Making Sense: An Interview with Leslie Gelb

Editor's Note: Leslie Gelb is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the new book: Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue U.S. Foreign Policy. A Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times, Gelb served in both the Defense and State Departments. When we spoke, President Obama had just unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan.

RCW: What do you make of the Obama administration’s plan for Afghanistan?

GELB: I’m of two minds. I want it to work. I have a strong vested interest in its success. And I hope that my take on the situation in Afghanistan and my sense of what Obama’s trying to do are wrong. However, his goals are still much too large and unattainable - even though they’re no longer goofy in the way Bush’s were. [Bush] wanted to turn Afghanistan into a democratic, free market paradise. That wasn’t going to happen. That’s been stripped away. Now the focus is on guaranteeing that terrorists will never have a foothold there again.

Even if we attained this goal in Afghanistan [terrorists] could still hit us today from Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, or Yemen. To think that we can deal with them all by military attack and occupation and a long term military presence is a misuse of American power.

[President Obama] makes a very big deal of the fact that he is going to have benchmarks for Pakistan and Afghanistan. But strikingly there were no benchmarks announced with his plans. He hasn’t worked them out yet. It’s a centerpiece to the policy and it doesn’t exist! What do we expect of the Afghans and Pakistanis? My experience with benchmarks during Vietnam was when they weren’t met, we didn’t walk away. We did more ourselves.

RCW: What’s your impression of the Obama administration’s approach to Iran?

GELB: The administration’s rhetoric has been sensitive and sensible. The Iranians should appreciate it. They won’t. They told us jump off a bridge, but they’re talking to themselves. They’re reassuring themselves that they won’t be snookered by the Americans. They’re more hesitant than us to open relations because they know that if they open up their country to the West, to trade and investment, it’s their power that’s diminished, not ours. We need to have confidence in ourselves, instead of always worrying that midgets have power over us. Iran, I predict, will be our closest ally in that part of the world between five and ten years from now.

RCW: Is that with the Mullahs still ruling the country?

GELB: The Mullah’s power would be curtailed. It will happen naturally. Just go back to 9/11. There was only one country in that part of the world, from South Asia to Palestine, where people flooded into the streets in sympathy for the U.S. - that was in Iran. In every other country, people flocked into the streets to cheer our being attacked.

RCW: One of the themes of Power Rules is that the U.S. must play to its strengths, and nation building, you argue, isn’t one of them. Yet if we accept that nation building isn’t an American strength, why shouldn’t we make the necessary investments to improve our weakness, rather than just accept it?

GELB: I don’t want to walk away from countries that are ready, willing and able to help themselves. But we need to have very hard headed criteria about who is helpable. And we can’t, from the outside, transform these countries. It only happens from within. People say ‘you did it in Germany Japan and South Korea.’ They had huge middle classes. They had all the basics for democratic development. And Korea had a thirty year dictatorship before they could become a democracy.

RCW: You write in Power Rules that America is the most powerful nation because only the U.S. can lead collective efforts to solve global problems. Some would argue that other second-tier powers can’t solve problems because U.S. leadership has either sapped them of the ability or allowed them to freeload. Couldn’t we share the burden?

GELB: I wish that view were true. But I think the idea that we could turn over that responsibility is hilariously and dangerously naïve. They can’t do it. The EU couldn’t take on responsibility in their own back yard when there was real threat to them in the Balkans. As far as doing it elsewhere in the world, they’re busy protecting their own interests. The Chinese leaders themselves say that they’re not ready to assume world leadership. India’s foreign policy consists of Pakistan, what world leadership would they offer?

If you wanted to turn over responsibility to these nations, they wouldn’t take it. They’re not clamoring for leadership but to have their views taken into account.

RCW: In the book, you praise China for how it has leveraged its growing economic clout. How would you characterize Chinese behavior during the current downturn and particularly in the past few weeks?

GELB: They know if solutions are to come, we are going to be the one generating them. They’re just putting their oars in. China is saying we need to be responsive to their views. It’s called – and excuse me for using a dirty word - bargaining.

Economic power is different to wield. The president has almost complete authority over the military and diplomacy –to go to war and make peace. The economy is largely private and he can’t control it. He has to think about it more as the tide…. Something you deploy and it has effects over time.

RCW: Before the election, you had urged Republican realists to break with the GOP and partner with “Truman-Acheson” Democrats more in line with their views than the neoconservatives. Are realists more at home with the Democrats in 2009?

GELB: The Republican realists – James Baker and Brent Scowcroft – were terrific. They were very sensible about what we can and can’t do. There is a natural policy relationship between them and their Democratic counterparts. I think their Democratic counterparts are more willing to work with them than vice versa. I think they still see themselves more as Republicans than as realists.

RCW: Do you think we’ll ever see the Republican party re-embrace realism?

GELB: I don’t think there’s any chance the Republicans will embrace the foreign policy approaches of Scowcroft and George H.W. Bush. The Republican party as a whole is in la-la land.

RCW: You worked in the State and Defense Departments during the Cold War. Given the recent tensions with Russia, is talk of a “second Cold War” premature or prescient? What can the two countries do to improve relations?

GELB: The Russians love to play muscular diplomacy, it’s in their bones, and that’s how they deal with us and the world. They love to feel like a great power. And on some issues, like dealing with Iran and dealing with their neighbors, they are a major power and we ought to treat them that way. I don’t think we’ll have a stand off if we play our cards correctly. I believe over time we’ll get their cooperation, but you need to give in order to get. It will mean re-thinking things like our missile defense in Eastern Europe- which we don’t need anyway.

RCW: In 2006 you proposed a plan with now VP Biden to federalize Iraq between the three dominant ethnic/religious groups. President Bush chose instead to send additional forces into Iraq to shore up the central government. Who had it right?

GELB: I think about it fairly often. First, [our plan] left it up to the Iraqis. It was nothing we wanted to impose on them. That would be nuts. It seemed to me even before the war, that once you take the dictator away, the country breaks up into different interests. And the level of trust and confidence between them isn’t very high. To me, it’s critical for [the Iraqis] to come to political settlement among themselves and to do so before we move our military presence out. So I urged them to make this deal. And I still believe the distribution of interests in Iraq favors a decentralized approach.

RCW: And your co-author?

GELB: I don’t know where he is [on that] now.