Anthony Cordesman tries (pdf):

The fact remains, however, that if the CRS and OMB figures for FY2001-FY2013 that follow are totaled for all direct spending on the war, they reach $641.7 billion, of which $198.2 billion – or over 30% – will be spent in FY2012 and FY2013. This is an incredible amount of money to have spent with so few controls, so few plans, so little auditing, and almost no credible measures of effectiveness

As Cordesman also notes, it's laid the foundation for a tremendous amount of Afghan corruption and created a state so precarious it could easily collapse as the funding is withdrawn - as it must be, over time.

It will be interesting to see if the self-styled stewards of America's fiscal responsibility will have anything to say about this. Just today, National Review published a piece lambasting the (admittedly poor) investment in GM which soaked tax payers to the tune of about $66 billion. I wonder what they'd make of the hundreds of billions invested in Afghanistan - a growing share of which is being spent on President Obama's watch.

What could go wrong:

Syrian rebels battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have begun receiving significantly more and better weapons in recent weeks, an effort paid for by Persian Gulf nations and coordinated in part by the United States, according to opposition activists and U.S. and foreign officials.

Obama administration officials emphasized that the United States is neither supplying nor funding the lethal material, which includes antitank weaponry. Instead, they said, the administration has expanded contacts with opposition military forces to provide the gulf nations with assessments of rebel credibility and command-and-control infrastructure.

“We are increasing our nonlethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, and we continue to coordinate our efforts with friends and allies in the region and beyond in order to have the biggest impact on what we are collectively doing,” said a senior State Department official, one of several U.S. and foreign government officials who discussed the evolving effort on the condition of anonymity.

Ultimately, regional states are going to make their own decisions to arm whatever groups they want, independent of what Washington wants. But the idea that Washington is going to scurry around and "coordinate" an effective end to the Assad regime and be able to contain the aftermath seems to fly in the face of recent experience in both Iraq and Libya.

Last week, Kennette Benedict argued that NATO's contentious missile defense shield was actually a dud that didn't work. The gist:

Independent scientists and engineers in the United States and Russia have consistently judged past efforts to be failures, and they have written detailed reviews showing why the plans for such missile defenses are not technically feasible. Yet, in spite of these technical critiques and negative results, the US government has persisted in its claims of success. Until now.

A little-noticed report released in September 2011 by the Defense Science Board, an independent advisory committee to the US Defense Department, found three major problems with the Early Intercept Ballistic Missile Defense now being developed. Apparently, (1) none of the necessary radars in the European Phased Adaptive Approach defense system are powerful enough to work, (2) none of the existing missile defense sensors can reliably distinguish among warheads, decoys, and other debris, and (3) US intelligence already has observed foreign ballistic missile launches that can deploy decoys and other countermeasures. So, after 27 years of development and $150 billion spent, there still is no effective missile shield -- it is still a dream.

NATO says its missile defense system is flexible and adaptive and deployments would correspond to the ballistic missile threat from the south. (Because of Turkish sensitivity, NATO cannot explicitly label Iran as the threat.) It is this adaptive uncertainty, not today's capabilities, that most concerns Russia. US radars and satellites could be upgraded and integrated to work jointly with additional ally and partner sensors to seriously "beef up" the system's efficiency, Deputy Chief of General Staff Colonel-General Vladimir Gerasimov said PPT. Colonel Evgeny Ilyin added that the mobility of sea-based assets, the numbers of deployed interceptors, and their velocities were among the other factors that, if enhanced, could pose a threat to Russia. Moscow is unsure about the NATO system's parameters but knows what they should not be.

It's worth reading in full to get the full sense of Russia's concerns.

Francois Hollande was inaugurated today as the new president of France. He immediately boarded a plane to Germany to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. En route to Berlin, his plane was hit by lightning. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

However, one wonders if Mother Nature is sending an omen about the future of the Eurozone.

More from the AFP.

(AP Photo)

Interesting:

While politicians, insiders and experts may be divided over how much the government should spend on the nation’s defense, there’s a surprising consensus among the public about what should be done: They want to cut spending far more deeply than either the Obama administration or the Republicans.

That’s according to the results of an innovative, new, nationwide survey by three nonprofit groups, the Center for Public Integrity, the Program for Public Consultation and the Stimson Center. Not only does the public want deep cuts, it wants those cuts to encompass spending in virtually every military domain — air power, sea power, ground forces, nuclear weapons, and missile defenses.

According to the survey, in which respondents were told about the size of the budget as well as shown expert arguments for and against spending cuts, two-thirds of Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats supported making immediate cuts — a position at odds with the leaderships of both political parties.

The average total cut was around $103 billion, a substantial portion of the current $562 billion base defense budget, while the majority supported cutting it at least $83 billion. These amounts both exceed a threatened cut of $55 billion at the end of this year under so-called “sequestration” legislation passed in 2011, which Pentagon officials and lawmakers alike have claimed would be devastating.

I think this is another clear example where "public opinion" is really irrelevant in the shaping of public policy. (Via David Axe)

David Sanger had a piece over the weekend wherein many of Governor Romney's foreign policy advisers griped about being ignored by their candidate:

But what has struck both his advisers and outside Republicans is that in his effort to secure the nomination, Mr. Romney’s public comments have usually rejected mainstream Republican orthodoxy. They sound more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the “Bolton faction,” as insiders call the group led by John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations.

I hate to break it to Sanger but the "talking points of the neoconservatives" are the Republican orthodoxy. Consider Sanger's example of what constitutes as a more "nuanced" critique of the Obama administration:

So far Mr. Romney’s most nuanced line of attack was laid out in the introduction to a campaign white paper last fall written by Eliot Cohen, a historian and security expert who worked for Condoleezza Rice in the State Department, that the “high council of the Obama administration” views the “United States as a power in decline,” a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.” It also alleged a “torrent of criticism, unprecedented for an American president, that Barack Obama has directed at his own country.”

The first quote is completely unsubstantiated in the white paper and is also false. But it is a staple of ... neoconservative criticism of the Obama administration.

The second critique is silly - Obama hurt America's feelings! But guess what - it's another neocon talking point.

(To be fair, the entire white paper is better than these quotes would indicate.)

And regardless of what talking points he prefers, it's really pointless to go searching for a Romney doctrine at this point. I suspect Romney leans toward the "Bolton faction" because it produces the best soundbites and the most scathing attacks against President Obama. Whether a President Romney would govern according to the councils of the "Bolton faction" would really depend on factors no one can accurately anticipate today.

Brendan Taylor thinks that, contrary to the emerging conventional wisdom, the South China Sea isn't all that important:

I should start by saying that my scepticism regarding the strategic significance of the South China Sea is largely a reaction to the flurry of recent op-eds and essays identifying this area as a potential trigger for great power conflict. I doubt that such a trigger really exists, certainly not one with the potential to impact upon Asia's larger strategic order.

The reasons for my scepticism become clear when we compare the South China Sea with Asia's two most widely accepted flashpoints, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. Richard Bush and Michael O'Hanlon have argued that the problem of Taiwan could spark a nuclear war involving 1.5 billion people and produce a fundamental change in the international order. Similar estimates suggest that a Korean conflict would cost somewhere in the vicinity of US$ 1trillion and 500,000 lives during its first 90 days.

It's difficult to envisage a scenario where a skirmish in the South China Sea could erupt into a conflict of that magnitude. For this reason, I just don't think it's a real flashpoint.

Patrick Clawson wants regime change in Iran:

Whether or not diplomacy results in an agreement, the sanctions have already fulfilled the core objective of the Obama administration -- namely, kick-starting negotiations. But that is not the right goal. Given Iran’s poor track record of honoring agreements, negotiations remain a gamble because they may never lead to an agreement, let alone one that can be sustained. Rather than focus on talks that may not produce a deal, then, the United States should place far more emphasis on supporting democracy and human rights in Iran. A democratic Iran would likely drop state support for terrorism and end its interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, improving stability in the Middle East. And although Iran’s strongly nationalist democrats are proud of the country’s nuclear progress, their priority is to rejoin the community of nations, so they will likely agree to peaceful nuclearization in exchange for an end to their country’s isolation. [Emphasis mine.]

Follow the logic: a nuclear-armed, democratic U.S. must interfere in Iran's internal affairs to bring about a democratic revolution in Iran so that once Iran becomes a democracy, it will no longer want nuclear weapons or interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Because it's a democracy.

Makes sense.

To celebrate his inauguration, newly installed Russian President Vladimir Putin took to the ice rink. Amazingly, his ragtag group of amateurs defeated a professional hockey team, with Mr. Putin himself scoring the game-winning goal. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by a "blond female translator," was there to cheer him on.

The Telegraph goes on to report:

Within minutes of his first appearance, the legends' defence seemed to magically vanish into thin air, allowing Mr Putin through to deftly slot the puck into the back of the net and equalise.

...

The referee then decreed that the match be decided by penalties and Mr Putin had the decisive shot, flicked the puck past the mountainous goaltender - who somehow avoided getting in the way of the softly-struck shot - and his team had won.

Mr. Putin's list of achievements is indeed quite long. Not only is he a skilled hockey player, but he is also an F1 race car driver, an archaeologist, and a rugged survivalist who can brave the Siberian wilderness without a shirt. And as a 2009 ABC News report stated, he is also adept at "volleyball, skiing, blacksmithing. He rides in submarines and fighter jets. He bowls. He tranquilizes tigers."

Is there anything this man can't do?

Well, there is one thing: Term limits. He definitely can't do those.

(AP Photo)

Via Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf laments some mislabeling:

In summary, President Obama escalated a major war and sent tens of thousands more troops to fight it, even as he joined in regime change in a different country, ordered drone strikes in at least three others, and sent commandos into Pakistan, a list of aggressive actions that isn't even exhaustive.

It's perverse for that record to be rendered, in America's newspaper of record, as Obama "straddling the precarious line between hawk and dove." In fact, he is a hawk. Republicans are misrepresenting his record and positions and some progressives are doing the same, because they are rightly embarrassed by the gulf between his campaign promises and the record he's amassed.

I think what Friedersdorf has identified is the bankruptcy of the hawk/dove label. In reality, no post-Cold War U.S. president could accurately be called a "dove." Every Democratic president since Roosevelt has either initiated large wars, escalated those wars, ramped up military spending or used military force in some capacity. Any contemporary president inherits a foreign policy apparatus that is weighted heavily toward the military (with its global footprint and immense budget) and a bureaucracy that perceives itself as stewards of the global order. Throw in the war on terror, with its open-ended mandate for interventionism, and it's silly on its face to call any president a "dove."

What's always interested me is why Republicans have chosen to ignore the tradition of Eisenhower and Nixon (presidents who stepped in to end the failed or stalemated wars initiated by their Democratic predecessors) and instead run as the amplified id of America's quasi-imperial foreign policy. Rather than step back and question some basic premises of America's global footprint or set of "interests" in need of a global nanny state funded by U.S. taxpayers, most Republicans run on a platform of global activism and big government.

I happened to listen to this TED talk over the weekend by Paul Gilding dubbed "The Earth Is Full." The short version is: we, as a species, are doomed! Gilding claims that we're outgrowing our environment and will enter an era of "peak everything" with some pretty grim consequences.

Then this morning I read Daniel Bier, who, while not responding directly to Gilding, rebuts his central thesis thusly:

Growth is only limited by our ability to innovate and solve problems, and that is only limited by our access to innovators and problem solvers.

The quixotic effort to quantify the exact amount of resources on earth and calculate when we will “run out” is doomed to fail because people are constantly inventing new ideas and discovering new uses for things. Nothing is a resource until someone discovers an application for it.

These two lines of thought are not actually mutually exclusive. One can believe that we're poised to exhaust economically viable energy sources and modes of agriculture yet still believe that we'll merrily skip along via some technological breakthrough to other modes of energy or agriculture that we can't think of yet. In fact, to have Bier's growth-oriented optimism, you essentially accept Gilding's case that existing resources are eventually going to run dry. One school of thought is worried about that outcome, the other is not.

Still, this and the recent European elections did get me thinking about a curious ideological disconnect. On the one hand, the left (in general) favors Keynesian solutions to economic crises on the basis that sacrificing growth today for balanced budgets in the future is a dangerous trade-off. "In the long term, we're all dead," as Keynes famously quipped. Conservatives, by contrast, are generally willing to embrace austerity and negative growth in the short term for fiscal balance over the long term.

Yet when it comes to the environment, it's the reverse: liberals are more willing to sacrifice short-term economic growth for long-term gain, while conservatives are more concerned with near-term growth than with long-term balance.

The UK's Conservative-led coalition government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron took a beating in local elections, losing some 400 seats. The junior partner of the coalition, the Liberal Democrats, lost 336 seats.

The election did not affect the membership of Parliament, but it did send a loud, clear message of voter dissatisfaction, perhaps driven by the country's poor economic performance. Last week, it was reported that the UK has officially entered a double-dip recession.

More from the Associated Press.

(AP Photo)

Powell and Musharraf on Tuesday both emphasized a role for moderate Taliban elements in a future government, although the Northern Alliance immediately rejected any Taliban presence in a future political arrangement. - Time, 2001

In coordination with the Afghan government, my Administration has been in direct discussions with the Taliban. We have made it clear that they can be a part of this future if they break with al Qaeda, renounce violence, and abide by Afghan laws. Many members of the Taliban - from foot soldiers to leaders - have indicated an interest in reconciliation. A path to peace is now set before them. Those who refuse to walk it will face strong Afghan Security Forces, backed by the United States and our allies. - President Obama, 2012

Rather than find some kind of ad-hoc, messy and compromising ending to the Afghan war in 2001, Washington decided to spend hundreds of lives and billions of dollars to find an ad-hoc, messy and compromising ending to the Afghan war in 2012 (or 2014 or whenever). Brilliant.

If anything, the beginning of the end in Afghanistan will help Obama build his “leadership” case against Mitt Romney. With the killing of bin Laden, the intervention in Libya, and the gradual end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has the resume he needs to present himself as a strong and competent manager of the country’s foreign affairs, which in turn, might improve perceptions of his economic management. What’s more, this provides a clear contrast with Romney, who at varying times in the last three years, has opposed each of these moves. At the end of the day, Obama will be able to pose a simple question to the American public—“Do you want a president who has brought peace, security, and good relations with our allies, or do you want a president who has called for extending our wars, and starting new ones?" [Emphasis mine - GS.] - James Bouie

Right. So President Obama will hail the success of the new war he started in Libya while castigating Romney for wanting to start a new war. I suspect we'll see this kind of cognitive dissonance emerge frequently during the campaign.

Michael Rubin claims that the 'core' of realism is the betrayal of dissidents:

But the betrayal of dissidents is simply the bread-and-butter both of realists and the UN’s breed of internationalists, both philosophies to which Obama aspires... Realists will always find an excuse to ignore dissidents and dismiss their fight for freedom and liberty. Unfortunately, what these realists see as sophistication not only is amoral, but actively undercuts long-term U.S. security.

It's true that realists are reluctant to take up the cause of dissidents in other countries and that this does not always redound to American glory. But this is because realists recognize that the world is not an ideal place and that the concerns of dissidents, however legitimate, always have to be weighed against U.S. interests and America's capability to actually effect the change these dissidents want to see. If all that was required to change China's human rights record was more U.S. hectoring and lecturing, it would have happened already.

Do realists always strike the right balance? Of course not. But Rubin's formulation elevates the unfortunate trade-off that can result from a realist approach as somehow the central, animating principle. In fact, it would be like saying that mass civilian death, torture and population displacements are the "core" of neoconservatism since that is what their policy produced in Iraq and would likely produce if U.S. "leadership" were exercised in places like Syria. But I wouldn't argue that such maladies are neoconservatism's "core" - since I don't believe neoconservatives are bloodthirsty sadists. Though, if I were a neoconservative, I certainly would be careful about throwing charges of "amorality" around.