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America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part I

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I wrote about nature of war from foreign policy perspective here.

In this first post about national defense policy principles and force structures, I want to talk about the meaning of “war” and “state of war”  from a defense policy perspective.  There is far more to war than shooting and exchanging missile fire, although overtly military actions are certainly central aspects of any war, especially in the end game.  A clear understanding is necessary if Defense and State are to work together as the unified whole they must in order for the United States effectively to defend itself in wars of any type.

The damage doesn’t have to be done with bombs or bullets.  Anything that is designed deliberately to impede or to prevent our freedom of action is damaging: it is an act of war.

What, then, is “war?”  Certainly it includes the formally declared state of war, wherein Congress acts under its Article I, Section 8 responsibilities; I won’t go into that further here.  War also includes, though, the aggregation of those acts of war described in the link above (and in links within that post); it need not be declared in order to be in progress, or to be damaging to us and to our security and even survival.  Indeed, in the modern world, where the distribution of formal military power among the nations of the world is so vastly asymmetric, the weaker almost invariably will make war—shooting or otherwise—outside a formal, openly declared state.  Rather, the (weak) attacker will fight in as stealthy a manner as can be managed, at least until the damage done has accumulated to the point of eliminating military advantage and transferring practical advantage to the attacker.  Obviously, such conflicts from deep within the shadows, includes seemingly nonviolent fighting [sic] as well as the asymmetry of terrorist attack.

Moreover, America’s enemies, especially those actively fighting us, are not even necessarily classically formed nation-states; they’re much more amorphous.  These entities, which I’ve been calling non-national entities in earlier posts, have components that are spread across national boundaries; they’re organized as coordinating, but largely separate and more or less independent components.  Further, these non-national entities operate outside Geneva Conventions governing the “proper” way of conducting warfare.  This diffusion across national boundaries and this lack of Convention guidance complicates our response to attacks, but they need not constrain us to the point we cannot defend ourselves.

Complications arise when an overt attack, or a limited series of “acts of war,” originate from within the jurisdiction of a nation-state with which we are not (formally) at war.  (When the attack originates from within a nation that is a friend or ally, the situation actually is much simpler: we can expect that when the attackers are identified, the “host” nation will act decisively on its own initiative.)  It is difficult to enter the host nation’s borders in order to strike the entity and destroy its ability to continue its war against us.  Alternatively, the diffusion of the non-national entity can make it difficult to identify useful targets.  It is the role of diplomacy to create the conditions, permissive or not, that facilitate our entry.  Afghanistan is one example of diplomacy’s success in enabling such an entry for such a purpose.

The Geneva Conventions contain within them mechanisms for prosecuting a defense against attackers who themselves do not follow the Conventions; however, even at that, the Conventions themselves are obsolete: they cannot apply in any practical way to modern wars that don’t necessarily involve actual shooting, nor are they an efficient framework for addressing the kind of war prosecuted by terrorist non-national entities.

In the end, while our diplomacy is creating the conditions that legitimize bypassing the Conventions in wars involving non-national entities and/or undeclared wars inflicted on us by nation-states, our defense policy that must create the conditions for actually fighting such wars to their only possible end: the destruction of the attacker’s ability to continue, wherever it exists, whether that attacker is a nation-state or not, and whether a legal, formal state of war exists or not.

Some examples of patterns of actions deliberately inimical to us and of non-declared war include these (note that this is not an exhaustive list; it is for illustration only).

Russia:

  • in 2007, threatened nuclear war against a US ally, Poland, if we went ahead with a planned missile defense shield radar installation.
  • in 2008, invaded and partitioned a US ally, Georgia, in a naked Sudetenland-like Anschluss.  Nominally, the partitioned provinces, with Russian tanks backing them, simply declared their independence from Georgia; however, they are functionally principalities of Russia.
  • in 2009, participated with the People’s Republic of China in a hack into our national electric power grid control facilities.
  • presently, in response our renewed efforts to defend ourselves against missile attacks, has said they will move nuclear missiles into western Russia so as to target our defensive installations, and our European allies generally.
  • actively supports Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, knowing Iranian purposes for the devices.  Russia routinely blocks any serious options, beginning with truly effective sanctions, that would influence Iran to stop its development and acquisition efforts.

Russia’s behaviors are not overt acts of war, but they are inimical to American interests, and Russia clearly knows this.

PRC:

  • actively engaged in hacking into our defense and national infrastructure computer systems, not just for “ordinary” espionage, but also to plant malware having the purpose of disabling those systems at a time of Chinese selection.  These hacks include a years-long penetration of the US Chamber of Commerce, hacks into our national electric power grid control facilities, and attacks against Lockheed Martin, maker of our newest fighter, the F-35, as well as an attack against the F-35 program itself.
  • routinely ships poisoned trade goods, including laptops assembled in Chinese factories under US trade names having Trojans installed before they leave the factory, baby formula with poisons in the mix, gypsum sheets for American housing permeated with sulfur (including hydrogen sulfide), strontium, and organic compounds associated with acrylic paints.
  • actively supports Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, knowing Iranian purposes for the devices.  The PRC routinely blocks any serious options, beginning with truly effective sanctions, that would influence Iran to stop its development and acquisition efforts.

While the poisoned trade goods may not be overt acts of war, but rather reflective of incompetence, it’s hard to accept the thesis that a modern nation like the PRC really is that sloppy.  The hacking and delivery of malware with a view to damaging our national ability to function plainly are acts of war, as DoD has lately recognized.

Iran has had a long-standing shadowy war in progress against the US.

  • in November 1979, Iran attacked the US embassy in Tehran and seized our diplomats and staff, imprisoning them for a year and a quarter.  Under international law, this is a casus belli.
  • in 1998, Iran, together with Sudan, participated in the terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, another casus belli.
  • presently threatens an ally of the US, Israel, with extermination.
  • presently developing nuclear weapons, which it will use for that extermination, and which it will pass to other terrorists so they can attack US allies in Europe and attack us directly in our homeland.

Northern Korea:

  • frequently attacks with artillery, and at sea, an ally of the US, the Republic of Korea.
  • transfers nuclear weapons technology to nations inimical to the US, including Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

Even Pakistan, a alleged US ally, actively transfers nuclear weapons technology to nations inimical to us, including the same Syria and Iran.

I’ll address the policy principles and force structure that must guide these capabilities in subsequent posts.  Our responses won’t necessarily be to shoot back, or to respond in kind (though these options will plainly be present); they do need to be directed to the purpose, and be capable, of promptly defeating the inimical acts.

Deterrence

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Deterrence is one means of influencing another nation’s behavior.  It is, by its nature a passive activity, relying as it does on persuading another nation not to do something by threatening a response so powerful that any gain from the undesired behavior is overwhelmed by the loss from the threatened response.  One nation might deter another from initiating a nuclear attack, for instance, by threatening a nuclear response of devastating effect.

But deterrence, to be successful, relies on a number of factors, only some of which are under the control of the deterring nation.  One of those factors is actually having the ability to deliver the threatened response and the ability to defeat the other nation’s initiating action.  This is generally within the control of the deterring nation.  Either the United States, for instance, has the ability to deliver a devastating response and to defeat sufficiently the initial action, or we do not, and within limits, only we make the determination acquire/maintain those abilities.  Another factor in deterrence is the will to use that strength, should the nation we’re trying to deter act anyway.  This is a shared factor, though, depending not just on our actual will, but on the other nation’s perception of our will.  We can manage that perception only by acting meaningfully and decisively with lesser consequences in response to lesser actions.  If we do not deliver those lesser consequences, the nation we wish to deter will have no reason to believe we’ll respond with our described deterrence actions.  A third factor on which deterrence depends is the clarity of our position.  The consequences of the other nation’s action must be well understood by that nation.  This also is a shared factor: communication is a two-way street, and we must ensure that the other nation does get the message.  A fourth factor in deterrence is the other nation’s tolerance for the damage we’ll inflict should they strike and we respond as our deterrence position says we will.  The moment the other nation decides the cost is worth the gain, our deterrence ceases to exist, and we must adjust our deterrence—and defensive—posture.  And we must recognize the other nation’s tolerance for pain in order to make the adjustments.  This factor, other than our understanding, is entirely under the control of that other nation.

With these thoughts in mind, let’s look at our ability to deter today.

We say we do not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, going so far as insisting that such a thing is unacceptable.  How have we gone about pursuing that goal?  This administration began by extending an open hand to Iran, if only they would unclench their fist: we would negotiate with them, offer them incentives, including help with enriching uranium to the level that an Iranian nuclear power plant needs in order to function effectively.  In truth, the negotiation attempts did not originate with the Obama administration; prior administrations had been pursuing this path all along.  When it became clear that the open hand, the negotiations, were failing, then this administration began a parallel course of threatening ever stronger sanctions, and repeated attempts to apply them.

Indeed, President Obama insists that “this administration has systemically imposed the toughest sanctions on…Iran ever.  When we came into office, the world was divided.  Iran was unified and moving aggressively on its own agenda. Today, Iran is isolated and the world is unified in applying the toughest sanctions that Iran has ever experienced and it’s having an impact inside Iran.”

The Iranian response, though, has been continued effort, and progress, toward nuclear weapons acquisition.  The “toughest sanctions” were ineffective, and part of their ineffectiveness was the active interference with global sanctions by Russia and the People’s Republic of China.  Indeed, Iran has taken to openly attacking diplomatic missions in Teheran, and they’re dispersing their medium range missile systems, making them harder to target should Iran take overt military action.

Our deterrence effort vis-à-vis Iran has failed on a number of fronts.  We did not demonstrate any particular will to apply serious consequences at any stage of our interactions with Iran.  We have not demonstrated even the capability to apply serious consequences.  Even our message is muddled: we’ve never really spelled out the consequences of their continued efforts or of their actually getting nuclear weapons: we’ve only made fatuous remarks about sanctions and vague threats of “no option is off the table.”  Finally, Iran has determined that it’s willing to bear the costs we might inflict.

With Russia, it’s a slightly different story.  The question here is who is actually deterring whom.  The Russians object to our having a missile shield to protect against Iranian missiles (against northern Korea’s missiles, too, but Russia’s public objections have centered on a defensive deployment in Europe).  Shortly after President Obama took office, Russian objections became quite vociferous as we concluded agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic to install components of the shield in each nation.  The Russians said that if we persisted, they would move nuclear weapons into western Russia from where they could strike Europe.  They also made direct threats to destroy Poland with nuclear strikes.  We canceled those agreements and agreed not to deploy a missile shield there.  (As an aside, keep in mind that this missile shield would have been part of that larger deterrence against Iranian use of their nuclear weapons—an ability to defeat a strike by them.

Now The Weekly Standard reports that

The Obama administration is…undertak[ing] what amounts to an off-schedule Nuclear Posture Review—one that ices out Defense and State Department experts usually consulted on nuclear issues.  It is also beginning a new round of talks with Moscow here in Washington next week that many observers believe will result in the United States offering to trade U.S. strategic weapons in exchange for reductions in Russian tactical weapons.

Further,

[T]he Obama administration is looking to make unilateral cuts….  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has suggested that to save money the administration might have to eliminate America’s land-based 450 single-warhead Minuteman III ICBMs (though ICBM sustainment is but a rounding error in the DoD budget)….”

It may be that Panetta’s threats are mere polemics in an attempt to protect the Defense budget from the cuts mandated by the Super Committee’s failure.  However, against the backdrop of Russia’s just concluded success at deterring us from deploying a defensive system—the flip side of which is our appeasement of them (which itself comes against the backdrop of our acquiescence in the Russian partition of an American ally, Georgia), it’s reasonable to ask whether we’re being further deterred, this time from having sufficient offensive weapons with which to respond to an attack against which we no longer can defend ourselves.  Understand: whether we’re conning the Russians (or conning ourselves) into accepting the decommissioning of supposedly obsolete ICBMs in return for their decommissioning of (obsolete) tactical missile systems or we’re being deterred from maintaining an offensive leg of our triad makes no difference.  We’ll lose a major fraction of our offensive capability.  Further, the tactical systems will be faster and cheaper to replace in the event of a breakout and arms race than will be the strategic systems.  And they will be more immediately decisive in a fight, especially one in which we have no defenses.

With no missile defense capability and with such reductions in our offensive capability, where is our ability to satisfy either the first factor in deterrence: the capability to respond?  And with the reduced capability to respond at all, the pain threshold is much harder to cross, also, giving Russia much less pause as they consider an offensive move.  Russia seems to be moving our behavior in directions satisfactory to it, however.

It’s different yet with the PRC, but not optimistically so.  We have a legal obligation to keep the Republic of China well enough armed with modern weapons that they can defeat an attack by the PRC.  Yet when we began the latest round of talks with Taiwan, the PRC objected so vociferously that we walked away from an initial sale of 66 modern F-16s, and agreed only to sell our ally a couple dozen of outmoded F-16s.

Further, the PRC is increasingly aggressive in the South China Sea, threatening American allies (vis., the Philippines) and potential allies (vis., Vietnam) and seizing key islands—including those that belong to the Philippines and Vietnam—and claiming them for itself.  The American response to this has been…silence.

Finally, DoD is on record as saying that the PRC is developing their own road-mobile ICBM (a capability which the Soviet Union had developed in the early days of mobile ICBMs), and they’ve dug a 3,000 mile tunnel system in which to hide their ICBM force.  They’ve also dismissed out of hand an offer of a joint weapons verification facility proposed by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Here, it’s clear that the PRC does not consider that we have the will to act, and so any ability to act does not concern them.  Nor have we said anything at all about consequences for their continued aggressiveness.  Finally, as they demonstrated with their human wave attacks in the Korean War, they’re perfectly willing, literally, simply to throw bodies into a fight until we run out of ammunition.  The degree of damage they’re willing to absorb is quite high.

So here we are with our deterrent capability.  Iran is about to acquire nuclear bombs, and it already has the missile systems with which to deliver them.

Russia has convinced us not to deploy a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.  Russia threatens our allies and any new, potential defensive systems we might deploy with nuclear attack, and it does so with impunity.  Indeed, the imbalance has reached the point where we can’t even determine for ourselves whether we will acquire/maintain the strength necessary for us to deter Russia.  We’re negotiating our arms levels with them.

The PRC threatens our allies and potential allies over sea resources and key islands in South China Sea and over our erstwhile willingness to provide the Republic of China the resources with which to resist a PRC invasion.

Given all of this, what happens when Iran gets its nuclear weapons?  Which of us will be deterred then?  From what else will we be deterred by Russia and the PRC?  What will we deter these three from doing?

Finally, a closely related aside on the question of appeasement: President Obama insists “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaida leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.  Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.”

Let’s also ask Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and Kim Jong-il, how American strength and steadfastness is working out.  Oh, and congratulations to President Obama on his success in carrying out President Bush the Younger’s drone and bin Laden policies.

US and Russia: Relations Re-reset

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Spiegel Online International‘s Matthias Schepp provides an interesting view of US-Russian relations, via his quasi-interview with the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin.  The nominal topic was the US missile defense shield that President Obama keeps chattering about installing in New Europe against rogue states like Iran.  But there’s far more in the subtext.

Ambassador Rogozin asks the question, “If space aliens were to completely disarm Iran, would Washington continue with its plans to build a missile defense system in Poland?”  Of course, this is a cynically disingenuous question: given the Russian obstruction to any sort of effort to prevent the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons—which obstruction they have claimed to be based purely on Russian economic self-interest—they’d only attempt to interfere with their space aliens, also.

Instead, Russia demands that we not install a missile defense capability; it demands a written guarantee that our overall military capability will not increase to the point that Russia won’t have a chance against us, even with nuclear weapons; and it demands that our missiles be unable to reach Russian territory.

Rogozin objects in all seriousness that, “For America, it is all about making itself impregnable.”

Here’s the backdrop to the present Russian demands.  President Bush the Elder was at pains to avoid anything that might embarrass surviving Russia in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he took great care for Russian sensibilities, including delaying contacts with, and aid to, the ‘Stans that had just been freed from Soviet Union dominance.  We supported Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization.  We extended economic aid, and economic policy advice and assistance—at its request—to Russia.  The Obama administration has appeased Russia concerning their domestic human rights abuses.  The Obama administration even has accepted Russia’s Anschluss-like occupation and partition of Georgia.

But it’s unacceptable to the Russians that we should want to ensure our survival in a hostile world.  In essence, the Russians want to continue to be assured that they can destroy us at will.

In support of their demands, the Russians have threatened Poland with nuclear immolation if that ally goes ahead with a proposed deployment of an arm of our missile defense shield, they threaten to target our missile defense capability with nuclear weapons, they threaten Europe with nuclear targeting, and they threaten to withdraw from the just-negotiated START treaty.

Russia both actively supports Iranian nuclear weapons development and actively obstructs our efforts to derail that development.

Russia even threatens a new arms race if we persist in being rude enough to wish to protect ourselves.  This, though, contradicts that claimed Russian economic self-interest—it’s a race we can win as decisively on economic, technological, and military grounds as we won the last, which economic competition destroyed the Soviet Union.  The Russians know this.

No, the motive behind their support for Iranian nuclear arming and their insistence that we take no measures to protect ourselves and our allies is nothing more than their continued, naked enmity toward us.

Censeo Carthagem esse delendam, was Scipio the Elder’s constant refrain.  The Russians actively support a nuclear-weaponed Iran.  The Russians actively demand that we be unable to defend ourselves against missile attack or to respond to one.

Hmm….

America’s Future

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This isn’t as apocalyptic as it might sound; on the contrary, this is the first in an occasional series I’ll be writing on our foreign and defense policies, with the latter being approached both in its own right and as an arm of our foreign policy.

In this post, I intend to outline what I believe is the environment for these policies as we move through the 21st century.  Another post will address the framework of our foreign and defense policies, and future posts will look at necessary structures for each, actions for and by each, and how events of the day might be handled by the new policy(s).

The present and future periods seem sufficiently different from the period ending in the mid-20th century that such a rethinking and reformulation, central as foreign and defense matters are to our existence as a nation, seems in order.  Many of the seeds of these differences, certainly, were sewn in the latter half of the 20th century, a period dominated by the Cold War and by the ready view of combat in progress in the Vietnam War, which was carried out within that Cold War.

This Cold War period was characterized by political maneuvers that would have made Metternich blush, and by military confrontations that seemed on the surface to threaten the century’s third total war, but that were, in fact, proxy confrontations wherein both sides used small surrogates to do the fighting.  Here was a use of foreign policy as a means of outright conflict, and this use represented the beginnings of a diffusion of physical conflict across a more amorphous set of actors than had been the formally structured nation-states that had dominated war for the preceding two or more centuries.

The environment within which international interactions are carried out has changed radically, including through large extensions from those earlier beginnings.  We operate in the 21st century in a media age where the events of the day, wherever on the planet they may occur, become available for viewing, commenting, prognosticating in near real time anywhere else on the planet.  We can see the results of an earthquake near Indonesia, or of an earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or of a failure to pay an international oil bill in the Ukraine, within hours, if not minutes, of their occurrence on our televisions, on our telephones, via the Internet, through nearly any visual and/or audio medium modern technology can provide a consumer.

We operate in the 21st century in a communications age that brings news of the event, or conversations with our friends and neighbors and strangers, to us nearly instantaneously via dinky little cell phones, that same Internet, video and still cameras—portable enough to be standard equipment in those cell phones—and bring us that news and those conversations from wherever our friends and neighbors might be, including half a planet away, and wherever we might be.

And we live in a 21st century where the major actors are not limited to formal nation-states.  These actors include international corporations with operating budgets larger than many of those nation-states.  These actors include less formally or classically organized entities which do great ill—terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda.  These entities also often have budgets larger than some nation-states, and they have military establishments that are the envy of many nation-states.  It is the threat from these, the terror organizations, of which al-Qaeda is only the most well-known, that must inform our policy formation, for the point of foreign and defense policy is the survival of the nation.

To be sure, the prosperity of the nation also is a major purpose of foreign policy, but without survival, there is nothing.

In this new set of conditions, the old, formal arrangements are not optimal.  NATO has lost its designed foes—both the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact no longer exist—and it has gained no other purpose; although this defensive alliance has been used, clumsily, to project political and military power offensively.  The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have descended into piggy banks for the profligate.  And so on.

Cropping up is an ad hoc arrangement of free trade areas, each of whose individual purpose seems as much to be to compete politically with other areas, both free trade and not, as to provide mutual economic benefit to the particular members.

We have a fractious, nonhomogeneous Europe trying to force itself, Procrustean-like, into a single coherent whole, of several layers: a Union of European nations loosely subordinating a poorly understood level of national sovereignty to a European “government;” a subset of that attempting to bind economies that operate from radically different moral and political imperatives to a single common currency; and a growing division among Mediterranean Europe, northern Europe, and eastern Europe.

We have a Russian Federation, perhaps in a demographically-driven last hurrah, that is attempting to reform the earlier Soviet empire, this time with a different arrangement of how Russia will rule from its geographically broad and vulnerable center.

We have a People’s Republic of China that perceives a political vacuum developing in Asia and the Pacific and so is rapidly expanding its military capabilities, and sopping up resources like oil and iron, in an attempt to fill that vacuum.

And we have a world that, on the one hand, demands that we spend our treasure and our blood in attempting a semblance of peace in the Balkans when Europe effectively refuses their moral duty in their back yard, and on the other hand that vilifies us for supporting an ally against threats to its very existence.  We have a world that lectures us on our proper economic or moral comportment.  The list goes on.

Accordingly, our policy principles must be informed by the following necessary underlying mindset.  Following George Washington’s advice, in spirit if not literally, we must be chary of entering into formal alliances too quickly.  In this light, we must review our existing alliances for their suitability to our national interests.  Further, we must make plain that our friends know who they are and that they have nothing to fear.  We will stand with them steadfastly through all of their—and our—trials.  We must also make plain that our enemies know who they are and that they have everything to fear; their existence is at risk.  They have complete control, though, over their status as our enemy.  Finally, we must make plain that those who sit on the sidelines and “comment” on American actions here or there, or in this or that milieu, are demonstrating their level of integrity and courage by standing on the sidelines.  Their words are unimportant, and we do not hear them.

We must also recover our recognition that the United States is an exceptional nation and our understanding that our 18th century liberal/modern conservative values of individual responsibility, individual liberty, entrepreneurship are what made us great.  Other nations, other peoples will benefit from these values, also, regardless of the form these might take when tailored to the specific polity involved.  Thus, it not only is in our interest to talk about these values in all areas of the world, it is in those areas’ interest to hear them.  And a more prosperous, freer world is in both our interests.

Within that, it is in our interest, also, simply to provide aid to nations and peoples that need help.  We need no consensus, we need no permission of consensus, to do this, our duty.  Americans are the most generous people on Earth, and that innate generosity works to our, as well as the recipients’, advantage.  For example, after the 2004 tsunami struck Indonesia and killed 185,000 around the Indian Ocean, American aid, delivered by our Navy’s hospital ships, with our Navy’s aircraft carriers providing critical helicopter transportation and supply in support of relief efforts, Indonesian economic and physical recovery were both made possible and accelerated.  And the Indonesian people altered their opinion of us—in the middle of our war against terrorism that, by its nature, mainly involves groups claiming to be Muslim.  Beyond that, our aid cut the Indonesians’ favorable opinion of Osama bin Laden by 60%.  Similarly, our aid to Pakistan after a 2005 earthquake in Kashmir had killed 80,000 helped Pakistan recover far more rapidly than would have been possible otherwise, and it altered the Pakistanis’ opinion of us almost as radically.  And today there is a measure of peace, if not necessarily of complete justice, in the Balkans because we acted.

In subsequent posts, I’ll expand on the impact these issues should have on our foreign and defense policies.