Amitai Etzioni Notes

The World America Didn't Make

Robert Kagan’s book, The World America Made, is refocusing the debate on whether the United States is declining as a global power—and speculation about whether other powers will step in to assume the responsibility for sustaining a liberal, rule-based international order. Kagan is known as a brilliant conservative observer, and even President Obama is reported to be reading this tour de force of U.S. foreign policy.

Most of the debate about the book is centered on the question of whether the United States is indeed declining and if China is ready to buy into the liberal order. But more attention should be dedicated to the question of whether there is such an order in the first place…

Read the rest at The National Interest.

Obama’s New Old Defense Strategy

When President Obama unveiled his military budget earlier this year, it was clear that he was essentially putting a new defense strategy on the table. The Pentagon’s plan called for the ranks of the active-duty Army to be reduced from 570,000 to 490,000 troops over five years. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, was supposed to shrink from 202,000 to 182,000. At the same time, drones were a high priority in the budget—not surprising, given that Obama has ordered about five times as many drone attacks as his predecessor. According to Robert Haddick, writing at Foreign Policy, “the Pentagon intends to keep its ability to maintain continuous drone surveillance over 65 spots on the globe, with the capability to surge that to 85 if necessary.”

Read the rest at The New Republic.

Obama's Iran Bluff

Much has been made of President Obama’s recent comments on Iran. During an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama said that America is “not taking any option off the table.” This was a reiteration of his State of the Union comment that “America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.” Obama’s explicit acknowledgement of the “military component” as one of the options on the table has been interpreted as a commitment to undertake military action should diplomatic efforts and sanctions not have the desired effects.

Read the rest at the National Interest.

Iran: Personal Observations

Several years ago, I spent three days in Isfahan, Iran, at a conference organized by the reformers at the Center for Dialogue among Civilizations. Asked to visit the rest of the country, I met with Iranians in Qom, Shiraz, Kashan and Tehran. What struck me most were the little shrines I saw all over the country at the sides of the road and at the entrances and exits of towns and villages. They are dedicated to Iranians—about five hundred thousand—who died young during the eight-year war with Iraq. Pointing to these shrines, my hosts bemoaned their losses the way Germans talk about WWII and the Nazi era: as traumatic experiences that have shaped their psyche and whose repetition they are keen to avoid at almost any cost. The Iranians I met—granted, a few years back, in 2002—were very war allergic.

Read the rest at The National Interest.