Saturday, July 11, 2009 10:48:45 PM
An Obama Doctrine Emerges in Moscow
Joe Cirincione [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione ]
Posted: July 8, 2009 12:55 PM
News called President Barack Obama's trip to Russia a "breakthrough" and the new agreement to cut nuclear arms "extraordinary." Henry Kissinger compared Obama to a chess master [ http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,634400,00.html ] playing simultaneous games.
But just as significant as the nuclear accords and the reset of US-Russian relations may be the worldview that Obama elaborated in his Moscow speeches. He deftly buried the deeply flawed strategic doctrine that launched an unnecessary war with Iraq and posited military force as the chief tool of US statecraft.
In his speech at the New Economic School [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/REMARKS-BY-THE-PRESIDENT-AT-THE-NEW-ECONOMIC-SCHOOL-GRADUATION/ ] he said:
There is sometimes a sense that old ways of thinking must prevail; a conception of power that is rooted in the past rather than in the future... In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries... As I said in Cairo, given our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over an other will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game - progress must be shared.
Obama applied this thinking to America's "interest in reversing the spread of nuclear weapons and preventing their use." Rather than narrowing the threat to one or two states, he described "the core of the nuclear challenge in the 21st century":
The notion that prestige comes from holding these weapons, or that we can protect ourselves by picking and choosing which nations can have these weapons, is an illusion. In the short period since the end of the Cold War, we've already seen India, Pakistan, and North Korea conduct nuclear tests. Without a fundamental change, do any of us truly believe that the next two decades will not bring about the further spread of these nuclear weapons?
But "picking and choosing" is exactly what we did under the doctrine elaborated by his predecessor, President George W. Bush. In his infamous "axis of evil" formulation, Bush declared the greatest threat to the United States to lays in the "nexus" of outlaw regimes, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The solution was to overthrow these regimes.
Iraq was the first implementation of this doctrine, but it was never intended to be the last. The war's architects expected regime change in Iraq to lead to regime change in Iran, Syria, North Korea and other states. It would trigger "a democratic tsunami," claimed American Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik. The results were a disaster, with Iran and North Korea accelerating their nuclear programs, making more progress in the past six years than they had in the previous twelve.
Obama eulogized and then put to rest the Bush Doctrine:
Now let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven't always done what we should have on that front.
Obama shifts away from the neoconservative notion that the problem is not nuclear weapons but a few bad states that have nuclear weapons. Obama's threat trio is not countries that may someday have weapons, but the countries that have actually exploded them since the end of the cold war, irrespective of their political orientation: India, Pakistan, and North Korea. This group includes allies, friends and foes.
That is his point. It is the same point made by past presidents including Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan. Obama returns to this basic understanding that it the weapons themselves, not certain regimes, that must be eliminated. In order to prevent a nightmare world of "10 or 20 or 50 nuclear-armed nations" that may not "protect their arsenals and refrain from using them," he says, "America is committed to stopping nuclear proliferation, and ultimately seeking a world without nuclear weapons."
He underlined his core message: "This is not about singling out individual nations -- it's about the responsibilities of all nations."
In Prague, in Cairo, and now in Moscow, we are witnessing the emergence of an Obama Doctrine. A world view guided by universal compliance with democratic norms and the rule of law; policies driven by the convergence of shared interests and responsibilities; and a statecraft that does not shirk from the application of military force when necessary but promotes America's interests with respect for other nations and the strength of joint enterprise.
Joe Cirincione [ http://www.ploughshares.org/expert/103 ] is President of Plougshares Fund based in Washington, DC and San Francisco and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons[ http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Scare-History-Nuclear-Weapons/dp/0231135114/ref=ed_oe_p/103-2551041-8800615 ].
Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione/an-obama-doctrine-emerges_b_227905.html [with comments]
==========
Obama’s True History Of The Cold War
By Matt Duss on Jul 7th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Earlier today, President Obama delivered a speech [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/europe/07prexy.text.html ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/europe/07prexy.text.html?pagewanted=all )] to Moscow’s New Economic School, in which he outlined his vision [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world/europe/08prexy.html ] for the future U.S.-Russia relationship.
While there was much in the speech that was notable, I think this was a key passage:
Like President Medvedev and myself, you’re not old enough to have witnessed the darkest hours of the Cold War, when hydrogen bombs were tested in the atmosphere, and children drilled in fallout shelters, and we reached the brink of nuclear catastrophe. But you are the last generation born when the world was divided. At that time, the American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose.
And then, within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Now, make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.
I think this is evidence not only of a generational shift in the perception of the Cold War, but also of a clear ideological shift in regard to the way that the Cold War ended, and the ways that momentous political change occurs.
As a university student in the early 1980’s, Obama was steeped in Cold War politics, and specifically concerned with strategic questions regarding the possibility of weapons reductions. As a young writer he grappled with the “twisted logic [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?pagewanted=all ) (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39386755 )]” of the US-USSR nuclear standoff, and wrote about [ http://documents.nytimes.com/obama-s-1983-college-magazine-article#p=1 (also at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39386755 )] the growing international nuclear freeze movement in 1983 for a Columbia University magazine. Having been engaged with this movement as both writer and student, Obama is acutely aware of the role that it played, both in the U.S. and internationally, in raising awareness and shifting perceptions of the insane nuclear gamesmanship.
As I wrote in the American Prospect [ http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=conservatives_cold_war_approach_to_iran ] last month, conservatives have for years been peddling a potted history of the Cold War — in which the Soviet Union basically collapsed out of fear of Ronald Reagan — in order to cast international politics as a zero-sum contest between good and evil, and to cow progressives into a more aggressive rhetorical posture toward America’s adversary of the moment. We saw this most recently in John McCain and Company’s sanctimonious grandstanding [ http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/20/mccain-sanctimonious-grandstanding-in-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice/ ] over the Iranian demonstrations.
In reality, the Cold War came to an end when and in the way it did because of a number of different factors. A major one was the organizing work of political dissidents in Eastern Europe, and the space created for that work by international agreements like the Helsinki accords — which conservatives at the time condemned as “appeasement”. Conservatives have consistently attempted to write the international peace movement out of any role in ending the Cold War, but there is a solid and growing scholarly consensus that its role was significant, not only in building ties between activists on either side of the Iron Curtain, but also in changing Reagan administration’s own perception [ http://hnn.us/articles/1797.html ] of the nuclear standoff and the need for nuclear arms reductions.
President Obama’s recognition of the central role played by Eastern European dissidents in ending the Cold War — and more generally of the complex way that history unfolds — is also in keeping with his measured approach toward the Iranian protests. Rather than imagining that he can change outcomes on the ground by taking a more belligerent stance toward the Iranian regime (there’s more to foreign policy than simply asking “What would Reagan do?”), Obama understands that the best way to facilitate the reformist critique [ ] of the system is to give it space to work on its own. This doesn’t mean being “neutral,” and of course the president has not been neutral on the issues of human rights and democracy. It just means recognizing that the place of the U.S. in Iran’s reform movement is not at the head of the parade.
© 2009 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/07/07/obamas-true-history-of-the-cold-war/ [with comments]
==========
also:
Medvedev-Obama Summit: A Path to Success
Igor Ivanov
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
July 6, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/igor-ivanov/medvedevobama-summit-a-pa_b_226254.html
Decrease Stockpiles, Increase Security
Lt. General Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.)
July 6, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lt-general-robert-g-gard-jr-/decrease-stockpiles-incre_b_226134.html
Obama, Putin Hold Private Talks In Russia
July 7, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/07/obama-putin-hold-private-_n_226778.html
Obama Does Moscow, and Vice Versa
July 8, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/obama-does-moscow-and-vic_b_228246.html
==========
and see (items linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39386755 (linked in the second item above) and preceding
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=21332669 and preceding and following
as well as (items linked in) my next post, a reply to this one
Joe Cirincione [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione ]
Posted: July 8, 2009 12:55 PM
News called President Barack Obama's trip to Russia a "breakthrough" and the new agreement to cut nuclear arms "extraordinary." Henry Kissinger compared Obama to a chess master [ http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,634400,00.html ] playing simultaneous games.
But just as significant as the nuclear accords and the reset of US-Russian relations may be the worldview that Obama elaborated in his Moscow speeches. He deftly buried the deeply flawed strategic doctrine that launched an unnecessary war with Iraq and posited military force as the chief tool of US statecraft.
In his speech at the New Economic School [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/REMARKS-BY-THE-PRESIDENT-AT-THE-NEW-ECONOMIC-SCHOOL-GRADUATION/ ] he said:
There is sometimes a sense that old ways of thinking must prevail; a conception of power that is rooted in the past rather than in the future... In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries... As I said in Cairo, given our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over an other will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game - progress must be shared.
Obama applied this thinking to America's "interest in reversing the spread of nuclear weapons and preventing their use." Rather than narrowing the threat to one or two states, he described "the core of the nuclear challenge in the 21st century":
The notion that prestige comes from holding these weapons, or that we can protect ourselves by picking and choosing which nations can have these weapons, is an illusion. In the short period since the end of the Cold War, we've already seen India, Pakistan, and North Korea conduct nuclear tests. Without a fundamental change, do any of us truly believe that the next two decades will not bring about the further spread of these nuclear weapons?
But "picking and choosing" is exactly what we did under the doctrine elaborated by his predecessor, President George W. Bush. In his infamous "axis of evil" formulation, Bush declared the greatest threat to the United States to lays in the "nexus" of outlaw regimes, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The solution was to overthrow these regimes.
Iraq was the first implementation of this doctrine, but it was never intended to be the last. The war's architects expected regime change in Iraq to lead to regime change in Iran, Syria, North Korea and other states. It would trigger "a democratic tsunami," claimed American Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik. The results were a disaster, with Iran and North Korea accelerating their nuclear programs, making more progress in the past six years than they had in the previous twelve.
Obama eulogized and then put to rest the Bush Doctrine:
Now let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven't always done what we should have on that front.
Obama shifts away from the neoconservative notion that the problem is not nuclear weapons but a few bad states that have nuclear weapons. Obama's threat trio is not countries that may someday have weapons, but the countries that have actually exploded them since the end of the cold war, irrespective of their political orientation: India, Pakistan, and North Korea. This group includes allies, friends and foes.
That is his point. It is the same point made by past presidents including Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan. Obama returns to this basic understanding that it the weapons themselves, not certain regimes, that must be eliminated. In order to prevent a nightmare world of "10 or 20 or 50 nuclear-armed nations" that may not "protect their arsenals and refrain from using them," he says, "America is committed to stopping nuclear proliferation, and ultimately seeking a world without nuclear weapons."
He underlined his core message: "This is not about singling out individual nations -- it's about the responsibilities of all nations."
In Prague, in Cairo, and now in Moscow, we are witnessing the emergence of an Obama Doctrine. A world view guided by universal compliance with democratic norms and the rule of law; policies driven by the convergence of shared interests and responsibilities; and a statecraft that does not shirk from the application of military force when necessary but promotes America's interests with respect for other nations and the strength of joint enterprise.
Joe Cirincione [ http://www.ploughshares.org/expert/103 ] is President of Plougshares Fund based in Washington, DC and San Francisco and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons[ http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Scare-History-Nuclear-Weapons/dp/0231135114/ref=ed_oe_p/103-2551041-8800615 ].
Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione/an-obama-doctrine-emerges_b_227905.html [with comments]
==========
Obama’s True History Of The Cold War
By Matt Duss on Jul 7th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Earlier today, President Obama delivered a speech [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/europe/07prexy.text.html ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/europe/07prexy.text.html?pagewanted=all )] to Moscow’s New Economic School, in which he outlined his vision [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world/europe/08prexy.html ] for the future U.S.-Russia relationship.
While there was much in the speech that was notable, I think this was a key passage:
Like President Medvedev and myself, you’re not old enough to have witnessed the darkest hours of the Cold War, when hydrogen bombs were tested in the atmosphere, and children drilled in fallout shelters, and we reached the brink of nuclear catastrophe. But you are the last generation born when the world was divided. At that time, the American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose.
And then, within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Now, make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.
I think this is evidence not only of a generational shift in the perception of the Cold War, but also of a clear ideological shift in regard to the way that the Cold War ended, and the ways that momentous political change occurs.
As a university student in the early 1980’s, Obama was steeped in Cold War politics, and specifically concerned with strategic questions regarding the possibility of weapons reductions. As a young writer he grappled with the “twisted logic [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?pagewanted=all ) (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39386755 )]” of the US-USSR nuclear standoff, and wrote about [ http://documents.nytimes.com/obama-s-1983-college-magazine-article#p=1 (also at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39386755 )] the growing international nuclear freeze movement in 1983 for a Columbia University magazine. Having been engaged with this movement as both writer and student, Obama is acutely aware of the role that it played, both in the U.S. and internationally, in raising awareness and shifting perceptions of the insane nuclear gamesmanship.
As I wrote in the American Prospect [ http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=conservatives_cold_war_approach_to_iran ] last month, conservatives have for years been peddling a potted history of the Cold War — in which the Soviet Union basically collapsed out of fear of Ronald Reagan — in order to cast international politics as a zero-sum contest between good and evil, and to cow progressives into a more aggressive rhetorical posture toward America’s adversary of the moment. We saw this most recently in John McCain and Company’s sanctimonious grandstanding [ http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/20/mccain-sanctimonious-grandstanding-in-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice/ ] over the Iranian demonstrations.
In reality, the Cold War came to an end when and in the way it did because of a number of different factors. A major one was the organizing work of political dissidents in Eastern Europe, and the space created for that work by international agreements like the Helsinki accords — which conservatives at the time condemned as “appeasement”. Conservatives have consistently attempted to write the international peace movement out of any role in ending the Cold War, but there is a solid and growing scholarly consensus that its role was significant, not only in building ties between activists on either side of the Iron Curtain, but also in changing Reagan administration’s own perception [ http://hnn.us/articles/1797.html ] of the nuclear standoff and the need for nuclear arms reductions.
President Obama’s recognition of the central role played by Eastern European dissidents in ending the Cold War — and more generally of the complex way that history unfolds — is also in keeping with his measured approach toward the Iranian protests. Rather than imagining that he can change outcomes on the ground by taking a more belligerent stance toward the Iranian regime (there’s more to foreign policy than simply asking “What would Reagan do?”), Obama understands that the best way to facilitate the reformist critique [ ] of the system is to give it space to work on its own. This doesn’t mean being “neutral,” and of course the president has not been neutral on the issues of human rights and democracy. It just means recognizing that the place of the U.S. in Iran’s reform movement is not at the head of the parade.
© 2009 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/07/07/obamas-true-history-of-the-cold-war/ [with comments]
==========
also:
Medvedev-Obama Summit: A Path to Success
Igor Ivanov
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
July 6, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/igor-ivanov/medvedevobama-summit-a-pa_b_226254.html
Decrease Stockpiles, Increase Security
Lt. General Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.)
July 6, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lt-general-robert-g-gard-jr-/decrease-stockpiles-incre_b_226134.html
Obama, Putin Hold Private Talks In Russia
July 7, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/07/obama-putin-hold-private-_n_226778.html
Obama Does Moscow, and Vice Versa
July 8, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/obama-does-moscow-and-vic_b_228246.html
==========
and see (items linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39386755 (linked in the second item above) and preceding
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=21332669 and preceding and following
as well as (items linked in) my next post, a reply to this one
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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