President Biden’s announcement in April, and again in his first State of the Union address, that the U.S. military will be withdrawing from Afghanistan must have seemed to many Americans to be an inflection point. But if pulling out of Afghanistan is thought to mark an end to the post‑9/​11 wars, think again.

Almost as soon as Biden could give the official orders to withdraw, reporting clarified that the new policy was by no means equivalent to ending the war. “With withdrawal preparations ramping up,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March, “U.S. military commanders want bases for troops, drones, bombers and artillery to shore up the Afghan government, keep the Taliban insurgency in check and monitor other extremists.” These military assets were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan and simply repositioned to neighboring Central Asian countries or to nearby Arab states in the Persian Gulf.

That sort of sounds like a continuation of the mission from non-Afghan soil. Though, even that formulation may be too generous: the New York Times reports that U.S. spy agencies are hard at work cultivating proxies inside Afghanistan in preparation for a Taliban offensive to seize control of the country. Is this an inflection point or a shift in tactics?

More significantly, Afghanistan is only one of the lingering “Global War on Terror” military missions the Biden administration is continuing to pursue. The United States is engaged in some level of active hostilities in roughly a dozen countries. In none of these disparate theaters does the United States face a clear and present national security threat, but the executive branch will apparently continue these quiet military missions so long as it has the legal authority to do so.

Congress is in the process of repealing old authorizations for the use of force. Bills to repeal AUMFs from 1957 and 1991 have passed committee in the House while committees in both the House and Senate have voted to move forward on repealing the 2002 AUMF, which authorized the Iraq War. Unfortunately, most members of Congress who support repealing the 2001 AUMF — the very authorization that enables America’s so-called Forever Wars — also support replacing it with another, updated AUMF that will effectively codify anew all of America’s ongoing missions. And in a sign of acknowledgment that the 2001 AUMF has been abused, some members are keen to include language intended to impose constraints on executive war powers that the broad text of the original failed to do.

My colleague Gene Healy and I explain in Defense One why it is a bad idea replace the 2001 AUMF and prolong the wayward War on Terror:

Unfortunately, President Biden and most of Congress aren’t interested in simply repealing the 2001 AUMF. They want to repeal and replace it with a new authorization broad enough to underwrite ongoing operations across the broader Middle East, from Libya to Pakistan. The danger of a replacement AUMF is that it will amount to hitting reset on a 20-year conflict, serving as congressional blessing for another multigenerational war.

Moreover, any authority Congress grants will likely be stretched still further by future presidents. Biden himself should be attuned to that danger. As a Senator, just after voting for the 2001 AUMF, he insisted the resolution was nothing like the Vietnam War’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: “We do not say pell-mell, ‘Go do anything, any time, any place.’” The 2001 AUMF has now been in effect over three times as long as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and it’s morphed into the boundless grant of power then-Senator Biden disclaimed.

…Americans should be skeptical of the claim that these alleged threats demand open-ended authority for waging war against disparate militant groups in multiple countries. The 9/11 attacks were an outlier event, not the arrival of a new normal. Since September 2001, an average of six people in America per year are killed by Islamic-inspired terrorism. Self-radicalized “lone-wolves” are a bigger risk factor than jihadists with operational connections to any of the myriad militant groups American forces are fighting overseas.

…The sprawling, low-intensity warfare such a policy demands entangles us deeper into local problems extraneous to American security…Under the logic of the global war on terror, policymakers have lost sight of the distinction between distant regional violence and a direct threat to the United States.

The end of the war in Afghanistan presents Congress with an historic opportunity to break that cycle. No current threat remotely justifies roving presidential authority to wage war on multiple continents. To end the Forever War, end the Forever Authorization.

Read the full article here. Gene and I made a similar case in the New York Times a few years ago to repeal and not replace the 2001 AUMF.

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan reviews Carol Leonnig’s book, Zero Fail, about the history and performance of the Secret Service. The federal agency has suffered from epic failures and scandals in recent years.

Secret Service management has been dreadful and burying the agency within the sprawling new Department of Homeland Security in 2002 probably made things worse, as Noonan suggests. Indeed, I think that the DHS superstructure should be abolished as an excessive layer of counterproductive bureaucracy.

Where Noonan and Leonnig appear to go wrong is assuming that the Secret Service budget has been shortchanged.

• Noonan says—based on Leonnig’s findings—that the agency has been “weakened by bad leadership, underfunding, an insular culture and declining professionalism.”
• Noonan claims that the agency “was always underfunded.”
• Noonan recounts: “In 2011 Julia Pierson, who would become the first female director, told the Office of Management and Budget her agency was ‘bankrupt.’ Budget cuts led to understaffing and waves of uniformed-officer resignations.”

The statements about “underfunding” and “budget cuts” could have used some factchecking. Secret Service spending and employment have soared since 1990. Spending did flatline for a while in real terms a decade ago, but that was after a large increase in the prior decade.

The chart below shows the agency’s spending in 2021 constant dollars. Real Secret Service spending increased from $0.75 billion in 1990, to an estimated $3.26 billion in 2021.

Secret Service civilian employment increased from 5,760 in 2002 to 7,669 in 2019, which is a 33 percent jump. This recent article suggests that the Secret Service is continuing to ramp up its employee count.

Finally, note that the agency failures Noonan highlights have nothing to do with funding levels anyway. For example, wild partying by Secret Service agents caused a major scandal on a 2012 presidential trip to Columbia. And in 2014, Omar Gonzalez took 29 seconds to make “his way from a public sidewalk to inside the White House. He had gotten directly past eight trained security professionals on a compound staffed with 154 men and women.”

The 2021 figure is the estimate from the new federal budget released in May 2021.

Update: This post has been updated to include the most recent spending figures.

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote on North Korea’s recent ballistic missile developments. CBNW magazine published the article on their website in early April 2021.

Adding solid-fuel missiles and improving the payload capacity of ICBMs are the two most pressing priorities for North Korea’s strategic missile forces. If both steps succeed, then Pyongyang will be able to significantly improve the survivability of its nuclear deterrent.

Greater protection against disarming attack could encourage U.S.-North Korea strategic stability in theory, but Washington is unlikely to accept mutual vulnerability. Absent a change in U.S. policy that places greater emphasis on arms control instead of full denuclearization, North Korea’s new strategic missile systems will likely accelerate an existing offense-defense arms race that will in turn encourage greater U.S. missile defense spending.

The rest of the article can be found on the CBNW website: https://​cbnw​.co​.uk/​n​o​r​t​h​-​k​o​r​e​a​-​f​o​r​g​e​s​-​a​head/

The Biden administration is working quickly to make good on its rhetoric about making America’s alliance relationships great again. East Asia has been the primary theater for alliance repair work thus far. The new administration moved quickly to reach military cost-sharing agreements with South Korea and Japan, smoothing over a prominent source of friction left by the Trump administration.

Biden has made it clear that he wants the United States and its allies to move together when solving common problems, but this ideal is starting to run up against an inconvenient truth of divergent priorities in friendly capitals.

It may be impossible for Washington to keep both Seoul and Tokyo happy because each capital has very different ideas about what it wants out of U.S. policy toward North Korea. While both South Korea and Japan would prefer to see North Korea completely denuclearize, the two U.S. allies have different priorities and their approaches to the problem vary significantly.

Generally speaking, the Moon Jae-in administration in Seoul would like to do more to incentivize North Korea to improve relations with both South Korea and the United States. Getting rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons is one of the major goals of South Korea’s strategy, but achieving denuclearization will require improvements in other policy areas along the way. South Korea’s efforts to reduce the risk of conventional military actions along the DMZ, plans for greater economic engagement and infrastructure improvements, and calls for a peace declaration to end the Korean War are examples of how Seoul prioritizes broader engagement efforts as a way to eventually achieve denuclearization. This approach enjoyed some early success in 2018, but after the failure of the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi in February 2019, the North has effectively shut down the South’s engagement push.

Compared to South Korea’s approach, Japan’s position contains very little room for engagement with North Korea until it makes significant steps toward denuclearization. While South Korea and the United States engaged in summit diplomacy with Kim Jong Un in 2018, Tokyo reiterated that sanctions on North Korea should not be lifted until it gives up nuclear weapons. Engagement is not completely off the table. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe, for example, said that he would be willing to negotiate directly with Kim Jong Un without preconditions. This offer of a summit was the exception to the rule, however, and Japan’s approach to North Korea’s nuclear program has generally favored greater pressure over engagement.

This presents a frustrating choice for the Biden administration if it remains committed to working closely with allies to address North Korea’s nuclear program. Adopting policies that favor Seoul’s approach of greater engagement with North Korea and place denuclearization as one of many goals for diplomacy would necessarily place the United States at odds with Japan’s preferences for denuclearization first. Hewing closely to Tokyo’s approach would mean throttling back on the engagement efforts that South Korea favors.

Early signs suggest the Biden administration will favor Japan over South Korea in this dilemma. In a statement released after the first leader-level Quad summit on March 12, the United States backed away from the phrase “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and instead committed to the “denuclearization of North Korea.” The former phrase was an important feature of both the April 2018 Panmunjom Declaration for Peace and the June 2018 Singapore summit joint statement, which South Korea participated in and strongly supported, respectively. The State Department repeated the “denuclearization of North Korea” formula in a March 14 press release that previewed an upcoming visit to Japan by the U.S. secretaries of state and defense.

Washington’s review of its North Korea policy is still ongoing but based on these recent statements it seems likely that the Biden administration will adopt a policy that is more closely aligned with Japan’s rather than South Korea’s preferences. This would be bad news for the Moon administration, which has consistently stressed the need for greater U.S. engagement with North Korea despite Kim going to ground after the Hanoi summit.

A tougher U.S. policy that brings Washington and Tokyo into closer alignment would help Biden differentiate himself from Trump, but it is unlikely to nudge North Korea closer to either denuclearization or arms control. Instead of trying to make allies happy, the Biden administration should focus on looking out for the best interests of the United States.

Just 36 days into his presidency Joe Biden has launched airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias in Syria. It is an ill-advised move for several reasons. Perhaps most troubling, it deepens U.S. military involvement in Syria’s murky civil war. Unfortunately, the latest step is symptomatic of the administration’s overall policy. In one of his first actions as president, Biden dispatched some 200 troops and 40 trucks of mostly military supplies to support Kurdish factions in eastern Syria.

Not only do the air strikes increase the likelihood of another bloody Middle East entanglement for the United States, they’re objectionable for other reasons. Russia is deeply involved in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered regime. It is never a good idea for two major powers, especially two nuclear-armed powers, to be operating in the same arena to back opposing factions in an armed conflict. That situation creates a dangerous risk of clashes between U.S. and Russian forces. Indeed, there already have been at least two ugly incidents. Such an episode can easily spiral out of control.

The airstrikes on pro-Iranian forces also greatly complicate the administration’s stated intention of reviving the multilateral agreement to impose limits on Tehran’s nuclear program. That effort already was faltering because each side has insisted that the other take the first substantive step toward a rapprochement. Washington’s new provocation further complicates an already fragile process.

Finally, the attack is another unhealthy manifestation of the imperial presidency. Once again, an occupant of the Oval Office has initiated military action against a sovereign country without even consulting Congress, much less asking for a declaration of war. Presidential arrogance has been especially pronounced with respect to Syria policy during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Syria did not attack the United States, and Congress has never formally authorized military operations in that country. Yet the United States now has several thousand troops there, has provided material support to insurgent factions attempting to overthrow Assad, and now is engaged in combat operations against the Syrian government and its militia allies.

The decision to launch airstrikes is a worrisome omen with respect to the administration’s overall Syria policy. Key members of the president’s foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, are long-time advocates of a more concerted U.S. effort to oust Assad, even when Biden, as vice president, seemed more hesitant. Now, he needs to listen to that inner voice of caution and resist the poisonous advice of such hawkish advisers. The Syrian quagmire beckons, and the Biden administration is flirting with having the United States wade into it.

One criticism of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is that it was “transactional.” In 2020, Joseph Nye lamented Trump’s “transactional myopia.” And last week in his speech to the Munich Security Conference, President Biden argued that “our partnerships have endured and grown through the years because they are rooted in the richness of our shared democratic values. They’re not transactional.”

They should be.

To get this out of the way up front, transactional isn’t a perfect synonym for Trumpy. Complaints about Trump’s habit of describing alliances as protection rackets or his struggle to separate his interest from the national interest or his boorish style are separable from complaints about transactionalism. (All presidents use their own personal style and mental shortcuts, including Trump.) Trump’s idiosyncrasies aside, the alternative to transactionalism is sentiment and reflexive tribalism.

Think about international trade, or immigration, or international law. Free traders and protectionists both make their arguments in terms of what’s good for their country. Immigration restrictionists and liberalizers both argue that their preferred policies would benefit the country. Those who favor and those who oppose the International Criminal Court argue in terms of the national interest. It is hard to conceive of these openly transactional debates in any other way.

To suggest by contrast that international security–alliances, troop deployments, and wars–should be something other than transactional is bizarre. But huge swathes of the foreign policy establishment do it.

In 2010 remarks at the Brookings Institution, for instance, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that:

there are certain commitments, as we saw in a bipartisan basis to NATO, that need to be embedded in the DNA of American foreign policy and not sort of beginning and ending in fits and starts.

Similarly, in his presidential campaign Foreign Affairs article, Biden wrote that NATO:

transcends dollars and cents; the United States’ commitment is sacred, not transactional. NATO is… an alliance of values, which makes it far more durable, reliable, and powerful than partnerships built by coercion or cash.

This kind of thinking pervades the foreign policy establishment. In remarking on Biden’s Munich Security Conference address, Heather Conley of CSIS remarked that:

This was a homecoming speech — the prodigal American son has returned to the trans­atlantic family. This was not a time to raise family squabbles or traumas.

This is airy romanticism. If an alliance is embedded in our DNA, or if it is not secular but sacred, or if the alliance is a family to which we, the prodigal son, have returned, then it is impervious to critical scrutiny. (For readers reeling at the prodigal son metaphor, Patrick Porter has you covered.)

It should not require the CRISPR to examine or shrink America’s alliance commitments. Thinking of alliances as immutable and non-transactional is the antithesis of the founding admonition contained in George Washington’s farewell address of 1796 that:

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world… Taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, on a respectably defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

There is no extraordinary emergency in Europe.

In a 1990 essay examining the meaning of the end of the Cold War, Jeane Kirkpatrick noted that “foreign policy elites often have different views than those of popular majorities,” warning against foreign policies lacking public support. She concluded that essay by arguing that “most of the international military obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated. Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens, and responsibilities.”

To judge what are equal risks, burdens or responsibilities requires transactional thinking: What assets and liabilities do we have, what do they have, and is an alliance in our interest? The alternative is romance and sentiment.

Diplomacy with Iran has been stalled since President Biden came into office, largely as a result of Biden’s tough opening position. The administration has insisted that, although Trump abrogated the nuclear deal when Iran was fully compliant, Iran must make the first move in bringing its nuclear program back within the limits of the JCPOA before the United States will even consider lifting sanctions. In response, the Iranians proposed a step-by-step process by which each side simultaneously puts an end to their violations and restores the agreement. Biden’s hardline position, probably intended to placate hawkish critics on Capitol Hill, was so stubbornly unmoving that it seemed to dismiss the notion of formal negotiations — at least until Iran satisfied this petty insistence to move first.

Fortunately, Biden has softened his position…somewhat. It might be more precise to say that the administration is offering a few diplomatic carrots in hopes that Iran will accommodate its demand to move first. In a strong signal of their desire to deal, Biden’s State Department announced that the United States would accept an invitation from the EU to attend a meeting of the P5+1 and Iran to discuss reviving the deal. The administration also rescinded Trump’s stated policy of re-imposing UN sanctions (which the Security Council had rejected anyways) and loosened Trump’s travel restrictions on Iranian diplomats in New York.

Once negotiating parties actually get together for talks, diplomacy can become a lot easier because leaders can communicate real positions and intentions with less concern about audience costs. To the extent that the parties see cooperation as mutually beneficial, direct talks can allow them to find face-saving ways to move forward without triggering hawkish objections within their respective domestic constituencies (or even among their respective allies). With luck, this dynamic can help overcome what remains an obstinate set of opening demands on the part of the Biden administration.

From the New York Times (emphasis mine):

The first obstacle to restoring the deal may be a delicate political dance of who acts first. Mr. Blinken said this week that the Biden administration believed simply restoring the old deal was insufficient. He has other goals that include extending and deepening the agreement in an effort to rein in Iran’s growing missile ability and its continued support of terrorist groups and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, issues that Iran has said are not on table.

It’s important to remember that many of the officials who negotiated with Iran and worked on the JCPOA in the Obama administration, and vigorously defended it in subsequent years, are the very same officials now saying the JCPOA alone is insufficient. Some future arrangement that expands on the JCPOA is not an inherently bad thing, in theory. But given the immense distrust between the U.S. and Iran, reinforced by the Trump administration’s JCPOA delinquency and outright aggression towards Iran, one wonders why the Biden administration would so explicitly reject the adequacy of simply returning to the status quo ante. And why insist on objectives that are obvious non-starters for Iran? In this case especially, leaving well-enough alone is an important diplomatic tenet that the Biden administration may want to seriously consider.

In all likelihood, what’s driving the administration’s recalcitrant position on Iran is politics. On the one hand, Biden feels pressure from hawks in Washington and in the capitals of America’s Middle East “partners,” to be tough on Iran. On the other hand, the baseless pathology that Iran presents a significant national security threat to the United States pervades official Washington, including Biden’s executive branch. Erroneous beliefs about the supposed threat posed by Iran’s missile capabilities (intended to deter their better-armed regional adversaries) can easily lead Biden to make more maximalist demands at the outset. As with the Obama administration, these pressures make a successful deal harder (but still possible) to achieve. A further strain may be Biden’s own ambition: isn’t it better for a president’s legacy to achieve a new and better deal than to simply revert to the achievements of a previous administration?

Disentangling America from the morass of the Middle East will be very difficult to achieve unless the enemy image of Iran loosens and Washington’s inflated security concerns are to some extent assuaged. Diplomacy is the route to satisfying those objectives. If the Biden administration wants that, it is there for the taking. But it is highly unlikely that their hardline posturing will appease the hawks they are trying to placate. With luck, the direct talks that the Biden administration has now opened the door to will enable the U.S. and Iran to overcome their respective domestic liabilities and reach an agreement they both want.