Talking to the Taliban will not solve our problems in Afghanistan

Aaron Ellis 10.34am

The debate over Afghanistan is like a boom & bust economy: repeatedly rocked by speculative financial bubbles that promise to end the war quickly.

As with financial bubbles, these get-peace-quick schemes show good returns initially but soon collapse under the weight of their own hype. Their investors - politicians, media pundits et al - are left feeling cheated, and so begin looking for the next big idea. The cycle continues.

In 2009, many ‘investors’ bought into population-centric counterinsurgency (P-COIN). That bubble burst when the following year when President Obama fired ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal, the architect of the P-COIN strategy in Afghanistan. If you’re looking for the proverbial get-peace-quick investment today, the smart money’s on talking to the Taliban.

Like bubbles before it, talking to the Taliban is not a solution to our Afghan problems. It will not achieve our stated objective of stopping al-Qa’ida from returning to the country and using it as a safe haven from which to plan attacks on the West.

David Cameron signed a strategic partnership with President Hamid Karzai in January, which states that both their governments:

“…recognise the threat posed by terrorism and violent extremism, particularly from Al-Qaeda, and will strive unceasingly to ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for any insurgent or terrorist group…”

The West’s strategy is two-fold. First, we will build up the country’s security forces so that they can expel al-Qa’ida if they try to return after our troops leave in 2014. Second, we will persuade the Taliban to break from the terrorist group by luring them into a power-sharing deal. The Prime Minister mentioned this during his press conference with President Karzai.

Regrettably, this strategy is conceptually flawed.

The first part assumes that Osama bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in the 1990s because it was a defenceless failed state. The second part assumes that if the Taliban agree to keep al-Qa’ida out of the country then they will be able to impose their will on local powerbrokers in a way no Afghan government has been able to do since the Iron Amir in the nineteenth century.

Both assumptions are undermined by the Haqqani network, which is allegedly responsible for the attacks in Kabul on Sunday.

When Osama bin Laden was kicked out of the Sudan in 1996, he did not flee to Afghanistan because it was a failed state; he fled there because of the protection offered by his close relationships with local powerbrokers like Jalaluddin Haqqani. Indeed, the grizzled guerrilla leader was crucial to al-Qa’ida, according to a paper published last July by West Point’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Haqqani provided al-Qa’ida with space to develop.

The CTC paper warns that Haqqani’s network retains strong ties to al-Qa’ida, suggesting it is unlikely the former will meaningfully disengage. If we are to contemplate talking to the Taliban, we have to understand the important role the Haqqanis play in the war. They are the most militarily effective force among the insurgency and the only conduit for the Taliban to project power in the direction of Kabul and south-east Afghanistan.

It is likely that the Haqqani network orchestrated the attacks on Sunday, as well as similar attacks in the Afghan capital last September. These ‘spectaculars’, as they are called, are meant to convey the simple message that the Taliban (via the Haqqanis) can strike anywhere irrespective of how secure an area seems.

Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Afghanistan, captured the insurgents’ dynamic when he commented tartly: “The Taliban are very good as issuing statements, less good at fighting.”

The historian Thomas Barfield explains, and is worth quoting at length:

“…[t]hose Afghan leaders who would best succeed during the [twentieth] century employed a ‘Wizard of Oz’ strategy. They declared their governments all-powerful, but rarely risked testing that claim by implementing controversial policies.

Conversely, the leaders who were most prone to failure and state collapse were those who assumed that they possessed the power to do as they pleased, and then provoked opposition that their regimes proved incapable of suppressing.”

Afghanistan is perhaps the most complex conflict in history. It contains all the problems of modern warfare and is the sum of decades of internal strife and great power politics.

The downside to this is the difficulty in finding solutions. “In Afghanistan, things are rarely as they seem,” General McChrystal once said. “If you pull the lever, the outcome is not what you have been programmed to think.”

This applies to the many get-peace-quick schemes that have dominated the Afghan debate, whether in counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, or talking to the Taliban. All produce outcomes that their many ‘investors’ do not anticipate, so putting the war effort at risk.

If we truly want to achieve our stated objective in Afghanistan - a relatively stable  country that can block al-Qa’ida’s return - then our solutions need to be as nuanced as the war is complex.

And of course, more and more governments are concluding that this just isn’t worth the effort.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Though an American will win, an African should be the next President of the World Bank

Alexander Pannett 7.15am

The World Bank is about to elect a new President.

There are three very well qualified candidates, who all promise to change an institution that has suffered severe criticism in recent years about its approach to global development.

The World Bank has a real opportunity to select a President from a developing nation and break out of its image as being run at the behest of the World’s richest nations (i.e. the West~).

In this regard, there is a clear favourite in Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (pictured above). As well as being an economics graduate from an Ivy League university and a former managing director of the World Bank itself, she has a proven track record as a finance minister of a major developing nation.  She also has the backing of the African Union. Who better to reform the World Bank and revolutionise its approach to the developing world?

Unfortunately, every president since the bank’s creation in 1946 has been an American. This is the consequence of a gentleman’s agreement with European nations. They support an American candidate for the World Bank and, in return, the Americans support a European for the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its sister organisation.

Voting at the IMF and the World Bank has also been weighted in favour of richer, Western nations. Thus the global financial institutions of the Bretton Woods system have been dominated by westerners since their inception.

Such a bias towards the developed world has attracted criticism that the conditions of economic funding to developing nations are often unsuited to those nation’s particular needs, concentrating on short-term GDP growth rather than long term stability. The results have often led to painful restructuring of traditional societies, local industries and employment practices as economies are forced to open up to global free markets in return for capital from the World Bank.

The experiences of Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America in the 1990s, are all demonstrative of this economic “shock therapy”, which often achieves more harm than good by forcing countries to accept structural adjustment packages which are tied to strict conditions resulting in a developing country deepening its dependence on foreign financial flows.

The consequences have been spiralling debt, massive unemployment, rising economic inequality and widespread social depredation as social services crumbled.

Developing countries that accept credit from the World Bank to ease desperate liquidity concerns have ceded economic sovereignty to World Bank supervision, where World Bank consultants can intervene and recommend private investor infrastructure ‘partnerships’ in areas ranging from health and education to utilities.

This transfers economic authority to the IMF, World Bank and foreign investor interests, leaving the developing country with little option but to accept strict conditions in order to ensure continued access to credit in order to meet its debts. Structural adjustment packages have deepened and prolonged financial crisis and underdevelopment in many cases and undermined the sovereignty of developing countries.

This is why a World Bank president who understands the harm that neo-liberal economic policies can impose on un-prepared markets is vital if developing nations are to secure lines of credit that promote sustainable development rather than trap nations in debt.

Regrettably, the chances of a non-American becoming president are nil. With the Europeans having secured the American vote for the election of their candidate, Christine Lagarde, to lead the IMF, they are certain to return the favour. Moreover, it is election year in the United States and President Obama will not want to be seen as weak by becoming the first US President to fail to have their World Bank candidate elected.

This is not to say that President Obama’s nomination, Jim Yong Kim, is not an excellent candidate, with an impressive reputation in international development.  He is also a doctor and former World Health Organisation official. The fact that President Obama has selected an individual with deep experience in development rather than a former politician or banker, as all former American nominations have been, suggests he is starting to address concerns that the World Bank be changed to meet the needs of developing countries rather than be a mere Jesuitical proponent of laissez-faire economics.

Yet until the World Bank and IMF appoint candidates according to merit rather than arcane arrangements, we will carry on wasting chances to help developing nations in a sustainable way and alleviate the grave poverty and environmental concerns that will continue to afflict both humanity and the biosphere we live in for the foreseeable future.

Follow Alexander on Twitter @alpannett

China can still learn from the West

Alexander Pannett 11.50pm

This week has seen the visit of Xi Jinping, the Vice-President of China, to the US.

It has been heralded as an important moment for the man widely expected to become China’s next president.

If this is so, Xi Jinping will be the leader of China at the moment that China has been forecast to eclipse the US as the largest economy in the world (in 2023).  To underline the importance of this fact, this will be the first time that a non-Western nation will have been the largest economy in the world for 500 years and the first non-democracy in almost 200 years.

The visit has again raised debate over the huge economic achievement of China compared with a soporific West that seems to lurch from one debilitating crisis to another. Commentators have insisted that it is now the West who should take political and economic lessons from China regarding the “China Model” of state capitalism rather than the alleged languidness and instability of the Western democratic model.

Impressive and sustained Chinese growth has been the defining feature of geo-strategic politics over the last 20 years cannot be denied. It appears that the rise of Islamic terrorism was a minor detour against the real historical changes affecting the world; the continuing transfer of wealth and power from West to East.

 Chinese advocates point to their government’s long-terms solidity, being able to implement projects that bring economic growth regardless of public opinion. The one party state can extend its will throughout China as no Western democratic government can. This allows for extensively ambitious construction works that have forged an infrastructure that has driven China to its current economic paean.

While the East has grown in importance, the West has descended into paralysis due to internal disputes. In the US, politics has never been more partisan, which has resulted in repeated failure to reach an agreement in lowering the titanic debt that is undermining America’s stature in the world, symbolic as the Chinese are the main creditors of this debt. In Europe, a sovereign debt crisis that has no end in sight threatens the very survival of the European Union.

America’s war on terrorism has shattered the Western unity that existed during the Cold War. Worse still, the Western intellectual genealogy that stemmed from a shared Enlightenment inheritance appears to be fraying as an increasingly secular and liberal Europe drifts further apart from an increasingly religious and conservative America. As America looks to the Pacific, Europe is becoming more pacific.

However, while there are undoubted merits to China’s economic growth, it still has much to learn from the West. Fractious as Western politics may be, democracies benefit from an attribute that all the economic growth in the world cannot bring: accountability.

Ruling through the acquiescence of the people ensures that Western governments must justify why grand endeavours are of benefit to their people. This checks the more hubristic ambitions of politicians. It also brings a modicum of transparency to the corridors of power that can too easily be swayed by vested interests, even corruption.

 A society that permits free expression will produce more innovative thinkers than a state that rejects views that differ from its priorities. It is telling that China has caught up with the technology of the West not from creating rival products or ideas through native research and development but from widespread piracy of Western intellectual property.

Though its economic growth has been herculean, China’s environmental record has been consequently sisyphean. Development has led to huge water shortages, with more than two-thirds of cities reporting an inadequate water supply and two-thirds of Chinese lakes have chemical deficiencies caused by pollution according to government estimates. Huge dust storms now envelop Beijing due to increasing desertification from over-farming. In 2005 China’s worsening air pollution cost the country $112 billion in lost economic productivity.

This is to say nothing of the social costs that have resulted from human rights abuses and a growing economic under-class. Despite its prosperity, most of China’s population earn too little to reach the threshold for income taxation. Only 24 million people make the $545 monthly threshold for taxation, according to the Ministry of Finance.

 This is the dark underside of a political system that is not accountable for its actions. The former USSR provides plenty of horrendous examples of wide-reaching government ambitions having ill-thought out and disastrous consequences. The Aral Sea is now an environmental wasteland and half its original size, due to extensive Soviet irrigation that attempted to turn Kazakhstan into a giant rice and cotton production centre. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is another example.

 The Western model of democracy is not the only model of governance or without its own faults. Western governments have often been guilty of grand strategies that have brought more pain and suffering than any lasting achievement. It should also be recognised that the current Chinese one party model originates from political ideologies that were cultivated in the West.

 However, before China grows too confident in its own manifest destiny, it should be aware of the severe dangers of a government that rules without accountability. While China’s economic achievements currently dwarf those of the West, China still has much to learn from Western democracy.

Let us hope that the coming century will be a beacon of mutual erudition between East and West. A Confucian century of social harmony, rather than a Machiavellian century of rivalry.

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How do you solve a problem like Iran?

Aaron Ellis 9.58am

This question dominates the news once a year and every politician, pundit, and foreign policy expert has an answer to it. Helpfully, they reduce their answers to a single phrase around the likes of “sanctions” or “war”. Then something else happens in the world and Iran and its nuclear programme fade from the headlines until next year.

And every year these solutions contain the same flaw: they are not part of an overarching strategy.

They are tactics. Those who push them never fully explain how they will solve this Iran Problem.

A few Iranian officials threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz last month if further sanctions were imposed on the country. So began the perennial debate. Should the West attack Iran or negotiate harder? Perhaps apply even more sanctions? The recent murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist (for which Iran has pointed a finger at Israel and the UN) led to op-eds advocating targeted killings as the best solution to the Iran Problem.

As with previous debates, few of those pushing these ‘tactical’ policies put them in the context of a wider strategy to dissuade Tehran from acquiring a nuclear capability. Few of them touched on the trade-offs and unintended consequences of their preferred one-phrase-solutions. We cannot come to an informed decision on what to do about Iran if the solutions are so underdeveloped.

The most underdeveloped is the call for war. It is not clear how military action would change the Iranian regime’s view that a nuclear capability is essential to both its own security and that of the country. Those who push for an attack never offer a strategy that connects an airstrike against an Iranian nuclear facility with Tehran giving up a decades-old ambition. The assumption seems to be that if we blow stuff up then good things will happen.

The Iran debate is a spectrum: “negotiation” sits at the opposite end to “war”. But negotiation has its flaws too. If the Iranian regime believes that a nuclear capability is essential to its security and the West believes that this is unacceptable, then towards what are we negotiating?

“Negotiation” as a solution to the Iran Problem also has trade-offs that some are not prepared to make. One can argue that just as an attack on Iran would legitimise the regime, so could negotiations, as was the case with détente during the Cold War. The Israelis are particularly susceptible to this view, writes nuclear policy expert Mark Hibbs:

“At a time when Israel is bracing for a coming wave of democratic anti-Israeli sentiment from its newly-freed Arab neighbors, Israel will want to invest in a future Iran which, as in the past, was willing to live with Israel in peace. [That] would imply that Israel wouldn’t be interested in a negotiated solution to the nuclear crisis that would legitimate Iran’s current rulers.”

In the middle of the spectrum is the vaguer term “containment”, or applying restrained but continuous pressure against the regime until it yields to Western demands or is overthrown by the Iranian people. The great George F. Kennan devised the idea of containment as a way of avoiding the extremes of war with the Russians and appeasing them, and many think that this is the best approach vis-à-vis Iran.

Both sanctions, of which the EU has just unveiled another collection, and targeted killing come under the rubric “containment”, but they both have just as many trade-offs and indirect consequences as the extremes of the debate. These are rarely touched on by those who advocate them.

Though sanctions are seen by many as an alternative to war, they could lead to it if our application of them is not more discriminating. The respected Iran scholar Gary Sick has warned that if the West completely shuts off the regime’s oil revenues, they will lose the incentive to keep open the Straits of Hormuz. One-fifth of the world’s exported oil production traverses this important waterway per day, as does 85% of the UK’s imported LNG (liquefied natural gas). Any attempt by Tehran to close it “would drive up the price of oil to unforeseeable levels and risk a wider regional war.”

The current debate was given further legs by the death of Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan on 11th January. Mr Roshan, who worked at the Natanz nuclear facility, was killed when a magnetic bomb was attached to his car by a mysterious man on a motorcycle. Is targeted killing really the answer, as some op-eds advocated?

As with the one-phrase-solutions discussed above, “targeted killing” has unpleasant trade-offs and indirect consequences. Murders like that of Roshan are acts of terrorism: if countries like the United States and the United Kingdom were to make them policy then how our governments talk about terrorism would need to change. Instead of it being “barbaric”, terrorism would become a tool of statecraft. I like to think of myself as a realist, but one has to accept that foreign policy just isn’t made like this in a democracy.

So how do we solve a problem like Iran? The short answer is that nobody truly knows. President Obama commented in an interview recently that “this isn’t an easy problem, and anybody who claims otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

But if we are to find the right solution to the Iran Problem, then the standard of the debate needs to rise considerably.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Iraq was a failure of the neo-conservative world view

Aaron Ellis 9.17am

Iraq is the centre of the world and crucial to the United States’ wider foreign policy. President Obama is a failure and President Bush is as wise and as farsighted a statesman as General Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan.

This is the context in which we must understand the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, says Tim Montgomerie.

Last week, Mr Montgomerie attacked President Obama’s withdrawal from the country. He contrasts it with President Bush’s decision in 2007 to ‘surge’ American troops in order to regain momentum against the insurgency. Typically, Mr Montgomerie presents the reader with black-or-white choices: Bush is good, Obama is bad; and if you support the withdrawal, you “hate freedom”.

Neo-conservatives possess a dated worldview – and it shows. They are stuck in the early 2000s and the language of the War on Terror. They show no appreciation of grand strategy in his article or the coming of the ‘Pacific Century’. This is in stark contrast to President Obama, which is why Iraq should be added to the list of foreign policy failures by neo-conservatives and not the President’s.

The two decisions of Presidents Bush and Obama that we should contrast are the former’s decision to invade Iraq and the latter’s announcement last month of a new American military base in Australia.

For no good reason at all, President Bush burdened the United States with a disastrous war in a country of only marginal importance; he handed “a massive gift” to Tehran as a result, and distracted Washington from a real challenge to its power: China.

With his own announcement, however, President Obama sent a signal to Beijing that the U.S. was no longer distracted. The new base, the President said, was “a deliberate and strategic decision – as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping the region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with allies and friends.”

The great scholar Walter Russell Mead has described President Obama’s announcement, and other diplomatic coups the U.S. achieved in Asia last month, as the “coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.”

If we understand the Iraq withdrawal in this context then it is obvious which of the two presidents can claim to be a wise and farsighted statesman. “Regardless of whether the twenty-first century will be another ‘American century’, it is certain that it will be an Asian and Pacific century”, Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, has written. “It is both natural and sensible that the US be central to whatever evolves from that fact.”

This undermines many of the neo-conservatives’ other beliefs. Tim Montgomerie is disappointed that the U.S. will not have a “foothold” in Iraq but he does not explain why such a foothold is important to the U.S. He has tweeted praise for a Mitt Romney line about whether a government scheme is so crucial that it is worth borrowing money from China to pay for it, but he hasn’t yet answered whether the same test can be applied to Iraq.

The fact that the interests of the United States are in Asia-Pacific also undermines the examples of post-war Germany and Japan as templates for American policy vis-à-vis Iraq. Those two countries mattered to U.S. security after 1945, justifying the time and money spent on developing them. You cannot make the same argument with regard to Iraq.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

The Iraq war may have ended but its disastrous legacy lives on

Alexander Pannett 8.00am

Yesterday, President Obama marked the final end of the Iraq war.  It has been nearly nine years since the US and its allies, including the UK, invaded the Middle Eastern nation on the pretence of removing Saddam Hussein and ending his perceived involvement in Islamist terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

While the war was trumpeted a success by President Obama - the man who once opposed it as “dumb” - its legacy has been one of instability and continued conflict across the strategically important region.

Over one trillion dollars have been spent by Amercian taxpayers and 4,500 American soldiers have lost their lives.  This is paltry compared with the alleged hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died due to the invasion and ensuing bloody insurgency.  In its wake Iraq simmers with sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shias.  Terrorism has increased and the government of Iraq clings on to power through backroom deal making and shaky coalitions with pro-Iranian factions.

The untamed use of American hard power may have eventually pacified Iraq but if its objective was to wrest the Middle East away from extremism towards a democratic future based on enlightened Western thinking then the invasion of Iraq must count as an unmitigated disaster.

Further evidence of the decline of American hard power as an effective foreign policy tool is the gradual withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan, having failed to pacify the Taliban, and the increasing friction between the US and their most dangerous ally, Pakistan.

Pakistan’s support has soured due to the repeated incursions into Pakistani sovereign territory by US military forces, most prominently the death of Osama Bin Laden. The Americans, for their part, are furious that Bin Laden was being sheltered in Pakistan and they hold deep suspicions that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence organisation, is providing significant military and logistical assistance to the Taliban.

On Tuesday, the US Congress unveiled plans to cut $700 million of aid to Pakistan and yesterday, Pakistan responded with plans to tax Nato supply trucks that pass through Pakistani territory on their way to Afghanistan.

The armoured fist of American military might has exacerbated sectarian tensions in the Middle East and has increased the standing of Iran by making it the natural pole for anti-Western forces to align themselves with.  Iran’s rise has opened a Sunni-Shia fault line in Iraq and within neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, causing further instability as Shia minorities have looked to Iran for support and leadership.

American disregard for the UN prior to the invasion of Iraq has also undermined the ability of international organisations to quell Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which will further destabilise the region as other countries seek a nuclear deterrent of their own.

The most dramatic expansion of democracy and removal of autocratic power in the Middle East has not come from America’s use of hard power in Iraq and Afghanistan but from the burgeoning Arab Spring movement whose source of momentum has come from the repressed democratic ambitions of the ‘Arab street’.  It is telling that in Egypt, where the second round of parliamentary elections were held today, the parties predicted to win are not those with Western secular values but Islamic ideals.

President Obama may echo George W Bush by publicly claiming the invasion of Iraq was a success but the legacy of Iraq is far from secure and the disastrous consequences for the West’s standing in the region and the concomitant rise of Iran expose the invasion as one of the worst US strategic errors since Vietnam.

Only the most determined of Manichean acolytes would see the removal of one dictator in a largely contained country as worth all the blood and treasure that Iraq has drained.  As the drumbeats for war with Iran are starting to sound, Western policy makers should take Iraq as an example of how poorly deployed hard power can exacerbate tensions and end in tragedy rather than the lofty and enlightened goals Western policy makers had sought to achieve.

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Who should moderate Tories back for US President in 2012?

Michael Economou 7.45am

It has always been difficult for British Conservatives to know who they should be rooting for in American elections. In 2008, global Obamania dazzled many Conservatives into going against their instincts. Even Daniel Hannan, who is turning into a hero for British libertarians, was sucked in and threw his support behind a man of the left.

This time it is different. Obama’s halo appears to have fallen off and his popularity has fallen nationally and internationally. His liberal base is disappointed in what it sees as a betrayal of his radical promise. ‘Yes we can’ has become ‘Yes we can but’ as his agenda is whittled down by a partisan Congress. With abysmal polling and a deflated base, there is room for a Republican candidate to seize some momentum and win the hearts and minds of the American people. But who (if anyone) should moderate British Conservatives cross their fingers for?

Jon Huntsman is too moderate amid the ferocious mood of Republican voters (which is unfortunate, as he seems to be the only candidate unwilling to pander to the more extreme fringes of his own party on issues like evolution and climate change).

Michelle Bachmann has lost her early strength and seems to be fading out of contention. Herman Cain can whip up a crowd, but he’s unlikely to win much more than the odd straw poll. Ron Paul? Forget about it. He has a strong cult following, but that will never win him the primary, let alone the presidency (besides, his radical agenda would be even harder to get through Congress than Obama’s) . Newt Gingrich is stumbling from humiliation to humiliation, including his entire senior campaign team resigning en masse earlier this year.

The race for the Republican nomination looks like it is boiling down to two men: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. Conventional wisdom says that Perry is the favourite of the Republican right, whereas Romney is the moderate, establishment candidate. Perry is unpredictable and fiery, with a history of strange remarks ranging from seemingly advocating the secession of Texas to calling social security a “Ponzi scheme”. He has become accepted as the most credible champion for the Tea Party movement, and is very much a product of the mood in the Republican grassroots.

Romney is calmer and has a greater control. He also has a much more moderate record as a Governor on issues like gay marriage and healthcare (which has led to the Perry team dubbing him ‘Obama lite’). He is a much better performer in debates than Perry (who has been embarrassingly bad in the past), but he lacks some of his rival’s rugged charisma.

It would be wrong, however, to divide them too sharply. Their actions as Governors are not an entirely fair prediction of how they would behave in power: it’s not surprising that someone who fought elections in Texas would have a different record to someone who fought elections in Massachusetts.

Perry isn’t quite the pure red-blooded conservative he wants people to think he is: his policy on giving benefits to the children of illegal immigrants (which was politically necessary in his state) has left some of the Tea Partiers disillusioned, as has his history as a Gore-supporting Democrat.

Romney, on the other hand, seems to be doing his hardest to shake off most of his earlier moderation, including his recent denial of man-made climate change.

The truth is that, despite their earlier records, there are not that many practical differences between Romney and Perry. It is almost reminiscent of the clash between the Miliband brothers for the Labour leadership last year: David was the favourite of the parliamentary party, Ed was backed by the unions, but they were basically singing from the same hymn sheet.

Where does that leave moderate Tories looking for someone to support in 2012? Pretty much nowhere. President Obama is a safe pair of hands, but he has proven himself to have certain values at odds with the Right. Neither of the likely Republican nominees are that impressive either: they both hold views on issues like gay rights and climate change which run counter to those of most moderate Tories. Sadly, although the American people seem to align themselves with the liberal centre-right, it does not look like they will get such a Presidential nominee from either party any time soon.

Is President Obama limping the United States towards another troubling period of isolation?

Nik Darlington 4.51pm

The Saturday just gone marked the 81st anniversary of the US Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. In so doing, the United States turned its back on international affairs, abandoned the nascent League of Nations, and entered a period of isolation that would only be broken twenty-one years later by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It is an auspicious admonition of America’s place in the world, at a time when the sole(military) superpower appears reluctant again to involve itself in global security.

After World War Two, the Cold War and Europe’s reconstruction meant that the US remained inextricably involved in world affairs. When history allegedly ended in 1991, America took a step back once more. The disastrous Operation Gothic Serpent in 1993 cowed the US from intervening abroad, as a bullish Tony Blair found when trying to persuade President Clinton to assist the NATO operation in Kosovo.

It took another horrific and unforeseen attack on American soil in 2001 to bring the US firmly back into the fray, conceptualising its mission as a ‘War on Terror’ against indeterminate opponents. Afghanistan and Iraq manifested themselves as the battle grounds for this mission as geopolitics in the first decade of the twenty-first century were defined by one thing above all: America’s position.

The election of Barrack Obama in 2008 was a watershed for America. Overnight, global perceptions were altered - to varying degrees, of course, but indubitably altered. The dawn was bright but beguiling. On the surface, the 44th President did not appear to deviate from the course set by the 43rd. In the Middle East, the US remained reluctant to criticise Israel and did not shirk from an increasingly hawkish stance towards Iran. A raptured rapprochement in Cairo proclaimed a “new beginning” for the relationship between the US and Islam. It created rhetorical waves in 2009, but any lasting impact in policy terms remains intangible. On the credit side, the closer economic engagement with the BRICs, especially China, and positive development activities in Africa, were carried on where George W. Bush left off.

But are we witnessing a shift in US foreign policy? President Obama has been slow and tenebrous in responding to the crises spreading across the Middle East and North Africa. This is most clearly apparent at the moment in relation to Libya. The President’s cold sweat is causing problems for America’s allies. Allegedly, it was his Secretary of State, Mrs Clinton who finally persuaded him to act. Either way, it took the confirmation of Arab League support to bring the US into line, a sign of the Obama administration’s sensitivity to Islamic opinion. As soon as the Arab League voiced disquietude about air strikes, America appeared to backpeddle on its commitment to the cause, with the Times (£) reporting today that the control of the mission is being handed over to Britain and France.

Western allies have the resources to continue operations against Libya without the US taking the lead. In fact, in this case a less prominent America is likely to be a benefit rather than a hindrance, so toxic is the legacy of Iraq. As the Mayor of London writes today, Arab allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia must be more directly involved with covering fire by aeroplane, not press release.

That notwithstanding, the vacillation is a troubling sign that the United States under President Obama is doing as the United States periodically does - retreat into its shell. If this is so, history suggests that the world is about to become a far more uncertain place.

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