Month: April 2014

In a post titled “US Warns China: Don’t Pull a Crimea,” The American Interest notes the Obama administration’s efforts to maintain a credible military threat as a bulwark against China’s disputed maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea:

The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia issued a stern warning to Beijing yesterday: Don’t even think about using force to annex islands in the South China Sea, as Russia did in Crimea.

“The prospect of the kind of incremental retaliatory steps that are gradually being imposed on Russia in terms of its banks, in terms of cronies and other areas should have a chilling effect on anyone in China who might contemplate the Crimea annexation as a model,” Daniel Russel said. ”The net effect is to put more pressure on China to demonstrate that it remains committed to the peaceful resolution of the problems.”

“The president of the United States and the Obama administration is firmly committed to honoring our defense commitments to our allies,” he continued.

China has been paying attention to the West’s response Russia, which has so far included nothing more than anemic sanctions and the categorical ruling-out of the military option.

It is very unlikely that China is drawing actionable lessons from Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just as Washington’s failure to bomb Syria did not influence Putin to take action in Crimea, Washington’s failure to respond militarily in Crimea is not going to convince Beijing that it can annex Taiwan or the Spratly islands. For one thing, the U.S. probably would intervene militarily in the East or South China Seas because Washington has formal defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines and remains the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan. Washington had no such arrangements with Ukraine. Beijing knows this.

That said, China’s long-term strategy has indeed been to gradually gain more economic, military, and political power while refraining from outright aggressive provocations that upset the status quo. Beijing intends to acquire its expanded claims in a de facto way as its own sphere of influence in East Asia expands and Washington’s contracts. As University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer noted: “The Chinese are going to imitate the United States. They’re going to try to dominate Asia the way we dominated the Western hemisphere, and they’re going to try to push us out.”

So a war over the Diayou/Senkaku islands is unlikely to happen in the near term. But as U.S. power declines due to imperial overstretch, the influence over questions like Taiwan or these disputed island chains will gradually be ceded to China. That can either happen peacefully, with the U.S. willingly withdrawing from its claims of global hegemony, or violently, with a clash between two nuclear-armed giants.

In other words, the U.S. could easily keep out of costly war (whether hot or cold) with China over hegemony in East Asia. As Jan Hornát wrote recently at The National Interest, “a balance of power system can accentuate mutual differences, intensify rivalries and legitimize expansionist policies and preemptive war in name of the equilibrium.” Ceasing to impose on a region half a world away, on the other hand, can keep these dangerous contingencies remote. Seems like an easy choice to me. But the Obama administration is instead reinforcing its claims of dominance in East Asia and is issuing reassurances that we will continue to surround China militarily and respond with violence to any perceived expansions.

According to the Associated Press, the U.S. government is still engaged in efforts to overthrow the Cuban government. Starting in 2010, a group of U.S. officials working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired high-tech contractors to stir up revolution in Cuba via social media.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,” using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet.

Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

The plan was to disseminate propaganda that would generate “mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.'”

“There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” one memo from the project said. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission.”

AP:

The program’s legality is unclear: U.S. law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization and that Congress should be notified.

The Obama administration on Thursday said the program was not covert and that it served an important purpose by helping information flow more freely to Cubans. Parts of the program “were done discreetly,” Rajiv Shah, USAID’s top official, said on MSNBC, in order to protect the people involved.

The administration also initially said Thursday that it had disclosed the program to Congress — White House spokesman Jay Carney said it had been “debated in Congress” — but hours later shifted that to say it had offered to discuss funding for the program with several congressional committees. “We also offered to brief our appropriators and our authorizers,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

…”If you’re going to do a covert operation like this for a regime change, assuming it ever makes any sense, it’s not something that should be done through USAID,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees USAID’s budget.

The administration can obfuscate all it wants about how transparent the effort was. What seems clear is that neither Congress or the American people knew about this effort. That means several things. First, it’s very likely illegal. Second, it represents an attempt to depose a foreign government that does not threaten the U.S. And third, it is anti-democratic to its very core since it was done without approval from the American people or their elected representatives. Taken together, it is ironic to say the least that this program was justified with claims of bringing democracy and the rule of law to Cuba.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history of committing serious crimes in Cuba. In modern history, this includes hiring organized crime syndicates to assassinate Cuba’s sitting president and training a counter-revolutionary militia to invade and overthrow the government. Both efforts failed. This is not to mention the decades of economic embargo which has contributed to mass suffering in Cuba.

When will this stop?

At the ceremony for the death of Nelson Mandela, Obama made headlines when he walked up to Raul Castro and shook his hand. The historic gesture seemed to say, “we don’t have to be enemies anymore.” If only Castro knew a program started by that same U.S. president sought to topple his government.

Much of the hawkish commentary on Syria has centered around this notion that inaction led the al-Qaeda elements in the rebel opposition to metastasize. If only we had intervened early on, before the deepening of the civil war and all the blood-letting, we could have empowered the democratic elements of the early protest movement, they argue.

This argument is wrong, as I’ve written here on this blog since 2011. The reverse is actually more accurate. Early meddling and support of rebel militias on the part of the U.S. and its allies in the Arab Gulf states is what helped the radical elements to prevail and eventually overwhelm the whole rebel opposition.

Leaving aside the inaccuracy for a moment, I’m wondering why interventionists don’t apply this same logic to Bahrain. Largely peaceful democratic protests erupted in Bahrain in 2011 and it was mercilessly crushed. Ever since then, the Sunni monarch in Bahrain has employed a mix of systematic repression (including indefinite detention, torture, strict limits on speech, etc.) and cosmetic political reforms to manage the domestic unrest and prevent the situation from getting to the point of mass killings and civil war. So for more than three years now, the brutally subjugated Shia majority has been left to fester and struggle to maintain a commitment to non-violence in the hopes of substantive change to the authoritarian system under which they live.

It’s worth noting the primary reasons change has not been forthcoming: both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia support the Bahraini dictatorship unswervingly. This has added to the frustration among the Shia opposition. Frederic Wehrey, writing at The National Interest, points to some worrying signs that some in the predominantly peaceful opposition have taken to violence:

A militant strand of the Shia opposition led by the February 14 Youth Coalition and the Ashtar Brigades is becoming bolder and more brazen in its attacks against regime security forces. It is not surprising that new, more sophisticated improvised explosive devices have become the currency of this radical strain, And perhaps most worrisome for the U.S., they are growing increasingly hostile to the presence of the Fifth Fleet, which they believe is colluding in the ongoing repression. Angry young men have marched on the Fifth Fleet housing area of Juffeir, burning U.S. flags. Swathes of the capital are now no-go zones for U.S. personnel.

Interventionist can’t imagine applying the same logic to Syria that they do to Bahrain. Assad is a brutal dictator; the Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain is a reliable ally that must be supported at all costs, even if it means crushing a pro-democracy movement.

The status quo in Bahrain is that the regime uses low-intensity violence and coercion to contain a peaceful pro-democracy movement fighting for basic human rights. The lack of change, which is largely thanks to U.S. support of the regime, could lead to a very different dynamic in the near future.

And then what?

We know a lot about the crimes committed by the U.S. government during the Cold War, but there remain areas of Cold War foreign policy almost completely hidden from the public. One of those dark areas is the U.S. role in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Brazil in 1964.

Yesterday, the National Security Archive posted transcripts of taped conversations in the Kennedy White House about deposing the Brazilian government. April 1 marked the 50th anniversary of the coup.

Almost two years before the April 1, 1964, military takeover in Brazil, President Kennedy and his top aides began seriously discussing the option of overthrowing Joao Goulart’s government, according to Presidential tape transcripts posted by the National Security Archive on the 50^th anniversary of the coup d’tat. “What kind of liaison do we have with the military?” Kennedy asked top aides in July 1962. In March 1963, he instructed them: “We’ve got to do something about Brazil.”

The tape transcripts advance the historical record on the U.S. role in deposing Goulart — a record which remains incomplete half a century after he fled into exile in Uruguay on April 1, 1964. “The CIA’s clandestine political destabilization operations against Goulart between 1961 and 1964 are the black hole of this history,” according to the Archive’s Brazil Documentation Project director, Peter Kornbluh, who called on the Obama administration to declassify the still secret intelligence files on Brazil from both the Johnson and Kennedy administrations.

Revelations on the secret U.S. role in Brazil emerged in the mid 1970s, when the Lyndon Johnson Presidential library began declassifying Joint Chiefs of Staff records on “Operation Brother Sam” — President Johnson’s authorization for the U.S. military to covertly and overtly supply arms, ammunition, gasoline and, if needed, combat troops if the military’s effort to overthrow Goulart met with strong resistance. On the 40^th anniversary of the coup, the National Security Archive posted audio files of Johnson giving the green light for military operations to secure the success of the coup once it started.

“I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do,” President Johnson instructed his aides regarding U.S. support for a coup as the Brazilian military moved against Goulart on March 31, 1964.

But Johnson inherited his anti-Goulart, pro-coup policy from his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Over the last decade, declassified NSC records and recently transcribed White House tapes have revealed the evolution of Kennedy’s decision to create a coup climate and, when conditions permitted, overthrow Goulart if he did not yield to Washington’s demand that he stop “playing” with what Kennedy called “ultra-radical anti-Americans” in Brazil’s government.

Once in a while, it serves as a helpful reminder to draw attention to the fact that, during the Cold War, the U.S. felt it had the prerogative to covertly overthrow whatever government they wanted, any time they wanted. It’s a kind of refutation to the picture most Americans have of their freedom-loving, stars-and-stripes government. Much of the U.S. involvement remains secret, but anecdotes about these kinds of deplorable yet routine policies are almost completely unknown to the broader public.

Were these crimes? Yep. Does that matter? Apparently not.

In negotiations with Israel and the U.S., the Palestinians threw down their wildcard this week. When the U.S. and Israel had essentially agreed upon an interim deal that was ludicrously one-sided in favor of Israel, the Palestinians announced they were moving ahead with the one thing that would have been prohibited in interim deal: pursuing further UN recognition.

As always, this will be branded as sabotage by the intransigent Palestinians. Like in the negotiations toward the very end of the Clinton administration, the myth that Yassir Arafat rejected “the best deal he was going to get” and abandoned the talks was propagated to no end, despite it being untrue.

According to the New York Times, the PLO made the provocative announcement to pursue further recognition at the UN “not to derail the peace process,” given that they are still technically in talks for another month or so and that the latest PLO statement says they “remain committed” to the talks until their scheduled end on April 29.

Critically, the interim deal would not have called on Israel to freeze settlement building. The PLO’s announcement could be a bargaining chip to alter the interim deal and pressure Israel to agree to a settlement freeze. This is extremely unlikely, given the apparent refusal of Washington to demand Israel stop building illegal settlements as part of a gradual annexation of the West Bank.

Israel and the U.S. have predictably condemned the PLO move. But this is what happens when you conduct negotiations in which one side has all the power and influence, and the other is kicked to the curb.

It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of these talks. According to Barak Ravid at Haaretz, the details of the interim agreement were just a bunch of “acrobatics” that “were intended to buy more time for sterile talks that are going nowhere.” There are all kinds of commentators trying to be diplomatic and blaming both Netanyahu and Abbas, but talks are “going nowhere” fundamentally because the right-wing leadership in Israel refuses to cede the West Bank to the Palestinians and, plainly, will do anything to prevent a Palestinian state.