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1https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2019-04-24/why-comedian-won-ukraines-presidency-landslide
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3Why a Comedian Won Ukraine’s Presidency in a Landslide
4Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Victory Is the Punchline to Decades of Misrule
5By Peter Dickinson [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/peter-dickinson]
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8The global wave of protest populism [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-10-17/power-populism] that began with Brexit [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2017-10-16/why-british-chose-brexit] and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump reached new heights in Ukraine this weekend. A comedian outsider whose campaign served as an echo chamber for public discontent in Europe’s most consistently corrupt nation has won a landslide victory in the presidential race. Ukraine’s new president-elect, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is in many ways the ideal poster boy for the antiestablishment trend currently sweeping world politics. A media-savvy TV celebrity who has never previously held political office, he has made a virtue of his inexperience by posing as an everyman candidate untainted by the rot within the system. Zelenskiy’s stunning success—he won the Ukrainian presidency by a record margin and triumphed in all but one of the country’s 24 administrative regions—amounted to a vote of no confidence in the entire Ukrainian political class. Whereas other populists have exploited hot-button issues or courted support among overlooked demographics, Zelenskiy was able to galvanize an entire nation to back him in what was surely one of the biggest protest votes ever seen.
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10VIRTUAL CANDIDATE
11What was Zelenskiy’s secret? He ran for president as a virtual candidate, eschewing traditional rallies, political talk shows, and press interviews in favor of comedy concerts, slick social media messaging, and carefully curated appearances on friendly channels. His most original and effective campaign platform was undoubtedly the hit TV series Servant of the People, in which he stars as an accidental president who crusades against corruption.
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13Launched in 2015, the show served as the perfect vehicle for a would-be protest candidate, allowing its star to pose as an honest man in a world of political sin. The fictional Ukraine depicted in Servant of the People is a grotesque parody of an already imperfect reality. A typical episode of the show conveys the moral bankruptcy of the country’s democratic institutions while reinforcing the morbid brand of political cynicism favored by many, if not most, Ukrainians. According to a recent Gallup survey [https://news.gallup.com/poll/247976/world-low-ukrainians-confident-government.aspx], Ukrainians have the world’s lowest levels of confidence in their government, with just nine percent expressing faith in the authorities. In this toxic environment, Zelenskiy’s humorous and sympathetic portrayal of a well-intentioned political novice struck a resounding chord. It did not seem to matter that the third season of the show, which premièred on the eve of the presidential vote, was a thinly disguised extension of his campaign. By then, the comedian’s presidential pretensions had already gained a foothold in the national psyche.  
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15Although Zelenskiy the candidate was in some ways almost indistinguishable from the presidential role he played on TV, he has been a household name in Ukraine for decades. Zelenskiy first entered the national consciousness in the late 1990s as part of a student troupe that cut its teeth on the hugely popular TV comedy show KVN. Zelenskiy emerged as one of the show’s standout performers and was soon a star in his own right. He has remained in the public eye ever since, his comedy shows a ubiquitous presence on Ukrainian TV and his live performances attracting celebrity audiences, including the politicians he routinely mocks.
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17Not everyone enjoys Zelenskiy the comedian. Throughout the recent election campaign, critics held up his habit of joking at Ukraine’s expense as evidence that he lacks patriotism, and his routines mocking minorities have raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, an affable onscreen persona coupled with sheer longevity have combined to lend him the aura of an old friend. An entire generation of Ukrainians has quite literally grown up with Zelenskiy. This sense of personal familiarity proved invaluable during the presidential race, allowing him to remain conveniently vague on policy details while emphasizing his everyman credentials.
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19CULTURE OF CORRUPTION
20The frustration that Zelenskiy exploited is not new. Ever since gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine has struggled with a pervasive culture of corruption that has fueled not one but two post-Soviet revolutions. Neither the 2004 Orange Revolution nor the 2013–14 Euromaidan revolution succeeded in bringing about fundamental change, creating the conditions for the rise of a populist outsider. This was bad news for Zelenskiy’s opponent, incumbent President Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko is by no means an especially corrupt politician, at least not by Ukrainian standards. His great crime is his perceived failure to break with the institutionalized corruption pervading the Ukrainian state apparatus. This ultimately outweighed his considerable achievements in nation-building and diplomacy. During Poroshenko’s presidency, Ukraine successfully stemmed Russia’s hybrid invasion and built an army capable of giving the Kremlin pause for thought. Poroshenko signed an Association Agreement with Brussels and won visa-free EU travel for Ukrainians. Under his stewardship, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church secured historic autocephaly, or independence, from the Moscow Patriarchate. These landmark geopolitical events, however, all took place against a seedy backdrop of graft scandals and backroom dealing that appeared to differ little from the unsavory shenanigans of previous administrations.
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22The frustration that Zelenskiy exploited is not new. Ever since gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine has struggled with a pervasive culture of corruption that has fueled not one but two post-Soviet revolutions.
23Poroshenko became president just three months after the massacre on Kiev’s central square that marked the tragic climax of the 2013–14 street protests, and he has since spent the entirety of his presidency in a state of undeclared war with Ukraine’s superpower neighbor. For many Ukrainians, this makes his apparent willingness to tolerate continued corruption unforgivable. If the sacrifices of Euromaidan and the far greater losses caused by Russia’s subsequent invasion are insufficient to produce a decisive change in political culture, they argue, then perhaps it is now time to try something completely different.   
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25Zelenskiy is certainly different, but nobody really has any idea what kind of president he will be. The comedian will soon take charge of a vast and volatile country at war with Russia and struggling to redefine its place in the world. He will do so while burdened with the impossible expectations of an electorate that has projected its diverse hopes and dreams onto the blank sheet of his candidacy. Everyone knows what Zelenskiy theoretically opposes, but what are his actual plans?
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27Inevitably, he has identified the fight against corruption as his top priority. This is likely to begin with wholesale personnel changes within government institutions and a push to end the immunity from arrest currently enjoyed by members of Parliament, judges, and other members of the political classes. There is also talk of symbolic gimmicks such as moving presidential administration offices out of the Soviet-era building they currently occupy. Observers anxiously await his first major political appointments as president, which will provide a clearer indication of his commitment to genuine reform.
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29Perhaps the most meaningful test of Zelenskiy’s anti-corruption credentials will be his future relationship with the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who is widely seen as his patron. Zelenskiy owes much of his celebrity status to the blanket coverage he receives on Kolomoisky’s 1+1 TV channel, and opponents have accused [https://www.politico.eu/article/volodomyr-zelenskiy-ihor-kolomoisky-the-comedian-and-the-oligarch-ukraine-presidential-election/] the comedian of being a puppet who ran for office only in order to settle a personal score between the oligarch and Poroshenko. Kolomoisky suffered a number of losses during Poroshenko’s presidency, most notably the nationalization of his prize asset PrivatBank. He has been living in self-imposed exile in Israel for some time, but now plans to return to Ukraine. Any subsequent upturns in Kolomoisky’s fortunes will come under huge scrutiny and have the potential to derail Zelenskiy’s political career entirely.
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31FOREIGN POLICY AND IDENTITY
32With anti-corruption activities serving as the alpha and omega of Zelenskiy’s presidency, other areas will receive less attention. The ongoing war with Russia will necessarily be one of his chief concerns, but although Zelenskiy has spoken of his ambitions to end the conflict, he is unlikely to diverge much from his predecessor in refusing to compromise with the Kremlin. Instead, he has proposed broadening the format of existing peace talks to include the United Kingdom and the United States, which would certainly not endear him to Moscow. This does not rule out the possibility of progress toward peace, but it makes a continuation of the current bloody stalemate a more realistic outcome.
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34In terms of foreign policy, Zelenskiy will almost certainly maintain Ukraine’s current geopolitical trajectory, but has also promised to put major national decisions such as NATO membership to referendum. Ties with Russia will probably remain in deep freeze, despite the fact that Zelenskiy’s opponents spent much of the presidential campaign depicting him as a Kremlin stooge. In reality, there is very little room for rapprochement in a relationship poisoned by five years of war and further complicated by Russia’s insistence that it is a mere bystander in the conflict.
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36A self-styled unifying figure, Zelenskiy will keep his distance from the national identity issues that have repeatedly divided Ukrainian society since 1991. Although supportive of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, he will shy away from attempts to bolster the official status of Russian and will instead maintain existing measures safeguarding the Ukrainian language. Likewise, he is unlikely to reverse efforts to recognize Ukraine’s mid-twentieth-century independence struggle against the Soviet regime, but will look to shift the emphasis toward less polarizing ground by honoring the heroes of contemporary Ukraine. He may adopt a more relaxed attitude toward Russian cultural content in the Ukrainian media, but most restrictions will remain in place as long as the current Kremlin information war against Ukraine continues. This hands-off approach to national identity will alienate some, but after five years of intensified nation-building, many Ukrainians will applaud a return to bread and butter issues.
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39FROM PRAISE TO PRESSURE
40As Ukraine braces itself for Zelenskiy’s presidency, there is a sense of an entire nation preparing to leap into the unknown. Zelenskiy himself will have to adjust to an unfamiliar and incredibly pressurized environment where he can no longer hide from the press or his political opponents. For a man more used to the praise and platitudes of showbiz society, this will come as a rude awakening. Ukraine’s president-elect has said he plans to serve only one five-year term before handing over the reins to a new generation of politicians. This is presumably an attempt to emphasize that he does not see himself as a career politician and fully expects to return to his previous celebrity existence once he has finished saving the country. At this stage, simply surviving five years in office would represent a remarkable achievement for a man whose main qualification is a complete absence of qualifications.
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42Zelenskiy’s campaign was a brilliant example of anti-establishment populism, but he must now make the leap from virtual candidate and serving president. As the challenges of actually running a country begin to mount, he may come to long for the days of his TV presidency when nothing went off script. Ukraine’s hunger for change catapulted Zelenskiy to a historic election victory, but that same hunger could quickly consume him if he now fails to deliver. 
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45https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sri-lanka/2019-04-24/religious-tensions-behind-attacks-sri-lanka
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47The Religious Tensions Behind the Attacks in Sri Lanka
48How Sectarianism Could Spin Out of Control
49By Neil DeVotta [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/neil-devotta] and Sumit Ganguly [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/sumit-ganguly]
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52The series of suicide bombings at Christian churches and hotels in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, on Easter Sunday threatened to rip apart the country’s complex ethno-religious fabric. The government has blamed the attacks on two obscure Islamist groups called the Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim and the National Thawheed Jamaat (NTJ). It appears the latter has links to jihadists outside Sri Lanka, including the Islamic State, or ISIS. If that attribution bears out, the attacks are likely to inflame tensions between the country’s Buddhist majority and its Muslim minority—and to promote sectarianism in the wider region, too.
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54A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
55Sri Lanka is no stranger to terrorism, having lived through a nearly three-decade-long civil war that pitted the majority Sinhalese against minority Tamil separatist organizations, most notably the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. During the war, the LTTE carried out dozens of suicide attacks. But last weekend’s carnage was unprecedented. The bombs killed over 300 people and injured at least 500 more.
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57Sri Lanka’s Muslim community has long bridled at the austere, Wahabi-influenced practices the NTJ propounds. But aside from making the news last year for desecrating some statues of the Buddha, the NTJ was hardly known to non-Muslims in Sri Lanka until this week. Now, however, the group has taken center stage in a long-running ethno-religious drama. Beginning around 2012, extremist Buddhist groups, emboldened by the LTTE’s defeat in the civil war, began targeting Muslims, even though most Muslims supported the state against Tamil separatism. Based on preliminary reports, it appears that anti-Muslim violence may have influenced some of last weekend’s attackers to join the NTJ. If so, that suggests an unsurprising lesson: further violence against Sri Lanka’s Muslim community will only radicalize others. 
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59Sri Lanka has long operated as an ethnocracy dominated by Sinhalese Buddhists, who make up 70 percent of the population. This was the main spur for the Tamils’ separatist campaign. By switching to targeting Muslims, who constitute less than ten percent of the population, Buddhist extremists sought to open up a new ethnoreligious fissure and then exploit it. Stereotypes of Muslims—the idea that traders fleece non-Muslims, for example, and that the Muslim community is more loyal to predominantly Islamic countries, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—coupled with the Muslim community’s relative insularity have made their Islamophobia all the more effective.
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61Muslims have pushed back against efforts to marginalize them. Muslim elites have worked diligently to ensure that young people do not react violently to the burgeoning anti-Muslim agitprop, and some Muslims have protested against the Islamist extremism within their communities and provided the state with intelligence on extremists. NTJ’s attacks will obscure those efforts and give Buddhist nationalists fodder for their anti-Muslim agenda. Most of the victims were Sinhalese and Tamil Christians, a fact that may lead to the creation of a broader anti-Muslim coalition. That could plunge the country into ethno-religious crisis once again.       
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63Even if Sri Lanka avoids this dire scenario, the country is in for a bout of political instability. The Indian intelligence services, which keep close tabs on Islamists in the region, warned their Sri Lankan counterparts of impending attacks weeks ago. Yet the bad blood between Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (partly stemming from Sirisena’s failed attempt to sack Wickremesinghe late last year) led the president to exclude the prime minister from National Security Council meetings. As a result, the prime minister and the cabinet were left uninformed of India’s warnings. After the attacks, the initial calls for unity and calm were quickly overtaken by ministers allied with Wickremesinghe questioning the actions of the president. Charges and counter-charges of blame for the government’s abject failure to forestall the terrorists are flying back and forth.
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65FALLOUT
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67The ethnic and religious fallout from the attacks is likely to ripple across the region. India, the region’s dominant power, has long played a role in Sri Lanka’s domestic politics. In the late 1980s, it tried to end the civil war by brokering a pact between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. The LTTE, however, refused to disarm, and the Indian peacekeeping force ended up fighting the group even as a new Sri Lankan government, fearful of India’s designs, demanded the peacekeepers’ withdrawal. India has made great efforts in the ensuing years to overcome the ill feelings the peacekeeping operation generated among Sinhalese and Tamils. Throughout, India’s nearly 70 million-strong Tamil population has kept a watchful eye on the conditions of their co-ethnics in Sri Lanka. No government in New Delhi can entirely overlook them, as they constitute an important electoral force.
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69Now the Indian government’s real focus, however, will be on India’s nearly 200 million Muslims. Few of them have responded to the siren call of global Islamic jihad. But since 2016, when a Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party government took office, large numbers of Indian Muslims have borne the brunt of discrimination in everyday life. The Sri Lankan bombings are likely to make things worse. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the throes of an election campaign, lost no time in telling voters that only his party could end terrorism in the region. Since all the suicide bombers are believed to have been Muslims, Modi’s sectarian message was hardly obscure. His fear mongering could well push some previously skeptical Hindu voters to throw in their lot with the BJP.
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71Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists harbor ambivalent feelings toward India, but they now share a common Islamophobic agenda with India’s Hindu zealots. Should former President Mahinda Rajapaksa return to power in this year’s presidential elections—a real possibility—India’s Hindu nationalists and Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nationalists will be able to forge a common anti-Islam platform. Combined with the presence of Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, the rise of Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh, and ongoing unrest in predominantly Muslim Indian-controlled Kashmir, an anti-Islamic front would further rupture communal relations in both India and Sri Lanka and foment Islamic radicalism across South Asia. The Easter Sunday bombings may yet claim more victims.
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74https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-04-16/longest-wars
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76The Longest Wars
77Richard Holbrooke and the Decline of American Power
78By George Packer
79One of the most celebrated diplomats of his generation, Richard Holbrooke helped normalize U.S. relations with China; served as U.S. ambassador to a newly reunified Germany and then to the United Nations; and, most famously, negotiated the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia. But he began and ended his career struggling with how to resolve two American wars: first in Vietnam, then in Afghanistan.
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81Richard Holbrooke was six feet one but seemed bigger. He had long skinny limbs and a barrel chest and broad square shoulder bones, on top of which sat his strangely small head and, encased within it, the sleepless brain. His feet were so far from his trunk that, as his body wore down and the blood stopped circulating properly, they swelled up and became marbled red and white like steak. He had special shoes made and carried extra socks in his leather attaché case, sweating through half a dozen pairs a day, stripping them off on long flights and draping them over his seat pocket in first class, or else cramming used socks next to the classified documents in his briefcase. He wrote his book about ending the war in Bosnia—the place in history that he always craved, though it was never enough—with his feet planted in a Brookstone shiatsu foot massager. One morning he showed up late for a meeting in the secretary of state’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria in his stocking feet, shirt untucked and fly half zipped, padding around the room and picking grapes off a fruit basket, while Madeleine Albright’s furious stare tracked his every move. During a videoconference call from the U.S. mission to the United Nations, in New York, his feet were propped up on a chair, while down in the White House Situation Room their giant distortion completely filled the wall screen and so disrupted the meeting that President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser finally ordered a military aide to turn off the video feed. Holbrooke put his feet up anywhere, in the White House, on other people’s desks and coffee tables—for relief, and for advantage.
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83Near the end, it seemed as if all his troubles were collecting in his feet—atrial fibrillation, marital tension, thwarted ambition, conspiring colleagues, hundreds of thousands of air miles, corrupt foreign leaders, a war that would not yield to the relentless force of his will.
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85But at the other extreme from his feet, the ice-blue eyes were on perpetual alert. Their light told you that his intelligence was always awake and working. They captured nearly everything and gave almost nothing away. Like one-way mirrors, they looked outward, not inward. No one was quicker to size up a room, an adversary, a newspaper article, a set of variables in a complex situation—even his own imminent death. The ceaseless appraising told of a manic spirit churning somewhere within the low voice and languid limbs. Once, in the 1980s, he was walking down Madison Avenue when an acquaintance passed him and called out, “Hi, Dick.” Holbrooke watched the man go by, then turned to his companion: “I wonder what he meant by that.” Yes, his curly hair never obeyed the comb, and his suit always looked rumpled, and he couldn’t stay off the phone or TV, and he kept losing things, and he ate as much food as fast as he could, once slicing open the tip of his nose on a clamshell and bleeding through a pair of cloth napkins—yes, he was in almost every way a disorderly presence. But his eyes never lost focus.
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87So much thought, so little inwardness. He could not be alone—he might have had to think about himself. Maybe that was something he couldn’t afford to do. Leslie Gelb, Holbrooke’s friend of 45 years and recipient of multiple daily phone calls, would butt into a monologue and ask, “What’s Obama like?” Holbrooke would give a brilliant analysis of the president. “How do you think you affect Obama?” Holbrooke had nothing to say. Where did it come from, that blind spot behind his eyes that masked his inner life? It was a great advantage over the rest of us, because the propulsion from idea to action was never broken by self-scrutiny. It was also a great vulnerability, and finally, it was fatal.
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89SOUTH VIETNAM, 1963
90In 1963, Holbrooke was a 22-year-old U.S. Foreign Service officer on his first diplomatic posting, to South Vietnam. The State Department detailed Holbrooke to the U.S. Agency for International Development in Saigon and a small, unconventional entity called Rural Affairs. It was an odd place for a young diplomat to land—unheard of, really. Holbrooke and a colleague were going to be the first Foreign Service officers sent into the field as aid workers. The agency would put them out among peasants in Vietcong strongholds where the war was being fought and have them hand out bulgur wheat, cement, fertilizer, and barbed wire. As bachelors, they were considered relatively expendable. It was an early experiment in counterinsurgency.
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92Within just a couple of months of arriving in Vietnam, Holbrooke had maneuvered his way into running the Rural Affairs operation in the province of Ba Xuyen, down in the Mekong Delta. Ba Xuyen was the end of the earth. It was almost all the way to Ca Mau, and Ca Mau was the terminal point of the Asian continent, “the southernmost province of North Vietnam,” the New York Times correspondent David Halberstam once called it, because Ca Mau and the lower delta were the heartland of the Vietcong, the communist guerrillas who had been lurking for years among the hamlets and canals and rice paddies and mangrove forests. Ba Xuyen was a province of more than half a million, eight or nine hours’ drive from Saigon down Route 4, across the interminable wet flatness of the delta, nothing but flooded paddy fields mile after mile all the way to the horizon—in mid-September, when Holbrooke arrived in the town of Soc Trang, the rice shoots were still golden, not yet the emerald green of the harvest—though more often he would fly, since there was a daily milk run on an Air America Caribou between Tan Son Nhut airport and airstrips around the delta, and driving was risky by day and out of the question after dark.
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94His room was on the second floor of a clay-colored colonial guesthouse, with a balcony overlooking the town square, across from the provincial headquarters and its tennis court. Next door to the guesthouse was a dance club called the Bungalow, except that the government of South Vietnam had banned dancing in order to protect the honor of Vietnamese women, so the Bungalow was now just a bar where local soldiers could go drink and pick up girls. Holbrooke’s neighbors, also newly arrived, were a young Christian couple from Rhode Island, George and Renee McDowell. George was an aggie with International Voluntary Services—he was introducing local farmers to a strain of enormous watermelons from Georgia. Holbrooke made it known that he wasn’t interested. He and McDowell once went to the Soc Trang airstrip to meet some officials visiting from Saigon, and Holbrooke introduced himself: “I’m Richard Holbrooke, the AID man here in Ba Xuyen.” He gestured to McDowell, who was three years older. “This is George McDowell, the IVS boy.”
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96Holbrooke’s thing was strategic hamlets. There were 324 of them in Ba Xuyen—at least, that was what he arrived believing. When he asked to visit a few of the farther-flung hamlets he was told that it was too dangerous. He went anyway, in his white short-sleeve button-up shirt, with his sunglasses case clipped to the breast pocket, and found that the strategic hamlets consisted of punji sticks stuck in a moat and a barely armed local militia. The Vietcong were overrunning and destroying them at will. There were 3,000 hard-core cadres in the province, according to the intelligence reports. Saigon had permanently conceded half the provincial territory to the guerrillas, who had their own district chiefs, tax collectors, and schools. At night only the towns belonged to the government. Nonetheless, in Saigon and Washington there were 324 strategic hamlets in Ba Xuyen, putting 61 percent of the population under the government’s theoretical control.
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98In Soc Trang the war was very close. The airstrip was often hit by mortar fire. Holbrooke lost 15 pounds in the heat. His room had no air conditioning or fan, no working toilet or shower, and he could never get away from the mosquitoes, so he spent a good deal of time at a compound a block toward the canal that was occupied by Americans from the Military Assistance Advisory Group. They were among the 15,000 U.S. troops supporting the South Vietnamese army, often in combat. The advisers had a small projector and showed movies such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Satan Never Sleeps, for which Holbrooke had a bottomless appetite. On weekends he tried to get back to Saigon.
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100Holbrooke was a good writer, never better than in his youth. He wrote hundreds of letters. Let him tell it.
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103I wish I could tell it all to you—the poorly lit room and bar that I am now sitting in, where the MAAG men sit and wait their tours out; the playmates from Playboy on the walls here, somehow very much out of place; the stacks of old magazines and paperbacks, the other hints of home that the US Army flies into the Vietcong’s homeland to make us feel a little less lost; the water everywhere, rising, raining, so that literally this province, even the ground around our building, is under water; the waiting; the ugliness, the cruelty, the tragedy. And in Saigon a regime so totally bankrupt and disgusting it is hard to describe.
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105There is something different about the Delta. Flying over it begins to give you some idea of the problems. It is completely flat, and ⅔ of it is under water right now. Yet it is the great VC [Vietcong] stronghold, which may be the last to fall. How is it possible? Where can they possibly be? Many are in the marshes and inaccessible swamps of the far south, but the fact is that for most, this day means being sheltered in someone’s house and in one of the hamlets right below us.
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107My job as civilian advisor to the province chief and overseer of the aid program here puts me continually in the position of advocate of plans and projects which would seek to make a reality out of the clichés that everyone pays lip service to. I don’t mind this (actually enjoy it) but it is sometimes tiring to try to get the Vietnamese to do something which is, after all, for their own good (or so we think . . .). On the other hand, when I step back just a little to look at everything, it seems to me that the Vietnamese have taken our overbearing presence rather well over the last few years. We arrive here with no knowledge of the country or of the situation and immediately start giving advice, some of which we can really turn almost into orders because of the materials and money and transportation that we fully control. I think that no American would stand for such a deep and continuing interference in our affairs, even if it appeared that survival was at stake. Yet the Vietnamese accept it, and with rather good grace.
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109At 0500 this morning the news came in that the VC had attacked and possibly overrun the furthest out outpost in the southeastern district of Ba Xuyen. It is a Cambodian post, located just three kilometers from a mangrove forest which forms the point where the lower branch of the Mekong meets the South China Sea. The mangrove forest is a VC haven, as almost all mangrove forests are. The post protects a huge and critical hamlet, also Cambodian, which was originally scheduled to be visited by [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara today before the schedule was cut. Anyway, by helicopter we flew out over the area for about an hour, circling at around 1500 feet, and from that height it could be clearly seen that the post had been destroyed. What the situation was on the ground could not yet be known—we did not go any lower, since we were getting shot at from time to time as we moved over the area. We refueled at Soc Trang, and joined an Eagle Flight moving out over the area now. An Eagle is a group of about 6 to 10 choppers, which fly very low over bad areas, hoping to draw fire, after which they pounce. We were above the main force choppers, which carry Vietnamese army. Finally, after the infantry had reached the hamlet and post, we went in.
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111On the ground was one of the worst sights I ever hope to see. The VC had apparently dug in with recoilless 75mm fire only 50 yards away, and leveled the post before moving a man against it. (Such a weapon is definitely from China—they never were used here by either US, French or VN.) Unlike most posts which fall here, it was apparently not an inside job. This may in part be due to the fact that these were Cambodians, and they are the best fighters around.
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113The fort was a shambles, of the 31 men in it 10 were dead, as were 7 children and 4 women, who live with their men in these terrible traps. The bodies were being assembled as we came in, and the noise of the women wailing, plus the horrible air and stench that overlay everything, was . . . One sees pictures of people picking their way through the war-torn rubble of Europe and Japan, and we have seen this sort of thing often in the histories of our times, but going in on the ground like this is still something new. One doesn’t know quite what his reactions will be. Mine were not as bad as I was afraid they might be; perhaps little by little I have been working up to this anyway. (There have been so many similar to this, and Vietnam is such a cruel country to begin with, but this was the worst I have yet been in immediately afterwards.)
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115But afterwards it has been harder to put away the pictures of Can Nganh post. In a way, so unreal, since the birds still flew around, and the children in the nearest houses, less than 50 yards away, played games and seemed normal. But there were the women crying over the torn bodies of their husbands, and legs sticking out here and there grotesquely.
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117I have my doubts, getting deeper and deeper, about our basic approach here. Recent discussions and hints I have got from various sources would indicate that out of the McNamara visits came added weight for the exponents of Victory through Air Power—the Air Force, and the armed helicopters. I feel that this is a terrible step, both morally and tactically. Of course, it would never do to actually attack policy on moral grounds in the American community here, which is a basically tough and getting tougher community (“War is hell,” justifies any horror). However, the decision to fight the VC from the air can be quite easily attacked on the simple grounds of stupidity (or as Talleyrand once said, “Sir, it is worse than a crime, it is a blunder”). The VC, I am convinced, often fire on our planes merely to draw artillery and air destruction down upon hamlets. This may sound amazing, but it is a generally accepted fact, and the reason for it that once we have committed such an act, the VC can make great propaganda hay out of it.
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119So, anyway, if by air power we mean to win this war, thousands of Vietnamese will die and the enemy will resist far longer; we will be making a grave mistake and I am not happy about it. Of course the irony of the whole thing is overwhelming, if one is ever stupid enough to stop and think about it. Today, in Vietnam, we are using by far worse weapons and worse—less humane—tactics than the enemy. I have no doubt at all that we kill more civilians than the VC, and with what might generally be admitted are less selective, less “right” tactics. I suppose that we are on the right side in the long run here. There is no doubt in my mind that if we lose here we will be fighting this war in other countries in Latin America and Asia within a few years. But right now, we are fighting wrong, and it hurts. In the short run terms, we really should be on the other side. Take away the ties to Hanoi and Peking and the VC are fighting for the things we should always be fighting for in the world. Instead we continue to defend a class of haves which has not yet shown its real ability to understand that the have-nots must be brought into the nation. Let that be shown, and perhaps there will be an improvement in the situation, not of our making, but to our benefit.
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121The whole damn thing makes me slightly ill. (Or is it my throat?) This is the most exciting assignment in the world, and I will always be grateful for having it. But I do not think I will be sorry to leave. One friend of mine just got his next assignment: Luxembourg. It seems almost a joke, but it is true. There are such places. I think I am beginning to see war, which goddamn it this really is, in the least glorified of lights. That is when the fight sometimes doesn’t even seem worth it, so bloody is the cost. But there is no choice, really, is there?
122
123
124Counterinsurgency isn’t for everyone—it’s a sophisticated taste. In Vietnam it attracted the idealists. This attraction wasn’t what got Americans into the war. We fell into Vietnam and kept on sinking out of a mistaken belief that the policy of containment required us to stake our security and credibility on not losing another square mile of Asia to communism even though the enemy were nationalists. But counterinsurgency was part of the lure. It was what kept Holbrooke and Americans like him there.
125
126We prefer our wars quick and decisive, concluding with a surrender ceremony, and we like firepower more than we want to admit, while counterinsurgency requires supreme restraint. Its apostles in Vietnam used to say, “The best weapon for killing is a knife. If you can’t use a knife, then a gun. The worst weapon is airpower.” Counterinsurgency is, according to the experts, 80 percent political. We spend our time on American charts and plans and tasks, as if the solution to another country’s internal conflict is to get our own bureaucracy right. And maybe we don’t take the politics of other people seriously. It comes down to the power of our belief in ourselves. If we are good—and are we not good?—then we won’t need to force other people to do what we want. They will know us by our deeds, and they will want for themselves what we want for them.
127
128There was a Peanuts comic strip that circulated among Holbrooke and his friends in Vietnam. Charlie Brown’s baseball team has just gotten slaughtered, 184–0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?!”
129
130WASHINGTON, 1967
131Years later, Holbrooke would describe an almost inevitable sequence of doubt and disillusionment that took place in the minds of certain Americans in Vietnam. First, they would begin to question official assessments of the war. Then, they would start to question U.S. tactics, and then, the strategy.
132
133By 1967, Holbrooke had entered the fourth and final stage of doubt. He began to question the American commitment in Vietnam. He had returned home and taken a position as a senior aide to Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach. Nine thousand miles away from Vietnam, he could see that the true threat was on the home front, that the war was tearing his country apart. He was coming to the conclusion that the United States could never win, at least not on terms that Americans would accept. But for the few doves in government, that didn’t mean, “Let’s get the hell out of Vietnam.” It meant, “What the hell do we do now?” That was about as far as skepticism could take someone while he was still inside. The process of disenchantment was excruciatingly slow. Later on, people would backdate their moment of truth, their long-deferred encounter with the glaringly obvious. This was often inadvertent—they honestly couldn’t believe that they were so wrong for so many years. And when they finally did begin to lose faith, they kept it to themselves and a few sympathetic friends.
134
135Katzenbach, number two in the State Department, was having his own doubts. He began to meet with a dozen senior people from around the government every Thursday afternoon at five o’clock in his office on the seventh floor. For 90 minutes they would sit in a circle of chairs and have drinks and talk about Vietnam. Katzenbach called it “the Non-Group,” because there was no agenda, no paper trail, and no one was allowed to quote anyone to outsiders. The Non-Group became a safe place to explore alternative policies—that was how deep the lying and fear ran throughout the Johnson administration. Secretary of State Dean Rusk knew but never attended so that he wouldn’t be tainted by talk of peace. Holbrooke walked uninvited into Katzenbach’s office and badgered him so many times that Katzenbach, who found Holbrooke’s boyish enthusiasm refreshing, finally agreed to let him join the Non-Group. Holbrooke’s neckties were too loud and his manner too flip for some of his colleagues, but he kept quiet unless one of his superiors asked him a question. Thus he was allowed priceless time with senior members of the foreign policy establishment, such as Averell Harriman, Walt Rostow, and McNamara’s deputy, Cyrus Vance. Holbrooke was the only one of them with any experience in Vietnam.
136
137On the evening of November 1, 11 elder statesmen of the Cold War assembled at the State Department for drinks, dinner, and a briefing on Vietnam. McNamara was there; he had just submitted a long memo to President Lyndon Johnson presenting a bleak view of the war, and he couldn’t conceal his gloom. But Rusk remained a good soldier, and the briefing was upbeat—body counts and captured documents showed that the United States was winning. The next morning, the Wise Men filed into the Cabinet Room and, one by one, told Johnson what he wanted to hear—stay the course. The president was greatly reassured.
138
139Katzenbach wasn’t. He thought the briefing of the Wise Men had been misleading and their validation of Johnson all wrong. Holbrooke thought so, too, and he offered to write up a dissenting memo for his boss to give to the president. Government service tends to turn written prose to fog and mud because it’s far better to say nothing intelligible than to make a mistake. Not in the case of Holbrooke. In 17 pages, he laid out the strategic problem by turning to history:
140
141Hanoi uses time the way the Russians used terrain before Napoleon’s advance on Moscow, always retreating, losing every battle, but eventually creating conditions in which the enemy can no longer function. For Napoleon it was his long supply lines and the cold Russian winter; Hanoi hopes that for us it will be the mounting dissension, impatience, and frustration caused by a protracted war without fronts or other visible signs of success; a growing need to choose between guns and butter; and an increasing American repugnance at finding, for the first time, their own country cast as “the heavy” with massive fire power brought to bear against a “small Asian nation.”
142
143North Vietnam couldn’t defeat half a million American troops, but it could drain the American public of the will to go on fighting. So Johnson had two choices. He could turn all of North and South Vietnam along with parts of Cambodia and Laos into a free-fire zone and try to knock out the enemy before dissent at home grew too strong. Or he could win back the center at home, and thus more time—not with patriotic slogans and false hopes, but by reducing the United States’ commitment. The first option was unlikely to work, because Hanoi’s will to fight was inexhaustible. The second option might work, but it would require several steps.
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145Johnson should change the United States’ objective—from victory over communism to a South Vietnamese government that could survive and deal with an ongoing communist threat. The United States should demand more of the South Vietnamese, militarily and politically. It should look to its own moral values and stop using airpower and artillery that killed large numbers of civilians or turned them into refugees in order to eliminate a few Vietcong: “Too many people are appalled by the brutality of the war. They feel that to fight a war of insurgency with vastly superior fire power is immoral and counter-productive. . . . Some feeling (more abroad than in the United States) is based on a feeling that the United States is calloused where non-whites are concerned.” And Johnson should announce a bombing halt over most of North Vietnam, which could lead to negotiations. “Time is the crucial element at this stage of our involvement in Viet-Nam,” Holbrooke concluded. “If we can’t speed up the tortoise of demonstrable success in the field we must concentrate on slowing down the hare of dissent at home.”
146
147The memo didn’t call for unilateral withdrawal, or even negotiated withdrawal. It made an argument for a way to buy more time. The war in Vietnam would go on. But on the spectrum of official opinion, the view was far dovish. In vivid and uncompromising language, the 26-year-old author said that the United States could not win the war. For this reason Katzenbach hesitated to put his name to the memo. But since he agreed with it and thought its analysis brilliant, he finally signed it on November 16. He didn’t show the memo to Rusk until a copy had been sent to the White House. When Rusk read it, he told Katzenbach, “I always try to find out what the president thinks before I give my advice.” No word came back from the White House. Johnson didn’t want to hear it.
148
149WASHINGTON, 2009
150Right after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama had to make a decision on the U.S. military’s request to send 17,000 additional combat troops and 4,000 trainers to Afghanistan. According to the Pentagon, the increase was necessary to stave off growing chaos in the south and provide security for the Afghan election in August. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had appointed Holbrooke to a position created especially for him: special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would report through her to the president. Obama was already a historic figure, a democratic prince, the John F. Kennedy of a new generation. Holbrooke had worked for every Democratic president since Kennedy. He badly wanted to win the trust of this one.
151
152He thought that the president should approve the troops, not just because of the eroding situation in Afghanistan but to make good on his campaign rhetoric about the need to win in Afghanistan. Holbrooke also thought that the military was trying to squeeze the new president with deceptive numbers and a rushed decision.
153
154He kept thinking about 1965. That was the year when Johnson, after being elected, increased the number of troops in Vietnam from 23,000 to 184,000. The parallels with 2009 and Obama were uncanny.
155
156On February 13, Holbrooke was in Kabul on his first trip to the region since his appointment. In the Situation Room, the president and his advisers were meeting to make a final decision on the troops. Clinton was giving a speech at the Asia Society and had asked Holbrooke to fill in for her. He sat in a darkened room in the U.S. embassy, connected by secure videoconference to the White House. It was past midnight in Kabul and Holbrooke was tired. When Obama called on him, he began to read from notes he’d written down in a lined copybook.
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158“Let me speak on Secretary Clinton’s behalf, and at her direct instructions, in support of Option 2.” This was the option to send 17,000 combat troops in one deployment rather than splitting them up into two tranches. “We do so with reluctance, and mindful of the difficulties entailed in any troop deployment. This is a difficult decision, especially at a time when Afghanistan faces a political and constitutional crisis over its own elections that further complicates your decision. As your first decision to send troops overseas and into combat—as opposed to Iraq—this decision lies at the savage intersection of policy, politics, and history.”
159
160“Who talks like this?” Obama murmured. He sounded genuinely puzzled. Everyone around the Situation Room table heard him, but Holbrooke, 7,000 miles away, didn’t hear and kept going.
161
162“It is in many ways strange to send more American troops into such a potentially chaotic political situation. If we send more troops, of course we deepen our commitment, with no guarantee of success. And the shadow of Vietnam hovers over us.”
163
164Obama interrupted him. “Richard, what are you doing? Are you reading something?”
165
166Holbrooke, onscreen, explained that the secretary had wanted to be sure the president heard her views accurately. He continued, “But if we do not send more troops, the chances of both political chaos and Taliban success increase.”
167
168“Why are you reading?” Obama insisted.
169
170Holbrooke stopped to explain again. He managed to get through the rest of his notes, which could have been summed up in a couple of lines. But he had lost the president. He didn’t understand what he’d done wrong, only that Obama sounded annoyed and ignored him for the rest of the meeting.
171
172Holbrooke regretted reading his notes aloud. He’d done so in order not to ramble on, but it had sounded like a speech or a first draft of his memoirs. A few younger people seated back against the walls found it exciting to hear this old lion talk about savage intersections, but no one around the table wanted to be addressed like that, and when Obama expressed irritation they could only conclude that Holbrooke was already out of favor with the new president. Which meant that nobody had to worry about him. After the meeting, Obama told his national security adviser, James Jones, that he would tolerate Holbrooke in the Situation Room only if he kept his remarks short, and that he wanted to be in Holbrooke’s presence as little as possible.
173
174Obama and Holbrooke at the State Department in Washington, January 2009 
175KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS
176Obama and Holbrooke at the State Department in Washington, January 2009 
177
178The heart of the matter was Vietnam. Holbrooke brought it up all the time. He couldn’t resist. He passed around copies of a book he’d recently reviewed, Lessons in Disaster, about the fatally flawed decisions that led to escalation. He invoked the critical months of 1965 so portentously that Obama once asked him, “Is that the way people used to talk in the Johnson administration?” It wasn’t just that Holbrooke was becoming a Vietnam bore, a sodden old vet staggering out of the triple-canopy jungle to grab strangers by the shirtfront and make them listen to his harrowing tale. Obama actually didn’t want to hear about Vietnam. He told his young aides that it wasn’t relevant, and they agreed: Vietnam was ancient history. Obama was three years old in July 1965.
179
180And what was Obama supposed to do with the analogy? It didn’t tell him how many more troops could make a difference in Helmand Province. It told him that his presidency might be destroyed by this war. It was the note of doom in the Situation Room. It turned Holbrooke into a lecturer, condescending to the less experienced man, and that was as intolerable to Obama as flattery. He liked young, smart, ultraloyal staffers. He didn’t like big competitive personalities.
181
182The divide between the two men began with temperament, widened with generation, and ended in outlook. Obama—half Kenyan, raised in Indonesia, Pakistani friends in college—saw himself as the first president who understood the United States from the outside in. He grasped the limits to American power and knew that not every problem had an American solution. The Bush administration, and Clinton’s before it, had fallen prey to the hubris of a lone superpower. Then came the Iraq war and the economic collapse of 2008, and a reckoning required the country to sober up.
183
184Obama wouldn’t say so, but his task was to manage American decline, which meant using power wisely. He embodied—his long slender fingers pressed skeptically against his cheek as he listened from the head of the table in the Situation Room—the very opposite of the baggy grandiosity that thought the United States could do anything and the craven fear of being called weak for not trying. Obama probably wasn’t thinking of the Berlin airlift or the Dayton peace accords, which Holbrooke had negotiated and which had ended the Bosnian war; Obama was thinking of the impulses that had sunk the United States in Vietnam and Iraq. The president and his aides believed these were Holbrooke’s impulses too, when in fact he was only saying, “Be careful. It could happen to you.” Obama didn’t want to hear it—couldn’t hear it, because the speaker kept distracting him with theatrics and bombast worthy of Johnson himself. So Obama told Jones, and Jones told Clinton, and Clinton told Holbrooke: stop it with Vietnam.
185
186“They don’t think they have anything to learn from Vietnam,” she said.
187
188“They’re going to make the same mistakes!” Holbrooke replied.
189
190Holbrooke confessed to his friend Gelb that even Clinton wasn’t interested.
191
192He tried to stop, but it was impossible. How could he not be haunted? There was nothing new under the sun. Somehow, after a half-century excursion across the heights of American greatness, the country had returned to the exact same place. All the questions in Afghanistan had been the questions in Vietnam. Could the United States transform Afghan society? If not, could Americans still win the war? Did our very effort make it less likely? What leverage did we have? Should we get rid of the Afghan leader? Could we talk our way out?
193
194“It is beyond ironic that 40+ years later we are back in Vietnam,” Holbrooke wrote in his diary. “Of course, everything is different—and everything is the same. And somehow, I am back in the middle of it, the only senior official who really lived it. I had not thought much about it for years, now it comes back every day. Every program has its prior incarnation—mostly unsuccessful. . . . I think we must recognize that military success is not possible, + we must seek a negotiation. But with who? The Taliban are not Hanoi, + their alliance with Al Qaeda is a deal-breaker.”
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196Here was the paradox: he knew from Vietnam that what the United States was doing in Afghanistan wouldn’t work—but he thought he could do it anyway. And there was something else. If he applied the real lesson of Vietnam—don’t—he would be out of a job. And then who would he be?
197
198Over time, he learned to save Vietnam for his staff. One day, as he sat through another White House meeting on Afghanistan, listening to another optimistic military briefing, a quote surfaced from the deep past, and he scribbled it down on a scrap of paper and took it back to the office to show his young aides, who of course had no idea where it came from: “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”
199
200In the fall of 2009, Obama faced another decision on troops. His new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, was asking for 40,000 troops in addition to the earlier 21,000. The latest increase would put the total number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at more than 100,000. McChrystal had been in Afghanistan since June, traveling around the country, learning the state of the war, and he had come to a conclusion: without a surge, Afghanistan would go into what he called “a death spiral.” McChrystal’s troop request had leaked, and Obama and his advisers felt boxed in again by the military.
201
202Over ten weeks in the fall of 2009, Obama presided at no fewer than nine sessions of his National Security Council, two or three hours at a time. In his diary, Holbrooke once called the Situation Room “a room that, to me, symbolizes the problem; a windowless below-ground room in which the distance from real knowledge to people is at its very greatest—very high-ranking people who know very little make grand (or not so grand) decisions, or maybe (as in the Clinton years so often) no decisions at all.” There had been an Afghanistan strategy review in the last months of the Bush administration, and there had been another in Obama’s first weeks in office, and here they were again, this time a marathon review: a sure sign of a troubled war, like the many fact-finding missions Kennedy had sent to South Vietnam.
203
204The discussion ran up against the fundamental contradictions of the war. Obama knew them as well as anyone. Around and around they went in the Situation Room as the weeks dragged on and Obama, crisp and lawyerly, listened and asked hard questions.
205
206Let’s get started.
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208Why are we in Afghanistan?
209
210Because al Qaeda attacked us from Afghanistan. Our objective is to prevent another attack, and ultimately to destroy al Qaeda.
211
212But al Qaeda is in Pakistan.
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214If the Taliban take power again in Afghanistan, al Qaeda could regain its safe haven there.
215
216But al Qaeda already has a safe haven in western Pakistan—not to mention in Somalia and Yemen and the African Sahel. Why do we need 100,000 troops and a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan to go after 100 al Qaeda members in the tribal areas of Pakistan?
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218Pakistan, our supposed ally, is actually supporting our enemies. The Pakistanis won’t stand for American troops on their soil. All we can do is covert ops, intelligence collection, drone strikes in the tribal areas against militants, some of whom are attacking Pakistani targets—even that is very unpopular.
219
220What do we really know about the Taliban? Are we sure they will allow al Qaeda back into Afghanistan?
221
222No, but they refuse to renounce al Qaeda.
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224Why not do a counterterrorism campaign: drones and a few thousand Special Forces and spies going after the hard-core bad guys?
225
226That’s what we’ve been trying since 2001, and it hasn’t worked. Only counterinsurgency will give the Afghan government the breathing space to win the support of the people and gain strength until it can defend itself.
227
228But classic counterinsurgency requires hundreds of thousands of troops.
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230So we’ll limit ourselves to protecting population centers and key lines of communication until the Afghan army gets bigger and better.
231
232What if the enemy keeps getting bigger and better?
233
234We might need to send more troops in a year or two.
235
236What if our presence makes it bigger and better?
237
238We’ll begin to transfer responsibility to the Afghan government in two to three years.
239
240What if the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, wants us to stick around for the fat contracts and the combat brigades while his government continues to prey on the people? Counterinsurgency can only succeed with a reliable partner, and the election did Karzai’s legitimacy great harm. What if the Afghan government lacks the ability or will to win the support of the people?
241
242There’s no good answer.
243
244And what if the Pakistani military will never change its strategy?
245
246There’s no good answer.
247
248Holbrooke sat at the far end of the table, next to General David Petraeus with his four stars, and took notes. Among his notes were private interjections. When McChrystal showed a slide that changed his definition of the American goal from “defeat the Taliban” to “the Taliban-led insurgency no longer poses an existential threat to the government of Afghanistan,” without changing the number of troops, Holbrooke wrote: “Wow! Words can be used to mean whatever we want them to mean.” Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, proposed joint U.S.-Chinese aid programs in Pakistan: “NONSENSE.” Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, argued that civilian aid to Pakistan might cause a backlash against the United States: “THIS IS NONSENSE!” Vice President Joe Biden said that every one of Pakistan’s interests was also America’s interest: “HUH?”
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250I’m from America, and I’m here to help: Holbrooke in Pakistan, June 2009
251MOHAMMAD SAJJAD/AP
252I’m from America, and I’m here to help: Holbrooke in Pakistan, June 2009
253
254Holbrooke kept the caustic skepticism to himself. He no longer gave speeches or read from notes. He complimented the president less often. He spoke very little, and when he did, it was on subjects that were part of his job but peripheral to the main discussion—agriculture and police corruption. He advocated a “civilian surge”—the State Department’s plan to recruit more than a thousand American experts and deploy them to Afghanistan’s cities and districts. The civilian surge gave Holbrooke a place at the table and credibility with the generals, who were always complaining that the civilian effort lagged behind. So at the White House he was careful not to say what he really thought—but back at the office, when his adviser on aid, Sepideh Keyvanshad, who did not believe that more was better in Afghanistan, asked him, “Why are we sending all these people? It won’t make any difference,” Holbrooke shot back, “You don’t think I know that?”
255
256In the 1990s, during meetings on the war in Bosnia, Holbrooke had said whatever he believed—hadn’t hesitated to contradict his boss, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, or even President Clinton, when he thought they were wrong. Now, in the 47th year of his career, he grew careful. He felt that he didn’t have the standing with Obama to go up against the military, least of all the famous general sitting just to his left. He had no supporters in the room except Hillary Clinton, and because he was wounded, and his need for her was existential, he couldn’t allow a glimmer of light or a breath of air between them. And she was with the generals. As a result, almost no one knew what Holbrooke thought of the surge. He kept it from his colleagues and his staff.
257
258On Columbus Day weekend, he stayed up one night till four in the morning drafting a nine-page memo for Clinton. He rewrote it several times in the following days, still not satisfied. It goes straight back to the memo he wrote for Johnson in the fall of 1967, the one about Napoleon’s Russia campaign. It has the same clarity, the same ice-blue gaze at a difficult reality.
259
260Like you, I believe in the possibilities of American leadership, and I am not a pessimist by nature. I hope my judgments are wrong. In 1965, over the course of a week, Lyndon Johnson had the same kind of discussions we are having now, but came up with the wrong answers. In 2002–3 George W. Bush never even really consulted his own Secretary of State before committing himself to the Iraq war. Now it is our turn, and Barack Obama deserves credit for having lengthy discussions and listening to everyone before making his decisions. But the parameters of the debate have been defined almost entirely by the military, and I do not believe the full political, regional, and global implications of McChrystal’s requests have been adequately discussed.
261
262Holbrooke believed that counterinsurgency would never succeed in Afghanistan. Historically it had worked in colonial wars, where it required a lot of coercion, and in wars where the enemy had no cross-border sanctuary. In Iraq, Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy had depended on specific political developments in the Shiite and Sunni communities. The analogy for Afghanistan was none of these. It was Vietnam, the war that had been barred from discussion.
263
264Rather than securing the Afghan population, 100,000 U.S. troops would only confirm the Taliban narrative of an infidel army of occupation supporting a puppet government. Everyone said that this was a political war, but Holbrooke pointed out that the review had ignored politics—the election disaster, the cancer of corruption, Karzai’s illegitimacy. The discussions had focused almost entirely on troop numbers—but what kind of government would tens of thousands of new troops be sent to support? “The current government does not have sufficient legitimacy and appeal to motivate hundreds of thousands of Afghans to die for it,” he wrote. “While a substantial portion of the Afghan population is strongly motivated to fight the Taliban, their principal motivation is usually ethnic and tribal, not any commitment to the values supposedly represented by the government in Kabul.”
265
266He wasn’t arguing against sending more troops—not in a memo to Clinton, anyway. (He told Gelb privately that if it were up to him, they’d send just 4,500 advisers, but he couldn’t tell Clinton that, not even discreetly.) A U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would “set off a cycle of uncontrollable events that could seriously damage our most vital interests,” he wrote. It was a kind of soft domino theory—not that neighboring governments would topple one after another, but the whole region stretching from the Middle East to India, with nuclear weapons and numerous insurgencies and jihadist groups, would be destabilized. Instead of a way out, Holbrooke was seeking a policy that allowed the United States to stay.
267
268The country didn’t want to hear this, and neither did Obama, but Americans needed to be long-distance runners in Afghanistan. That was why Holbrooke kept saying it would be the longest American war. A big surge promised too much, to both Americans and Afghans, and would soon play out in predictable ways, with calls for yet more troops or a rapid departure. A more modest number—Holbrooke settled on 20,000 to 25,000, just one combat brigade and the rest trainers and advisers to the Afghan army—would hold off the Taliban and the American public while giving a new political strategy time to work. “And time, the commodity we need most to succeed, is in the shortest supply.” More time—that had been the theme of his Napoleon-in-Russia memo, too.
269
270What would a political strategy look like? That part wasn’t clear—solutions for Afghanistan were never as persuasive as critiques. Holbrooke included a brief, vague paragraph on “reintegration and reconciliation”—“the biggest missing piece of our policy.” Reintegration meant bringing in low-level Taliban defectors. Reconciliation meant talking to the Taliban leadership. But Clinton didn’t want to hear of peace talks, and neither did the military, and neither did the White House. Talking to the enemy—the only way to end the war—was never part of the strategy review.
271
272NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON, 2010
273 
274
275Yesterday I went to the final performance of the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center. A fantastic production, which I found immensely moving. Men were crying, myself included. I tried to understand why that show had such an enormous emotional impact on us. For me it was the combination of the beauty of the show and its music, and the capturing in that show of so many moments in American history, the show itself opening in New York at the height of New York’s greatness, 1949, the theme—Americans at war in a distant land or islands in the South Pacific—the sense of loss of American optimism and our feeling that we could do anything. The contrast with today—it was very powerful, and I kept thinking of where we were today, our nation, our lack of confidence in our own ability to lead compared to where we were in 1949 when it came out, evoking an era only five years or seven years earlier, when we had gone to the most distant corners of the globe and saved civilization.
276
277
278Even though the chances of success in any kind of dialogue with the Taliban are very small—I put it at 10 to 20 percent—it would be irresponsible of us not to try given the fact that there’s no military solution to the war and given the fact that we are in a harsh spiral right now, a declining relationship with Karzai and at home. The bottom is falling out of this policy as we speak, and everybody knows it. The only way to deal with it, in my view, is to seek a political solution.
279
280Petraeus, on the other hand, believes deeply that classic counterinsurgency is the answer. By classic counterinsurgency he means what he wrote about in his doctrine. I don’t believe it will work here any more than it did in other places. They can talk about the Algerian or Moroccan or Malaysian or Philippine models all they want, but it won’t work here because of the sanctuary that is Pakistan, and because of the incompetence of the government, because we don’t have enough resources and we don’t have enough time, and because the president is going to start drawing down troops next year. Petraeus is gambling that his brilliance—and he’s undeniably brilliant—will trigger an outcome which will decimate the enemy, and then they will in effect fade away. Highly unlikely.
281
282When I went up to see [Obama’s senior adviser David] Axelrod, I said as I was leaving, “David, I know you don’t want to hear this again from me, but the president is the only person in the Administration at a high level who I haven’t ever given my views to directly and candidly, and I hope we can correct that.” He just nodded. This has been my greatest frustration, though I do not believe that if I saw him I would actually make a difference. At least, however, I would have fulfilled my obligation to him.
283
284The question constantly arises—I ask it of myself, friends ask me—how long do you want to do this? My answer is simple: as long as I can make a difference. We’re now embarked on the most difficult period in terms of formulation of policy. Since last year, we’re shaping the policy, as I wrote Hillary in my memo last week, in ways that will determine the rest of the course of the war. It’s the president’s last chance to turn away from the problems that are faced. We are going to try to get them to make one effort at what we call reconciliation. That’s really a euphemism for seeing if there’s the basis for a political settlement with the odious Taliban. But since a military victory is impossible, we have to make that search.
285
286On December 10, 2010, during a meeting in Clinton’s office, Holbrooke suffered a torn aorta. He died three days later, at the age of 69. Negotiations between the United States and the Taliban began the following year, but the war in Afghanistan continues to this day.
287
288____
289https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2019-04-16/commitment-issues
290
291Commitment Issues
292Where Should the U.S. Withdrawal From the Middle East Stop?
293By Robert Satloff [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/robert-satloff], Ian S. Lustick [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/ian-s-lustick], Mara Karlin [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/mara-karlin], and Tamara Cofman Wittes [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/tamara-cofman-wittes]
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296DON'T PULL BACK
297Robert Satloff
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299Mara Karlin and Tamara Cofman Wittes (“America’s Middle East Purgatory,” [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2018-12-11/americas-middle-east-purgatory] January/February 2019) argue that because the Middle East matters less to the United States than it did 20 years ago, the region should receive less attention and fewer resources. “Heavy U.S. involvement in the Middle East over the past two decades has been painful and ugly,” they conclude. “But it is the devil we know,” they continue, “and so U.S. policymakers have grown accustomed to the costs associated with it. Pulling back, however, is the devil we don’t know, and so everyone instinctively resists this position.”
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301In fact, pulling back is a devil we know all too well. As Karlin and Wittes acknowledge, U.S. President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, “seem to share the view that the United States is too involved in the region and should devote fewer resources and less time to it.”
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303Washington’s declining enthusiasm for the Middle East is reflected most clearly in the shrinking U.S. troop presence there. Today, there are only 35,000 American soldiers in the entire region—a fraction of the approximately 500,000 that U.S. President George H. W. Bush sent to the Gulf in 1991 or the nearly 285,000 that U.S. President George W. Bush [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-12-07/costs-george-h-w-bushs-foreign-policy-genius] sent to the Middle East in 2003. The size of the troop presence is inversely proportional to the political turmoil it is triggering. Trump’s decision to withdraw about 2,000 troops from Syria reportedly led U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis to resign [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-announces-mattis-will-leave-as-defense-secretary-at-the-end-of-february/2018/12/20/e1a846ee-e147-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html?utm_term=.a8e5cc7cc8ae] from his position, the first resignation on principle by a senior member of the cabinet in 40 years. And unlike the exponentially larger numbers of troops deployed for the two wars against Iraq, the U.S. troops in the region today are charged with defeating a terrorist group that has actually killed U.S. citizens.
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305Indeed, the United States is already well into executing the pullback that Karlin and Wittes fear American leaders will resist. This should be cause for concern, because the authors are wrong about something else, too: that the Middle East matters so much less than it once did that the United States can be indifferent about what happens there. In fact, contrary to what Karlin and Wittes claim, the potential for state-on-state conflict in the Middle East is higher today than at any point in the last two decades. Israel’s attacks against the Iranian forward presence in Syria, for example, are ominous signs of a potential war between Israel and Iran. And in the event of a conflict between Hezbollah [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2019-03-08/will-hezbollahs-rise-be-its-downfall] and Israel, if Hezbollah inflicted mass casualties on Israel, there is a good chance that Israel would extend its retaliation beyond Lebanon to the terrorist group’s masters in Tehran. Karlin and Wittes also argue that because the United States is now the world’s top oil producer, energy security has decreased as a driver of U.S. policy. But Washington still has an interest in a stable global oil market, given its allies’ reliance on Gulf energy, and in the security of the energy-producing countries.
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307Either Washington can work with local partners to mitigate problems before they leave the Middle East, or it can try to wall itself off from these problems.
308Moreover, the argument that the United States should shift some of the resources it currently expends in the Middle East toward Asia fails to account for the fact that the Middle East [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2018-10-31/major-realignment-taking-place-middle-east] has always been a theater for great-power competition. It would be naive to think that Washington can insist that China and Russia compete with the United States only where it wants (in Asia and Europe) and to believe that these countries will not try to fill the vacuum that a U.S. departure from the Middle East would create—especially when Russia has already reemerged as a power broker in the heart of the region for the first time in 50 years. Nor can one assume that the United States would be able to easily reestablish its dominance in the region once it pulled out. Regaining physical access to abandoned ports, bases, and airfields would be difficult; regaining the trust and confidence of Washington’s forsaken partners, even more so.
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310But the biggest mistake Karlin and Wittes make is that they ignore the Middle East’s tendency to export insecurity. They suggest that Washington should treat the Middle East with the same insouciance it displayed toward Africa during the Cold War: a policy they say may have had terrible consequences for Africans but was tolerable for U.S. interests. But Africa never excelled in exporting its insecurity the way the Middle East does. From jihadists flying airplanes into American buildings and decapitating American prisoners to refugees streaming across the borders of the United States’ European allies, the Middle East has been a persistent source of threats to vital U.S. interests. Such insecurity can be met with only one of two responses: either Washington can work with local partners to mitigate problems before they leave the Middle East, or it can try to wall itself off from these problems. I vote for trying to do the former, using many of the tools that Karlin and Wittes reject as “the Goldilocks approach,” such as a balanced mix of military engagement and vigorous diplomacy.
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312A close inspection of their argument reveals that Karlin and Wittes seem to want it that way, too. Look at their long list of what still matters in the region—those interests for which the United States should be willing to continue investing blood and treasure. It includes “sustaining freedom of navigation” through the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el Mandeb Strait, and the Suez Canal; fighting terrorism and preventing new threats from emerging; limiting the spread of the Middle East’s problems to other regions; and countering Iran’s “bad behavior.” Flesh out what it would take to achieve those objectives—the attention from the U.S. administration, the military deployments, the diplomatic effort—and one is left with a rather substantial agenda. And that’s before accounting for the United States’ heavy commitments to Israel, which the authors largely omit from their analysis.
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314Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. troops in Hasakah, Syria, November 2018
315RODI SAID / REUTERS
316Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. troops in Hasakah, Syria, November 2018
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318“The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries,” Obama [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/obama-and-middle-east] once said. In this mangled response to a question about Egypt’s and Israel’s human rights records, the president inadvertently captured the frustration he and many other American leaders have felt toward the region. By urging the United States to leave its Middle East purgatory, Karlin and Wittes have elevated that misspoken line to policy prescription. But in reality, the Middle East is just another part of the world where the United States has flawed allies, vicious adversaries, and enduring interests. It will not be able to escape from that reality anytime soon, as appealing as that prospect may be.
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320ROBERT SATLOFF is Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
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324WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ISRAEL
325Ian S. Lustick
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327Mara Karlin and Tamara Cofman Wittes argue that the United States’ tendency to overcommit to Middle Eastern partners has created “a moral hazard,” prompting them “to act in risky and aggressive ways” while feeling “safe in the knowledge that the United States is invested in the stability of their regimes.” As evidence of their claim that much of the chaos in the Middle East can be traced to this effect, Karlin and Wittes cite the perverse incentives that caused leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to adopt destabilizing policies toward Libya, Qatar, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories. But they neglect to mention the best example of this dynamic: Israel.
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329The economic and military aid the United States has provided to Israel, and the political and diplomatic protections it affords that country, have, by any measure, far exceeded anything it has given to the Arab states mentioned in the article. The United States has delivered more than $134 billion in direct economic and military aid to Israel, and it recently pledged another $38 billion to be delivered over the next decade—immense sums, especially considering Israel’s relatively small population and high standard of living. And since 1967, the United States has vetoed 41 UN Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel (accounting for 77 percent of all its vetoes during that period).
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331A Palestinian woman at a protest calling for an end to the power crisis in the Gaza Strip, April 2017
332IBRAHIM ABU MUSTAFA / REUTERS
333A Palestinian woman at a protest calling for an end to the power crisis in the Gaza Strip, April 2017
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335These policies have emboldened Israeli governments to engage in undesirable behavior in just the way Karlin and Wittes describe Arab states acting in response to overly generous, no-strings-attached support from the United States. The consequences of the cocoon of immunity that successive U.S. administrations have spun around Israeli governments include Israel’s defiant nuclear posture, its ruthless and violent policies toward the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, its refusal to negotiate constructively with the Palestinians or respond to the decades-old Arab peace initiative, its support for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and its efforts to drag the United States into a war with Iran. What is more fundamental, by reducing the incentives for restraint, Washington’s virtually unconditional support has undermined moderate Israeli politicians [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2016-06-08/end-old-israel] and empowered belligerent ones [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2019-02-06/netanyahus-referendum]. Why vote for moderates when their willingness to compromise never seems to be required, and when their predictions of a confrontation between the United States and Israel never come true?
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337By omitting Israel from their analysis (with the exception of one sentence wisely advising against further diplomatic efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), Karlin and Wittes ignore the most consequential alliance the United States has in the Middle East. Concern about the domestic political sensitivity of the question of U.S.-Israeli relations is precisely what explains why U.S. support for Israel has been so free of conditions and mechanisms of accountability. It is also the reason the authors’ advice—that U.S. Middle East policy be determined by core U.S. interests instead of the whims of overconfident Middle Eastern leaders—is even more important when applied to Israel. Bellicose Arab allies embroil Washington in needless quarrels abroad, but coddled and overconfident Israeli leaders also whipsaw U.S. presidents at home and thereby hugely complicate the pursuit of U.S. interests.
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339The problems posed by unconditional U.S. support for Israel are glaringly apparent when it comes to Iran. Karlin and Wittes advise the U.S. government to abandon Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announced policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran in favor of returning to the nuclear deal. Such advice treats the issue as if it could be addressed independent of the pressure that Israel, and the Israel lobby, put on U.S. politicians and policymakers to prevent the agreement, scuttle it after it was signed, and then adopt an all-out strategy of regime change against Iran—including military action—a call that Israeli leaders have been making regularly for the last 15 years. Indeed, a major obstacle to dealing comprehensively with Iran’s nuclear threat is that doing so would ultimately mean transforming the Middle East into a nuclear-weapons-free zone, a proposal that Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states have already made. But this would require Israel to acknowledge and dismantle its large nuclear arsenal, something the United States has refused to advocate.
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341According to Karlin and Wittes, curbing Iran’s “bad behavior” remains a priority for the United States. They recommend doing so in coordination with regional allies. Although they note the difficulties that aggressive Saudi policies toward Qatar pose for an effective alliance in the Gulf against Iran, they ignore the need to distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli policies and actions in Syria, Lebanon, and the Golan Heights. The United States is so closely associated with Israel that no tough but restrained policy toward Iran will be sustainable so long as Israel is launching hundreds of air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, sparring with Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, and taking every opportunity it can to drive Washington to undertake regime change in Tehran.
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343The authors also contend that combating terrorism remains a priority, but here again the relationship with Israel gets in the way: nothing makes it easier for the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) or al Qaeda to recruit terrorists than U.S. support for a state that blockades the Gaza Strip [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/12/generation-blockade-gaza-young-palestinians-who-cannot-leave], shoots and gases Palestinian protesters [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2018-05-03/israels-costly-neglect], and takes Arab land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to construct settlements. Anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic appeals are prominent in the propaganda of these groups not because their leaders necessarily care about the issue but because they know that many of the people they are trying to recruit do.
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345Karlin and Wittes refer in passing to “recalcitrant domestic politics” in Israel (and among the Palestinians) to advocate an end to U.S. efforts to rescue “the fairy-dusted prospect” of successful peace negotiations. I agree. Improving Israeli-Palestinian relations is not about establishing a separate state in some of the territory Israel rules—the two-state solution. It is—as Karlin and Wittes say is true for all U.S. partners in the Middle East—about building regimes that are “transparent, responsive, accountable, and participatory.”
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347Trump and Netanyahu in Jerusalem, May 2017
348JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS
349Trump and Netanyahu in Jerusalem, May 2017
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351In Israel, that will be achieved not by negotiating an impossible separation of Jews and Palestinians but by democratizing the state that dominates, even if it does not directly govern, all who live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Working to improve this one-state reality will require that the United States shift its focus, for example, from where Israel constructs housing to whether that housing is available to all who need it, whether Jewish or Arab. The United States often invokes democratic values to justify its special relationship with Israel, but it rarely applies them. Changing that would mean insisting that all who live under Israel’s power enjoy civil and political rights and equal protection under the same laws.
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353Neither U.S. President Donald Trump nor his successor is likely to be able to overcome the United States’ own recalcitrant domestic politics when it comes to Israel. But the sound advice offered by Karlin and Wittes—to end extravagant and open-ended commitments to allies in the Middle East in order to reduce reckless behavior and U.S. exposure to its consequences—will never be followed if U.S. profligacy toward Israel is treated as unmentionable.
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355IAN S. LUSTICK is Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the forthcoming book Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality.
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359KARLIN AND WITTES REPLY
360Our article outlined the growing and profound opportunity costs of the United States’ decision to continue wallowing in purgatory in the Middle East and sketched a sustainable path forward for U.S. policy. We wish to add three points in response to Robert Satloff and Ian Lustick.
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362First, there is a wide space between the overwhelming resources and attention the United States has devoted to the Middle East over the past two decades and what Satloff decries as being “indifferent.” As we argued, continued U.S. involvement is crucial for protecting U.S. national security, and ignoring the region is a recipe for disaster. But the Middle East does matter less to U.S. national security than China and Russia, great-power competitors whose visions of international order directly collide with that of the United States and whose militaries present a serious challenge to American power. If the United States cannot credibly compete with China and Russia to defend regional security and order in Asia and Europe, respectively, then its ability to contest their influence in the Middle East will not make up for that failure.
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364The region’s disorder limits how much the United States can shape its trajectory, no matter how much it invests.
365Matching the United States’ ambitions in the Middle East to its interests and capabilities cannot be done wholesale. Rather, it requires a clear-eyed assessment of what the region’s turmoil, the recalcitrance of the United States’ partners, and the United States’ own priorities enable it to do, and what they do not. Satloff invokes the half million U.S. troops President George H. W. Bush sent to fight the Persian Gulf War and the more than a quarter million that President George W. Bush sent to wage the Iraq war, but those anomalies are unhelpful in deciding which U.S. military posture will be sustainable or effective in responding to today’s and tomorrow’s threats. And contrary to what Satloff writes, Secretary of Defense James Mattis did not resign over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria. As his resignation letter made clear, he left because of the president’s wanton disregard for U.S. allies and partners—evident in his decision to leave Syria, which blind-sided the European allies fighting there alongside the United States.
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367Second, the region’s disorder limits how much the United States can shape its trajectory, no matter how much it invests. Both friendly and adversarial governments in the Middle East are preoccupied with regional rivalries and what they view as existential challenges from their enemies. Satloff writes that the potential for state-on-state conflict is at its highest in decades, but tensions were certainly higher in the period between 2007 and 2012, when Israel and the United States considered using military force to delay Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We agree with Satloff that the region’s ability to “export insecurity” is a genuine concern. Managing that threat, however, does not require an unlimited commitment. With a proper staff and a functioning policy process, the U.S. government has proved capable, and will again be so, of resolving conflicts in the region with far less cost and effort than it has spent fighting them in recent years. The House of Representatives’ recent vote [https://www.vox.com/2019/3/13/18263894/yemen-war-senate-sanders-murphy-lee] to force Trump to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen demonstrates that taking a harder line with U.S. partners in the region, especially in the Gulf, can advance, rather than undermine, U.S. interests. By establishing the limits of U.S. support, this approach can do more than unbounded commitments to deter destabilizing or escalatory behavior and tamp down regional conflicts. And although the current moment offers few opportunities for U.S.-led democracy-promotion efforts to gain traction with governments in the region, Washington can and should continue to advocate human rights, support civil society, and articulate to rulers its view that accountable governance, rather than repression, is the key to lasting stability.
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369Finally, all of the United States’ major relationships in the Middle East deserve a keen eye. But we vehemently disagree with Lustick’s argument that Israel is the most destabilizing and least helpful of the United States’ partners. When polls show that three-quarters of Americans across the political spectrum see Israel as a strategic asset, and defense cooperation has yielded benefits such as qualitative leaps in missile defense, one does not need the nefarious influence of a moneyed “Israel lobby” to account for the depth and breadth of the U.S.-Israeli partnership.
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372That is not to say that Israel’s actions do not deserve scrutiny from Washington. Like other U.S. partners, Israel looks at regional turmoil and sees not only dire threats but also opportunities for expanded influence and economic gain; like others, it seeks to enlist greater U.S. support on its side of regional arguments and is unlikely to subordinate its own preferences to those of Washington when making choices about what it views as existential threats. As it pursues Chinese infrastructure investment and sells weapons to Myanmar, the Philippines, and Vietnam or surveillance technology to repressive Gulf governments, Israel should be mindful of U.S. interests and concerns.
373
374It is Washington’s job to be active and forthright about protecting those interests, and it has proved eminently capable of doing so. From President Ronald Reagan selling Airborne Warning and Control Systems to Saudi Arabia in 1982, to the various types of U.S. civilian support for Israel that Congress has legislated may not be used outside the June 1967 borders, to Barack Obama negotiating the Iran nuclear deal [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-08-13/how-we-got-iran-deal] and Congress allowing it to stand, the United States’ elected leaders have repeatedly advanced policies that are contrary to Israeli preferences. Overall, the United States’ partnership with Israel stands out as more mutually beneficial and more strongly rooted in public and political support than any of the others it has in the region.
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376The Middle East is not, as Satloff writes, “just another part of the world where the United States has flawed allies, vicious adversaries, and enduring interests.” Washington can do better than choosing between abandoning its interests there and making a boundless commitment to reordering the region on behalf of partners whose goals and means do not fully align with its own.
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378____
379https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-04-23/why-trump-should-leave-fed-alone
380
381Why Trump Should Leave the Fed Alone
382In Defense of Central Bank Independence
383By Alan S. Blinder [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/alan-s-blinder]
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386Monarchs of old used to clip currency. Shaving slivers of gold or silver off coins was a crude but effective way to acquire seigniorage—revenue from minting money—which they often used to finance unpopular foreign wars. Nations don’t do that anymore; there aren’t enough gold and silver coins left to make a difference. Instead, they generate seigniorage by printing money to finance debt and allowing the resulting inflation to erode the value of the currency in circulation and, if the inflation surprises markets, to erode the value of the pre-existing debt.
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388Which brings us to U.S. President Donald Trump and his plan—now hastily modified—to put both Herman Cain and Steven Moore on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Trump has expressed extreme unhappiness—anger, even—over the actions taken by the politically independent Federal Reserve. He would like to clip its wings by placing sycophants like Moore (and, before he withdrew [https://www.wsj.com/articles/herman-cain-asks-trump-not-to-nominate-him-for-federal-reserve-board-11555950147], Cain) on its board. Economists and businesspeople, almost to a man and woman, think this is a terrible idea.
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390To see why, look back a few decades to a time when U.S. presidents regularly sought to enlarge the budget deficit while persuading the central bank to keep interest rates low. Economists call that practice “monetizing the budget deficit,” and it tends to raise inflation.
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392In extreme cases, which the United States has thus far managed to avoid, monetizing deficits leads to hyperinflation; indeed, it’s hard to imagine getting the latter without the former. But even in more modest cases, it still tends to lead to higher inflation, and until fairly recently was practiced on a bipartisan basis by U.S. presidents. Lyndon Johnson tried to do it in the 1960s, but collided with Federal Reserve Chair Bill Martin. Richard Nixon, who had his own man, Arthur Burns, running the Fed, succeeded in doing it in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan made a rather lame effort to do so in the 1980s, but ran in to an immovable object named Paul Volcker.
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394To guard against the dangers of monetization, congresses and parliaments throughout the world have granted their central banks substantial independence on the grounds that non-political technocrats charged with keeping inflation at bay would do exactly that. Although the United States was pretty much the last advanced nation on earth to equip itself with a central bank (Alexander Hamilton’s idea did not survive Andrew Jackson’s presidency), it was in the vanguard when it came to granting its central bank independence, starting with the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
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396Sound monetary policy requires thinking for the long term—something not many politicians are known for.
397Almost all economists think this was a wise move. Compared to politicians, technocrats can set monetary policies that are less subject to political manipulation, geared toward the long term, and informed by specialized expertise.
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399First, the politics. An independent central bank can and should insulate monetary policy from the extremes of political influence. As a candidate, Trump claimed that Fed Chair Janet Yellen maintained near-zero interest rates to further the political interests of President Barack Obama. As president, he has fretted that his own choice for Fed Chair, Jay Powell, has raised interest rates to damage his political prospects. He’s wrong on both counts. Each Fed chair did what the Federal Reserve Act instructs the central bank to do: pursue “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” And both have done the job well.
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401Sound monetary policy also requires thinking for the long term—something not many politicians are known for. Roughly speaking, analysis of the U.S. economy suggests that changes in interest rates take a year or two to have major effects on real GDP and employment levels, and then about another year to have major effects on inflation. Three years is an eternity in politics. But technocrats, who don’t have to stand for election, can afford to wait that long.
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403Finally, doing monetary policy well requires specialized expertise. If you are skeptical, try asking your member of congress why the Federal Reserve now uses the interest rate on excess reserves as a central tool of monetary policy, but did not do so before the financial crisis. (For that matter, try asking Moore.)
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405Virtually every economist and financial market participant, and even most members of Congress, believe that monetary policy decisions should be left to technocrats with insulation from politics, long time horizons, and serious expertise.
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407That said, the word “independent” has a sharply limited meaning in the context of the Fed. The Fed has no special constitutional protections; indeed, the Constitution makes no mention of a central bank whatsoever. Rather, it assigns the power “to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof” to Congress. “Regulating the value thereof” is what we now call monetary policy—an idea unknown to the Founders. In 1913, Congress delegated that authority to the new central bank it was establishing. The Constitution’s silence on the issue means that the Federal Reserve Act is an ordinary statute that Congress can amend any day it chooses. It could abolish the Fed tomorrow. (And this president, unlike most, would probably sign the bill.)
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410That would be a drastic step, but it illustrates an important point: the Fed’s powers, while substantial, are sharply limited. It was Congress, not Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, or Jay Powell, that assigned the Fed its famous dual mandate to pursue both “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” The law also severely limits the types of assets the Fed may buy and sell in pursuit of these objectives. Since 2010, even its ability to make emergency loans in a crisis has been curtailed (in what was probably a bad move).
411
412The Fed’s vaunted independence from politics is also not absolute. All Federal Reserve governors, one of whom serves as chair, are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate. Once confirmed, however, they may be removed from office only “for cause”—for malfeasance, basically—not at the whim of the president. And, importantly, the Fed does not have to go to Congress for its annual budget.
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415All this adds up to a great deal of, though not absolute, independence from politics. Current law and Trump’s Fed appointments to date strike a delicate balance between politics and technocracy that is working well. Let’s not unravel it at the whim of a would-be monarch.