One of the more notable results of Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea is how unenthusiastic the Chinese government has been about that development. In a piece at China‑U.S. Focus, I describe Beijing’s reaction as one of “nervous ambivalence.”

Moscow’s policy regarding Crimea sets extremely dangerous precedents from China’s standpoint. Amputating the province of a neighboring state through military occupation and a subsequent referendum to give the “secession” a façade of legitimacy, triggered multiple alarm bells in Beijing. Russia’s Crimea annexation violated China’s repeatedly stated position emphasizing respect for the territorial integrity of all states as a key principle of international behavior. Beijing’s emphasis on that principle is hardly surprising, given its own territorial issues involving Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. The last thing Chinese leaders want to encourage is a precedent whereby one or more of those entities might seek secession with the assistance of a hostile foreign power or combination of powers.

Unfortunately, U.S. officials are apparently oblivious to opportunities to exploit China’s nervousness. Instead, Washington seems determined to adopt measures that are likely to push Beijing and Moscow together. Obama administration officials have thrown diplomatic temper tantrums because Beijing has joined Moscow in resisting U.S.-led efforts to unseat Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and impose increasingly harsh economic sanctions on Iran. On one occasion, Susan Rice denounced Chinese and Russian vetoes of a UN resolution on Syria, proclaiming that her country was “disgusted.” She added that those actions were “shameful” and “unforgivable.”

Washington’s position regarding China’s territorial disputes with neighboring states in both the South China and East China seas has been even clumsier and more provocative. The Obama administration has exhibited none-too-subtle, backing of Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other rival claimants. Beyond such specific issues, China shares Russia’s growing worries about Washington’s dominant position in international affairs. Beijing is concerned that the United States and its allies are using their military and economic advantages to encroach upon important interests of China and other major powers in the international system. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s visit to China has not improved matters. A series of testy exchanges culminated with a pointed warning from Defense Minister Chang Wanquan that efforts to “contain” China will never succeed.

Henry Kissinger once observed that it should be a crucial objective of U.S. foreign policy to make sure that Washington’s relations with Beijing and Moscow are always closer than their relations with each other. U.S. officials are violating that wise approach. It is a dubious strategy to pressure either China or Russia over matters that are not vital to U.S. interests. Both Crimea and the East Asian islands disputes fit that description.

But as unwise as it would be to antagonize either power over such stakes, it would be utter folly to antagonize both of them simultaneously. Yet Washington is now in serious danger of making that blunder. At a minimum, U.S. officials need to carefully think through their priorities and not push China and Russia together into an anti‑U.S. alliance.

Russia’s brazen annexation of Crimea has generated a flood of proposals to reinvigorate NATO. Doing so would make America less secure.

For most of its history, the United States avoided what George Washington termed “entangling alliances.” In World War II and the Cold War, the United States aided friendly states to prevent hostile powers from dominating Eurasia. 

The collapse of communism eliminated the prospect of any nation controlling Europe and Asia. But NATO developed new roles to stay in business, expanding into a region highly sensitive to Russia. 

The invasion of Crimea has triggered a cascade of demands for NATO, mostly meaning America, to act. President Barack Obama responded: “Today NATO planes patrol the skies over the Baltics, and we’ve reinforced our presence in Poland, and we’re prepared to do more.”

The Eastern Europeans desired much more. An unnamed former Latvian minister told the Economist: “We would like to see a few American squadrons here, boots on the round, maybe even an aircraft carrier.” A gaggle of American policy advocates agreed.

Moreover, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said alliance members would “intensify our military cooperation with Ukraine,” including assisting in modernizing its military. A number of analysts would make Ukraine an ally in everything but name.

For instance, wrote Kurt Volker of the McCain Institute, NATO should “[d]etermine that any further assaults on Ukraine’s territorial integrity beyond Crimea represent a direct threat to NATO security and … will be met with a NATO response.” Charles Krauthammer suggested creating “a thin tripwire of NATO trainer/​advisers” to “establish a ring of protection at least around the core of western Ukraine.”

AEI’s Thomas Donnelly proposed “putting one brigade astride each of the two main roads” connecting Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland, “backed by U.S. aircraft.” Robert Spalding of the Council on Foreign Relations advocated deploying F‑22 fighters along “with an American promise to defend Ukrainian skies from attack.”

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham urged increasing “cooperation with, and support for, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other non-NATO partners.” John Bolton suggested putting “both Georgia and Ukraine on a clear path to NATO membership.” 

Of course, more must be spent on the military. Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council complained that “The past half-decade has seen the U.S. defense budget fall victim to the budgetary axe.” 

Yet America’s military spending is up 37 percent over the last two decades, while collective expenditures by NATO’s other 27 members are down by 3.4 percent. Overall, the Europeans spend 1.6 percent of GDP on the military, compared to America’s 4.4 percent. Today most NATO members, including the Eastern Europeans–with the exception of Poland–continue to cut outlays.

Of course, U.S. officials insist that Europe should do more. But the Europeans have no reason to change so long as Washington guarantees their security.

Despite Europe’s anemic military efforts, it still far outranges Russia. And with a collective GDP more than eight times that of Russia, the Europeans could do far more if they desired. 

The basic problem, noted Stephen Walt, is that “president after president simply assumed the pledges they were making would never have to be honored.” Obviously, an American threat to go to war may deter. But history is replete with alliances that failed to prevent conflict and became transmission belts of war instead. 

In fact, in 2008 Georgia appeared to believe that Washington would back it against Russia. Offering military support to Ukraine could have a similar effect.

Washington should bar further NATO expansion. Over the longer term the United States should turn responsibility for Europe’s defense back to Europe. 

As I point out in my latest Forbes column: “Americans should sympathize with the Ukrainian people, who have been ill-served by their own government as well as victimized by Moscow.But that does not warrant extending military support or security guarantees to Kiev. Doing so would defeat the original purpose of the alliance: enhancing U.S. security.”

Today Washington could best protect itself outside of the transatlantic alliance.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is a corrupt authoritarian. The United Nations is a wasteful, inefficient organization that tolerates corrupt authoritarians. Unfortunately, the two don’t make beautiful music together.

Not everyone at the UN is corrupt. One hero is Georges Tadonki, a Cameroonian who for a time headed the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Zimbabwe. The others are three judges in a United Nations Dispute Tribunal who last year ruled for Tadonki in a suit against the international organization.

Soon we will find if members of a UN appeals panel possess equal courage. That ruling is expected soon with rumors circulating that these judges might reverse course and absolve the organization of misconduct.

In 2008 President Robert Mugabe, who took power in 1980, and ZANU-PF, the ruling party, used violent intimidation to preserve their control. At the time Tadonki had been on station for six years and predicted epidemics of both cholera and violence. 

Unfortunately, UN country chief Agostinho Zacarias dismissed Tadonki’s warnings. By the end of the year 100,000 people had been infected with cholera and thousands had died. During the election campaigns hundreds also had been killed by government thugs, who succeeded in derailing democracy. 

Naturally, no good deed went unpunished. After extended discord between the two UN officials, Tadonki was fired in January 2009. There was little doubt that the action was retaliation for being right and embarrassing Zacarias—who now serves the UN in South Africa. 

The controversy demonstrates that something is very wrong with the UN system. Tadonki decided to fight, though he had to ask the international law firm Amsterdam & Peroff to handle the litigation on a pro bono basis. Last year the UN Dispute Tribunal based in Kenya heard his case and Judges Vinod Boolell, Nkemdilim Izuako, and Goolam Merran issued their 104-page judgment. 

They concluded “that the Applicant was not, at all material times, treated fairly and in accordance with due process, equity and the core values of the Charter of the Organization” and that OCHA management ignored the UN’s “humanitarian values.” The tribunal ordered the UN to apologize for its misbehavior, investigate the mistreatment of Tadonki, hold his superiors accountable for their misconduct, cover Tadonki’s litigation costs, pay past salary through the judgment date, and provide $50,000 in “moral damages for the extreme emotional distress and physical harm suffered by the Applicant.”

Explained the judges: “This case has brought to light not only managerial ineptitude and highhanded conduct but also bad faith from the top management of OCHA. This mismanagement and bad faith were compounded by a sheer sense of injustice against the applicant who was hounded right from the beginning.” 

Perhaps even worse was the larger environment in which this misconduct occurred. Observed the tribunal: “There was a humanitarian drama unfolding and people were dying. Part of the population had been abandoned and subjected to repression. The issue between Tadonki and Zacarias was to what extent these humanitarian concerns should be exposed and addressed and the risk that there was of infuriating the Mugabe government.”

The tribunal’s conclusion is devastating: “the political agenda that RC/HC Zacarias was engaged in with the Government of Zimbabwe far outweighed any humanitarian concerns that OCHA may have had.” Of course, “The UN and Zacarias’s chief responsibility should have been to Zimbabwe’s embattled civilian population. Instead, both failed to live up to their obligations—even as they were conspiring against someone who had exceeded them.”

But as I note in my new American Spectator online article: “the final resolution depends on the appellate process, which is approaching its decision. Hopefully Georges Tadonki and the three tribunal judges are not the only UN officials willing to do what’s right, irrespective of cost.”

Last year,* Twitter was, well, atwitter with news of a report from the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Executions (who knew there was one of those?) calling for a moratorium on “lethal autonomous robots.” Readers who have seen Terminator 2 will know the potential for trouble in such platforms, but the UN came online with some concerns of its own.

The real utility of the UN’s call for a moratorium, however, is to allow me to start a competition: “great moments in academic citation.” What does academic citation have to do with autonomous robot armies, you ask? Simple. One of the entrants has to do with exactly that subject.

I think all scholars and policy wonks have occasionally come across a brilliantly witty turn of phrase buried in a footnote of an otherwise dry academic treatise. Three stuck in my mind enough that I kept them written down.

Sadly, though, I only have three entries worthy of competing against one another, and all are from my narrow reading in security studies. Which means I need your help: If you have another entrant, from a bona fide, published scholarly work (or approved dissertation) in whatever field but on this level of wit, email me to enter it in the competition. The prize is nothing. With that…

Great Moments in Academic Citation Competition, 2014

CANDIDATE ONE

Text: “[C]apital and labor are imperfect replacements and show diminishing returns; given a hundred tanks and ten soldiers, adding another tank will not produce as much military power as another soldier. Until it is possible to build a military made entirely of robots, defense requires some of both factors.”

Footnote: “Even then this is likely to be prohibitively expensive and may very well result in a war between humans and machines programmed to enslave us all, a public bad.”

Jonathan Caverley, Death and Taxes: Sources of Democratic Military Aggression, PhD diss. University of Chicago, 2008.

CANDIDATE TWO

Text: “[M]ultiple qualifying parameters need to be taken into account when considering population as an indicator of how large a military can be…Fourth is, for lack of a better phrase, the willingness to serve (and the willingness to learn how to fight)…”

Footnote: “One of the themes that emerges by comparing the military effectiveness of one nation’s forces to another’s is that operationally successful nations (e.g. Germany) have soldiers who value the ability to fight intelligently, while the less successful nations (e.g. Italy) seem to have great difficulty in learning the operational art of war. See Allen R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. 3: The Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).”

Martin C. Libicki, Howard J. Shatz, and Julie E. Taylor, “Global Demographic Change and Its Implications for Military Power,” RAND Corporation Monograph 1091.

CANDIDATE THREE (cheating because most of the humor is in the text)

Text: “Why would American leaders in a diplomatic confrontation with Chinese leaders rely on an audience cost strategy? American leaders must believe Chinese leaders believe that American leaders believe that American citizens believe that Chinese leaders believe that failure to keep a commitment results in a reputation for irresolution, so Americans must boot their leaders from office, and that is why Chinese leaders will view audience costs as decisive evidence that a commitment is credible. An argument that depends on a belief about a belief about a belief about a belief is unbelievable. Perhaps no one uses audience cost strategies because everyone knows that everyone knows that no one can keep the argument straight….”

Footnote (cheating here, too; footnote comes a bit later than above text but is germane): “One realizes recursion’s comedic potential when a television character, Phoebe Buffay, matches the levels of British deception: “They don’t know that we know they know we know.” “The One Where Everybody Finds Out,” Friends, NBC, 1999. See also Patricia Cohen, “Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know,” New York Times, 31 March 2010.

Jonathan Mercer, “Audience Costs Are Toys,” Security Studies 21, no. 3 (July-September 2012).

Let the wittiest scholar(s) win!

*(I started this post last year, but had trouble coming up with a third entrant. Political scientists are not, as a group, very funny in print. But now my third entrant problem has been solved.)

ABUJA, NIGERIA—Like so many developing states, Nigeria showcases poverty while exhibiting potential. People are entrepreneurial but the state is exploitative. Wealth is made but too often stolen. Evidence of security—which really means insecurity—is everywhere.

I traveled with a journalist group on a business tour of Nigeria. We were met by representatives of the organizer, along with a driver and two national policemen armed with AK-47s.

All of my hotels around the country had metal detectors. High walls and gates manned by armed security personnel. 

Nevertheless, Abuja, as the seat of government, is relatively safe. Former governor Orji Uzor Kalu, a successful businessman considering a presidential run, complained that “without a police escort you can’t move” in much of the country: “You can move in Abuja, maybe some parts of Lagos, but you cannot move elsewhere.” Security checkpoints on major roads were common as we traveled outside of major cities.

As I explain in my latest article on the American Spectator online: “The Niger Delta, host to manifold energy and maritime operations, is particularly risky. Residents resent northern domination and perceive that, as one businessman put it, money being extracted from the ground and water isn’t going to the local people. These attitudes have prompted kidnappings of foreigners and attacks on facilities and ships.” 

Being careful isn’t enough. Nor is hiring protective personnel. Company officials privately acknowledge more directly buying protection, spreading cash throughout local communities. 

The smart outsider makes sure he has a well-armed friend or two. A sign on the door leading from the pool to the hotel proclaimed: “All Escorts Terminate Here. Fire Arms Are Prohibited In This Facility.” 

Nigeria has had its share of conflict—four decades ago the central government brutally suppressed the attempted secession of the eastern region as the state of Biafra, resulting in anywhere between one and three million dead. More recently ruthless military dictators ruled.

Today the greatest problem may be internal divisions within the population of about 175 million divided into roughly 500 ethnic groups. The country is almost evenly divided between Christian and Muslim, leading to complicated political bargaining. Recently the terrorist group Boko Haram has been slaughtering Christians and moderate Muslims.

The country already suffers from the usual Third World maladies of the over-politicized state. Bureaucracy is pervasive and corruption is rife. One expatriate worker observed: “Nigeria is not a country. It is an opportunity.”

These economic disincentives are greatly exacerbated by problems of insecurity. A potential investor or trader cannot move freely. Expatriate employees much watch their backs. And the costs roll down to indigenous peoples, who lose economic opportunities.

Kalu, who is considering a presidential run, emphasized the need for deregulation and privatization and professed his admiration of Ronald Reagan. He also highlighted the problems of corruption and energy for his oil-rich nation, where bribes are expected and power outages are constant.

But he suggested that the lack of personal safety is even more basic. During a recent interview in Abuja he noted that “internal security is crucial.” Without security, he said, “I don’t know how we can develop. We need internal security so citizens and non-citizens can move more freely.”

Nigeria’s security problems underscore the country’s extraordinary unmet potential. It has Africa’s largest population and Nigeria’s GDP will soon surpass that of South Africa. Nigeria’s energy reserves are an envy of the continent.

Moreover, the Nigerian people exhibit both hard work and entrepreneurship. People are every where on the move, hawking products. What Nigerians lack, one businessman complained to me, was an “enabling environment” from the government.

Which should include security, perhaps the most foundational government responsibility.

Nigeria has many advantages lacking in its neighbors, and other developing states. However, so much of its potential is yet untapped. It is well past time for Nigeria’s leaders to put their people’s interests first.

The Obama administration seems determined to demonstrate that there is no place in the world so geographically remote or strategically and economically irrelevant that U.S. military intervention won’t take place. Any doubt on that score was eliminated earlier this week when the administration deployed another 150 Special Operations Forces personnel (along with CV-22 Osprey aircraft) to help the government of Uganda track down rebel warlord Joseph Kony. The new deployment augments the 100 troops Washington previously dispatched to the region in October 2011. At that time, the administration assured skeptics that the mission was strictly limited in nature. Clearly, it has now become somewhat less so, and one must wonder whether there will be future deployments to enlarge Washington’s military intervention.

Make no mistake about it, Kony is a repulsive character. Among other offenses, his followers have drafted children as young as 12 into the movement’s armed ranks, and there are numerous allegations of other human rights abuses. But no rational person could argue that Kony’s forces pose a security threat to the United States. And under the Constitution, the purpose of the U.S. military is to protect the security of the American people, not engage to quixotic ventures to rectify bad behavior around the world.

The willingness of the U.S. officials to send Special Operations personnel, who have been trained and equipped at great expense to American taxpayers, on such a mission underscores a growing problem: the unwillingness or inability of U.S. leaders to set priorities in the area of foreign policy. America’s security interests can (and should) be divided into four broad categories: vital, secondary or conditional, peripheral, and barely relevant. Each category warrants a different response.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, U.S. leaders have had a tendency to lump almost everything into the “vital interest” category. The reality is that for any nation, truly vital interests are few in number. National survival is obviously the most important one, but the preservation of political independence, domestic liberty, and economic well-being from external threats all are part of the mix as well. When vital interests are threatened, maximum exertions and sacrifices are justified.

But that ought to be the great exception, not the rule, when it comes to the conduct of America’s foreign policy. Even an effort to protect the next highest category, secondary or conditional interests, requires a rigorous cost-benefit calculation. Secondary interests are assets that are pertinent but not indispensable to the preservation of America’s physical integrity, independence, domestic liberty, and economic health. An example would be the goal of keeping a key strategic and economic region such as Western Europe or Northeast Asia from being dominated by a hostile major power. The defense of secondary interests justifies significant, but nevertheless limited, exertions–especially if they involve military measures.

The cost-benefit calculation shifts even more in the direction of restraint when the matter involved is one of peripheral interests. That category consists of assets that marginally enhance America’s security, liberty, and economic well being, but the loss of which would be more of an annoyance than a significant blow. The existence of an unpleasant regime in a mid-size country in Latin America (Venezuela comes to mind) is an example of a threat to a peripheral interest. Russia’s crude coercion of Ukraine is another example. It may be asking too much for Washington to be indifferent to such matters, but there is nothing at stake that normally requires more than a diplomatic response.

Many situations in the world do not rise even to the level of peripheral interests. They instead fall into the category of barely relevant (or often entirely irrelevant) matters. Whether Bosnia remains intact or divides into a Muslim-dominated ministate and a Serb republic, or whether East Timor is well governed, can and should be a matter of indifference to the United States. It is highly improbable that such developments would have a measurable impact on America’s security, liberty, or economic health. Washington ought to confine its role to one of routine diplomatic involvement on the margins—and sometimes not even that.

Joseph Kony’s activities in Central Africa are a textbook example of a largely irrelevant development. That conflict certainly does not warrant the expenditure of defense budget dollars, much less putting the lives of American military personnel at risk.

There is a lot of hand wringing in Washington and other Western capitals about Russia’s sudden invasion and annexation of Crimea. But as I point out in a recent article in The National Interest Online, a policy that the United States adopted more than two decades ago made such an outcome nearly inevitable. The administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton bribed and pressured Kiev to give up the nuclear weapons it had inherited upon the demise of the Soviet Union, thus making Russia the only nuclear-armed successor state.

As University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer pointed out at the time in Foreign Affairs, that policy was extremely myopic. He argued that a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent was “imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it.” In a prophetic passage, he added: “Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia with conventional weapons, and no state, including the United States, is going to extend to it a meaningful security guarantee. Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression.”

The Crimea incident demonstrates how ill-advised it was for Ukraine to relinquish its inherited nuclear deterrent. Under intense U.S. pressure, Kiev discarded the one strategic asset that would have made the Kremlin exercise caution. Now, Ukrainians have no alternative but to accept a humiliating territorial amputation. Despite the abundance of rhetorical posturing, there is little that the United States and its European allies will or can do to prevent Russia from pursuing its goals regarding Ukraine—unless they are willing to risk a military confrontation with a nuclear-armed power in its own neighborhood. And no sane person advocates that. Even ultrahawks such as Senator John McCain concede that a U.S.-led military intervention is not an option.

True, if Ukraine had retained its nukes and Putin had nevertheless gone ahead with his military conquest of Crimea, that crisis would have been more dangerous than the current version. But it is highly improbable that the Kremlin would have adopted such a risky course against a nuclear-armed country. Moscow received a great geopolitical gift when Washington succumbed to its obsession to oppose nuclear proliferation in all cases, regardless of the strategic circumstances. That move effectively disarmed Ukraine and made it vulnerable to coercion by its much stronger neighbor. Both Ukraine and the United States are now paying the price for that policy blunder.