Enforcement of International Norms:
Bringing and Keeping Dissenters in the Fold
Leveraging US Strength in an Uncertain World
Stanley Foundation Conference on National and Global Security
Washington, DC,
Thursday, December 7, 2006
How does the international system strike the right balance between punishing regimes who rebel against it and offering them a reasonable opportunity to come back to the table? What will it take to build a new international political consensus for stronger enforcement of global norms?
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Post—Panel Summary
The following summary of the panel "Enforcement of International Norms: Bringing and Keeping Dissenters in the Fold" was drafted by Tony Fleming. It has not been approved or reviewed by the panelists.
In discussing the enforcement of international norms, particularly in the bringing and keeping of dissenters within the fold, the speakers looked at enforcement in terms of tradecraft as required for the management of specific cases, and also in a structural approach as to how enforcement related to the international system as a whole.
Bruce Jentleson pointed out the appropriateness of the term leveraging in the conference title, noting that there is very little leverage even the strongest governments can impose in today's world. The ability to exert power does not always translate into influence, contrary to the perceived ideology of the Bush administration. We may still be able to do what we want, but getting others to do what we would like them to do is these days is a challenge.
Jentleson cautioned, however, that we cannot lay the blame for this entirely on the Bush administration. Today's international system is much less hierarchical than it was in the past, and others are much more assertive in their identities and their own policies. That would not be different had Gore been inaugurated in 2001 rather than Bush.
But he did suggest we can conclude that the Bush administration has made this situation much worse. During the Cold War, the essence of American leadership was overridingly based on other countries (at least the non—Communist ones) benefiting from the United States' pursuit of its own interests. Not everyone saw it that way, but as a general trend, that conclusion is sound. Today, however, most countries do not see the United States' pursuit of its best interests necessarily as in their own. There has even been a push back from allies in Europe on whether they want the United States to continue to play a leadership role in international affairs.
US interests are best met and international institutions work best when the United States works through them, but international institutions do not always act as they should or follow up when they should. The United States needs partners in conducting multilateralism, but the world also needs American power to enforce many of the norms resolved through those international institutions.
So what are the best means of enforcing norms against dissenters? Miller noted that enforcement—bringing into conformity those states in violation of accepted international norms—is a difficult task and that the international community has not demonstrated a keen ability in doing so. It is not because governments do not care or that they think that the regime is not important. At least in terms of NPT compliance, nonproliferation is at the top of the list of concerns on which the international community is in fundamental agreement.
There are a number of reason why offering inducements (or threatening sanctions) as a means of enforcement is not often a straightforward ability. No country, including the United States, has an unfettered ability to offer carrots or impose sticks, and domestic political interests may frustrate diplomatic interests in offering inducements if such "carrots" are seen as rewarding bad behavior.
Enforcing compliance is especially difficult when ambiguities arise as to where a violation has occurred. When this happens, enforcement action is much more difficult, as is building a coalition around the need for enforcement. Shorr noted that to minimize ambiguities, the enforcement of norms should not be framed as an exercise in global governance or even multilateralism, but more clearly in the context of a rules—based order.
We study military strategy left, right, and sideways, and that's great, noted Jentleson. But we don't do that as much with questions on diplomacy. Due in large part to this and a pervasive lack of understanding of other countries' internal political processes, the more acute crises often happen across an incredibly hostile divide. This makes efforts to build trust, offer inducements, or enter into negotiations all that more difficult.
To some extent, our ability to overcome these obstacles can almost be by accident. In pragmatic terms, if we are to build trust, we should reconsider the commonly held wisdom that you need to threaten sticks to make the carrots worth accepting. By suggesting the possibility of regime change, we could be pushing dissenters in the direction that prompted them to break from the norms in the first place.
Both Miller and Jentleson pointed out that collective action is also challenged when states, even those pursing the same outcomes or at least cooperating, are not prepared to accept the costs associated with enforcement. In this regard, enforcement becomes particularly difficult when the enforcers themselves have interests that clash with the proposed enforcement measures. Whereas the United States desires a tough sanctions resolution from the Security Council on Iran, Russia and China recently signed deals with Iran, undermining a possible consensus. Similarly, China's oil interest in the Sudan make enforcement action against the genocide there more complicated. It is not impossible, but will require a flexibility that the Bush administration has been unwilling thus far to employ. On North Korea, China joined in on a unanimous Security Council resolution, provided it was not required to faithfully enforce its more intrusive provisions. This disharmony illustrates that often the problem of enforcement rests as much with the enforcers as with the dissenters.
Similarly, pursuing enforcement action is also undermined when those engaged in it are perceived as not acting according to the rules themselves. The US action in Iraq proceeded without approval from the Security Council, which many felt was as severe a breach as what the United States often accuses others of. Similarly, the United States was viewed at the 1995 NPT Review Conference as acting hypocritically, given that we were ourselves not meeting our obligations under the treaty.
Nonetheless, a commitment to enforcing agreed—upon norms must be made, Shorr noted, even when that clashes with either the enforcers' interests or with a sacrosanct view of sovereignty that permits dissenters to avoid inspection or criticism. We can be hopeful about seeing China integrate more fully into the international community, but integration will require they help uphold shared norms. The United Nations needs to mean what it says when it condemns the genocide in Darfur and calls for IAEA inspections in Iran, despite China's bilateral energy agreements with those countries. This is not just a problem with US policies but with the wider international community and with the invocation of sovereignty when dissenters violate international norms.
Multilateral desirability does not always match up with multilateral feasibility. Miller noted for instance that, within the NPT regime, there is no clear mandate for anyone to act in the face of obvious noncompliance. So the question remains, when dissenters violate agreed—upon international norms, who should act and what should they do?
Jentleson drew on lessons learned from Libya's concession of a nuclear weapons program that, while not applicable in all cases, could provide guidance in enforcing international norms generally. The first lesson is to recognize a need to balance force with diplomacy. The Bush administration claimed that the Libyan decision was prompted by the Iraqi invasion when in fact it was a process that began under the Clinton administration with strong leadership from the United Kingdom.
Secondly, enforcement should be based in policy change rather than threats of regime change. If dissenters are convinced that giving up weapons program will render them more vulnerable to invasion and ouster, they resist. But if security reassurances are in place and regime change off the table, enforcing norm compliance is much more achievable.
Lastly, Jentleson reminds us that it is important to know the other side. Qaddafi faced a challenge not only from the outside international community but from within in terms of the Libyan economy and growing presence of Al Qaeda within the country. We have done a poor job of understanding the role of nationalism, particularly in the developing world. During the Cold War, everything was about communism; today it is about jihadism. An understanding of domestic and internal interests is missing from the discourse. In this regard, one area which needs further exploration is that of elites within dissenter governments. To the extent they see their interests promoted by resisting the pressures of the international community, the elites will support resistance. However, where their interests, as business leaders for example, are promoted by compliance with international norms, they can serve to convince leaders to cooperate.
Likewise, Miller suggested a number of important options for enforcers, particularly the United States, to keep in mind. Enforcement of norms against a government does not require a full disengagement of relations with that government. Deep and persuasive mistrust is an effective barrier. The United States should remain willing to engage without being viewed as caving in to the other side. On the other hand, we need to think about a division of labor—recognizing as we have in part with Iran that it may not always be the United States that can best deliver. This approach should be complemented by a willingness to reward other enforcers. Comprehensively, the United States should recognize that there may be a beneficial trade—off between its maximum objective and feasible results; if we insist on not budging, we risk dissenters moving ahead in their noncompliance.
Panel Transcript
This text has been professionally transcribed; however, for timely distribution, it has not been edited or proofread against the tape.
Nancy Soderberg: Good morning everyone. I hope you all had a chance to hear the very sane presentation of Strobe Talbott's, a breath of fresh air given what's going on in the world today and I think feeds very well into our discussion this morning which is enforcement of international norms, bringing and keeping dissenters into the fold. And we have two really superb papers that I hope all of you have had the chance to read. If not, I commend them to you. There are copies on the table.
David Shorr: Bruce is on the website. I don't Steve's is not yet.
Bruce Jentleson: It's forthcoming and we had copies on the chairs back so far. There are extra copies of Steve's that maybe could be past from the front chairs if nobody's there.
Nancy Soderberg: We have a very distinguished panel this morning and what we thought we would do is have presentations by Bruce and by Steven and then a comment by, excuse me, by David and then we'd have a very lively open discussion for about an hour on that. Please use the microphone. This is going to be transcribed and so I'd hope we'd alternate sides and use the microphone.
And then for the last half hour, 20 minutes or so, depending on how the discussion goes, we'll bring it back up here. We'd like to try and have some kind of general summary of the views of this discussion and try and come up with some general guidelines using the papers as the basis for the discussion, but also the extraordinary expertise among the distinguished audience that we have gathered here today to try and come up with some general principals of enforcing and — of enforcement of international norms and how to bring the dissenters into the fold.
I'm going to ask Bruce to go first and there's really no one better qualified to comment on this very complex subject. His paper's really quite a work of art and very in—depth and thoughtful. So I commend it to all of you. He's currently a Professor of Political Science — Policy and Political Science at Duke University. For the first half of the decade he's been Director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and before that was on the Al Gore and Gore—Lieberman campaign. He's a very distinguished author. Several books including, "American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice of the 21st Century." Has a Ph.D. from Cornell University and is the recipient of numerous awards. And with that I'll turn it over to Bruce.
Bruce Jentleson: Thanks very much Nancy. Appreciate that. And thanks to David and the Stanley Foundation for organizing all of this.
We had agreed to try to be very brief and I'm going to try to stick to that as Nancy was saying to maximize the discussion. And so, the caveat of course is there are a lot of things in the paper that I'm not gonna cover.
In fact I actually I want to talk mostly about things that are not in the paper but are part of the context. I assume you'll have an opportunity to read the paper, the policy analysis belief that Stanley's put out for us.
And so I want start by setting the context. You know, similarly actually to Strobe just did, but with maybe a little — some overlap, but a little bit different take on this notion of leveraging US strength in an uncertain world and then go to this panel's particular focus on dissenting states. Although dissenting states is sort of the latest in a long line of terms that don't quite get it. You know we've had rouge states and states of concern. Every time I think of dissenting it's Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great dissenter, that comes to mind and I don't think Kim Jong Il is exactly that. But, so we still need to find the term that gets it. This rogue is very — can be politically charged. My good friend and colleague, Rob Litwak, has written one book and is about to come out with another dealing with that issue in a very systematic way and I commend that to you when the next book comes out in January.
Nancy Soderberg: Rob's in the audience if anyone wants to –
Bruce Jentleson: Rob's here I guess and I would have said it even if he wasn't here. So, the guy even said it on the jacket, right Rob.
Rob Litwak: That's right.
Bruce Jentleson: So after the context I want to get in a little bit into this question of dissenting states and applying sort of the general approach and then just sort of leave it open and respond and talk more as we get into a discussion.
I actually think this question of leveraging US strength really is the crucial question across almost everything that we do because as Strobe talked about it and others have talked about it, leveraging is the right concept I think. There's very little that you can impose into today's world and we can discuss and debate how much strength the United States has. You know, I would say we live in more than a — the United States is — this is more than a multipolar world, but it's very much less than a unipolar world.
But I actually go back to Thucydides which I think actually the Bush administration did and his old expression that the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept. And if the Thucydides were right we'd be sitting pretty in the world. We do spend more in the military then the next 15 nations combined. Our economy's still accounts for over 30 percent of global GDP. Our seed is still at the head of most every important diplomatic table, or at least those we choose to sit at. And I think you can see back into Bush 2002 National Security strategy that they very much bought into Thucydides. This — that strategy proclaimed that the United States possesses unprecedented and unequalled strength and influence in the world.
And we still hear lots of references to American empire, to the Goliath, to the uber power and the like. But I think the fundamental flaw in this dictum from Thucydides is this gap between power and influence. And, you know, to wax a little conceptual for a second, I think that it's really important — it's very important 'cause it underlies many of the specific examples we get into.
The reality is that the weak don't always roll over or fall into line just because the strong want them to and the strong are not always strong enough to achieve their objectives on their own or on their own terms. That what we have been finding out the hard way is that our crucial foreign policy challenges are less about doing what we want to do. We can probably still do whatever we want to do. But they're really about getting others to do what we want them to do and ensuring that the outcomes are what we want them to be. That's the difference between we have the power to do basically whatever we want to do, thank you very much. But, converting that power to influence that is succeeding in the objectives we set, persuading others to work with us, having some influence outcomes. There is this big gap between power and influence.
And so what we're finding out is that the bottom line is that the possession of power does not guarantee the successful exercise of influence.
Now it's fair to say that some of this gap is structural and it does trace back to the end of the Cold War and would have been there irrespective of how the Supreme Court voted in December 2000. The United States in the Cold War was the center of almost everything. Major international institutions, the principle military alliances, non—communists, international economy, the prevailing ideology of liberal democracy.
But today's global system is less tightly and hierarchally structured. It's not that any other major power's close to challenging for number one. I don't view the rise of China as that, but being not — number one isn't what it used to be cranked up to be. And it's not just the other major powers, but what one sees around the world is many of the other 190 plus nations who are finally emerging on the global stage after decades and deep centuries of colonialism and super power dominance are much more assertive of their interests and identity.
And so there is a structural problem here that would have been with us whatever happened on January 20, 2001 and will be with us on January 20, 2009, irrespective of what happens.
Having said that there's no question and I here I think Strobe laid it out very strongly, you know that the policies the Bush administration have made this much worse. And so I'm not gonna reiterate all that, but I think that the essence of American leadership useful to remember during the Cold War, was the overriding sense that others, at least in the non—communist world, genuinely did benefit from the pursuit of the — benefit from the US' pursuit of its own national interests. It wasn't just that we claimed our hegemony to be benevolent. Many others saw that — saw it that way as well. Not everybody and particularly not in many of the conflicts of the third world but I think as a general trend, I would at least argue that.
But, on too many issues, too many countries including many allies today see their interests is hurt rather than helped by the U.S. pursuit of its own interests.
We had a meeting in Europe in September that David had helped organize and the discussion there was called Alternative Security Regimes. And so while some of it was about what role the United States should shift to playing that might be more constructive, some of the push back from some European colleagues, partly to get effect, but partly with seriousness behind it was we're not exactly sure, you know, what — how much of leadership role you all should play. And so I think there is this issue that we really want to have in our minds and not just attribute it all to the Bush policy.
The other side of this though I think is sometimes there's an overemphasis on what multilateralism can do. And here I think the great dilemma is that we're much more convinced about multilateralism's desirability then its doability. And that brings me to this panel and the notion of the enforcement of international norms.
The very notion that norms are not self—enforcing, they need to be enforced and that international institutions don't always do a very good job of this follow through. Consider Darfur and the Genocide Convention. Considering my view of Iran and the NPT and where the UN has been since the passing of its resolution in August.
So the context I think for thinking about dissenting states or any other is that we need partners, but I would argue at least that the world also needs American power and leadership. Not the Bushism version, but the ultimate win—win I think is that international institutions and other arrangements work best when the United States works with and through them. That when we seek to oppose them it's lose—lose for both sides, but I think without us many times it doesn't work particularly well either.
So how do you enforce norms especially against dissenting states? The paper I wrote for Stanley and an article I published in international security, the journal that Steve edits, earlier in the year really focused on the Libya case and what the lessons were for the balance of force and diplomacy and I'm not gonna go all through that. We can come back to that. But it was a case where things worked. And whenever you have both successes and failures in foreign policy you try to learn from them. Nothing's a cookbook. Oh hey, it worked her, it's gonna work say in Iran and North Korea automatically.
At the same time if we don't draw appropriate lessons and figure out how to do that analytically, we risk violating the – what's carved on the building a few blocks away, the National Archives, about the past being pro –law.
So let me just stress quickly three main lessons I think that come out of this that are work – worth thinking about for other cases current and future. One is the need to balance force and diplomacy or perhaps better phrased the coercive dimensions and diplomacy. The Bush administration claims that, excuse me, Qaddafi made his concessions just because of the Iraq war were widely over claimed. When you – this was actually a strategy that began in the Clinton Administration. The British played an important role in and it's a strategy that gives you at least two or two and a half cheers for diplomacy.
There were secret talks that went on since 1998 which did a number of things including building trust between countries that had had no relations before. There were various third parties that played roles in all the details and stuff. I think there's no question that the sanctions that had been imposed by the UN back in 1992 and '93 had an impact. Took awhile, but they had an impact. Part of Libya's motivation was to become a part of the global economy in part for domestic stability at home.
And I think it's fair to say if somebody said to me, somebody involved in the process saying, look, you know, in the minds of leaders particularly in the Middle East, the back drop of force is never irrelevant. But frankly if I was Qaddafi in December 2003 and I was thinking does Iraq mean the United States is going to come get me next, I might have felt that I was even more secure than before given how bogged down we were in Iraq and given how much we've lost in terms of our international credibility.
But there is a balance between forced/coerced elements in diplomacy, I think. I think that that balance is tricky, but often diplomacy without the backdrop of coercive elements is not effective in these situations and as we've seen in Iraq force without diplomacy is not effective.
The second main point is the difference between policy change and regime change. The Libya case is a really interesting example of how important it is to make clear that the goal is policy change not regime change. This was a huge issue in those secret talks that I talked about going back to the late Clinton administration in which Qaddafi and his people needed constant reassurances that if I do policy change, major policy change like a full Monty on WMD, you know, will you then interpret that I'm weak and that means you're more likely to come and get me. Kofi Annan was involved, the Saudi's were involved, the Egyptians. Providing third—party reassurances. And that the lesson here I think is that you're more likely to get policy change if you take regime change off the table, not it if you leave it vague and if you make a deal we'll tell you later. But that it actually makes it less likely that you're going to get policy change if this reassurance is this security reassurance. It does not mean that you totally give up to democracy and human rights portfolio, but it does mean you make clear that this is not about covert action, military action efforts at regime change. That clearly has implications I would argue for Iran and North Korea.
And third, in closing, is just the importance of knowing the other side. It was very important to understand what was going on within Libya and the ways in which Qaddafi was beginning to face his own threat from groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic groups to his own rule, what was happening in the Libyan economy. Strobe alluded to this at the end. I actually think – and here is where I think it goes back to the Cold Wars for sure. One of the great flaws in American foreign policy is we have done a very poor job of understanding identities and nationalism, particularly in the third world and different cultural and historical context. So everything was about communism, which I think as we look back at the Cold War and say we won, containment worked, you know, I think there's a difference between Europe and the third world. And today I think we risk the notion that everything is about evil or, you know, all is about Islamic Jihadism and you don't have to understand the national and cultural context. I think that we had a – we gained a good sense of Libya. Its political, its economic conditions and those were really important.
So I think that, you know, sometimes people say well the Libya case is very unique. There's reasons why it worked. Well that's true and that's why we're not surgically extracting from it and trying to draw out lessons. But if you had gone to Las Vegas in 1998 or 1999 and said I'd like to put some money down on the fact that Qaddafi's gonna get out of the terrorism business, settle Lockerby and totally give up his WMD, I could have given up my day job and been quite rich with the odds I probably could've gotten. Thanks very much.
Nancy Soderberg: Well thank you very much. We'll now turn to Steve Miller who's paper's equally in–depth and interesting, The State Code, Rule Breakers and Enforcement of International Obligations. He's looking more at the axis of evil and the NPT instruments. He is currently Director of the International Security Program at the Velfor Center for Science and Human Rights at the JFK School of Government at Harvard, and if that's not enough of a fulltime job, he's also editor and chief of the quarterly journal, International Security, editor and co–editor of two dozen books, most recently Offense, Defense and War in 2004. Graduate of Fletcher and Occidental College and I will now turn it over to Steve.
Steve Miller: Thank you Nancy. Bruce looked at a successful case, Libya and very effectively extracted some lessons from that about what we might learn. I'm trying to compliment him, look at the less successful cases through the NPT lens since that's my area of expertise. And what I was asked to do was try and think analytically about the problem of enforcement in the context of these cases that we've been struggling to deal with.
One way of putting it is to say that since the early 1990s we've faced three protracted enforcement crisis. Ones that in truth I've lived with for half my professional career. Iran, Iraq and North Korea. And the results of those — the efforts to deal with those three protracted enforcement crises are a painful war, a nuclear armed North Korea and an endless confrontation with Iran during the course of which Iran appears to be moving steadily in the direction of acquiring precisely the fissile material production capabilities that we wish to deny them. So, we've tried pretty hard. Lots of different approaches have been attempted over a decade and a half period. We've zigged and we've zagged, we've induced and we've threatened and the upshot has been that none of these cases has been resolved to our satisfaction. None of them have been resolved in a matter we regard as consistent with our best national interests.
And what this suggests is that enforcement is hard. Something about this is difficult. Now by enforcement I mean bringing the — bringing into conformity the behavior of a state with the rules that the state itself has accepted. At least in the NPT context that definition works rather well. And we don't seem to have a good ability to do that.
And so what I try to draw out of the three cases that I've looked at in—depth is what are the impediments to effective enforcement that make it so damn hard to achieve the outcomes we want despite strenuous efforts. I pause for a moment just to say that at least in the NPT case, you can't really argue it's because people don't care or they think it's unimportant or the regime is regarded as minor or dispensable. On the contrary, since the end of the Cold War the proliferation threat has been right at the top of those items that are regarded as menacing to our security and finding ways of making this regime operate effectively ought to be central to our effort to protect ourselves from this large and looming threat.
And what one sees when you look at the cases is that there are in fact a series of impediments that make it hard to achieve the outcomes we want. The broad way of putting it is that the politics of enforcement among the enforcers and between the enforcers and the rule breaker, that turned out to be very complicated, difficult and rarely successful. But if you break that open there are some more specific problems that I think we flounder on rather regularly.
The first is that there's no clear mandate for anyone to act in the face of non—compliance. There's no clear patterns of responsibility, there's no established mechanisms of enforcement, there are no widely agreed criteria for action. In the NPT context at any rate clear and unambiguous cases of non—compliance that cannot be resolved with the technical level or cost to the UN Security Council which has a deliberative body and what it generally does is deliberates. But, nothing effective issues from such deliberations and hasn't for some time.
There's a clear example on the case of North Korea which was referred to the UN Security Council in 1993 as being non—compliant and from that tape to this we're still waiting for the first effective action by the UN Security Council. It did step aside and let the United States engage in some bilateral negotiations in the early 90s but this was in lieu of the UN Security Council not the UN Security Council itself engaging in effective response.
So the question of who should act and what should they do. There's no clear or inherent answer to that question in the face of a compliance problem.
Secondly, the stakeholders themselves, those who might enforce compliance have their own perceptions and interests which heavily color the way in which they respond to a compliance crisis. You see this today where the United States is engaged in strenuous diplomacy trying to get a serious tough potentially effective sanctions resolution out of the UN Security Council. And for those of you who have been following this closely, last week the Russians began delivery of an air defense missile system to Iran. This week the Chinese signed an enormous natural gas deal with Iran. These are the — precisely the parties that we're trying to draw into this sanctions resolution and whose dissent from it is preventing it from being reached and there off indulging their other interests simultaneously.
So harmonization of the stakeholders in terms of how they see the problem, what their stakes in the problem are, what they think of the appropriate remedies for the problem. Turns out to be a huge headache and in fact when you look back into the history of these enforcement crises it turns out that most of the diplomacy is among the potential enforcers. Trying to figure out what they can collectively agree to do.
A third point is that enforcement action usually involves the incurring of costs. Whether you're going to use force. Somebody has to bear that burden. If you're talking about sanctions this normally disrupts profitable economic intercourse for somebody. These burdens are normally distributed unequally, hurts some more than others and it turns out to be the case that states even those that are preferring the same outcome, a non—nuclear Iran, a non—nuclear North Korea and even states that are willing to cooperate up to a point in achieving those common objectives, in fact are not prepared to impose on themselves very substantial costs in order to achieve those ends. Particularly if they're going to bear more costs than someone else. So there's a kind of classic collective action problem here.
A fourth problem is that it turns out that — it turns out as we learned very vividly I think in the Iraq case in 2003, that it's very difficult to be a rule enforcer when others regard you as a rule breaker. If you're not going to be a law abiding state in the eyes of others it's very hard to be — to make a persuasive argument that the rules need to be strictly and sternly enforced against other parties. So in the 2003 debate, about the UN Security Council resolution to authorize the use of force in Iraq, the notion that the United States would act without such authorization was regarded by many other parties to be at least as serious a breach of international norms as anything that Iraq itself had done and therefore, we were unsuccessful even at bringing on many of our close friends and allies in the course of that.
There's also fifthly an intelligence limitation. It's one thing if — as in the case of North Korea you have very clear cut non—compliance. There was no question. In the case of Iran, for example, it's much more murky what's going on there. Without question safeguard violations but whether you have a clear cut Article II violation the existence of a weapon's program, well the IAEA says in all of its 14 reports since August of 2002 when this latest crisis erupted, that Iran has done many inappropriate things. It has violated it's safeguards in a number of respects, but it also says in each and every report that there's no clear evidence of a weapons program. So this means that those who are disinclined to act have an ambiguous basis of accusation to justify their inaction. And I think in many cases Iraq was another case where we had Hans Blix and Mohammad Elbaradei, sitting in front of the world saying, "We've looked hard. We've tried our best. We don't find any WMD." Makes it much tougher to bring other people along when you've got that murkier base of accusation.
And the last impediment seems me leaps out of these cases is that normally these — the most acute of these enforcement crises and certainly the three that I'm talking about here involved enforcement across a very hostile divide in a context of implacable hostility. And what this tends to do is drives both sides of the bargain, both the enforcers and the ruler breakers into a frame of mind that's quite uncompromising and as a result offering inducements, engaging in negotiations, building trust, making bargains, turns out to be much tougher than it might be under other circumstances because you start from a premise of uncompromising hostility.
So that — those attributes of enforcement situations I think make the politics of managing these things effectively very very tough. Now the essence of this kind of diplomacy is generally thought to be the effective manipulation of carrots and sticks in such a way that you give the rule breaker incentives to bring his behavior back into conformity with the rules. So, you inflict pain and that pain will be alleviated when compliance is re—achieved and you offer rewards, inducements for compliant behavior. But, it turns out to be not so straightforward to manipulate carrots and sticks in several ways.
First, no one has unfettered ability to offer carrots and sticks and in particular if you think about the Iran case today, there are a number of big things that Iran might like, huge large scale investment in their fossil fuel industry, for example, by western oil companies. But it's going to be very tough in the American domestic context and given the makeup of and attitudes of the US Congress to champion enormous benefits packages for the current government of Iran.
Even in 1994 when we did succeed in achieving the agreed framework with North Korea it involved a provision of food, involved the provision of fuel oil, it involved subsidized construction of light water reactors for North Korea. This was harshly criticized as rewarding bad behavior, appeasing bad guys and providing huge benefits to someone who had been off the reservation. So that can be tough. You also don't have ubiquitous ability to threaten the use of force. There are many limitations and constraints on that. And what that raises is a basic question of whether what one is capable of offering in the way of, for example, inducements, provides sufficient overlap with what the rule breaker is looking for and wants to get out to the bargaining process.
There's also the question of how do you make your threats or your promises credible. This is the second big difficulty with manipulating carrots and sticks. Often when we try to put force into the background of these situations it's tough to persuade the bad guy that in fact we're serious about it or we could really do it. Or in the case of Iran now they seem to believe that they've been inoculated from this threat by the fact that we're so bogged down in Iraq.
But even on the promises side, the question is can you deliver? Do you mean it? Will the promise benefits actually be delivered? In the case of North Korea, for example, the deal went off the roads very quickly because the Congress didn't want to authorize the money to provide the benefits that we had promised to give.
In the case of the EU3 — I'm running out of time here. In the case of the EU3 offer to the Europeans, for example to the Iranians the judgment of the Iranians wasn't, in my opinion that the European's couldn't deliver this without the enthusiastic support of the United States and the United States was not enthusiastic. So, we have what the complicated politics and also real constraints on our ability to wield carrot and sticks. And what this means is that you end up with enforcement crises that are marked by disharmony, mistrust, incredible rule enforcers and dynamics between enforcers and rule breakers that lead us to negative versus desirable outcomes. I'll stop there.
Nancy Soderberg: Okay. Thank you very much. We'll now turn to our discussant who will tee up what we hope will be a lively discussion with the audience. David Shorr is in large part the intellectual maestro for this conference and we all owe him a debt of gratitude for conceptualizing the issues that we're here to discuss. David is the Program Officer for the Stanley Foundation and very much the force behind what we're discussing today. So, over to you David.
David Shorr: Thanks Nancy for leading the session and thanks Bruce and Steve for really producing excellent work in response to the question. I am responsible for this part of the discussion today. The entirety of the whole was a big enterprise. The two presenters laid out one set of — one distinction between their two papers and I'd like to make another or at least make it more prominent.
Bruce it seems to me was very much talking about trade craft. He was talking about management of particular cases. And I think it is — it's very helpful for us to have that analysis and I think that Steve was looking at things more structurally. And looking at the structure of the problem as a whole as it relates to the international system, the distribution of power in whatever polar world this is. Polarized I guess.
Picking up on what Bruce said about the difference between power and influence. He talked about how the United States with our power can do whatever we want as distinct from other people doing what we want them to. The basis of the problem we're talking about today is that others can do, if not whatever they want, can do what they want enough to pose a problem. And another way to put that I guess is the difference between looking at these states as objects of policy or looking at them as their own subjects with their own policy options.
And so I thought it was excellent the way Bruce talked about the combination of force and diplomacy, which as he says neither of them can do on their own what proponents of either claim. In other words, they really only work when combined and it's a nontrivial challenge how to combine them. And in this case it really is a calibration and sequencing problem. If you read what Bruce talks about, you see just how carefully this has to be done. And the essence of that challenge is that it is a bargaining — it's a bargaining over time. It takes patience and at every step the rule breaker, rule enforcer what have you are exchanging something for something. In other words, it really has be sort of a fair trade and that, you know, that takes an awful lot of kind of careful tending.
Moving on to Steve's paper. Of course, he's absolutely right about diffused responsibility at the essence of the problem. He's right to highlight the double standards issue with regard to the United States and the super powers own relation to the rules. But what I was most interested in is when he said that, you know, it's not because stakeholders don't care about the nonproliferation treaty. It's not, you know, that they don't — they're not concerned about new nuclear states. The question is how much do they care. And that's the problem that I find most interesting. We — how much do they care and what else do they care about?
Steve talks about countervailing interests and, you know, other things that stakeholders — other interests they have, other stakes in their relationship. It is so essential to all of this that here be a preservation of a unified front on behalf of the norms; that the distribution of power, unipolar, multipolar, however you describe it has to be aligned with the rules based order. Has to be supporting it.
And the last point that I wanted to make is global economy seems to cut two ways here. Alright. You know, we want to be hopeful about China as a rising power, one that has decided to integrate into the global economy and that, you know, makes us feel like, well okay. They're gonna join us as a bulwark of the system, you know, a strong status quo power, you know, promoting shared objectives. Okay. But, you know, the other half of the global economy equation in that case is their demand for oil which they're supplying, you know, from Sudan among other places. You know, energy relationships with Iran also. And so, you know, it cuts both ways. What I would like think, and I still want to hold out some hope and we'll see if other people are as hopeful, is seems to me that the best frame for a lot of these situations is that the targets state, defector, dissenter, whatever you call, faces two paths. It's sort of, you know, kind of a fork in the road. That, you know, they can either integrate with the rest of the world and be a part of a system of shared objectives. Or they can be fending off isolation and being kind of a continuous conflict, continuous tension and problem management.
I think that, you know, those major strategic choices are, you know, the most productive frame. Although as Steve reminds us what comes in into that dynamic is, you know, well are you kind of rewarding blackmail and that political perception problem.
Nancy Soderberg: Okay. Well thank you to all of you. I think we have a lot of good food for thought on the table here. I think what we'd like to do is open it up for discussions for about 40 minutes and I think what we'd like to do is focus the discussion on trying to actually answer the question that was posed for this panel in addition to the areas that David just put out. In the pamphlet it talks about what is needed to build a new international consensus for strong enforcement of norms. And I think from the two papers it's clear that there — in order to do that effectively you need consensus on essentially two things that were identified in both papers is how do you get consensus on when the threat is real as Steve said, you know, China and Russia don't really think Iran is a particular threat right now. We tend to think it's one of the biggest threats out there against international norms. How do you get a consensus on that because unless you get a consensus on that you're not gonna have consensus on the action afterwards and therefore the second part of that question is how do you get consensus on action when there is a need for enforcement and as well the sharing of the costs. When there's not that kind of consensus one country that chooses to act as we did in Iraq ends of bearing the costs primarily on our own in terms of blood and treasure. How do you get enforcement going and agree to equitably share the costs and participation.
In that, what I'll do is ask anyone who would like to comment on this, contribute to the discussion to come to the microphone, introduce yourselves. And I will cut you off if you give a speech so try and make it a constructive comment. So thank you. Yes.
Tom Reckford: Hi. I'm Tom Reckford with the World Affairs Council and I'm very glad that China has been mentioned because I think it's really useful to look very closely at China's policies on Iran and North Korea for example. Because we don't have a whole lot of leverage over China. And on Iran I think you're basically right that China doesn't think of Iran as a huge threat, but as Mr. Shorr said what's far more important for China is that it desperately needs energy supplies and that's going to overcome all other issues as far as China's concerned and it's hard to say how we can get China not to feel that way. I mean it needs the energy supplies from Iran. It may need them from Sudan. It may need them from Algeria, various other unsavory places in Africa. It needs the supplies.
And on North Korea, I think we often fail to see how North — China's interests are different from ours. Yes, China wants North Korea policy to change on nuclear weapons. It certainly doesn't want further nuclear weapons in North Korea and it doesn't want Japan to develop its own nuclear weapons as a response. It doesn't want Taiwan to develop its own nuclear weapons.
But China doesn't want regime change in North Korea the way the Bush administration does. And China doesn't want hoards of North Koreans pouring over its — over the borders into China. And, you know, yes China has been very helpful to us getting the six—party talks going. But, its views on what to accomplish are different from ours and we don't have coercive methods to deal with China at this point. It's a big boy and you could argue that its international diplomacy these days is a lot better and better carried out than US policy.
Nancy Soderberg: Thank you. What I would suggest is we take three a time so you don't have a long line and then we can come back to the table to comments. So why don't we take these three comments and then I'll come back to the panel for reactions and so you don't have everyone standing up in the middle of the room for a long period of time.
Nancy Gallagher: So, Nancy Gallagher, University of Maryland. And I just wanted to back up and get Steve, in particular, but any of the panelist to reflect on the way this session has been framed. Because going in assumption seems to be that there are clear cut international rules; that everybody agrees on what they are and that there are clear cut violators who are somehow the really hard cases that are separate from everybody else. And that what we're trying to do is to figure out how to enforce the rules against those clear cut rule breakers.
I didn't hear very much systematic discussion of the fact that the rules are deliberately ambiguous and there are different interpretations in many cases of what the rules are. Certainly how they apply to different countries. Or the idea that it's not, you know, just a sort of matter of having intelligence about what did or did not happen, but a much more, you know, complicated process of trying to figure out, okay, where are they on the compliance spectrum and why are they where they are. And if you're gonna try and design an effective compliance management strategy, as opposed to an enforcement strategy, I think you have to have a much clearer sense of the rules at large and how everybody in the system understands them and to the extent that there's a mixed record of compliance and in all of these cases the record really is much more mixed then it was being depicted. Think about why that's occurring and what combination of tools do you have to bring to move them along.
I think one of the big reasons that Russia and China are very uncomfortable right now is because they're afraid that it's an all or nothing decision. That if they find, particularly Iran in violation of its MTP obligations that they somehow are authorizing any actions that the United States wants to take. And that if it was a much more graduated approach of compliance management they'd be more comfortable playing a constructive role.
Chris Preble: I'm Chris Preble with Cato Institute. I also want to challenge one of the premises of the way this panel's been framed because the premise I think of the panelists and probably many people in the audience is that what we are currently doing is not working. Steve teed it up that way. What we are currently doing is not working. That is — I am not sure that's the premise — the governing premise at the White House right now and I am sure that is not the governing premise at the Wall Street Journal or American Enterprise Institute or the Weekly Standard.
The governing premise as far as they are concerned is that Libya is a shining example of an effective coercion strategy which is why, Bruce, it's so important and it's kind of an exhortation for the audience as much as it is for the panelists, to hammer away on this point that Libya is a complex case and that the details of this are not as clear as it has been presented to the public. And it's all about presenting inconvenient facts. I mean the inconvenient facts with respect to Iraq have slowly come out, okay. Democracy does not — elections do not lead to peace inside of Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction and these inconvenient facts when you hammer on them, you make the defenders of these, you know, of the counter factual look foolish.
I mean, Rick Santorum and Curt Weldon believe that if a few hundred canisters of mustard gas is proof of weapons of mass destruction. Well they're contemplating that now in Pennsylvania, okay. And we have to do exactly the same thing with respect to the Libya case and again no — absolutely no disrespect to Steve and to IS. What's terrific about this is taking a well argued paper, boiling it down a bit that Stanley did, but now we've gotta do much more. We have got to hammer this point because if you — when you debate these people they bring out the Libya case every single time and still many Americans are operating under the assumption that it's a clear cut case.
Nancy Soderberg: Okay. There's a lot of good ideas on the table there. One is what do we do about China. It's not necessarily going to be a compliant follower of what we want it to do. Should we look at why the rules are deliberately ambiguous and how to address that. And, Chris' point on the Libya case not being exactly as it was described. So, Bruce you want to start?
Bruce Jentleson: Yeah, these are really good points. Let me just try to weave them together in a couple respects. One is, I think they all speak to, you know, this — a panel like this just being a piece of the larger issues and so on the question of various aspects that weren't covered, absolutely right.
On the question of the formulation and norms, I'll come back to that in a second. I think — let me start — Chris on your points. I mean I think I agree. I think that there's, you know, I — you said inconvenient facts. Well, I, you know, do have certain sympathies for what somebody once called inconvenient truths given my past or whatever affiliations. So I like that expression.
But, although apparently there's this seminar today or tomorrow at the Heritage Foundation explaining why those inconvenient truths or convenient lies it's called, but we won't go there.
And it is a complex case and this speaks to something that David said, you know, in the sense that, you know, we study military strategy left, right and sideways. Whether it's in the policies scholarly world or it's the kind of, you know, war gaming or other studies that our military does for, you know, anticipated hypothetical operations. And that's great. We don't do that as much with things like diplomacy or, you know, state building, for example. And, you know, we end up either anecdotal or not enough attention and I think we need to, you know, in every sense of the term, whether it's people study it in an academic or policy think tank way or in government.
We need to really think these through and there are some interesting lessons from the Libya case in that regard that came through how the diplomacy was practiced and how difficult it was to get credibility. You know, in terms of this notion of trust. Steve's point about the implacable hostilities, the context is why those cases are different than say I think when South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons as its political, or Argentina to Brazil right?
So I do agree with that and I do agree with the political communication issue. I would say on that that, you know, I actually — I think that when you talk to the public in the kind of terms you're talking about, people get it. You know, I actually believe it. I've spent some time studying public opinion and Steve calls me to do his polls four weeks later; that the public is more pragmatic, more commonsensical than many of us give them credit for. They may not know where these places are on a map and they have low levels of information, you know, and I'm not talking about in the research triangle, but I'm talking about 50 miles from there, walk into a bar, talk to a guy in Fayetteville, North Carolina with a pack of Marlboros in his sleeve. I think they actually make more sense then we give them credit for. So, you're right that you need to address people, you know, about, you know, the pragmatism of those things.
I think that also relates to the questions that were raised about, you know, compliance, regime norms and the role of China. I think that — I'm actually doing another study for the Century Foundation right now on the Iran case and the question of sanctions that we're about to finish in there. And there's no question that the oil motivation in a very mercantilistic way is part of China's larger issue, both for the domestic reasons and for becoming a global diplomatic power in the Middle East.
I'm not totally convinced that it's unmovable, that it's the trump card for them. In the broader sense, I think China's trying — the larger interests is what they call peaceful rise, you know, that helps them in terms of the larger context. It does not necessarily mean doing what we want to do and there are recent polls of the Chicago Council, I guess now called the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, that were interesting. Public opinion polls on perceptions of Iran and North Korea as threats from Chinese publics and American publics and you see a huge discrepancy there. So, I think that that's an indicator of things. And I think there is an interest frankly in, you know, in classical balance of power terms in not necessarily wanting either one of these to explode. And there is this scenario actually that I think China started to get more worried about after the October test, that if North Korea — if we don't figure out a way to solve the North Korea problem they may end up with the scenario you described. That's not gonna happen. They don't want regime change for sure. But that a continuing crisis might actually contribute to that as well.
So they don't want, you know, major blow up on either front, but having the United States either a bit tied down or not come out triumphant especially in the context of the Bush administration is not a terrible thing for other major powers. And that's where the context that we've said really matters. So that, you know, again, I mean Strobe made the point and I don't want to over bash, but I was up at the UN for some discussions related to the Iran case a couple months ago and you had some sense that people actually believed that the UN's credibility was in fact a bit on the line on delivering on 1676. Did they really mean it? But when John Bolton was asking it, it made it a lot harder to do it, okay. In the larger context of doing it.
So the last point in that regard I think relates to the question of whether — which norms are they. And one of the things I think — Steve's framework is really good about the inherent problems and things that are not just about this administration. And one other aspect of that is this question of sovereignty, right. It seems to me that the sovereignty issue whether it relates to how far you can go in getting the information you need among inside countries is a problem for verification and enforcement and compliance.
I think the invocation by the Iranians that this is about our sovereignty. You know, has a lot of resonance among many other countries that, you know, claim to be for international community but, you know, for their own reasons we see this on Darfur as well. So, to the extent that we have international norms, you're right there's not a consensus what they should be. One of the ones I think China would like to push is a much more sacrosanct version of sovereignty. I happen to think that's not in the interest of the international community.
We are in an incredibly weak position to argue that for many of the reasons that Strobe said and Steve said, but it is the case I think for those that really believe in multilaterals and international institutions and the UN, there's a little bit of a tough love dimension to it that says, you know, if we want these things to work the UN really needs to mean what it says about Darfur, when it passes responsibility to protect. And when it passes 1676 about Iran and sets a deadline, it really needs to show that it cares about the NPT. And so there I think, again, we all know the arguments why it's hard to do under this administration. But I think we need to push back a little bit on those that defend those intuitions and say, you know, you really — if you want to have a, you know — if we want you to help bring order and enforcement and norms to the world, but it's not just a problem of US policies.
There's a lot of hiding underneath the sovereignty issue. I think, you know, in a way that gets in the way of larger global interests.
Nancy Soderberg: Steve, I'll give you the floor next, but maybe I could ask you to address Nancy's point directly on, you know, the rules of the road are deliberately ambiguous and is that a good or bad thing, or should we try and change that as a starting point for this discussion.
Steve Miller: Well, I framed my analysis entirely in terms of the cases that I know best which are the non—proliferation cases and I actually think in those cases the rules are somewhat clearer than in other context. In both the North Korean and Iranian cases you had a judgment by the IAEA Board of Governors that the state was in a formal condition of non—compliance and this was then referred to the UN Security Council.
And, the — there are 14 Secretary Generals reports now on implementation of IAEA safeguards in Iran. They're available on the IAEA website. You can download them and read them. They don't actually make for thrilling reading, but they make clear that over an 18 year period the Iranians in a sustained and systematic way committed violations of their IAEA safeguards agreement. So that's more clear cut than we often have.
Nancy Soderberg: Only half of it though. The rules that they're supposed to follow are clear, but the sanctions for failing to do so are very much unclear.
Steve Miller: Yes. No, there's — that was one my points is that there's no clear road map for what to do when the non—compliance is identified. If I were a trade expert I might say well there's an adjudicatory mechanism for dealing with compliance issues and procedures for redress and so on. So I freely can see that in realms that are outside my own expertise the argument may play out rather differently.
There's also a vantage point issue here. If you travel outside of our own little orbit of the American of the American debate and the sort of transatlantic debate, the United States is often viewed as one of the major transgressors of the rules. You know, if you go back to the 2005 NPT review conference, for example, where we were hoping to make some serious progress, get some traction against the Iranians. The Non—Aligned Movement 114 states issued a resolution backing the Iranians against us on the grounds that we were abusing Article IV, that we were exempting our own behavior from scrutiny, that we refused to let Article VI and the associated elaborations of it from the 1995 and 2000 review conferences, even beyond the agenda. And so, we were viewed by many parties who had a voice in this matter, at least at the review conference, to be ourselves not strictly observing our obligations under the treaty and to be engaged in an act hypocrisies.
So if you look like what you're doing is using a regime against your enemies it's much harder to persuade third parties that you're engaged in a disinterested exercise in enforcing the rules on behalf of the regime.
The existence of ambiguity deliberate or otherwise I think simply compounds the problem of creating reliable coalitions on behalf of effective actions because they are too many escape clauses for the parties who might choose to ac. If they have reasons not to act and often they do, or if the actions are costly and often they are, then there's a real incentive to find ways of wriggling off the hook and that's what people often do.
With respect to China, I think that was a good illustration of one of the points I was trying to make which is each party who is a potential member of an enforcement coalition brings its own perception and interests to the party. And when they have different stakes in view this very much affects how they frame the issue, what they're prepared to do, what they're prepared to agree to. It also may even affect genuinely how they think in terms of effective remedies. But in the Iran case the United States since the early 90s I would say more or less continuously since the first Bush administration, has viewed Iran as on the track to nuclear weapons, has thought this was deeply undesirable and very contrary to American interests. And we have an extreme version of this view in the current administration when the President has said over and over again that Iran's nuclear capabilities are intolerable and unacceptable. This represents a serious threat to American security and to its regional interests in the Middle East and so on.
The Russians don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon I don't think. But they don't see Iran in that same way. They don't see it as evil, they don't see it as the great menace to their security. They see big opportunities in Iran. In fact, I would say that Russia and China both see Iran as a geo—strategic asset. A stake to be won over. As well as a nonproliferation problem to be managed. And when those two values come up in collision it affects their willingness to accept tough sanctions resolutions for example.
We've had months of diplomacy now trying to get a tough sanctions resolution out of the UN Security Council. The Bush administration has tried incredibly hard to line up the ducks on this one. And several times they thought that they had succeeded. But every time the deadline comes it turns out that the enforcement coalition is not really fully on board and they're not really willing to accept what the United States thinks is necessary and desirable. And so we've been in a progressive process of weakening the sanctions resolution and eventually we'll get down to some lowest common denominator which satisfies no one and it turns out be ineffective.
David Shorr: That's cheery. If we're forced to conclude that the kind of commercial interests that we were talking about for China are trumps, it's almost like there's now way out. You know, they'll never see past them. They'll never feel the stake in stemming the spread of nuclear weapons to new countries. I have to believe that these interests are in the mix and in some kind of balance and I also have the question in the transaction with the government of Sudan or in the transaction, you know, does the customer have no leverage.
On the ambiguity in the norms, I do — I accept that point. I watch my language very carefully. Compliance management is interesting. It sounds a little bit squishy but certainly when describing the system I don't use global governance anymore. I'm really getting away from multilateralism. Don't like that especially. So, the terminology I use does tend to be looser for that exact reason that you raise. I talk more about a rules based order or a social contract kind of ideas.
Lastly, a quick point. I think you've hit on something very important with the perception of an all or nothing proposition as we're trying to build the coalition for compliance management. And a quick example in that. In the humanitarian intervention debate I've always felt that basically mass killing, mass violence, mass displacement and that's, you know, that's really what humanitarian intervention is to address. And so when we see human rights violations coming into that norm, that absolutely triggers the kind of all or nothing perception on the part of a Russia or a China with regards to preservation of a sovereignty norm. Because, you know, if you're leaving it loose enough that, you know, lower grade chronic human rights violations are, you know, enough of a premise for military intervention. I can see that as a problem.
Nancy Soderberg: Okay. Let's take a few more questions. Just listening to this I would also — let's do three at a time so that not everyone has to stand up. So the first three, then we'll come back up here. Just listening to this discussion and following on Nancy's comment, right now the enforcement really will only happen if one country wants to do it on their own as we did in Iraq. Or, if you have the P5 and the Security Council agreeing that firm action is necessary and is that a system that we want to keep. Is it a system that we want to change and if so, how would we change that system and make it more universal and more likely that you actually get action.
Munish Puri: Well, thank you for both of your papers. Get me thinking about —
Nancy Soderberg: No, can you introduce yourself?
Munish Puri: Oh sure. My name is Munish Puri from the Nautilus Institute. This question's directed to Professor Miller, but anyone on the panel I would be interested to hear your comments.
Specifically, about carrots and sticks. This sort of trite phrase that we hear, read about very often and every time I read that I can't help but think that that particular country that's faced with the carrots and sticks is becoming inured to the sting of the sticks and getting bored with the taste of carrots. And, you know, I wonder if there's not an alternative. I understand that it requires some finesse and diplomatic creativity and as Professor Miller brought up in his paper, there's also an issue of credibility. So sometimes a country's that are faced with this decision look back and see that there's domestic issue over the carrots or proposed sticks and sort of take advantage of that and just sit and there's a lot of inertia and I wonder if Professor Miller or anyone on the panel has ideas of alternatives to this or this is just an inherent problem and there's another way to propose it. I don't know if there's a package and you just wait until everybody can put all their carrots on the table and then all at once. I'm not sure, but, yeah open to it. Thank you.
Rachel Klenfeld: Hi. I'm Rachel Kleinfeld with the Truman National Security Projects. This could be a where you stand is where you sit or where you sit is where you stand, but coming from a politically organized think tank, I loved David's point and the point that he brought out from both speakers of treating countries domestic interests is extremely important in this discussion and treating the domestic politics of what's going on in these dissenting or rogue or what have you states is extremely important.
And, we've heard a lot — or I've heard a lot over the last year about Iran's internal politics and the internal pressures. But I've heard almost nothing on North Korea and outside of some Kaplan pieces in the Atlantic Monthly I have trouble thinking about anyone who's really analyzing the internal debates going on in North Korea and the fact that although you'd have an atrocity of some sort, you've also got a lot of other powers working in that country and I'm wondering if you can address that.
The second thing, and it'll be quick, is that before I got into security I was a human rights activist and I think your point is very well taken that you cannot be telling someone to strip naked and then saying you're going to throw them out in the cold. You can't say we'll gonna regime change and work for policy change at the same time. However, when you look at the Gulag system in North Korea or you look at the women being sewn in Iran, I think it gives any human rights activist pause. And I'm wondering if you do think that there's ways that well saying, okay, nuclear weapons are a priority. It's not doing anyone any good to have a nuclear arms state, that there might be ways that we can also be working on human rights along the edges. Thanks.
Dan Smith: I'm Dan Smith, Friend's Committee on National Legislation. The title of the conference plus the reference to Thucydides remind me of Archimedes. Point that if you give him a ladder and a point to stand on far enough away he can move his world.
It seems that the US in trying to form coalitions of the willing is trying to move the world without necessarily finding that point that's removed to give the leverage on a consistent basis as you would have in the institutions — the formal intuitions for change. And I'm just wondering if anyone would be interested in commenting on this trend away from the formal established institutions towards the coalitions of the willing which the US, if it is the formulator, can set the rules for.
Bruce Jentleson: Sure.
Steve Miller: The idea with respect to carrots and sticks is to structure incentives so that the non—complaint state has self—interested reasons for arriving at the conclusion wish them to arrive at, which is that it's in their best interests to restore their behavior to compliance. And, there are a number of variables here that make it tricky I think to, at least on the NPT context, that make it tricky to effectively deploy a package of carrots and sticks that works.
One of them is that by threatening pain, particularly by evoking military action, and especially by invoking military action in the context of a regime change policy, you may in fact be reinforcing the very instincts that drove them to pursue a nuclear option in the first place. It's not clear to me that threatening more severe pain down the road, including possible regime change, is the way to persuade them that they don't need nuclear weapons.
On the same — at the same time it's sort of a convention of wisdom that you need some sort of punishment in the back drop to make the carrots seem more alluring. One of things I've noticed in trying to look carefully at these cases is that perceptions of inducements tend to be quite divergent. The — if you talk to European diplomats, for example, they say we've offered everything the Iranians wanted, that we've accepted their rights to have nuclear technology, we've offered to help them with their light water reactor program. We've given them fuel assurances. We've concocted a scheme that will provide them with a five year kind of emergency supply of enriched uranium and so on and so forth and if they were really serious about just wanting civilian nuclear power they would've accepted this agreement.
If you talk to the Iranians, what they say is we're being asked to give up our enrichment program up front and what we get from the Europeans is a list of things they're prepared to talk about and we will then enter into a negotiation having given up all of our most important leverage without having a single tangible thing that we can reliably pocket. Which means that we haven't structured our incentives in a way that provides the Iranians with the belief that they're actually gonna gain what we seem to be dangling out there.
Those are both strongly perceptions. It's hard to overcome them short of changing our — the way we deploy incentives. Now, the whole purpose of this, getting to the second question about domestic politics. The whole purpose of these packages of inducement and punishment is to influence the behavior of these other parties. And one of the problems we have in both Iran and North Korea is that these are opaque societies whose internal politics are largely impenetrable to us. And we have no idea as far as I can tell what are the effects of our manipulation of carrots and sticks on their perceptions and their choices.
In Iran you have a visible power structure and the real power structure. You have — we superimpose on all of these bad guys a moderate faction in a hawkish fashion — faction or a reformist faction and an Islamist faction or whatever you want to call it, but it's by no means clear that that bifurcation in any way captures the real internal political dynamic. And so to some extent if we find a successful means of influencing them it will be almost by accident because we certainly don't understand them and their internal politics.
What we can say though is that their politics — internal politics and our internal politics reverberate back and forth in ways that further compound many of the kind of structural problems that I've tried to identify. In the case of Iran, for example, the move from the Khatami [unclear audio] regime to the Ahmadinejad Larijani regime has only inflamed the difficulties and made it much more difficult than our own body politics to think about, for example, fashioning a large attractive package of possible inducements. You're gonna give Ahmadinejad help building light water reactors, you're gonna put five years of low enrich uranium in that guys territory? You're gonna lift sanctions? You're gonna let them go into the WTO. We're going to do this that and the other thing for Ahmadinejad who denies the Holocaust, who calls for the elimination of Israel and so on and so forth. This is gonna be very difficult in our internal politics and likewise the more we condemn Iran as evil, cast them as beyond the pail, this gives their own nationalists an ability to mobilize around that kind of anti—American platform.
So I think you can get these kind of negative spirals in which the domestic politics of the two sides, however, opaque their side may be they tend to — they can sometimes reinforce their own worst tendencies. The point about trying to make inducements and punishments work simultaneously I think is an excellent one. And I have a passage in the paper where I try to say that while it's under — while it's possible to understand how these things work symbiotically to reinforce one another, it's also possible to imagine that they negate one another. That in an atmosphere of distrust where each side worries that the other side is really out for some ulterior motive that's not denied, that the — that leaving on the table regime change, the threat of force, extensive sanctions, further punishments, while also trying to persuade them that we're going to provide all of these rewards, we undercut the inducements by emphasizing the sticks and I think often that's what happened in the Iran case where the Europeans genuinely believe I think that they've dangled some very serious opportunities in front of the Iranians. And the Iranians have always responded with great suspicion and ultimately with rejection in part because they fear that the Americans are not on board and that the underlying game here is really one where the United States is trying to overthrow the regime.
Nancy Soderberg: Bruce you want to take it on the —
Bruce Jentleson: Sure
Nancy Soderberg: Archimedes?
Bruce Jentleson: The—
Steve Miller: (inaudible audio)
Bruce Jentleson: Okay, let me —
Nancy Soderberg: No he's going to —
Bruce Jentleson: Let me address that then I'll work backwards to some of the points that Rachel and the others made.
The — you know my sense of the well of international institutions — two things I'll just stress. One is I sort of alluded to this before, is the real importance of a tough love approach. That people that believe that international institutions should play a significant role in international peace and security justice should really be the ones to make the arguments and analysis as what are the flaws so I can help make it better. We sometimes get into a dynamic. I think we all understand why is if you have to defend these institutions because we know who's attacking them. But I don't think it's necessarily helpful. So, my emphasis on, for example, the principal sovereignty and the way its used in the UN system that I think is counterproductive to international peace, security and justice, whether it's Darfur or some, you know, verification issues related to proliferation. I think it's really important. So if we want them to play a role I think we need to be, you know, faithful critics not just defenders.
Second is, in my own view, others may not share this, the role of international institutions formal or informal on international peace, security and justice is significant but limited. You know, I continue to believe that a crucial part of international dynamics will come from the relations among the major powers of the system inside and outside institutions. So, you know, the US/China relationship is a really crucial one. Okay. What we may be able to do or not do bilaterally is important. So that's my perspective on how much that lever really is. I think there are others. I don't — and again others may have different views. I think the future, going back to the structural comments I made at the outset, you know, lies in strengthening international institutions but also roles that the United States needs to play with other major powers. And it's a category by the way that it's not just the existing P5, but clearly — well it's China, but in a more significant way I think it's Indy, I think its regional influentials that are emerging in different regions and I also think it's not just at the global level but it's the role of regional organizations and others in this sort of multilayered kind of way.
On the carrots and sticks question, you know, it's a little bit about who's your favorite psychologist, right. And I sometimes worry that the Bush people read B.F. Skinner and nothing else. Right? Behavior modification, shock the rat, you know, don't shock the rat, you know. And a lot of what you read is very much like that and I says, you know, Steve's notion and others notion that this is a complicated dynamic, you know, inherently as a basic social psychological problem but also, you know, what's the perception set that others have.
One of the reasons I — if I have to single out one thing that I stress policy change not regime change and making that clear. I mean, you know, without giving any credence to the rants of Ahmadinejad, you know, what's the Iranians view of their history. There is 1953. Right? And Mohammad Mosaddeq coup. And there is, you know, the Shaw period and the US support for that. We don't have to dis — we don't have to fully agree with that but we have to understand that that dominates their perceptions. And you make similar arguments about many other countries in the world. So, how you do this is tricky. In the Libya case, again, it was done very skillfully. Where's the balance between demanding, I refer to it as sort of reciprocity, you know, sort of demanding too little for too much in return. Right? Which you're not likely to get the concessions you want. On the other hand, if you give too much for too little, too soon you may not have the credibility to get fully to resolution of the problem. So it's a very tricky business.
In the international security piece we did and I think a little bit in here, we used the terminology or the images to think about the domestic politics. This leads into part of Rachel's question too. What we called, you know, the role of elites within those societies whatever they may be is transmission belts and circuit breakers. But all these countries have politics. North Korea has politics. We probably know the least about it. Iran, we have some sense. We have competing interpretations on Iran. And so we talk about to the extent that key elites within the society, whether they're business elites interested in globalization trade or they're military elites with vested interests, or bureaucratic or the WMD establishment. To the extent that she see their interests as lying and resisting the pressures and the demands of the, you know, international community they kind of act like circuit breakers.
Right. They don't — they — any pressure that's coming from the outside they intercept and it reduces the pressure. If you assume that all of these leaders their primary goal is self—perpetuation, right, Qaddafi and Kim Jong Il and just about everybody else. But to the extent that their interests in their own camases, you know, rarified terminology but in their own calculation of cost and benefits, you know, they actually have more to lose by continuing to resist the international community. They can start to become transmission belts which is a little bit what happened in Libya, you know, in terms of the pressures, their economy not withstanding a little bit of the oil boom they were getting. And so you had a scenario in which different key groups within the society were kind of saying that Qaddafi, you know, your survival and power and our interests are best served by striking a deal. You know, so, you do need to understand the domestic politics.
On Iran, you know, you kind of get two competing camps. [Unclear audio] has a very good new book out. I think he's one of the people who has the most insight and others have been writing this in the blogosphere in others. Since I get, from reading others, 'cause I don't profess to be an Iran expert, is that the notion that everybody in Iran is so tied to nationalist pride around a nuclear program, I think is not right. I think it's an exaggeration. The notion that — notions of regime change or military threats from the United States would make everybody rally around their flag. I think is right. And [unclear audio] others, you know, point to possible transmission belt points within Iranian society.
So I think North Korea, Richard, you're right. I, you know, — maybe Diane Sawyer's latest trip will give us some insights I don't know. But, your other point about human rights, I think it's a really tough issue. Right? You know, talking to a lot of Europeans social democrats they were okay with the deal that the US and Britain struck with Libya and they kept up the pressures in the Bulgarian nurses case. I don't know that you can get everything. Right? I actually — I did something on our blog that we both write on a number of months ago when an Iranian civil society activist was arrested. It was around February or March of this year. No it was actually — it was probably March or April 'cause I happened to have met him in a conference in Athens in February and had lunch with him and his wife and their young child. So this guy gets arrested, you know, so you kind of get beyond your policy walking personally and I also did a little bit of thinking out loud which many of our people on our blog didn't agree with same.
So if somebody came to me now and I know this guy and we was just arrested and said you can have the nuclear deal with Iran but you can't link Ramine getting out jail to it. What would I have done? And I confess I said I would have taken the deal and continued to work on the issue. Those are very tough calls at every level. At the personal and the policy level. I don't think, you know, you totally sign them off because then you are sending a message to countries around the world that if you do what we want in security terms go do whatever you want in human rights. But I think where and how you draw the linkages is complicated in a sense of I don't think you can get everything so you have to take a longer term strategy which has real ethical problems to it, but I think it's, you know, it's just a balancing act.
Nancy Soderberg: David, you wanna add anything?
David Shorr: No not much. I mean I'll amplify what Bruce just said that having your priorities arranged, you know, the other way in terms of kind of stability, international security, you know, doesn't mean that in any way that you have to stop applying diplomatic pressure on human rights issues.
Bruce Jentleson: He did by the way get out of jail largely through the Canadians a couple months later.
Nancy Soderberg: Okay. We have about 20 minutes left. We got four people. Anybody else wanna? Okay. What I would suggest is we go through these four and as you make your comments I would ask you to perhaps add some final comments into what we're trying to come up by the end of this discussion which is identify some useful directions and first step towards building a political consensus for stronger enforcement of norms. That's kind of the task of this panel.
So, just think about that as you go through your comments if you wanna add any last comments on that. And then I'll close off the discussion from the audience, bring it back here to discuss these four points and then try and come to some kind of recommended directions and steps in trying to answer the questions of the panel. So, over to you.
Nancy Donaldson: Hi, I'm Nancy Donaldson with Dutko Worldwide. I find myself thinking that maybe there can be some lessons drawn not so much from the extreme examples of North Korea and Iran, but from sort of the middle ground countries. And what I mean is that in the last year I've worked on democracy building related issues in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and offshore, Uzbekistan.
So, from that vantage point just wanna say two things, three things quickly. One is you talked about, David, about not wanting economic interests to trump military interests. I actually think economic issues and economic interests may often times more — be more influential and more important for finding a pathway to international norms now then force. And I could give some examples, but I'll just say one thing. I think neighbors and regional influences is very important to international norms and South Korea, for example, has been pushing for a long time and people haven't been listen, but they've been pushing reunification and a major economic strategy that if our country listened to it at all it would be an interesting discussion.
But talking about central Asia and some of these other in—between democracy and developing democracy countries and some of them are disasters. I was in a discussion post—Palestinian election, post—Belarus, though coming up on Belarus and post—Azerbaijan and I asked this kind of question to Dan Freid and I really give him credit because he said, it was in a public setting, well you know these things are really pretty messy. Yes, oil interests seem to change everything and etc. etc. He said, but you know, I think it's better that we're promoting democracy as an international norm than promoting dictators like we were 20 years ago.
That actually, I thought was a remarkably candid answer and just to close. I don't mean to go on. What that has affected me is, you know, whenever I talk to people who say there really can't be real democracy moving forward or there really can't be free and fair trade, I say, you know, there's never gonna be a perfect regime, but we have to believe in these things and we have to hold these norms out and we have to find a half full cup on our way there because it makes such a difference in people's lives when they have freedom, whether it's human rights or otherwise.
Mary Mullin: Mary Mullin and I work with the Bosnia Support Committee. I was wondering if, excuse me, a change in the Security Council that's being proposed having Japan or Germany or Brazil or whoever it is that they want to be on the — to be permanent members of the Security Council, would that help in making some of these decisions.
And also I wanted to ask you if you know why the United States has really only ratified two international conventions. I believe it's just the chemical weapons and the torture. I — they haven't ratified, they haven't even signed as Strobe Talbott was saying they haven't even signed the Rome Convention and of course it's a convention on the landmines convention and convention on the child and so many more conventions. Do they have — does the United States have good reasons for not signing these conventions? I'd just like you speak on that, please.
Karin Lee: Karin Lee, National Committee on North Korea. Thanks for a very useful session. On the question of the link consensus for international norms, it really struck me that when we use the word norm we're really talking about ideals. Because if you look at the normal way a nuclear weapons state behaves, like the United States for example, it's how to rationalize developing new nuclear weapons. And I think it's — and that's how it violates the NPT. So, I think — I would say that in this room we want to say that we're promoting international norms, but I would really say that we're promoting our ideal of what the international norm would be.
Specifically, on North Korea. I was very taken with the comments that regional reassurance that regime change was not the goal is very difficult to envision in the North Korean situation. And what has been one of the most flawed aspects of the six—party process is the lack of consensus among the stakeholders. You have Japan and the United States as the most — as the outliers in the region of what their goals are, but at the same time you have China playing the communication role. And it seemed to me that what it would take to actually really move forward in the DPRK is to use China's outcome, that lowest common denominator, as the goal and if you dropped that lowest common denominator then China can play a greater role in reassuring North Korea about what the ultimate goals of the United States would be. It's still a very iffy proposition. It's not as though the DPRK and China have a fully trusting relationship, but as long as you have the US and Japan trying to push up to this higher outcome, this more idealistic outcome, I don't see how you can have that reassurance at that level. Thank you.
Alexander Stephanowski: Hello. My name is Alexander Stephanowski and I'm from the George Washington University. This might be the last question but it might be a little bit unorthodox and the question is has the US thought of the scenario where the enforcer becomes enforced. And in particularly what would the US do when it becomes asked to comply to international laws and norms. Before it was bipolar world in the cold air where we had Russia and the USSR and the United States trying to keep each other in check and balance, but now we are in a multipolar world where we have rising powers as China, India, Brazil and other European Union, in particular. And, as Steven touched in the — on the basis that the non—aligned members program, resolution and how the US is viewed globally by other countries. In South America we have the anti—US movement by Hugo Chavez and in the Middle East it's not so great. And how — so the question is what should the US do and if it becomes in that scenario to become asked to be put in check and gets balanced by other countries. Thanks.
Nancy Soderberg: You mean other than the recent democratic elections and Congress taking over. Okay. What I would suggest is we have about 12 minutes left. I would ask the panelists and David to comment on this last round of discussions and then we'll come to a closing five minute discussion on trying to answer the question that's before us. And I'll give David the last word in coming up with the answers on our panel.
Bruce Jentleson: And I also have some housekeeping that pushes us towards preserving a little bit of time to fill out the evaluation forms before people leave.
Nancy Soderberg: Actually I looked at those evaluation forms and they include lunch speaking so you can't do it—.
Bruce Jentleson: Okay
Nancy Soderberg: Don't they? They say what did you think of —
Bruce Jentleson: Do they cover —
Nancy Soderberg: The lunch speaker on the one I have.
Bruce Jentleson: Alright, then hold them I guess. I thought I was supposed to get them into the basket.
Nancy Soderberg: Is the other two?
Steve Miller: Yeah.
David Shorr: There's two.
Nancy Soderberg: Oh. Okay.
Steve Miller: One per panel.
Nancy Soderberg: Oh. Okay. Okay, so we'll —
Bruce Jentleson: Save a little time.
Nancy Soderberg: Save a little time at the end. So okay. You wanna —
Bruce Jentleson: I'll be very brief 'cause and I can't do justice to all those questions. But don't want to hold people from lunch in terms of . On the first question about the non—extreme cases. Yeah, I mean I think we're dealing with the hardest issues here and it is a little bit like in the non—proliferation world, you know, no case is easy but there've been some successes with South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and others. And so in that same logic you could take some of the arguments that we've made and, you know, Steve's made and I've made and others and apply 'em to some issues that relate to, you know, the Azerbaijan's and those kinds of — and I think you're right. And I think economics will have a lot to do with it. Sometimes it may be emphasized to much how much economics triumphs other issues, but I think clearly, you know, every economies need to be connected to the global sphere.
On the question of UN Security Council expansion, you know the high level panel that Security General Anan had assembled had established three criteria by which it would make all its recommendations and one was equity and the other was effectiveness. In anytime, in any organizational setting that you expand the numbers, you know, NATO's been wrestling with this, universities — I mean everybody, you know, you sometimes have a more difficult time, you know, having effectiveness and efficiency in decision—making. At the same time I do think that the question of the representativeness of the Security Council just can't go on any longer. And, you know, so the notions of Japan and Brazil or India, I think that'd continually have to be addressed. You know, they basically punted on that. But having said that part of the problem is not just with the major powers and the United States, it's getting them to agree in the African context. They had huge fights about how it would be. Would it be South Africa? Would it be Nigeria? Egypt was saying well we're, you know, an African country in some respects too.
You know, in Latin America the same thing. So it's not just a yes it should be expanded I think, but it's not just a major powers issue. If the major powers said tomorrow you could have the seats, the regions as they were in their processes were still having trouble with that.
The larger question you asked about the UN, I think is a way of trying to distinguish between the concerns that when we act through the UN and other institutions we encroach upon our prerogatives. But we also can enhance our policy capacity. And so that's one of the ongoing debates. How much do you give up freedom of action to gain policy capacity? And my own view is almost any problem in the world now, even the best policies in the most power country in the world can't solve them by ourselves. And so that you really need to — you know, that you gain through the right kind of tradeoffs. But we have to sort of breakout of that.
On North Korea, I think one of my concerns about least common denominator — I mean I think a lot of what you said I agree with. Is you get to the scenario Steve was beginning to foresee with Iran which is we're gonna have water downed sanctions and then the message to the country of concern is not that the international community is united and credible but this is best it can do and, you know, again one of my mantras is policy change, not regime change. I think that has to be made clear and I don't think we've done a good job of that. Those kind of reassurances. But I think that to me, you know, North Korea does need to be a non—nuclear state. And I'm very open tactically how one gets there.
Then on the last question about the US being enforced upon. It's an interesting question. I think there is this issue of what one might call relative hypocrisy. It may not be that we are more hypocritical than any other country out there. Again maybe these countries that claim they want the UN to play a role stand in the way of doing it. But we do make very large claims. And I think the hypocrisy of life is often a relative judgment. So, if, you know, I think we need to close the gap between the purity we often claim and our willingness to live up to it. Then in a very, you know, pragmatic way you say to countries look, you're right, I have ideals but I'm not perfect, but I'm not claiming to be perfect anymore. But I would come to the point though, you know, I think that there's, you know, a little humming around that in Chavez and Amadijahd, but it comes back to one of the points I made at the beginning is we need partners and the world needs the United States. I think that many of the problems that are out there really are much more likely to be managed or resolved in so many spheres if the US uses our power resources and leadership capacity through institutions, not against them and not withdrawing from them. And that when you cut through a lot of the rhetoric a whole lot of the world doesn't want to see us, you know, just go home.
Steve Miller: I think Bruce gave very sensible reactions to this sequence of interesting questions and since I agree with most of them I'm not gonna retrace his footsteps in the interest of leaving time for some suggestions at the end. Let me just make a couple of quick buttressing points.
The North Korea case, the problem of reassurance which I think is always a hard one in circumstances of high mistrust and the problem of consensus among stakeholders. I think this is a vivid illustration of precisely some of these structural difficulties that I was trying to lay out in confronting enforcement issues.
When the North Koreans went and did their nuclear tests despite everybody's preferences, I think including China's preference, Secretary of State Rice mounted her steed and headed off to Asia to try and punish them with some additional sanctions. The Chinese were willing to agree as long as they didn't have to promise to implement them faithfully, which was their explicit position. The South Koreans refused to agree to strict implementation of the proliferation security initiative that is to say interdiction of vessels leaving North Korean waters. They refused to abandon their sunshine policy. They refused to abandon their economic development projects in North Korea. And so already what you see is that the real room for action is greatly circumscribed by the harmonization problems among the potential stakeholders. And I think that that's precisely why in the end we often find ourselves living with precisely the results that we were seeking to avoid.
On the whole question of enforcing against the enforcer. Hypocrisy is common in this world and I think in relation to effective enforcement the fundamental question is are you showing sufficient fidelity to the rules yourself that you don't pay an enormous hypocrisy cost in terms of the diplomacy of enforcement. If you're viewed as being flagrantly transgressive yourself it's very hard to persuade other parties that you're being a disinterested enforcer of the rules against others and that impairs your ability to build an effective coalition.
Nancy Soderberg: Okay. We have just a couple of minutes left and I will try and summarize real quickly what I'm trying to do in this last minute which is to try and look at some useful directions and first steps that might help us move forward.
Bruce talked about the need for proportionality risks, and — creative coercive credibility. Steve's been talking about engagements, inducements, carrots and sticks. The problems of the hypocritical transgressors. And I'm going to give David the last word, so I'll come back to, you know, 30 seconds from Bruce and Steve on what would the first steps that you'd recommend and the directions that we need to try and have, not just the dissenters in the fold as the title panel, but the good guys in the fold too it looks like. So, Bruce why don't you just take a minute, Steve a minute and then I'll leave David with the last word.
Bruce Jentleson: Just very cryptically that the objectives need to be policy change, not regime change, number one. Number two is you really need to know thy enemy or other side to genuinely understand the dynamics going on so you can better have an effort to try to influence their behavior. And again, just not inclusive but a number three is for the United States to be able to reclaim that we are the ones that really believe in the collective global community and indeed turn the table a little bit on those often, again like China does this and Russia and others, that say they're standing up for their international community 'cause we've made it so easy for them because of where we are, but to really become once again what I like to call sort of the fulcrum rather that foil of multilaterals.
Steve Miller: I have six quick suggestions about how we might be able to do better. One which I'll obviously do in a very cryptic fashion since I have a minute or so.
Nancy Soderberg: 30 seconds.
Steve Miller: Yes. First, our engagement — our enforcement diplomacy with the other big powers is not divorced from our relationships with those powers. If we had better relations with Russia which are quite sour at the moment, we might be more effective at bringing them onboard. Secondly it may be that inducements are easier to configure internationally than punishments because they don't have this self—punishing policy in — punishments usually require people to pay costs where as you can figure in — you can configure inducements in a way that create rewards for our side.
Thirdly, maybe if we, the United States, care enough about some of these outcomes we need to think about rewarding some of the other enforcers to get them fully onboard. Some sort of concessions or advantages to them.
Fourth, I think we need to think about a division of labor when — particularly when configuring these packages of inducements. Who can really deliver what. It's not always us that has the relevant goodies.
Fourth or third, I can't quite remember which — fourth I guess. Engagement, that is to say, willingness to discuss with the other side should not be regarded as a concession. In the past in many of these circumstances we haven't even been able to get the discussion going because we wanted to be paid for even talking to the other side. There's no guarantee that talking to them gets us to a solution, but not talking to them prevents the process from even getting started.
Fifth, something that leaps out of these cases is that the deep and pervasive mutual mistrust is an incredible barrier to effective resolution of these cases and if you could find some sort of mechanisms for confidence building, something we tried a lot in the Cold War period with respect to our bitterest enemies, with mixed results. So it's no panacea but maybe if we could reduce the temperature a little bit we would have better prospects.
And then the last point I would make is that there may be trade off between maximum objectives and feasible objectives. We have been holding our breath and banging on our highchair wanting to have non—nuclear North Korea and Iran without any enrichment capability. And while we refuse to budge they proceed to acquire the capabilities that we don't want them to have. And it may be that we have to make some tradeoffs there where the perfect isn't the enemy of the good or the achievable.
David Shorr: Well — no thanks everyone. Thanks to the panel and thanks to everyone for being here. I'm gonna do my two housekeeping announcements actually before doing a wrap—up comment.
If you would please take a minute to fill out the evaluation forms. You can even do it while I'm talking right now and I won't be offended since it was on me to make sure that got done. There is an in basket at the front here to leave them in before you leave the session.
Housekeeping on lunch. Behind your name is your lunch ticket. It says where you're having lunch at the bottom of it. There was kind of a first come, first served in terms of where people are in overflow rooms and all that so please look. Those of you who have special dietary needs will have a ticket behind that you should take out, put it on your plates so the wait staff can see it.
Back to the substance. Nancy put an excellent question on the table. Norm management is highly concentrated on the UN Security Council. Are we entirely happy about that? Separate and apart from the composition of the council. You know, in this big system should all the weight be there. And it relates to Steve raising the question about division of labor.
Nancy Donaldson on trade. Trade cuts both ways. It's a double—edged sword. I absolutely believe in how, you know, an integrated global trading system pulls everyone in the right direction of a shared stake, but we saw that energy transactions really do push back the other way. You know, we're not clear exactly to what extent. Nancy, everybody's Nancy today I guess. We have three Nancys.
Nancy Donaldson also reminded us of kind of the middle cases. There's not only Ukraine but another state that gave up nuclear weapons don't forget is South Africa. It's an interesting question whether, you know, we look at them as kind of responsible stakeholders although on the Zimbabwe situation South Africa kind of less so. And other problems in Africa.
On the question of, you know, what treaties we've signed does relate to Strobe Talbott's presentation this morning and the fact that we exempt our self and have taken exceptionalism too far and it's not worth going into the reasons why, you know, this or that treaty. Obviously, you know, we need to get back into good citizenship. But, there is a reason not to overemphasize treaties, I feel. And this brings us back to Nancy Gallagher's point about the ambiguity of norms or at least the ambiguity of how the system works. Because I think that if the international law frame and the treaty frame is over emphasized, then there's a false sense that this is just like domestic law and order within a country. And I think that is not helpful to a constructive debate overall.
And, my last word will be on thanking everyone is I couldn't — I thought that Bruce Jentleson almost got us a bumper sticker, which is always very impressive. We need partners and the world needs the United States. It's not exactly soaring or catchy, but I think it captures something essential about today's world and how we want to be in it. So thanks very much.
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This text has been professionally transcribed; however, for timely distribution, it has not been edited or proofread against the tape.