, than election outcomes will be the same each time and the government will either be paralyzed or permanent winners and permanent losers will emerge. When this happens, democracy falters because, in the former case, the state is immobilized, and in the latter case, the permanent losers see no democratic way out of their condition. Iraq, Bosnia and Lebanon are all examples of countries where ethnic identity has held sway as the major issue which determines how people vote.

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Changing Course on Missile Defense: Why Refusing to Pick a Fight with Moscow is Not a Sign of Weakness

Obama’s decision to stop pursuing this is being described by critics as surrendering to Russia and a sign of the American president’s weakness. When viewed through the narrow lens of competition and machismo, this is not an unreasonable conclusion, but when the lens is expanded to include the actual interests of the U.S. and its allies, things look a little different.

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The Ownership Deception

Rumsfeld’s remarks are so bizarre because they occurred after, if not during, an invasion of Iraq by the U.S. during which Iraq’s government was destroyed. Whether or not one supported that invasion, it is reasonably clear that less than four years later, the U.S. still had a fair amount of responsibility for Iraq’s reconstruction and security. While Rumsfeld’s remarks were clearly premature in post-war Iraq, there are many cases around the world where the question of when international, or U.S., responsibility should stop is far more difficult to resolve.

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Obama+Afghanistan=Bush+Iraq=Johnson+Vietnam

And yet Obama has already shown in his presidency that his views on Afghanistan are more than just a campaign tactic. The easy thing for Obama would have been to lump Afghanistan in with Iraq as failed Bush policies and instead begin a slow–some might say too slow–pullback of troops in Afghanistan, similar to that in Iraq. And yet it seems that Obama’s assessment of national security concerns made this option less appealing. Obama’s reward for this approach is that Afghanistan may do for Obama what Iraq did for Bush, what Vietnam did for Johnson, what Afghanistan itself did for the Soviet Union, or whatever other analogy you like.

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The Shutdown is No Longer Only a Domestic Issue

In the very big picture, the shutdown is a reminder that the US is no longer the dominant global hegemon to whom the rules and limitations facing other countries do not apply. It turns out the US also can be hamstrung by institutions and structures and that ideological fanaticism can damage the country's economy and global standing. The irony, or perhaps tragedy is a better word, is that the same faction who is crippling our government today, will be screaming about American exceptionalism tomorrow.

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Afghanistan-How Much Election Fraud is Okay?

As allegations of election fraud, intimidation, violence and ballot stuffing in the recent Afghan elections increase it seems as if the election in Afghanistan is in that gray area where there was a fair amount of fraud, but it is not yet clear whether there was enough for it to have changed the outcome of the election. This puts the U.S. and other international actors in a complicated position. It is not uncommon in elections in semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian, post-conflict, or as in Afghanistan, mid-conflict countries for some amount of mid-level election fraud and misuse of resources to be discounted by international actors because “the voice of the people was heard”, or to phrase it less delicately “the guy who would’ve won (usually the incumbent), won anyway.”

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Russia Hires Proxy Flacks in DC: How Foreign Policy is Getting Outsourced to Lobbyists

Foreign governments hiring firms to polish their image, build relationships with key American policy makers, or hiring think tanks to issue reports favorable to their view, is different. It is no longer about Americans trying to influence their own government, but foreign governments seeking to influence the American government, and in many cases, trying to influence American public opinion as well. These practices are now widespread in Washington and have become an important part of how policy is made. There is nothing illegal about any of this as long as the firms in question report their contracts as required by American law. Yet these practices take on something of an absurdist twist when countries which receive ample financial support from the U.S. hire firms to lobby on their behalf, creating a situation where the U.S. government is, at least in part, paying lobbying firms to lobby the U.S. government.

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Afghanistan's Robert Redford Moment

“So, what do we do now?” This is the question newly elected senator Bill McKay, played by Robert Redford, asks his campaign manager in the last scene of the 1972 movie The Candidate. It is also the question we should be asking in Afghanistan today, now that the election– which took months of preparation, thousands of people doing everything from security to election administration to political party development, and millions of dollars in assistance–is over, and has been judged a success.

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An Olympian Mistake by the IOC

The Olympic decision seems to have come right as international baseball is approaching a tipping point. In the next few years Major League Baseball will likely become more international as more countries are represented at the Major League level, thus building greater fan bases outside the U.S. and contributing the growth in popularity of the baseball globally, and the WBC specifically. The inner workings of the IOC on questions like this are something of a mystery to me, but they made a mistake this time and placed themselves firmly behind the curve with regards to baseball’s international popularity.

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Afghanistan's Presidential Election: Why It's a Problem that Karzai is a Sure bet to Win

The election in Afghanistan on Thursday will be watched closely around the world. It will be a critical moment for Afghanistan’s future as well as for American efforts in that country. The election will be a test for the nascent Afghan state, the ability of American and other forces to maintain peace in the country, and for Afghan unity. It is also an election, at least at the presidential level, where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. It is almost certain that Afghan president Hamid Karzai will be reelected.

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The Crisis of No Crisis: The Post-Recession Blues

The celebration of the recovery is a little premature, but it reflects the reality that most financial pundits and reporters have only two settings regardless of the economic conditions. One might be called the Jim Cramer setting, where we are told that talk of recession is nonsense and that we should keep buying. The second might be called the Nouriel Roubini setting, where we are told that things are much worse than we think. Accordingly, first the recession itself, and later the overstated claims about how bad it was going to be, have discredited most of the financial punditry.

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