Beyond the War on Terrorism
By Peter Zeihan

One of our dominant themes for 2005 is that, while the bloodshed and anarchy in Iraq rule the headlines, a fundamental realignment of American strategic priorities lies beneath the chaos. Recent changes in the Iraqi political milieu are responsible for a broad global inflection in U.S. priorities. One method of not only confirming the dawning changes but also ascertaining just how those changes will be carried out is to peruse the various personnel changes in the American diplomatic corps.

At the beginning of the first term of the current Bush administration, the majority of foreign policy efforts were poured into establishing a cordon sanitaire around the only country to recently pose a serious threat to the United States -- Russia -- and the only country that could conceivably pose one in the future: China.

The theory was that a bit of proactive work on Washington's part would weaken its past and potential foes sufficiently to prevent any re-emergence of Cold War power balances. If Moscow and Beijing could be prevented from acting as international pillars of power, then American hegemony would be secured for at least a generation -- and perhaps much longer. Put another way, the Rome of the modern age sought to deliver a death blow to Carthage and pre-emptively hobble a still-rising foe.

The 9/11 Interruption

The Sept. 11 attacks massively disrupted that strategy. Suddenly, the United States found itself under threat from an amorphous, hidden enemy, extremely well schooled in the tricks of the U.S. intelligence trade. Al Qaeda was intimately aware of how to avoid detection by all of the methods the United States preferred to use. This was particularly true for methods such as signals intelligence, which worked exceedingly well for targeting entities such as the Soviet Union but fared very badly when attempting to pre-empt militants training in rural Afghanistan.

These U.S. intelligence weaknesses ultimately led to the Afghan war. The inability to finish al Qaeda there led to the invasion of Iraq, so that the United States could use its troops to force Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to help root out al Qaeda. That, in turn, created the quagmire in the Sunni triangle, which has occupied U.S. policy planning for the past two years.

Somewhere along the line, however, the United States sensed that the momentum toward democracy, or at least stability, was sufficient that it could return its attention to global geopolitics and international economic trends. The departure of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- the architect of the Iraq war -- was symptomatic of this change. The United States no longer needed diplomatic and military planners for a war in progress; it needed personnel who could prepare for what would follow the conclusion of that war.

The big changes afoot in Iraq do not relate to this militant cleric or that dark alleyway -- long gone are the days when the White House cared in the least what Muqtada al-Sadr thought -- but rather to the fact that the Sunnis have begun to join the political process. Should enough of them do so, the largest percentage of people supporting the militants -- Iraqi nationalists -- will have been co-opted, while the remainder, the foreign jihadists who secure assistance from the Sunni population, will have few places to hide.

While there will still be shrill debates and plodding documentaries about the PATRIOT Act, troop deployments and the pros and cons of expanding the Homeland Security Advisory System to include ThreatCon Fuchsia-Mint Delta 6, for all practical purposes U.S. foreign policy will move on.

In fact, it already has.

Putting Iraq on Cruise

The focus on the Middle East, which has absorbed almost every shred of U.S. diplomatic effort since Sept. 11, is being spun down. Of course, the Middle East will always command attention -- the developing crisis with Iran and ongoing Israel-Palestinian agonies are excellent examples -- but the proactive nature of U.S. policy in the region is already changing. An excellent way to register U.S. intentions toward a region or state is to look at which personnel are running the show. Wolfowitz's departure was eye-opening, as is the choice of Washington's ambassador to Iraq: Zalmay Khalilzad.

In the days of John Negroponte and Paul Bremer, the job of foreign policy officials in Iraq was not just to coordinate U.S. policy but, in essence, to dictate Iraqi policy on Washington's behalf. Iraq now has a government, albeit a halting and inexperienced one. And so the American administrators have moved on and an actual ambassador has moved in.

Considering the stage of Iraq's development and U.S. goals for the country, the new man on the scene is a logical choice. Until recently, Khalilzad was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was never as politically hands-on as it has been in Iraq. It may have sponsored meetings and supplied aid, but Washington never had any illusions or ambitions about uniting Afghanistan's fractious warlords into a single cohesive state.

And Khalilzad did not attempt to do so. Instead, the major portion of his job was to point out how U.S. and Afghan efforts against the Taliban and al Qaeda would be more effective if those groups were not able to regularly cross the Pakistani border to rest, plan and resupply. He regularly criticized Pakistani intelligence forces for remaining sympathetic to Afghan militants and for inadequate cooperation in rooting those forces out. He focused a spotlight on the United States' unwilling ally, cajoling officials and illuminating problems.

Most important, while Khalilzad often played the role of hammer, he also ultimately took Pakistan's interests into account by helping bring the "moderate" Taliban -- Pakistan's chief tool for influencing its nothern neighbor -- into the Afghan mainstream.

A quick look at the state of the Iraqi insurgency -- and Iraq's neighbors -- gives an excellent idea of precisely what the administration is thinking. In Washington's mind, Iraq no longer needs to be administrated, it just needs to have its environment tweaked. Khalilzad's recent experience makes him uniquely qualified for what is essentially the end phase of Iraq's centrality to U.S. policy.

Iraq has been at the core of U.S. policy for the past two years, and now it makes sense that any inflections in grand American geopolitical strategy will manifest there. The May-to-July period has witnessed a series of dramatic shifts in U.S. policy as Washington eases out of the day-to-day grind of the U.S.-jihadist war. (But note: "eases out" should not be confused with "wins" or "finishes." Terrorism as a political tactic has hardly been stamped out, but al Qaeda's ability to influence geopolitical developments appears to be steadily waning.) So while the United States will have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and similar locales for some time, no longer are efforts to combat al Qaeda the pre-eminent drivers of American policy. Al Qaeda, and with it the Middle East, are becoming background noise. The shift from Bremer to Negroponte to Khalilzad is symptomatic of a much broader trend.

But if the United States is shifting away from Iraq, the Middle East and the war on terrorism, where precisely is it shifting to?

Back to Business in Asia

Before Sept. 11, Washington's China policy was designed to gradually confront and contain China until Beijing was forced to buckle under the pressure and sue for piece. Three years later, now that the administration has some free bandwidth, that policy has been resurrected and the American ambassador to Beijing, Clark Randt (now serving his fourth year in that position) is actually beginning to do the work that he was originally hired to do. Though we maintain that China's recent decision to repeg the yuan was a purely cosmetic act, it was a cosmetic act that would have never occurred without a U.S. policy much more aggressive toward China than that immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Similarly, the rest of Asia is in for more of the same -- or, more accurately, more of what Washington set out to achieve before the al Qaeda distractions took hold. The one exception is in South Korea, where Alexander Vershbow, until recently the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, appears set to relocate.

The Clinton administration cannily selected Vershbow to be its man in Moscow after he helped shove NATO's 1999 expansion and the Kosovo war down the Kremlin's throat in his role as permanent representative to the Atlantic alliance.

After becoming ambassador to Moscow in 2000, Vershbow maintained a similar outlook and helped push U.S. influence deeper into the former Soviet world. When his Russian hosts were feeling generous, they called him "brutally frank." Vershbow espoused a combination of directness and effectiveness that appealed to the Bush administration, which kept the ambassador plugging away at Moscow for the entirety of Bush's first term despite the fact that he was a Clinton appointee.

So what in the world did the Koreans do to land themselves in the company of a personality like Vershbow? Simply put, Seoul is asking for change. Vershbow's greatest legacy for the United States has been his extremely successful effort to redefine NATO's mission in the post-Cold War environment, and to sell that vision to -- or, as some may say, force that vision upon -- NATO's primary (former) adversary. The South Koreans want to redefine military relations with Washington so that they have more control over military operations and decisions on the Korean peninsula. There may be no better man for the job than Washington's former ambassador to Russia.

Unfinished Business in Russia

It should come as no surprise that the most dynamic part of U.S. foreign policy relates to Russia. Condoleezza Rice, appointed as Secretary of State at the beginning of the year, began her government work during the end of the Cold War, when she served as former President George H. W. Bush's Soviet expert at the National Security Council. Now that she is in the big chair at Foggy Bottom, she has surrounded herself with members of the same team from her previous stint in government service. Of particular note are former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, former U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns, and Robert Joseph, former special assistant to the president and senior director for proliferation strategy, counterproliferation and homeland defense with the National Security Council (NSC) -- a wordy way of saying that he was really important. The three now serve essentially as Rice's No. 2, 3 and 4 at State.

As we stated when Rice was appointed in January, the State Department is now
"staffed by a team that helped knock the Soviet Union off its superpower perch. Russia can look forward to four years of a State Department with the resources and the will to ratchet back Moscow's influence throughout the Baltics, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia and even its western Slavic flank. The confrontation over Ukraine was just the beginning."

Personnel changes have not been limited to the top tier. Vershbow's replacement as ambassador -- William Burns -- fits the mold set by Rice and her top team. He served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow as minister-counselor for political affairs during the 1980s, a position and time that would tend to shape one's political views. He is now coming back to Moscow after several years of knocking Israeli and Palestinian heads together.

In the case of Russia, however, the transformation is much deeper than "just" a fresh ambassador, secretary of state and top management team. The rank and file of the entire Russia desk at the State Department is being overhauled. Considering that most State Department personnel swap out positions every two to three years to avoid the dangers of going native, a certain amount of turnover is expected, but the top-to-bottom housecleaning in the case of the Russia team appears to be far more thorough than any scheduled rotation.

The big shift began -- and the direction of U.S. policy was set -- at the V-E Day celebrations in Moscow in May. During that trip, the Bush team bracketed a whirlwind tour past a parade stand in Moscow between deep, long and extremely friendly visits to Latvia and Georgia. The message was clear: the United States is now more concerned with the comings, goings and concerns of Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Mikhail Saakashvili-- the Latvian and Georgian presidents -- than it is with the Russians, and this message was sent on the Russians' national day.

In the Russian mind, it is all snapping into place: color "revolutions" in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine; NATO and EU expansion right up to the Russian border; the commencement of pumping on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline; and now a thorough personnel shift in the State Department that is stocking the top ranks with people who were present at -- and played a role in -- the Soviet defeat. The Kremlin's belief is that the West, led by the United States, is committing to a full-court press into Russia's geopolitical space in an attempt to permanently remove Russia as a threat.

They are correct.

Waking Up to a Threat in Latin America

Latin America has been largely ignored by the United States since Clinton's bailout of the Mexican peso in 1995. Since then, the only "proactive" U.S. policies in the region have involved military aid to Colombia, the embargo against Cuba and a weak push for a hemispheric free trade area. Under Bush, no meaningful evolutions to these core policy planks have emerged, while personalities such as John Maisto (ambassador to Venezuela), Otto Juan Reich (former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs), and Roger Noriega (Reich's replacement) have simply represented drift. Even a personal push by Bush at the Organization of American States summit in June failed to spark any interest or results on behalf of the Latin Americans.

In the meantime, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been busy.

Tightly aligned with Havana and systematically severing relations with the U.S. government, Chavez has redefined Venezuela's relations with the United States in hostile terms -- adopting a new national security doctrine that perceives the United States as Venezuela's greatest enemy.

Since solidifying his power in the aftermath of a civil-military revolt in 2002, an oil industry strike in 2003 and a presidential recall referendum in 2004, Chavez has used his country's oil wealth to export his Bolivarian Revolution throughout the region. His plan is to exploit the region's weak governments and disaffected populations -- already hostile to Washington -- to facilitate the formation of radical social governments opposed to the United States.
Assisting indigenous groups in Bolivia and working to undermine U.S. influence in Ecuador by courting the government with offers of financial and energy assistance are his two biggest policy thrusts at the present time. Should they succeed, Venezuela will have largely limited U.S. influence in South America to the cocaine-fueled war in Colombia.

In contrast, U.S. policy has largely reflected the underwhelming personnel tasked with administering it: unimaginative, obtuse, reactive, outdated. Even when Argentina crashed and burned, Congress voted $3 billion in military aid to Colombia, and Venezuela spiraled into coups and energy industry strikes, American policy barely fidgeted.

However, as Chavez's strategy unfolds and his momentum builds, Washington is belatedly acting. The first step of the response has been -- again, no surprise -- a change of personnel at State. Otto Reich departed the scene in 2004, and Thomas Shannon, whose previous postings include serving as Rice's senior Latin American adviser at the NSC, has been appointed as the new assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. Other diplomats -- many with experience in countering Castro's Cuba -- are now being reshuffled to counter a different revolution. Kevin Whitaker -- at the Cuba desk and now on his way to be the No. 2 at the Venezuelan embassy -- comes to mind.

Collectively, these diplomatic appointments reflect growing U.S. concerns about the regional expansion of Chavez's Bolivarian revolution, as well as an effort to build a political containment strategy to stop the Chavez/Castro alliance from winning converts among radical groups throughout South America.

Unlike Washington's growing anti-Russian efforts, however, its Latin American policies are coming from a low base with few resources. In contrast, the Venezuelan-Cuban strategy is well funded, entrenched and using subsidized oil to entice financially strapped governments into aligning themselves politically with Caracas. Add in that anti-American sentiment is both strong and rising in Latin America -- and that no Latin American government is signing on to Washington's late-to-the-party strategy -- and it becomes apparent that boxing in Caracas it will take more than a change of nameplates and some vague commitments to a new containment agenda.
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Sunday, August 07, 2005