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.

The Geopolitics of 'Girls' - By Daniel W. Drezner

This is the Golden Age for television shows that offer commentary, directly or allegorically, on world politics. Shows like AMC's The Walking Dead and NBC's Revolution examine how humans react to a Hobbesian system in which trust is a scarce commodity. Showtime's Homeland and FX's crackerjack The Americans explore the corrosive effects of espionage and counterintelligence during the War on Terror and Cold War respectively. HBO's Game of Thrones combines a dollop of magic with the realpolitik of 17th-century Europe. I'm here to tell you: Forget all those shows. The true TV connoisseur appreciates that the most insightful television show about world politics airing right now is, obviously, Girls.

I'll wait until you finish your peals of laughter. Ready? OK, sure, at first glance it might seem as though Lena Dunham's dry comedy is merely about the trials and tribulations of aimless millenials congregating in the hipper enclaves of Brooklyn. Heck, the biggest online debate in its second season was about whether someone as hot as Patrick Wilson would really go for someone as unconventional as Dunham (the correct answer, by the way, is yes). But anyone who has heard Dunham speak about the show knows that she's quite savvy about her characters' flaws and foibles. The central journey in Girls is how immature people fumble their way toward maturity. The parallels to world politics here are surprisingly strong -- after all, sovereign states are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, so national polities also possess some immaturity.

While "national culture" is a shopworn concept in international relations, it is inescapable that most of the major characters in Girls evoke distinct national tropes. Start with the protagonist: Dunham's Hannah Horvath, a struggling young writer who clearly represents the United States in all her fading hegemony. She borrows from others in order to afford her current lifestyle. Hannah manages to insert herself into every situation, making it all about her -- a process that evokes myriad U.S. military interventions. Like many an American president abroad, Hannah often leaps before she looks, convinced that the experience will be enriching. Of all the characters on the show, she is naked the most often, revealing a transparency that parallels the American political system. Finally, despite all of her flaws, Hannah clearly possesses both talent and charm, which allows her to get away with such egregious behavior for sustained periods of time -- until it finally catches up with her. Tell me I haven't just described the United States as viewed by the rest of the world.

If Hannah is America, her female friends represent other major players in the Western alliance system. Jemima Kirke's Jessa, who, on a whim, marries a banker she despises, is France -- self-absorbed, flighty, with a taste for the grand gesture that doesn't quite work out. As the junior member of the quartet, Zosia Mamet's Shoshanna, the youngest of the four friends, embodies Canada -- seemingly polite, but bubbling over with passive-aggressive insecurities. As for Hannah's ostensible best friend, Allison Williams' Marnie, she exemplifies Germany. There is much to admire in Marnie -- her undeniable beauty, her self-assuredness, and her unwillingness to go into debt. Unfortunately, however, Marnie expects everyone else to behave the same way she does -- and is truly flummoxed when others seem to prosper using a different recipe for success. Because she's so attractive, however, many of the characters still try to emulate or win her approval, to the point of self-flagellation. In this way Charlie, Marnie's on-again, off-again paramour, represents the rest of the European Union and all EU aspirants -- and Charlie suffers just as much as they do. The estrangement between Marnie and Hannah crystallizes the fraying transatlantic partnership better than any earnest think tank white paper on the subject.

If the female characters on Girls represent the West, the two most important male characters come from the BRICs. Ray is a coffee-shop manager, the oldest member of the group, and far and away the most cynical and angry character on the show. He scorns just about everything that every other character says or does, but seems unable to make much of himself. Ray is Russia personified. In contrast, Adam -- Hannah's former beau -- is China. He's a force to be reckoned with, but it's not entirely clear whether he's socialized into how the rest of Brooklyn society behaves. One could posit that Hannah's relationship with Adam represents the promise and peril of the "responsible stakeholder" concept. On the one hand, Hannah seems to use her "soft power" to entice Adam into liking her a lot more than he originally thought -- in other words, getting him to want what she wants. He begins to socialize with Hannah's circle of friends. At the same time, Hannah is unsure just how much she wants to engage Adam, reflecting America's ambivalence in its relationship with China. At the end of the first season, she is quite uneasy about moving in together. The result is an Adam that, much like China, is angry and frustrated at his treatment by others -- which in turn leads to bellicose behavior, which in turn leads Hannah to call the cops and try to contain his behavior. The breakdown in the relationship between Hannah and Adam is yet another example of the security dilemma destroying lives.

With the finale of Season Two this Sunday, we will get some further insight into Dunham's geopolitical worldview when a number of dramatic arcs could find resolution -- or not. If Hannah and Marnie reconcile, then Dunham is clearly urging the United States and European Union to patch up their petty differences, negotiate that transatlantic trade deal, and show the rest of the world a West reunited. If Adam and Hannah reconcile, then Girls is suggesting, akin to A. Iain Johnston's work, that China can be socialized into international norms. If, however, Hannah's obsessive-compulsive behavior requires her to commit herself to a psychiatric facility, then Dunham will have delivered a most Spenglerian pronouncement: The United States is doomed to cycles of self-defeating behavior on the world stage.

Pakistan's Wildcard - By Daniel Markey

On March 17, Tahir-ul-Qadri -- the Pakistani cleric who led popular demonstrations that brought Islamabad to a standstill for four days in January -- plans to announce his intentions for the upcoming national elections at another major rally in Rawalpindi. Most American observers have written Qadri off as a flash in the Pakistani pan. They may need to think again. Qadri can still shake up Pakistani politics. In the near term, he remains a wildcard, disruptive in ways that might even tip the balance of power in Pakistan's next government. Over the long run, however, Qadri has the potential to play a far more constructive role in Pakistan's political development. Either way, Washington would do well to pay him closer attention.

It is possible that Qadri will decide to send his party, the Pakistan Awami Tehreek, into the fray of national elections in May. Building a Pakistani party machine with credible, popular candidates is the work of years, not weeks, so there is a very good chance he wouldn't win any seats. Even so, Qadri-backed politicians might steal just enough votes to spoil the plans of the front-running party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) and shift the makeup of Islamabad's next ruling coalition.

Qadri might play an even more significant and constructive role over the long run by choosing not to contest elections. As an outside voice favoring reform, religious moderation, and better governance, Qadri would offer a glimmer of hope for a future in which Pakistani opposition figures hold their nation's leaders accountable to the nation's constitution and laws. That would represent a genuine, farsighted contribution to the maturation of democracy in Pakistan, the best hope for long-term economic development and stability of the sort that would render Pakistan a far less dangerous and fragile state.

Qadri, a former law professor and acclaimed Islamic scholar, stormed out of his unlikely home base in Toronto, Canada, this past December after having disappeared from the scene for eight years. The media portrayed his out-of-the-blue return to Pakistan and rapid ascendance as mysterious. Who had backed Qadri's massive media blitz? Rumor swirled. Some said it was Washington, again out to influence Pakistani politics. Others saw the hand of the Pakistani military looking to derail the electoral process.

Contrary to many press reports that depicted him as a detached Islamic scholar with little in the way of a political background, Qadri has a decades-long history of dealing with all of Pakistan's top leaders since the 1980s, from Generals Zia and Musharraf to Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Today, Qadri's politics are motivated by deep disillusionment with all of them, military and civilian alike. Such sentiments place him squarely in the mainstream of Pakistani public opinion.

Qadri's movement has found is greatest strength -- and probably most of the cash that fed his impressive media machine -- in the well of popular disgust with Pakistan's status quo of corruption, power outages, and terrible violence. Among Pakistanis there is little stomach for another round of military rule, and none for political intrusion by outside forces like the United States. But everyone, including Pakistan's most powerful civilian and military leaders, admits the state needs to do a far better job at governing. Qadri, like the reform-minded cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, taps into this sentiment.

Kenya's Most Wanted - By Suzanne Nossel

The victory of indicted war criminal Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya's presidential election poses a familiar dilemma for the West: how to weigh support for human rights against economic and security interests in a part of the world marked by terrorist threats, simmering regional conflicts, and increasing economic and trade opportunities. But Kenyatta's victory also raises a potentially thornier conundrum: whether actively opposing his assumption of power will indeed advance the cause of international justice at all.

Last week's Kenyan elections were a messy affair. There are allegations of fraud in the electoral register and the country's electronic counting system crashed, leading Raila Odinga, the runner-up, to challenge the result. But the current outcome seems likely to hold. If it does, Kenyatta -- the son of the legendary Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta -- will soon begin a five-year term.

The contentious outcome echoes the country's last vote, in 2007, when Odinga lost narrowly to a different opponent. Back then, Odinga also disputed the result and -- saying he did not trust the courts -- urged his followers to take to the streets. Two months of unrest ensued, including boycotts, ethnic clashes and more than 1,000 deaths. During this upheaval, according to an indictment issued by the International Criminal Court, Kenyatta and others engaged in the wholesale displacement, torture, persecution, and ever murder of ordinary Kenyans. Kenyatta stands accused of directing leaders of a Kenyan criminal syndicate to attack perceived opposition supporters. He has vehemently denied committing any crime, vowing to cooperate with the court and mount a robust defense.

The indictment was a landmark for the ICC. Most of the court's cases targeted abuses by militias during armed conflicts. This time, in what observers called a warning shot for African and other global leaders accustomed to using violence to defend their rule, the court went after top national leaders who had used brutal repression to maintain political power. The case was also noteworthy because it was undertaken by the ICC prosecutor himself without a request from either the U.N. Security Council or the Kenyan government. After the indictment was issued, the Kenyan parliament passed by a wide margin a non-binding protest motion calling to withdraw the country from participation in the ICC.

Fast forward five years to this year's contested Kenyan election. This time the country's constitution had been strengthened with a bill of rights; the courts have been cleaned up. Those improvements seem to have helped avert violence thus far. But while lives may be spared this time around, the stakes in this election are still high for Kenya, Western governments, and the ICC. The United States and Kenya have cooperated in fighting terrorism ever since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Under the Obama administration, economic and security cooperation and the sharing of intelligence have intensified, particularly on Somalia, home to the al Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab. Nairobi is a prime media hub for the continent and is the locus for the United Nations' vital peacekeeping and humanitarian programs throughout Africa. The United States and Europe are aware that if Kenya pivots away from them, it will likely be in the direction of China, which is already heavily invested in Kenyan oil, mining, transportation, and infrastructure projects.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their close relationships with Nairobi, the United States and Europe have not hid their distaste for a Kenyatta victory. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson warned Kenyans before the vote that "decisions have consequences" and Britain has announced that its diplomats would have only "essential contacts" with Kenyatta. The impetus to treat Kenyatta as a pariah is motivated not just by recoil at his alleged actions, but by the practical notion that to deter them, the international community must make war crimes out of bounds not just legally but also politically, diplomatically, and socially. If the ICC hopes to avert abuses and isolate war criminals, it must ensure that indicted leaders can't simply go on with business as usual. This is why there has been so much pressure on governments to shun and isolate Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted and subject to an arrest warrant by the ICC for five counts of crimes against humanity.