North Atlantic Treaty Organization

This commentary appeared in Christian Science Monitor on February 15, 2013.

In the 15 months since NATO ended its intervention in Libya, little has been accomplished to secure the hard-won gains of the war, and trends are headed in the wrong direction. It's time to go back, lest Libya's post-war transition run off the rails.

Today, as Libyans mark the second anniversary of the start of the revolution that ousted Muammar Qaddafi from power, security conditions here are bad and getting worse. There is violence in the South, major towns have been at war with each other in retribution for past deeds, and Islamic extremists are making inroads in the eastern province of Cyrenaica. Crime is on the rise. The post-revolutionary street is armed and restive.

As the crisis along the border between Syria and Turkey intensifies, Turkey appears on the brink of a formal request to the North Atlantic Council that NATO deploy Patriot missiles to help defend the border. Such a demand falls short of requesting a NATO intervention or even a full-fledged allied defense of Turkish territory, but if the alliance agrees to provide the missile system, it will move NATO a step in that direction.

Turkey has a 550-mile border with Syria. As a result, it is the NATO ally most seriously threatened by the ongoing crisis. The latest border tensions date back to June, when Syrian air defense systems shot down a Turkish military aircraft. In October, mortar fire from within Syria landed in Turkey, killing five civilians and injuring several more. Last week, the Syrian government deployed MIG-25fighter aircraft against civilians in Ras al-Ain, a town along the Turkish border that had recently fallen into rebel hands.

This commentary appeared on U.S. News & World Report on October 25, 2012.

A year ago this week, the Libyan people watched as Muammar Qadhafi, their dictator of 42 years, was captured and killed in gory, televised fashion. With his death, a seven-month NATO intervention came to an end and a door opened to a better future for the Libyan people.

Libya had considerable advantages compared with other post-conflict states. It was wealthy. The region was relatively stable. And the rebel victory was uncontested....

The remainder of this op-ed can be found at usnews.com.

This commentary draws from an article that will appear in the December 2012–January 2013 issue of Survival.

The tragic assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 raised new doubts about the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. But while the attack drew into question aspects of Libya's transition, it did not change the fact that the intervention had toppled Muammar Qaddafi and opened the door to a better future for the country. Without it hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent civilians would have died and the pro-democracy protest movements sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa would probably have been slowed. From this perspective it remains a genuine, even if moderate, success for NATO.

But could it be repeated? A year after Qaddafi's death, the ways in which good fortune contributed to NATO's success are even clearer. Militarily, Qaddafi's air defense system was relatively weak and his security forces had been so hollowed out that most of them quickly defected. Geographically, most of Libya's important towns, including Tripoli, were located near the Mediterranean coast, within fairly easy striking distance of NATO bases in Italy and Greece. Politically, France and Britain—largely for domestic political reasons—were eager to push their allies to intervene. And international opprobrium of Qaddafi's actions was strong enough to permit a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing a no-fly zone, as well as a more ambitious civilian protection mission that allowed NATO to attack Qaddafi's ground forces.

This commentary appeared on GlobalSecurity.org on May 24, 2012.

This week's NATO summit successfully navigated a tricky turn toward an end to the alliance's combat role in Afghanistan without veering into a stampede from the region altogether. The plan for handing over the lead in combat operations to Afghan forces is a little more clear, allies committed over $1 billion annually to support the ANSF, and NATO reaffirmed it will stay beyond 2014—even after combat operations are over. Meanwhile, several allies signed long-term partnership agreements with Kabul that parallel the agreement signed by President Obama there three weeks ago.

But the summit also drew attention to at least three challenges on the road ahead:

In this media conference call, RAND experts Stephen Larrabee and Christopher Chivvis discuss key issues addressed at the NATO summit in Chicago on May 20–21, including Afghanistan and the future of a European-based missile defense system. The call was moderated by RAND Media Relations Officer Joseph Dougherty.

This commentary appeared in Chicago Tribune on May 17, 2012.

The decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin not to attend the NATO summit and the G-8 summit is a blow to the Obama administration's hopes of building closer ties to Russia and underscores that the effort to "reset" relations with Russia is likely to be slow and fraught with difficulties.

Putin's excuse — that he was too busy with the formation of the new Cabinet — is hardly credible. Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has the responsibility to nominate the Cabinet, not Putin. But Medvedev will be in the United States attending the G-8 summit. So the prime minister, who is in charge of forming the Cabinet, can go to the summit. But Putin, who does not have the main responsibility in this matter, cannot.

This commentary appeared on NYTimes.com on May 16, 2012 and in International Herald Tribune on May 17, 2012.

The upcoming NATO summit meeting in Chicago on May 20–21 is being billed as a historic event that will enable the alliance to achieve consensus on several important security issues, particularly military capabilities, missile defense and Afghanistan. But a dodgy European economy and the change of government in France could severely complicate prospects.

The most serious obstacle is the severe economic constraints on defense resources. The global economic crisis has forced European governments to sharply cut their defense budgets. Germany plans to reduce defense spending by a quarter over the next four years. Britain's defense budget will be slashed by 7.5 percent until 2015. The defense budgets of some smaller European nations have taken even larger cuts.

The euphoria with which the United States initially greeted the news of Osama bin Laden's death caused discomfort to many Europeans. However, the uneasiness was not only about celebrating the death of a man — albeit America's and arguably Europe's worst enemy. It also touched on a fear that America could now consider its mission accomplished and lean towards a more isolationist approach to foreign policy — one that elements in both of America's major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, defend today.

This uneasiness may seem paradoxical, considering the criticism that the previous US Administration faced over its omnipresence in world affairs and use of military force. Yet it demonstrates the persistence of a historical reality: While Europeans dislike a ubiquitous America which is always ready to prove its power, they seem to dislike an isolationist America even more. For historical reasons, Europeans know better than anyone the potentially disastrous consequences of an American withdrawal from world affairs. In addition — and perhaps from a more practical point of view — European countries have largely relied on US security guarantees even after the end of the Cold War. They have not had the incentive or the motivation to implement a common and coherent defence policy at the regional level as a result.

"Bad cases make bad law." This axiom of jurisprudence can as easily apply to the use of force. What is happening in Libya at the moment is a "bad case" in three ways: military intervention in its civil war does not derive from well-established precedent, does not draw on unambiguous principle, and may not set a course or parameters for future conduct of various nations and institutions in similar — or roughly similar — cases. This conclusion will be tested the next time the U.S., its European and Canadian allies, and others are faced with a situation that seems to cry for outside intervention.

This is not to say that decisions on Libya taken in Paris, London, Washington and other capitals, plus at NATO headquarters in Brussels, came out of nowhere. They were based on a resolution of the UN Security Council (under Chapter VII enforcement provisions of the UN Charter). That has been important in the past to NATO's European members and to some other countries, although not always a necessary condition. Witness the NATO air campaign to stop Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in 1999 in Kosovo. (In that situation, in the absence of a Security Council resolution authorizing intervention, each ally assumed the responsibility for choosing its own juridical basis for approving NATO military action decisions, a precedent that may prove appropriate in some future circumstances.)