The Ties That Bind - By Thomas R. Nides and Abdul Hafeez Shaikh

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship has weathered more than its fair share of crises over the years. The experience has taught each of us -- and our respective governments -- that we have much work to do. Over the last few months, we have made real progress on issues critical to the interests of both of our countries. And we are meeting this week in Washington to carry forward this effort, focusing especially on expanding our economic relations. It is clear to us that trade, investment, and private sector growth are the future of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

The United States remains the largest and most open economy to trade and investment in the world, and Pakistan is a large and emerging market with a growing class of entrepreneurs. Two-way trade between Pakistan and the United States totaled nearly $5 billion in 2011, spurred in part by the preferential access many Pakistani products enjoy under the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences Program, which provides preferential market access to 128 countries and territories, including Pakistan. The United States purchases nearly 20 percent of Pakistan's total exports -- more than any other country in the world. Major U.S. companies such as Citicorp, Proctor & Gamble, Boeing, Pepsico, and Coca-Cola are already operating large and growing ventures in Pakistan.

U.S. development assistance has broadened our economic ties. The United States' commitment to supporting Pakistan's development is enshrined in the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, popularly known as "Kerry-Lugar-Berman," and focuses on areas critical to economic growth -- from energy to infrastructure, health to education. U.S. assistance is helping alleviate severe electricity shortages in Pakistan, adding a total of 900 MW to Pakistan's grid by the end of next year. U.S. assistance has built more than 400 miles of roads since 2009 in Pakistan's underdeveloped border regions, generating more business activity. Pakistan benefits from one of the largest U.S. government-sponsored people-to-people exchange programs in the world, with programs, scholarships, and university partnerships enabling thousands of Pakistani students to study in or visit the United States. This is making a difference in the lives of many Pakistanis.

Building on this solid foundation, we believe our two governments can do more to expand sustainable economic ties. First, we have restarted a series of working groups to discuss a broad range of bilateral issues, including law enforcement, defense cooperation, economics and finance, and energy. These groups are designed to expand government-to-government discussions in the areas of our shared interests.

The Art of the Deal - By Andy Johnson

With the abrupt departure of Director David Petraeus, the revolving door on the CIA's seventh floor continues to spin: The average tenure of the agency's last five leaders has been less than 20 months.

The timing of this leadership upheaval could not have come at a worse time for the agency. The CIA once ruled the operational and analytic fiefdoms of the U.S. Intelligence Community with near-monopolistic control. But bureaucratic reorganization and the expansion of military intelligence during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars brought an end to a half-century of preeminence. The steady diminution of the CIA's influence over the past decade echoes the travails of Microsoft -- the spy agency is weakened, beset by competitors, and facing an uncertain future.

The paradox of this post-9/11 reality is that the CIA is now more mission-focused than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Its aggressive, collaborative prosecution of terrorist networks has been wildly successful and saved American lives here and abroad. This was by design, aided in large part by reform efforts to eliminate intelligence agency stovepipes, force information sharing, and enhance paramilitary capabilities. The results have borne out the wisdom of these and other steps to remake the Intelligence Community.  

And yet, the CIA's traditional primacy has taken a number of body blows. The creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its "community" superstructure in 2004 abolished the CIA director's authority beyond Langley and foreign stations. Increased military intelligence collection and operations overseas sometimes lacked coordination and caused confusion in the field as to who was in charge. The proliferation of new intelligence and analysis offices, such as the one within the Department of Homeland Security, created rival (and welcome, some would contend) judgments and estimates. Even inside the White House, the president has appointed his own trusted homeland security and counterterrorism deputy, John Brennan, to ride point on pressing security threats. With remarkable swiftness, the CIA director was crowded off of his privileged perch as the president's chief intelligence advisor. 

Those reportedly on the shortlist of qualified candidates to replace Petraeus possess the intelligence expertise traditionally sought to run the agency. For the next CIA head to excel, however, more than a mastery of our nation's intelligence apparatus is required. Bureaucratic tug-of-wars and overseas challenges have rewritten the chief spymaster's job description. The next director must have the skills of a hard-nosed negotiator and the acumen of a Washington insider if the agency is to reclaim lost ground. Being an experienced clandestine operative, veteran intelligence manager, or seasoned congressional overseer is no longer sufficient. The CIA needs a power broker, because only a director with clout, someone who is well-versed in the art of the deal, will be able to win the fights brewing within the administration's national security team.

In the intelligence universe, the "battlefield" is always evolving and the lines of engagement are in constant flux, particularly when it comes to transnational threats like terrorism. Clear parameters of authority and operational responsibility are essential in order to locate, track, monitor, and -- if need be -- arrest or attack the enemy. Bringing this cohesion to the Intelligence Community has been a necessary and at times painful process -- and one that still continues today.

The Defense Department moved aggressively after 9/11 to ramp up counterterrorism collection, and it expanded its footprint further after the 2003 Iraq invasion. A more robust, forward-leaning military counterterrorism strategy was needed, but efforts were not always coordinated with the CIA and foreign missions and information were not always corroborated and vetted before making it into the national policy chain. Most notably, the insertion into senior policymaker briefings of faulty Defense Department analysis claiming an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda promoted a linkage that the Intelligence Community did not believe existed, and buttressed calls for military action. Notwithstanding efforts to resolve such issues, reducing the tension between defense and intelligence collection efforts overseas remains unfinished business for the incoming director.

Hillary Clinton's Remarks at Foreign Policy's 'Transformational Trends' Forum

Before I begin, I want to say a few words about the unfortunate and counterproductive resolution at the United Nations General Assembly that just passed, because it places further obstacles in the path to peace. We have been clear that only through direct negotiations between the parties can the Palestinians and Israelis achieve the peace that both deserve: two states for two people, with a sovereign, viable, independent Palestine living side by side in peace and security with a Jewish and democratic Israel.

And I see my longtime friend and colleague, Ehud Barak, here, and I know he would agree with that, as both the most decorated soldier in Israeli history and a distinguished public servant. I'll have more to say about this later, but I did want to begin by recognizing the challenge that this will surely present.

I want to add my words of welcome to all of you. I want to thank Admiral McRaven for being here. It's wonderful that you are here, Bill. We very much appreciate your participation. Foreign Minister Sikorski, a good friend and colleague, who himself is a top global thinker - well deserved because of the careful, comprehensive views he's developed over many years of hard work about issues as fundamental as freedom.

And of course, I see right before me a wonderful friend and colleague, former Senator John Warner, who has been just a great example of public service - military and civilian - his entire life. And to all of our friends and colleagues from the diplomatic corps. And thanks, of course, to David and Susan and Deb and everyone at Foreign Policy for joining with the State Department's Office of Policy Planning to organize this conference about transformational trends. And I want to thank Jake Sullivan and everyone at Policy Planning. When Jake Sullivan first came to work for me, I told my husband about this incredibly bright rising star - Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School - and my husband said, "Well, if he ever learns to play the saxophone, watch out." (Laughter.) Now we travel all over the world together and people say how excited they are to meet a potential future president of the United States, and of course they mean Jake. (Laughter.)

Well, I will state the obvious to begin. We do live in a rapidly changing world. And many of the constants that shaped American foreign policy for decades are shifting. That poses new challenges but also new opportunities for our global leadership. Let me offer a few examples.

First, our alliances in Europe and East Asia are stronger than ever. After four years of repairing Iraq-era strains and answering questions about America's commitment to diplomacy, our staying power, our global leadership, we are working across the board on so many important issues to all of us. At the same time, however, many of our allies are struggling with serious economic challenges and shrinking military capabilities. This will have implications for how we uphold the global order going forward.

Second, China's peaceful rise as a global power is reaching a crossroads. Its future course will be determined by how it manages new economic challenges, differences with its neighbors, and strains in its political and economic system.

Third, in the Middle East, the Arab revolutions have scrambled regional power dynamics. And the energy revolution around the world will likely further change the region's strategic landscape in the coming years. Indeed, America's increasing energy independence will have far-reaching implications not only for our economic future, but for our security relationships around the world.

Fourth, economics are increasingly shaping international affairs alongside more traditional forms of national power. Emerging powers like India and Brazil are gaining clout because of their size, of course, but more the size of their economies than of their militaries, more about the potential of their markets than their projection of what we used to think of as power. Meanwhile, the global economic system - open, free, transparent, and fair - that fueled unprecedented growth is now under unprecedented pressure from trade imbalances, new forms of protectionism, the rise of state capitalism, and crippling public debt.

Continental Drift - By Bates Gill

The so-called pivot to Asia gets a lot of attention in Washington -- from the secretary of state, from the secretary of defense, and from the president himself. It has become the Obama administration's signature shift in grand strategy. No one knows quite what it will look like, but everyone agrees that one key aim is to hedge against a rising China -- a purpose carefully left unstated by American officials lest they upset economic relations with Beijing or provoke the very military response that they are trying to discourage.

But lost amid the care over what the pivot means for U.S.-China relations has been the question of what it means for U.S. allies and their relations with China. Those allies don't necessarily see China the same way as Washington does, but their cooperation will be key to implementing the pivot successfully.

Australia -- long one of America's closest allies -- is a case in point. The U.S.-Australia relationship is shaping up to be far more strategically important than it has ever been in economic, diplomatic, and military terms. American investors have poured some $130 billion into Australia -- the United States is the largest source of foreign direct investment in the country by far -- with major American companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips fueling the recent energy resource extraction boom in western and northern Australia.

Last month, Canberra released a 350-page white paper, "Australia in the Asian Century." A year in the making, the document dwells predominantly on the country's future relations with key Asian states such as China, India, Indonesia, and Japan, but it also makes clear Australia's commitment to its alliance with the United States:

We consider that a strong and consistent United States presence in the region will be as important in providing future confidence in Asia's rapidly changing strategic environment as it has been in the past. We will continue to support US engagement in the region and its rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific, including through deepening our defence engagement with the US and regional partners.

Australia's election to a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council will likewise strengthen the opportunities for strategic cooperation between Canberra and Washington.

In defense and security affairs, the two countries have also steadily strengthened an already robust relationship. Australia has remained committed in Afghanistan, currently fielding 1,550 troops there, the largest contingent of any non-NATO country; Australia has lost 39 soldiers in Afghanistan, half of those in the past two years alone. During his visit to Australia a year ago, President Obama announced plans to rotate U.S. Marines, for training purposes, through an Australian base in Darwin, with the aim of rotating up to 2,500 Marines a year by 2017; the first detachment of 200 Marines arrived in April and wrapped up their training six months later. These rotations will constitute the largest ongoing U.S. military presence on Australian territory in decades.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta visited Perth in November for the annual U.S.-Australian ministerial, the two sides agreed to continue augmenting the U.S. military presence in Australia, particularly for joint training, and discussed the possibility of increased American access to Australian naval facilities, such as HMAS Stirling on the Indian Ocean. Another important outcome was the agreement to locate highly advanced U.S. space surveillance capabilities in the form of radars and telescopes in Australia in order to better track space assets and debris. Looking ahead, enhanced defense science and technology cooperation is also in the works.

Seen from these angles, the U.S.-Australia relationship is stronger than ever and should grow even more so as each country looks to devote more resources to successfully engaging the increasingly dynamic Asian region.

But here is where the tensions and contradictions arise. To begin with, Australian defense spending will be at its lowest level as a proportion of the national economy since 1938, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The government budget released in May provides 24.2 billion Australian dollars (about 25.3 billion U.S. dollars) for defense in the 2012-13 fiscal year, equivalent to about 1.6 percent of Australian GDP. Most of the defense spending cuts -- amounting to AU $5.5 billion over four years -- will come from reduced capital investments in equipment and facilities. This more austere budgetary environment will constrain Australia's contributions to the pivot.

UMP Shaker - By Eric Pape

PARIS ' Though it's only been six months since they were booted ignominiously from the Elysée Presidential Palace, it ought to be a pretty good time for French conservative leaders. According to a burgeoning right-wing narrative that began to take shape this summer, and is starting to gain currency among voters, the feckless President Francois Hollande is incapable of overcoming France's go-nowhere economy, its double-digit unemployment, or the European debt crisis. After all, if such forces swept away the dynamic incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, making him France's first one-term president since 1981, what chance does a schlemiel like Hollande have? It isn't just that he's a weak leader who still hasn't found his footing, they argue; the guy explicitly acknowledged, in Jimmy Carter-like fashion, last summer that his government won't shake France from its economic malaise anytime soon. No wonder Hollande has seen his popularity cascade downward, from 61 percent approval at the start of his presidency to 64 percent disapproval in late October.

The road ahead for the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) is clear. The key is to offer a strong, decisive alternative, and cross the minimum credibility threshold. Then the new conservative leader, ideally one who exudes fresh post-Sarkozy era legitimacy, will galvanize his disciplined political storm troopers heading into an array of municipal, regional, national, and European elections, beginning in March 2014. If executed properly, this would mean turning back the rising Socialist tide of recent years, and returning the presidency to the conservatives in 2017.

But there is a problem, and it is becoming a big one: There is no clear conservative leader. The party's dominant force for most of the previous decade, Nicolas Sarkozy, was forced into retreat in May when he lost his presidential re-election bid. When a national leader loses reelection it is, almost invariably, traumatic for their party. It can be the political equivalent of a beheading, separating the vision and guiding principals from the body, which writhes around for a time, unaware that it is dead. This process -- which only ends when one or another portion of the party rises to dominance -- often takes months or, in some particularly ugly cases, years.

It's beginning to look like this will be the fate of France's conservatives. Six months after losing power, the UMP held an election for the movement's leadership in mid-November. The leadership battle pitted the popular François Fillon, who was Sarkozy's prime minister for five years, against the ambitious Jean-François Copé, a former budget minister and government spokesman, who has been the acting head of the party since his predecessor became a government minister in 2010.

Of course, being nominal party leader isn't all that important when your party controls the presidential palace; the head of state is the de facto leader of the party. The assumption in the UMP was always that, on the off chance that Sarkozy lost -- and he clearly didn't believe that he would until he did -- the party would hold a leadership vote shortly after in which the relatively unpopular Copé wouldn't stand a chance. After all, Fillon is one of the few prime ministers in French history to remain popular at the end of his time in power and, in another rarity, he lasted in his position as long as the president. He comes across as serious, grounded, and full of gravitas. Copé, by contrast, can come across as a slick, self-satisfied panderer who will say or do anything to get elected. The decision was up to UMP party members.

Surveys in the run-up to the Nov. 18 vote long showed Fillon winning, generally by substantial margins, but in the final weeks of the campaign, some journalists began to question the reliability of such polls. Copé, having usurped Sarkozy's old campaign rulebook by calling for the UMP to stand proudly behind bed-rock right-wing principles (including talk of "anti-white racism") rather than go mushy to win centrist support, seemed to be gaining momentum within the party. Fillon, by contrast, began to carve out a more centrist identity, putting some clear space between himself and Sarkozy.

State of Confusion - By Ephraim Sneh

The Israel-Hamas war has refocused international attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and increased the stakes surrounding U.S. President Barack Obama's handling of the Palestinian bid for recognition at the United Nations as a non-member state. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas intends to submit that bid on November 29th -- the 65th anniversary of the U.N. resolution to partition the territory of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

Not only does the American president have to decide how to respond, so too do the U.S. Congress and Israel's leaders, who will face voters on January 22. How each of these parties reacts will have momentous repercussions for America's standing in the Arab world, Israel's security (specifically whether Abbas or Hamas controls the West Bank), and the viability of the two-state solution. On the eve of the U.N. vote, Israel and the United States are both actively opposed to the Palestinians' statehood campaign.

Add to these factors Abbas's remarkable interview on Israeli television earlier this month. "We will not go back to terrorism and violence," he said. "We will only operate through diplomacy and through peaceful means." Abbas then made a surprising concession on the refugee issue that has long plagued Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, noting that while he is a refugee from Safed, he would like to visit but not live there. "Palestine for me is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital," he explained. "The West Bank and Gaza is Palestine. Everything else is Israel." Just days before this interview, in Ramallah, Abbas confirmed to a small group of former Israeli generals, including me, that he will ask the Israeli prime minister to restart direct peace negotiations immediately after U.N. recognition.

So what should Obama do? The truth is that the Palestinian bid will gain a solid majority in the U.N. General Assembly anyway and is all but certain to succeed (the resolution doesn't need to go through the Security Council, where the United States wields a veto), and active American opposition will not improve the popularity of the United States in the Arab world. Washington should back the effort, but condition its support on a clear commitment by the Palestinian Authority (PA) not to use its new U.N. status to sue Israel at the International Criminal Court or pursue other measures such as academic or commercial boycotts. Such an approach would position the United States again as a power that actively encourages the two-state solution and sides with the moderate forces in the Arab world.

If, however, the U.S. Congress follows through with its threat to cut financial support to the Palestinian Authority as part of a series of punitive measures for Abbas's campaign at the United Nations, it would be a shot not in the foot but in the liver -- Israel's. If the PA collapses economically and Palestinian security forces have to stop their operations because of budget constraints, the struggle against terror in the West Bank will suffer dramatically. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will then have to increase their presence in the West Bank at the expense of other areas in the region, generating more unnecessary friction with the population in the territory. The fruitful cooperation between the IDF and Palestinian security forces -- trained and organized by Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton's team -- will collapse, reversing the most impressive American achievement on the ground in recent years. The near-total cessation of terrorist activity in the West Bank in the last four years is a result of this cooperation. Without it, more Israelis will be killed. And Israel's friends in Congress must remember this.

Why Do We Keep Digging Up Dead World Leaders? - By Uri Friedman

On Tuesday, a Palestinian medical team cranked open the West Bank grave of former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, took samples of his remains, and handed the evidence over to European experts to determine whether Arafat was poisoned -- by Israel, the theory goes -- before his death in 2004. "This will bring closure," Arafat's widow observed, "We will know the truth about why he died."

But that answer won't come for at least another three months, according to Palestinian medical officials. And even then, the results could very well be inconclusive. Polonium-210, which a Swiss lab detected on Arafat's clothing this summer, decomposes quickly. And if the long history of exhuming world leaders is any guide, the macabre exercise rarely proves the conspiracy theorists right. Here are seven of the most famous examples.

SIMON BOLIVAR

In 2008, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced a curious new project: a commission to exhume the remains of the 19th century military and political leader Simón Bolívar and determine whether the inspiration for Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution had really died from tuberculosis in 1830. Chávez's suspicion? Elites in Colombia and Venezuela had assassinated Bolívar to prevent him from uniting Latin America. "How the oligarchs fooled us," Chávez marveled, "how the historians who falsified history fooled us."

Chávez opened Bolívar's grave in 2010 with characteristic flair, displaying the independence icon's skeleton on national television. But the results of the investigation, unveiled in 2011, proved the Venezuelan leader wrong. Experts found toxins that may have contributed to Bolívar's death, but suggested they may have come from medicine. "We could not establish the death was by non-natural means or by intentional poisoning" Venezuela's vice president explained. Chávez was unmoved. "They killed Simon Bolívar," he insisted, even while admitting that he didn't "have proof" (the Venezuelan president is now building a mausoleum for his hero).

ZACHARY TAYLOR

The circumstances surrounding the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor -- one of eight U.S. presidents to die in office -- are admittedly bizarre. As the History Channel tells it, Taylor "gulped down a large quantity of cherries and iced milk" at an event associated with the construction of the Washington Monument and then chased it with "several glasses of water" after returning to the White House. He died several days later after suffering from a stomach ailment that his doctors suspected was a bacterial infection of the small intestine.

In the early 1990s, the author Clara Rising, convinced that Taylor had been poisoned because of his opposition to slavery, persuaded a coroner in Kentucky, where Taylor is buried, to exhume the former president's remains. But medical officials determined that Taylor died from any of "a myriad of natural diseases which could have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis." Rising too had difficulty accepting the lack of evidence of foul play. "His political enemies benefited from his removal, whether they removed him or not," she declared.

LEO RAMIREZ/AFP/Getty Images

Budget Agreement Reached! - By Gordon Adams

The fiscal cliff is all the rage. The lame-duck Congress is back and the tidal wave of pressure for a budget agreement is almost overwhelming. The public discussion and the negotiations are about taxes and entitlements, as anyone could have predicted. And, despite a year of special interest lobbying, the defense budget is headed down further, as a byproduct of those talks.

We're not talking about sequester; that drama is almost over. We are talking about defense budgets that will go as much as another $500 billion below the 10-year forecast Secretary Panetta offered last February -- making the overall reduction, including his budget request, at least $1 trillion. Real defense cuts, not a budget that keeps up with inflation, the way Panetta wanted. And it is time to plan accordingly.

Think tanks are often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to change in Washington, and their perspective on defense has changed dramatically since the election. Over the past few weeks, think tanks right, left, and center have issued reports that lay out the road to a disciplined defense drawdown, in which they rethink strategy, military force, weapons buying, and management. The reports come from the Stimson Center/Peterson Foundation, the Center for American Progress, the Project on Defense Alternatives, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and, interestingly, the RAND Corporation. They agree on a surprising number of things, and all of them suggest deep cuts are inevitable.

The Stimson report, endorsed by a wide range of analysts (disclaimer: with a dissent, I am one of them), carefully describes a series of budgetary options, including one that would increase defense spending (however unrealistic) and one with additional cuts ranging from $350 to $590 billion beyond Panetta's. The CAP report strongly advocates $1 trillion in defense reductions (including the Panetta reductions). The PDA report calls for an additional $560 billion in defense cuts. The CSIS report (disclaimer: I am also part of its working group) starts with the assumption that defense budgets (including war costs) will decline around 30 percent in constant dollars (consistent with past drawdowns). As CSIS working group leader (and former DOD official) Clark Murdock puts it: "DOD needs to accept the likely reality that it will absorb a deeper reduction in defense spending and plan accordingly." And the RAND study, while eschewing any support for defense cuts, says it is realistic to think that defense budgets will go down $300-$500 billion below the Panetta estimate.

I think these estimates are actually on the low side. The last defense drawdown, from 1985 to 1998, saw defense budgets fall 36 percent in constant dollars. If the FY 1985 defense budget had been allowed to grow with inflation over the same period, DOD would have had $1.6 trillion more in resources than it got. So there may still be a way to go and, frankly, we won't know until we get there how deep the drawdown will actually be. But when we look back, we will see it was very deep, indeed.

Readers can surf the reports at will. But there are a number of strikingly consistent options they propose:

• All agree that the days of long-term stabilization operations, nation-building, and insurgent-chasing (read: Iraq and Afghanistan) are over. The Panetta strategy from January 2011 said this; all the reports endorse that view, and more. (Though RAND, to be fair, does provide an option that has the United States still chasing insurgents and instability in the Middle East through the next decade.)

• All of them agree that shrinking U.S. ground forces (Army and Marines) is the easiest and most appropriate way to cope with the new national security challenges in light of fewer resources. Some would have the overall military shrink below 1 million troops, while others suggest 1.15-1.2 million (again, except RAND's Middle East option).

• All of them would sharply reduce U.S. strategic nuclear forces, though none of them appears to endorse my favorite option: a submarine-based monad. This means, for many of them, between seven and nine nuclear-missile subs (down from the current 14), smaller ICBM forces, and an end to nuclear bombers and fighters.

• All agree that a robust investment in defense research and development is a suitable hedge against the future.

• None of them thinks China is a near-term military threat, which flies in the face of the Washington cottage industry that seeks to make China the next major enemy. For the most part, however, they hedge with a continued Pacific presence (RAND has a Western Pacific option).

• All agree that terrorist organizations are not a strategic threat to the United States and do not necessitate a large military force. Some, particularly CAP, argue that non-military instruments -- diplomacy, law enforcement, training -- are key to dealing with terrorist organizations. But virtually all of them, left or right, endorse special operations forces (which the PDA proposal would grow) as the military arm of a counterterrorism strategy.

• All say cyber threats present a strategic challenge. However, none of them analyzes this challenge in any depth, tells us why the military should lead the response, or looks for even a moment at the risk of a rapidly-growing U.S. cyber-offense capability.

• Virtually all of them, from left to right, call for greater "burden-sharing" from U.S. allies as a way of reducing the U.S. load.

These studies tell us that the drawdown is now inevitable; with less money, we need to do some serious thinking. But there is more road to travel here, and there are several issues the reports do not discuss in much depth that will be a critical part of the drawdown.

Launch Your Own Gaza War - By Michael Peck

Wargame designer Paul Rohrbaugh has just created a board game based on the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. He is playtesting "A Reign of Missiles" to tweak the rules, and he wants your suggestions on how to improve it.

"A Reign of Missiles" is a simple game in which the player steps into the shoes of the Israeli military command as it tries to stop Hamas rockets from striking Israeli cities. The player controls Israeli air, ground, and naval forces, as well as the Iron Dome missile defense system, while the game itself uses dice rolls to control Hamas forces. Winning the game means suppressing Hamas' rocket capabilities, but applying too much force will draw international condemnation and cost Israel the game. It's a narrow balancing act for the Israelis in "A Reign of Missiles," which is based on Paul's earlier game on the German V-1 buzz bomb offensive against England in 1944.

"A Reign of Missiles" is a print-and-play game, meaning that the map, playing pieces, and rules are in three small PDF files that you can print out yourself. (Paul, the owner of High Flying Dice Games, has graciously allowed FP to host the files, which you can download below.) All you need is a printer (color is best) at home or the office, although it only cost me a dollar to print out the map and pieces at FedEx Kinko's. You'll also need scissors to cut out the playing pieces and a 10-sided die. If you don't have dice, use a random number generator (set for 0 to 9) for your PC, iPhone, or Android phone.

FP will collect the most useful suggestions (and we mean most useful to the game, not the most abusive toward either side in the conflict) and post them later. You can enter your suggestions in the comments section below, or send them to me at michael.peck1@gmail.com. Remember that "A Reign of Missiles" is only a work in progress, and you can help shape the final product.

You can download the rules, game board, and pieces here, here, and here.

Rules

A Reign of Missiles rules revised November 26 2012.pdf

 

Game Board

A Reign of Missiles Map

 

Game Counters

A Reign of Missiles Counters Revised November 26 2012

We Did Not Hype the Nuclear Threat - By Dennis C. Shea and William A. Reinsch

Foreign Policy published an article by Tom Z. Collina that discusses a section on China's nuclear developments in the 2012 Annual Report to Congress by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which we chair. We are writing today to correct a few misrepresentations in that piece.

Mr. Collina's article states that our report "raises concerns that China may be hiding hundreds of nuclear weapons in underground tunnels." His subsequent commentary says, "[t]his might be scary but for the fact that the Pentagon says it's not true." First, we did not attempt to quantify what China's underground nuclear storage and transportation infrastructure might mean for China's arsenal size. We simply said that an expansion in such infrastructure "could indicate an increase in [China's] warhead inventory." Second, we note that the Pentagon's annual report to Congress, Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2011,plainly acknowledges this issue, stating: "China's strategic missile force, the Second Artillery Corps (SAC), has developed and utilized UGFs [underground facilities] since deploying its oldest liquid-fueled missile systems and continues to utilize them to protect and conceal their newest and most modern solid-fueled mobile missiles."

We reject Mr. Collina's assertion that, with respect to nuclear issues, the commission's report "is just the latest in a line of studies that hype the China threat." We took great pains to detail a range of open source estimates of China's arsenal size, including one as low as 100 total weapons. We also noted that the "most rigorous open source surveys to date produce results that cluster around 240." On the other hand, we identified a Russian estimate as high as 1,800 weapons, although we acknowledge that some Western analysts have disputed its credibility. Nevertheless, the range in the estimates we aggregated is puzzling. That's the point of our recommendation that "[c]ommittees of jurisdiction seek input from relevant U.S. government agencies and international organizations to assess disparities in estimates of the size and disposition of China's nuclear forces."

Mr. Collina's charge that the commission's "report goes so far as to question 'the desirability of further cuts' to U.S. and Russian nuclear forces 'without clearer information on China's nuclear forces,'" is an unfortunate misrepresentation of our statement. We noted only that recent developments have made others in Congress and elsewhere question further cuts without additional information.

But in raising this issue, Mr. Collina has touched upon another key commission recommendation: that "Congress require the U.S. Department of State to detail current and planned efforts to integrate China into existing and future nuclear arms reduction, limitation, and control discussions and agreements" as well as to request periodic updates on these efforts. As General James E. Cartwright (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.), former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently testified to the commission, "We need as a nation to stop thinking bilaterally" about nuclear arms control. The longer we wait to bring others into the discussions, he said, "the more problematic it's going to be to have a multilateral approach."

It's His Prerogative - By David Rothkopf

Susan Rice should be America's next secretary of state. At least, she should be if the president wants her to be. But just who takes over in Foggy Bottom is far from the most important decision President Barack Obama faces when it comes to his national security team.

Let's get the Rice question out of the way first. It was heartening to see that over the past few days, Republican opposition to her appointment seems to have softened. The attacks over her Benghazi statements were among the most egregious examples of attempting to shoot the messenger in recent U.S. political history. Benghazi was a tragedy, and it deserves a thorough investigation. Mistakes were made.

But they were not Susan Rice's mistakes, and there is no evidence that she did anything other than present the administration's talking points as asked. If there is fault -- and there surely is regarding security for U.S. officials in Libya, and there may be in the administration's seemingly politically motivated decision to put off acknowledging the obvious terrorist roots of the attack -- it lies elsewhere. That said, the biggest reason to shift the focus away from Benghazi is that it is a double distraction, both from the important business of putting in place a high-quality national security team and from the extraordinarily complex challenges posed by the spreading, interconnected crises currently bedeviling the Middle East.

The situation in the Middle East is more dangerous than it has been since the height of the Cold War, and it is only one of an array of profoundly complex challenges the president's national security team will face in the next four years. Virtually all -- from the rise of new powers to America's challenges at home, from the impact of new technologies to the need for new alliances and institutions -- will demand a kind of new thinking not seen in U.S. foreign policy in decades. It is the "what" and the "how" of this foreign policy that are at the moment more important than the "who."

Of course, people make policies, and the cocktail of personalities at the center of the policy-making process will be a key component in determining whether Obama is ultimately viewed as a creative change-agent in tune with his times or a disappointing vestige of the status quo, the latest American political leader to steer the ship of state by looking squarely in the rear-view mirror.

Especially because this president has already shown a strong pre-disposition to hands-on management and keeping his inner circle very small, picking people with proven access to him -- people he already trusts -- is so important. Rice's closeness to the president is her strongest asset. The relationship between top officials and the president is critical in all administrations, not just those with a tight inner circle like this one. Indeed, in the American system, the power of top officials rises and falls with their relationship with the chief executive. We've seen secretaries of state with great resumes -- hugely capable people -- be hamstrung by not being sufficiently empowered by their boss. There are few better examples of this than the plight of Colin Powell, or the degree to which Condoleezza Rice's close ties to President George W. Bush helped give her more clout, as foreign leaders knew she had the ear and trust of the boss in the way her more experienced immediate predecessor did not.

Killer Swarms - By John Arquilla

Today marks the bicentennial of the culminating catastrophe that befell the Grande Armée as it retreated from Russia. This past weekend one of the French Emperor's descendants, Charles Napoleon, traveled to Minsk in Belarus to attend ceremonies commemorating the disaster at the nearby Beresina River crossing, where thousands died -- many by drowning -- in a final, panicked rout in freezing weather. Bonaparte had marched deep into Russia with nearly half a million soldiers; he returned with less than 25,000.

Given that Napoleon was the great captain of his time -- perhaps of all time -- and that his armies had conquered and held most of Europe, the tragic events on the Beresina demand explanation. His defeat is something of a puzzle, too, as the Grande Armée won the campaign's pitched battles fought at Smolensk and Borodino. Harsh winter weather, the commonly assumed culprit, cannot explain the result either; the first frost didn't arrive to bedevil the retreat until just a few weeks before the Beresina crossing.

The answer to the puzzle is that Napoleon and his forces were beaten by what a young Russian hussar, Denis Davydov, called his "indestructible swarm" of Cossacks and other raiders who constantly harried the French columns on the march. They also struck relentlessly, repeatedly, and to fatal effect at the Grande Armée's supply lines. As David Chandler, an eminent historian of Napoleon's campaigns, put it: "raids of Cossacks and partisan bands did more harm to the Emperor than all the endeavors of the regular field armies of Holy Russia."

Davydov, who probably inspired Tolstoy's character "Denisov" in War and Peace, had lobbied his superiors hard for the creation of a small force of behind-the-lines raiders. General Pyotr Bagration, not long before his death in battle at Borodino, gave Davydov permission to launch his swarm -- though he detached only a single troop of riders to accompany him. This was all that Davydov needed, though, as he picked up Cossacks, freed Russian soldiers taken prisoner, and recruited willing peasants along the way. Soon the French knew no rest. In Davydov's own words, they "had no choice but to retreat, preceded and surrounded by partisans."

The Beresina bicentennial provides us a moment to contemplate one of history's greatest military debacles from an alternative point of view: as an outcome driven not by the clash of hundreds of thousands of troops massed tightly on some constricted battlefield, but rather as the result of constant pinprick attacks from all directions, mounted by a relative handful of irregulars. Who acted like a swarm of bees.

Davydov's concept of operations portended an entirely different approach to military affairs, one that would grow ever more valuable with the advance of technology. The Russian partisans of 1812 attacked French wagon convoys. Fifty years later, in the Civil War, Confederate raiders disrupted rail lines, imposing near-fatal delays on the advance of Federal forces. In World War I, T.E. Lawrence and his Arab irregulars swarmed the 800-mile-long rail line from Damascus to Medina, contributing mightily to the eventual Turkish collapse. At sea in World War II, U-boat wolf packs swarmed Allied convoys, nearly winning the war for Hitler.

Throughout the Cold War, and on into the post-9/11 era, the swarm -- simultaneous attack from several directions -- has been the favored fighting method of insurgents and terrorists. The Viet Cong swarmed helicopter landing zones and American foot patrols in Vietnam. Hezbollah did the same to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in southern Lebanon during the long war to evict the IDF -- and then did so again during the 2006 conflict there. The Free Syrian Army today regularly strikes many places at once, too, giving the Assad regime's military a problem it cannot solve. Iranian naval strategy embraces swarming as well, the idea being to attack the relatively few, large vessels of the 5^th Fleet from all directions with hundreds of small, explosive-laden boats. Even in cyberspace one sees swarms in the form of the millions of hits to single sites, coming from all over the world, that often characterize debilitating "distributed denial-of-service" attacks. If al Qaeda were ever to develop a capacity for sustained swarming in the United States, rather than just mounting rare, one-off attacks, the consequences would be truly dire.

Swarms matter, and have done much to shape the world. As my colleague David Ronfeldt and I have noted in our RAND study of swarms, the phenomenon began long ago. The Mongols were particularly adept at this way of war, following a doctrine they actually named "Crow Swarm." Edward Luttwak, in his masterful The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, observed that the success of the Byzantines in protecting the edges of empire for nearly a thousand years after the fall of Rome had much to do with their employment of defensive swarm tactics. But Davydov, in a brief campaign launched only after he overcame bureaucratic resistance, helped defeat one of history's greatest adventurer-conquerors, giving us perhaps the single most dramatic example of swarming ever seen.

Clearly, the insurgents, terrorists, and other irregulars -- including "black hat" hackers -- who cause most of the world's mischief today are highly attuned to swarm tactics. In addition to being the bicentennial of Bonaparte's disaster on the Beresina, today also marks the fourth anniversary of the small terrorist swarm -- composed of five two-man teams -- that hit Mumbai simultaneously at several different spots and held the city hostage for three days. Nearly 200 were killed, and hundreds more were wounded, as it took days for Indian counter-terrorist forces to mass and move into place to deal with them. Even small swarms are deadly.

Those who must contend with swarms will fail if they rely simply on the heavy hitting of massed forces. Swarms easily slip such punches, and hit back in stinging ways. No, the answer must be to learn to "swarm the swarmers." The Sri Lankan Navy did this against the Tamil Sea Tigers a few years ago, by shifting to a fleet of light, swift vessels that proved even nimbler than those of their enemy. The Sri Lankans quickly proved adept at attacking the Sea Tigers from many directions. And in Gaza, where Hamas leaders think they deterred the Israelis from mounting a ground invasion, the IDF was absolutely ready to move in from several directions simultaneously, reflecting both a refinement of the swarm tactics used the last time they raided Gaza some years ago and the lessons they have learned from Hezbollah.

Denis Davydov's official report on his operations during the war against Napoleon concluded that his "indestructible swarm" was likely to change the face of war. In fits and starts over the past two centuries, it has begun to do just that. But now the period of fitful progress is over; take warning of the coming swarms that threaten to sweep all before them.

The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers

2012's Global Marketplace of Ideas and the Thinkers Who Make Them

The backlash after the heady Arab revolutions of 2011. The rumblings of war with nuclear-aspiring Iran. The bloody persistence of Bashar al-Assad in civil war-torn Syria. Not to mention a Europe mired in its biggest crisis since World War II and an American presidential campaign that distracted and depressed in equal measure. If ever there were a year for Big Ideas, and a frustration at not hearing them from our leaders, 2012 was it.

Which made it all the more rewarding -- if even more challenging than usual -- to identify this year's Foreign Policy Global Thinkers. It's particularly inspiring to have settled on a most heroic and unlikely pair as our top honorees for 2012: Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein, the once-jailed dissident and the longtime general who joined hands to open up one of the world's most repressive dictatorships. It's also testament to the notion that individuals and their ideas can truly change the world, a theme that resonates in ways large and small throughout this year's list, from digital-age visionaries like Sebastian Thrun (whose robot cars may just make him the Henry Ford of a new era) to rare political leaders like Malawian President Joyce Banda, who is imagining a new Africa freed from toxic corruption. Still, many others on this year's list are there not necessarily for reinventing the world but for waging its ever-more complicated intellectual battles -- think Paul Ryan budget austerity versus Paul Krugman stimulus. If you want to shape the global conversation, you have to be a part of it.

Indeed, if there's one theme to this year's list, it's all about the perils and possibilities of free speech in this globalized age. As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger notes in a powerful essay, "Today, we quickly experience how censorship anywhere becomes censorship everywhere."

In an age when ideas, good and bad, travel the world at hyperspeed, we are proud to celebrate the brave thinking of those at the cutting edge of this global debate over freedom of expression. Welcome to the global marketplace of ideas, 2012 edition.

December 2012

Follow us on Twitter | Visit us on Facebook | Follow us on RSS | Subscribe to Foreign Policy

About FP | Meet the Staff | Foreign Editions | Reprint Permissions | Advertising | Writers' Guidelines | Press Room | Work at FP

Services:Subscription Services | Academic Program | FP Archive | Reprint Permissions | FP Reports and Merchandise | Special Reports | Buy Back Issues

Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | Contact Us

11 DUPONT CIRCLE NW, SUITE 600 | WASHINGTON, DC 20036 | Phone: 202-728-7300 | Fax: 202-728-7342
FOREIGN POLICY is published by the FP Group, a division of The Washington Post Company
All contents ©2012 The Foreign Policy Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

 

Life inside the Iron Dome - By James Traub

As I write, the ceasefire in Gaza has held for going on two days. Every day is likely to bring a new provocation which will test the willingness of both sides to keep their arms sheathed; the most recent is the killing of a Gazan protestor by Israeli soldiers at a border crossing. For the moment, though, we can be thankful that Israel's security cabinet agreed, by what appears to be a hairsbreadth, to accept the ceasefire terms fashioned in Cairo and pressed on them very hard by President Barack Obama.

Usually the act of contemplating the might-have-been requires a leap of speculation -- but not in this case. Part of the horror of watching the drama of the last week was the sense of an almost mechanical, and thus helpless, re-playing of past events. As in Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Israel would follow up an extensive air assault with a ground operation designed to destroy Hamas's fighting capacity as well as the infrastructure of the state and the economy. Many innocent civilians would die, though of course the definition of "innocent" and "civilian" would be hotly disputed. Israel would be condemned for wanton destruction, and further isolated in world opinion. The United States would stand by its ally, and earn the further hatred of Arab peoples.

Actually it could have been worse this time. In 2009, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) refused to allow journalists access to Gaza until after the fighting ended. The consequence was that when investigators for the so-called Goldstone Report sought to investigate claims that Israel had committed war crimes, they had to depend on accounts from the Palestinian victims, which Israel and its supporters naturally viewed as unreliable. This time, however, the IDF allowed journalists to cover the battlefield. I'm not sure why; maybe they thought they could win the propaganda war through Twitter. It's safe to say that they didn't succeed. The appalling imagery of bulldozers pulling masonry off of the corpses of Palestinian children killed by an Israeli airstrike inevitably overwhelmed Israel's arguments about its own security.

But that was just the air campaign. This time, as last time, a ground assault would have caused far more casualties and far more intimate destruction. In this case the world's media would have been watching, and the inevitable targeting mistakes and excesses would have been documented in real time. What's more, the parallels between Israel's assault on Gaza and Bashar al-Assad's assault on the Syrian opposition would have been unavoidable: Israel decimates al-Shifa Hospital; Assad's forces obliterate the main hospital of Aleppo. That's bad company for Israel to be in.

Does it matter? Liberal American Jews like me may writhe over the Goldstone Report, but the Israeli leadership, and many Israelis, view the periodic denunciations as the cost of doing business. Hamas "wins" by further undermining Israel in world opinion and bringing new Arab allies to its side; but Israel doesn't actually lose, at least so long as it can count on Washington to supply it with arms and funds, and to stand by its side at moments of crisis. Israel now lives in an Iron Dome world: incoming missiles clang off its miracle shield, while America stands ready to repel any assaults on its legitimacy at the United Nations or elsewhere.

This is not a recipe for long-term security; but Israelis seem to feel that they can no longer afford to think long-term. Every few years they have to "cut the grass," with at F-16 as their scythe. As a metaphor it sounds grotesquely cynical, though what it really reflects is a policy founded on despair. There is no political solution, and neither is there a lasting military solution. The real goal of policy is to lengthen as much possible the period of time between these acts of lethal maintenance. In this respect, the ceasefire agreement may turn out to be a failure, because Hamas will be able to regroup faster than it had after Operation Cast Lead in 2009. And even if Hamas concludes -- as Hezbollah has since the 2006 Lebanon war -- that its interests are best served by husbanding its resources, one of the more radical factions in Gaza, like Islamic Jihad, maybe be delighted to invite another round of Israeli grass-cutting.

The Cult of Massoud - By James Verini

KABUL ' The first sign of officialdom you see when you drive from the Kabul airport parking lot is a government billboard looming above a traffic jam. It's the size of a highway billboard in the United States, but closer to the ground, so that you can make out every nuance of the faces on it. Those faces belong to, on the right of the coat of arms of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, and on the left, slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, dead some 11 years. With Karzai, you note those tired eyes and that child's chin, unaided by a trimmed gray beard. Massoud comes off vastly more dashing. He appears to be in conference with the heavens: The eyes smolder from within, the strong chin and bushy goatee angle out like a divining rod. A pakol, the traditional hat of the Hindu Kush, sits like a column capital on his head.

The billboard calls to mind a prizefight boxing poster, and the champ is obvious. It also happens to capture the attitude of many Afghans and foreigners working here. In the years since Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda, just two days before 9/11, and Karzai installed as Afghanistan's interim president the following summer, their reputations have moved in inverse proportion. Karzai's popularity has steadily contracted, while Massoud's legend in Afghanistan has grown. As though he had just been killed last week, Afghans still talk about what a great president the guerrilla leader would have made. The implicit slight on Karzai, once dismissed as merely ineffectual and now as ineffectual, corrupt, and deluded, is obvious. Abroad, after years of worshipful portrayals of him by foreign reporters and historians, Massoud has become the Che Guevara of Central Asia. A young Norwegian woman staying in the same guesthouse as me here went weak in the knees when she learned the house's driver fought under Massoud. "I want to meet him," she breathed, referring to the driver, but really meaning the Lion of Panjshir.

Oddly, the billboard captures at least some portion of Afghan officialdom's attitude, too. Lately, no one has promoted the cult of Massoud as much as Karzai's government. This October, a month after the 11th anniversary of his death, the barrier walls of ministry buildings and the homes of officials are covered with Massoud's stoic visage, as are awnings, shop windows, street-food carts, car windshields, and so on. Wherever possible, as at the airport, Karzai is placed alongside Massoud, as though they were running mates in the 2014 election -- an election for which Karzai is ineligible to run, though there is talk that he may be so oblivious to his unpopularity he'll attempt to amend the constitution to allow himself a third term. ("Sure, if he wants to be killed," one Kabuli friend responded when I asked if he thought Karzai might try it.)

In fact, Massoud has been a kind of unwelcome spectral running mate to Karzai all along, a Kalashnikov-slung Banquo, against whom, by comparison, the president is always falling short. Karzai's inability or unwillingness to reign in graft, his failure to halt the Taliban, his perceived timidity and indecision -- Massoud's ubiquitous image is a rebuke to all of it. His years spent fighting the Soviets and then the Taliban from within Afghanistan contrast with the years Karzai spent safely in exile in Pakistan. The exception is in the department of political survival, where Karzai is at least Massoud's match, maybe his better. The president may venerate Massoud's memory or he may not, but he knows he must appear to do so to keep ex-mujahideen and ethnic hostilities in check. In an Afghanistan largely managed by foreign governments and defined by internal division -- most importantly the rivalry between the powerful Tajik minority, among whom Massoud is the favorite son, and the Pashtun majority, among whom Karzai is among the least favorite sons -- Massoud is, regrettably, the closest thing Afghans have to a national hero.

I say regrettably, because, while many Afghans venerate him, many others see Massoud as a false idol -- as just one in a rogue's gallery of militia commanders, living and dead, with their own personal fan clubs. His legacy is a matter of bitter divisiveness. His most ardent admirers are confined largely to Tajik strongholds in the north and west and in the capital. Recently, I visited Herat, Afghanistan's second-largest city, and saw only a few Massoud photos around. That the Taliban had just staged a firing-squad execution of accused kidnappers outside the city was not, I was assured, the reason for this. In many Pashtun-dominated areas in the south and east, and not just those where the Taliban is gaining control, Massoud is more of a national anti-hero. As one friend put it to me, "You can't say in the north that he's not a hero. People will kill you. And you can't say in the south that he's a hero. People will kill you."

The Cult - An FP Slideshow

 

Afghan leaders have for years sought a means through which to unify a country made up of a patchwork of different ethnic groups and tribal rivalries. The means they've settled on: Ahmad Shah Massoud. Since his death at the hands of an al Qaeda bomb in September 2001, a cult of personality has formed around Massoud, whose mythology was built up through fighting against both the Soviets and the Taliban. This elevation of Massoud to the status of national hero has come about both organically and at the encouragement of officials, who seek both to claim a bit of Massoud's popularity for themselves and to provide a larger-than-life figure that Afghans can rally around.  Whether or not Massoud -- who fought bravely, but whose personal feuds often devastated the lives of  thousands of unwilling civilians -- fits the bill is not yet clear. In the meantime, Massoud, whose face now covers cars, billboards, posters and carpets across Afghanistan, has become an absentee rival for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who now must operate in the shadow of a legend. Writing in Foreign Policy, James Verini argues that the combination of a complex legacy and posthumous star power means Massoud has become "the Che Guevara of Central Asia."

Two men sit under a billboard of Massoud in Kabul in 2002. At the time, Massoud had been dead less than a year, but his image was already plastered across Kabul.

PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Homeland Insecurity - By Joshua E. Keating

This week, audiences will line up to see the new remake of Red Dawn, a cult classic of chest-thumping Reagan-era bombast in which a group of all-American teenagers -- including the bulk of the future cast of Dirty Dancing -- transform themselves into Colorado mujahedeen to fight off the invading Soviet and Cuban forces.

The remake -- which features Thor star Chris Hemsworth in the Patrick Swayze role -- has been mocked by critics and journalists for months before its opening, thanks in large part to the filmmakers' decision to re-edit the movie to turn the invading Chinese army into far less plausible North Koreans. Yes, the idea of a country incapable of successfully launching a single rocket invading the United States is pretty far-fetched. But many of those laughing dismissively at the premise of Red Dawn were probably more than happy to plop down their $12 to watch a plutocrat in a bat suit fight crime from his private hovercraft or a suave British spy grapple a bad guy on top of a speeding train without wrinkling his immaculate Saville Row tailoring.

The reason why we find Red Dawn so much more ridiculous than Batman or Bond (well, apart from inferior writing, directing, and acting) may have less to do with the plausibility of the premise than the fact that images of invading armies fanning out across the American homeland are rare in contemporary pop culture -- compared to terrorist cells, shadowy crime syndicates, or even aliens. But this wasn't always the case. From the last decades of the 19th century until World War I, invasion scenarios and tales of future wars were a staple of popular fiction in both the United States and Europe. In many ways, the new Red Dawn is less a throwback to the 1980s than the 1880s.

In 1871, shortly after the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Germany, a British Army engineer and India veteran named George Tomkyns Chesney published a short story in Blackwood's magazine titled The Battle of Dorking. Told from the perspective of a former gentleman volunteer speaking years later in occupied Britain, it tells a tale of how disciplined and technologically superior forces (Germany is never mentioned by name, but it's pretty clear who he has in mind) overwhelmed British defense at the decisive Battle of Dorking -- putting an end to British freedom forever.

Alarmed by growing German militarism, Chesney's scenario was a not-so-subtle call for the reorganization of the British military to defend an increasingly vulnerable empire:

I need hardly tell you how the crash came about. First, the rising in India drew away a part of our small army; then came the difficulty with America, which had been threatening for years, and we sent off ten thousand men to defend Canada -- a handful which did not go far to strengthen the real defences of that country, but formed an irresistible temptation to the Americans to try to take them prisoners, especially as the contingent included three battalions of the Guards. Thus the regular army at home was even smaller than usual, and nearly half of it was in Ireland to check the talked-of Fenian invasion fitting out in the West. Worse still -- though I do not know it would really have mattered as things turned out -- the fleet was scattered abroad; some ships to guard the West Indies, others to check privateering in the China seas, and a large part to try to protect our colonies on the Northern Pacific shore of America, where, with incredible folly, we continued to retain possessions which we could not possibly defend.

As British intelligence officer turned literature professor I.F. Clarke recounts in his entertaining history of the genre, Voices Prophesying War, The Battle of Dorking wasn't the first tale of future war, but the inventiveness of Chesney's scenario and the timing of its publication -- amid growing fears of German militarism and the quality of Otto Von Bismarck's army -- combined to make the story a sensation. (In its depictions of how the technological advances of the invaders would change the global balance of power, The Battle of Dorking is also considered to be a precursor to modern science fiction.) Blackwood's quickly sold out its initial print run and proceeded to sell 800,000 copies of the story as a stand-alone pamphlet. Editions of the story were reprinted in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States and translated into French and German. Rebuttals to Chesney in the form of unauthorized sequels to his story like After the Battle of Dorking and The Other Side at the Battle of Dorking packed the popular press. The story was even adapted into a popular dancehall tune. Decades later, it would take on a second life as a Nazi propaganda pamphlet.

Overdone Turkey - By Steven A. Cook

One day before announcing Wednesday, Nov. 21's cease-fire agreement, at a brief news conference prior to talks between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, late on Tuesday night, the secretary announced that her itinerary included Ramallah and Cairo in addition to Jerusalem. The visit to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a head-scratcher -- given how marginal he was to the conflict raging in the Gaza Strip -- as much as talk with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy is a no-brainer. There also seemed to be a glaring omission from Clinton's shuttle: Ankara.

This was a surprise only if one took all the hype about Turkey's aspirations to be a regional power broker and problem solver seriously. For all of Turkey's apparent assets, including its good relations with Hamas and the regional popularity of its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it is Egypt that was at the center of diplomatic efforts to find a formula for a cease-fire. As for poor Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose plane is usually first to land in a crisis zone, he was a bit player in this drama. His visit to Gaza on Tuesday seemed late, especially as it came five days after Morsy dispatched the Egyptian prime minister to Gaza to demonstrate his country's solidarity with the Palestinian people. Observers have understood since Hosni Mubarak's fall that Cairo would make a bid to re-establish its regional prestige, but no one knew it would be so fast, performed with such deftness, and at the definitive expense of Turkey -- last year's Middle East's "it" country.

The widespread praise for Egyptian diplomacy is no doubt well deserved, but the fact is that the Turks have long written themselves out of the Arab-Israeli script. Once upon a time, Turkey -- even under Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- had good relations with Israel. The Turkish prime minister visited Israel in 2005, as did then-foreign minister, now president, Abdullah Gul, both in the service of peace between Israelis and their neighbors. Yet Ankara is no longer a problem solver with good offices on all sides.

The AKP's critics will no doubt want to hang Ankara's absence from all the Gaza diplomatic action on incompetence. That's unfair. The Turks have legitimate disagreements with the Israelis, starting with Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009. It was not just the way the Israelis prosecuted their military operations, but the fact that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had visited Ankara two days before Israel's incursion into Gaza and did not even give the Turks a hint of what might be coming -- even though Turkey was then serving as a go-between to discuss the future of the Golan Heights with Syria.

Israel's silence was likely sound in terms of operational security, but it was bad for relations with Turkey. Once the Israeli tanks got rolling, Erdogan risked looking either complicit with Olmert or too weak to stop his Israeli counterpart. Then, of course, there is the infamous Mavi Marmara incident 17 months later, in which the Israelis intercepted a flotilla of vessels attempting to run Israel's naval blockade of Gaza. In the melee when Israeli commandos boarded the Turkish ferry, eight Turks and a Turkish-American were killed. There are two sides to these incidents, but no one is ever going to convince the Turks of any narrative that does not place exclusive blame on the Israelis, rendering once-close allies adversaries for the foreseeable future.

Still, the Mavi Marmara is not where it all began. The downward trajectory in Turkey-Israel relations began in February 2006, when the Turks inexplicably invited Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal to Ankara, where he met government officials at AKP headquarters. Over the course of the following six years, the Turks made an effort to build a relationship with the hard-line Islamist movement, ignoring the organization's bloody history and instead emphasizing that the organization won a free and fair election in January 2006. Hamas's electoral success was certainly a fact, but the irony of Ankara's position was only lost on the Turks, who systematically repress legal Kurdish political parties with ties to the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK.

Turkey for the Troops - An FP Slideshow

Deployed soldiers don't have the luxury of gathering with family and loved ones for Thanksgiving, but the military goes to some pretty great lengths to get the troops a holiday meal with all the trimmings -- a taste of home, even if its not home-cooked. This year, soldiers at more than 200 locations in Afghanistan will dine on more than 60,000 pounds of beef, 20,000 pounds of ham, 45,000 pounds of turkey, 28,000 sweet potatoes, and 4,800 pies, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. And that's just Afghanistan. Troops will be celebrating Thanksgiving around the world -- from Japan to Germany to bases here in the United States. Here's a look back at 60 years of soldiers abroad taking a break for the holiday.

Above, U.S. Army soldiers eat their Thanksgiving meal at Combat Outpost Cherkatah, Khowst province, Afghanistan, on Nov. 26, 2009.
SSgt Andrew Smith/DVIDS

Turkey's Weakest Export - By Gamze Co'kun

The Arab Spring has prompted a lot of talk about Turkey's possible role as a model. Turkey's recent economic success and the relative liberality of its institutions have made it a point of reference to many in the Middle East.

Let's leave aside for the moment the issue of whether the Arabs really need a role model, since they're perfectly capable of establishing their own system without copying either Turkey or the West. Being a model is not only about having a well-functioning democratic system but also having the capacity to be able to foster it domestically and internationally and to be able to put rhetoric and aims into action. Does Turkey really offer a useful template for democratic values and institution building?

First of all, it's worth taking a look at Turkey's capabilities. While there has been considerable discussion of Turkey's role in the region, a look at the country's diplomatic, economic, and soft-power resources is sobering. Though Turkey has 25 diplomatic missions in the Arab countries, at last count only six of the 135 staffers in these missions actually spoke Arabic. Needless to say, this says a lot about Turkey's ability -- and perhaps its willingness -- to develop wide-ranging diplomatic relationships throughout the MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Furthermore, although Turkey's trade relations with the region are frequently cited, most of its exports are based on natural resources and low-technology (56 percent), followed by medium-technology goods (40.5 percent). Its share of high-tech exports to the region remains low (3.5 percent in 2010). This suggests that Turkey is not necessarily one of the main economic competitors in the region, a factor that will tend to limit its influence.

My previous employer, the Turkish think tank USAK, has published a report offering some useful data for assessing Turkey's capacity as an economic and diplomatic actor in the Arab world. A USAK report -- which includes the data mentioned above -- shows that there is much that needs to be done if Turkey wishes to increase its credibility as a regional role model. Currently, Turkey is far from having the capabilities to take action in line with its rhetoric. This doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Ankara's ability to project its influence into more dysfunctional Middle Eastern states.

Let's take "soft power" for a moment. The report notes that, while Turkish state TV began Arabic-language broadcasting to the Arab countries in 2010, its presence on the airwaves still lags far behind other Arabic satellite broadcasters -- not to mention Arabic-language broadcasting from the western countries, Russia, and Iran. (The report also notes that Turkish TV dramas are highly popular around the region -- though some polling figures suggest that more conservative segments of local populations often regard these shows as a bad influence.) Of the 9,374 foreign students who chose to study in Turkey in 2011, a mere 1,123 (12 percent of the total) were Arabs. This suggests that the talk of Turkish soft power influence might require a bit of qualification.

Despite its structural shortcomings, Turkey has undeniably been working hard to develop its political and economic ties within the broader region. (The photo above shows Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arriving in Cairo for an official visit on Nov. 17.) Yet Ankara has offered little in the way of concrete measures to promote democracy or safeguard human rights. Generally the Turkish government prefers to stick to the principle of non-intervention and non-interference in other countries' internal affairs. Although this so-called zero problems policy has helped Turkey to establish good relations with the MENA countries, the non-intervention aspect of this policy has somewhat hindered Turkey's open emphasis on democracy promotion. Most notably, the cases of Syria and Libya have exposed the contradiction between Turkey's claim to support democracy and its reluctance to undertake actions that would amount to concrete support for pro-democracy forces within specific countries.

Trouble on the Home Front - By Kathy Roth-Douquet

Are my fellow military wives and I shocked and outraged by General Petraeus' adultery? Frankly, after 11 years of war, military families around bases and posts throughout the world are too tired for shock, too experienced for outrage over this unhappy episode. I've heard a range of reactions, from sad recognition, to compassion, to the knowing response that no one can look inside another person's marriage. This story does, almost universally, make us reflect on the strains our families have been through over the past 11 years, and the fact that in many ways, the strains are about to get worse. 

Yes, worse. 

It is wonderful that the war in Iraq is over, that the war in Afghanistan will wind down in 2014. Sing hallelujah, strew the eucalyptus. It has been a difficult time for many men, women, children, and marriages. That's not the whole story -- many marriages stand strong for the joint experience of having been called to do something difficult, and meeting the call. Many marriages took a heavy challenge, but fought back. I think of my friend who, in the airport after the welcome home "honeymoon" with her Special Forces husband, opened an email with pictures of him and another woman. She left her husband, but eventually they came back together, and with counseling confronted together the strain of repeated combat and his destructive choice to cope through affairs. In fact, despite extraordinary challenges, military couples are still no more likely to divorce than similar civilians. But statistics shouldn't mislead anyone to think that things are therefore fine. 

It is very difficult for civilians to appreciate what the past decade-plus has been like for so many of our military families. Half of those responding to the Blue Star Families annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey have been separated from their spouse for more than two years. Half of those families have been separated for more than four years -- not only for combat and non-combat deployments, but for schools, trainings, and temporary assignments. 

What happens during those years apart? Births, deaths, personal growth, trauma. As one friend of mine explained to me, "When my husband left for his first deployment, we were basically newlyweds. Three years later after back-to-back deployments and 'temporary duty' assignments he came home to find me, this single mother of a special needs child who didn't recognize him." 

It's not just the separation; it's also the reintegration after the stress of combat. Over a quarter of the military spouses in the BSF survey reported seeing symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress in their service member (with less than half seeking and receiving a diagnosis). That squares with the Veterans Affairs estimate that 11-20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans experience PTSD. Almost a fifth in the survey said that reintegration with spouse and children after deployment was difficult or very difficult. Add the difficulty of reunion to the fact that the average military child moves 6-9 times. 

Another friend of mine tells of her Marine husband's anger and how her son, dealing with moves and his father's rage, spiraled down in school. Her husband retired from the military, and the marriage fell apart. She loves her ex-husband, and still wonders about reconciling -- on the other hand, her son is doing much better. It's hard to know what the right thing is to do in these situations.

Mongol Hordes Take Manhattan - By J.M. Berger

Red Dawn, the trippy, jingoistic 1984 movie about a Cuban-Soviet invasion of the United States, is heading back to theaters this week in a big-budget remake.

Early reviews have been leaning negative, with more than one describing the depiction of invading North Koreans as xenophobic and ambiguously racist, a perception not helped by the fact that when the movie was shot, the Communist invaders were Chinese and in post-production they were transformed into North Koreans through the magic of special effects (in order to do better box office in China).

Whether or not the new Red Dawn ultimately deserves that critique, we've actually come pretty far on the politics of race -- at least when it comes to hypothetical invasions of the homeland.

Before there was ever a Red Dawn, there was The Red Napoleon, the very first paranoid fictional Communist invasion of the United States, a book stuffed from cover to cover with perfervid nationalism and over-the-top racism beyond the wildest dreams of anyone working in Hollywood today.

The Red Napoleon was written in 1929 by Chicago Tribune war correspondent Floyd Gibbons, whose fictional alter ego is also the book's protagonist. A journalistic pioneer, Gibbons' nonfiction reporting has been the subject of glowing hagiographies, most of which omit mention of the fictional race war he spent 470 pages chronicling.

The Red Napoleon describes the invasion of the United States by Communists in lavish detail. Where both Red Dawn movies open with foreign paratroopers landing on U.S. soil, The Red Napoleon takes its time, spending nearly 200 pages methodically describing the Soviet conquest of the entire world before a shot is fired in North America.

Despite a few clumsy stabs at political relevance, Red Dawn is a melodrama using an invasion as a backdrop. In contrast, The Red Napoleon is a book about an invasion, with a flimsy narrative overlay to keep the geopolitics from becoming too oppressive.

Real-life figures populate the pages, from American icons (and Gibbons contemporaries) Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur, to a host of foreign political luminaries, most of whom meet with bad ends.

Africa's Forever War - An FP Slide Show

For much of the last 20 years, the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered from conflict and instability -- but until recently, the area had appeared to be stabilizing. In 2009, the main rebel army signed peace accords with the Congolese national army -- the FARDC -- and everyone had high hopes that the region would begin transitioning towards peace. But in April, several hundred former rebels defected from the national army and formed a new armed group known as M23. Within months, the M23 conflict had diverted the resources of the national army away from their regular posts throughout the country into fighting on the Ugandan and Rwandan borders. In the vacuum left behind, a series of tit-for-tat massacres and attacks against the population by various armed groups began, and nearly half a million people fled their homes. Millions of people are now trying to survive in desperate conditions, many of whom remain in isolated locations nearly inaccessible to humanitarian organizations. Unfortunately, it looks as if things are only going to get worse. Early on Monday, Nov. 19, rebels approached Goma, the largest city in North Kivu province, and the U.N. pulled its employees out of the country. By Tuesday, the group had taken the airport and the city in a move that, as Anjan Sundaram explains, could re-draw the map of Africa.

Since January 2012, Emily Lynch has traveled around North and South Kivu as a communications officer and as a logistician on a rural measles vaccine campaign for Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Here, her photographs provide an inside look into the tragedy and violence that are continuing to plague the population of North and South Kivu, most of whom remain out of sight and out of reach of humanitarian aid.

A 16-year-old girl shows where she was shot through her buttocks and her jaw during an attack by an armed group on her village in North Kivu in May 2012. She walked with her mother and younger brother for three days through the forest to reach safety, arriving in a hospital run by MSF more than a week after she was injured. This was the second time in May that the girl's village was attacked by the armed group.

Emily Lynch

Panetta's Wrong About a Cyber 'Pearl Harbor' - By John Arquilla

In recent months, the specter of a looming cyber "Pearl Harbor" has reappeared -- the phrase having first come into use in the 1990s. But it is the wrong metaphor. Given the surefire emotional effect evoked by memories of the "day of infamy," how can this be? How are good cyber security legislation and regulations to be enacted and pursued in the absence of such galvanizing imagery? Clearly, the Obama administration thinks that trotting out the Pearl Harbor metaphor is essential, and so a range of officials, right up to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, have been using it recently. But there is a fundamental problem: There is no "Battleship Row" in cyberspace.

In December 1941, a great deal of American naval power was concentrated at Pearl Harbor and Japan dealt it a sharp blow, enabling Imperial forces to pursue their expansionist aims for a while. Of the eight U.S. Navy battleships that were there, four were sunk and the other four were seriously damaged. And if the Kido Butai, the Japanese carrier strike force, had caught the three American aircraft carriers deployed to the Pacific in port -- they were out to sea at the time of the attack -- or had blown up the base's massive fuel storage tanks, the damage would have been catastrophic. Pearl Harbor was a true "single point of failure."

Nothing like this exists in cyberspace. Indeed, part of the logic behind the creation of the Internet, going back more than 40 years now, was to ensure continued communications even in the wake of a nuclear war. Redundancy and resilience are the key notions that shaped the structure of cyberspace. Yes, there are very important nodes here and there; but workarounds and fallbacks abound. Cyberspace is more like the oceans that cover two-thirds of the world: it has its choke points, but there are always alternate routes.

If the Pearl Harbor metaphor is misleading -- encouraging the belief that strong defenses concentrated in one or a few major areas can protect most, if not all, threatened spaces -- there may be another harbor metaphor that does much more good. This one comes from World War II as well and has to do with the harbor lights of the Eastern seaboard cities. Very soon after Germany declared war on the United States -- in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor -- U-boats were dispatched to attack shipping on our side of the Atlantic. German submarine skippers were assisted in their task by the failure of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to order a blackout along the coast. And so the U-boats had what their crews called "the happy time," teeing up targets for night attacks because they were illuminated against the backdrop of blazing city and harbor lights.

For several months in 1942, mayors of coastal cities resisted pressure to enforce blackouts because of the loss of business they feared would ensue, plunging an economy still not fully recovered from the Depression into a new downward spiral. It was only when shipping losses grew dangerously high -- over a million tons were sunk in the first four months of 1942 -- that a blackout was finally put in place and merchant ships began to move in escorted convoys. This didn't put an end to the U-boat menace, but did bring it under control.

Today, the "harbor lights" are on all over cyberspace. A wide range of targets is well illuminated, highly vulnerable to all manner of cyber mischief. Our armed services, increasingly dependent upon their connectivity, can be virtually crippled in the field by disruptive attacks on the infrastructure upon which they depend -- but which are not even government-owned. Leading commercial enterprises hemorrhage intellectual property to cyber snoops every day -- a point Governor Romney made twice in his debates with President Obama. And countless thousands of Americans, having had their personal security hacked, are now serving unwillingly and unknowingly as drones or zombies, pressed into service in the robot networks, or "botnets," of master hackers.

Southeast Asia's Economic Poster Child Is Stalling - By Ben Bland

"Long live the glorious Communist Party of Vietnam," proclaims one of the many red-and-yellow official banners that loom over central Hanoi.

Like citizens of other one-party states, most Vietnamese have developed a handy ability to block out propaganda as they buzz through the streets on their ubiquitous scooters in search of subsistence, stability, or greater riches. "Is the Party really attempting to send a message to the people, or merely trying to reassure itself?" quips one Vietnamese academic, unwilling, like most in this police state, to speak openly about the future of the country's self-appointed rulers.

Vietnam's leaders have good reason to be nervous these days. After an extended period of rapid economic growth (above 7 percent per year) that ended in 2008, the economy has been floundering, beset by inflationary bubbles, large outflows of capital, the collapse of two major state-owned companies, and a crippling build-up of bad debt in the banking sector.

In the headlong rush to invest in Vietnam as it prepared to join the World Trade Organization in 2007, foreigners overlooked structural weaknesses such as widespread corruption, the clunky but politically powerful state-owned sector, and a dearth of investment in infrastructure, health, and education. With most economists forecasting that Vietnam will struggle to grow much more than five percent in the near future -- hardly fast enough to absorb the young people entering the labor force -- no one is ignoring these difficulties now. Indeed, the timing of the slowdown could hardly be worse: Other Southeast Asian emerging-market economies, including Indonesia and the Philippines, appear to have sharpened their acts, while Burma has peeked from the shadows in search of connection to the global economy after decades of isolation and stagnation.

Everyone, from government advisers to foreign investors, knows what it would take to get the economy back on the fast track. Hanoi must stop providing, monopoly licenses, cheap credit, and other privileges to state-owned companies and their private-sector cronies. The banking sector must be recapitalized and given sufficient incentives to channel capital to enterprises with the best prospects. And the government must get serious about preventing corruption, which has a synergistic relationship with all the other ills. The catch is that this would require more than technocratic tuning of policies, and an atavistic, secretive Communist Party is hardly a promising vehicle for such reform.

Strategic Overreach - By Jonathan Spyer

JERUSALEM ' The current conflict between Hamas and Israel is the result of the Palestinian Islamist movement overplaying its hand in an attempt to rewrite the rules of engagement between itself and Israel.

Hamas's miscalculation of the balance of forces between itself and Israel has now brought the Israel Defense Forces to the brink of a renewed ground operation in the Gaza Strip. If this is to be avoided, much depends on Western pressure on Hamas's allies, above all Egypt, so that they in turn may press the movement to accept a renewed ceasefire.

Hamas overreached in this conflict because it believed that its strategic position had been dramatically bolstered by recent events. Tactically, Israel's apparent willingness to tolerate a gradually increasing volume of rocket fire on communities in the western Negev and then beyond it -- in Beersheva, Ashkelon and Ashdod -- caused Hamas to assume that Israel could be further pressured into ceasing or significantly reducing its activities along the "security perimeter" west of the border fence, where the IDF operates to prevent tunnel digging and roadside bombings.  

In the early period following Operation Cast Lead, Israel's last offensive in Gaza, Hamas at times acted to prevent rocket fire on Israeli communities by the rival Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, or one of the smaller Salafi groups operating in the region. The movement did this for pragmatic reasons -- it needed time to recover and rebuild from the effects of Cast Lead.

For obvious reasons, however, this situation was deeply uncomfortable for Hamas, which regards itself as being engaged in a long fight to the death with the Jewish state. In the course of 2012, it gradually divested itself of this approach. Fewer restrictions were placed on other organizations. Hamas itself began once more to openly join the fight against Israel. The number of rockets launched correspondingly increased.

In the course of 2012, prior to the outbreak of the current round of fighting, over 700 rockets were launched at Israel, the highest number since 2009. The final straw came with the Kornet missile attack on an IDF jeep patrol on Nov. 10, wounding four Israeli soldiers.

Hamas overestimated Israel's desire to avoid conflict. The assassination of Hamas military commander Ahmad al-Jaabari and the round of fighting now under way followed.

Strategically, Hamas has been deeply encouraged by the astonishing advances made by Sunni Islamism across the region. In Egypt and Tunisia, Hamas's fellow Muslim Brothers are now in power. In Syria, Sunni Islamists are at the forefront of the insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad's regime. And the Emir of Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Qatar recently visited Gaza, pledging a gift of $400 million.

The movement is right to be encouraged. Indeed, it may in retrospect be seen as the initiator of this process. The practical result of the 2011 "Arab Spring" has been the replacement of decrepit Arab nationalist regimes by Islamist ones. This began not in Tunisia in 2011, but in Gaza in 2007 -- when Hamas defeated and drove out the forces of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

So with the wind of history at its back, and with its ideological confreres now in power to its south in Cairo, Hamas felt able to push forward with the next chapter of its long, existential war against Israel.

China's Soft Power Surge - By Dustin Roasa

On a blustery recent Saturday morning on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, as planes roared overhead on approach to the nearby international airport, three dozen people sat in a tiny classroom at the Royal Academy of Cambodia. Crammed shoulder to shoulder, they watched raptly as a flat-panel TV showed a pair of Chinese pop stars crooning a love song in Mandarin.

Chea Munyrith, head of the academy's Confucius Institute, one of more than 350 such Chinese government-funded outposts of language and culture around the world, pointed out prominent students in the class. "There, we have a high-ranking member of the military," he said, gesturing toward a man wearing a black tunic and gold-rimmed glasses, standard garb for Cambodia's ruling elite. "We also have a secretary of state of the Council of Ministers," he added, the equivalent of Cambodia's cabinet.

When the video finished, a teacher in her early 20s from China named Zhu Hong walked to the front of the room and led the group in a booming recitation of the song's saccharine lyrics. Chea nodded with satisfaction. Earlier, he had told me, "The relationship between China and Cambodia is growing stronger, and more and more Cambodians want to learn Mandarin." He added, "They are turning away from American culture to Chinese culture."

After investing tens of billions of dollars in Southeast Asia, China has now decided that its vaunted economic power, which has bought it significant influence with regional governments, is not enough. Beijing now wants to be loved, too. In this brave new world of Chinese diplomacy, language and culture -- and, yes, pop songs -- are playing a major role in Beijing's quest to be understood and, if all goes well, win the affection of Southeast Asia's 600 million people. It's is uncharted territory for a government that until recently appeared to care very little about how it was perceived outside of China. "The Chinese government is paying much more attention to public diplomacy than before," said Yang Baoyun, a Southeast Asia expert at Peking University in Beijing. "The government has realized that people are important, and that cultural exchange can supplement traditional diplomacy."

On Nov. 18-20, Cambodia will host Barack Obama, Wen Jiabao, and other world leaders at the ASEAN Summit. As the United States pivots from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and re-engages with the 10 countries of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, much of the focus at the summit will be on Washington's ability to revive its flagging diplomatic influence. But in the contest for public opinion, which the United States is accustomed to leading without challenge, the landscape is shifting. The Chinese government, with the help of large companies and thousands of young language teachers willing to relocate overseas, has launched an ambitious cultural diplomacy effort designed to clean up its image, which has been soiled by a number of high-profile scandals in the region, including investment projects that have resulted in land grabbing and environmental damage. To counter these negative perceptions, Beijing has overseen an explosion of language schools, exchange programs, bookstores, and cultural corners. The effort began in earnest in 2004 when Hanban, an organization that falls under the Ministry of Education, began establishing Confucius Institutes at universities around the world. There are now 353 of them in 104 countries, part of what Hu Jintao described in a 2007 speech as China's effort to "enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country." Hanban plans to open 1,000 Confucius Institutes by 2020.

Cambodia, the current chair of ASEAN and a key backer of China in its disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines, and other bloc members over resource-rich islands in the South China Sea, is a microcosm for China's cultural ambitions. Phnom Penh's Confucius Institute, which coordinates closely with the Chinese Embassy, has 31 teachers from China and 1,000 students. In addition, Beijing has provided nearly 500 scholarships for Cambodians to study at universities in China, and it has sent numerous government officials, academics, and journalists on exchange visits to Chinese cities. One of the largest bookstore chains in China recently opened its first overseas outlet in Phnom Penh, and the country is home to 57 Chinese-language schools with more than 40,000 students, although many of these do not receive support from Beijing.