Our So-Called Foreign Policy: U.S. Cyber Strategy Still Seems Full of Holes

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arms control, asymmetrical war, China, cyber-war, deterrence, Iran, James Clapper, Joseph S. Nye, multilateralism, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Politico, Project Syndicate, Russia, treaties

Terrorism has understandably grabbed all the recent national security headlines lately, but two big articles this week have also valuably reminded us that major cyber threats still loom. Unfortunately, these pieces also (unwittingly) remind of all the reasons to worry that Washington still doesn’t have its arms around two of the biggest challenges facing the nation on the cyber front. The first is the asymmetry issue, which is a fancy way of saying that many of America’s current and likely cyber adversaries have much less to lose than the United States in a computer-war exchange. The second is the unlikelihood that the kinds of legalistic foreign policy approaches favored by much of the American establishment can meet this challenge.

Actually, the asymmetry issue has several cyber-related dimensions. One, widely noted (and especially by Chinese strategists), is that today’s civilian computer networks, whose development has long emphasized openness and information sharing, are vulnerable to attacks even from relatively low-tech countries. So for that reason alone, cyber-war can be a great geopolitical equalizer.

The second, however, is less widely noted. As I’ve written, the decision to launch a cyber attack against an adversary with significant cyber-war capabilities of its own rests on much more than a calculation of whether any assets the attacker values (its own cyber forces, its other military forces, its economy or broader society) can survive a retaliatory strike in meaningful form. This decision also hinges on more than how “meaningful” is defined for one or both parties to the conflict. It depends as well on a more fundamental, more political assessment regarding how much pain the two countries and societies can withstand.

Paradoxically, and especially relevant to Americans, the more advanced a country is, the less able it arguably is to deal satisfactorily with the disruptions stemming from a major cyber strike. And because the converse makes sense, too, it may not be decisive that the United States could inflict more damage in absolute terms in a cyber exchange on foes such as North Korea or Iran or Russia or even China than vice versa. The kinds of hardships stemming from the disabling of modern infrastructure could be much more tolerable for the peoples of these less developed, less prosperous countries than for Americans because much greater percentages of them rely so much less on these systems. Moreover, life without them is a much more recent memory – as are knowledge of and experience with coping.

That’s where, for all the information it contains (and keeping in mind that national cyber capabilities are closely guarded secrets), this detailed new Politico article on U.S. forces in this realm falls short. Even if America’s technological edge is as strong as portrayed, some of its adversaries might not be impressed enough to be deterred. One big possible policy implication: Asymmetry means that shoring up the nation’s cyber defenses, difficult as that is, is at least as important for ensuring cyber-security as creating matchless offenses. And as RealityChek readers know, U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper and other senior officials have said – for attribution – that these offenses actually aren’t so matchless. Another big implication – at least against China, trade and broader economic sanctions may be the most effective cyber counter-moves, since China’s dictators will struggle so to remain in power without the growing prosperity created largely by exporting to the United States.

One conclusion that shouldn’t be drawn from this cyber predicament is that a realistic way out is an international treaty or code of conduct banning or limiting cyber war. In this respect, it’s encouraging that Joseph S. Nye’s new essay for Project Syndicate is hardly a ringing endorsement of such legalisms and their effectiveness. But he does suggest that these measures can strengthen deterrence, and notes approvingly that

“major states have agreed that cyber war will be limited by the law of armed conflict, which requires discrimination between military and civilian targets and proportionality in terms of consequences. Last July, the United Nations Group of Government Experts recommended excluding civilian targets from cyberattacks, and that norm was endorsed at last month’s G-20 summit.”

Nye isn’t an Obama administration official, but he has been at the center of Democratic Party foreign policy circles for decades, and his pioneering emphasis on “soft power,” multilateralism, and other supposed substitutes for military might fits right in with Mr. Obama’s belief that world affairs is coming to be dominated by a fundamentally new, more cooperative set of dynamics and relationships. 

So it’s important to note that these ideas are simply efforts to define America’s biggest international problems – and international tensions in general – out of existence. Think about it: If the United States faced cyber-armed adversaries who were willing to abide fully by the conflict-limiting agreements they signed, these agreements wouldn’t be needed in the first place. For those countries would never take such commitments seriously unless they decided that their stake in maintaining whatever degree of (shaky) global peace and order prevails significantly outweighs whatever goals they could hope to achieve through major use of cyber-weapons – or any other weapons.

That is, if the world’s Chinas, Russias, and Irans were truly devoted to competing for influence peacefully and according to a set of rules, the rules would simply codify that reality. Their existence on a piece of paper cannot create it. And the asymmetry problem makes assuming their reasonableness (at least as Americans judge it) or perceived support for the global status quo even less reasonable.

Moreover, anyone believing that the history of nuclear arms control debunks that pessimism doesn’t understand that the various Cold War agreements signed by the United States and Soviet Union had nothing important to due with preventing armageddon. Instead, in this case, the conditions for a successful “balance of terror” – of mutual deterrence – were obviously in place. Fears of final physical destruction trumped all other considerations and produced restraint.

Sadly, there’s no evidence that any of the presidential candidates this year have better ideas. But as I wrote above, what the public doesn’t know about America’s cyber-war programs and strategies greatly (and properly) exceeds what it knows. So perhaps there’s some hope that truly realistic approaches are being developed, and that the next president will start learning about them once he or she is elected.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Worrisome Obama Interview on Iran

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allies, arms control, China, Cold War, INF treaty, inspections, Iran, Iran deal, New York Times, nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Richard Nixon, Robert Gates, Ronald Reagan, sanctions, Soviet Union, Thomas Friedman, verification

On Day Two of what we might call the Iran Nuclear Deal Era, I find myself wondering whether the more President Obama speaks out on the agreement, the weaker public support will get. Based on his new interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, this at least certainly should be the case.

To be clear, I continue to believe there could be a respectable case for Congress approving the agreement. It depends largely on technical questions about whether the monitoring and verification provisions really are crafted well enough to at least postpone Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. I have strong doubts for political reasons, as I’ve explained, but hesitate at this point to decide definitively. These are matters that should be illuminated by serious evaluation process by lawmakers. Yet the Friedman interview casts further doubt on Mr. Obama’s strategic and political judgment, which House and Senate members need to consider as well.

Arguably the loopiest claim Mr. Obama made in the interview came in response to Friedman’s question, “Why should the Iranians be afraid” of “serious U.S. military retaliation if [they cheat]?” In fact, the question itself was kind of loopy, since the most immediate question raised by the prospect of Iranian violations is whether sanctions really are certain to be “snapped back” on. Even so, I was startled to read Mr. Obama answer, “Because we could knock out their military in speed and dispatch if we chose to, and I think they have seen my willingness to take military action where I thought it was important for U.S. interests.”

Leave aside any doubts over the president’s trigger finger. Does he really believe that the United States, either alone or even together with allies, could reduce Iran to a military pygmy? If so, then why doesn’t he have similar confidence about destroying Iran’s nuclear complex? What’s known of it is located in many fewer locations than Tehran’s military deployments, and without any meaningful Iranian defenses, America would face a much easier challenge monitoring and, if need be, acting against any other facilities. Moreover, these undeclared sites would pose much less of a proliferation danger in the absence of the declared sites.

Just as important: Could this possibly be the Plan B I called for yesterday? At least for now, I sure hope not, especially given warnings against this course of action from a wide range of military experts in the United States, Israel, and abroad, including Mr. Obama’s own former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Mr. Obama’s discussion of sanctions, moreover, seems to bear out my concerns that international support for keeping Iran non-nuclear has always been paper-thin, and that as a result, talk of automatic or even highly likely snap back is nonsense. On the one hand, the president told Friedman that the current sanctions have “crippled the Iranian economy and ultimately brought them to the table.” He attributed their effectiveness to widespread global agreement that “it would be a great danger to the region, to our allies, to the world, if Iran possessed a nuclear weapon.”

On the other hand, however, Mr. Obama emphatically insisted that “in the absence of a deal, our ability to sustain these sanctions was not in the cards,” mainly because so many other countries had paid so much greater an economic price that America. He continued:

“if they saw us walking away from what technical experts believe is a legitimate mechanism to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon — if they saw that our diplomatic efforts were not sincere, or were trying to encompass not just the nuclear program, but every policy disagreement that we might have with Iran, then frankly, those sanctions would start falling apart very rapidly.”

But as I emphasized yesterday, countries that evidently have made their economic pain so clear to Mr. Obama can’t possibly view a nuclear weapons-free Iran as their top priority, and can’t be relied on to implement threats of snap back – unless an Iranian violation is genuinely obvious and egregious. In fact, the further into the deal’s time frame we proceed, the less reliable the allies will become – since they’ll have ever more Iran-related business to lose.

Finally, for now, it’s disturbing to see Mr. Obama compare his Iran breakthrough with (using Friedman’s words) “the same strategic logic that Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used to approach the Soviet Union and China.” But as I noted yesterday, America’s China policy looks ever more like an historic failure. Beijing has become increasingly powerful and belligerent, and the leadership’s hold on power has remained strong because the trade profits and technology it’s secured (largely) from the United States have enabled it to foster prosperity as well as build up its military.

If anything, the Reagan-Soviet analogy is further off base. The former president signed a treaty on intermediate range nuclear weapons (INF) with Mikhail Gorbachev, and agreed to resume talks with Moscow on longer range, strategic arms. But before the INF deal was signed, he deployed American missiles in Europe to offset previous Soviet installations, and more broadly launched a huge military (including nuclear) buildup that played a big role in persuading Soviet leaders that the vastly superior U.S. economy could race theirs into the ground. The president also worked overtime to keep curbs on western dealings with the Soviet economy – often over heated allied objections. And in an interesting coda, the Obama administration recently has accused Russia of violating the INF accord.

It’s still of course possible that Mr. Obama has produced an Iran deal that protects American national security better than any realistic alternative. But if he has, the Friedman interview strongly suggests that the adage “Nonsense in, nonsense out” (to put it politely) will never be the same.