The Skeptics

New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker broke the story on May 5 that the U.S. military had established three base camps in Honduras to help that country combat the increasingly powerful Mexican drug cartels. The Obama administration authorized this new, and potentially quite dangerous, military operation without congressional approval or the slightest public debate by the American people. That aspect is merely the latest evidence that Obama is as much a devotee of the imperial presidency as any of his predecessors.

But this move should not have come as a great surprise. The Mexican cartels have become a major force in nearly all of the Central American countries, especially Honduras and Guatemala, over the past four years. Political leaders in Central America, as well as their U.S. counterparts, have grown increasingly worried that one or more of those countries could become de facto narcostates.

The increased cartel activity in Central America is a direct result of the vigorous, military-led offensive against those organizations in Mexico during President Felipe Calderón’s presidency. That offensive has been a fiasco for Mexico, resulting in the deaths of more than fifty thousand people in the past five and a half years and turning portions of the country into full-fledged war zones.

One key effect of the offensive, though, has been to pressure the cartels to find safer locales for their operations. That incentive has caused several of the trafficking organizations to greatly expand their presence in neighboring Central American countries, where government institutions, security forces and civil societies are significantly weaker than in Mexico. Whether that was an inadvertent effect or a deliberate goal of the Calderón government is uncertain. Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady suspects it is the latter. According to O’Grady, “Mexico seeks to raise the cost of trafficking so that the flows go elsewhere.” And, one might add, so that much of the violence accompanying the drug trade also goes elsewhere.

But even if it is not a deliberate ploy by Mexico’s government to “beggar thy neighbor,” the impact is the same. Central American governments have become increasingly vocal in wanting heightened financial and security assistance from Washington. The latest measures in Honduras confirm that the Obama administration is determined to take stronger action against the cartels.

Sending U.S. military personnel into Honduras to wage the war on drugs, though, is ill-advised. American military commanders openly state that they intend to apply the lessons learned in Iraq to the situation in Honduras. That anyone would regard the Iraq debacle as a template for future military operations is more than a little worrisome. The principal lesson of the Iraq war should be to avoid murky counterinsurgency/nation-building crusades, not to try to pursue such missions more effectively.

Given Central America’s geographic proximity, the United States does have some security interests at stake there. No one wants to see even one of those countries come under the control of the vicious Mexican drug cartels.

But trying to thwart the cartels with this strategy is akin to putting a Band Aid on a malignancy. The primary reason the cartels are so powerful both in Mexico and Central America has to do with fundamental principles of economics. There is a huge demand for drugs, especially in the United States but also in Europe and, increasingly, in other portions of the world. When such a robust demand for a product exists, it is an economic certainty that profit-seeking entities will try to fulfill that demand. Prohibiting commerce in a product does not negate that dynamic, it merely perverts it. Instead of legitimate businesses engaging in lawful competition, the trade falls into the hands of elements that don’t mind breaking the law and assuming all the other risks in a black market. Often, that means that the most ruthless, violent individuals and organizations come to dominate the trade.

Because of the black-market risk premium, profit margins are far wider than normal, filling the coffers of illicit traffickers and giving them ample financial resources to challenge competitors and either corrupt or neutralize government institutions. That is what happened in the United States during the Prohibition era, when the government tried to ban alcoholic beverages. That is what is happening today, especially in the Western Hemisphere, with the prohibition of marijuana, cocaine and other illegal drugs. And the major beneficiaries are the Mexican cartels.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration stubbornly refuses to recognize that reality. Instead of moving to abandon the futile, counterproductive prohibition strategy, the president and his advisers seem intent on sending U.S. military personnel into yet another quagmire, this time in Central America. The deployment in Honduras appears to be the first, fateful step into the quicksand.

Japanese Navy destroyer HyugaMichael Auslin of AEI writes at Foreign Policy that Japan is changing its defense posture in ways that “will have profound implications for the balance of power in Asia.” I hope this is right, but I’m fairly sure it’s wrong.

Last month, while I was in Japan meeting with industry and goverment leaders, including people close to the Ministry of Defense, I saw no evidence for this thesis. And Auslin’s evidence is somewhat thin.

The article claims the Japanese government is laying the groundwork for a much larger military role in Asia over the next several decades. The evidence Auslin provides includes:

—A deal on realigning the U.S. military presence in Japan that avoids dealing with the biggest sticking point between the two sides (Futenma);

—A smattering of Japanese overseas deployments that Auslin claims have produced “a generation of [Self Defense Force] air, sea, and land officers with extensive operational experience”;

—Japan’s decision to buy the F-35;

—Tokyo’s beginning of a process to revise the proscription on arms exports; 

—and Japanese cooperation with the United States on missile defense.

These developments all indicate some militarization but nothing likely to produce “profound implications for the balance of power in Asia.” Missile defense and experience conducting humanitarian-relief operations are all well and good, but they do not buy you the naval wherewithal to prevent China from taking over your sea lanes.

Auslin allows that the “overriding challenge” to a more normalized Japanese defense posture is the fact that these changes “lack a coherent political articulation and have not been supported by a national debate over Japan’s role in Asia and in the world.” Beyond that overriding challenge, however, there are a number of problems that could ground this vessel before it gets out of port.

First, demographics. Japan currently is swirling down the demographic drain. By 2040, 14 percent of the Japanese population is projected to be eighty years of age or older, with every five-year (i.e., ten-fourteen, fifteen-nineteen, etc) age cohort under sixty-five shrinking dramatically as compared to the same age group in 2010. Japan is likely to possess 40 percent fewer citizens under age fifteen and a 30 percent drop in working-age population by 2040, placing significant stress on its economy and its pension and health systems. This does not bode well for Japan’s future economic performance and thus for its ability to generate the military investment that would underwrite a more assertive defense policy.

The demographic conundrum, coupled with expansive health-care and pension benefits for Japan’s elderly, has built a tumor of structural debt into the Japanese economy. Meanwhile, the economic “lost decade” of the 1990s has turned into something that looks an awful lot like two lost decades. Maybe more. The attitude in Japan among young people is commensurately dyspeptic.

Relatedly, the big political issue in Japan today is whether to raise the consumption tax, which is essentially a value-added tax, from 5 percent to 10 percent in order to begin to close the gaping fiscal maw. What this would do, in essence, is redistribute money from high-consumption/low-earning Japanese (the large, politically powerful elderly cohort) toward lower-consumption/higher-earning Japanese (the smaller, politically weaker group of younger Japanese). But it is important to understand a) that whether this will happen is still anyone’s guess, and b) even were it to pass, it would not come close to patching over the shortfalls in the Japanese welfare state.

In Tokyo, I heard a profound sense of resignation about Japan’s ability to take a larger role in providing its own defense, even among defense intellectuals. When pressed on this point, Japanese-security scholars shrug and point at both public opinion and straight-trend-line projections of Chinese military spending and argue that they could not possibly keep up. True, but mostly irrelevant. They don’t need to keep up, dollar for dollar; they need to do a limited number of things well. Some of those things they currently do well, like antisubmarine warfare and surveillance, but the China side of the China-Japan balance is shifting rapidly.

As I said, I’d like very much to believe that Japan is going to take on a much larger role in providing for its own security. But as long as Washington defines America’s security as coextensive with Japan’s, Tokyo would be foolish to stop free riding on America’s exertions in Asia.

Image: An Honorable German

Outside the White House after Osama bin Laden's death on May 1, 2011.The first anniversary of the murderous raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideaway presents an opportunity to evaluate the threat al-Qaeda now poses. For its part, the Obama administration/reelection campaign seems more interested in using the event to score political points against Mitt Romney. But terrorism alarmists are more focused on al-Qaeda itself and are in peak form explaining that, although the organization has been weakened, it still manages to present a grave threat.

Various techniques, honed over a decade, are applied to support this contention. If they are accepted as valid, al-Qaeda will cease to exist or be “defeated” only when we run entirely out of tiny groups or individual nuts operating with al-Qaeda-like aspirations.

One technique is to espy and assess various “linkages” or “connections” or “ties” or “threads” between and among a range of disparate terrorists or terrorist groups, most of which appear rather gossamer and of only limited consequence on closer examination.

Another is to darkly elevate the vague and the distinctly aspirational as if there were some tangible potential there. Thus, al-Qaeda’s “ideology of the global jihad” still “survives,” we are told, and the group is “making provisions for the long term;” is “poised to survive;” “is regrouping;” is “not entirely isolated;” might work with Iran because “they share a common enemy;” has been “embraced” by a Nigerian group with purely local concerns; has provided “strategic advice;” has “inspired” a number of inept would-be amateur terrorists here and there; and has been thinking about plotting the assassination of Barack Obama.

A third technique is to exaggerate the importance and effectiveness of the “affiliated groups” linked to al-Qaeda central. In particular, alarmists point to the al-Qaeda affiliate in chaotic Yemen, proclaiming it to be the “deadliest” and the “most aggressive” of these and a “major threat.”

Insofar as it threatens the United States, the Yemen group has been elevated by two efforts at international terrorism, both of which failed abysmally.

It apparently supplied the 2009 underwear bomber with an explosive that he was unable to detonate, one that, a test by the BBC suggests, might not have downed his plane even if it had gone off.

The other failure is the foiled effort to set off bombs contained within laser printers on planes bound for the United States in 2010. The organization explained that one of their packages contained a copy of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations to express its optimism about the operation’s success even as the group promised more such attacks. The optimism, and thus far the promise, have gone unfulfilled.

With that track record, the group may pose a problem or concern to the United States. But it scarcely presents a “major threat.”

Much of the alarmist perspective has been generated in opposition to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s contention last year that “we’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” Insofar as this declaration can be decoded, it actually seems to be supported by the alarmists’ own admission that “the organization that brought us 9/11 is essentially gone” and that it no longer plays “a major strategic and operational role.”

More important, however, is to supply some degree of quantitative heft to an evaluation of the “threat.”

To the administration’s claim that it is trying “to keep our country safe,” Associated Press intelligence writer Kimberly Dozier rhetorically observes, “How safe remains in question.”

But there is a perfectly valid method for assessing the question and for measuring the risk international terrorism presents to the United States. At current rates, an American’s chance of becoming a victim of terrorism in the United States is about one in 3.5 million per year. In comparison, that same American stands a one in twenty-two thousand yearly chance of becoming a homicide victim, a one in eight thousand chance of perishing in an auto accident and a one in five hundred chance of dying from cancer.

These calculations are based, of course, on historical data. However, the terrorism data include not only 9/11 but also the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and alarmists who would reject such history need to explain why they think terrorists will suddenly become vastly more competent in the future.

But no one seems to be making that argument. Indeed, notes Dozier, U.S. officials say al-Qaeda has become less capable of a large attack like 9/11.

She also discloses that these officials made this brave disclosure only on condition of anonymity because they feared that “publicly identifying themselves could make them a target” of terrorists. Meanwhile, however, terrorism specialist Peter Bergen observed to Dozier in heroic full attribution mode that “The last terror attack (in the West) was seven years ago in London,” that there “haven’t been any major attacks in the U.S.,” and that “they are recruiting no-hopers and dead-enders.”

The problem is that there is an endless supply of no-hopers and dead-enders out there.

And also, it appears, of terrorism alarmists.

Image: Chris.M.G.

On May 20, the 2012 NATO Chicago summit will bring together the heads of state from the alliance. The agenda reads like a rundown of major world events in the past two years: the Arab Spring, the Libyan civil war, the global financial crisis and the war in Afghanistan. It seems no problem is too big for NATO.

Of these topics, the most pressing and headline-grabbing will be the plan NATO and the United States establish to gradually turn responsibility for security in Afghanistan over to the Afghan national forces. But also of note are the topics—“lessons learned from Libya” and the "Smart Defense Initiative,”—that display the reliance of Europe on the United States for advanced military capabilities. Libya in particular showcased Europe's inability to act without Washington.

The lessons from Libya are twofold, and it is important to keep them in mind as policy makers and pundits in Washington call for the next U.S. intervention, possibly in Syria or Iran. First, the results so far have been disappointing for America’s latest stab at coercive democratization.

Libya also was a disappointment as a supposed new model for U.S. intervention. In fact, that conflict reinforces the fact that NATO really stands for North America and The Others. Without the United States, the Europeans would be essentially helpless.

A new alliance study underscores Europe’s relative ineffectiveness. Reports the New York Times:

Despite widespread praise in Western capitals for NATO’s leadership of the air campaign in Libya, a confidential NATO assessment paints a sobering portrait of the alliance’s ability to carry out such campaigns without significant support from the United States.

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

This should surprise no one. After all, during the war against Serbia—another nation which had not threatened America or any American ally—Europe was estimated to have a combat effectiveness less than 15 percent that of the U.S. The Europeans had large conscript armies, but outside of Britain and France had very little ability to project power. Later European participation in Afghanistan has been marred by the dozens of national “caveats” limiting participation in combat.

Yet alliance expansion is also on the agenda for the May NATO summit in Chicago. The list of alliance wannabes includes such powerhouses as Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia. Former Soviet republics notable mostly for their tangled and/or troubled relations with Russia—Georgia and Ukraine—are also on the list. All of these nations would be security liabilities, not assets, for America.

As the NATO study demonstrates, should the alliance’s Article 5 commitment get invoked, America would do most of the fighting. It would be one thing to take that risk where vital interests were at stake. But they are not in the Balkans, let alone in the Caucasus, which was part of Imperial Russia even before the Soviet Union.

Alliances should reflect the security environment. The Cold War is over. The Europeans have developed, the Soviet Union is kaput, and the potential European conflicts of the future—distant and unlikely—are linked to no hegemonic threat against America.

Instead of talking about NATO expansion, the United States should set down the burden of defending Europe. Let the Europeans take over NATO or create their own European defense organization, as they have discussed for years. The latest reminder of Europe’s relative military ineffectiveness reinforces the case for ending the Continent’s cheap ride. It is time to turn North America and The Others into simply The Others.