Strategic Trust-Building

Our transforming relationship with the United States presents major opportunities as well as snares. The increasing attention we receive from the US recognises as well as contributes to our growing international stature. If the US re-evaluates the potential of its relationship with India, others are spurred to do so in their own interest. If the allies and friends of the US are influenced to follow the US lead, those wary of a fortified India-US relationship because of their own differences with the US have good reason to engage India more. The US remains the world's foremost power; the quality of our relationship with it has global significance.

That in courting India the US is pursuing its own national interest should not be a reason for us to recoil from its overtures. Which country, including India, does not give primacy to national interest in formulating its foreign policy? If the national interest of the US impels it now to give depth and breadth to its relationship with India, we need not draw back with doubt and suspicion. We should protect our own national interest, without being too ready to be co- opted into promoting US goals or too cautious in exploring convergences.

Equations

Our concern should be the management of an unequal relationship. The US can more easily configure India into its foreign policy jigsaw than we can fit the US advantageously into our diplomatic play. The US is interested in incorporating India into the global political, security and economic arrangements put in place especially since the World War 2. India, a victim in these arrangements in many ways, has all these years challenged them to affirm the principle of sovereignty, equality and non-discrimination.

Our challenge is to find ways to cooperate with the US even as we continue to demand that the present international system reflect contemporay realities and not those of 1945. US and Indian expectations are misaligned here. The US views continuing Indian resistance to its blandishments either as lack of boldness in decision- making or as the toxin of non- alignment still coursing through our political veins, or, yet again, as unwillingness to accept the responsibilities that accompany great power status. The US puts across that with the nuclear deal liberating India from strategic isolation and its G- 20 membership reflecting its rising economic stature, India has already "risen", whereas india remains conscious of its vulnerabilities, is risk- averse and reluctant to involve itself more than necessary in exter- nal distractions, especially if interference in internal affairs, aggressive promotion of human rights and democracy, and the use of force are involved.

The US is most resistant actually to any formal change in global power equations, though it has to accommodate itself to the reality of other power centres emerging and the dilution of its own dominant position. This disposes the US to woo India, especially at a time when India has neither developed the sinews nor the confidence for self-assertion. It therefore offers support to make India a great power, as Condoleeza Rice did, or encourages it to assert itself in its neighborhood, in Central Asia, in West Asia, and, most notably, in the Asia-Pacific region, where China's phenomenal rise has become menacing, as Hillary Clinton did in her recent " vision for India" speech at Chennai. The US would prefer the rise of the next Asian giant to occur within the orbit of its influence.

This new found US enthusiasm for an expanded Indian geopolitical role contrasts with its strategic containing of India through China and Pakistan until now. If the bonds of democracy and shared human values are arguments today for a mutually reinforcing India- US relationship to manage global issues, they mattered little in the past in shaping US policies towards India. It is not easy to comprehend why the US kept a democratic country like India strategically trussed up as much as possible, while shoring up a powerful authoritarian behemoth like China and ignoring its nuclear and missile misconduct at India's strategic expense. Similarly, encouraging an increasingly Islamicised Pakistan to contain a secular, pluralist India and subvert its territorial integrity is not fully explicable even in the Cold War context.

Nuclear

The legacy of these policies remains alive in the US political system. The Indo-US nuclear deal was accompanied by several galling non-proliferation related restrictions that India chose to swallow. If at the non-governmental level powerful lobbies keep pursuing their malign efforts to impose more NPT related constraints on India, at the governmental level the US continues to tolerate Sino-Pakistan nuclear commerce outside the NSG framework while imposing, simultaneously, further disabilities on India in the NSG by tightening restrictions on transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to non-NPT countries.

US hectoring of India on our nuclear liability Bill, with the commercial interest of US nuclear suppliers in mind, as was the case during Secretary Clinton's visit, makes the Indo-US nuclear deal appear less a strategic choice than a commercial one.

The Clinton vision of an economically integrated South Asia- Central Asia region, which could also help resolve the Afghan tangle, takes insufficient cognisance of Pakistan's truculence and the need for tougher policy options to discipline this quasi- rogue state. The US wants to "manage" its divergent India- Pakistan interests by wanting to be a strategic partner of both countries. Its balancing act between India and Pakistan continues. Exposing the ISI links of the head of the Kashmiri American Council in Washington DC should, beyond tit for tat jousting between the CIA and the ISI, lead to a re- working of US's "even-handed" Kashmir policy.

Convergences

While India should not have illusions about the extent of US strategic munificence towards it, there is much to be gained from engaging it comprehensively. Even if the US is not as yet a trusted friend, it is by no means an adversary. The US itself recognises that India will not be an ally of the US and that policy differences will remain. But it believes there are sufficient common interests to build upon-an approach that we should find congenial. If US interference in our Iran policy is a problem, its renewed Asia thrust to thwart China's hegemonic ambitions is not. Enhanced India-US cooperation in Asean, the East Asia Summit, in protecting the Indian Ocean sea lanes, in developing a new security architecture in Asia, etc is to our advantage, and so is the planned trilateral India-US-Japan dialogue.

India's relationship with the US is uniquely broad- based, covering trade, high technology, innovation, clean energy, agriculture, food security, education, health, counter-terrorism, homeland security, intensive people to people ties etc. The high- powered economic team accompanying Hillary Clinton signalled a desire to move ahead meaningfully. The US, always eager for for quick results, will push for economic reforms that give it more market access in India. We have our own priorities and demands. This normal cut and thrust of building mutualities in relationships should not make us defensive. We may be overplaying the word "strategic" to describe even the banalities of our bilateral agenda, but that our relations with the US have strategic implications for us and the rest of the world is indisputable.

Click here to read Sibal's piece in India Today

The Red Sea is bordered on the West by Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti, and on the East by Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In the north, touching the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea are Israel and Jordan. Somalia is not a Red Sea littoral country but, sitting on the Gulf of Aden, commands the waterway linking the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

The news this past week of Saudi deportation of an Eritrean Christian for proselytizing (instead of executing him) is a small glimmer of hope in an all too grim narrative of civil conflict, political repression and humanitarian problems. For example, just this month in Yemen, air strikes continued against extremists in the south of the country linked to Al Qaeda, while protesters and security forces continued violent clashes in a number of cities over political liberalization.

Linkages across the Red Sea deserve more attention. For example, President Bashir of Sudan met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia this month to discuss the difficulties of transition by Sudan after the secession of South Sudan. These difficulties include civil conflict, repression and state-sponsored violence. Just last week, Saudi Arabia officially recognized South Sudan as an independent state, but Saudi news sources describe Sudan as a “close ally” of the kingdom. There are about half a million workers from Sudan (north and south) in Saudi Arabia.

By contrast, Eritrea is something of a pariah state among its neighbours, in large part because of its support to terrorist groups, notably Al Shahab in Somalia, and military occupation of small parts of Djibouti territory. A recently completed report by a UN Monitoring group has reportedly recommended a stiffening of UN sanctions against Eritrea. The country has just been accused by the United States of covering up a large scale humanitarian disaster.

If ever a region needed creative new thinking, new dialogue and indeed an improvement in regional collaboration, the Red Sea littoral surely is one. The active Saudi diplomacy on political unrest in Yemen and Egypt in the first half of 2011 is a key marker of the need for and potential of a stronger Red Sea political community.   

Critics might complain: do we need yet another regional organization? There is after all a number of institutions where these countries can meet to promote dialogue, common political interests and economic prosperity if they were so inclined.  For the moment, they are not even so inclined.

The pundits should not decide. Given the emergence of stronger civil society activism in some countries of the region, and given the high need for more effective policies to promote peace, security and prosperity, the idea of a Red Sea political and economic community is certainly worth canvassing at an unofficial level. Of the littoral countries, only Saudi Arabia has the resources to fund such a regional dialogue. This would be a useful course of action for the Saudi government to consider.

At the same time, there can be a useful role for external actors, either governmental or non-governmental, to promote new regional dialogues on security and economic relations among Red Sea states and communities. The idea of a Red Sea community can be used as a unifying and peace-building idea in this troubled region.

Scroll to page 7 to read Austin's piece in New Europe

One of the biggest mistakes in decision-making for war and peace is over-simplification. This is one conclusion of a profound and sadly overlooked book from 1984 called “Ideology of the Offensive” by Jack Snyder. Europe and the United States appear to have fallen into this trap of over-simplification with their Iran policy.

The danger is that policy-makers overlook the limits of their knowledge and discount the possibility that they may be inflexible. According to the book, “most public policy problems entail considerable complexity and uncertainty”. We know most elements of the problem “only in an approximate way”. The strategist develops “relatively simple but effective techniques for scanning and organizing information about the problem and for structuring and evaluating different options”. “Discrepant information is either ignored or incorporated into the belief system in a way that minimizes the need to change the system’s structure”.

The belief system (orthodox doctrine) about Iran is dominated by the idea of a “rogue state”. In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration would put Iran and Libya in that category, with others. George Bush put Iran, Iraq and North Korea into the “axis of evil”. These terms may be rhetorically useful for speech writers but they are desperately unhelpful and counter-productive for policy-makers.

President Obama tried to break the hold of such a rigid and doctrinaire approach to Iran in his Nowruz speech of 19 March 2009 but failed to do so. The explanation for failure of that overture lies not in Iran’s lack of meaningful response, but because it was just easier for senior officials in the United States and Europe to continue with the doctrinaire approach.

The suppression of anti-government demonstrations in Iran after the 2009 presidential elections only stiffened the appeal of the orthodoxy for Western officials. The persistently rejectionist approach and bellicose language of a handful of Iranian leaders toward Israel also buttressed the power in the West of the single orthodoxy about Iran. In the Western official view, the only way to deal with Iran is to see it as a rogue state. No other perspectives should intrude.

The main reason why policy-makers prefer a doctrinaire and rigid approach to Iran is that it usefully disguises the basic weakness of their position, both in respect of Iran and in respect of the region as a whole. The United States and Europe now have very few levers of power and influence anywhere in this strategically vital region and appear to many people to be in retreat, both through withdrawal of military forces and through alienating key allies on the Arabian peninsula. Moreover, domestic political orthodoxies in Europe and the United States (about subjugating foreign policy to human rights issues) and domestic interest groups (Iranian expatriates and pro-Israel groups) make it so much easier to stick with the Iran orthodoxy in foreign policy.

But by any objective standard, our policy toward Iran is lazy, is stuck in a rut and simply does not correspond to our needs. A change in policy is urgently needed. It has to be driven by a reassessment of those needs. Iran’s importance today to the West is several degrees of magnitude greater than it was a decade ago, but we have more rigid confrontational policies than at that time and we have even less room for maneuver. In addition to a reassessment of our needs, we need to search more robustly and creatively for new levers of influence. Continued and intensifying isolation of Iran defeats any opportunity for influence. Can we afford to treat Iran as a pariah state or do we need it? If we waiting and hoping for regime change, that may be bad policy because we have no way of knowing whether it will come before or after the next crisis.

Click here to read Austin's piece in New Europe

Click here to read the piece in CivSource.

Perspectives coming out of the EastWest Institute’s global cyber security summit in London

EWI is a global think tank that has organized a series of meetings to help address the pressing issue of international cybersecurity cooperation. The London Summit was attended by government representatives from 47 countries, as well as a significant number of business and technology leaders.

For me, the important insights that emerged from the London Summit were the potential cyber threats that could impact state and local governments. Many vital citizen services are provided online and international cyber intrusions can compromise the security of these networks. Still there are significant challenges that need to be addressed in order to develop the multilateral agreements and the policies that need to be in place to ameliorate the cyber risks. This issue is not new. Two years ago in Beijing I attended meetings organized by the East/West Institute that addressed the issue of cyber threats. A preliminary agreement was reached at that time, to support multilateral cybersecurity negotiations around several agreed upon topics. The U.S., China, India, Russia and NATO were also ultimately parties to that agreement.

The discussions around protecting critical government services in cyberspace that emerged from the Beijing discussions became the platform for a preliminary interchange on the issue at the first EWI Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit held in Dallas in 2010. It was developed further this year at the 2011 EWI Summit in London.

In addition to the Summits, EWI working groups continue their work throughout the year, to try to hammer out recommendations that set the stage for international cyber cooperation to move forward. Earlier this year U.S./Russia bilateral negotiations on political infrastructure protection took place under the sponsorship of the EWI. The following five major recommendations emerged from that working group:

• Russia and the U.S., along with other willing parties, should conduct an evaluation of the present state of the intermingling of protected, humanitarian critical infrastructure with non-protected infrastructures in order to determine whether existing Convention and Protocol articulation is sufficient and whether significant detangling of essential humanitarian critical infrastructures is feasible.
• Russia and the U.S., along with other willing parties, should conduct a joint assessment of the benefit and feasibility of special markers for zones in cyberspace that can be used to designate humanitarian interests protected by the Conventions and Protocols of War.
• Russia, the U.S. and other interested parties, should assess how best to accommodate Convention principles with the new reality that cyber warriors may be non-state actors.
• Russia, the U.S. and other interested parties, should conduct a joint analysis of the attributes of cyber weapons in order to determine if there are attributes analogous to weapons previously banned by the Geneva Protocol.
• Russia and the U.S., along with other willing parties, should explore the value of recognizing a third, ‘other-than-war’ mode in order to clarify the application of existing Conventions and Protocols.

With these US/Russia recommendations as the foundation, one of the objectives of the London Summit was to define approaches to protect critical government services for our citizens. The protections are critical because of the proliferation of services available on the internet, including emergency response, health care, and human services. Several significant insights came out of the discussions at the Summit.

• There is a need to more clearly and specifically define those critical government services on the internet that directly affect the lives of private citizens.
• Work also needs to be done around policies to protect other critical infrastructure, such as the electric grid, which if attacked, could affect the ability of governments to provide critical citizen services.
• Once defined, policy should apply in peacetime as well as in wartime.
• Although consideration of the U.S.-Russia recommendation of markers in cyberspace was considered, there was concern about the recommendations as they did not address the risks posed by non-state actors.
• It was discussed that cost benefit analysis is required around potentially segregating certain vulnerable entities on the internet.
• Finally, it was also recognized that some multilateral backup capabilities may need to be established subject to assessing cost effectiveness.

The commitment was made by the Summit attendees to continue to refine the observations and recommendations, recognizing that there may ultimately be a requirement for international statutory changes and treaty agreements. The commitment was made to report back on progress at the third Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit planned for 2012 in India.

As always I welcome your feedback and questions for a lively discussion in the comment section below.

Mr. Robert N. Campbell III is Vice Chairman, Principal, Deloitte LLP and is the U.S. State Government Leader, based in Austin, TX

Click here to read the article in Der Standard

The arrest of Mladic is a highly symbolic marker that Serbia is now a normal state, prepared to enforce European values, EWI Vice president Greg Austin tells Time. 

Writing for chinausfocus.com, Fred Teng, a member of the President’s Advisory Group at EWI, examines the implications of China’s military posture and expenditures.

EWI Vice President and Director of Public Policy Andrew Nagorski talks on Russia Today about Polish-Russian relations, as two countries mark one year since the Smolensk presidential plane crash.

The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act denies permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to non-market economies that restrict emigration. The amendment was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress to pressure the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. In 1994, the Clinton administration found Russia to be in full compliance with the amendment’s freedom-of-emigration requirements. And in 2002, the United States officially began describing Russia as a market economy. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and now Obama all declared their intention to work with Congress to repeal the legislation as it applies to Russia, but no action has been taken. The reason: Congress still sees Jackson-Vanik as a lever to punish Russia for its human rights record even when the executive branch is prioritizing the security aspects of the bilateral relationship.

Jackson-Vanik’s ongoing application has been a major symbolic irritant in the relationship, even though the United States has granted Russia a waiver every year since 1992. But once Russia joins the WTO, which could happen next year, Jackson-Vanik will go from being a symbol of mistrust to inflicting actual harm both to Russia and the U.S.-Russia relationship.

Jackson-Vanik is inconsistent with WTO requirements on unconditional application of most-favored nation status. If Russia enters the WTO and is still subject to Jackson-Vanik, the United States will have to invoke the non-application principle, by which a member can opt out of its obligations to a newly acceded member. The United States has invoked non-application before—and is the only WTO member to have done so. Non-application, however, is reciprocal. U.S. businesses would face market barriers in Russia that other companies would not be subject to. Congressional refusal to pass legislation to permanently graduate Russia from Jackson-Vanik would then hurt the U.S. economy.

With U.S. support and some of the hardest negotiations behind it, Russia is, according to some observers, 95 percent of the way to WTO membership, after first applying nearly 18 years ago. By comparison, China’s accession process took 15 years; the average is five to seven years. And although there are still economic and political barriers to Russian accession—Georgia has a significant role as a possible spoiler of Russian WTO ambitions—the United States is actively working to support Russia’s bid.  As Vice President Joe Biden puts it, membership would produce “stronger ties of trade and commerce that match the security cooperation we have achieved.”

There are clear benefits that would accrue to Russia from joining the WTO—including an expected 3 percent increase in GDP. There are also significant benefits that would accrue to U.S. companies that do business or want to do business in Russia, including greater predictability, transparency, and access to mechanisms for dispute resolution.  All of which would translate into greater access to the world’s tenth largest economy—and the largest economy currently outside of the WTO. The President’s Export Council estimates that U.S. exports to Russia, totaling nearly $6 billion in 2010, could double or triple once Russia joins the WTO. But if the United States has to invoke the non-application principle, this could make U.S. products more expensive and U.S. companies less competitive in the Russian market. This is not the first time that Congress has grappled with how to support WTO membership for a country that many members feel does not respect human rights and the rule of law. China was graduated from Jackson-Vanik shortly after it joined the WTO in December 2001, despite such concerns. But the legislation granting China PNTR also created the Congressional Executive Commission on China, which is tasked with monitoring human rights and the rule of law. This provides a workable model for how to decouple the economic and political issues, without downplaying the legitimate political considerations stressed by members of Congress from both parties. There is still a forum for addressing those highly sensitive issues, but the economic relationship isn’t held hostage to them.

Even if the administration decides to propose this kind of solution for Russia, however, it may not be willing to push hard for it.  While it claims it is prioritizing the economic aspect of the reset, the administration has relegated Russia to at least fourth place in its queue of priorities. It is currently pursuing congressional approval of free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, and the Republican leadership in the House has indicated it will not consider Russia’s Jackson-Vanik status before these FTAs are considered. While these three countries are larger trading partners for the U.S. than Russia, there is also a compelling strategic interest in promoting the U.S.-Russia relationship that goes beyond pure economics.

The administration should start laying the groundwork now for the repeal of Jackson-Vanik rather than waiting for Congress to consider the FTAs for South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. And the administration should offer a way forward for Jackson-Vanik graduation for Russia that separates the economic issues at hand from long-standing congressional concerns about Russia’s dubious record on human rights and the rule of law. The legislation approving China’s PNTR status provides a ready example of how to move forward. WTO accession would be good for Russia, it would be good for the United States, and it would be especially good for American business.

Miller is a senior associate at the EastWest Institute.