Lincoln Mitchell

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This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Posted in: Foreign Policy

A Second Chance in Kyrgyzstan

Regardless of how events play out in Kyrgyzstan, it is now clear that US policy there in recent years has been misguided. The U.S. allowed itself to be manipulated into supporting a government that was not only corrupt and undemocratic but also weak and incompetent because of the strong need to have access to the Manas Air Force Base which is only a few miles from Bishkek. It is worth noting that the U.S. had to provide Bakiev thugocracy a contract worth roughly $180 million, in the form of loans, grants and contracts, all of which was looted by the ruling clique, in exchange for access to the base.

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The Impact of the Health Care Bill on Foreign Policy

Passage of the health care bill is obviously of primary import inside the U.S., but it will also have an impact on U.S. foreign policy. The stakes in the health care debate were extremely high and clearly out of proportion for a bill that was somodest and moderate in nature. Nonetheless, Obama all but wagered his presidency on passage of the bill. Had the bill failed, which seemed very likely in January, Obama’s presidency would have been reeling. He would have been viewed as ineffective, even a failure, before his first term was halfway over. The bill, of course, passed, reinvigorating and strengthening the president.

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Economic Cooperation's Poor Track Record

The reality that these types of programs have rarely had a significant impact on resolving territorial disputes has not appeared to daunt proponents of the shared economic venture as path to peace approach. These programs have generally had a marginal effect as conflicts have either endured in spite of these programs, or more frequently these programs have failed to get off the ground because the conflict and rancor between the groups. It is clear that, for example, joint Palestinian-Israeli tourism ventures could generate needed income, or cooperation liberalized trade zones involving Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh would help the economy of the South Caucasus, but even though the west supports programs to do these types of things, the underlying problems are more enduring. The China-Taiwan case is an interesting example of a conflict where trade has expanded substantially in recent years, but the tensions between the two polities remains quite strong with both sides retaining strong militaries and the threat of war breaking out no less significant, despite the economic ties

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Change and Continuity in Global Politics

All of these events certainly had significant impacts on the world, or on part of the world, but focusing too much on how events like September 11th changed the world only tells one side of the story. This is exacerbated by a media and punditry that focuses often overstate the impact of political events. The other side of the story, that even world changing events are usually as much about continuity as change, does not get as much attention, but is also important. Ignoring this continuity, or focusing on the changes to a degree that precludes and understanding of the continuity is a mistake.

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Democracy Isn't the Only System in Crisis Now

The broad turmoil which this will cause for the western democracies will be serious, but it should be seen in a broader context. The next few years will be tough for the world’s major democracies, but they may be worse for the world’s non-democratic regimes. Keeping non-democratic regimes running smoothly also requires resources, economic growth and stability. However, when these are not in place, it is often more difficult for authoritarian regimes to manage the consequences and the corresponding voter anger.

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Still Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Iraq

Thus, at any given moment, the best option is to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, but because there are always such immediate and negative consequences for doing that, it is easy to postpone this decision. Another possible option would be to recognize that the effort in Iraq cannot realistically be achieved in a few more months or years and to prepare for a longer commitment in Iraq or as Ricks puts it “30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come.” This approach is also flawed because even a longer commitment would be far from a guarantee of success and because it is hard to imagine the American people supporting an essentially open-ended commitment in Iraq that could be measured in decades, not months, As Ricks’ analysis shows, perhaps inadvertently, while the decision in Iraq is not easy, it is clear.

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Getting it Right in Iran and Ukraine

President Obama has certainly made foreign policy mistakes, but he has also set a different tone that, in the disparate cases of Iran and Ukraine, has been the right one. The administration has understood that one of the lessons of the last ten years is that democracy is about processes not electing leaders and that a fairly elected leader who is not enthusiastically pro-American is still a leader with whom we can and should work. Another lesson has been that from Iran to Venezuela, one of the best ways to shore up domestic support for an unpopular leader is to rhetorically attack that leader in Washington. By avoiding this very tempting pitfall, Obama has weakened Ahmadinejad more than any inspiring speeches about freedom ever could have. In Iran, Obama made a tough but right decision. In Ukraine the decision was a little easier, but in either case it should be recognized that the administration got it right.

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Is the Orange Revolution Over or Did It Never Happen

In other words, maybe the Orange Revolution never really happened at all. Obviously, the events on Kiev’s Maidan in late 2004 happened, leading to Yuschenko’s becoming president, but it is possible that in the excitement of the moment, too much was read into these events. The victory in December of 2004 by a former prime minister under Leonid Kuchma over Kuchma’s sitting prime minister may simply not have been the pivotal and revolutionary moment which it looked like at the time. Rather, it may have been another stage in Ukraine’s continuous path from Soviet republic to something else.

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A Bad Week for China and the U.S.

This has been a very interesting week or so for U.S. China relations. During this time, internet censorship, the Dalai Lama, Iran, and arms sales to Taiwan have been at the center of the interaction between the two countries. It seems the relationship has come quite a distance since the fall when President Obama traveled to Asia and outlined the import of China to the U.S.

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Ukraine's Election and the Value of a Divided Electorate

Speculation about who will win the election, and how that person will govern, can overshadow the democratic advances Ukraine has made since the Orange Revolution of 2004, particularly when contrasted with Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the other two post-Soviet countries to have Color Revolutions in the last decade. All three Color Revolutions were, at the time they occurred, hailed as democratic advances, but Ukraine is the only one of the three countries that can accurately be said to have experienced greater democratization since those dramatic events. According to Freedom House, for example, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have the same level of democracy as they did before the Rose and Tulip Revolutions, while Ukraine has become more democratic that it was before the Orange Revolution.

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International Responses to the Earthquake in Haiti

International assistance following a natural disaster of this sort is not new. Many of the same actors provided support to the victims of the Tsunami in 2004. It may, however, become more common in the next decades. Unusual weather events will likely be one of the first impacts of climate change which will be felt. Although the event in Haiti was an earthquake with no likely connection to climate change, the general pattern of a devastating natural disaster occurring in a country that has already had more than its share of misfortune which will both cause immediate tragedy and perhaps set that country’s development back years may become more common.

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Limbaugh, Robertson and Trevino on Haiti →

Recent comments by Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson and now US Senate candidate from California Chuck Devore's communication director regarding assistance to Haiti are so hateful, misguided, myopic and, in the case or Robertson, downright strange, that they obscure the question of what they are trying to accomplish by making these comments. Robertson's comments are extraordinarily insensitive, focusing not on the suffering and desperation of the innocent victims of the Haitian people, but on a belief that the earthquake was a form of supernatural intervention as Satan himself has finally extracted his deathly fee for help in liberating Haiti from France.

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Five New Foreign Policy Challenges for the New Decade

During the next ten years, the U.S. will confront a broad range of policy challenges. Some will likely be largely unchanged over the course of the decade. Others, like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the fight against terrorism will probably remain important issues but will change and evolve during the decade. There are some issues, however, which seem somewhat remote today, but which may dominate headlines by the year 2020. We cannot, of course, know for certain what these issues are, but the five issues below all may become very important by 2020.

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Five Foreign Policy Issues That Will Be With Us for Another Decade

When this decade, which is now only a few days old ends, we will almost certainly be confronting foreign policy challenges that are hard to foresee right now. In January of 2000 few would have foreseen that a terrorist attack on the U.S. would so radically reorient and drive our foreign policy for most of the decade or that we would spend most of the decade embroiled in a seemingly endless war in Iraq. However, it is likely that some of the foreign policy issues confronting the U.S. now will not go away and will remain confounding problems throughout the decade. Some issues such as the problem of combating terrorism or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain, but may take very different forms over the course of the decade. These five are likely to remain substantially unchanged over the next ten years.

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2009 Annus Horriblus or the Year We Stopped Digging

Obama’s first year in office, while far from a foreign policy failure, has not brought resolution to any of the major challenges facing the U.S. Wars continue in Afghanistan and Iraq; peace remains more elusive than ever in the Middle East; Iran is still on the brink of developing nuclear weapons; significant parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union remain concerned about renewed Russian power in that region and the global economic downturn has raised the possibility of political instability in much of the world. This was the capstone year of a decade that has included the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001, a conflict in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II, plummeting U.S. popularity abroad, the stalling, or even reversal, of the spread of democracy, and rising military, political and economic threats to the U.S. from Teheran to Beijing and from Moscow to Caracas.

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Copenhagen, Darfur and New Perceptions of China

Blame for the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference to lead to a stronger agreement has, in many quarters, been assigned to China. A recent piece in The Guardian sums up this view very clearly. While it may not be entirely fair to blame this failure solely on China, and affluent countries including the U.S. and many in Europe are not, in the bigger picture, without blame for the climate change crisis, China clearly bears some of the responsibility for the relative failure in Copenhagen.

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The Troubled U.S. Pakistan Relationship

Only two weeks after President Obama decided to expand the war in Afghanistan, their have been a several news stories describing how the U.S. alliance with Pakistan, a relationship without which success in Afghanistan is difficult to imagine, is frayed. Reports that Islamabad does not see eye-to-eye on the war with the U.S. are unfortunate, but reports that U.S. officials in Pakistan are facing obstacles and even harassment make the prospect of success in Afghanistan seem even more distant.

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Will Obama Really Get Us Out of Afghanistan in 2011?

The Obama administration began qualifying the President’s proposed timeline for beginning the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan almost immediately after his speech last week. Administration officials such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates have since then made it clear that the July 2011 date for beginning the drawdown is only a target. A closer reading of Obama’s speech suggests that Obama did not really commit to a withdrawal date, only to a date to “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan.” This could mean anything because the extent and speed of the withdrawal remains unspecified.

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Obama's Unconvincing Argument that Afghanistan is Not Vietnam

Comparisons between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam have grown stronger in recent weeks. While this concern has been raised, often with the buzzword quagmire, about every conflict since the end of the U.S. effort in Vietnam, it is not without reason that this is mentioned with regards to Afghanistan. It is hard to ignore the similarities between the two conflicts. In both cases, the U.S. got involved in a war far away for which there was no easily foreseeable resolution. Obama, like another Democratic president more than four decades ago, was convinced, to some extent by his own generals, that more troops would make the difference and drew the U.S. further into the conflict. The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson’s presidency and overshadowed some of his impressive accomplishments on domestic issues. Critics of the war in Afghanistan, many of whom are supporters of the current president, do not want to see the same thing happen to Obama.

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Is Obama About to Make a Disastrous Mistake?

This is one of the reasons why Obama’s views on Afghanistan are so puzzling. Adding troops in Afghanistan to pursue a mission that looks more difficult every day is the perfect recipe for overextending the U.S. and accelerating our declining power and influence, at a time when we cannot afford it. It is a policy that simply does not recognize how the world, and the ability of the U.S. to change the world, has changed. The threat of terrorism is real, but a policy of keeping the U.S. safe from terrorism and expanding the war and rebuilding in Afghanistan are not at all the same thing.

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