Wednesday, May 30, 2012 3:19:33 AM
Dick Cheney poised to influence another presidency
May 23, 2012
Rachel Maddow reviews the shocking and shameful political history of former Vice President Dick Cheney and notes that not only has Mitt Romney stacked his campaign with former Bush staffers but he has openly expressed his association and admiration for Dick Cheney without fear of political repercussion.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47544497#47544497 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRqRJ6_W83U (clip of Mitt speaking re Cheney at the end cut off a few seconds; same clip of Mitt begins the next below)]
*
Will the GOP identity crisis bring us back to Bush?
May 23, 2012
Frank Rich, writer-at-large for New York Magazine, talks with Rachel Maddow about the degree of superficiality in the 2012 presidential race and the Romney campaign's effort to associate itself with Cheney-style truculence without any of the policy rigor.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47544521#47544521 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIBeCWmpic ]
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The Bushies are back
Missed the neocons? Doon't worry, Mitt Romney's getting the band back together again
May 3, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/03/the_bushies_are_back/singleton/ [with comments]
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Romney’s Adversarial View of Russia Stirs Debate
Mitt Romney, who prayed at The Citadel in October before a major foreign policy speech, said recently that Russia was this country’s chief geopolitical adversary.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times
Mitt Romney signed posters at a campaign event on Friday in Charlotte, N.C.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: May 11, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney ]’s recent declaration that Russia [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/russiaandtheformersovietunion/index.html ] is America’s top geopolitical adversary drew raised eyebrows and worse from many Democrats, some Republicans and the Russians themselves, all of whom suggested that Mr. Romney was misguidedly stuck in a cold war mind-set.
But his statement [ http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/26/romney-russia-is-our-number-one-geopolitical-foe/ ] was not off the cuff — and it was not the first time Mr. Romney had stirred debate over his hawkish views on Russia. Interviews with Republican foreign policy experts close to his campaign and his writings on the subject show that his stance toward Russia reflects a broader foreign policy view that gives great weight to economic power and control of natural resources. It also exhibits Mr. Romney’s confidence that his private-sector experience would make him a better negotiator on national security issues than President Obama has been.
Mr. Romney’s views on Russia have set off disagreements among some of his foreign policy advisers. They put him in sync with the more conservative members of his party in Congress, who have similarly criticized Mr. Obama as being too accommodating to Russia, and generally reflect the posture of some neoconservatives.
But they have frequently put him at odds with members of the Republican foreign policy establishment, like Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who was defeated in a primary this week [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/us/politics/lugar-loses-primary-challenge-in-indiana.html ], and the party’s shrinking band of foreign policy “realists” — those who advocate a less ideological and more pragmatic view of relations with rival powers.
The Romney campaign has been critical of Mr. Obama’s record and positions on a variety of national security issues, including containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and confronting China’s rise. But many of the positions taken by Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have either been vague or not fundamentally different from those of the administration.
Russia, however, is an exception, one where Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has carved out a clear contrast to Mr. Obama, who came to office promising to “reset” relations with Moscow, only to find that Russia can be a difficult partner. Just this week, President Vladimir V. Putin abruptly canceled his plans to visit the United States [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/world/europe/white-house-says-putin-will-skip-g-8-meeting-at-camp-david.html ] next week for the Group of 8 summit meeting and for talks with Mr. Obama at Camp David.
Mr. Romney was a leading opponent of the most recent arms-reduction treaty with Russia, ratified by the Senate and signed last year by Mr. Obama. Russia figures prominently in Mr. Romney’s book, where he calls it one of four competitors for world leadership, along with the United States, China and “violent jihadism” embraced by Iran and terrorist groups.
Some advisers close to Mr. Romney, who declined to be quoted or identified by name, say Russia is a good illustration of his belief that national security threats are closely tied to economic power — in this case stemming from Russia’s oil and gas reserves, which it has used to muscle European countries dependent on energy imports.
They also cite his tendency to view foreign policy conflicts as zero-sum negotiations. Mr. Romney, an accomplished deal-maker at Bain Capital, views his negotiating skills as an advantage he holds over Mr. Obama.
Mr. Romney signaled his stance toward Russia two years ago, when he argued that the New Start missile treaty with Russia should be rejected, putting him at odds with a long line of former Republican secretaries of state and defense. A number of arms control specialists said they were startled by some of Mr. Romney’s assertions, like fretting about intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on bombers.
“It would be really fun to watch a Russian bomber with an SS-25 strung to its stomach try to take off,” said Steve Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine and now director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “Some of the arguments just left people scratching their heads.”
Within hours, rebuttal pieces to Mr. Romney’s position, laid out in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, were being circulated among arms control experts. Mr. Lugar, who had spent decades working on arms control issues, publicly disparaged some of Mr. Romney’s arguments as “discredited objections.”
Mr. Romney felt the missile treaty was a bad deal partly because it would impede American defenses by preventing ballistic missile silos from being converted to missile defense sites, while treaty supporters said that was not an issue because American officials prefer to build missile defense installations from the ground up.
Mr. Romney also criticized a White House decision scrapping a proposed antiballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe and building in its place a reconfigured system to shoot down short- and medium-range Iranian missiles. Mr. Romney argued that Mr. Obama had caved to Russian pressure, trading away a crucial program with little in return. Administration officials say their reconfigured system offers better protection for American allies.
Mr. Romney’s more recent statements on Russia have also drawn criticism from nonpartisan Russia experts who say he mischaracterizes Russia’s potential economic power and paints an inaccurate picture of Russian recalcitrance. Republicans close to Mr. Romney acknowledge that politics are a factor, but they also say Mr. Romney is driven by fears that Mr. Putin will continue political repression and use his country’s energy wealth to finance military expansion.
Some former diplomats and Russia specialists, and some leading Republicans in Congress, have also questioned his characterization of the country as America’s major foe. Many experts, including some close to his campaign, see a declining power that the United States will need to help manage global challenges. Some analysts also say Mr. Romney understates the help Russia has provided in dealing with rogue states, like backing a heavy-arms embargo and other sanctions against Iran in 2010.
“There’s a whole school of thought that Russia is one you need to work with to solve other problems in the world, rather than being the problem,” said Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Russia has blocked United Nations Security Council efforts [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/world/middleeast/syria-homs-death-toll-said-to-rise.html?pagewanted=all ] to end violence in Syria, drawing a rebuke from the Obama administration. But analysts also point out Russia’s support for the Iran arms embargo, its cancellation of a surface-to-air missile system sale to Iran and its allowing supplies to be sent through Russia to troops in Afghanistan.
Mr. Romney says natural resources could vault Russia to a position of global influence rivaling any nation by midcentury. But many analysts say Russia’s fate is so closely tied to oil exports that anything short of a sustained rise in prices will lead to cuts in spending on the military and social programs. Citigroup estimates that oil must reach $150 a barrel in coming years (from current export prices of $120) for Russia to pay for Mr. Putin’s spending promises.
The co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s Russia working group, Leon Aron, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote this month [ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/04/a_kremlin_made_of_sand ] that in the short term, “Russia’s most serious risk stems from a near-fatal dependence on the price of oil,” and that it could face a fiscal crisis as soon as 2014 that depletes cash for the military and other commitments. (Mr. Aron declined to comment, but friends say he would never argue, as Mr. Romney has, that Russia is America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”)
Some experts add that the only way the Russian economy could reach the heights Mr. Romney fears would be through a wholesale economic liberalization — one that would be cheered by Western countries.
“It would mean radically reforming and changing the Putin system,” said Angela Stent, a Russia expert at Georgetown University and a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/politics/romneys-view-of-russia-sparks-debate.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/politics/romneys-view-of-russia-sparks-debate.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
===
Is There a Romney Doctrine?
Tom Tomorrow
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: May 12, 2012
WASHINGTON
DURING the Republican primary debates in January, when Mitt Romney was still trying to outmaneuver the challengers who were questioning his conservative bona fides, he made a declaration about Afghanistan that led a faction of his foreign policy advisers to shake their heads in wonderment.
“We should not negotiate with the Taliban [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/politics/scrutiny-of-romneys-stance-on-afghan-war-now-more-likely.html?pagewanted=all ],” the former Massachusetts governor declared, just as diplomats dispatched by the president were in Qatar trying to get those negotiations going. “We should defeat the Taliban.” In case anyone missed his meaning, he drove home the point, saying the best strategy was, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.”
Set aside for the moment that many of Mr. Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement, which means talking to some elements of the Taliban. Stephen Hadley, the former national security adviser to George W. Bush, has argued this “would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies.” A co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s working group on Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Shinn, who also served Mr. Bush, was co-author of perhaps the best single unclassified document on the complexities of those negotiations, entitled “Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer [ http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1131.pdf ].” It argued that a negotiated deal would “obviously be desirable” if elements of the Taliban could be persuaded to renounce violence and take “some role in Afghan governance short of total control.”
It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/index.html ]. In the Afghanistan case, “none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,” one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.
“It begged the obvious question,” the adviser added. “Do we stay another decade? How many forces, and how long, does that take? Do we really want to go into the general election telling Americans that we should stay a few more years to eradicate the whole Taliban movement?” In phase one of a long presidential campaign, Mr. Romney could duck those questions: the spotlight moved to the wisdom of the economic stimulus and the auto-industry bailout, contraception and, now, same-sex marriage and high school bullying.
But in the long stretch before the Republican convention in August, the battle for Mr. Romney’s mind on the key foreign policy questions that have defined the past few decades will have to be joined: When is a threat to America so urgent that the United States should intervene unilaterally? Is it worth the cost and casualties to rebuild broken societies? Should America feel it must always be in the lead — as Mr. Romney seems to argue — or let other powers play that role when their interests are more directly affected?
On these questions, Mr. Romney’s own advisers, judging by their public writing and comments, possess widely differing views — often a result of the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power. But what has struck both his advisers and outside Republicans is that in his effort to secure the nomination, Mr. Romney’s public comments have usually rejected mainstream Republican orthodoxy. They sound more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the “Bolton faction,” as insiders call the group led by John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations. In a stormy tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Bolton was often arguing that international institutions, the United Nations included, should be routed around because they so often frustrate American interests.
Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.
This may change as the arrival of the general election requires Mr. Romney to grapple with the question of how to attack a Democratic president whose affection for unilateral use of force — from drones over Pakistan and Yemen to a far greater role for the Special Operations command — has immunized him a bit from the traditional claim that Democrats can’t stand the sight of hard power. So far Mr. Romney’s most nuanced line of attack was laid out in the introduction to a campaign white paper [ http://www.mittromney.com/sites/default/files/shared/AnAmericanCentury-WhitePaper_0.pdf ] last fall written by Eliot Cohen, a historian and security expert who worked for Condoleezza Rice in the State Department, that the “high council of the Obama administration” views the “United States as a power in decline,” a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.” It also alleged a “torrent of criticism, unprecedented for an American president, that Barack Obama has directed at his own country.”
But in a campaign likely to be dominated by a slow-burning nuclear crisis with Iran, the likelihood of a North Korean nuclear test, the kind of eruptions with China that have dominated headlines for the past two weeks and the end of the surge in Afghanistan come September, the internal struggles between the various factions within the Romney campaign are likely to become evident.
Iran may be a first test. Mr. Romney put it pretty bluntly, in another line that caused some of his advisers to cringe and others to celebrate, when he declared late in 2011: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”
BUT when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding. The economic sanctions Mr. Obama has imposed have been far more crippling to the Iranian economy than anything President Bush did between the public revelation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 2003 and the end of Mr. Bush’s term in early 2009. Covert action has been stepped up, too. Mr. Bolton has called efforts to negotiate with Iran “delusional [ http://mrctv.org/videos/john-bolton-obama-administration-delusional-trying-talk-iran-out-their-nuclear-program ],” but other advisers — mostly those who dealt with the issue during the Bush administration — say they are a critical step in holding together the European allies and, if conflict looms, proving to Russia [ ] and China that every effort was made to come to a peaceful resolution. Several e-mails to the campaign asking for Mr. Romney’s position on the talks yielded no response.
“There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” said one adviser who aligns more often with Mr. Bolton. “But as in any campaign, there are outer circles, inner circles and inner-inner circles, and I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own on this.” Another adviser, saying he would be “cashiered” if the campaign caught him talking to a reporter without approval, said the real answer was that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office” and for now was “just happy to leave the impression that when Obama says he’ll stop an Iranian bomb he doesn’t mean it, and Mitt does.”
On some issues, Mr. Romney clearly does have his own views: He drafted an op-ed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/05/AR2010070502657.html ] opposing the ratification of the New Start treaty [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/strategic_arms_reduction_treaty/index.html ] with Russia, which cut in half the two countries’ nuclear launchers but left huge stockpiles of non-deployed nuclear weapons [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/atomic_weapons/index.html ] largely untouched — without much input from his staff. In recent days, Mr. Romney’s advisers argued that the candidate’s declaration that Russia is “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” looks less out of touch now that President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed his office with a brutal crackdown on dissent. Mr. Romney’s best line: He will “reset the reset.”
More complicated for Mr. Romney, given his business credentials, is his position on China. He argues for more arms to Taiwan and much tougher use of trade sanctions to respond to China’s currency and market manipulations.
In the past, such actions have frozen Chinese cooperation with the United States, but, the white paper insists, “Romney will work to persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament,” as if the last three presidents have not.
Such trade-offs are, of course, a bit too subtle for any presidential campaign. Yet so far this year Mr. Romney has spent little time on foreign policy, understandable given the length of the primary battles. The Romney strategy for now may simply be to portray Mr. Obama as a weak apologizer and figure out the details later.
The chief Washington correspondent [ http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/s/david_e_sanger/index.html ] for The New York Times and author of the forthcoming “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power [ http://www.randomhouse.com/book/202541/confront-and-conceal-by-david-e-sanger ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/sunday-review/is-there-a-romney-doctrine.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/sunday-review/is-there-a-romney-doctrine.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Mitt Romney's Russia Problem
Mark Adomanis, Contributor
5/12/2012 @ 10:14AM
Perhaps motivated by the path-breaking investigative research featured on this blog [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2012/01/06/mitt-romneys-russia-policy-a-lot-of-nothing/ ]*, the New York Times today has a story about Mitt Romney’s aggressive, strange, and incoherent views on Russia [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/politics/romneys-view-of-russia-sparks-debate.html (two items up)]. People, even the Very Serious People who are the NYT’s target demographic, are starting to notice that the Republican presidential nominee has views on Russia that, even in the context of an increasingly angry and aggressive GOP, are really quite odd.
I encourage everyone to read the article in full, it’s not particularly long and it covers the relevant issues quite well, but I did want to highlight a few paragraphs because they say quite a lot about the 2012 presidential election and the vanishingly small foreign policy differences between Obama and Romney:
The Romney campaign has been critical of Mr. Obama’s record and positions on a variety of national security issues, including containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and confronting China’s rise. But many of the positions taken by Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have either been vague or not fundamentally different from those of the administration.
Russia, however, is an exception, one where Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has carved out a clear contrast to Mr. Obama, who came to office promising to “reset” relations with Moscow, only to find that Russia can be a difficult partner…
Some advisers close to Mr. Romney, who declined to be quoted or identified by name, say Russia is a good illustration of his belief that national security threats are closely tied to economic power — in this case stemming from Russia’s oil and gas reserves, which it has used to muscle European countries dependent on energy imports.
They also cite his tendency to view foreign policy conflicts as zero-sum negotiations. Mr. Romney, an accomplished deal-maker at Bain Capital, views his negotiating skills as an advantage he holds over Mr. Obama…
Mr. Romney also criticized a White House decision scrapping a proposed antiballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe and building in its place a reconfigured system to shoot down short- and medium-range Iranian missiles. Mr. Romney argued that Mr. Obama had caved to Russian pressure, trading away a crucial program with little in return. Administration officials say their reconfigured system offers better protection for American allies.
I wanted to start off by noting that I am genuinely confused as to why this article was released today. Using arcane and obscure tactics such as “going to Mitt Romney’s website and reading his Russia platform” and “Google searching his statements on the START treaty,” I was able to produce a broadly similar analysis back in January. I’m not complaining that the story was written, as should be clear from the paragraphs I pasted above it’s an extremely valuable, I am just honestly curious as to why it was written in mid-May instead of mid-April, mid-March, or mid-February. As near as I can tell Romney has been incredibly consistent in his statements on Russia, so it’s not as if there’s some sudden change in policy that needs to be analyzed.
Moving right along, the idea that Romney’s dealings in the business world will in any way prepare him to deal with the Russians is an extremely strange one** (I could use other adjectives to describe it, but I’m trying to stay polite). Vladimir Putin isn’t some chubby, balding corporate executive from flyover country, the sorts of people over whom Mitt Romney is used to running roughshod in his business dealings, he’s someone who’s been at the highest levels of state power for more than a decade, someone who knows how the game is played.
Putin is not going to be won over with PowerPoint presentations about “synergy,” he won’t be impressed to hear someone use the word “leverage” in every sentence, and he can’t simply be “bought out” as would often happen in Bain-style hostile takeovers. If your plan to extract concessions from Vladimir Putin is “aggressively bluster in the hope that he caves” you’re going to be extremely disappointed. Moreover the entire Russian diplomatic corps is basically opposed to zero-sum deals as a matter of principle. The Russians, and this is not a personal characteristic of Vladimir Putin but something that characterized Russian/Soviet diplomacy for decades, never give up something for nothing. If Romney views the United States-Russia relationship as something he can “win,” then he is guaranteed to fail.
The article also briefly outlines Romney’s very strange belief that Russia is somehow on pace to become an economic hegemon. Indeed the extent to which Romney’s beliefs differ from those of Leon Aron, his Chief Russia adviser, is scarcely believable and, frankly, more than a little bit alarming. I don’t think a political campaign needs to have everyone in ideological lockstep, but Aron and Romney aren’t even marching in the same direction. Aron thinks that the far more serious danger facing the US is of a weakened and disintegrating Russia, while Romney thinks they are a “rising power” whose military and economic power pose a direct threat to American national security. Romney and Aron are not simply “not on the same page,” they’re not reading from the same book. Hell, they’re not even reading books in the same language.
But apart from Romney’s unique foibles concerning Russia, which I’ve covered before and will cover again, I wanted to focus on the last paragraph I cited above because it is as handy a summation of the corrupted state of American foreign policy as you’re likely to see. To avoid turning into a partyarchy , a stale and perverted form of democracy in which elections are held and parties alternate in power but there is never a meaningful change in policy, a country should have at least two parties that have essentially dissimilar views: a party in favor of greater economic liberalization, and a party that is in favor of greater state intervention, a party in favor of an aggressive military posture, and a party that strongly favors diplomacy and so on and so on.
But as that paragraph makes clear, there is no such distinction in America right now. The “dovish” president doesn’t argue against the idea of ABM, a position which until recently was held purely by conservative Republicans, indeed he is fully and aggressively in favor of it and has been willing to sacrifice the effectiveness of “the reset” at its altar. The only differences between Barack Obama‘s view of missile defense and Mitt Romney’s view of missile defense are tactical in nature. They both agree that America needs ABM to defend itself from non-existent Iranian missiles carrying non-existent Iranian nuclear warheads, they just have some quibbles about where exactly to put the interceptors and how much the Russians should be antagonized in the process of doing so. To put it succinctly: when Barack Obama’s position on missile defense, which in the 1980's would have put him in Reagan’s camp, is the farthest “left” that a mainstream politician is allowed to go, something is very badly amiss.
* For the sarcasm-deficient, this is a joke. I’m fully aware that the New York Times does not orient its news coverage based on anything that has been featured, or will be featured, on this blog .
** The idea that experience in ‘business’ gives someone unique insight into international diplomacy is shockingly naive, which is very odd for a campaign that has relentlessly attacked Barack Obama for his supposed naivete and fecklessness.
Copyright 2012 Forbes.com LLC™ (emphasis in original)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2012/05/12/mitt-romneys-russia-problem/ [with comments]
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The path to 'a hollow military' or a hollow op-ed?
By Steve Benen
Mon May 21, 2012 4:47 PM EDT.
Mitt Romney has a curious habit of being one of the most prolific op-ed writers in the country. He doesn't much care for interviews or press conferences, but the Republican loves to engage the media in a way in which he doesn't have to answer any direct questions.
Lately, this means op-eds that chase President Obama around the country -- the president schedules an event in a city, so Romney writes an op-ed in that city's major daily paper. Yesterday, the tactic led the former governor to write a piece [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-19/news/ct-perspec-0520-romneynato-20120519_1_collective-military-irrelevance-nato-president-obama ] for the Chicago Tribune, condemning Obama in advance of Chicago's NATO meeting.
Most of the condemnation is pretty boilerplate -- neither Romney nor his ghost writers are good at faking expertise in foreign affairs -- and almost appears intended to embarrass the United States in advance of a meeting of world leaders.
But one claim, in particular, seemed rather remarkable to me.
Instead of working to strengthen NATO, the Obama administration has taken actions that will only undermine the alliance.
Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. President Obama's own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called cuts of this magnitude "devastating" to our national security. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has plainly said that such a reduction means "we would not any longer be a global power." Despite these warnings, the Obama administration has pledged to veto an attempt to replace these cuts with savings in other areas.
This is reckless.... With the United States on a path to a hollow military, we are hardly in a position to exercise leadership in persuading our allies to spend more on security.
Romney may have trouble keeping up with current events -- I imagine he's rather busy -- but he should at least try to brush up on the basics before publishing nonsense in major media outlets.
In reality, most of the defense cuts Romney's referring to were proposed by Republicans. He may not realize this, but he's accusing his own allies of trying to gut the American military.
It's true that the Obama administration is prepared to cut about $500 billion from the Pentagon budget in the coming years. But contrary to the misleading claims in Romney's op-ed, U.S. military leaders support these cuts [ http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/30/10938733-paul-ryans-unbridled-chutzpah-on-defense-spending ] and have asked Congress to approve them. These reductions -- made in the name of fiscal responsibility, which Republicans occasionally pretend to care about -- don't "hollow" the U.S. military. We can accept this as true since the U.S. military agrees.
But there are additional Pentagon cuts that may yet be approved, not because the White House requested them, but because congressional Republicans did. As Ben Armbruster explained [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/20/487290/romney-obama-military-sequester/ ]:
Congress, however, is responsible for the other $500 billion in military spending cuts as a result of the bipartisan debt deal that Obama signed into law. Those reductions are set to take place because of the sequester the deal put in place should lawmakers fail to agree on how to find savings elsewhere (House Republicans want to cut much needed programs [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/07/479229/house-gop-military-cut-programs-poor/ ] for the nation’s poorest [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/08/480017/mccarthy-trimming-fat-poor/ ] to offset the military spending cuts).
Indeed, as the Washington Post noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/ahead-of-nato-summit-mitt-romney-argues-that-bipartisan-defense-cuts-are-obamas-fault/2012/05/18/gIQALxH5YU_blog.html ], “Romney’s statement fails to note that the sequester was part of a deal negotiated by the White House and leaders of both parties, a sweeping proposal that was approved by nearly three-quarters of the House Republican conference and six in 10 Senate Republicans.”
Here's hoping NATO officials in Chicago for the event didn't see the op-ed. I'd hate to leave world leaders with the impression that the leaders of one of our major political parties has no idea what he's talking about.
© 2012 msnbc.com (emphasis in original)
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/21/11796875-the-path-to-a-hollow-military-or-a-hollow-op-ed [with comments]
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Powell Criticizes Romney on Foreign Policy
May 23, 2012
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/powell-criticizes-romney-on-foreign-policy/ [with comments]
*
Colin Powell questions Mitt Romney’s foreign policy: “C’mon, Mitt, think.”
May 23, 2012
http://articles.boston.com/2012-05-23/politics/31823725_1_foreign-policy-colin-powell-romney
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‘Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.’
"Darth Vader" accepts the Ultimate Villain award from "Star Wars" creator George Lucas during the 2011 Scream Awards on Oct. 15, 2011, in Los Angeles.
(Chris Pizzello/AP) (Chris Pizzello - AP)
Posted by Gregory Koger at 04:41 PM ET, 05/08/2012
I wish to address the most important policy question of the millennium: Should we build a Death Star? This debate picked up this year after some Lehigh University students estimated [ ] that just the steel for a Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the current GDP of the Earth.
Kevin Drum suggests [ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/death-star-surprisingly-cost-effective-weapons-system ] that this cost estimate is too low but, in the context of a galactic economy, a Death Star is perfectly affordable and “totally worth it.” Seth Masket [ http://enikrising.blogspot.com/2012/02/you-cant-afford-not-to-buy-death-star.html ] and Jamelle Bouie [ http://prospect.org/article/death-stars-arent-all-fun-and-games ] highlight the military downside of the Death Star, suggesting that more people might rebel against the wholesale genocide of the Empire, and that the Death Star would be the prime target of any rebellion.
I have two thoughts to add. First, the Death Star is a bit misunderstood. It is primarily a tool of domestic politics rather than warfare, and should be compared to alternative means of suppressing the population of a galaxy. Second, as a weapon of war, it should be compared to alternative uses of scarce defense resources. Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.
The Death Star and the Dictator’s Dilemma
The classic problem of representative democracy is that citizens must delegate power to leaders, and then ensure that leaders do not use that power to serve their own interests. As James Madison states, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Dictators suffer a similar problem of delegation, but in reverse. Dictators must delegate the tasks of subduing and taxing the population to internal security forces, and of maintaining external security to subordinate governors and generals. Any delegated power, however, could be used to displace the dictator. Internal security forces can assassinate the dictator or join in palace coups. Military leaders can use their forces to rebel against the dictator or secede from the dictator’s realm with a slice of territory. So the dictator must carefully design her security apparatus to maintain control of the population without empowering potential rivals. This challenge grows acute the more dispersed the dictator’s realm and the greater the number of external threats. (For more on the strategy of dictatorship, see here [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Politics/dp/161039044X ]. Political scientists, feel free to add citations in the comments section).
I see the Death Star (DS) as the Emperor’s solution to the dictator’s dilemma. First, note that its construction precedes the Rebel Alliance; the plans are first developed by the Separatists in Episode 2 and, by the time it is completed, the Rebel Alliance has just won its “first victory.” While it may have some use as a deterrent against possible invaders, the DS is primarily a tool of domestic politics. Prior to its completion, the Emperor is compelled to keep the Imperial Senate around, presumably to maintain the semblance of popular consent. But the Senate imposes some inefficiency — meddling in military strategy, perhaps, or directing spending to some favored planets. Once the DS is operational, the Emperor can disband the Senate and, instead, empower Imperial governors to suppress the local population and extract revenue. Here’s the critical scene [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYllEjiQ3SQ ]:
Note that this scheme provides an easy answer to the question, “how can we afford a Death Star?” If the scheme works, the Death Star will pay for itself dozens of times in the additional tax revenue from fearful planets, and by the money not spent by the military putting down revolts with conventional weapons.
But will it work? Only if it induces cooperation through fear. Every planet blown up represents a tremendous loss of potential future revenue, so like nuclear weapons today, the actual use of the DS is a calamity. Moreover, like nuclear weapons, they only work as a deterrent if they are used judiciously. Citizens throughout the galaxy must believe that failure to pay their taxes and comply with their Imperial masters will lead to detonation, but also that compliance will save them. The fact that the DS was used against Alderaan, however, would likely have had the opposite effect. Alderaan is “peaceful” and “has no weapons.” It was detonated because its teenage senator was secretly aiding the Rebel Alliance and waited too long to give up Dantoonie. To me, that’s a little too Caligula to induce rational compliance. One imagines the conversations on other planets:
Peasant 1: Did you hear the Empire blew up Alderaan? What kind of government blows up one of the richest planets in the galaxy because of one smack-talking teenager? It could be any of us next.
Peasant Windu: Enough is enough! I have had it with these [redacted] emperors on their [redacted] Death Star!
If the net effect of the DS is to make every person in the galaxy think their planet could be the next one arbitrarily destroyed, it actually mobilizes them to join the rebellion.
If the DS is an uncertain solution to the problem of internal security, what are the alternatives?
1) Democracy? Unacceptable to the seeker of unlimited power. Your faith in your friends is your weakness.
2) A Sith Academy? During the Old Republic, the Jedi did a good job of providing internal security at a very low price. Why not repeal the limitation on Siths and create a small, powerful and cheap guard of Sith lords?
This is also unacceptable. An army of Siths, however small, would be a large pool of potential rivals and assassins, all angling to seize the throne. In the end, just having one other Sith around was the Emperor’s undoing; dozens of Siths would lead to anarchy.
For this reason, dictators have favored delegation to minions who are ineligible to replace them, such as eunuchs, lower-class citizens, foreign bodyguards or captives from an underprivileged social group. This leads me to:
3) Upgrading the internal security apparatus.
A) Clones. The Emperor already has a military force of clones. Why not a bureaucracy of clones? They could be designed to be smart, honest and unambitious, and they would be relatively cheap. This would help with the knotty problems of tax collection and law enforcement.
B) Domination of planetary elites. There are tried-and-true methods for gaining compliance without having to pay for massive armies or float around the galaxy in a planet-killing machine. The emperor could compel the political and economic elites of each planet to send their children (as hostages) to Imperial schools, where they will learn about all the great things the Empire is doing. Second, the Emperor could assign Imperial bodyguards to the elite of every planet to protect those who are loyal, report on those who are not and eliminate the worst. If the Emperor followed this approach, the Organa family would be sleeping with the fishes and Alderaan would still be paying taxes.
C) Imperial takeover of rebellious planets. Again, destroying a planet is a tremendous loss for the Imperial treasury. It would be far more profitable for the Emperor to seize rebellious planets (once subdued by his new and improved army – see below), imprison the rebels and bring in settlers and Imperial workers to keep the planet’s economy humming.
Upgrading the internal security apparatus is a far more cost-effective option than a DS for the next Sith dictator.
The Death Star as Super-Weapon?
When I watch Star Wars films now, I often find the battles simplistic because there is little tactical thinking. How would people actually use and respond to these futuristic weapons? The best exception to this pattern is the Rebels’ attack on the Death Star in Episode IV. Instead of attempting a large-scale frontal assault with their strongest ships (the anticipated response) they sent small ships armed with an asymmetric advantage: blueprints of the DS revealing a womp rat-sized weakness.
That is what the Rebels should have done. When I was a congressional staffer working on defense policy in the 1990s, one of the most insightful essays I read was Richard K. Betts’s “The Downside of the Cutting Edge” (National Interest, 1996), which makes this point: Once one has a force that can beat anyone in a fair fight, no one will want to fight fair. Even if the Empire eventually built a DS without a design flaw, its enemies would find some way to fight it indirectly. For example, when its not destroying planets, the DS also likes to grab passing ships in its tractor beam, drag them inside, and then scan them for bad guys. It would be simple to rig a decoy ship as a massive bomb, piloted by a robot with orders to detonate the ship once it’s inside the DS.
The Emperor should not expect, therefore, that a single super-weapon will vanquish all foes. As Seth Masket notes, the same money could be used to make some much-needed, lower-risk investments in the Imperial military. Some examples:
1) Information Security. Wouldn’t it be nice if some too-dumb-to-talk 30-year-old bucket of bolts couldn’t hack into the DS’s computer system in a few seconds? I would think so.
2) Troop Transportation. How does the U.S. military get around in the desert? Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles. How do elite scouts of the future get around? On overgrown lizards.
It’s just embarrassing.
3) More robots, please. I get it: The “Clone Wars” featured Republic clones vs. the robot armies of the separatists, and the clones won. Still, though, some of those robots would be really useful in tactical situations, perhaps guided by clones on the ground.
4) More probe droids, please. After the Yavin debacle, the Empire sent out probe droids to scan remote systems. Why not keep a few loitering on every planet on a permanent basis? Then it would be lot harder for any rebellion to hide.
5) Practice, Practice, Practice. An entire legion of the Emperor’s best troops was defeated by a village of teddy bears fighting with sticks and stones. It’s just embarrassing. Clearly they needed better training in tactics, marksmanship and hand-to-paw combat.
Again, it is my belief that a rational dictator could make better use of the resources that would be used to build Death Stars.
So, in conclusion: The Death Star is bad for internal security and a misallocation of military resources. No thank you!
Gregory Koger is a political scientist at the University of Miami. This post was originally published on the Monkey Cage [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/04/death-star-no-thank-you/ (with comments)], and we at Wonkblog thank them for letting us republish it.
Copyright 2012 Gregory Koger (emphasis in original)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/understood-properly-the-death-star-is-not-worth-it/2012/05/08/gIQAgzUDBU_blog.html [with comments]
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(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=4393656 (the post linked to "reality-based" in the board intro) and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66050980 and preceding (and any future following)
The Rachel Maddow Show
May 23, 2012
Rachel Maddow reviews the shocking and shameful political history of former Vice President Dick Cheney and notes that not only has Mitt Romney stacked his campaign with former Bush staffers but he has openly expressed his association and admiration for Dick Cheney without fear of political repercussion.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47544497#47544497 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRqRJ6_W83U (clip of Mitt speaking re Cheney at the end cut off a few seconds; same clip of Mitt begins the next below)]
*
Will the GOP identity crisis bring us back to Bush?
The Rachel Maddow Show
May 23, 2012
Frank Rich, writer-at-large for New York Magazine, talks with Rachel Maddow about the degree of superficiality in the 2012 presidential race and the Romney campaign's effort to associate itself with Cheney-style truculence without any of the policy rigor.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47544521#47544521 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIBeCWmpic ]
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The Bushies are back
Missed the neocons? Doon't worry, Mitt Romney's getting the band back together again
May 3, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/03/the_bushies_are_back/singleton/ [with comments]
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Romney’s Adversarial View of Russia Stirs Debate
Mitt Romney, who prayed at The Citadel in October before a major foreign policy speech, said recently that Russia was this country’s chief geopolitical adversary.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times
Mitt Romney signed posters at a campaign event on Friday in Charlotte, N.C.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: May 11, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney ]’s recent declaration that Russia [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/russiaandtheformersovietunion/index.html ] is America’s top geopolitical adversary drew raised eyebrows and worse from many Democrats, some Republicans and the Russians themselves, all of whom suggested that Mr. Romney was misguidedly stuck in a cold war mind-set.
But his statement [ http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/26/romney-russia-is-our-number-one-geopolitical-foe/ ] was not off the cuff — and it was not the first time Mr. Romney had stirred debate over his hawkish views on Russia. Interviews with Republican foreign policy experts close to his campaign and his writings on the subject show that his stance toward Russia reflects a broader foreign policy view that gives great weight to economic power and control of natural resources. It also exhibits Mr. Romney’s confidence that his private-sector experience would make him a better negotiator on national security issues than President Obama has been.
Mr. Romney’s views on Russia have set off disagreements among some of his foreign policy advisers. They put him in sync with the more conservative members of his party in Congress, who have similarly criticized Mr. Obama as being too accommodating to Russia, and generally reflect the posture of some neoconservatives.
But they have frequently put him at odds with members of the Republican foreign policy establishment, like Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who was defeated in a primary this week [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/us/politics/lugar-loses-primary-challenge-in-indiana.html ], and the party’s shrinking band of foreign policy “realists” — those who advocate a less ideological and more pragmatic view of relations with rival powers.
The Romney campaign has been critical of Mr. Obama’s record and positions on a variety of national security issues, including containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and confronting China’s rise. But many of the positions taken by Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have either been vague or not fundamentally different from those of the administration.
Russia, however, is an exception, one where Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has carved out a clear contrast to Mr. Obama, who came to office promising to “reset” relations with Moscow, only to find that Russia can be a difficult partner. Just this week, President Vladimir V. Putin abruptly canceled his plans to visit the United States [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/world/europe/white-house-says-putin-will-skip-g-8-meeting-at-camp-david.html ] next week for the Group of 8 summit meeting and for talks with Mr. Obama at Camp David.
Mr. Romney was a leading opponent of the most recent arms-reduction treaty with Russia, ratified by the Senate and signed last year by Mr. Obama. Russia figures prominently in Mr. Romney’s book, where he calls it one of four competitors for world leadership, along with the United States, China and “violent jihadism” embraced by Iran and terrorist groups.
Some advisers close to Mr. Romney, who declined to be quoted or identified by name, say Russia is a good illustration of his belief that national security threats are closely tied to economic power — in this case stemming from Russia’s oil and gas reserves, which it has used to muscle European countries dependent on energy imports.
They also cite his tendency to view foreign policy conflicts as zero-sum negotiations. Mr. Romney, an accomplished deal-maker at Bain Capital, views his negotiating skills as an advantage he holds over Mr. Obama.
Mr. Romney signaled his stance toward Russia two years ago, when he argued that the New Start missile treaty with Russia should be rejected, putting him at odds with a long line of former Republican secretaries of state and defense. A number of arms control specialists said they were startled by some of Mr. Romney’s assertions, like fretting about intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on bombers.
“It would be really fun to watch a Russian bomber with an SS-25 strung to its stomach try to take off,” said Steve Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine and now director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “Some of the arguments just left people scratching their heads.”
Within hours, rebuttal pieces to Mr. Romney’s position, laid out in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, were being circulated among arms control experts. Mr. Lugar, who had spent decades working on arms control issues, publicly disparaged some of Mr. Romney’s arguments as “discredited objections.”
Mr. Romney felt the missile treaty was a bad deal partly because it would impede American defenses by preventing ballistic missile silos from being converted to missile defense sites, while treaty supporters said that was not an issue because American officials prefer to build missile defense installations from the ground up.
Mr. Romney also criticized a White House decision scrapping a proposed antiballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe and building in its place a reconfigured system to shoot down short- and medium-range Iranian missiles. Mr. Romney argued that Mr. Obama had caved to Russian pressure, trading away a crucial program with little in return. Administration officials say their reconfigured system offers better protection for American allies.
Mr. Romney’s more recent statements on Russia have also drawn criticism from nonpartisan Russia experts who say he mischaracterizes Russia’s potential economic power and paints an inaccurate picture of Russian recalcitrance. Republicans close to Mr. Romney acknowledge that politics are a factor, but they also say Mr. Romney is driven by fears that Mr. Putin will continue political repression and use his country’s energy wealth to finance military expansion.
Some former diplomats and Russia specialists, and some leading Republicans in Congress, have also questioned his characterization of the country as America’s major foe. Many experts, including some close to his campaign, see a declining power that the United States will need to help manage global challenges. Some analysts also say Mr. Romney understates the help Russia has provided in dealing with rogue states, like backing a heavy-arms embargo and other sanctions against Iran in 2010.
“There’s a whole school of thought that Russia is one you need to work with to solve other problems in the world, rather than being the problem,” said Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Russia has blocked United Nations Security Council efforts [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/world/middleeast/syria-homs-death-toll-said-to-rise.html?pagewanted=all ] to end violence in Syria, drawing a rebuke from the Obama administration. But analysts also point out Russia’s support for the Iran arms embargo, its cancellation of a surface-to-air missile system sale to Iran and its allowing supplies to be sent through Russia to troops in Afghanistan.
Mr. Romney says natural resources could vault Russia to a position of global influence rivaling any nation by midcentury. But many analysts say Russia’s fate is so closely tied to oil exports that anything short of a sustained rise in prices will lead to cuts in spending on the military and social programs. Citigroup estimates that oil must reach $150 a barrel in coming years (from current export prices of $120) for Russia to pay for Mr. Putin’s spending promises.
The co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s Russia working group, Leon Aron, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote this month [ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/04/a_kremlin_made_of_sand ] that in the short term, “Russia’s most serious risk stems from a near-fatal dependence on the price of oil,” and that it could face a fiscal crisis as soon as 2014 that depletes cash for the military and other commitments. (Mr. Aron declined to comment, but friends say he would never argue, as Mr. Romney has, that Russia is America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”)
Some experts add that the only way the Russian economy could reach the heights Mr. Romney fears would be through a wholesale economic liberalization — one that would be cheered by Western countries.
“It would mean radically reforming and changing the Putin system,” said Angela Stent, a Russia expert at Georgetown University and a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/politics/romneys-view-of-russia-sparks-debate.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/politics/romneys-view-of-russia-sparks-debate.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Is There a Romney Doctrine?
Tom Tomorrow
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: May 12, 2012
WASHINGTON
DURING the Republican primary debates in January, when Mitt Romney was still trying to outmaneuver the challengers who were questioning his conservative bona fides, he made a declaration about Afghanistan that led a faction of his foreign policy advisers to shake their heads in wonderment.
“We should not negotiate with the Taliban [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/politics/scrutiny-of-romneys-stance-on-afghan-war-now-more-likely.html?pagewanted=all ],” the former Massachusetts governor declared, just as diplomats dispatched by the president were in Qatar trying to get those negotiations going. “We should defeat the Taliban.” In case anyone missed his meaning, he drove home the point, saying the best strategy was, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.”
Set aside for the moment that many of Mr. Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement, which means talking to some elements of the Taliban. Stephen Hadley, the former national security adviser to George W. Bush, has argued this “would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies.” A co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s working group on Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Shinn, who also served Mr. Bush, was co-author of perhaps the best single unclassified document on the complexities of those negotiations, entitled “Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer [ http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1131.pdf ].” It argued that a negotiated deal would “obviously be desirable” if elements of the Taliban could be persuaded to renounce violence and take “some role in Afghan governance short of total control.”
It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/index.html ]. In the Afghanistan case, “none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,” one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.
“It begged the obvious question,” the adviser added. “Do we stay another decade? How many forces, and how long, does that take? Do we really want to go into the general election telling Americans that we should stay a few more years to eradicate the whole Taliban movement?” In phase one of a long presidential campaign, Mr. Romney could duck those questions: the spotlight moved to the wisdom of the economic stimulus and the auto-industry bailout, contraception and, now, same-sex marriage and high school bullying.
But in the long stretch before the Republican convention in August, the battle for Mr. Romney’s mind on the key foreign policy questions that have defined the past few decades will have to be joined: When is a threat to America so urgent that the United States should intervene unilaterally? Is it worth the cost and casualties to rebuild broken societies? Should America feel it must always be in the lead — as Mr. Romney seems to argue — or let other powers play that role when their interests are more directly affected?
On these questions, Mr. Romney’s own advisers, judging by their public writing and comments, possess widely differing views — often a result of the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power. But what has struck both his advisers and outside Republicans is that in his effort to secure the nomination, Mr. Romney’s public comments have usually rejected mainstream Republican orthodoxy. They sound more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the “Bolton faction,” as insiders call the group led by John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations. In a stormy tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Bolton was often arguing that international institutions, the United Nations included, should be routed around because they so often frustrate American interests.
Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.
This may change as the arrival of the general election requires Mr. Romney to grapple with the question of how to attack a Democratic president whose affection for unilateral use of force — from drones over Pakistan and Yemen to a far greater role for the Special Operations command — has immunized him a bit from the traditional claim that Democrats can’t stand the sight of hard power. So far Mr. Romney’s most nuanced line of attack was laid out in the introduction to a campaign white paper [ http://www.mittromney.com/sites/default/files/shared/AnAmericanCentury-WhitePaper_0.pdf ] last fall written by Eliot Cohen, a historian and security expert who worked for Condoleezza Rice in the State Department, that the “high council of the Obama administration” views the “United States as a power in decline,” a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.” It also alleged a “torrent of criticism, unprecedented for an American president, that Barack Obama has directed at his own country.”
But in a campaign likely to be dominated by a slow-burning nuclear crisis with Iran, the likelihood of a North Korean nuclear test, the kind of eruptions with China that have dominated headlines for the past two weeks and the end of the surge in Afghanistan come September, the internal struggles between the various factions within the Romney campaign are likely to become evident.
Iran may be a first test. Mr. Romney put it pretty bluntly, in another line that caused some of his advisers to cringe and others to celebrate, when he declared late in 2011: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”
BUT when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding. The economic sanctions Mr. Obama has imposed have been far more crippling to the Iranian economy than anything President Bush did between the public revelation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 2003 and the end of Mr. Bush’s term in early 2009. Covert action has been stepped up, too. Mr. Bolton has called efforts to negotiate with Iran “delusional [ http://mrctv.org/videos/john-bolton-obama-administration-delusional-trying-talk-iran-out-their-nuclear-program ],” but other advisers — mostly those who dealt with the issue during the Bush administration — say they are a critical step in holding together the European allies and, if conflict looms, proving to Russia [ ] and China that every effort was made to come to a peaceful resolution. Several e-mails to the campaign asking for Mr. Romney’s position on the talks yielded no response.
“There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” said one adviser who aligns more often with Mr. Bolton. “But as in any campaign, there are outer circles, inner circles and inner-inner circles, and I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own on this.” Another adviser, saying he would be “cashiered” if the campaign caught him talking to a reporter without approval, said the real answer was that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office” and for now was “just happy to leave the impression that when Obama says he’ll stop an Iranian bomb he doesn’t mean it, and Mitt does.”
On some issues, Mr. Romney clearly does have his own views: He drafted an op-ed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/05/AR2010070502657.html ] opposing the ratification of the New Start treaty [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/strategic_arms_reduction_treaty/index.html ] with Russia, which cut in half the two countries’ nuclear launchers but left huge stockpiles of non-deployed nuclear weapons [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/atomic_weapons/index.html ] largely untouched — without much input from his staff. In recent days, Mr. Romney’s advisers argued that the candidate’s declaration that Russia is “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” looks less out of touch now that President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed his office with a brutal crackdown on dissent. Mr. Romney’s best line: He will “reset the reset.”
More complicated for Mr. Romney, given his business credentials, is his position on China. He argues for more arms to Taiwan and much tougher use of trade sanctions to respond to China’s currency and market manipulations.
In the past, such actions have frozen Chinese cooperation with the United States, but, the white paper insists, “Romney will work to persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament,” as if the last three presidents have not.
Such trade-offs are, of course, a bit too subtle for any presidential campaign. Yet so far this year Mr. Romney has spent little time on foreign policy, understandable given the length of the primary battles. The Romney strategy for now may simply be to portray Mr. Obama as a weak apologizer and figure out the details later.
The chief Washington correspondent [ http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/s/david_e_sanger/index.html ] for The New York Times and author of the forthcoming “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power [ http://www.randomhouse.com/book/202541/confront-and-conceal-by-david-e-sanger ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/sunday-review/is-there-a-romney-doctrine.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/sunday-review/is-there-a-romney-doctrine.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Mitt Romney's Russia Problem
Mark Adomanis, Contributor
5/12/2012 @ 10:14AM
Perhaps motivated by the path-breaking investigative research featured on this blog [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2012/01/06/mitt-romneys-russia-policy-a-lot-of-nothing/ ]*, the New York Times today has a story about Mitt Romney’s aggressive, strange, and incoherent views on Russia [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/politics/romneys-view-of-russia-sparks-debate.html (two items up)]. People, even the Very Serious People who are the NYT’s target demographic, are starting to notice that the Republican presidential nominee has views on Russia that, even in the context of an increasingly angry and aggressive GOP, are really quite odd.
I encourage everyone to read the article in full, it’s not particularly long and it covers the relevant issues quite well, but I did want to highlight a few paragraphs because they say quite a lot about the 2012 presidential election and the vanishingly small foreign policy differences between Obama and Romney:
The Romney campaign has been critical of Mr. Obama’s record and positions on a variety of national security issues, including containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and confronting China’s rise. But many of the positions taken by Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have either been vague or not fundamentally different from those of the administration.
Russia, however, is an exception, one where Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has carved out a clear contrast to Mr. Obama, who came to office promising to “reset” relations with Moscow, only to find that Russia can be a difficult partner…
Some advisers close to Mr. Romney, who declined to be quoted or identified by name, say Russia is a good illustration of his belief that national security threats are closely tied to economic power — in this case stemming from Russia’s oil and gas reserves, which it has used to muscle European countries dependent on energy imports.
They also cite his tendency to view foreign policy conflicts as zero-sum negotiations. Mr. Romney, an accomplished deal-maker at Bain Capital, views his negotiating skills as an advantage he holds over Mr. Obama…
Mr. Romney also criticized a White House decision scrapping a proposed antiballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe and building in its place a reconfigured system to shoot down short- and medium-range Iranian missiles. Mr. Romney argued that Mr. Obama had caved to Russian pressure, trading away a crucial program with little in return. Administration officials say their reconfigured system offers better protection for American allies.
I wanted to start off by noting that I am genuinely confused as to why this article was released today. Using arcane and obscure tactics such as “going to Mitt Romney’s website and reading his Russia platform” and “Google searching his statements on the START treaty,” I was able to produce a broadly similar analysis back in January. I’m not complaining that the story was written, as should be clear from the paragraphs I pasted above it’s an extremely valuable, I am just honestly curious as to why it was written in mid-May instead of mid-April, mid-March, or mid-February. As near as I can tell Romney has been incredibly consistent in his statements on Russia, so it’s not as if there’s some sudden change in policy that needs to be analyzed.
Moving right along, the idea that Romney’s dealings in the business world will in any way prepare him to deal with the Russians is an extremely strange one** (I could use other adjectives to describe it, but I’m trying to stay polite). Vladimir Putin isn’t some chubby, balding corporate executive from flyover country, the sorts of people over whom Mitt Romney is used to running roughshod in his business dealings, he’s someone who’s been at the highest levels of state power for more than a decade, someone who knows how the game is played.
Putin is not going to be won over with PowerPoint presentations about “synergy,” he won’t be impressed to hear someone use the word “leverage” in every sentence, and he can’t simply be “bought out” as would often happen in Bain-style hostile takeovers. If your plan to extract concessions from Vladimir Putin is “aggressively bluster in the hope that he caves” you’re going to be extremely disappointed. Moreover the entire Russian diplomatic corps is basically opposed to zero-sum deals as a matter of principle. The Russians, and this is not a personal characteristic of Vladimir Putin but something that characterized Russian/Soviet diplomacy for decades, never give up something for nothing. If Romney views the United States-Russia relationship as something he can “win,” then he is guaranteed to fail.
The article also briefly outlines Romney’s very strange belief that Russia is somehow on pace to become an economic hegemon. Indeed the extent to which Romney’s beliefs differ from those of Leon Aron, his Chief Russia adviser, is scarcely believable and, frankly, more than a little bit alarming. I don’t think a political campaign needs to have everyone in ideological lockstep, but Aron and Romney aren’t even marching in the same direction. Aron thinks that the far more serious danger facing the US is of a weakened and disintegrating Russia, while Romney thinks they are a “rising power” whose military and economic power pose a direct threat to American national security. Romney and Aron are not simply “not on the same page,” they’re not reading from the same book. Hell, they’re not even reading books in the same language.
But apart from Romney’s unique foibles concerning Russia, which I’ve covered before and will cover again, I wanted to focus on the last paragraph I cited above because it is as handy a summation of the corrupted state of American foreign policy as you’re likely to see. To avoid turning into a partyarchy , a stale and perverted form of democracy in which elections are held and parties alternate in power but there is never a meaningful change in policy, a country should have at least two parties that have essentially dissimilar views: a party in favor of greater economic liberalization, and a party that is in favor of greater state intervention, a party in favor of an aggressive military posture, and a party that strongly favors diplomacy and so on and so on.
But as that paragraph makes clear, there is no such distinction in America right now. The “dovish” president doesn’t argue against the idea of ABM, a position which until recently was held purely by conservative Republicans, indeed he is fully and aggressively in favor of it and has been willing to sacrifice the effectiveness of “the reset” at its altar. The only differences between Barack Obama‘s view of missile defense and Mitt Romney’s view of missile defense are tactical in nature. They both agree that America needs ABM to defend itself from non-existent Iranian missiles carrying non-existent Iranian nuclear warheads, they just have some quibbles about where exactly to put the interceptors and how much the Russians should be antagonized in the process of doing so. To put it succinctly: when Barack Obama’s position on missile defense, which in the 1980's would have put him in Reagan’s camp, is the farthest “left” that a mainstream politician is allowed to go, something is very badly amiss.
* For the sarcasm-deficient, this is a joke. I’m fully aware that the New York Times does not orient its news coverage based on anything that has been featured, or will be featured, on this blog .
** The idea that experience in ‘business’ gives someone unique insight into international diplomacy is shockingly naive, which is very odd for a campaign that has relentlessly attacked Barack Obama for his supposed naivete and fecklessness.
Copyright 2012 Forbes.com LLC™ (emphasis in original)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2012/05/12/mitt-romneys-russia-problem/ [with comments]
===
The path to 'a hollow military' or a hollow op-ed?
By Steve Benen
Mon May 21, 2012 4:47 PM EDT.
Mitt Romney has a curious habit of being one of the most prolific op-ed writers in the country. He doesn't much care for interviews or press conferences, but the Republican loves to engage the media in a way in which he doesn't have to answer any direct questions.
Lately, this means op-eds that chase President Obama around the country -- the president schedules an event in a city, so Romney writes an op-ed in that city's major daily paper. Yesterday, the tactic led the former governor to write a piece [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-19/news/ct-perspec-0520-romneynato-20120519_1_collective-military-irrelevance-nato-president-obama ] for the Chicago Tribune, condemning Obama in advance of Chicago's NATO meeting.
Most of the condemnation is pretty boilerplate -- neither Romney nor his ghost writers are good at faking expertise in foreign affairs -- and almost appears intended to embarrass the United States in advance of a meeting of world leaders.
But one claim, in particular, seemed rather remarkable to me.
Instead of working to strengthen NATO, the Obama administration has taken actions that will only undermine the alliance.
Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. President Obama's own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called cuts of this magnitude "devastating" to our national security. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has plainly said that such a reduction means "we would not any longer be a global power." Despite these warnings, the Obama administration has pledged to veto an attempt to replace these cuts with savings in other areas.
This is reckless.... With the United States on a path to a hollow military, we are hardly in a position to exercise leadership in persuading our allies to spend more on security.
Romney may have trouble keeping up with current events -- I imagine he's rather busy -- but he should at least try to brush up on the basics before publishing nonsense in major media outlets.
In reality, most of the defense cuts Romney's referring to were proposed by Republicans. He may not realize this, but he's accusing his own allies of trying to gut the American military.
It's true that the Obama administration is prepared to cut about $500 billion from the Pentagon budget in the coming years. But contrary to the misleading claims in Romney's op-ed, U.S. military leaders support these cuts [ http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/30/10938733-paul-ryans-unbridled-chutzpah-on-defense-spending ] and have asked Congress to approve them. These reductions -- made in the name of fiscal responsibility, which Republicans occasionally pretend to care about -- don't "hollow" the U.S. military. We can accept this as true since the U.S. military agrees.
But there are additional Pentagon cuts that may yet be approved, not because the White House requested them, but because congressional Republicans did. As Ben Armbruster explained [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/20/487290/romney-obama-military-sequester/ ]:
Congress, however, is responsible for the other $500 billion in military spending cuts as a result of the bipartisan debt deal that Obama signed into law. Those reductions are set to take place because of the sequester the deal put in place should lawmakers fail to agree on how to find savings elsewhere (House Republicans want to cut much needed programs [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/07/479229/house-gop-military-cut-programs-poor/ ] for the nation’s poorest [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/08/480017/mccarthy-trimming-fat-poor/ ] to offset the military spending cuts).
Indeed, as the Washington Post noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/ahead-of-nato-summit-mitt-romney-argues-that-bipartisan-defense-cuts-are-obamas-fault/2012/05/18/gIQALxH5YU_blog.html ], “Romney’s statement fails to note that the sequester was part of a deal negotiated by the White House and leaders of both parties, a sweeping proposal that was approved by nearly three-quarters of the House Republican conference and six in 10 Senate Republicans.”
Here's hoping NATO officials in Chicago for the event didn't see the op-ed. I'd hate to leave world leaders with the impression that the leaders of one of our major political parties has no idea what he's talking about.
© 2012 msnbc.com (emphasis in original)
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/21/11796875-the-path-to-a-hollow-military-or-a-hollow-op-ed [with comments]
===
Powell Criticizes Romney on Foreign Policy
May 23, 2012
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/powell-criticizes-romney-on-foreign-policy/ [with comments]
*
Colin Powell questions Mitt Romney’s foreign policy: “C’mon, Mitt, think.”
May 23, 2012
http://articles.boston.com/2012-05-23/politics/31823725_1_foreign-policy-colin-powell-romney
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‘Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.’
"Darth Vader" accepts the Ultimate Villain award from "Star Wars" creator George Lucas during the 2011 Scream Awards on Oct. 15, 2011, in Los Angeles.
(Chris Pizzello/AP) (Chris Pizzello - AP)
Posted by Gregory Koger at 04:41 PM ET, 05/08/2012
I wish to address the most important policy question of the millennium: Should we build a Death Star? This debate picked up this year after some Lehigh University students estimated [ ] that just the steel for a Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the current GDP of the Earth.
Kevin Drum suggests [ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/death-star-surprisingly-cost-effective-weapons-system ] that this cost estimate is too low but, in the context of a galactic economy, a Death Star is perfectly affordable and “totally worth it.” Seth Masket [ http://enikrising.blogspot.com/2012/02/you-cant-afford-not-to-buy-death-star.html ] and Jamelle Bouie [ http://prospect.org/article/death-stars-arent-all-fun-and-games ] highlight the military downside of the Death Star, suggesting that more people might rebel against the wholesale genocide of the Empire, and that the Death Star would be the prime target of any rebellion.
I have two thoughts to add. First, the Death Star is a bit misunderstood. It is primarily a tool of domestic politics rather than warfare, and should be compared to alternative means of suppressing the population of a galaxy. Second, as a weapon of war, it should be compared to alternative uses of scarce defense resources. Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.
The Death Star and the Dictator’s Dilemma
The classic problem of representative democracy is that citizens must delegate power to leaders, and then ensure that leaders do not use that power to serve their own interests. As James Madison states, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Dictators suffer a similar problem of delegation, but in reverse. Dictators must delegate the tasks of subduing and taxing the population to internal security forces, and of maintaining external security to subordinate governors and generals. Any delegated power, however, could be used to displace the dictator. Internal security forces can assassinate the dictator or join in palace coups. Military leaders can use their forces to rebel against the dictator or secede from the dictator’s realm with a slice of territory. So the dictator must carefully design her security apparatus to maintain control of the population without empowering potential rivals. This challenge grows acute the more dispersed the dictator’s realm and the greater the number of external threats. (For more on the strategy of dictatorship, see here [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Politics/dp/161039044X ]. Political scientists, feel free to add citations in the comments section).
I see the Death Star (DS) as the Emperor’s solution to the dictator’s dilemma. First, note that its construction precedes the Rebel Alliance; the plans are first developed by the Separatists in Episode 2 and, by the time it is completed, the Rebel Alliance has just won its “first victory.” While it may have some use as a deterrent against possible invaders, the DS is primarily a tool of domestic politics. Prior to its completion, the Emperor is compelled to keep the Imperial Senate around, presumably to maintain the semblance of popular consent. But the Senate imposes some inefficiency — meddling in military strategy, perhaps, or directing spending to some favored planets. Once the DS is operational, the Emperor can disband the Senate and, instead, empower Imperial governors to suppress the local population and extract revenue. Here’s the critical scene [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYllEjiQ3SQ ]:
But how can the Emperor guard against rebellion by one of these governors? Or revolt by a local planet’s population? The answer is simple: He can zip around in the baddest weapon in the galaxy, destroying his foes with the push of a button. No foe could fight back, and the DS is mobile enough to respond to multiple threats in short order.
Note that this scheme provides an easy answer to the question, “how can we afford a Death Star?” If the scheme works, the Death Star will pay for itself dozens of times in the additional tax revenue from fearful planets, and by the money not spent by the military putting down revolts with conventional weapons.
But will it work? Only if it induces cooperation through fear. Every planet blown up represents a tremendous loss of potential future revenue, so like nuclear weapons today, the actual use of the DS is a calamity. Moreover, like nuclear weapons, they only work as a deterrent if they are used judiciously. Citizens throughout the galaxy must believe that failure to pay their taxes and comply with their Imperial masters will lead to detonation, but also that compliance will save them. The fact that the DS was used against Alderaan, however, would likely have had the opposite effect. Alderaan is “peaceful” and “has no weapons.” It was detonated because its teenage senator was secretly aiding the Rebel Alliance and waited too long to give up Dantoonie. To me, that’s a little too Caligula to induce rational compliance. One imagines the conversations on other planets:
Peasant 1: Did you hear the Empire blew up Alderaan? What kind of government blows up one of the richest planets in the galaxy because of one smack-talking teenager? It could be any of us next.
Peasant Windu: Enough is enough! I have had it with these [redacted] emperors on their [redacted] Death Star!
If the net effect of the DS is to make every person in the galaxy think their planet could be the next one arbitrarily destroyed, it actually mobilizes them to join the rebellion.
If the DS is an uncertain solution to the problem of internal security, what are the alternatives?
1) Democracy? Unacceptable to the seeker of unlimited power. Your faith in your friends is your weakness.
2) A Sith Academy? During the Old Republic, the Jedi did a good job of providing internal security at a very low price. Why not repeal the limitation on Siths and create a small, powerful and cheap guard of Sith lords?
This is also unacceptable. An army of Siths, however small, would be a large pool of potential rivals and assassins, all angling to seize the throne. In the end, just having one other Sith around was the Emperor’s undoing; dozens of Siths would lead to anarchy.
For this reason, dictators have favored delegation to minions who are ineligible to replace them, such as eunuchs, lower-class citizens, foreign bodyguards or captives from an underprivileged social group. This leads me to:
3) Upgrading the internal security apparatus.
A) Clones. The Emperor already has a military force of clones. Why not a bureaucracy of clones? They could be designed to be smart, honest and unambitious, and they would be relatively cheap. This would help with the knotty problems of tax collection and law enforcement.
B) Domination of planetary elites. There are tried-and-true methods for gaining compliance without having to pay for massive armies or float around the galaxy in a planet-killing machine. The emperor could compel the political and economic elites of each planet to send their children (as hostages) to Imperial schools, where they will learn about all the great things the Empire is doing. Second, the Emperor could assign Imperial bodyguards to the elite of every planet to protect those who are loyal, report on those who are not and eliminate the worst. If the Emperor followed this approach, the Organa family would be sleeping with the fishes and Alderaan would still be paying taxes.
C) Imperial takeover of rebellious planets. Again, destroying a planet is a tremendous loss for the Imperial treasury. It would be far more profitable for the Emperor to seize rebellious planets (once subdued by his new and improved army – see below), imprison the rebels and bring in settlers and Imperial workers to keep the planet’s economy humming.
Upgrading the internal security apparatus is a far more cost-effective option than a DS for the next Sith dictator.
The Death Star as Super-Weapon?
When I watch Star Wars films now, I often find the battles simplistic because there is little tactical thinking. How would people actually use and respond to these futuristic weapons? The best exception to this pattern is the Rebels’ attack on the Death Star in Episode IV. Instead of attempting a large-scale frontal assault with their strongest ships (the anticipated response) they sent small ships armed with an asymmetric advantage: blueprints of the DS revealing a womp rat-sized weakness.
That is what the Rebels should have done. When I was a congressional staffer working on defense policy in the 1990s, one of the most insightful essays I read was Richard K. Betts’s “The Downside of the Cutting Edge” (National Interest, 1996), which makes this point: Once one has a force that can beat anyone in a fair fight, no one will want to fight fair. Even if the Empire eventually built a DS without a design flaw, its enemies would find some way to fight it indirectly. For example, when its not destroying planets, the DS also likes to grab passing ships in its tractor beam, drag them inside, and then scan them for bad guys. It would be simple to rig a decoy ship as a massive bomb, piloted by a robot with orders to detonate the ship once it’s inside the DS.
The Emperor should not expect, therefore, that a single super-weapon will vanquish all foes. As Seth Masket notes, the same money could be used to make some much-needed, lower-risk investments in the Imperial military. Some examples:
1) Information Security. Wouldn’t it be nice if some too-dumb-to-talk 30-year-old bucket of bolts couldn’t hack into the DS’s computer system in a few seconds? I would think so.
2) Troop Transportation. How does the U.S. military get around in the desert? Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles. How do elite scouts of the future get around? On overgrown lizards.
It’s just embarrassing.
3) More robots, please. I get it: The “Clone Wars” featured Republic clones vs. the robot armies of the separatists, and the clones won. Still, though, some of those robots would be really useful in tactical situations, perhaps guided by clones on the ground.
4) More probe droids, please. After the Yavin debacle, the Empire sent out probe droids to scan remote systems. Why not keep a few loitering on every planet on a permanent basis? Then it would be lot harder for any rebellion to hide.
5) Practice, Practice, Practice. An entire legion of the Emperor’s best troops was defeated by a village of teddy bears fighting with sticks and stones. It’s just embarrassing. Clearly they needed better training in tactics, marksmanship and hand-to-paw combat.
Again, it is my belief that a rational dictator could make better use of the resources that would be used to build Death Stars.
So, in conclusion: The Death Star is bad for internal security and a misallocation of military resources. No thank you!
Gregory Koger is a political scientist at the University of Miami. This post was originally published on the Monkey Cage [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/04/death-star-no-thank-you/ (with comments)], and we at Wonkblog thank them for letting us republish it.
Copyright 2012 Gregory Koger (emphasis in original)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/understood-properly-the-death-star-is-not-worth-it/2012/05/08/gIQAgzUDBU_blog.html [with comments]
===
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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