ISS Guest Column June 2008
Looming Security Challenges for the Next Administration
By
Dr. Jack Caravelli
The November election of a new US president will complete what has become a seemingly interminable political season. As that process winds down the process of governing will commence, replete with myriad vexing challenges. In the foreign policy arena a decision to drawdown or continue prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will dominate the new administration’s early thinking. Attending that decision will be a series of closely related considerations such as how to deal with Pakistan, the only Muslim nuclear nation whose long-troubled political system was further roiled by the December 2007 assassination of Mrs. Bhutto. In the wake of its recent elections the Pakistani parliament seems prepared to challenge the increasingly isolated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, heavily relied upon by the current administration, by trying to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban that would allow that terrorist organization considerable operating freedom in the so-called tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Such an agreement would further complicate any administration’s plans to aggressively interdict Taliban efforts to cross into Afghanistan. Moreover, the tribal region is the likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden and almost certainly the staging ground for terrorist operations against the US and UK.
While these issues alone would be enough to challenge most governments, whoever ascends to the White House will soon confront foreign policy issues that range far beyond the headlines on war and terrorism. China is an emerging superpower and few outside Beijing fully understand the Middle Kingdom’s long-term goals and objectives let alone how to respond to them. Moreover, and wholly true to form, Russia, with its new president, Dmitry Medvedev, sharing power with Vladimir Putin, his immensely popular predecessor (who remains as Prime Minister), is likely to continue along an assertive path that will not be quite a new Cold War but won’t be a friendly relationship with the West either.
Managing the bilateral relationships with China and Russia will be a lengthy and arduous process but there are at least two other security problems that are likely to come to the fore in the next administration’s first year in office. These are Iran’s relentless march to developing a nuclear capability and the formulation of a comprehensive strategy that enhances America’s energy security.
Notwithstanding the mantra-like chants of Iranian officials that Tehran seeks to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes only, which it is entitled to do under Article IV of the Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran since at least the early 1990s has been developing through overt as well as clandestine means the capabilities to both enrich uranium and produce plutonium, the two major paths to making a nuclear device, as well as the capability to deliver nuclear weapons to distant targets, including Israel, through the development of a long-range missile program. Iran has received considerable external assistance at various stages in its WMD programs from North Korean and Russian experts as well as the notorious Pakistani merchant of death, A.Q. Khan. On three separate occasions over the past 18 months the UN Security Council has imposed economic sanctions on Iran; all have been almost wholly ineffective. If current trends continue Iran could cross the nuclear threshold by 2009-2010, that event could trigger a tectonic shift in the already troubled politics of the region as the moderate Arab states have almost as much fear and loathing of Tehran as does the government of Israel. How they would react to the presence of a nuclear Iran is as profound as it is uncertain. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations expended considerable effort to slow or stop Iran’s nuclear and missile program; Iran remains undaunted in asserting it will continue along a path that could well lead to its becoming the newest member of the nuclear club. Time will not be on the new administration’s side. Its policy choices likely will fall into three broad categories; formulate a policy that prevents Iran from reaching its apparent goals—which could mean another war in the region with all the attendant uncertainties—persuade Tehran to abandon those goals through a mixture of international incentives and disincentives which will be very hard to achieve, or tacitly acknowledge that Iran will succeed and adapt US security policies accordingly, possibly including a declaratory policy aimed at deterring Iranian aggression.
America is far too dependent on foreign energy sources. That fact is weakening the US economy as rising energy prices are a significant contributor to inflationary pressures while US freedom of action is constrained by the ever present reminder that disruption of the flow of oil, the possible outcome of a US decision to attack Iran over its WMD programs, could cripple the US economy. The continuing rise in the price of oil, now over $120 per barrel, reinforces a long trend by which more wealth has been transferred from one region (the West) to another (the Middle East) than at any time in history. At least several trillion dollars have flowed from Western (mostly US) coffers to the Middle East to ensure the continued supply of oil, the critical commodity that underpins much of economy of the industrialized world. On a daily basis, the US must import well over half its energy from external sources. This is a much higher percentage than the situation in 1973, when the Arab world first realized it could use its oil resources as a political weapon. Compounding this situation are several related factors. First, none of the largest oil producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Venezuela are democracies and with the exception of Saudi Arabia, US relations with this group range from tepid to poor. Second, the growing appetite for energy to support growing economies in China and India is further straining global energy supplies, another reason for record high energy prices. Third, fledgling democracies on Russia’s periphery such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Estonia have all been victimized over the past few years by deliberate Russian disruption of their energy supplies. The UK and mainland Europe, home to important US allies, also are heavily dependent on external energy sources. Finally, both US political parties have not done nearly enough to develop a national energy strategy or to encourage more aggressive private sector investment in alternative energy sources. Moreover, while other the governments in Russia, China and France support and include nuclear power in their mix of domestic energy sources, the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986 have dampened enthusiasm here for nuclear power to play a significant role in reducing America’s energy dependence. The next administration will be entering a political thicket if it takes on this issue as special interests abound but its willingness to do so will be a litmus test of its seriousness to confront one of our most pressing security problems.
