True enough – but you should think very, very carefully about what can and should be done.

REACHING FOR DEFAULT - slowly

I fear that the western powers are slowly reaching out to press the default button. In this sort of case, that means help the victims, use a bit of force to hold the bad people in check, and find a winner to back. 

It’s a sort of slow motion shooting from the hip. It’s almost instinctive but it’s also hesitant.

In part, that’s because of the fear of repeating Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iraq the first time round. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that anybody who again proposes sending large US ground forces into action in Asia or the Middle East needs to have their head examined (he said it to US Army cadets too, which makes it official).

Of course, enforcing a no-fly zone does not entail a large ground force intervention but there is something called a slippery slope and we’ve been on it before. For a decade before US forces finally invaded Iraq in 2003, there was a no-fly zone over both southern and northern Iraq. Both zones were initially imposed to protect the people from the viciousness of Saddam Hussein’s response to popular uprising.

It is extraordinary and unsettling how much precedent there is.

Western leaders may have to make ringing endorsements about where things are headed in Afghanistan but everybody knows that western policy is not in a confident place right now.

drive-by Intervention?

Fear of large scale intervention combined with the urge to do something, even without clarity about exactly what, raises the possibility of drive-by intervention, as a participant in a conference I was at last week neatly called it. And one of the things that the term so neatly captures with its mockingly flip tone is that the idea of painless intervention is a myth.

To enforce a no-fly zone you need air power, satellites and look-down radar. You will get into combat and it is likely some of that will be over Libyan soil. Which leads to the all too likely prospect of at least one shoot-down by Libyan air defence, which in turn means captured air crew displayed for the media.

With that, following the playbook Saddam Hussein wrote up, Qaddafi can simultaneously pull out a few emotional stops at the expense of the intervening powers and show the Arab ‘street’ that he is an authentic national leader resisting yet another round of foreign intervention in Arab affairs.

Alternatively, of course, in the effort to avoid that, imposing a no-fly zone would mean destroying Libyan air defences including radar with relatively widespread attacks, risking unintended damage and casualties among Libyans.

The Myagi principle

It is hardly surprising that, faced by Qaddafi’s air power, the Libyan opposition has come out in favour of the no-fly zone. But it is extremely unlikely that what they want is a drive-by intervention. If no-fly doesn’t work, they are almost certainly hoping the West will take another step down the intervention slope.

But there’s a problem. Can the West’s commitment be relied on?

I hope I will not be thought flippant if I express my point by reference to Mr Myagi, the mentor in the film Karate Kid. For one big lesson in the brief history of what has come to be called (and sometimes derided as) ‘humanitarian intervention’ is the lesson of life that Mr Myagi teaches his pupil, Daniel.

Paraphrased, what Mr Myagi says is, Do karate or don’t do it, but don’t half do it.

So with intervention, do it or don’t do it, but above all don’t pretend there is a cheap and easy version. Because all too often, intervention light is either the top of the slippery slope or an ineffective gesture that serves only to worsen the autocrat’s eventual vengeance. If you are going to do it, be prepared to go the whole way.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, in the light of what Defense Secretary Gates has said, knowing what we know about political realities and uncertainties in the US and Europe, just how likely is it that the West will respect the Myagi principle? 

Arguments for and against

So what are the main arguments for and against forceful intervention in Libya?

For, I think there are three basic ones:

• Humanitarian: to care for the victims of the current fighting, and in longer perspective to end the suffering of Libyans under the dictator.
• Democratic: to support Libyans who want to make a better life for themselves.
• Power: to re-stabilise the global oil economy, get a western-leaning leader installed, and make a generally impressive display of western power.

In political discourse, these motives get served up in various blends, sometimes with one being used to mask another, but all are present.

Against, I see five basic ones:

• Risk aversion: seeing a no-fly zone as the first step towards a large scale intervention, with human and economic costs that are much too high, and which the risk averse think may well fail anyway.
• Lack of capacity: because it seems we don’t know how to do it; even a small mission with a couple of helicopters goes wrong and ends up with British Special Forces arrested by farm guards in the middle of the night.
• Moral objection to the use of force, even in a good cause: too much can go wrong and too much harm can be done.
• Passivity on the basis that the affairs of other countries are no business of ours in any case; let them get on with it.
• Sovereignty: Libya is a sovereign state and whatever we do must be constrained by that simple if often inconvenient fact.

Again, these objections can be served up in different mixes and the most actively articulated objection may not always be the most deeply felt one.

Two core issues

Two separate if related core issues are at stake here. One of them is the question of sovereignty and politics, to which I will return in my next post. This encompasses the second and third of the arguments in favour of intervention (support democracy and exert power) and the fifth argument against (don’t intervene in sovereign states’ affairs).

There is also the moral argument around the use of force, encompassing the humanitarian and democratic arguments deployed in favour of intervention balanced against risk aversion and moral objections. For those who are not completely pacifist in their approach to this kind of question, there are always dilemmas and case-by-case uncertainties to sort out.

The samuel johnson principle

Although each case differs from the next, however, there are some general principles that can be referenced, even by those of us who exist in the moral grey zone where force is not always wholly bad. The most important may be the precautionary principles of the Just War tradition: only use force as a last resort, be sure success is likely, and do not do so much damage that it outweighs the good in the intended outcome.

Last resort is the starting point of this argument. It is a long established moral principle and a couple of hundred years ago, Samuel Johnson expressed it rather well:

“He may be justly hunted down, as the enemy of mankind, that can choose to snatch, by violence and bloodshed, what gentler means can equally obtain.”

Johnson + Myagi

Add Myagi and Johnson together and the conclusion that emerges is along the lines of, Don’t use force unless you absolutely have no alternative, and then do it properly.

Or: Don’t opt prematurely to use a military instrument that is a long way short of certain to get the job done.

 Which is what western leaders seem now to be doing.

With the added risk that, by reaching so slowly for the hip, they are giving Qaddafi ample warning of what might be coming at him, so he will pour on the pressure to get the action over before intervention is ready, and will himself be very ready if and when the intervention starts.

It is not a pleasant prospect.

The last few days have witnessed two interesting statements about the Egyptian revolution by representatives of outside powers: one from Frank Wisner, President Obama’s special envoy to Mubarak, a former US Ambassador to Egypt; the other from Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative.

The temptation and the warning

In the my last blog entry I used the grisly example of the Algerian civil war 1992-2003 to illustrate the dangers of outside powers taking ill-informed, poorly thought through, unprincipled positions. I picked up the language of “orderly transition” that the US State department and all of Europe’s foreign ministries are using and said that, however moderate and commonsensical it sounded, there is great danger if the outsider starts trying to fix the terms of transition.

Wisner

Right on cue, up pops Wisner to tell the world’s leaders via the Munich International Conference on Security Policy that Mubarak should stay in order to steer the changes needed for a democratic transition.

We could start by asking an experienced diplomat what evidence there is in President Mubarak’s approximately 60-year military and political career to indicate he has the knowledge, skill or inclination to steer a transition towards democracy.

Representative or what?

Or like much of the media coverage across the weekend, we could focus on whether Wisner’s view is representative of the Obama administration. The US State Department said Wisner’s role as envoy was short-term and done with and that his views were his own and not coordinated with the US government. Interestingly, though, the State Department, while disowning Wisner and his view, did not disagree with it.

Indeed, I don’t think Wisner’s view represented any departure from Obama’s stated view that Mubarak should “make the right decision” and start the transition “now.” It’s one of the downsides of Obama’s ringing tones that what sounds grand when he says it can look vague when you read it and permits many different interpretations – probably deliberately. 

Now, it is not wrong for the American President to desist from laying down the law, whether to another President or to a mass citizens’ movement. And if that non-interventionist principle is expressed in Obama’s policy, that is admirable. 

But his words are also compatible with a distinctly interventionist policy that could include a detailed agenda for what should now happen and a readiness to put some muscle there to back it.

My last blog on Algeria was all about this. Wisner precisely illustrates the persistent Western flaw of wanting to shape the terms of a democratic transition, not according to its values, but according to a messy compromise between its values, interests and tomorrow’s headlines.

Ashton

It is difficult nonetheless to make the non-interventionist principle chime with being active in support for democracy. EU High Rep Catherine Ashton had a go in the Guardian on Friday.

It’s interesting to follow the comment thread on an article like that because it gives you a sense of what the EU is up against in Britain. The vast bulk of the early comments were all about knocking the EU and barely any engaged with Ashton’s arguments. When they did, they mostly missed the point.

Ashton’s starting point was unusual and refreshing because she began with history and, given that history, the need for humility. Indeed, Europe has been telling the Middle East how to run its affairs and very often forcing its preferences upon the region for just over two centuries. It began pretty much as a sideshow in a European war, when a French General called Napoleon Bonaparte defeated and destroyed the power of the Mamelukes who had run Egypt as a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire. And after those two centuries, for the EU’s High Representative to say, hang on, we should be careful here given our bloody awful record is a fine thing.

The position Ashton’s article briefly outlines is that the EU wants to support a genuine democratic transition. As she points out, this means more than having an election every now and again. As the blog rats in the Guardian’s comment thread pointed out, it wouldn’t be at all bad for there to be a bit more democracy in the EU and in, for example, the process that appoints the High Representative. But that doesn’t make the High Representative wrong about democracy in the Middle East.

Deep democracy?

Personally I think it’s a bit of a shame that she and her advisers have chosen to hang the tag of ‘deep democracy’ round the neck of this policy because the alliteration makes it sound a bit too flash and easy, which is the opposite of what she means. But I think it is pretty clear what she means and in broad terms it’s the right policy direction. The devil will lie not only in the details but in the durability of the EU’s commitment.

The challenge here is, in part, the challenge of Algeria in 1992 or equally the challenge for the EU when Hamas won the Palestine Authority elections in 2006: what do you do if the election produces what you think is the wrong result?

There is only one democratic answer and the EU – like everybody else – had better be sure it knows it.

The EU’s staying power

But part of the challenge lies also in simply staying the course – not being blown off track by changing political winds and the tides of fortune or fashion.

Here, as Cathy Ashton rightly emphasised near the end of the article, is one of the EU’s great strengths – its staying power: ‘The EU is perhaps not always the fastest on the way in, but often the one that stays the longest.’

Turning words into Action Service

So Ashton has said pretty much the right things – and certainly is much more right than the envoy-or-not of the US President. She has brought a degree of clarity to the difficult questions of exactly how outsiders should shape their policies and actions in order to support liberty and democracy without imposing themselves. And she’s laid down a marker.

What will now give her words the staying power that is one of the EU’s main distinguishing features? What is needed is a well established External Action Service. It is not ultimately even the best crafted diplomatic initiative that will define the success or failure of the EU’s High Representative but the strength of the institutions that are now being built.

As it turns out, democracy in the Middle East is the EEAS’s first big challenge and may be its defining moment.

The Algerian civil war

The Algerian civil war lasted from 1992 to 2003. About 150,000 people were killed. In its worst phase in 1997 it degenerated into a series of attacks on civilians, mainly perpetrated by the anti-government Armed Islamic Group (known in much of the western media by its French acronym of GIA), which openly claimed responsibility for them, but with numerous more clandestine attacks on civilians by government security forces.

In the GIA attacks, the cruelty and brutality is still hard to credit or even discuss. Whole villages and neighbourhoods were targeted, especially ones near Algiers. Makeshift weapons were used such as mattocks and shovels as well as guns and knives. People were literally hacked to pieces and disembowelled. Children were not left out and young women were kidnapped for sexual slavery.

Quite frequently, government forces stationed nearby – sometimes no more than a few hundred metres away - made no attempt to repel the attack or help the victims. There was a reason for that, and it was not just laziness or fear.

the background

The war started on the back of elections that the power holders in Algeria could not let run their course, which is reason #1 for thinking about it when viewing events in Egypt with its record of fixed elections. The army interrupted elections in January 1992, backed by every outside power with a serious stake in Algeria. It was driven, of course, by fear of the dreaded Islamists (reason #2).

The post-Independence regime in Algeria was widely discredited within the country throughout the 1980s (reason #3). In riots in 1988, security forces killed hundreds of people. But after its iron response on the streets the government was prepared to offer democratic flexibility. Political parties could be formed, among them the Islamic Salvation Front (or FIS in western media coverage), which took more than half the vote in local elections in 1990.

The government tightened election law in 1991 to disadvantage the FIS and pressed ahead for national elections. In December, the FIS got very nearly half the votes cast. The following month, the army stepped in. It cancelled the elections, arrested thousands of FIS activists (at least 5,000 and maybe as many as 30,000), replaced the President and suspended political rights and freedoms.

On the basis that anything and anyone were better than the Islamists, the army was supported from outside by the US, the European powers that mattered and most Arab states.

descent into chaos

War started within a couple of months. The GIA was formed in 1993 by veterans from the war in Afghanistan. It was a breakaway group from the FIS’s armed wing. It targeted anybody who supported the government and was particularly venomous towards foreigners whom it attempted systematically to drive out of the country. But it reserved much of its most extreme violence for the FIS and its supporters.

The 1997 massacres were largely in villages and neighbourhoods that had voted particularly strongly for the FIS in December 1991. That is why the government’s forces, on those occasions when they could have intervened to save lives, did not.

The anti-civilian strategy of the GIA sickened some of its fighters who in 1998 broke away and formed the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (usually referenced as the GSCP). This group focused its attacks on army, police and intelligence (though it was often accused by its opponents of having been formed by Algerian intelligence).

AL-Qaeda’s Lineage in the Maghreb

The GSCP continued to fight long after the FIS-related groups negotiated an end to violence with the new Algerian government in 1999 and 2000. Many GIA fighters took advantage of an amnesty at the same time.

In 2006, the GSCP linked itself to the al-Qaeda network and in January 2007 announced it had changed its name to be the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb.

Today, it fights on. People still die for reasons that can be traced back to the army’s externally backed side-lining of democracy almost 20 years ago.

If that is not a lesson, then at least it is an example…

…of what happens when outsiders link up with anti-democratic forces in a “we know best” display of force and power.

It is the temptation for all external powers of any weight or scale to avoid in the case of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and wherever else the surge of popular revulsion at existing power holders takes hold and links with a urgent wish for more responsive and responsible government.

President Mubarak has said he will step down only not right now. In Yemen, President Saleh has said he will step down only not right now. “Orderly transition” is the call of the day in Washington and London.

It sounds so reasonable and moderate. But if outsiders say what constitutes “orderly”, if they try to join in to fix the terms of that transition according to their interests, and even if their interests coincide with those of a few articulate internal power holders who will be damaged by a transition of any kind, orderly or not – if outsiders fall for that temptation, the result may well be catastrophic.

Where there is temptation, remember Algeria. And government leaders, EU officials, all – remember that actively or through silence, your predecessors all backed the Algerian army in 1992.

Deep, well-established and extraordinarily well-organised opposition movements in Egypt (plural – movements) are the only possible source of a future for Egypt that is both peaceful and democratic. They are neither dominated nor, apparently, led by the Muslim Brotherhood but the Brothers do participate.

As they make headway they will need support and should receive it. But that support should be offered in a spirit of humility, shaped by recognition that when it comes to democracy in the Middle East, outside powers have persistently got it wrong.

Council and Parliament have agreed to maintain the budget reserve (see my post of 22 November for background and details). The reserve effectively denies the Commission the use of the funds for those staff members until the transfer occurs.

Parliament and Council plan to approve the general budget next week with the reserve intact.

It is up to the Commission, as the other two institutions see it, to present a proposal to transfer the staff dealing with crisis response and peacebuilding, as previously agreed.

Relatively speaking, the sum of money is not huge so the Commission is under no great pressure unless member states decide to intervene to support the Council and Parliament position.

Further developments awaited with interest.

The budget

The Commission’s new draft general budget has confirmed its position that the the peacebuilding and crisis response planning and policy officers should not be transferred across to the EAS. Instead, the budget has them reassigned to financial administration duties in the Commission.

The Parliament has responded by keeping in place its “reserve”, meaning funds won’t be released for those positions unless they are transferred to the EEAS, in line with the Parliament’s interpretation of the June agreement on the staffing of the new service.

There will be a meeting on 6 December – a “trialogue” between Commission, Council and Parliament – to talk the issues through and see if there is a way to sort them out. It may be the first meeting of several. 

The Commission’s argument and the foreign policy instruments service

An argument for the Commission’s position is expressed in - among many other places no doubt – a letter by Commission Secretary-General Catherine Day to the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO), an NGO platform.

One of EPLO’s functions, funded by the Commission, is to facilitate dialogue on peacebuilding issues between civil society and the EU institutions. It wrote to the Commission to ask about the transfer of just two staff members from the Instrument for Stability team to the EAS (in my last post I had said it was three but perhaps I was being over-optimistic). 

The response is full of reassurance about the commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding, and emphasises that there will be far than just the two staffers working on peacebuilding – only not in the External Action Service. Instead, responsibility for this area will be shared jointly by the Commission and the EAS.

To this end, apparently, another service is being set up: the Foreign Policy Instruments Service. Within the Commission. Located in the same building as the EAS. Working hand in hand.

The only thing is, it makes you wonder why the External Action Service has been set up at all.

For if the needs of coherence and coordination and the EU packing a policy punch more appropriate to its scale and its ambitions can all be met without peacebuilding staff joining the EAS, why should anybody be transferred into it?

policy without expertise?

Obviously, the needs of coherence and proper punching weight can’t be met except by bringing the appropriate staff together in one institution. That’s what the EAS was set up for.

And plenty of policy staff are being transferred. But not those with peacebuilding expertise. 

The cost of leaving the peacebuilding staff outside the EAS is that their policy and planning input will not be at the heart of things. It will be treated by those inside the EAS as coming from outsiders, because that’s how institutional anthropology works. It risks being marginalised before the discussion begins.

And that means that policies on peacebuilding will be shaped without specific peacebuilding expertise being in play. It would be like working out policy on climate change without anybody on the team who knows about it. Or policy on Russia without any staff member who speaks or reads Russian.

It would be a pretty poor outcome after so many good things have been said about how the EAS should work and about the commitment to security, conflict prevention and peacebuilding being at the heart of its mission.

So as the EAS starts out in life, the tussle over its shape goes on, looking weirder as it progresses.

If unchecked, the course the Commission is taking would seriously damage the EAS’s potential peacebuilding role. With that, it would deny EU High Representative Catherine Ashton the service committed to conflict prevention, security and stability she has spent this year trying to build.

So the stakes are high and it is time for Commission President Barroso to step in and stop it – and, if he does not so with alacrity, for the EU’s member states to step up and put some pressure on him to enforce the simple of principle of keeping your word.

The issues

So what on earth is going on? So far as I can piece it together, the basic story really is as simple as the Commission trying to break or at least circumvent the agreement that it signed up to over the shape of the EAS in Madrid in June, confirmed by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers in July.

At issue are the peacebuilding and crisis response policy officers in DG Relex (External Relations) in the Commission. So far none of them has been transferred to the EAS. Unless the Commission is forced to back down, they will carry on being excluded. Hard security and counter-terror policy officers have transferred across and so have Common Foreign and Security Policy people – but not the ones from peacebuilding.

Parliament opposes

The European Parliament has reacted by hitting the button the Commission best understands – money.

A letter has gone to Commission President Barroso from the Parliament, signed by the Parliamentary rapporteurs on the EAS – Elmar Brok, Roberto Gualtieri and Guy Verhofstadt – to explain to him a budgetary blocking move the Parliament has just voted through.

Respectively, the three rapporteurs are the European People’s Party, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats. That’s the three biggest party groups in the EP and they are joined by the Greens to make a formidable cross-party opposition to the Commission’s antics.

It’s a strong letter. Dated 29 October, it outlines a part of the June agreement on which the Parliamentary representatives were particularly insistent – that High Representative Ashton should commit herself to “integrating current Commission (Instrument for Stability) planners into the EEAS, side by side with the Council’s (Common Security and Defence Policy) structures, both under her direct authority. The Commission supported this and it formed an integral part of the agreement found in Madrid on 21 June.”

The three MEPs then take the Commission to task for acting “contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Madrid agreement” by putting in a budget amendment “that foresaw only a very limited transfer of IfS-Personnel to the EAS.”

In fact, they rather understate the issue at this point. It’s not just that very few staff from the peacebuilding team are proposed for transfer – three, so I gather – but that none of them are substantive policy posts.

The rapporteurs inform Barroso that the part of the EU budget that applies to the positions that ought to transfer has been placed under a reservation by the plenary of the Parliament. That means the money will not be released until and unless those positions move from the Commission to the EAS the way that was agreed.

The stakes

If the Commission gets its way, it would mean the end of long-term peacebuilding by the EU – at least for a period of a few years.

Take the well established, well informed, well set IfS staff of Relex working on peacebuilding, give them purely financial implementation tasks (yup, that seems to be the Commission’s plan), and put other staff with a strong background in hard security and counter-terror in charge of those areas of policy in which peacebuilding needs arise.

With a staff competent at something other than peacebuilding, peacebuilding needs will be neglected, misinterpreted and met with non-coherent initiatives – just like it used to be. At best, there will be a hiatus of a few years until a new professional cadre is trained up.

The real impact will be felt not in the abstractions of EU policy and capacity but in the lived reality of ordinary people in violence-wracked, crisis-torn countries, where the EU could be a source of judicious assistance if the EAS could hold the reservoir of knowledge on how best to provide it.

And the other stake

There’s a secondary stake involved here too. Am I just naive and old-fashioned to say that something starts to stink when the Commission cannot do something as simple as stand by an agreement freely made?

If the European Union is not about the rule of law and the resolution of conflict by arriving at agreements and standing by them, it is almost about nothing at all. The Commission’s hypocrisy is more damaging than it knows.

Uniting all against it

It is widely acknowledged that the Commission is currently getting this issue 100 per cent wrong. Amazingly the Parliament and the Council of Ministers have found something they agree on – the Commission is breaking its word and trying to weasel its way out of a clear agreement.

The word on the street is that Catherine Ashton agrees with the Council and the EP on this but cannot say so because of what she needs on other issues from the Commission. Her problem, in short, is a weak bargaining position. She needs somebody – or somebodies – or some governments – to come forward and back her up with the muscle that the Brussels system denies her.

They are, of course, pre-occupied by Ireland this week and another crisis next. In the world of mass media headlines, this issue is too small and subtle to get a look in.

But EU governments surely don’t want to be led by the nose?

Motive?

What is or could be the Commission’s motive in all this? Perhaps it’s to horse-trade on other issues (I have no idea which ones but it could be). Perhaps the aim is to try to keep peacebuilding policy in the Commission, as it has managed to do on some other key issues like trade and climate negotiation.

But it’s ridiculous: the member states won’t let the Commission have the lead on peacebuilding and keep responsibility for crisis planning. They have already decided that those functions will belong to the EAS. Likewise the Parliament. It’s a losing, potentially bruising, self-defeating battle by the Commission.

Rationale

There is a rationale of sorts for the Commission’s line and it’s worth airing.

The basis of the argument is that it is agreed that the Commission will keep control of financial implementation while the EAS does policy and planning. Hold that thought and turn to the peacebuilding policy and planning people.

In general, the crisis response planning and peacebuilding officers in DG don’t handle the financial implementation of the actions that arise from the policies they work on. Financial implementation is largely “deconcentrated” out to the EU delegations in the countries where the actions are taken.

But some of the actions are politically sensitive and it’s thought that having responsibility for them might put the EU delegations at risk. So the control of those activities, including financial, is kept in Brussels. EU support for Tony Blair’s Middle East role is one example, as was EU support for UN mediator Ibrahim Gambari in Burma.

These activities amount to about 10 per cent spent on peacebuilding and they come under the control of the planners and crisis response officers.

You see where this is going: the fact that as crisis response planners the peacebuilding policy team in Relex has a marginal responsibility for financial implementation is being used to justify not transferring any of them to the EAS.

To the detriment of the EAS role in peacebuilding, thus to the EU’s role in it, and thus to peacebuilding in general.

Incredible? Yes, especially if I add that in the case of the team for election observation, the planners are going to the EAS while finance remains with the Commission. And CFSP planning staff are also headed for the EAS while finance stays with the Commission.

Ah, says, the committed bureaucratic obstructionist, but neither of those previously handled both policy and money. That’s the difference. And that, say I, is where we encounter the damage that the bureaucratic world can do to rational thinking and good policy.

To resolve the issue

Fortunately, resolving this issue is simplicity itself. It entails three steps:

1. Commission President Barros0 writes back to the three Parliamentary rapporteurs and says, sure, the positions move as agreed, sorry for the misunderstanding.

2. Catherine Ashton is left free to do the complex job to which she was appointed a year ago, to construct an external Action service that can express the ideal of building peaceful relations between states and nations that lies at the heart of the EU’s foundation and trajectory.

3. The Commission reflects on the importance of keeping its word.

TAKING shape

A fully functioning service is still some months off – some time around the Christmas break seems a reasonable bet – and until EU High Representative will still be performing under the double handicap of under-staffing and over-expectancy. But a glance at the EAS web-site shows plenty of diplomatic action, behind which things are now warming up in the selection and distribution of the main jobs. 

It looks like the core decisions have been taken about the organisational shape though there are probably more to come. There’s an organigramme doing the rounds in cyber space (but it’s not linkable and I’m not techno-smart enough to be able to include it here – sorry). It’s labelled “illustrative only,” whatever that may mean (after all, organisational charts are by definition only illustrative) and “High Representative’s Draft.”

It has both strengths and problems – hardly surprising since it’s the result of compromises between many different competing forces.

The chart shows five main regional directorates and a thematic directorate; units for crisis management and peacebuilding are organisationally separate, located under the Situation Centre with a direct line to and from the High Representative.

Some of the peacebuilding NGOs are especially pleased about this, because peacebuilding has been protected as a separate and identifiable area of work. That’s positive but I am not so sure as yet that it is particularly important. Other features are more significant – both those that are worrisome and those that are encouraging.

THE DOWN SIDE: Just a new MFA?

To my eyes, the organisational chart shows what looks pretty much like a regular ministry of foreign affairs, as I feared it would be and argued against in earlier blogs.

The reason for concern about this is partly that the birth of the EAS has been an opportunity to create a new kind of external service for the new era we are entering. This is an age of

• diffused and shifting power, changing assumptions about who can get what done,  with uncertain international coalitions of interest and opportunity,
• the unfolding impact of climate change, rising food prices, upward trending oil prices – and other sources of potential destabilisation,
• dramatically broadened opportunities for citizens’ political participation in resolving these challenges.

Both the challenges and the empowerment of participation are beyond the range of capabilities gifted to foreign ministries by their institutional DNA.  To match up to them, we need an innovative powerhouse of new approaches to doing international politics. The formation of the EAS offered that opportunity to construct an institution fit for 21st century purposes. It is not clear that this opportunity has been lost yet it remains unclear that it has been seized.

The second reason for concern is the risk that an EAS that behaves like an ordinary foreign ministry will trip over heels of the German, French, British and a few other governments’ foreign ministries.

Charts never fully reflect they organisation they are illustrating and is never the whole story. It is nonetheless important especially because staffing draws on the same human sources as the basic structural idea – foreign policy people.

True enough, they will come from the different national governments, from the EU Council of Ministers and the European Commission. Each of these bodies has its distinctive organisational culture. But it is diversity within a pretty limited range.

In the arguments that have shaped the EAS, Catherine Ashton, appears to have a won a considerable number. As I anticipated on the basis of her record in the House of Lords (see earlier blogs) she has shown herself to be a shrewd deal-maker and by no means the pushover her opponents were talking her down to be. Nonetheless, she has won tactical issues in a decision-making process that from the outset was subject to a gravity pull towards the unstated assumptions that underlie the shape and structure and, indeed, behaviour, of an ordinary foreign ministry. Her wins are within those limits.

These are all reasons for continued concern about how the EAS will pan out once it is fully operational. But there is also a major positive.

AND THE GOOD NEWS

On the other hand, the same organigramme carries a strap-line:

THE EEAS: A SERVICE FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION, SECURITY + STABILITY

And that is something that is worthwhile, worth fighting for and working with. If Cathy Ashton can imbue the service with that mission, she can still produce an Action Service that is a major international institutional innovation and that could be of historic significance.

The long game of conflict prevention

The EAS enters the global arena with characteristics derived from the broad and long-lasting dimensions of the EU rather than the daily detail of in-fighting and compromise. Ultimately, this is what makes a well-led EAS an exciting prospect.

The EU is not a state and will never be one, but nor is it just a multilateral organisation or a trading bloc. It is itself, sui generis. It has huge economic weight its political decision-makers often find hard to deploy. At its best the EU (and the EAS on the EU’s behalf) can be

• More focused, bold and cohesive than the UN or the OSCE;
• Broader ranging in geography and issues than NATO;
• Admittedly slower, less targeted and with lower impact than a major state ;
• But also less selfish, flighty and fickle than most states (including its own members).

At the same time, no other major global actor has such a central and durable interest in building a world system based on the rule of law. For big and medium powers, interest comes first and commitment to the rule of law is contingent upon that, while, by definition, small powers are not global actors. The UN is global and law-committed but it is a forum rather than an actor; as a world body, it is no more than the sum of its heterogeneous states (and sometimes less). Its agencies depend for their continued operations on relations with states whose attitude to international law ranges from conditional via negligent to contemptuous.

The EU is a global actor in which the commitment to international law is hard-wired through the pooling of sovereignty that membership entails. This pooling makes sense in its own terms given the general benefits of EU membership but it makes most sense in a world in which state sovereignty is more effectively constrained by international law than today

For the EAS these considerations add up to prioritising an approach based on the long-term – it means specialising in playing the long game. As the EU’s external face, the EAS will have a broader range of capabilities than most of its member states and more underlying policy durability than any of them.

Thus, an EU service dedicated to conflict prevention, security and stability must be able to interpret and operationalise each of these terms in a long-range perspective. When crises arise as they must, crisis response has to be focused on actions within that long-lasting framework, avoiding the temptation of simply chasing after events.

This is the service Cathy Ashton is setting up. This is the ambition. What does she need to do in order to achieve it?

Pretty obviously, she needs to get the set-up right and she needs some early successes.

getting the set-up right

Cathy Ashton’s approach is that having a separate section on conflict prevention is virtually a sell-out. The risk is that a separate section ghettoises the issue; she wants conflict prevention to colour everything the EAS does.

Great – but peace and security issues do not mainstream themselves across a service, especially one whose initial recruitment is inevitably and rightly of people who are well established in their careers.

So there are a couple of things to do – or get done – as the service approaches cruising speed late this or early next year.

First, Cathy Ashton needs to find an institutional home for a core team that acts as a centre of excellence on conflict prevention, security and stability within the service. If she doesn’t do that at the outset, long-term conflict approaches will be sidelined by the press of events and the dominance of crisis-response among her staff, on her agenda, in politics, among her international counterparts, in the air she breathes. To ensure the banner her service carries is not mere fluttering decoration she will set up some sort of special section eventually. Better sooner than later, I reckon – so best if it’s done at the outset.

It won’t need to be an especially big team but it needs to carry weight within the service. It must have unchallengeable expertise and be backed by the High Representative’s personal authority with the solid support of the service’s top management. It does not have to have any particularly peace-y/conflict-y name but it does have to be located in a place where it can affect the main issues. It should probably sit between her and the regional directorates and sieve the issues and the responses that the directorates and the High Rep’s cabinet are handling.  

Second, there’s the staff. To ensure a viable conflict prevention strategy colours everything the service does, it has to be embedded in professional formation – in recruitment, career path, incentives and succession. Absorbing and operationalising it need to be among the criteria for reward and promotion. And it needs to be started now because it will be much harder to do it as an after-thought.

What success might look like

How would success look – that is, how will we know that the EAS is fulfilling the mission? What are reasonable criteria or expectations?

Thinking about the initial timeframe to mid-2013 when Cathy Ashton will present a major interim report (pushed back from 2012 in earlier plans), I would suggest two indicators:

1. What you might call a ”good” crisis – i.e., a response to immediate events that shows the EAS and the High Rep herself bring something new to the table of international politics. As I have suggested in earlier blogs that “something new” should be based on high levels of expertise and a focus on the long game. So responding to a humanitarian disaster, whether natural or caused by war, with not just emergency relief but a long recovery and reconstruction plan would fit the bill.

2. Matching promise to delivery on, let’s say, two big issues. The EU is good at mouthing off but the implementation is often deficient. The member states can usually agree to cover their differences with careful wording, but that paper over their cracks splits when the action gets started. If Cathy Ashton can conquer the internal divisions enough to produce consistency between the word and the deed - if through the EAS she can teach the EU to walk the talk - that will be some achievement indeed.

So what would be appropriate issues on which to seek this consistency? I might say trade, not least because Cathy Ashton has considerable competence in that area, having been EC Trade Commissioner. However, trade remains a Commission area (or “competence”) so freedom of action here is limited for the EAS. I might also say relations in the EU’s neighbourhood would be a fruitful area of engagement but these have also been removed from the EAS’s purview and put under the Enlargement DG (which, by the way, gives a confusing and even misleading message to, for example, the governments and people of the South Caucasus). I might also say the Middle East because an EU policy that implemented EU law in relation to Israel and Palestine is an outcome devoutly to be desired – but I think it’s also too high a bar by which to measure the EAS’s effectiveness because the role of the US is always the most important external consideration.

But there are plenty of other areas and issues where EU needs to raise its game. Pick two from the following long-term security-related themes and regional issues:

• Climate change: Ref Copenhagen, the existing negotiating mechanism is bust. The EAS should not focus on designing a new one but rather on the complex diplomacy of constructing a coalition for a progressive response to climate change that includes mitigation, greening the economy and support for adaptation to face the impact of climate change, especially in developing countries. NEEDED: technical expertise, long view, diplomacy, financial ingenuity, huge sums of money.
• Relations with China: Now the second biggest economy in the world, un-ignorable on most major issues including climate change and trade, and increasingly a likely partner in building durable international trading relations and structures, as long as its concerns are not sidelined. NEEDED: long pragmatic view, deep understanding of China, tough diplomacy, capacity to link up diverse policy areas.
• Relations with Russia: Also un-ignorable, though those of its actions that are most important for the EU take place in a somewhat narrower framework of issues and regions than China’s. This is more than a question of energy security, which seems to be the filter through which many EU policy makers see the relationship with Russia, and also more than an issue of human rights, which is how many others seem to see it. The key question and challenge is how to construct a security partnership in the huge swathe of territory from southeastern Europe, through the southern Caucasus, the northern rim of the Middle East and Central Asia. NEEDED: deep multi-regional historical knowledge, long-term approach, solid diplomacy, tough-minded prioritisation.  
• Africa policy: Africa’s national and regional political institutions continue to be weaker than they need to be even if in many aspects they are getting stronger than they were. Powerful outsiders can therefore pick off what they want in Africa without helping on issues such as trade fairness, investment incentives, infrastructure and governance. The EU knows how to deliver development aid projects but, like other donors and outsiders, has little idea about how to support the development process in Africa. Putting that right is ambitious, and therefore slow, and also essential so it should start now. NEEDED: bold vision, clarity on objectives, coalition building, shedloads of money.
• The EU’s energy economy: The IEA estimates that meeting world energy needs and restricting carbon emissions requires investment in all forms of energy infrastructure amounting to $36.5 trillion by 2030 – i.e., about $1.8 trillion a year on average. In the long-run, that huge investment will generate profits but mobilising it in the first place is the big issue. Unless the international energy market goes green of itself at an unfeasibly high speed, this is a deeply political issue. Inaction will lead to crises mounting year by year but inaction is the default mode for individual states. Which makes this an ideal topic on which the EAS should develop solid specialised expertise. NEEDED: capacity to combine knowledge from different fields, credibility so as to generate a shared view of the future, policy innovation, capacity to inspire joint action.
• International development: There is a quiet but important role waiting to be carried out and the large number of countries where the EU has a presence, in the form of a Union Delegation that the EAS will run, means the EAS is best placed to do it. The task is to provide coordination and a degree of leadership to EU government donors in developing countries. It is always difficult to carry out the notional commitments to coherence between donor governments unless someone takes the lead. In a few cases, this comes down to a trusted individual from one donor agency taking the lead. In most casers it comes down to nobody doing anything very much because whatever they talk about when they have their donor liaison meetings, they have to report back and get contradictory sets of advice and instruction from their capitals. Done carefully, the EAS could take the lead. NEEDED: a clear lead and a delegated attention to detail.

It’s a big agenda and this is not the full list of issues on which the world sorely needs a new, thoughtful and firm global actor. If not the EAS, who? If not now, when?

Stakes – the long game

What is at stake here is a once-only opportunity to create something different from the norm of foreign ministries handling a myriad details of the relationship of one government to a couple of hundred others. Extending that model to the EU and creating a supra-ministry of European foreign affairs is pointless, probably impossible, and distinctly counter-productive.

• Pointless because there’s no need for another foreign ministry.
• Probably impossible because the EU’s member states won’t let it happen.
• And counter productive because the High Rep, foreign ministers and heads of government would spend their time tripping over each other’s feet as they competed for profile and coverage on the big headline issues.

Instead, the EAS should be designed to deal with some big, 21st century, long-range issues – a broad concept of security, the international politics of climate change and coming to a new and equitable agreement on world trade. On these issues the EAS has the potential to offer something distinctly different, playing a well-prepared long game, providing intellectual muscle and policy stamina on complex issues in which politicians’ instinct to keep launching new initiatives can be useful but won’t be the real driver of a progressive agenda.

A view from outside the vortex

Baroness Ashton’s proposal is the outcome of intensive discussion and not a little lobbying over the past couple of months. The proposal is framed as a resolution, using formal language, and does not contain the supporting arguments for the choices embedded in it. There is a 30 April deadline for finalising and taking the decision.

Those who are closer than I am to the Brussels vortex of code, gossip and personalities may see it differently but to my eyes, the general nature of some of the key passages in the draft decision about who is responsible for what has both the intention and the effect of keeping options open. The argument is going to carry on. That is part of the structure of the eventual decision, with a report from the High Rep due in 2012 and a review of the EAS’s functioning in 2014. But perhaps more importantly it is an implication of the drafting, which has left many issues vague.

I am doubtless blind to nuances of the bureaucratic drafting process, but to me it looks as if in the tussles so far that have led to this draft, Catherine Ashton has successfully gained budgetary independence from the Commission. The draft seems to reflect a vision of the EAS that is closer to the Lisbon Treaty’s original concept of a service that would coordinate the EU’s relationship with the world than it is to some of the narrower versions that have been aired, focused purely on providing diplomatic support to the High Representative and other senior officials. The EAS in this proposal

• would have a somewhat confusing double function, because it is there to support the High Rep but also assist the Commission President (Jose Manuel Barroso), the Commission itself and the President of the European Council (Herman van Rompuy) – and words like “support” and “assist” can have a zillion different disputable meanings in the right hands;
• would be staffed on merit but also so as to be geographically representative of the EU – a balance that is another arena for contestation;
• will get plenty of policy control over security but it is unclear how much it is going to have over other foreign policy areas including development assistance;
• will have thematic as well as geographical desks, which is fundamental.

Muddy and muddier

The relatively brief formulation in the Lisbon Treaty offered what looks now like a pretty strong version of the EAS. The proposal Catherine Ashton has now presented is also a fairly strong version, weaker than the way many interpreted the Lisbon Treaty but not far removed from it.

Against that, different forces - some foreign ministries, parts of the European Commission, some MEPs, some important NGOs – have wanted a weak and even muddier version with little or no leadership on key components of external relations, and in the view of some of the development NGOs, none at all on development assistance. 

There are random alliances among the forces of greater muddiness but they have not and will not come together as a coalition. The preferences and underlying interests of some of these diverse opponents of the strong version are quite different and often at odds with each other. All they share is a preference for a weak EAS – and some of them wouldn’t mind a strong-ish version if they thought their own hands would be on the tiller.

In the midst of all this, keeping options open through some studied vagueness seems to me to be the right way to go. The difficult trick is to have only a moderate amount of vagueness and progressively to replace that with clarity as the issues move along – to dispel the mud and get the EAS into clean water for its launch. If Catherine Ashton can get her proposal through pretty much intact, she will be in a stronger position for keeping to a stronger version of the EAS in the long term.

Three targets for clarity

A group of NGOs and think tanks wrote an open letter criticising the state of debate on the EAS. The letter, dated 22 March, comes from E3G, Bertelsmann Stiftung, Centre for European Reform, demosEuropa, East-West Institute, Global Witness, IDDRI, International Alert, International Crisis Group and Open Society Institute. It says Brussels turf wars are undermining the prospects for the EAS and outlines three areas to focus on:

1. Strategic Policy Coherence: As the actual shape of the EAS is elaborated and refined – as the desks are defined – it is crucial that the High Rep can ensure consistency across all the areas of the EU’s external relations. Keeping the policy areas in separate silos will make it impossible to have coherent policy either on the issues themselves or to shape relations with China, or the US, Russia, India or anybody else. To this end, the EAS has to be the vehicle that provides strategic coordination of big programming commitments such as development assistance.
2. Staff expertise: There has been a strong push to recruit the EAS only from foreign ministries and the Commission. This has opened up a little in the current draft proposal. If the EAS is constituted only by diplomats, it will probably act as a diplomatic service, locked in the policies and the processes of institutions whose DNA belongs to 19th and 20th century. It will not be able to offer something that is distinctively different to meet the distinctive challenges of our age. 
3. Addressing critical priorities: The EAS has to be empowered – with formal mandates if necessary – to generate policy and lead action on core relationships and in key areas such as climate change, energy, peacebuilding, the Neighbourhood Policy.

Prospects

How this pans out now is partly in the hands of the member states of the EU. They should get on board. The turf and functions of the foreign ministries are not threatened by an EAS that takes on the long game on the key issues. They are only threatened if the EAS is shaped like a traditional diplomatic service. In other words, the narrowness of their view risks creating the beast they fear.  They should cut through the murk and start supporting the strong version of the EAS and stop undermining the High Rep.

The outcome is also partly in the hands of the EU institutions – both the Parliament and the Commission. The Parliament is rightly concerned with its prerogatives and maiking sure the High Rep and the EAS are answerable to it. But MEPs should not worry about micro-managing the EAS, its administrative set-up and its budget, and instead focus onto the broad objectives and how to miss them.

And the Commission has to recognise at all levels that when the Lisbon Treaty became law, a new era has begun in the EU’s affairs. Bureaucratic resistance to change and an enthusiastic engagement in turf wars are fighting anachronistic wars. For the parts of the Commission that are resisting the strong version of the EAS put themselves in a lose-lose position: even if they win the short-term bureaucratic battle and see off the change, they will actually have won nothing in the medium and longer term because they will have created nothing. Their “victory” will leave the Commission as a damaged structure of diminishing credibility.

Embracing the change is the only worthwhile option in front of the Commission and it has to be hoped that its leadership will act on that basis.

For which century should the External Action Service be designed?

Cathy Ashton’s first big task is to lead the process of constructing the new European External Action Service. It’s common to refer to the EAS as Europe’s foreign ministry and Ashton as its foreign minister. But that’s a mis-translation. Lest you haven’t noticed, allow me to point out that the EU does not have a government. Rather it is made up of 27 of them. If Ashton tries to be Europe’s foreign minister she’s going to collide with the others, or at least they’ll spend a lot of time tripping over each other’s heels. The same goes in trumps for the EAS itself; if she tries to make it into a supra-ministry for foreign affairs she will create a big unholy mess.

One of her smaller problems is that, necessarily, most of the advice she can get about how to construct the EAS and more generally how to do her job is from people who only know foreign ministries. So they can only help her build one. Likewise, most of the criticism she is getting – as reflected in a big piece in the Guardian, for example, or as sharply expressed by the choleric Jean Quatremer, a  well connected French journalist and blogger – reflects this default preference for the new institution to be like a lot of old ones. The irony is that if Ashton successfully creates an EU foreign ministry, she’ll be taken apart for that by the same people.

Quatremer and the boatload of critics quoted in the Guardian piece – some anonymously - need to get their heads round the idea that (a) this is the 21st century, so (b) it would be a waste to use the once-only opportunity of the EAS’s birth to create a 19th or 20th century institution, and in any case (c) when did duplicating national institutions at the EU level become a good idea? Cathy Ashton is streets ahead of her critics in thinking through this challenge.

Gossip and egos

You can always when tell little minds are at large because pointless factual errors are perpetrated and perpetuated. Quatremer hilariously entitles his piece “Ashton doesn’t pick up the European phone after 8pm.” And his equally inaccurate remark that she had never got herself an apartment in Brussels is scaled up by the time the Guardian has it to her having lived in hotel rooms for 18 months as EU Trade Commissioner and now High Rep. Both the no-phone and the no-apartment statements are untrue and silly. What we are dealing with here is gossip rather than a thought-through critique.

Let’s go a bit further with that.

• One criticism of Ashton is that she has gone to the wrong meetings. How do we interpret that? Surely not as a mutter from people who went to a meeting and found to their chagrin that she wasn’t there? Or maybe from the Spanish hosts and organisers of the meeting in Majorca she blew off in order to be in Kiev the same day? Forgive me but I long since stopped taking this kind of thing seriously. The officials who were quoted by the Guardian presumably retained their anonymity because they were embarrassed by their own pettiness.
• Reportedly Pierre Lellouche, the French minister for EU affairs, has complained that Ashton didn’t go to Haiti soon enough. When I saw she hadn’t gone, I applauded the fact that at least one senior politician decided not to block the airport in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake; it was much better to defer her visit until later when, by discussing plans for long-term recovery and how to support them, it could actually do some good to be there. If indeed Lellouche criticised her for not joining the throng that got in the way of the relief effort, we should mourn the fading of a once fine intellect.
• Ashton has also nettled some people by appointing other people to diplomatic posts. That’s certainly a hard one to interpret what it’s all about.
• While the Guardian carries a story full of criticisms that she is ineffectual, in the same issue it has a front-page story that the French and German governments are anxious that she is out-manoeuvring them and they are losing out on key appointments. So, um, which is it to be?

All that and more – it’s a long, long way, a whole Brussels boulevard away from a fully thought-through critique. It’s no more than a hotch-potch of personal axes being ground and some out-dated ideas on international politics, spiced up by entertaining anglophobia from Quatremer (his story’s crap but he unfolds it beautifully) and rank poor reporting from the Guardian.

The long game

Having a go at the High Representative for not being extremely visible begs a couple of questions: if you want the EU to make an impact in world affairs, what impact? And within that, given 27 member states, what is the specific role for the EAS and its head?

The issue really is, what can the EAS bring to the table? What can it add to what 27 member governments already bring? There is nothing to gain and much to lose by duplicating what the foreign ministries can (or should) already do. This means the EAS and its head should not be chasing the headlines, trying to be in the front row for the photo op at the next big disaster or gala. Nor should they be focused on the short-term issues that consume most of the energy of most ministries of foreign affairs for most of the time.

It also means the EAS must try not to be just another foreign service, even if foreign service personnel will make up the bulk of its staff. We don’t want or need another institution doing the same old foreign policy thing; it will be a great gain for the EU and for world politics if the new service is a different kind of service.

What could that mean? One of the abiding biases of all foreign services is their focus on process rather than results. It’s hardly surprising given the nature of diplomacy as unending network and relationship building with an ever-shifting cast of characters; for most of the time, meetings, statements and joint declarations are as close as diplomacy gets to a result. It is also hardly surprising given the way that international politics moves is largely shaped by forces that diplomats and their ministers do not control; diplomacy responds and reflects much more than it initiates or directs. But one of the qualities the EU has is its staying power, the durability of its consensus-forged policies, its long time-lines and, in short, a capacity for the long game. And that has produced real long-term results in Europe, decisively changing the political and economic map, the nature of government and the structure of opportunities available to EU citizens.

There are three key issues around which the EAS can develop a long-game role:

• Security and peace, on which the EU has a history and in which it can claim one of its three greatest successes (spreading prosperity and enhancement of democracy being the other two);
• Climate change and, more broadly, the tough environment and resource issues, in which the world badly needs a new input of sustained drive and direction, and where Europe has some good policies on paper that need to be seen through into action (and a few not so good that have to be seriously reworked);
• Equitable international trade relations, on which the vast majority of individual EU member states (25 out of 27) can have no world impact except by working together – and for France and Germany the prospect of individual impact is more apparent than real.

It is around these three issues that the EAS can weave its policies towards Russia, the Middle East, China, its stable alliances and its support for international development.

The EAS and the High Representative

On visibility and results, Ashton has riffed smartly on the remark by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband that the EU President should be somebody who could stop the traffic in Washington, DC; she told Time magazine, ‘In fact my job is to keep traffic moving. I’m not interested in the limelight. I’m interested in what we can actually do.’

So it seems that, more by luck than judgement, a High Representative has been selected who is not trying to treat the job as the vehicle for an ego trip. This is one up-side of the much criticised choice of somebody who has never been elected to national representative and legislative office. It is probably a fair point that she cannot be expected to have a career politician’s instinct for how to do politics. Good!

It is also a fair point that she lacks the long contact with senior diplomats and their ministers that can be claimed by others who think they would do a good job in her position. But don’t over-estimate the significance of that lack of familiarity with the diplo-clan – fresh approaches can be a good thing and Ashton’s record in the House of Lords shows she is a deal-maker and a conciliator, a record earned by her ability to win confidence from people whose political views are far from her own.

The challenge is to bring these talents to bear, despite her acknowledged lack of prior deep familiarity with the issues and the problems, in designing an External Action Service that is not just another foreign service and can play a long game on security and peace, climate change and natural resources, and equitable trade.

To do this she is not only going to have to unfold the big vision on these three issues and where the EU should be on them in three to five years time. She is also going to have to pay detailed attention to the structure of the new service and to how its incoming personnel are re-trained and, once absorbed into the new institution, given incentives that keep them focused on the long game and a strategic approach on the three decisive issues. She is going to need to ensure that the policy apparatus on peace and security does not get over-militarised, and she has to figure out how to stop a short-sighted combination of narrow national interests and special corporate interests crawling all over EU policy on climate change, the environment and trade.

Everything else is just noises off from disgruntled diplomats and politicians who lack a proper understanding of the challenges and possibilities in front of EU international policy. The long game is what counts.

The Year One report card: “could do better”

Commentary leading up to and out of Obama’s first State of the Union address has been pretty predictable. His first year’s presidential performance has been flawed. Discounting the extremes – unmoveable Obama-lovers and -haters – the argument is basically about where he sits on the spectrum of flawed-ness and the judgement generally reveals more about the would-be judge than the President.

Nick Cohen probably won a special prize in the build-em-up-and-knock-em-down school of journalism by declaring that Obama’s first year in office shows him to be the most reactionary US president since Nixon. It’s the kind of stuff that the blogosphere loves and perhaps encourages. Shame to see a normally thoughtful commentator fall for it. But while it is fair to say that it it is not good enough for Obama simply to be better than Bush, it seems odd to forget the destructive and poisonous effect on international peace and politics of Obama’s incompetent, proudly know-nothing predecessor.

Of course, Obama has emerged from his first year in office as a flawed president. Guantanamo remains open, two wars continue, and though recession is over the burden on ordinary people of its costs and the recovery is great and growing. Moreover, Obama did not finalise health reform nor come to the Copenhagen climate conference with anything worth anything – and he didn’t leave with anything either.

From the political centre leftwards, a lot of argument back and forth about Obama swings on the issue of how much of this is his responsibility. From the centre rightwards, the emphasis tends to fall on what he’s done or doing and whether it is proper or will work. Actually, I think the right’s preferred terms of argument are the better place to start, despite the huge amounts of dust that right-wing American politics characteristically throws up in the air about issues such as climate change and health.

We don’t have to concern ourselves with the political debate within the USA. It would take up too much time and energy. Well, OK, but just a little. The USA has a health system that is more expensive than any other and lets several tens of thousands of Americans die each year of ailments that are easily curable and – this is the truly weird bit - the right has somehow gained traction with the apparently lunatic argument that trying to change the system is unpatriotic.

Explaining how that sort of argument can persuade many people who are in other ways intelligent is a task for another time. And for somebody else. 

I’ll content myself with noting that that all political cultures have their oddities and the country of which I am a citizen has more than many others.

Flawed compared to what? Or whom?

But cutting through that dusty, artificial fog, where the right is right in its emphasis on the actions of the president is that government has to deal with the world as it is. Romantics of both right and left often appear to find that unfair; strangely, the world they want to change should somehow already have adapted to the change-goals and principles behind them. It’s politics as if politics doesn’t matter. I think politics does matter, so how the administration goes about getting its programme implemented is to me the key thing.

So let’s build on Nick Cohen’s prize-winning hyperbole by asking, which president since Nixon would you rather have facing the challenges of two wars and a recession plus climate change, the Middle East, the further unfolding of long-term changes in the global balance of power, and numerous other issues? 

• It wouldn’t be the younger George Bush: enough said on that topic. 
• Nor I think would it be Clinton with his compulsion to triangulate all policy positions, so that international policies always came off second best against what worked in Washington in the short term.
• The older George Bush is often credited retrospectively with being a steady pair of hands, but he let a recession happen without noticing it arriving and in foreign policy was criticised at the time for instinctive passivity. He sent mixed messages to Saddam at a critical moment but he did know how to put an international coalition together, he knew when to stop a war, and perhaps his conservative caution fitted the bill as the world changed around him.
• Reagan benefitted from the economic cycle, which swung neatly up in time for his re-election, and from the extraordinary good fortune that Mikhail Gorbachev became the USSR’s leader, since the latter’s peace diplomacy cast a warm after-glow on the administration’s later years. Reagan also allowed Contra-gate to flourish, introduced the let-it-rip approach to the economy that exploded in the world’s face at the end of 2008, and actively supported Saddam (remember Rumsfeld’s mission of support and supply).
• Carter was a thoughtful and principled president who has been widely judged as ineffective because he was able to do nothing about rising oil prices or revolutionary fervour that soared in Iran and challenged US policy just as the post-Vietnam national hangover hit. His failure to rise to these challenges crippled his re-election effort.
• Ford lacked credibility in the wake of Nixon’s impeachment.
• Nixon himself – the man who opened relations with China and got the US out of full scale combat in Vietnam – does not look so bad in retrospect but, like all the other presidents including both carter and Clinton, he saw the world in a top-down US-centric perspective. His was an approach that would have been far less toxic than the younger Bush’s but less subtle than is required now.

Against this line-up, I think Obama has a chance of being the best president for the challenges of today. No he is not perfect, no he has not wholly transformed the world or even US politics. And it’s not only the Republicans he hasn’t persuaded; he’s missed out with a lot of Democrats as well. He’s also burdened by the way the American political system makes it hard simply to get an administration in place; at last count he still had over 170 officials whose appointments had not been confirmed. 

But he has repeatedly revealed his understanding that globalisation is changing the way world problems are formed, have an impact and must be addressed. He also seems to have a pragmatic recognition of the constraints on US power. And he tries to drive policy forward on the basis of enunciated principles and not just on a perception of US national interest; in today’s world, that’s what’s needed though experience is showing how tough it is to work in that way. Above all, so far, he has n’t made things worse.

Actually, for an American President, he’s not so bad.

But now Iran

I wonder now, however, about the apparent ratcheting up – real if modest – of the confrontation with Iran over that country’s nuclear enrichment as missile defences are deployed for the naval deployments in the Gulf: I wonder if this could be the issue that negatively defines the Obama administration. This is not like the recession and the wars he inherited, or the inaction on climate change, or the sclerotic health system. This is not a new issue but it has one that has been handled by political pressure backed by now more militant and now more accommodating rhetoric. Shifting to actual military confrontation would be an altogether new step: it would be Obama’s own chosen confrontation.

And whether it would lead to stand-off or war is not wholly in his power to decide.

Iran’s refusal to cooperate fully with the IAEA or accept UN Security Council resolutions creates a real problem. It is far from certain that Iran has plans – or even ambitions – to develop nuclear weapons but it is not out of the question either. Compared to enriching uranium for use in nuclear energy, the way to enrich uranium to weapons grade is, broadly speaking, to keep the process going for longer. Nuclear inspections that essentially check what technology is in use and keep a running inventory of nuclear material, allow the IAEA and UN to know what is going on. Iran’s refusal to comply is in itself suspicious though proves nothing.

So there’s a major issue in Iran possibly aiming to get nuclear weapons. It has big and unsettling ramifications in the region and more widely. It needs to be understood not only in the light of Iran’s relations with the West, nor simply in the added light of its relations with Israel (which is already nuclear-armed) but also in the light of Iran’s relations with Arab states and the increasingly difficult politics of relations within the world of Islam between Sunni and Shi’a political groups.

There’s a timing problem here because China has forcefully expressed its irritation with the Obama administration over arms sales to Taiwan, announcing sanctions on US companies involved as well as cancelling a visit by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates that was being discussed for some time this year. The problem is that China is notoriously sceptical about sanctions against Iran and its support is vital if the UN Security Council is going to back up previously agreed resolutions.

Israel rears its ehad

But there are two deeper problems that are nothing to do with China or timing. The first of these is that US policy appears to be being worked out carefully with Israel. The US and Israel agreed an informal deadline for Iran to come up with some constructive response to the IAEA and UN by the end of 2009; now it hasn’t, the US appears to be making its move. But if Obama’s policy is to get into bed with Israel over Iran, that is going to have an impact on everything else the US is trying to do in the region. Forget the 4 June speech in Cairo. Forget new relations with the Islamic world. Arab states may want to see Iran held back but cosying up to Israel is not part of a game plan they can be seen to go along with. So some of their envoys may give quiet hints and nods but the public discourse will be very different.

And in any case, if the idea is that by following Israel’s preferences over Iran, Obama will get concessions over West Bank settlements, my bet would be to forget it. The furious public reaction in the Arab world to a close alignment of US and Israeli policy will do damage to any and all possibilities of Arab state pressure on Hamas. Israel knows this and will concede nothing on settlements because it won’t have to.

The requirements of stability in Iran 

The second problem has to do with Iran, the nature of the regime and the way it gains legitimacy, and the impact a new US policy will have upon it. Like many other governments, ruling circles in the Middle East need and arrange to achieve stability. There are two main ways they can get it. Broadly speaking, there is the stability of stasis and the stability of constant forward motion. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are two examples of very different modes of static stability. Iran and Saddam’s Iraq are two equally different examples of stability through forward motion. With Iran, you get the impression that if they stop moving forward and taking on new challenges they will topple over. It is from that forward movement that they derive the legitimacy and support they need to remain in power. That is how a government remains a revolutionary government over thirty years after the revolution, during which time it has signally failed to revolutionise anything.

Part of what that means is that stability within Iran requires a constant process of renewing risks, even maximising them. And at this point, American pressure offers a new challenge with welcome new risks. It lets the Iranian government and religious authorities continue to be revolutionary. In turn, that means that once set on the course of confrontation it is not in the Iranian government’s interest (nor perhaps in its power) to stop for fear of the consequences. They can slow down. They can stretch it out. They can indefinitely delay things coming finally to a head. But stopping is not an option.

Which means that if the confrontation goes so far that it has to stop or else there will be a disaster, there is only one side able to do that.

But that, of course, would mean backing down. At which point, the American president would be in a corner of his own making in which he can only turn towards disaster or towards political failure – and pay the price in either case.

I am predicting nothing. Apart from anything else, enough information has come out for it to be clear that a whole lot more has not been allowed out into the public realm. All I will say is I only hope that we are not witnessing the first steps of Obama feeding the beast that will joyously turn and bite him.

So far, see above, he is certainly not so bad – but the Iran policy contains risks that I am not sure the Obama administration has identified, understood or figured out how to manage.