Lost in the Desert - By James Traub

In recent days, I've been talking to officials in the Obama administration about what they think they're doing in Egypt. Even as Obama hesitates to thrust the United States into the rolling cauldron that is Syria, critics accuse him of coddling a dictator in Cairo. Congressional Republicans like Marco Rubio accuse the administration of cutting a $250 million blank check to Mohammed Morsy's authoritarian, Islamist regime. Analysts with no axe to grind, like Michael Walid Hanna of the Century Foundation or Peter Juul of the Center for American Progress, make the more nuanced argument that the administration has rewarded Morsy for his compliance on American national security goals, just as his predecessors did with Hosni Mubarak.

Is that fair? Obama does, after all, deserve credit for openly accepting the Egyptian people's choice of an Islamist government after long years when Washington viewed any partnership with Islamists as beyond the pale. But it is also true that the administration has under-reacted as Morsy made himself immune from judicial oversight, rammed through an illiberal constitution, and showed contempt for his opponents. And while it's impossible to prove, Morsy may well have felt that this strategic silence gave him carte blanche to continue down his path of majoritarian autocracy. Obama has not wanted to rock Morsy's very fragile boat. One figure who left the administration after the first term conceded that "We are not raising our voice," and added, that "there hasn't been enough attention to supporting those who are on the other side."

Let's stipulate that Obama has erred on the side of caution with Egypt. That is his nature, after all, and it's a lot better than the alternative, which we tried with that Bush guy. Obama's overall pattern in the Arab Spring has been doing the right thing, but a little late. So what now? What do administration officials think about Morsy, and how do they believe that they can influence his behavior? The short answer is that they think that Morsy and his circle are in way over his heads, and worry much more about their incompetence than their intolerance. "This is a bunch of guys who have been in jail for 40 years," said one figure. "They don't know what they're doing, they're paranoid, and they're making a huge number of mistakes. But there's no alternative to pushing them forward on the democratic path." Morsy, in short, is the wrong man for the moment, but also the only man. He must be nudged; and he can be nudged.

The administration's view of the opposition is like almost everyone's view of the opposition -- it's feckless, lazy, and disorganized, happier sulking in Cairo than campaigning in the countryside. When Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cairo last week, he spoke to leading figures, including Mohammed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, and urged them not to boycott the upcoming parliamentary election, as they are currently planning to do. Morsy's plummeting popularity should allow his opponents to make serious gains -- though many of those gains may go to Salafists rather than secularists. The only good news here is that the elections now seem likely to be postponed for three to four months, which would give the opposition time to reconsider a very bad decision.

Finally, the Obama administration seems to feel more comfortable with the Egyptian army than with any other current institution. After all, the reasoning goes, the army deposed Mubarak and delivered power to an elected leader, whom it has since helped sustain. "They have been resolute in working with the Israelis, they work well on the border," says the official mentioned above. The administration has no interest in seeking to either cut or seriously reprogram military assistance, as many critics have suggested -- and Kerry said nothing about it in Cairo.

Obama, in short, is less worried about authoritarian regression than he is about Egypt falling apart. Egypt's treasury has only three months of foreign exchange left, with no more money coming from Qatar or elsewhere. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is offering a $4.8 billion loan, which is Cairo's only chance to stave off bankruptcy. And other institutions which might supply additional financing, including the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank, will not act until Egypt signs an accord with the IMF. The IMF, however, is demanding that Egypt make some reforms which are politically excruciating -- above all, cutting subsidies which keep down the price of energy and food. Morsy's answer is that Washington should tell the IMF to just give Egypt money.

Iraq Roundtable Participants

Gen. John Allen, U.S. Marine Corps, was the commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from July 2011 to February 2013. From 2006 to 2008, he served as the deputy commanding general in al-Anbar Province, where he played a key role in the so-called "Sunni Awakening."

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, senior correspondent and associate editor at the Washington Post, was Baghdad bureau chief in 2003 and 2004. He is the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone and Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.

Chris Chivvis is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He has served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he worked on Eurasian security issues and NATO-Russia cooperation.

Eliot Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood professor of strategic studies and director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Service. He was a member of the Defense Policy Board and served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Amb. James Dobbins is director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center. A veteran diplomat, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he was named the Bush administration's representative to the Afghan opposition with the task of assembling a successor to the Taliban regime.

Peter Feaver is professor of political science and public policy at Duke University -- and a Foreign Policy blogger. He was special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff from 2005 to 2007.

Doug Feith is director of the Center for National Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute. He served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005.

Susan Glasser is editor in chief of Foreign Policy. She spent four years as co-chief of the Washington Post's Moscow bureau and covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the Post in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 before returning to Washington, where she edited the Post's weekly Outlook section and led its national news coverage.

Michael Gordon is a national security correspondent for the New York Times. He is the co-author, with Bernard Trainor, of two books about the Iraq war: Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq and The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.

Steve Hadley is senior adviser for international affairs at the United States Institute for Peace. He served as President George W. Bush's deputy national security adviser from 2001 to 2005 and as his national security adviser from 2005 to 2009.

Greg Jaffe is a Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the co-author, with David Cloud, of The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.

Col. Peter Mansoor (ret.) is the Raymond E. Mason Jr. chair in military history at Ohio State University. The author of Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq, Mansoor served as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded multinational forces in Iraq. 

Philip Mudd is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Mudd managed Iraq analysis at the CIA from 1999 to 2001, he served as the CIA member of the small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for Afghanistan, and he was the first-ever deputy director of the FBI's national security branch.

Lt. Col. John Nagl (ret.) is the Minerva Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy. An operations officer in a tank battalion during Operation Iraqi Freedom, he helped author the revision of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, with Gen. David Petraeus, in 2006.

Paul Pillar is a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. A 28-year veteran analyst at the CIA, during which time he focused on counterterrorism and the Middle East, he retired in 2005 as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.

Kenneth Pollack is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He previously worked for the CIA and National Security Council, focusing on the Middle East.

Amb. Charlie Ries is vice president, international at the RAND Corporation. A career diplomat, he served as coordinator for economic transition in Iraq at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad  from 2007-2008.

David Rothkopf is CEO and editor-at-large of Foreign Policy. He is the author of Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government and the Reckoning that Lies Ahead and Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. He also serves as president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory firm.

David Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and the author of two books: Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power and The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.

Kalev Sepp is senior lecturer at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations capabilities, he participated in congressionally appointed 2006 Iraq Study Group.

Walt Slocombe is senior counsel for the law firm Caplin & Drysdale. He was the undersecretary of defense for policy from 1994 to 2001, and in 2003 he became a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Preserve the Reserves - By Christopher Holshek

As the end of the draft in 1972 ushered in the era of the professional force we know today, the military instituted another key reform that transformed America's ability to wage war, at least on a large scale. Still smarting from the failure of the nation's body politic to do what had been done in every major war prior to Vietnam -- namely, to call up the militia -- a group of Army generals, among them Creighton Abrams, John Vessey, and Edward C. Meyer, introduced the Total Force Policy.

More than just a way to manage another postwar demobilization, the Abrams Doctrine, as it was also known, transformed the Reserve and National Guard from being shelters to avoid service into integral parts of the nation's war machine. The policy made it strategically and operationally impracticable to engage in serious conflict without calling up America's part-time troops.

By placing the majority of the Army's combat support capabilities in the Reserve component, where they largely remain today, the policy ensured that Congress, as well as the president, would be involved in deciding matters of war and peace. This made it harder to engage in a major war without the support of the American people. And by weaving citizen-soldiers back into the fabric of the military, the military would be woven back into the fabric of the country, thus maintaining a healthy, democratic civil-military relationship.

It appears we have reached a similarly pivotal decision point in our civil-military history.

The winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is forcing the United States to realign and rebalance foreign policy and national security commitments in ways that are more cost-effective. Overwhelming fiscal pressures are mounting to the point where even defense spending is no longer sacrosanct. Politicians are realizing, as Foreign Policy's Gordon Adams has put it, that "it is high time to start thinking about how to manage a serious drawdown instead of pretending it will not happen." Columnist David Brooks noted that the President Obama may have appointed Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense chiefly to "supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks."

Yet these constraints present strategic opportunities more than national dilemmas. Among them is the opportunity to exploit improvements in the Reserves over the past dozen or so years to provide a relatively ready force that can be drawn upon for missions across the "full spectrum" of peace and conflict -- small- as well as large-scale -- at about one-third the price.

The most recent report of the Reserve Forces Policy Board (RFPB) concluded that while Reserve component forces comprise 39 percent of the total force, they account for 16 percent of the costs. It calculated that an Active component service member costs taxpayers $384,000 compared to $123,000 for his counterpart in the Reserves, which would translate into about $2.6 billion in savings for every 10,000 positions shifted from full-time to part-time.

According to Chief of the Army Reserve Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Talley, the Army Reserve "comprises almost 20 percent of the Total Army and for just 6 percent of the Army budget...with the lowest ratio of full-time support to headquarters per capita (less than one percent), and the lowest ratio of full-time support to end-strength (13.1 percent) in the Department of Defense."

"The RFPB did not suggest changes to the Active Component or Reserve Component end strength, nor did it comment on balance and mix," noted Robert Feidler of the Reserve Officer Association. "But the implications of its report are obvious. If the Active Component does suffer substantial personnel cuts, the logical place to locate the resources -- which may be critical but are used only sporadically -- is the Reserve Component."

From Back-Ups to Bench Players

While reservists may cost one-third the money, they are hardly one-third the soldiers. Today's Reserve component force of over one million troops is not your daddy's Cadillac, taken out and driven only on weekends. Despite chronic underinvestment in some areas, the gaps in professionalism and performance have narrowed to the point where reservists in the field are hardly distinguishable from their active-duty counterparts. This owes mainly to a decade of intense operations in combat zones. At various times, 30-40 percent of deployed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have been mobilized citizen-soldiers. Since 9/11, more than 860,000 Reserve personnel have served active tours of duty.

Now, more than simply providing strategic depth during big wars, the Reserves have grown to fill a variety of roles. The Pentagon's 2008 Integrated Security Posture Statement concluded that the Reserve component is best suited for steady state engagement, stability operations, homeland defense, and humanitarian assistance missions -- as well as major combat operations. Rather than just back-ups, they have become bench players who can do things others can't.

The Reserves are ideal for the security cooperation missions that will increasingly be part of America's efforts to maintain global leadership and influence. In places like Africa, where the United States is venturing further, security has long been community-based -- more a function of socioeconomic development. The latest National Security Strategy looks to "tap the ingenuity outside government through strategic partnerships with the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and community-based civil society organizations." And there is no national entity that better utilizes non-government resources than the Reserves.

Phasing Out - By Tom Z. Collina

On March 12, Pentagon policy chief Jim Miller gave a speech on the Obama administration's plans for missile defense in Europe, saying that the first three phases of the system are on track. But, significantly, he did not mention the fourth phase, intended to defend against Iranian ICBMs, which do not yet exist. Then, in response to a question, Miller said, "We are continuing to look very hard at" whether to move forward with phase four or to pursue other options, given budget setbacks and technical issues.

This is welcome news. Until now, the administration has insisted that it would deploy all four phases of what is formally called the European Phased Adaptive Approach; in December 2010, in order to secure approval of the New START treaty, President Obama explicitly promised the Senate he would proceed with the full plan, assuming the Iranian missile threat continued to develop and the interceptor technology proved effective against it. But the United States does not need phase four, and it has become a significant roadblock to Obama's plans to seek another round of nuclear arms reductions with Russia. It is time to shift gears.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama announced that he would renew efforts to seek a second round of nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia, reportedly aiming to cut U.S. strategic forces by about one-third. According to diplomatic sources, Russia wants the United States to cancel phase four in Europe as a condition for arms reduction talks to proceed because it fears that the final phase of the missile defense system could threaten its nuclear deterrent.

The United States should not cancel phase four to appease Russia. The simpler reason is that the United States does not need phase four. Not only does the interceptor missile in question, the SM-3 IIB, have major unresolved technical issues, but the United States has other options to defend itself against future Iranian long-range missiles, should they appear, that are less objectionable to Russia. For example, Washington has an existing, albeit limited, missile defense system in Alaska and California, and Republicans in Congress are calling for a new missile defense deployment site on the East Coast.

Each phase of the administration's European missile defense plan comes with more capable interceptor missiles to keep pace with an evolving Iranian missile program. Phase one, with SM-3 IA short-range interceptors based on U.S. Navy ships and a radar in Turkey, is already deployed in the Mediterranean. Phases two and three, with more-advanced SM-3 interceptors based in Romania (2015) and Poland (2018), are planned to handle medium- and intermediate-range missile threats to Europe.

Phase four, however, is in a different league. The SM-3 IIB interceptor, planned for Poland, is intended to defend the United States -- not Europe -- from an Iranian long-range missile threat that does not yet exist, and is progressing more slowly than many had feared. The SM-3 IIB is planned to be bigger and faster than its predecessors, a SM-3 missile on steroids. But it's already behind schedule. Originally planned for 2020, phase four has been pushed back to 2022 at the earliest due to budget cutbacks imposed by Congress. It exists only on paper, and no ones knows how big it will be, how fast it will go, or where, ultimately, it will be based.

Xi Pivots to Moscow - By John Garnaut

BEIJING ' In January 1979, shortly after he rose to power as paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. While there, he defined the direction he would take the country, donning a cowboy hat and symbolically steering away from the Soviet Union-which he never visited as China's ruler-and toward the markets of the West.

But Xi Jinping, who completed his formal leadership ascension by being crowned president on Thursday (he was appointed chairman of the Communist Party and head of the military in November), is heading first to Moscow.

Will Xi's late March trip to Vladimir Putin's Russia -- a bastion of authoritarian state capitalism -- symbolically define China's path ahead, like Deng's U.S. tour?

It's too early to say, but he's certainly taking care to make it a success.

Xi has been brushing up on his rudimentary Russian, which he learned at Beijing's most exclusive school, No. 101, when it was reserved for the children of high ranking leaders. He has even been rehearsing Russian poetry to impress his hosts, according to one of his close associates.

And he has sought the assistance of his female friend Li Xiaolin, a princeling -- the term used for the children of high-ranking officials -- who heads a ministry-level back-channel diplomatic organization called the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, according to the close associate. Li's father, Li Xiannian, worked closely with Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, when both men were vice premiers in the 1950s. Li's husband Gen. Liu Yazhou is an important confidante of Xi's.

One of Li's aides has been seconded to the economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, from where she had been shuttling between Beijing and Moscow to prepare a huge new oil and gas supply deal to sweeten Xi's arrival.

Whether Russia can open an energy artery to China will depend, essentially, on price. For years, the two countries have been negotiating deals that would double China's imports of Russian oil, making it less dependent on the Persian Gulf and East Africa. The two countries are also planning a huge new joint investment fund, with Li's aide penciled in to be vice chair, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Whether or not the deals come through, Xi's use of Li shows how networks of the red aristocracy enable him to work around the Communist Party's sometimes sclerotic bureaucracy.

Morning Brief: Netanyahu reaches agreement to form coalition government

Israel: Following weeks of negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached a coalition agreement with two first-time politicians to set up a government that will contain a mix of secular and nationalist groups but not any ultra-orthodox political parties, which is only the third time since 1977 that such a party will not be included in the governing coalition.

While Netanyahu has made waves in recent weeks for his bellicose statements on the Iranian nuclear program, his new government likely portends a returned focus to domestic political issues. Yair Lapid, one of the political newcomers with whom Netanyahu brokered the agreement, campaigned on a platform that centered on reintegrating the country's ultra-orthodox population into Israeli political life, which currently exempts them from military rule and provides generous subsidies in order for ultra-orthodox men to continue religious study. Lapid will serve as finance minister in the new government, a role which will grant him wide control over the country's budget and places him in a key position to deliver on his promise to end subsidies to the ultra-orthodox.

Given the government's composition, it also appears unlikely that Netanyahu will be able to restart peace talks with the Palestinians. His other major coalition partner, Naftali Bennet, a nationalist who campaigned on a hard-line platform on Jewish settlements, will lead the economy of ministry and trade, and his party will control the Construction and Housing Ministry, which is a key post in the settlement question and one that carries an outsized role in laying the groundwork for talks to restart. Tzipi Livni, a veteran of Ehud Olmert's government, will serve as minister of justice and will head up peace talks with the Palestinians should they resume.

With control over 68 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Netanyahu's coalition is a fragile one, cementing what was largely seen as a humbling election result for a man who had sought to consolidate power in elections earlier this year. "This coalition is a humiliating defeat for Netanyahu," Eytan Gilboa, an Israeli political scientist, told the Washington Post. "He wanted a very different coalition but couldn't break up the Lapid-Bennett axis. He has a narrow-based government, and at any point Lapid, Bennett, or both, could bring it down."

U.S./Finance: A new report from the U.S. Senate alleges that J.P. Morgan ignored internal risk controls and tampered with documents filed to regulators as the bank racked up staggering losses -- estimated at about $6 billion -- centered around the investment activity of one trader in its London office, a man better known as the "London whale." 

Learning Curve - By James Dobbins

The war in Iraq is regarded by most Americans as a costly mistake. This does not mean the experience was without value. Indeed, one can profit from mistakes even more than successes in terms of improved performance. Ten years on, it is worth asking whether we as a nation have done so.

Last year, at the direction of Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Staff issued a short but fairly candid compendium of lessons from the Iraq and Afghan wars. Entitled "Decade of War," this paper acknowledged that the United States had failed to understand the environments in which it was operating, employed conventional tactics to fight unconventional wars, and was unable to effectively communicate with local populations. The report contends that these problems were largely overcome in the last five years, but admits that this adaptation took longer than it should have.

This otherwise commendable examination of past failures omits two of the most important. Invading Iraq on the basis of bad information was not exclusively or even primarily a military error, but much of the U.S. intelligence apparatus resides in the Defense Department and is commanded by military officers. Yet only the tiny State Department intelligence unit demurred from the judgment that Saddam had active WMD programs and indeed weapons, neither of which turned out to be true.

Second, this Joint Staff compendium does not examine the fatal mismatch between the scale of initial American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the scope of its ambitions. Some now argue that initial American objectives were too ambitious, while others insist that the commitment of military manpower and economic assistance was inadequate. But virtually everyone agrees that the Bush administration should have either scaled down the former or upped the latter. In the end, of course, it did both.

Civilian agencies -- to include State, USAID, Treasury, and the CIA -- have not produced a lessons-learned compendium comparable to that issued at Gen. Dempsey's direction. This is unfortunate, for while the Joint Staff paper does cite failures on the civil side, we lack any comparable analysis of such failures from the responsible agencies.

The lesson most Americans seem to have drawn from Iraq is "never fight a land war in Asia." This advice was first given by Douglas MacArthur to President Kennedy in 1961. It was reiterated two years ago by then Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. Another version of this lesson is contained in the Obama administration's official defense guidance, which directs that the United States no longer size its military for large-scale stability operations.

While negative lessons are legitimate and useful, they don't lead to improved performance, since one does not hone skills one does not intend to use. The post-Vietnam "never again" attitude led to a severe atrophy of the U.S. military's counterinsurgency skills and it is quite possible that the U.S. military will go through a similar phase of unlearning over the next several years.

Obviously, the United States should in the future avoid invading large hostile Asian states on the basis of bad information against the advice of major allies and over the objections of most regional governments. History suggests, however, that the more general injunction against land wars in Asia may enjoy a short half-life, as may the determination to steer clear of large-scale stability operations. Kennedy escalated the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam in the years following MacArthur's warning. George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan only a year after promising, in a presidential election debate with Al Gore, not to engage U.S. forces in any more nation-building endeavors -- and he then directed the occupation of Iraq only 18 months later.

The current national aversion to future such engagements is clearly limiting American involvement in Syria's still escalating civil war, much as the hangover from President Clinton's Somalia debacle in 1992 helped delay American intervention in the Bosnia civil war until 1995, by which time that conflict had claimed over 100,000 victims. This is a threshold the Syrian conflict seems likely to cross sometime this year.

More important even than identifying lessons to be learned is adopting enduring remedial measures. "Decade of War" is right to argue that most of the early failures it identifies have been corrected. But many of those fixes have been of a provisional nature, altering institutional behavior and structures in ways not likely or even intended to endure once the immediate need for reform diminishes. As the war in Iraq recedes and that in Afghanistan winds down, there will be a tendency for all our national security agencies to return to business as usual. Should this be allowed to happen, the nation will have missed an opportunity to profit from some very costly mistakes.