Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced yesterday that the U.S. is going to step back from a combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013, and shift over to an "advise and assist role" instead. Assuming he means it, we'll be ending our combat role about a year before all U.S. troops are supposed to be out.

As regular readers know, I've favored a greatly reduced presence in Afghanistan for a long time, simply because I didn't think a COIN/nation-building campaign there was worth the costs, and because I don't think the outcome in Afghanistan makes much difference in the larger struggle against Al Qaeda. (In other words, I reject the "safe haven" justification for the war, largely because Al Qaeda has havens elsewhere and Afghanistan isn't an especially desirable one from their point of view).

But by a strange coincidence, we were discussing an aspect of this problem in my graduate course the very same day that Panetta made his announcement, in the context of a broader discussion on international cooperation. As some of you know, one of the basic principles of the literature on cooperation is that it is facilitated when there is a lengthy "shadow of the future." States are more likely to cooperate today if they anticipate being able to reap the benefits of cooperation far into the future; they will be leery of stiffing potential partners and foregoing that stream of long-term benefits.

What does this insight have to do with Afghanistan? Although I favor getting out as rapidly as possible, we ought to do so with the full knowledge that announcing a certain date (or even an approximate date) will reduce Afghan incentives to cooperate with us now and in the interim, and their incentive to cooperate will decline more and more as the date of withdrawal nears. Once they know that the stream of benefits is finite, they will be less willing to make adjustments or concessions to us in order to keep us in the fight. So by announcing we're leaving, Panetta was tacitly acknowledging that our leverage over the Afghan government is going to erode pretty quickly. Not that it was ever that great, of course.

Notice: This situation is different than trying to encourage greater Afghan cooperation by threatening to leave if they don't shape up, coupled with a credible promise to stay if they do. In this case, continued U.S. help would be conditional on Afghan cooperation and reform. But that's not what we're saying: Instead, we've made an essentially unconditional pledge to end our combat role (and eventually leave completely). In short: We've had enough of this war and are heading home, if not exactly briskly.

As I said, I think this is the right course of action. But actions have consequences, and we should be under no illusions about what it means for our ability to determine outcomes there. Washington still has a few cards to play (i.e., we can still empower different contenders by providing them with money, arms and training), but our long-term influence over decisions there is going to decline rapidly. But unless you're one of those people who thinks it's a good idea for Americans to try to steer the politics of an impoverished, deeply-divided Islamic country in the middle of Central Asia, this development really isn't so bad.

Having written a fair bit about the pros and cons (mostly the latter) of a war with Iran, I feel compelled to offer a brief comment on Ronan Bergman's alarmist article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine. I say this even though I think the article was essentially worthless. It's a vivid and readable piece of reportage, but it doesn't provide readers with new or interesting information and it tells you almost nothing about the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran.

First off, the article is essentially a reprise of Jeffrey Goldberg's September 2010 Atlantic Monthly article on the same subject. The research method is identical: a reporter interviews a lot of big-shots in the Israeli security establishment, writes down what they say, and concludes that that Israel is very likely to attack. Bergman doesn't present new evidence or arguments, pro or con; it's just an updated version of the same old story.

Second, the central flaw in this approach is that there is no way of knowing if the testimony of these various officials reflects their true beliefs or not. There are lots of obvious reasons why Israeli officials might want to exaggerate their willingness to use force against Iran, and this simple fact makes it unwise to take their testimony at face value. Maybe they really mean what they say. Or maybe they just want to keep Tehran off-balance Maybe they want to distract everyone from their continued expansion of West Bank settlements and other brutalities against Palestinians. Maybe they want to encourage Europe to support tougher economic sanctions against Iran, and they know that occasional saber-rattling helps makes sanctions look like an attractive alternative. Maybe it's several of these things at once, depending on who's talking. Who knows?

By the way, I'm not accusing the officials that Bergman interviewed of doing anything wrong. I don't expect top officials of any country to tell the truth all the time, and I'm neither surprised nor upset when foreign officials try to manipulate fears of war in order to advance what they see as their interests. My point is that it is impossible to tell if they mean what they are saying or not, which is why an article based on interviews of this kind just isn't very informative. They might be telling the truth, or they might be lying, and nobody knows for sure.

Lastly, as Gary Sick notes in an excellent post of his own, the Bergman piece ignores the considerable evidence suggesting that Iran is not in fact trying to build a nuclear weapon. Equally important are Sick's reminder that the IAEA still has lots of inspectors keeping a watchful eye on Iran's nuclear activities, and his observation that Israel cannot attack Iran without warning, because doing so would almost certainly kill a bunch of IAEA inspectors.

His conclusion (and mine): until Iran expels the inspectors or Israel warns them that it is time to leave, there isn't going to be a war. And if that is the case, then Bergman's scary essay is just another example of empty alarmism.

Dan Drezner misunderstands me, and not for the first time. Specifically, in my post on the debate over whether China is overtaking the United States, I neither said nor implied that "developing accurate assessments about the power balance between China and the United States" was not important. My point, rather, was that focusing so heavily on whether China was "catching up" ran the risk of distracting us from equally important issues, such as America's ability to advance its interests more broadly.

In particular, even if everyone agreed that China was not catching up at present, it might still be true that the United States was less able to get its way than it used to be. And even if Michael Beckley is correct that China is not "catching up," it does not necessarily follow that the United States is in great shape, or that it hasn't committed some costly blunders that it ought not to repeat.

Dan is correct to say that the United States is still the world's most powerful country, but of course I never said it wasn't. Indeed, America's enduring assets are a point that I emphasized in my own post and in the National Interest article to which I linked. But the real issue is whether our capacity to "run the world" is more constrained than it used to be. After World War II, the U.S. was able to create a working international trade and monetary order, create new alliance partnerships in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and pretty much run those partnerships on its own terms for decades. Back in those days, the U.S. could devote fully five percent of its GDP to a single initiative like the Marshall Plan without batting an eye. And then we spent the 1950s subsidizing our allies' recovery. Can anyone imagine our doing something similar today (i.e., spending five percent of GDP (that is, about $700 billion) on economic aid for anyone, in addition to our normal expenditures for defense and foreign affairs? And let's not forget that it has been two decades since the last successful multilateral trade round, which is another indicator of how power has diffused.

But one doesn't have to go all the way back to 1947. I'd argue that U.S. influence was significantly higher in 1999, in part because we enjoyed a budget surplus,but also because we had a reputation for military prowess and idealism that made many states want to be on our side. For lack of a better term, let's call it soft power.

Today, by contrast, we have budget deficits looming as far as the eye can see. We've lost one war (Iraq) and are going to lose another (Afghanistan). Our global image has been tarnished by events like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the persistent use of drones, and our decidedly one-sided policies elsewhere in the Middle East. Israel ignores our efforts to foster peace, Saudi Arabia ignored us when it intervened in Bahrain, both Pakistan and Afghanistan routinely lie to us, and we have little influence over the political evolution underway in places like Egypt or Libya. Turkey may be cooperating on some issues, but it is hardly as compliant an ally as it was back in the days of the old military government. And so on.

Again, this situation doesn't mean the U.S. is devoid of all influence or a "pitiful, helpless giant." But at the same time, to conclude that all is well because China is not about to supplant us as the world's number 1 power strikes me as a dangerous misreading of recent trends.

Dan is undoubtedly correct to point out that many states still want to rely on U.S. power to help them deal with local security problems, and that the United States is sometimes able to elicit support from like-minded allies if we work really, really hard at it. It is therefore not surprising that a number of Asian countries are eager for U.S. help to counter the challenges posed by a more powerful China. But as I've argued previously, forming a balancing coalition against a rising China is not going to be a walk in the park, and it will require adroit diplomacy to overcome the inevitable dilemmas of collective action and other incentives to "free-ride" on Uncle Sam.

One can also raise at least two questions about Beckley's optimistic assessment. If China hasn't been "catching up," then why are so many states in Asia worried about it? It's possible that they have fallen for the hype too, but at a minimum it ought to give us some pause to realize how seriously China's neighbors see its growing capabilities. Second, as Tom Christensen and some others have previously noted, China does not have to equal the United States in order to pose a greater challenge for us (which is a point that could also be said, on a far lesser scale, for some other countries).

To see this, just ask yourself the following question: if the U.S. were contemplating a direct test of strength with China, would it be better for the United States for this to have occurred in 1992, 2012, or 2022? I'd argue the former, and I'll bet almost anyone in the U.S. military would agree. That's not to say the United States would not win a direct test of strength both now and well into the future, it's just to say that it would have been easier in the past than it is likely to be in the future. And if that inference is correct, then it tells you something about whether Beckley's optimism is fully warranted.

All of which leads to stand by my original post. Of course we should pay attention to the balance of power between the U.S. and China, and Beckley's original article is an important contribution to that effort. But it would be a mistake to read Beckley's reassuring conclusions as evidence that everything is just hunky-dory with current U.S. foreign and defense policy, and to conclude we hadn't spent a lot of the past decade wasting a lot of blood and treasure on fools' errands.

As co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security, I couldn't be more delighted by the attention that Michael Beckley's article questioning China's rise (and America's supposed decline) is getting. See here, here, and here. But I fear that people who are seizing on Beckley's article to pooh-pooh fears of U.S. decline -- including our own Daniel Drezner -- are mostly asking the wrong question.

As I've noted elsewhere, the issue isn't whether the United States is about to fall the from the ranks of the great powers, or even be equaled (let alone surpassed) by a rising China. The world may be evolving toward a more multipolar structure, for example, but the United States is going to be one of those poles, and almost certainly the strongest of them, for many years to come.

Instead, the real issue is whether developments at home and overseas are making it harder for the United States to exercise the kind of dominant influence that it did for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The United States had a larger share of global GDP in the 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn't running enormous budget deficits. The United States was seen as a reliable defender of human rights, and its support for decolonization after World War II had won it many friends in the developing world. It also had good relations with a variety of monarchies and dictatorships, which it justified as part of the struggle against communism. These features allowed the United States to create and lead combined economic, security and political orders in virtually every corner of the world, except for the portions directly controlled by our communist rivals. And the U.S. and its allies eventually won that struggle too, driving the USSR into exhaustion and watching the triumph of market economies and more participatory forms of government throughout the former communist world.

The United States remains very powerful -- especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran -- but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America's image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment -- which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region -- and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world's strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.

All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there's an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who's bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home.

One of the nice things about writing for Foreign Policy is the energy and creativity of its leadership, as exemplified by their relentless quest for new publishing innovations. Just yesterday, for example, FP launched a new fiction section, clearly intended to highlight writing on international affairs that doesn't have much basis in reality.

I refer, of course, to Elliot Abrams' brief essay entitled "A Forward Strategy of Freedom," where he argues that neoconservative ideas and policies are responsible for the "Arab Spring." It's been apparent for a long time that being a neoconservative means never having to say you're sorry (or even admit that you're wrong), but this essay displayed a degree of historical amnesia unusual even by neoconservative standards. It's not really worth a sustained critique, so I'll just make a few quick points.

First, there's no evidence that the Bush administration's "forward strategy for freedom" had anything to do with the Tunisian's fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi's tragic decision to set himself afire, an act of protest that started the wave of upheavals that has convulsed much of the Arab world ever since. Or is Abrams' suggesting that Bush's 2^nd inaugural inspired Bouazizi? More tellingly, neither the liberal forces that drove much of the uprisings against the Mubarak regime nor the Islamic forces that have profited most from Mubarak's departure give credit to Bush & co. for inspiring their efforts. And it's not hard to see why: both the Muslim Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist Egyptian Salafis have been anathema for the neocons from the get-go.

Second, the entire neoconservative strategy for spreading democracy depended heavily on U.S. military power, and it focused almost entirely on countries like Iraq, Syria, and Iran.  The Bush administration in which Abrams served continued to coddle Mubarak, the Saudis, and America's other authoritarian allies, for the same reasons that previous administrations did. The Arab spring emerged elsewhere, however, and had little to do with the deployment of American military power. Obama's Cairo speech is a far more plausible candidate in this regard (though I'd have my doubts about its impact too), but strangely, Abrams doesn't mention it.

Meanwhile, in the one place where the neocon strategy was fully implemented -- Iraq -- it was a colossal failure. The United States spent trillions of dollars and thousands of its soldiers' lives, and the end result is a deeply divided society and a dysfunctional political system that is drifting steadily back towards authoritarian rule and is at least partly aligned with Iran. So what were the neocons right about?

Third, the neoconservative hypocrisy about democracy was exposed in 2006, when the United States refused to accept Hamas' victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. You don't have to like Hamas or its charter to concede that they won the election fair and square, but that didn't stop the Bush administration from ignoring the outcome completely. In fact, Abrams subsequently tried to foment a Fatah coup against Hamas in Gaza, only to have his putative allies routed and discredited. Another neocon blunder, in short. And isn't it a bit odd that this deeply committed apostle of democracy has no problem with Israel continuing to violate the human rights of the millions of Palestinians it controls via its illegal occupation of the West Bank and its continued restrictions on movement in Gaza? Why isn't he pressing Israel to either give these people the right to vote, or to let them have a viable state of their own so that they can vote there? Some neoconservatives (e.g., Paul Wolfowitz) have been sympathetic to such aspirations, but as far as I know Abrams is not one of them.

Finally, let's not lose sight of all the other things that neoconservatives got wrong. They were wrong about Saddam's WMD. They were wrong about his alleged links to Al Qaeda. They were wrong that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself. They were wrong that it would be easy to create democracy there once Saddam was gone. And given America's toxic image in much of the Arab world, they were wrong to believe that fostering democracy in the Arab world would create legitimate and pro-American regimes.

Weighed in the balance, therefore, the neocons got far more wrong than right, and it would be refreshing if they'd just man up and admit it.

Imagine that you were the dean of a public policy school, and of course you wanted to boost your school's reputation and attract lots of outstanding applicants for admission. There are several ways to do this, but one familiar strategy would be to hire some really famous, world-class faculty: people with truly global reputations who would raise the visibility of your school and make more prospective students want to attend and rub shoulders with them.

I can think of lots of high-profile academics to go after in economics, political science, history, and a few other fields. For example, an ambitious dean could try to recruit global superstars like Paul Krugman, Robert Putnam, Amartya Sen, Joe Stiglitz, Theda Skocpol, Anthony Giddens, Martha Nussbaum, K. Anthony Appiah, Elinor Ostrom, John Lewis Gaddis, or Frank Fukuyama. Or you could go after a highly visible former politician or policy-maker (e.g., Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice, Javier Solana, etc.) and use their fame to generate buzz and attract more applicants.

So here's a puzzle: even though public policy schools are supposed to train people to work in and lead public sector organizations (to include government agencies, non-profits, I can't think of a scholar of public management or public administration with the same sort of marquee value as the people I just mentioned, and whose hiring would catapult a school up the rankings dramatically.

Please note: I am not saying that there are no excellent scholars in these domains -- among other things, I think I have some pretty terrific colleagues who work in this area -- and I'm not saying that an ambitious dean couldn't raise his or her school's profile somewhat by recruiting the best people in this area. And I'm certainly not suggesting that scholars who work in this area aren't doing useful work teaching students and advising government agencies and other organizations about how they could operate more effectively. But my sense is that the sub-fields of public management or public administration aren't producing highly visible "public intellectuals" or attracting a lot of attention outside of the sub-field itself.

But I'm not sure why this is the case. For starters, intellectuals studying the workings of public sector organizations used to be a prominent part of sociology and political science (going all the way back to Max Weber), and this body of work was a central part of the social sciences for much of the twentieth century. I am thinking here of scholars such as Dwight Waldo, Robert K. Merton, Aaron Wildavsky, Charles Perrow, James Q. Wilson, Charles Lindblom, James March, Herbert Simon, or Anthony Downs; all of whom cast long shadows over their respective fields and had an enormous impact on how we think about bureaucracies and public organizations. Moreover, management experts at business schools have and continue to enjoy a lot of global visibility -- think Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Clayton Christenson, Michael Porter, etc. -- which suggests that it is not the topic of "management" or organizational behavior itself that is the problem.

Finally, it's hard to argue that there isn't a continued need for bold ideas that would help improve the quality of public management. The public sector consumes more than 40 percent of GDP in a lot of advanced industrial countries, and the lack of effective public institutions is a major obstacle to economic and social advancement in many developing countries. So the lack of superstar figures in this field isn't because the topic itself is unimportant.

So how might one explain this pattern? I'm not sure. One possibility, which I'm not sure is correct, is that the long effort to discredit public sector organizations and to encourage privatization has made studying such organizations less fashionable. A second possibility is that the field of organizational behavior has gradually become more "micro-oriented" -- drawing more on social psychology than on political science, sociology, or history -- and that this trend has made the field more rigorous in purely academic terms but also less interesting to anyone but specialists within the field. Or perhaps the lack of towering figures in the study of public administration at present is just a manifestation of the broader "cult of irrelevance" that I've discussed before: even though we need public institutions that work well, the scholars that inhabit elite departments of political science, economics, or sociology just aren't that interested in doing that anymore. Which is too bad.

While I was away, a friend sent me a link to an article from the online magazine Tablet, and asked me what I thought about it. The piece is by Adam Kirsch, and it's basically a critical summary of the impact of my book (with John Mearsheimer) on the Israel lobby.   Kirsch was clearly moved to write the piece by Robert Kaplan's laudatory profile of John in the Atlantic Monthly, which undoubtedly drove Kirsch and a number of our other critics crazy.

So what do I think?  On the one hand, I could be somewhat gratified by the piece, insofar as he describes the book as an "intellectual landmark, one of those rare books that succeed in altering the intellectual climate."  But on the other hand, Kirsch clearly thinks we've altered that climate for the worse, and his discussion of our work is filled with falsehoods.   Like most of our other critics, Kirsch seems unable to address what we actually wrote.  So he invents a straw man version of our argument -- in some cases accusing us of believing the exact opposite of what we actually said -- and proceeds to lambaste it instead.

Consider his very first paragraph, which purports to offer a summary of our argument (my emphasis):

"What [The Israel Lobby] did not do, to judge by the reviews, was convince anyone of its central argument, that an all-powerful "Israel lobby" had hijacked American foreign policy using illegitimate means…"

There are two problems here. First, "to judge by the reviews" doesn't tell you much about the book's merits (or its flaws), insofar as almost all of the mainstream reviewers in the United States were acknowledged Zionists who were bound to be hostile to our point of view. Not surprisingly, most reviews outside the U.S. -- including several in Israel itself -- were favorable.

Second, and more importantly, Kirsch's summary of our argument bears little or no resemblance to what we actually wrote. Indeed, he managed to pack three separate falsehoods into a single sentence, which is no small achievement. To wit:

1. He claims we said the lobby was "all-powerful." In fact, we wrote "we do not believe the lobby is all-powerful, or that it controls important institutions in the United States. As we will discuss in several subsequent chapters, there are a number of cases where the lobby did not get its way." (TIL, p. 14). We repeated this statement elsewhere in the book, in public presentations, and in several subsequent articles. So how did Kirsch manage to miss this?

2. He claims we argued that the lobby had "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy "using illegitimate means." In fact, we wrote "The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort. It is engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie." We also emphasized that "it is perfectly legitimate for any American to have a significant attachment to a foreign country" (TIL, p. 13). And we repeated similar statements throughout the book. Either Kirsch didn't bother to read it, or he is just inventing arguments that we did not make so that he has something to criticize. 

3. Kirsch alleges that "in our insinuations about secret Jewish power, Mearsheimer and Walt…had given a respectable imprimatur to old and sinister anti-Semitic tropes. " Wrong again. We have a lengthy section denouncing traditional anti-Semitism, and we never--repeat never--said one word or offered "insinuations" about "secret" Jewish power. On the contrary, we repeatedly emphasized that the lobby's activities were above-board and out in the open, like those of other prominent interest groups. We are both familiar with the long and sordid history of anti-Semitism, and we devoted a lengthy section of our introduction to a discussion of these various "anti-Semitic tropes" and our explicit rejection of them, emphasizing that they help explain why it is hard to even talk about this issue. Moreover, when discussing the neoconservative movement, we wrote "what may seem to some like a shadowy conspiracy (or even a "right wing cabal") is anything but. On the contrary.Tthe various think tanks, committees, foundations, and publications that have nurtured the neoconservative movement operate much as other policy networks do. Far from shunning publicity or engaging in hidden plots, these groups actively court publicity for the explicit purpose of shaping public and elite opinion and moving U.S. foreign policy in the directions they favor." (TIL, p. 131).

For that matter, we repeatedly emphasized that the term "Jewish lobby" was an inappropriate label, because many Jews do not support the lobby's agenda and because some key members of the lobby were not Jewish (most notably the so-called Christian Zionists). For this reason, we wrote "it is the specific political agenda that defines the lobby, not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it" (TIL, p. 115).

4. Lastly, Kirsch suggests that our book advocated "cutting Israel adrift," and implies that we believe "America's interests and problems in the Islamic world will be resolved…if and when a Palestinian state is created." This isn't even close to what we wrote. We repeatedly said that we supported Israel's existence, and that we believed the United States should come to its aid if its survival were in jeopardy." We repeatedly say the U.S. should have a "normal" relationship with Israel, akin to our relations with other democracies. How is this "cutting Israel adrift?" And we made it clear that our recommended policy approach "will not eliminate all the problems currently facing the United States in the Middle East…Israeli-Palestinian peace is not a wonder drug that will solve all the region's problems: it will by itself neither eliminate anti-Semitism in the region nor lead Arab elites to tackle the other problems that afflict their societies with new energy and commitment" (TIL, p. 348). Once again, Kirsch is either writing about a book he hasn't read, or engaging in willful distortion.

In short, Kirsch's supposed summary of our core argument, as well as his tortured effort to interpret the book's cover as anti-Semitic, is demonstrably false. It is not even a caricature of what we actually wrote; it is a wholly fictitious construction of his own. And the same could be said for virtually all of the reviews that he cites as "evidence" of our supposed errors and alleged bigotry. As I've noted before, our critics are forced to misrepresent our book because they cannot deal with the arguments that we actually made. The only way for them to challenge us is to distort or misrepresent what we said, or to pretend we said the exact opposite. And it is surely no accident that these distortions are always slanted to portray us falsely as anti-Semites, which has become the all-purpose way for hardline defenders of Israel to respond to those with different views.

Fortunately, there is a more parsimonious explanation for why our book may have helped open up public discourse on these issues. Not by legitimizing anti-Semitism, of course, which would be a deplorable development that both Mearsheimer and I would condemn in the strongest terms. Rather, our book may have helped open up a more fruitful debate on U.S. Middle East policy, and especially on the U.S.-Israel "special relationship," for the simple reason that we were pointing out obvious truths that many knowledgeable people already recognized. We may have succeeded because there was overwhelming evidence of the lobby's impact -- including testimony from a wide range of politicians -- evidence that no amount of distortion or slander could conceal. Eyes have also been opened by unfortunate events like the Lebanon War of 2006, the Gaza War of 2008-2009, and the Obama administration's failed attempts to advance a two-state solution, all of which cast a bright light on the lobby's clout in Washington. And it surely didn't hurt that our critics reacted in precisely the way we described in our book, resorting to misrepresentation and smear tactics instead of dealing with our arguments and evidence in a rational and fair-minded fashion.

If Kirsch is correct that we are "winning," in short, maybe it's because we paid close attention to facts and logic and did not attack our opponents with inaccurate smears or attempts at character assassination. Maybe we're "winning" because our core argument was correct: the various groups that make up the "Israel lobby" have been mistakenly advocating policies that were in fact harmful to the United States and to Israel itself, and more and more people have begun to figure this out.

Suppose you were a member of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. You don't really want to run the country openly anymore, and turning it over to some sort of civilian rule would be ok with you. But you've gotten pretty rich over the past couple of decades and you're worried the secularists or Islamists might create a genuine democracy, strip you of your power, and then take away all your money and leave you and your family destitute. Or worse. Similarly, what if you were a member of the Alawite ruling elite in Syria, closely tied to the Assad regime? You're now facing the prospect of civil war, but giving the opposition any real share of power threatens your position and maybe your personal security. Alawites are only 12 percent of the population, after all, and there's no guarantee that sharing power won't ultimately put others in a position to persecute you. So compromise is inherently dangerous, and brutal repression starts to look like the only appealing option despite the costs and risks.

In these (and many other) cases, a central issue is the familiar problem of credible commitment. In order to convince unpopular rulers to leave power (or at least to give up a lot of their current privileges), you have to convince them that they are not signing their own death warrants or ensuring their own financial ruin. But it is difficult for a successor regime to guarantee that they won't go after the old elites at some point in the future; they cannot "credibly commit" to leave the old rulers alone once they have the power to prosecute them. Just look where Hosni Mubarak is today: if he had known he was going to be in trial for his life, I'm betting he wouldn't have left office so easily, or stayed in the country afterwards.

By the way, this is one issue where the so-called "Turkish model" is not so reassuring. Many people see the AKP government in Turkey as a successful illustration of moderate Islam, and one that has been economically successful, politically popular, and diplomatically innovative. All true. The AKP has also finally broken the back of the Turkish military, which dominated politics for decades (much to Turkey's detriment). So far so good. But the AKP has used its position of power to wage a far-reaching (and almost certainly excessive) campaign against former military leaders (who have languished in jail for months without trials) and to take a number of worrisome steps to restrict press freedom. So if I were a member of the SCAF in Egypt, I wouldn't find the "Turkish model" very appealing. Indeed, it's more of a warning.

There's no easy answer for this problem, although adopting constitutions that provide for various guarantees (including rule of law, judicial independence, property rights, etc.) and possibly even formal amnesties might be one possible avenue. My own view is that entrenched elites need to reassured that their immediate privileges won't be dramatically curtailed, even if they give up a lot of political power. In essence, current rulers need to believe that they will be able to live out their lives in reasonable comfort, and that their immediate families won't be ruined. The state can tax the hell out of their ill-gotten gains, however, so that the great-grandchildren don't get much, but by then it won't matter. The downside is that you're in effect letting the current elites get away with something, for the sake of the greater good.

The best analogy I can think of for this process is the long, slow decline of the English landed aristocracy. Beginning in the early 19^th century, the gradual expansion of the franchise and the rise of the middle class gradually led to a curtailing of noble privilege and political power. But the aristocrats weren't dragged to guillotine or have their estates confiscated, they just got a little weaker and a little less rich, on average, with each successive generation. But this ensured that the nobility didn't try to dig in its heels and stop the process completely, which would have created a far greater risk of a major explosion.

I think this process needs to happen a bit more quickly in the cases discussed above, but if the forces of change try to overturn the existing order in its entirety and destroy the current elites, then they are likely to face far more resistance. But as I said at the outset, it's hard to make pledges of restraint completely credible, which is why I expect the process to be pretty bumpy in the months and years ahead.

It was a beautiful day on Sunday in Singapore, and I listened to a live-stream of the Patriots game against the Broncos. (As I typed this, Tom Brady threw six touchdown passes far, which was gratifying for us New Englanders but didn't make for a very exciting contest).

It's been an interesting trip, but I have the distinct impression of having left the U.S. just when a lot of things got interesting. I was off the grid a good part of the time, and it drove home to me just how addicted I've become to having access to a constant stream of news. I didn't start catching up on events until I got to the airport in Dubai on Friday evening, and picked up a Wifi connection in the lounge. 

Here's just a few items that I wish I could have commented on in real-time.

 1. The Euro takes on water: As many of us expected, ratings agencies have started to down-grade the credit-worthiness of several Eurozone countries, including France. These agencies aren't infallible of course (i.e., several of them were complicit in the mortgage scandals that caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis), but this event confirms that all the activity last year to bail out Europe's finances haven't convinced these agencies (or the markets) that the problem is solved. Quite the contrary, in fact, which is why I think 2012 will be even rockier.

And I can't help but see the tragic grounding of an Italian cruise liner the other day as an apt metaphor for Europe's dilemma. For in the end the problem facing the Euro also arose from poor navigation and incompetent command, as well as a failure to prepare for rough seas or unfortunate accidents. And if the Euro ends up on the rocks, the people who steered it there are going to end up with prominent places in the annals of modern history. And not in a good way

 2. More Insanity about Iran:  I haven't been able to keep up with all of it, but the debate over what to do about Iran's nuclear program seems to be getting more and more unhinged. Another Iranian nuclear scientist was murdered, which fits the standard U.S. definition of an act of terrorism, and is surely something we would regard as an act of war were someone to do something like it here on American soil. The Obama administration says we were not involved, which doesn't leave a whole lot of other likely candidates.

As one would expect, the most bizarre ideas on Iran keep emanating from places like Commentary or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where Iran seems to be seen as a combination of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, but on steroids and raised to the N^th power. So WINEP's Patrick Clawson tells us that murdering Iranian scientists is a good thing because it might provoke Iran into doing something truly nasty, which would then provide us with a pretext to whack them. He used the examples of Pearl Harbor (!) and the sinking of the Lusitania as historical analogies (which is both inaccurate and suggests a remarkable indifference to the human consequences of blithely bombing other countries. And some people accuse realists of being amoral!) And let's not overlook the truly bizarre announcement that Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham intend to introduce a resolution that would seek to rule out a strategy of trying to "contain" Iran.  Needless to say, their goal isn't to facilitate accommodation, but to hold Obama's feet to the fire about increased sanctions, or maybe preventive war. Gee, I wonder why some people in Iran think they might need a nuclear deterrent…

The Obama administration deserves credit for having assembled a more effective set of economic sanctions on Iran, which is clearly putting the regime under more pressure. But I keep wondering what the endgame looks like, and whether the United States would be willing to accept anything less than a complete Iranian capitulation and/or regime change. In other words, is there any Iranian offer short of complete surrender that we would say "yes" to?  I can't tell. Unfortunately, a diplomatic compromise would probably require the U.S. to accept Iran having its own enrichment capability and thus the potential to develop weapons if it so chose.   

In other words, we'd have to accept that Iran has legal rights (and also obligations) under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of course, both Israel and the Israel lobby here in the United States are dead-set against that sort of deal, which means that Washington isn't likely to go that route. The confrontation is bound to continue, therefore, and therein lies the long-term danger. As we saw with Iraq in the 1990s through 2003, if a conflict keeps going with no resolution, and if well-connected hawks keep beating the drums for war, sooner or later the stars may line up as they did after 9/11, and somebody will decide to roll the iron dice. I think war is unlikely in the short-term, but I can't rule such folly out forever.

 4.  More "Help" from the "Special Relationship:"   Of course, we wouldn't even be discussing war with Iran if we weren't being egged on by Israel and by its supporters in the United States. Which is what makes Mark Perry's blockbuster reporting of an Israeli "false flag" operation so interesting and so disturbing. According to Perry, Mossad agents posed as CIA operatives in order to recruit a Pakistani-based terrorist group called Jundallah to conduct attacks inside Iran. They did this without U.S. approval, of course, and the obvious threat to U.S. interests is that we end up getting blamed for what was in fact an independent Israeli operation.

No good realists should be surprised when countries do deceitful or underhanded things to try to advance their interests, and if that's the way the Israelis want to play it, so be it. But this sort of behavior helps you understand why more and more U.S. officials are questioning the "special relationship," no matter what they have to say in public to keep the lobby quiet. And it's just another reminder that all that rhetoric you hear about the U.S. and Israel having nearly identical interests is a lot of nonsense. The United States and Israel have certain interests in common, but there are also important issues on which our interests diverge. Unfortunately, you can't say that if you're running for office, or if you're somebody who wants to have a high-flying career in Washington. 

In any case, you owe it to yourself to read Perry's article, and also the interesting interview he gave to the Israeli online magazine +972 here.

 5.  Burma Opens Up?   A top story in today's International Herald Tribune is the Burmese government's decision to release assorted political prisoners, as part of their continuing effort to get economic sanctions lifted and to restore better relations with the West, and the subsequent U.S. decision to restore fully diplomatic relations with it. One needs to be careful about direct analogies or comparisons wth other cases, but doesn't this positive development tell us something about the value of sanctions, of diplomacy, and most of all, patience? Might similar lessons apply in the case of Iran? Outside pressure clearly played a key role in Burma's change of heart, but notice that nobody was talking about going to war with them in order to get them to alter their policy. Burma wasn't pursuing a nuclear research program, of course, and its foreign policy wasn't as directly at odds with Washington's regional preferences. But threatening other states with military force isn't a very good way to convince them to reduce their own military potential, and repeated military threats aren't a very good way to conduct diplomacy. One really does wonder what U.S. diplomats could accomplish if we could deal with Iran in a more creative and patient manner.  

6. Tarnishing Democracy?   I like living in a democracy, and I frankly can't imagine ever choosing to live somewhere that I couldn't write or say what I thought. I also think the evidence shows that they have better human rights records than most (all?) authoritarian states and tend to do a better job (on average) of encouraging economic growth and social welfare. But some of the conversations I've had on this trip suggest that the current state of Western democracy isn't helping sell this system in some parts of the world. Defenders of autocracy point to the corrosive role of money in contemporary American politics, the gridlock and sheer nastiness that infects Washington, the unimpressive credentials of many members of Congress, the opera bouffe behavior of leaders like Silvio Berlusconi or even Nicolas Sarkozy, and the inability of Western democracies to take decisive action in the face of mounting problems.   Of course, monarchies, military dictatorships, and one-party autocracies have their own share of dysfunctions, and you aren't going to hear me defending them as an alternative.  My point is simply that the current state of Western-style democracy is making it harder for people like me to persuade others that they should move in similar directions. As I think I've said before, a lot of attack-dog media jocks and for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder politicians like to trumpet their patriotism, but their various antics are doing more to damage our global image than most of our genuine adversaries could even dream of.

Sean Kay offers the following guest post on the implications of the new Defense Guidance for the NATO alliance:

Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense announced new strategic guidance for force structure and budgets. Buried in the short public document is a single sentence, originally in italics for emphasis, which moves debates over European security after the Cold War into a new paradigm: "In keeping with this evolving strategic landscape, our posture in Europe must also evolve." If President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are faithful to their basic assumptions, then it is fair to anticipate dramatic, and highly appropriate, changes in America's role in NATO.

Three key elements of the new strategy make it hard to escape the logic of a major realignment in NATO. First, there is a clear statement that Asia is the priority for American national security planning. Second, major troop reductions are coming -- including shrinking the size of the U.S. Army from 570,000 to possibly as low as 490,000. These cuts have to come from somewhere and Europe is the obvious place to start. Third, the document states that (also with original italics): "Whenever possible, we will develop innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives, relying on exercises, rotational presence, and advisory capabilities." If there is any place in America's global footprint where this approach is most immediately applicable, it is Europe.

America will not just "walk away" from its NATO allies. Rather, the challenge is to create new incentives for European members to assume lead responsibility for their own security. The strategic guidance asserts that the United States will "maintain our Article 5 commitments to allied security and promote enhanced capacity and interoperability for coalition operations. In this resource-constrained era, we will also work with NATO allies to develop a "Smart Defense" approach to pool, share, and specialize capabilities as needed to meet 21st century challenges."

NATO needs a radical new kind of American leadership if Europe is to be incentivized to assume new responsibilities in effective ways.  For generations, American officials have asked Europe to increase burden sharing and economize defense planning -- and repeatedly failed. George Kennan warned about this risk in 1948 when he wrote (in an internal memo for negotiators that were creating NATO): "Instead of the ability to divest ourselves gradually of the basic responsibility for the security of Western Europe, we will get a legal perpetuation of that responsibility. In the long-run, such a legalistic structure must crack up on the roots of reality; for a divided Europe is not permanently viable, and the political will of the U.S. people is not sufficient to enable us to support Western Europe indefinitely as a military appendage." Today, with the Eurozone in extended crisis, to expect "more" from Europe would be delusional.

What, then, might be done to align next steps policy with what the new guidance calls "a strategic opportunity to rebalance the U.S. military investment in Europe?"

First, declare victory! Europe is experiencing unprecedented sustained peace. If there ever was a moment to take advantage of that climate, it is now. The risks of defense re-nationalization are next to zero and potential conventional threats far over the horizon. Meanwhile, austerity programs are incentivizing Europe to economize military spending via deeper integration -- as Britain and France commenced in 2010. The European security dilemmas that required a heavy American military presence have long been resolved. As but just one recent example, late in 2011, Polish Foreign Minister Radislaw Sikorski stated that: "I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity." [[BREAK]]

Second, the United States can, in recognizing this unique opportunity, lead NATO towards a new force structure which puts European allies squarely in the lead. This would be done by:

1. A clear statement from President Obama that over the next 2-3 years, America will work with the NATO allies to help them develop the integrative capacity they need to simultaneously conduct a Libya-style war and a Balkans-style peace support operation -- without the United States. Europe must now assume primary responsibility for security provision in and around its area.

2. Make clear that America's role in NATO will be limited to Article 5, collective defense, contingencies. In the current environment this means placing America's participation in reserve, as a hedge against great power tensions or shocks to transatlantic security interests. Operationally, this means limiting America's role in Europe to missile defense and liaison activity for consultation, intelligence sharing, planning, exercising, and base-access and deployment logistics.

3. Logic follows that this approach means major reductions in American military personnel stationed in Europe from many tens of thousands down to very low thousands or even hundreds. Some forces based at home would be allocated as reserves available to European contingencies.

4. Major American bases would be closed or transferred to allies for operation and funding and storage of pre-deployed equipment where appropriate. A symbolic start would be to relocate EUCOM from Germany to the United States with American command structures similar to CENTCOM.

5. Announce a clear time-table for this realignment of 2-3 years, with pooled cost-sharing in the NATO infrastructure fund to pay for associated near-term realignment costs that will eventually yield long-term savings. Additionally review the NATO international staff and determine what areas would be better managed through the European Union and which American positions can be handed over to Europeans, including SACEUR.

There will be incredible bureaucratic opposition to this kind of major realignment. This is, after all, asking America to be a wise great power and discard its jealous hold on primacy in European security matters. But the primary criticism, that Europe is needed as a transit point to other theaters just does not hold like it once did. Even in the Iraq war in 2003, most American troops transited through Shannon Airport in Ireland - a neutral country not in NATO. Where necessary bilateral U.S. strategic partnerships can enhance reassurance in places like Turkey and occasional exercises can reassure new NATO allies as in Poland and the Baltic countries. Other criticisms are emotional and driven by historicisms about World War II and the Cold War, not a realistic assessment of today's situation. After all, NATO is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself, and as the U.S. now states, "our posture in Europe must now evolve."   

If the United States cannot disengage from Europe now, then from where in the world can it? This is a unique moment to test assumptions about the role of power and international institutions in world politics. Will it be a "Back to the Future" realist scenario of nationalism and anarchy? Or will institutional norms and principles embedded across Europe hold the peace? We have an opportunity to test these assumptions in a benign environment. Success will, however, require a radical rethinking of how America leads NATO. For both America and Europe, the best case is worth going for. A more efficient kind of defense cooperation among European allies that can compliment American power and generate cost savings across the Atlantic.

Sean Kay has written extensively on NATO, including his first book NATO and the Future of European Security (1998). A professor of international relations at Ohio Wesleyan University he is Mershon Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. His most recent book is Global Security in the Twenty-first Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace (2011).