Taiwan's upcoming elections on January 14^th look set to be a close-run thing. In the presidential contest, incumbent Ma Ying-Jeou's Kuomintang (KMT) is locked in a tight race with Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Less important than the policy specifics of who prevails is the spectacle of a lively, democratic election in a free Chinese society. Taiwanese may rightly fear China's overweening military power and growing economic leverage. But it is rulers in Beijing who will watch nervously as citizens across the Taiwan Strait who look like them, speak their language, and share their culture freely and peacefully choose their leaders.

Unlike a senior Obama administration official -- who last September used an interview with the Financial Times to inappropriately inject Washington into Taiwanese domestic politics by suggesting that the United States did not believe Tsai Ing-wen was ready to govern - most Shadow Government types presumably hold no position on who should win on January 14^th. The election is an opportunity, however, to highlight a troubling argument in American foreign policy circles over whether Taiwan has become a strategic liability for the United States.

A gathering debate is underway in Washington over whether Taiwan is a spoiler, rather than a partner, in America's Asia strategy as President Obama continues the efforts of Presidents Bush and Clinton to "pivot" towards the region.

The core of this argument assumes that relations between the United States and mainland China will define the 21^st century -- and that they should not be held hostage to the legacy of the civil war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists in the 1940s. Why should Washington risk its relationship with the rising superpower of 1.3 billion people over its ties to a small island nation of only 23 million, given the high military and economic stakes for the United States of a conflicted relationship with Beijing? In this view, China and America could enjoy a fruitful partnership if only the thorn in the side of the relationship posed by U.S. arms sales to Taiwan could be removed. Without arms sales, of course, Taiwan would have no choice but to rapidly accept the mainland's terms for unification, irrespective of the views of the Taiwanese people.

But arguments to let Taiwan go get strategy backwards. First, cutting off an old U.S. ally at a time of rising tensions with an assertive China might do less to appease Beijing than to encourage its hopes to bully the United States into a further retreat from its commitments in East Asia. Second, it would transform the calculus of old American allies, like South Korea and Australia, who might plausibly wonder whether the U.S. commitment to their security is as flexible as it was towards Taiwan.  

In particular, Japan, the United States' most important ally in Asia, may have few viable strategic options to maintain an independent foreign policy without a free Taiwan. As China's military power casts a growing shadow over its neighbors, Japan's capacity to maintain strategic choice may hinge on Taiwan's ability to retain autonomy from the mainland in ways that preclude a hostile China from projecting military power from Taiwan into the sea lanes that are the Japanese economy's lifeline.

Third, abandoning Taiwan would upend the calculations of new U.S. partners like India and Vietnam, whose leaders have made a bet on U.S. staying power and the associated benefits of strengthening relations with America as a hedge against China. Fourth, such preemptive surrender would reinforce what remains more a psychological than a material reality of China emerging as a global superpower of America's standing -- which it is not and may never be. Finally, and most importantly, it would resurrect the ghosts of Munich and Yalta, where great powers decided the fate of lesser nations without reference to their interests - or the human consequences of offering them up to satisfy the appetites of predatory great powers.

Taiwan's people may one day vote to reunify with (a politically liberalizing) China. The choice should be left to the Chinese and Taiwanese people, acting through legitimately elected leaders. That's why Taiwan's election this week -- made possible by a regional security environment underwritten by the United States and its allies -- is strategically significant, irrespective of who prevails.

My colleagues have offered good criticisms of the defense budget and strategy unveiled by President Obama and Secretary Panetta last week. Let me add to the chorus with two more points.

First, the defense strategy is an explicit and unfortunate rejection of parts of the Quadrennial Defense Review completed less than two years ago by former Undersecretary Michelle Flournoy. The QDR rightly, repeatedly, and explicitly argued that the United States needs to retain a large-scale stability operations capability. "The United States must retain the capability to conduct large-scale counterinsurgency, stability, and counterterrorism operations" (emphasis added). "DoD will continue to place special emphasis on stability operations," because stability missions will be a permanent requirement of the 21^st century environment. "Stability operations, large-scale counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism operations are not niche challenges...Nor are these types of operations a transitory or anomalous phenomenon in the security landscape." That is why "U.S. military forces must plan and prepare to prevail in a broad range of operations...Such operations include...conducting large-scale stability operations."

The new defense strategy, by contrast, openly admits that "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations."

The abandonment of a decade's worth of investment and grinding experience in stability operations is a dangerous risk that willfully ignores the realities of the contemporary security environment. Weak and failing states, and the rogue actors who operate within them, represent a real threat to regional and global stability. In response, the  U.S. and UN have launched more than two dozen stabilization and reconstruction efforts between them since the Cold War -- averaging about one per year -- and there is no sign that demand for such operations is easing. We have gradually and painfully improved our ability to execute such missions, and they are a real contribution to U.S. national security. Cutting back on stability operations now will throw away our hard-fought gains and expose us to new risks from across the globalizing, fragile world.

My second criticism of the new defense strategy, and some responses to it, is that it is still captive to the decades-old debate about how many wars we need to fight simultaneously. Since World War II, U.S. military planners have argued that we need to fight two major theater wars at the same time. The two-war doctrine has become something like Holy Writ or an idée fixe. The idea was somewhat well-founded during the Cold War when we plausibly could have faced simultaneous crises in, for example, Germany and Korea, or Germany and Cuba.

However, holding onto this idea for the last twenty years has looked increasingly disconnected from reality. Obama's new strategy goes through contortions to claim that we will, sort of, maybe, continue to be able to almost fight and nearly win two wars at the same time. But it fails, like every defense strategy has for two decades, to explain why this precise formulation is worth defending.

Read on

The United States today faces a growing gap between its commitments and capabilities. There are, in theory, three approaches to dealing with this mismatch. The first would be to ensure that the U.S. military is fully funded to protect American interests. According to the bipartisan 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, such an approach would require additional funds to modernize U.S. forces and increase force structure to counter anti-access challenges; strengthen homeland defense, including cyber threats; and conduct post-conflict stabilization missions. The panel called for an increase in the size of the U.S. Navy, the acquisition of a next-generation bomber, and new long-range strike systems.

A second approach, favored by neo-isolationists of various stripes in both parties, would be to scale back U.S. commitments and accept a narrower definition of America's role in the world than we have played for the better part of a century. Reducing commitments is, however, easier said than done. Protecting the United States against attack is one of our government's most fundamental responsibilities. Similarly, we would lose more than we would gain by abrogating any number of treaties that commit the United States to the defense of allies across the globe. A failure on the part of the United States to continue to command the commons would similarly incur great economic, political, and military costs.

The third approach would be to accept greater risk - that is, to seek to pursue a broad international role on the cheap.

The Obama administration's newly released defense strategy sits somewhere between the second and third approaches. That is, it envisions a scaled-back American presence and incurs greater risk without leveling with the American people as to the nature and magnitude of that risks.

Read on

My colleague Kori Schake goes some way toward taking the administration to task for what it calls a new strategy. But she does not go far enough; her critique appears to postulate that the strategy is not new. On the contrary, in my view it is indeed a new strategy of sorts, and a very dangerous one at that.

This is, of course, a budget-driven strategy -- after all, the DoD's Strategic Guidance, which was released together with the president's announcement, specifically states that the strategy "supports the national security imperative of deficit reduction through a lower level of defense spending." Leaving aside for a moment the question of how a reduction of some $50 billion a year will enhance national security given an annual deficit that exceeds $1 trillion, such an assertion leaves little doubt regarding the reason for a new strategy.

It should be recalled that the administration's own Quadrennial Defense Review, written in the shadow of the president's pledge to depart from Iraq, was committed to "maintain ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors." Now, however, the administration proposes to plan for our forces to fight just one war, while being "capable of denying the objectives of - or imposing unacceptable costs on - an opportunistic aggressor in a second region" (emphasis in original document). What changed since the QDR appeared, other than the explosive growth of the national debt? What exactly does denying the objectives mean? Would we necessarily know what those objectives are? Where would we find the forces to deny those objectives if they were enmeshed in a major conflict elsewhere?

This budget driven strategy is a throwback to the discredited "win-hold-win" strategy that the Clinton administration proposed early in its first term. At that time, it quickly became clear that the strategy could not work. There was no way of knowing whether forces engaged in one combat theater could be freed to fight in another theater, and, even if they could be freed, whether they could arrive in a timely fashion to defeat the enemy.

The Obama administration does not even offer the pretense of "holding" an enemy. The troops fighting elsewhere will somehow miraculously arrive in time to fight a second war. But our forces are not the cavalry in a 1940s Western. With the cuts that are being proposed, there is no way that they can arrive in time to fight a second war, assuming there are enough of them to do so. As for our enemies, it is a virtual certainty that they would do all they could to ensure that our forces do not arrive in time and, indeed, would exploit American preoccupation in another theater to realize long held objectives of their own. North Korea and Iran both come to mind in this regard.

The new strategy asserts that "everything is on the table," meaning perhaps, that everything is subject to cuts. Given the administration's concomitant commitment to preserve benefits and avoid a hollow military, it is clear that, in addition to force structure (which must mean the land forces, since naval and air forces have been cut significantly over the past decade), the acquisition accounts will be the bill payers.

There is nothing in the two regional contingency strategies that needs fixing. We have potential and real enemies in several theaters, and encountered difficulties conducting two wars in the same regional theater. What is needed is a focus on accounts that the administration shies away from: civilian personnel, staff augmentation contractors (which Robert Gates identified as a major budget concern) military retirement, and military entitlements. The latter have grown as much, if not more quickly, than civilian entitlements and both need to be ratcheted back.

The administration itself acknowledges that the world remains a dangerous place. It wants to maintain its commitments to Europe and NATO, and to the Middle East, and to our Asian allies and friends. It wants to do so with a strategy and budget priorities that belie its high flown pronouncements. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asserts that the new strategy accepts more risk. That is quite the understatement. This is not a strategy that merely invites risk, it is one that courts disaster. 

The president and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced today the administration's approach to cutting defense spending back to a $583 billion topline, the requirement for next year's budget. The guidance issued today does not set the parameters for all the cuts necessitated by last summer's budget agreement -- a whopping $500 billion across a decade will yet need to be found, and DOD has been loudly saying that cannot be done within this strategy. The Pentagon's approach is sensible, but the real problem is the president avoiding a serious discussion about risk -- and that is dangerous when cuts of this magnitude are underway.

There's not really much news in the strategic guidance released to such fanfare today. The administration hype is that this is a new strategy. That is not true. The "two war strategy" under discussion is not a strategy at all, but a planning construct for sizing the force.  Previously, the U.S. has maintained active duty forces ostensibly adequate to fight two wars nearly simultaneously in different regions. But the planning translates only loosely to actual war (because of allied military and political limitations, the Kosovo air campaign required all the assets of one war, even though it was a limited mission). The president -- any president -- is not going to refuse our treaty commitments to the defense of Korea if it is attacked, or precipitously end operations in Afghanistan if that should happen. By cutting the force, you are not saying we will only fight one war, you are saying we will take greater risk and time to fight the wars we need. If the President is really saying we will not fight two wars simultaneously, it would beg challenges between now and 2014, when he's committed to ending the one war we are fighting.

Panetta's plan looks to (the details of programmatic cuts are not yet public) take the bulk of cuts in the size of the force, which is not a bad choice, given the administration has chosen to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manpower is the quickest return of cash, and our military has demonstrated in the past decade that it can recruit, train, and equip quality soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to surge our ranks when the demands of two wars require more forces. Whether Panetta's approach remains viable as the sequestration cuts go into effect next year is an open question; even accepting we're unlikely to choose to fight our wars by counterinsurgency means anytime soon, I'm skeptical enough can be cut from manpower to bring the budget into alignment. 

There is also a crucial guns versus butter issue Panetta fails to take up, at least so far. As Arnold Punaro from the Defense Business Board puts it, unless major changes are made to DOD medical and retirement programs, "If we allow the current trend to continue, we're going to turn the Department of Defense into a benefits company that occasionally kills a terrorist." The same growth of medical and retirement programs that is the principal driver of our federal debt is also crowding out other spending within the DOD budget. I expect that is where Panetta will focus the second tranche of cuts.

The Panetta approach reverses his predecessor's relentless attention to near term demands of the wars we are fighting and accepting greater risk in the out years. Gates' strategy heavily weighted the need for manning and equipping the current force for winning two simultaneous wars by counter-insurgency, the most personnel-intensive and long-term approach. Gates' strategy was also, it must be acknowledged, the most likely to produce results conducive to America's security and a stable, prosperous international order. Other means (stand-off strikes, greater reliance on allies, adopting a marginal contribution formula, decapitation attacks, etc) are cheaper but bring greater risk of failure to achieve stable political objectives and a wide range of collateral problems. Gates' strategy is a costly way to win the nation's wars, but it is also the best of our current options.

Read on

A few quick-take reactions to the new strategy roll-out at the Pentagon today:

Reporters may emphasize the "scaled back" aspect in their headlines, but President Obama and his team went to some lengths to provide the opposite frame. Indeed, Obama's opening comments in his prepared remarks could have been taken from any Romney stump speech about America's exceptional role in the world and the importance of never surrendering American military superiority. At least in tonal terms, this was not a "lead from behind" message the administration was selling today.

The president emphasized that this was a strategy-driven rather than a budget-driven exercise. The team tried to dramatize that by refusing to provide budgetary specifics. However, even if the budget is rolled out later, there was an important resource decision that logically and chronologically preceded this strategy: the decision to cut future defense spending by at least $450 billion, more if the sequester hits. Even some of the major strategic shifts the president mentioned -- ending major troop presence in Iraq and cutting short the Afghanistan surge -- were dictated as much by a decision about resources (do we want to spend as much on Afghanistan as it would cost to provide medical coverage to the uninsured?) as they were about geopolitical developments in the region. The president established a topline resource figure, and then the staff tried to devise the optimal strategy underneath it. Put another way, this is not necessarily the strategic posture one would choose if more resources could be made available. That is not a critique of the strategy, just of the way it is being described.

This strategy is something of a vindication of Donald Rumsfeld's arguments about defense transformation. Virtually everything Secretary of Defense Panetta said could have been said (and probably was said) by Secretary Rumsfeld. The search for a smaller, less-manpower intensive, more agile, yet more capable military is the essence of the reforms Rumsfeld pursued.

It is a bit misleading to claim that since defense spending will still be higher in the future than it was five years ago (not counting the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) therefore the military will be at least as capable and, more to the point, the risks at least as manageable as they were then. There are three big cost drivers that continue to grow and together they undermine this claim, at least somewhat: (1) personnel costs, especially pay and benefits (what President Obama means by the code words "keeping faith with our troops"); (2) per-unit procurement costs of weapon systems; and (3) the Chinese military build-up. In theory, we have more leverage over the first two than we have over the third. In practice, all three seem stubbornly resistant to reform and collectively they mean that a dollar of defense spending five years from now may not buy as much national security as the same dollar five years ago.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey had it exactly right when he said this strategy is all about managing risk. If you cut defense, you can either reduce your goals or accept greater risk in pursuit of those goals. Despite all of the hoopla, I did not read or hear any clear delineation of how the goals have been reduced, beyond the veiled reference to downscale in Europe. (In fairness, I suspect an Obama briefer would say that the Administration has accepted scaled-back goals in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.  That is true, but I think it belongs on the risk side of the ledger, see below). By cold logic, then, this strategy is a strategy to embrace increased risk.

The briefing paper does not spell out where that increased risk is but one can deduce it:

• Risk that our European allies will not adequately carry the burdens we are shifting to their shoulders.
• Risk that adversaries will exploit a crisis because they believe that a less-capable United States is tied down in one theater.
• Risk that conflicts will not be short and will not require large stabilization forces.
• Risk that Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan will unravel in ways that profoundly affect U.S. national security.

There is a fundamental tension in the strategy that does not seem resolved: it is cheaper to fight "dumb" because to fight "smart" requires using expensive high technology to minimize the human costs of war, ours and theirs. Ever since Vietnam, we have tended to increase the financial costs we were willing to bear in order to reduce the human costs of our national security. It will be very hard to reverse that. We are inching toward a point where we cannot afford to fight the wars in the manner we like to fight them. One solution, of course, is not to fight the wars. But if you choose to fight them, you may be doing so at higher human cost.

There is a lively debate among theorists of civil-military relations about the appropriate levels of political activity in which the military may engage. Some advocate fairly tight restrictions, even encouraging soldiers to emulate Gen. George C. Marshall who famously refused to vote so as to demonstrate his apolitical professionalism. Others allow for greater leeway, and encourage the military to speak out more regularly in policy debates, even when those debates have a partisan overlay.

I tend towards the restrictive end of the spectrum. I do not discourage the military from voting, for instance, but I do think it is a mistake for prominent retired senior generals and admirals to campaign actively for political candidates (I do not see a problem with veterans of whatever rank running as candidates in their own right. When they do that, they clearly cross over to the pure political side. The problem is trying to maintain the authority, even deference, that comes with professional distance while simultaneously politicking for a candidate).  

For a good introduction into the complexities of this debate, I recommend reading Risa Brooks survey of the topic: her chapter on "Militaries and Political Activity in Democracies,"  an excellent chapter in a recent compendium. (Full disclosure: I have a chapter in that same book, which I co-authored with a brilliant graduate student. I got permission to present and publish that article while still on the NSC staff because, when my superiors reviewed it, they declared it so academic and abstruse that no one would read it, and thus it would neither constitute a conflict of interest nor expose the White House to any risk of embarrassment -- or words to that effect. Sometimes, there is utility in academic irrelevancy.)  

It is also clear that there is a spectrum of opinion within the ranks. A first-rate Georgetown U. dissertation by Heidi Urben (more full disclosure: I was on her dissertation committee) documents that Army personnel have some difficulty in determining where to draw the line -- is it acceptable to encourage fellow military comrades to vote? How to vote? To demonstrate the same with bumper stickers in the barracks?

So I accept that there are gray zones in the area of military and politics and that it is especially difficult to draw clear lines for reservists who have feet planted firmly in both civilian and military worlds.

However, I am hard-pressed to think of a specialists who would tolerate this: an Army reservist, Corp. Jesse Thorsen, speaking to a campaign rally before the Iowa caucus while in uniform. Perhaps there are lawyers who will try to argue that because the corporal was not on active duty at the time he may avoid the harshest punishment. And most people will point out that a corporal is very close to the bottom of the totem pole so hardly on his own capable of destroying our democratic institutions. But this seems a pretty clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Department of Defense regulations.

Of equal importance, it is corrosive of healthy civil-military relations. The corporal may believe he is speaking only for himself, but the reality is that if he is wearing his uniform, his audience seems him as speaking on behalf of the institution. For that matter, almost no one is interested in what civilian Jesse Thorsen has to say; the primary reason he was invited to speak was that the campaign knew that folks would be interested in what a corporal had to say. It was his military status, in other words, that gave his political views cachet. That makes it a matter for civil-military relations and a matter for public rebuke.

The Iowa results probably indicate that there will not be a big crack-up within the Republican party on foreign policy because the caucus returns are likely to be the high-water mark for the candidate with the most distinctive foreign policy platform in the field: Ron Paul. He did well enough to gain another week of press attention. But in the one contest best-suited to his unusual political operation, Paul did not beat expectations. He would have to really surprise in New Hampshire in order to remain relevant in the later primaries, and those are likely to be even tougher terrain for him. 

Paul is no longer likely to be a spoiler within the party. He can still play the spoiler in the general election, if he runs a Ross Perot-style third party campaign  and siphons off enough of the anti-incumbent vote to re-elect President Obama. There will be many Obama supporters cheering him on to do just that, but at least one influential Paul supporter argues compellingly against it.

Jon Huntsman is the other candidate who tried to capitalize on foreign policy divisions within the party, but he avoided Iowa altogether, thus delaying his moment of truth until next week's primary in New Hampshire. Predictions in this campaign season have been notoriously unreliable, but I am willing to bet that New Hampshire will be more of a Waterloo than a surge for Huntsman.

That means that Romney will very likely be the nominee, and whichever runners-up remain in the race to challenge him through a few more primaries will be doing so on the basis of domestic or economic policies or personality, not national security and foreign policy. Romney already had the strongest foreign policy platform of the field, and, if I am right about the fading of Paul and Huntsman, any remaining rivals -- even a surprise new not-Romney drafted from the bench -- will largely echo him on foreign policy.

There had always been a chance that the primaries would exacerbate the within-party divisions on national security, which are wider today than they have been since Reagan. A majority of Republican voters continue support the traditional "peace through strength" posture of muscular internationalism that characterized the tenures of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush (yes, there were differences across those administrations, but I would argue far more continuity than is popularly credited). A sizable minority shows more sympathy for steps ranging from retrenchment to neo-isolationism. Paul was the candidate that resonated most effectively with the latter group, but his positions were probably too extreme to serve as the foundation for a new Republican consensus. In any case, he would have to be considered a plausible candidate to win the nomination to further that debate, and I think that moment has passed.

There are still policy divisions: some Republicans think there should be essentially no cuts in defense spending, while others are willing to live with the first round of Obama cuts; some Republicans want more of a populist message on Chinese trade policy, while others want more of a traditional free trade posture; and so on.

But I think the big intra-party fight over foreign policy is over, if it ever really began.