My latest for The Atlantic, “Why Obama Is Right to Withdraw From Afghanistan Early,” has been posted. The lede describes a paradox: Everything the critics say about the decision is right–and so is the decision.

The Obama administration’s acceleration of its Afghanistan withdrawal deadline to 2013, a year earlier than planned, is a break with America’s commitment to its NATO and Afghan allies, an abandonment of a mission Obama deemed “essential” in his 2008 campaign, and kills any chances of negotiating an acceptable settlement with the Taliban. It’s also the right thing to do.

The next few paragraphs lay out in brutal detail what an abrupt turnabout this is from the NATO policy that Obama extracted through heavy arm twisting a mere 14 months ago, his Afghanistan goals as laid out in the West Point speech, and his campaign rhetoric about this being the “necessary” war that was derailed by the Iraq distraction. We’ve simultaneously undercut our allies and strengthened the hand of the Taliban. And yet:

[T]he alternative is to continue getting people killed — not to mention inadvertently killing innocents — in a fight we can’t win.

[...]

It’s become painfully obvious in recent months that the governments in both Kabul and Islamabad are, to put it mildly, less than reliable allies. There’s simply no reason to think staying another year is somehow going to turn things around.

Whether NATO’s goals are achievable with unlimited time and resources is debatable. It’s also moot. Most of our allies were going to have, at most, a token force in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. They were there largely at America’s urging and they’ll be happy to leave.

[...]

As with many other Obama foreign policy decisions, one might have wished for a better rollout. Consultation with our NATO allies and partners on the matter would have been good form. And, after a more than a decade of fighting, a presidential speech rather than a casual announcement by the defense secretary would have been more fitting.

Ultimately, though, hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call.

Much more at the link.

My latest for the Atlantic, “For Europe, Some Fear a Conflict Between Union and Democracy,” expands on a theme I briefly explored earlier in the week.

For now at least, the Greek referendum that could have been the beginning of the end for the euro has been shelved. The panic that it provoked, however, says something about the tension between democracy and effectiveness that has marked the European project from its outset.

[...]

There are times when national leaders make unpopular choices because they fear dire consequences if they don’t. On both sides of the Atlantic, bailouts for the financial industry and austerity measures have been enacted despite howls of popular protest. Governments have fallen in Europe and several others teeter on the brink. President Obama’s party suffered heavy losses in the 2010 midterms and mired in the 40′s in the opinion polls for two years.

Direct democratic participation in the form of referenda, popular in many EU countries and a handful of U.S. states, does not appear to have been working very well. The outcome is easily manipulated or distorted by question wording, election timing, and deceptive advertising. Representative democracy, where leaders make decisions and face electoral consequences, seems to be more effective, though at times elected leaders may feel compelled to do things that their constituents don’t want — such as bail-outs or austerity measures.

The problem, as Farrell puts it, is “whether there is a European Union that could be affirmed (after long and painful debates) by both the Greek and German publics.” In other words, is there a version of the EU that is acceptable to its Greek as well as its German constituents, both of whom currently have to live under EU rule. If there’s not — and this well might be the case — then it raises the question of whether the European Union, a collection of some of the world’s most democratic governments, is actually democratic itself.

Much more at the link, naturally.

What started off as an early-morning answer to a blog comment turned into my latest for The Atlantic, “The Changing Definition of ‘Conservative’.”

It’s based on two data points.

First, Rush Limbaugh, who today proclaimed ”Romney is not a conservative. He’s not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn’t,” was proclaiming Romney the only candidate who “embodies . . . all three legs of the conservative stool” om February 2008–nearly two years after the “RomneyCare” law that Limbaugh cites as his primary evidence and a year after Romney left the governor’s mansion.

Second, David Frum — who made his name as a conservative opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the The American Spectator and whose  first book, Dead Right (1994), was described by William F. Buckley as “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation” and who, as speechwriter for George W. Bush coined the phrase “axis of evil”–yesterday resigned from NPR’s “Marketplace” on the basis that he couldn’t in good conscience represent the conservative viewpoint as a counter to Robert Reich.

My explanation:

Parties losing elections tend to take one of two paths. Either they collectively decide that their platform is out of touch with public sentiment and adjust accordingly, or they decide that their problem was a poor candidate and weak messaging and double down.

[...]

The Republican Party took the second course after its 2008 defeat. Despite respect for his enormous courage during seven long years as a prisoner of war, conservatives never considered John McCain one of their own. He was nominated almost by default when Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and others more popular with the base imploded before the race really got started. And conservatives had been sold the idea that a relatively moderate candidate who could count on favorable press coverage would do well with the coveted “swing voters.”

[...]

This sentiment grew into a force of nature with the tea party movement. Ostensibly a backlash against government bailouts and out-of-control spending, it became something of a purge of Republicans who were deemed too moderate, with tea-party-backed candidates challenging Republican incumbents and establishment favorites — including McCain, who for a time looked likely to lose his Senate re-election race to former congressman J.D. Hayworth, before rallying for a comfortable win.

Longtime Delaware congressman Mike Castle was defeated by upstart Christine O’Donnell for the party’s Senate nomination. Longtime Utah senator Bob Bennett lost to Mike Lee. Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski was beaten in the primaries by tea-party favorite Joe Miller. All three of the tea-party candidates lost, although Murkowski narrowly won re-election anyway, as an independent.

To be sure, conservatives had plenty of successes, most notably the populist Scott Brown taking the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by liberal lion Teddy Kennedy. And Marco Rubio, who successfully primaried sitting Republican governor Charlie Christ, went on to easily win the general election and looks to be a rising star in Republican politics.

The result of all this — in addition to retaking the House and coming close to taking back the Senate — is a Republican Party and conservative movement that is largely bereft of the moderates of the past. After years of political leaders spouting conservative mantras without doing much to turn them into policy, the congressional delegations now feature a critical mass of True Believers.

Democratic leaders have charged their Republican counterparts with bad faith and hypocrisy for filibustering and vilifying policy proposals that their own party had proposed in the recent past. In some cases, this is justified. In many, though, it’s simply a function of the center of gravity having suddenly shifted. Proposals that came from the pages of National Review or the halls of the Heritage Foundation in 2006 may not be “conservative” by 2011 standards.

As many have noted, while conservative politicians constantly reference Ronald Reagan’s legacy as the gold standard, it’s arguable whether the Gipper himself would pass tea-party muster. After all, he signed a huge amnesty bill for illegal aliens into law and his signature tax cut left the top marginal rate at 50 percent. As we all know, anything above 35 percent is socialism.

Thus far, the presidential nominating process seems to be the last redoubt of the old conservatism, with Romney looking to be the likely nominee. But it’s been a rapid, stunning transition.

My latest for The Atlantic, “Romney’s Realist Foreign Policy Is a Lot Like Obama’s,” has been posted.

It’s ridiculously long, looking at the key points of a 27-page white paper, and therefore defies excerpting. The headline actually does an excellent job of capturing my conclusion:

Aside from the standard point scoring that goes along with a campaign to oust a sitting president, it’s remarkable how much continuity there is between Romney’s vision and Obama’s — which itself isn’t all that different from that which George W. Bush campaigned on in 2000 and governed by starting in 2006 or so. There’s some shibboleths uttered for the crowd to signal that he’s one of them but this is fundamentally a realist foreign policy vision couched in a lot of rhetoric about values.

Like Romney himself, it’s not particularly exciting. Nor, thankfully, is it frightening.

Many if not most foreign policy wonks will focus too much on the shibboleths. There’s quite a bit of silliness and cheap shots at the Obama administration. But, as I note in the piece, we have to read it with an understanding that “this is fundamentally a campaign document rather than a governing platform.” If one reads it with that in mind, there is a lot of sanity in the document–signals that Romney is not a neoconservative ideologue hell bent on invading every last country on the planet to promote democracy and American Greatness.

I point, for example, to this paragraph:

The United States will apply the full spectrum of hard and soft power to influence events before they erupt into conflict. In defending America’s national interest in a world of danger, the United States should always retain a powerful military capacity to defend itself and its allies. Resort to force is always the least desirable option, the costliest in resources and human life. A Romney administration will therefore employ all the tools of statecraft to shape the outcome of threatening situations before they demand military action. Though the use of armed force will never be off the table when the safety of America is at stake, a President Romney will take a comprehensive approach to America’s security challenges. The tools of “hard” and “soft” power must work together to be effective. They are complements not substitutes for one another.

This is at once incredibly banal and potentially a breath of fresh air. The buzz words “soft power,” “all the tools of statecraft,” and “comprehensive approach” amount to a coded signal that the days of treating military power as the solution to everything are behind us. Of course, having Eliot Cohen, a signatory to the Project for a New American Century declaration that founded the modern neoconservative movement, write your foreword sends the opposite signal.

This is just a roll-out; one expects Romney’s foreign policy vision to evolve somewhat as we get to the point in the campaign where we really start talking about the topic. But, unlike another roll-out four years ago (see “Rudy Giuliani’s Dangerously Stupid Foreign Policy Vision“) I’m mostly pleased.

My latest for The Atlantic, “The Thorniest Question: When Can a President Order an American Killed?” has been posted.

It’s a longish piece but the bottom line is this:

What’s to prevent a president from simply declaring Americans he doesn’t like for whatever reason “enemy combatants” and having them murdered? The same thing that prevents him from launching nuclear weapons, launching military attacks, and otherwise abusing the incredible power that comes with that office: the system, such as it is.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the road to the Oval Office goes through the American people. The grueling two-year campaign cycle serves as a powerful vetting tool, weeding out candidates without the character, judgment, and temperament to sit in the big chair. It’s not a perfect safeguard, of course, and there’s room to quibble over the quality of a few who made it through.

Second, we have a system of checks and balances. Congress has the power to force its way into the decision-making process in cases like this one, where action is planned over months and even years. In the Awlaki case in particular, Capitol Hill has had plenty of time to insist that the Obama administration lay out its case for action. Either they’ve done that (behind closed doors in the appropriate national security committees) and been satisfied or they’ve abrogated their responsibility. Further, lacking such advance warning, Congress can certainly exercise its oversight powers after the fact, calling the administration on to the carpet. Its members have enormous power in this regard, up to and including the ability to impeach the president.

Additionally, the courts also have a significant role to play in safeguarding the Constitution. While they’ve historically been deferential to elected policy-makers on matters of national security policy, they have, as seen in Hamden, Boumediene, and several other cases, been willing to limit their prerogatives, even when applied to unsympathetic defendants, in order to defend larger principles.

I don’t claim it’s a satisfying answer. But we trust the president to make these calls and Congress and the courts to keep him in check. If there’s a better system for balancing the legitimate national security interests and civil liberties of Americans, it has yet to be devised.

The German Marshall Fund has just released its annual Transatlantic Trends report, which measures U.S. and European public opinion on transatlantic issues and trends. The big headline is that a bare majority of Americans, 51 percent, now think the countries of Asia are more important to their national interests than the countries of the European Union, which only 38 percent of respondents called more important. But this change, likely driven by Asia’s economic rise and Europe’s economic decline, isn’t the only major piece of news: NATO is still seen as essential by 62 percent of both EU and U.S. respondents, demonstrating that the transatlantic military bond is still, despite a rough decade, firmly entrenched in American and European views of the world.

The strong public support for NATO is interesting precisely because it has been so steady, remaining at essentially the same levels for years now, despite the tremendous challenges it has faced: the U.S.-European tensions of the George W. Bush Bush years, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, and the global economic crisis.

[...]

EU approval of the U.S. president has been as high as 83 percent (2009) and as low as 18 percent (2006). Bush peaked at 38 percent (2002) and Obama has fallen to 75 percent with the latest survey.

Similarly — and in rough parallel — Europeans have fluctuated in their conviction that “U.S. leadership in world affairs is desirable.” It peaked at 64 percent (2002), dropped to the mid-30s after the Iraq squabble, and rebounded to the mid-50s during the Obama years. But, through it all, the NATO numbers stayed steady.

[...]

For over six decades, NATO — the transatlantic military alliance — has been the one constant throughout ever-shifting interests, affections, and priorities. For Europeans, it’s a guarantee that the world’s dominant military power will treat an attack against them as an attack against us. For Americans, it’s a tangible partnership with those whose values we share. That the U.S. and Europe are so military close is something we just assume — and that’s a good thing.

Much more at the link.

My first piece for CNN, “Libya Exposes Transatlantic Contradictions,” has been posted at Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square. It’s reposted below in its entirety.

As the Libya crisis has unfolded these last several months, some long-festering contradictions have come to light.

First, for a variety of reasons, many of us opposed American intervention in the conflict. As horrible as the potential humanitarian crisis in Benghazi could have been, preventing it did not strike us as a vital national interest worthy of going to war. Further, we had and continue to hold doubts about whether the end state — which the United States would have great responsibility for given our role in bringing it about — would be the stable, pro-Western democracy for which we would hope. Also, given fatigue from ten years of constant war fighting and the strains of the global recession, it’s clear there is little appetite for post-conflict reconstruction.

At the same time, however, once President Obama committed the United States to war and declared the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi as the only acceptable end game, it was very frustrating to simultaneously rule out a lead role in the mission.

The late-night comedian Jon Stewart’s quip that “the U.S. handing Libya over to NATO is like Beyoncé saying she’s ceding control to Sasha Fierce” constantly came to mind as the fight dragged on. Yes, Gadhafi was ultimately ousted — after six months — with a European face on the fight. But it came at the cost of undermining our partners’ confidence in American leadership as well as rendering hypocritical our complaints about European “caveats” in Afghanistan.

Second, the fight has both reaffirmed my belief that NATO is an absolutely vital vehicle for transatlantic cooperation and underscored my fear that it is structurally unsound. Headline writers to the contrary, the toppling of the Gadhafi regime is an unqualified success for the Alliance. Who else could have, in short order, coordinated a complex operation with American, Canadian, European and Arab states? Certainly, not the European Union. Nor was the French offer to simply lead in an ad hoc fashion acceptable to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and others. Years of working and training together under a stable institutional framework had created vital trust.

At the same time, however, the lack of investment in defense infrastructure that so many of us have been warning about for years — and that Bob Gates so eloquently outlined in his parting shots as U.S. defense secretary — was laid bare in the skies over Libya.

Despite the Europeans having far more at stake in their own backyard than the Americans — and France and the United Kingdom spearheading the intervention — the fact of the matter was that the operation would simply not have been possible without the United States. Not only did the Americans do most of the heavy lifting in the early days but, even after the ostensible handover, we supplied almost all of the aerial refueling, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses). And some European militaries infamously ran out of fuel and bullets and had to pass the proverbial hat around to stay in the fight.

Third, there is a serious disconnect between the will to intervene and the ability to do so. The Germans are rightly taking blistering criticism from not only their NATO partners but many of their own elder statesmen, most recently former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. But at least their reluctance to invest in their own defense is matched with reluctance to project power. Lamentable as the German pullback from the steady leadership position they’ve held the last quarter century may be, it is consistent with the will of the German people. In a democratic republic, that’s perhaps as it should be — although Kohl might argue that strong leadership could change public sentiment.

In the UK and France, by contrast, the combination of war weariness and the ravages of the economic crisis have forced austerity. Two countries who stood astride the world for centuries — frequently in direct competition with one another — by virtue of their ability to project military power are now reduced to sharing a single aircraft carrier. With massive unemployment and the demands of large welfare states, the political will to spend on defense just doesn’t exist. Yet, this has not thus far been met with a decreased appetite to project power.

The United States, meanwhile, is in a strange netherworld in between. Austerity is coming at the Pentagon, too, with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expected to find tens of billions in savings. But, with a defense budget larger than that of the other twenty-six allies and its likely military competitors combined, the pain will be felt mostly in lost jobs rather than diminished capability. Yet, as Libya demonstrated, the United States is no longer interested in carrying the burden.

At the Lisbon Summit last November, the Alliance put out a new Strategic Concept that paid lip service to a bold, ambitious future. At the time, many of us praised the words but noted that they would have to be followed by deeds. Ironically, the victory in Libya has demonstrated the hollowness of the words.

When they meet in Chicago next May, it will be time to re-align NATO’s strategic ambitions with its capabilities and will.

My latest for The National Interest is posted under the somewhat misleading headline “NATO Fails in Libya.”  A key excerpt:

I’m an Atlanticist by conviction and profession, but the notion that helping take out Muammar Qaddafi after six months of heavy fighting proves much of anything is absurd.

According to the World Bank, Libya is sixty-third in the world in GDP. Twenty of NATO’s twenty-seven members are ranked ahead of it. Alliance members hold the top spot, six of the top ten and eleven of the top twenty-five largest economies on the planet. Romania has more than double Libya’s GDP; it’s the sixteenth-largest economy in NATO.

Moreover, the United States spends more than Libya’s entire GDP on just the “Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation” portion of its defense budget. There are three larger items in said budget, with the Operations and Maintenance portion accounting for three and a half Libyas. The total U.S. defense budget? Almost nine Libyas.

There are twenty-six other militaries in NATO. Fourteen spent more that Libya’s $1.5 billion on defense in 2010, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. France and the UK each spent forty times that.

[...]

I remain a NATO booster because there is no alternative vehicle for the Western powers to act together in concert. Despite the Keystone Kops routine we saw in March and April, it would have been impossible to coordinate the operation without the infrastructure, planning, training and shared procedures developed over six decades of working together.

But it would be a great mistake to take the defeat of a tinpot dictator as sign that all is well. The six-month road to this victory should instead be a wake-up call.

Much more at the link.

The Atlantic has published an essay I wrote yesterday morning titled “Libya After Qaddafi: Lessons from Iraq 2003.” An excerpt:

Who can forget the giddiness when Saddam’s statue fell? When sons Qusay and Uday were killed? When Saddam himself was dragged out of his spider hole? Or the smiling faces of the purple-fingered Iraqis voting in their country’s first meaningful elections?

Before President Obama slips into a flight suit, it’s worth remembering that things soon took a turn for the worse in Iraq and it would be years before that fight began to calm.

That’s not to predict, much less hope for, a repeat in Libya. Despite Americans’ love of historical analogies in framing foreign events, they seldom follow neat patterns.

[...]

While the revolutionaries were united against Qadaffi, it’s far from clear what, if anything, they’re united for. And with their unifying enemy on his way out, they’ll need something more to bring them together to rule.

How will reconciliation with former regime elements be handled? How quickly will law and order be established? Will international peacekeepers be necessary? If so, how will such a force be organized and manned? When will elections be held and who will be allowed to participate? What form of government will be established in the interim? These are just a handful of the questions most immediately facing Libya.

Daunting though these questions might be, there’s at least one good reason to be optimistic that Qaddafi’s fall will not be like Saddam’s: the latter debacle is fresh on everyone’s minds. While NATO appears to have done scant planning for post-Qaddafi Libya, the Transitional National Council and others, including the UK government, have shown encouraging signs that they aim to avoid the mistakes of 2003.

Much more at the link.

My latest piece for The Atlantic, “Is the U.S.-European Relationship Really in Decline?” is posted. An excerpt:

[I]f it ever existed, the Unipolar Moment that Charles Krauthammer and others saw in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse is over. But that multipolar dynamic actually makes transatlantic cooperation more, not less, important. A hegemon needs much less help than one of many great powers, even if it remains the biggest.

Take the G-20. Seven of the members are NATO Allies: the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Turkey. Toss in the EU, and you have 40 percent of the delegation. If they can form a united front at G-20 summits, they are much more powerful than if each stands alone. Add in four NATO Partner countries (Russia, Japan, Australia, and South Korea) and you’re up to 60 percent of the delegation — a comfortable majority for the U.S.-European partnership and its circle of closest allies.

Granted, it’s unlikely that we’ll achieve consensus among all 12 states on any one issue, let alone most issues. But constantly working together toward shared goals and values expands a sense of commonality.

And, like so many things, projects end. Indeed, that’s generally the goal. The transatlantic military alliance that formed to defeat fascism remained intact after victory; indeed, it expanded to include its former German and Italian adversaries. NATO outlasted the demise of its raison d’être, the Soviet threat, and went on to fight together –along with many of its former adversaries — in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya. Is there seriously any doubt that other challenges will emerge in the future in which the Americans and its European allies might benefit from working together?

More at the link.

My first piece for The Atlantic, “How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology,” is posted.Some excerpts:

The United States has found itself in a seemingly endless series of wars over the past two decades. Despite frequent opposition by the party not controlling the presidency and often that of the American public, the foreign policy elite operates on a consensus that routinely leads to the use of military power to solve international crises.

Neoconservatives of both parties urge war to spread American ideals, seeing it as the duty of a great nation. Liberal interventionists see individuals, not states, as the key global actor and have deemed a Responsibility to Protect those in danger from their own governments, particularly when an international consensus to intervene can be forged. Traditional Realists, meanwhile, initially reject most interventions but are frequently drawn in by arguments that the national interest will be put at risk if the situation spirals out of control.

[...]

While neoconservatives and liberal interventionists have led post-Cold War U.S. foreign policymaking, traditional realists continue to dominate the academic study of security policy and even the rank-and-file military and intelligence communities. But their more ideological brethren are better positioned to win the day politically.

The Cold War not only provided a neat national grand strategy, the prospect that superpower competition could lead to global nuclear annihilation greatly restrained the inclination for adventurism. That may be why, for example, no one seriously suggested a Responsibility to Protect Ugandan innocents from the atrocities of military dictator Idi Amin; Uganda was a Soviet client state. Similarly, a U.S. invasion of Libya to affect regime change after Muammar Gaddafi’s 1980s terrorist strikes against our citizens would have been unthinkable. There was simply too much risk of escalating U.S.-Soviet tension.

Those days are gone. Bush senior proclaimed a “new world order” after the quick and decisive victory in the 1991 Gulf War, thinking that a permanent international consensus to enforce norms of decency had been forged. Though that grand vision never came to pass, the notion that the United States and its allies were now free to project power to “do good” has remained intact.

This has coincided with a still-ongoing revolution in global communications technology. With the rise of network news channels that can broadcast far-away violence into American living rooms, and more recently of social media technologies that give voice to oppressed peoples in all corners of the globe, this environment has made it much easier for advocates of humanitarian intervention to make their case.

Realist arguments about national interests, unknown risks, and post-conflict reconstruction have proven far less able to sway Americans than are television images of humans being slaughtered. Whereas the victims of Idi Amin were statistics, those dying in the Arab Spring have faces, names, and Facebook accounts.

The passionate zeal of the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives satisfies an emotional hunger that has been a part of our political system since the emotion-laden days of the Cold War, when the public first came to view U.S. foreign policy as a tool of good to be deployed against evil. Both ideologies use the language of morality and appeal to our shared humanity. People want to do something about tragedy and it’s easy to persuade them that doing the right thing will be worthwhile. Realists may often be right, but they are rarely convincing.

The heart of the argument is between those. I invite you to read it at the link.

A version of a piece I wrote Wednesday, titled “NATO’s Death Greatly Exaggerated,” has finally been published at Foreign Policy under the title “Back in the Saddle: How Libya Helped NATO Get Its Groove Back.” The opener:

NATO’s operations in Libya got off to a rocky start. Although the venerable treaty organization’s member countries — principally Britain, France, and the United States — were dropping bombs on Muammar al-Qaddafi’s military as soon as the ink was dry on the March 17 U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, as of late March the allies still couldn’t agree on whether NATO itself should lead the mission. Turkey, opposed to intervention, insisted on the alliance acting unanimously, which was to say, not acting at all; hawkish France opposed NATO leadership, fearing less-enthusiastic countries would muck up the ad hoc coalition’s campaign. Weeks later, confusion still persists, with heads of member states issuing conflicting statements and military leaders contradicting their civilian bosses.

These hiccups have spawned the inevitable prophecies of doom for the alliance. “Will the Libya intervention bring the end of NATO?” asks the headline on a column by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post this week. Other interested parties in the Libyan conflict, meanwhile, have engaged in no end of backseat driving over the alliance’s performance. The Arab League, whose call for action in Libya was a crucial catalyst for spurring intervention, denounced NATO for being too aggressive once the action began. The anti-Qaddafi rebels bitterly complained the alliance wasn’t doing enough.

These dire predictions are nothing new — they’ve greeted every NATO operation over the past several decades. NATO’s critics were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. Indeed, the case for the alliance is stronger than it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Much, much more at the link.

My first piece for The American Conservative, which they’ve titled “War Isn’t for Everyone–The military needs civilian control, not citizen soldiers,” is in the May issue. It’s now available online under the title “Civilian Control, Not Citizen Soldiers.”

The impetus for the article (submitted February 2nd but delayed a month because of events in the Middle East) is that the recent hand-wringing by Bob Gates, Mike Mullen, and others that the military is bearing the brunt of our perpetual state of war while most of us  are blithely aware of their sacrifices misses the point.

Key excerpts:

• America has traded a model in which a tiny cadre of professional soldiers was augmented with legions of amateurs during wartime for a large professional force augmented by a semi-professional reserve force. And, by most accounts, the result is a far superior fighting machine.

• That most people don’t share in the sacrifice of war is no different than the fact that most of us don’t share in the sacrifice of fighting fires, rounding up criminals, slaughtering and processing meat, mining coal, or any number of other dirty, dangerous jobs that need doing.

• We’ve gone from military service being something that was simply viewed as a man’s duty, to the ugly disdain for the military in some circles in the late Vietnam era, to a cult of worship where everyone who wears a uniform is viewed as a hero or part of a priesthood above questioning.

• [T]hey have one unique attribute that distinguishes them from those in any other line of work: They’re not allowed to quit whenever they feel like it.

Originally posted March 24.

World Politics Review has published a special issue on “NATO’s Identity Crisis” ahead of next month’s Lisbon summit and the unveiling of a new Strategic Concept. I contributed the lead essay, “NATO in an Age of Austerity.”

The 3500-word article can be accessed at the link above.  The essence of the  article is that the global recession is forcing the key European Allies to make major cuts in their defense budgets, widening an already huge capabilities gap with the United States and bringing into question the value and viability of the 60-year-old institution. The cuts coincide with what Julian Lindley-French has termed a Great European Defense Depression, where a case for armed forces and the use of force has been profoundly damaged, and a growing sense in Washington that Europe is of decreasing importance.

The best-case scenario is for austerity to force a wholesale rethinking of how Europe manages its defense posture, with decisions made as an Alliance rather than piecemeal, coordinating cuts and acquisitions in such a way as to avoid duplication of effort and ensure that all necessary bases are covered. The promising negotiations currently underway between France and the United Kingdom offer a ray of hope for this outcome.

My conclusion:

Over the past few months, dozens of high-level discussions with insiders either working on or close to the negotiations for the new Strategic Concept have offered little reason to question Kurt Volker’s previously cited observation about NATO’s “lack of unified commitment and vision.” Virtually every contentious issue appears to be still up in the air as of this writing, less than a month from the Lisbon summit at which it will be finalized.

Far from being the grand unifying vision for a renewed alliance that was imagined as recently as a year ago, the final document will essentially be a punt. The assembled ministers will agree on some vague language about working together on a variety of listed tasks, while articulating little in the way of substance that might bind the alliance together.

Given the current environment, that’s not such a bad outcome. Ultimately, NATO’s continued existence, even without a shared vision on future missions, is important in its own right. As Ramsussen recently observed, “There is no place but NATO where Europe and North America sit together every day to assess the security issues that affect us, and figure out how to tackle them together.” Even though no pressing security threat exists today that might unify the alliance in the same way that the Cold War-era threat of nuclear annihilation did, the NATO allies continue to share interests and values that will, from time to time, require collective action to defend. And when that time comes, they must be prepared to do so.

More at the link.  If you’re not already a subscriber, you’ll need to register.  Or you can click over from the Atlantic Council version of this post, since the domain is whitelisted through.

My latest for The National Interest, arguing that the talk of crisis in Europe is overblown, is up.   Naturally, they’ve titled it “Crisis in the EU.”

While these essays and others like them point to very real problems with the European project in general and the eurozone in particular, they tend to make at least one of three mistakes: treating the EU as if it were a nation-state, regarding anything less than utopia as a failure, and projecting short-term trends long into the future.

[...]

Regardless of the policy choices made, it’s unfathomable that Germany, France, the United Kingdom and most of the other members of the EU will decide that they would be better off not cooperating with one another in some very intense fashion on economic and security issues. Indeed, it is just inconceivable that any but the most tangential current EU member won’t be part of a free-trade, open-border zone with all the others. The benefits are so large and so engrained in the European culture at this point that abandoning progress would be madness.

Much more at the link.