By a vote of 100-0, the Senate last week passed its most stringent Iran sanctions bill to date. The vote was on an amendment by Senators Robert Menendez (D, NJ) and Mark Kirk (R, IL), and it would:

• Prohibit [maintenance of] accounts on foreign financial institutions engaged in non-petroleum-related transactions with the Central Bank of Iran after 60 days;
• Impose sanctions on foreign financial institutions, including central banks, engaged in petroleum-related transactions with the Central Bank of Iran after 180 days…
• Provide a humanitarian exception for food, medicine and medical devices; and
• Provide the president with an unclassified (with classified annex, if necessary) national security waiver authority every 120 days.

The administration opposed it.  Their beef this time is that it might raise the price of oil.  It might antagonize nations that do business with Iran and support the acquisition by Iran of nuclear weapons.

The Obama administration has opposed anything firmer  than very stern finger-shaking where Iran is concerned for the last three years, preferring instead “engagement” and chit-chat, which the Iranian regime has alternately rebuffed or ignored.

With the Obama administration so determined to appease a non-nuclear Iran, to what will it stoop after Iran obtains nuclear weapons?

In this companion post to Part IV of my foreign policy principles, I offer some means (far from exhaustive) of recognizing friend, ally, enemy, and foe.  The ideas I describe may seem obviously simplistic; however, in light of the incoherence of the present administration’s foreign policy—and that of prior administrations post-Reagan—it seems that an enumeration is useful.

In general, in any dispute there will be those who are “with us” and those who are “against us”—and some will always try to sit out the affair.  Of those who are “with us”, we need to know who is a friend, and who is an ally. An initial filter might seem to be a shared core set of beliefs.  This characteristic is highly useful, but I suggest that it’s only a secondary filter whose value is greatest when used to assess the potential durability of a relationship and thus to help discriminate a friend from an ally; it cannot, though, define either.

What are the essential differences between a friend and an ally?  The distinction lies in motive and purpose of the relationship.  An ally is with us against a common foe, for so long as the joint opposition suits our individual purposes—the allies of WWII, for instance.  Similarly, an ally is with us to achieve a common purpose for so long as the coordinated effort in the achieving suits us both—the building and manning of a space station, for instance.  For a friend, these short-term common ends are irrelevant; indeed, we might not work together on very many endeavors at all.  We simply associate with each other freely and easily.  Our bond is deeper, and far less a matter of convenience.

How might we recognize a friend?  A friend is a nation that moves to stand with us, that sends its assistance unasked in our moment of need, or that moves to stand with us in a conflict that has been thrust on us by another.  Our common efforts—military, political, diplomatic, economic, etc.—are joint endeavors, not merely coordinated actions of allies.  An example of a friend might be England and Poland, who stood with us in Iraq and Afghanistan despite their own misgivings about those wars or their duration.  An example might be the United States, who at Japan’s request, sent an envoy to northern Korea to support Japanese efforts to recover their citizens, stolen by the northern Koreans in the ’70s and ’80s, despite the harm sending an American envoy did to our efforts to prevent this entity from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is not to say that a friend always takes our side uncritically, although one might on occasion.  Having criticisms and standing with us despite them is the mark of an even stronger friendship.  Their doing so with criticism, though, puts a premium on us: it creates in us a moral obligation beyond our simple duty to reciprocate in their hour.  We owe a friend thoughtful consideration of their criticisms; even more than that, we owe either a change in our own behavior where their criticism is legitimate, or a clear and unequivocal answer where we disagree with the criticism.

And that’s it.  It’s a short list containing a single way to tell a friend, especially compared to the much longer list of ways by which to recognize an enemy or a foe.  But that’s as it should be.  Our friends are “high, bright, and clear,” while our enemies and foes lurk in the shadows.

How do we recognize an ally?  Some recognition keys include offers, or accepting our offers, to work toward a common goal, whether this be sharing costs in a resource development project, or sharing financial data concerning a third nation of common interest.  Recognition keys also include offers, or accepting offers, to jointly oppose a third nation or non-national entity interfering with matters of mutual interests.  Nations working together to reduce piracy off the Horn of Africa are allies, for instance, as well as those nations of WWII mentioned above.  Recognition keys further include willingness to permit over-flight, transit transportation, staging, and so on in their territory to facilitate our prosecution of a conflict or other endeavor.  Granting basing rights to facilitate supply delivery to a combat zone is an example of an act of an ally.

While understanding who is our friend and who is an ally is important, it’s arguably even more important to recognize those who are “against us,” including distinguishing between our enemies and our foes.

An enemy is actively attacking us or planning to do so.  The difficulty here sometimes lies in recognizing the attack.  It isn’t always as open as a Schleiffen Plan’s storming across a border or an Operation AI’s aerial bombing attack on a naval base.  In the 21^st century, there are many more ways of executing an attack and of prosecuting the subsequent war than merely shooting at us.  It might not even be a formal nation-state conducting the attack; rather the entity might be a non-national organization of terrorists.  Attacks might consist of cyber-attacks that impede or destroy nationally critical networks or that plant malware to be used for this at a different time.  Attacks might consist of economic embargos.  Indeed, the war may be purely one-sided, ranging from the asymmetrical warfare perpetrated by non-national terrorist organizations to a war where only one side is actually fighting because the victim of the war isn’t even aware of it: those cyber-attacks, for instance.

On the other hand, our enemy may “merely” be carrying out a collection of acts, short of legally defined war, that are designed to harm our friends and allies or us to the point of tightly circumscribing freedom of action or even to the point of subjugation.

In particular, we cannot accurately estimate other nations’ relationships to us or their intent by actively offering excuses for their behavior (vis., the Chinese want sea bottom resources, and this justifies aggressively seeking control of the South China Sea, at the expense of that area’s other bordering nations: the Republic of the Philippines, The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Republic of China).  On the contrary, such actions must be assessed, and their underlying motives must be estimated, by their effect on our friends and allies and on us.  And we must understand that the other nation’s imperatives and motives may be nothing like ours.  It is legitimate, despite this though, to assume that the other nation’s leadership, in taking those actions, are neither stupid nor ignorant; they understand fully the impact—and so the implications—of their actions on our friends and allies and on us.  In essence, then, a nation’s publicly-stated intent is largely irrelevant; we must read their actions and assess their motives in light of those impacts.

How do we recognize an enemy, then?  Only by recognizing the shadowy keys of inimical behavior.  To repeat, understanding the other nation’s or non-national organization’s imperatives, so that we can (better, if still imperfectly) understand its motives, is critical, as is the fact that we must work from the premise that the leadership in question is highly intelligent and highly motivated: they know what they are doing, and they know the effect of their actions on us. We can infer their goals from their actions’ predictable effects.

What are our recognition keys?  Acts of enmity include these (a non-exhaustive list) in addition to classic military attacks:

• deliberately restricting our access to critical resources—oil, for instance, or rare earth metals—for the purpose of damaging us.
• actively moving to seize control of international waters whose free navigation and/or freedom of access to undersea resources are important to us or to our friends or allies.
• harassing our ships in international waters or our aircraft in international airspace.
• shipping, as part of ordinary trade, poisoned products: formaldehyde-laced gypsum board, or toxic baby food, for instance.
• manipulating their currency value so as to damage our economy.
• attacking our computing and/or communications networks, or our computer-controlled infrastructure, with cyberware capable of damaging/destroying those targets, or planting malware that will be used “later” for that purpose.
• providing aid to terrorist organizations plotting, or which have carried out, attacks on us or our friends or allies.
• moving to facilitate the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by other nations or non-national organizations that are hostile to us and/or our friends or allies.
• actively arming those who intend to use those weapons against us or our friends or allies.
• directly threatening our allies with nuclear attack if we don’t comply with the threatening nation’s wishes.
• deploying nuclear weapons so as to carry out those threats.

As the number actions from this such a list which a nation or non-national organization carries out goes up, so does the clarity of that nation’s enmity toward us increase.

There is one more class of nation or non-national organization to be identified, and that is what I’ll call a foe.  In this usage, I consider a foe to be an ally of our enemy, loosely analogously to an ally of us.  A foe works deliberately against the interests of our friend or ally or of us as a common goal with another nation, but only for so long as that commonality of purpose exists.  As with identifying an enemy, the recognition keys are shadowy and unclear by themselves.  That list, though, is the same as the keys to identifying an enemy, with the single difference of motive.  This difference is that the foe, of its own volition, is following another nation’s lead in the actions; it is not acting as the primary decision-maker.  (As an aside, a nation or non-national organization forced into the role of foe, but which would not act inimically were it left to its own choices, represents a point of fracture within the enemy’s structure.  This, though, is the subject of a different thread.)

There are two items which I have deliberately elided in order to maintain a certain clarity, and these are the overlaps possible between the actions of an enemy or foe and the actions of an aggressive competitor, even the (less common) overlap with the actions of a friend or ally.  This overlap is a major factor in the need to understand the nation in question and its motives.

The other item is the nation that is neither friend or ally nor enemy or foe, mentioned briefly above.  Such spectators are neutral in some sense, and by holding themselves on the sidelines, tend to render themselves irrelevant to the essentials of the struggles of the active players.

I have posted here (which has links to my other posts on this subject) on other aspects of our necessary future foreign policy.  In this post, I want to talk about principles of policy application given an understanding of who  our friends, our allies, our enemies, and our foes are; in a closely related post, I talk briefly about how to recognize our friends, allies, enemies, and foes.

As I have written before, the mindset within which our policy decisions are made must be that of American leadership in the 21^st century.  We are not just one among many nations; our national security requires that we maintain that leadership.  While being the leader brings its own constraints to our freedom of action, we can choose not to accept those constraints when our security requires.  Being led (and we either lead or be led; there is no middle ground) has constraints on our freedom of action that are far more binding.  Nor is it hubris to suggest that the national security of our friends requires that leadership, as well, if only because they are not strong enough in their own right: our own security demands the security of our friends.

Accordingly, our foreign policy decisions must be founded on what is best for the United States, and our responses to other nations’ words and behaviors must be made within that framework.  Reading and understanding those behaviors, though, demand coldly objective and highly skilled foreign policy personnel in the State Department.  It is necessary to be able to discriminate between legitimately competitive behavior and behavior that is (directly or indirectly) inimical to our national interests, and our policy personnel must be equal to that task.

Within the framework, then, of understanding the relationships the various nations and non-national organizations have with us for the time, what should we do?

How should we shape our foreign policy?

In what follows, I will limit myself to relationships involving our enemies and foes.  To be sure, interacting with our friends and allies also is important, and especially with them it’s too easy to act on auto-pilot, taking them for granted.  But they are not threats to us, and so I will leave that topic for another post.

In responding to, and in following up on, an action or a collection of actions, we must follow a clear, predefined sequence of steps (although both the steps and their sequence must themselves be flexible enough to handle disparate situations—no two sets of encounters can be identical).  Again, the purpose of diplomacy is to resolve differences, even with those who oppose us, through peaceful means and to influence others through peaceful activities.  It is the purpose of the State Department to lead in these endeavors, and our national foreign policy is the tool set through which these endeavors are attempted.

Our necessary first step in any interaction with an opponent (whether a nation or non-national organization) is to obtain in our own minds a clear understanding of the consequences for us and for others (most especially our friends and allies) of the opposing entity’s activities.  This must be followed by obtaining in our own minds a clear understanding of what might be termed the victory conditions: the outcomes we must have for the sake of our (for the rest of this post, I’ll subsume our friends and allies into “our”) national security and our continued freedom of action on the planet.  (It’s important to note that this step is highly important to our domestic policy set, also.)

Another step (not of necessity a second step; time constraints may not permit this order in every instance) is to engage with the entity(s) (from here on, I’ll subsume nation and non-national organization into such collective terms) diplomatically.  This is useful for a couple of reasons.  First, it might actually work: with a clear explanation of the consequences to us of the offending entity’s actions, we will demonstrate both that we know and that we know they know those consequences.   Following this with a clear explanation of the consequences to them of their continuing their actions may persuade them to desist.  This step is unlikely to succeed, however; we must assume the leadership of the entity in question is highly intelligent and highly motivated, they know what they are doing and the effect of their actions on us, and they’re doing those things, anyway.  But the second reason for attempting this first, where possible, is frankly political: if we can go to other nations that have a stake in the dispute having already attempted diplomatic solutions, we will be more likely to succeed in taking the next step in the sequence.

This next step is to attempt to form a coalition of nations for the purpose of attaining a political encirclement and constraint (note that constraint is the goal; encirclement is only a tool for achieving the goal) of the entity(s) in question.  The encirclement need not be geographical to achieve constraint; political and/or economic encirclement will constrain, as well.  Further, this constraint must be real: it cannot leave loopholes; likewise, attempts to evade the constraints must themselves have clear consequences that are plainly more costly than any gains from the evasion.  Failure to meet this condition is the reason most internationally applied sanctions fail: they are insufficient to constrain and/or they are too easily evaded.

Key to either of these two steps is our own credibility.  If our efforts are perceived as just talk—what China often refers to as being a paper tiger—then our efforts are still-born.  This, for instance, is why northern Korea has nuclear weapons and Iran is about to achieve them.  When the Bush administration found northern Korea in violation of the terms of the Agreed Framework in 2002, it notified the Congress of that fact, which by law triggered some mandatory responses, including the cessation of all aid to northern Korea.  But, symptomatic of our own lack of seriousness, there was much debate within the administration over whether we should even take the formal action of notifying Congress.  Yet there could be no debate over the existence of the violation: this was a matter that could be verified or falsified on the basis of hard fact.  The very existence of the debate over whether to report the violation is the proof of our own lack of resolution.  Further, when the administration did report the fact of the violation, it asked for an exemption for $95 million in aid to be continued.  Of course, regardless of intent, northern Korea responded logically: they read the waffling and the exception as our own lack of determination. Our diplomacy was just idle chit-chat, they went about their purpose, and today they have nuclear weapons.

So it is with Iran.  Despite the failure of the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to deal with Iran diplomatically to dissuade them from attempting to obtain nuclear weapons, the present administration has simply done more of the same.  Certainly, the Obama administration has obtained “sanctions” against Iran, but with Russia and China actively opposing more than lip service sanctions, and with Germany and Japan actively trading with Iran for oil, the sanctions, and the ever-increasingly sterner talk from us, has been correctly understood by the Iranians as just idle chit-chat, and of no consequence.

But we cannot necessarily wait on the remonstrations or on the constraints from encirclement (for instance) to take effect, even were those potentially effective.  Excessive delays in favor of getting an international response coordinated first are foolish—at best they allow the damage to us to grow and constraints on our own freedom of action to increase, and dangerously so.  When it becomes clear that those steps are not working, or results are not occurring quickly enough (and we must make this decision quickly, without dithering), then we must act unilaterally.  There comes a time when State must accept that their diplomatic efforts are not working, and the reasons for the failure—whether State missed the boat, or the diplomatic process cannot work in the present circumstances, or our enemy simply is unresponsive to diplomacy—are irrelevant.

It’s also important to understand that we can take unilateral actions (and often we must take these actions) while our other diplomatic efforts are in progress without interfering with those efforts.  What unilateral actions can we take?  There are several; I suggest these by way of illustration.  (Military actions I’ll leave to later posts.)

Unilateral actions include the relatively benign, such as our military shipping, on being harassed, ignoring the harassment, and continuing on its way, including being rammed—collided with—as a result of the other nation’s shipping losing its intimidation game of chicken.  Unilateral actions include applying tariffs to targeted—or all—trade goods from the offending entity.  They include embargoing those goods.  They include freezing the offending entity’s bank accounts, up to and including refusing to deal with that nation’s central banking facility or its financial network entirely.  To be sure, such economic sanctions will harm agents of our own economy, but that harm is already occurring at an unacceptable level—it’s why we’re responding in the first place.  Economic sanctions will be leaky, absent participation by an encircling coalition, but this is no reason to leave the offending entity entirely unscathed.

But more important than these application principles, are the principles of pushing the pace and of maintaining the engagement until our goals are realized.  There can be no “graduated responses,” no “nuanced ‘dialog’ or series of actions and reactions.”  We learned—and we must remember—the lesson in this regard from our Viet Nam war: gradually escalating does not dissuade the enemy; it only allows him to adjust and to act with greater effect.   Our actions in response to the offending behaviors must inflict greater cost than the enemy is gaining from his actions to which we’re objecting, and the application of our responses must be faster than the offending entity can respond, they must be inside his decision cycle.  Further, we may not necessarily know his tolerance for pain; it behooves us to over-punish rather than risk our opponent believing we’re weaker and not interested in a real fight.  Doing this lets us seize the initiative from the offending entity, and it enables us to hold the initiative.

Additionally, we must not disengage until our goals have been satisfied.  In concert with keeping up the pace, we must keep applying ever-increasing pressure until then.  To paraphrase a fundamental principle of the self defense system of Krav Maga, “Finish him!”  Disengagement before true completion is not materially different from graduated responses: it gives that offending entity space in which to regain his balance, to regroup, and to come at us again, with better organization and stronger effect.  And even more emotional commitment to damage or destroy us in response to our damage to him.

If the principles outlined in this post seem martial, they are not very.  It’s important to keep in mind that military and diplomatic actions are not mutually exclusive: as Clausewitz understood 180 years ago, they are two areas of a continuum.  Finally, the principles I’ve outlined are not new;  they represent no breakthrough in diplomatic technique.  The real keys, here, are that accelerated pace (especially compared to traditional diplomacy) coupled with a continuing pressured engagement.  These are paramount; they are the keys to driving the situation to resolution in accordance with our goals and not those of our enemy.  Success here will make future attempts less likely.  On the other hand, accepting the others’ actions without consequence to them only makes our failure, and future challenges, more likely as we’ve already seen with northern Korea and Iran and with an increasingly belligerent China.