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T H E H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N • S T A N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y


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T H E H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y

HOOVER DIGEST

RESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICY

SUMMER 2015 • HOOVERDIGEST.ORG


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The Hoover Digest explores politics, economics, and history, guided by the

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center at Stanford University.

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ON THE COVER

Many peoples and nations are known

by their symbols. This oak tree and the

colors red, green, and white symbolize the

Basques, a people without an independent

nation of their own. The Basques do,however, have a tree—not just a symbolic

one but an oak actually growing in the

town of Guernica, Spain, and celebrated in

poetry and song. The oak and its forebears

have seen centuries of war, revolution, and

peace, and only time will tell if the tree will

witness lasting peace in today’s Basque

Country. See story, page 186.

HOOVER DIGESTRESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICYSUMMER 2015 • HOOVERDIGEST.ORG

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Summer 2015 HOOVER DIGEST

TERRORISM

9 Sledgehammers of Ideology Jihadists are trying to destroy history—in the halls of Iraq’s

museums, quite literally. Standing in their way: a civilizationthat cherishes both political and artistic freedom. By Charles

Hill.

18 State of Terror Jessica Stern, a member of Hoover’s Task Force on National

Security and Law, shows how ISIS uses a slick, media-savvy

campaign to lure vulnerable youth to its end-times army. ByChristina Pazzanese.

26 Escape from GitmoThe legal path out of our long Guantánamo nightmare. By

Jane Harman and Jack Goldsmith.

FOREIGN POLICY

30 Weak, in Review When the Cold War ended, strategists became distracted by

the dangers of the “weak state.” Powerful adversaries used the

opportunity to grow even more powerful. By Amy B. Zegart .

37 Flip the Script Abandoned friends and defiant foes: what the president’s

foreign policy has wrought. By Kimberly Kagan.

HOOVER DIGEST • SUMMER 2015 3


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IRAN

41 No Sign of RestraintProperly understood, the Iran nuclear deal is at best only a

beginning, not an end—and regional stability may be fartheraway than ever. By George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger.

49 Digital DefianceThe Iranian people are challenging the theocracy that governs

them with a quiet revolution of their own, much of it online. By

Abbas Milani.

55 Memo to the “Great Satan”Iran isn’t reasonable—revolutionary states never are. The

United States should seek not to appease Iran but to contain

it. By Josef Joffe.

THE ECONOMY

58 Making the Poor RicherWhen the free market benefits people of all incomes,

“inequality” becomes a red herring. By Edward Paul Lazear .

61 Minimum Wages as Stealth TaxHigher minimum wages help almost nobody—but raise

prices for everybody. How is that a good idea? By Thomas E.

MaCurdy.

4 HOOVER DIGEST • SUMMER 2015


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65 The Wages of Stagnation Average pay has remained in the doldrums even as the

economy has grown. Here’s why. By Edward Paul Lazear .

68 Lyft Out A bad legal ruling in California could impede ride services, one

of the most promising offspring of the sharing economy. By

Richard A. Epstein.

SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

73 Green AlliesWhat would bring conservationists and conservatives

together? Environmental solutions that really work. By Terry

L. Anderson.

78 To Market, to MarketThe FDA finally admits genetically enhanced potatoes and

apples are safe. A sorry tale of bureaucratic timidity andinertia. By Henry I. Miller.

LAW

83 Law Schools Are FlunkingEnrollment is sagging and student debt climbing. Law schools

are a business—and in desperate need of a new businessmodel. By James Huffman.

CALIFORNIA

91 A (Dry) Winter’s TaleIn parched California, the well of political foresight ran dry

years ago. By Victor Davis Hanson.



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EDUCATION

104 Human Capital 101Why does college enrollment boom when the economy goes

bust? Hoover fellow Caroline M. Hoxby explains. By Clifton B. Parker .

107 A Degree of DifficultyNot every job requires a college degree. Employers are

shrinking the labor pool unfairly—and unwisely. By Michael J.

Petrilli.

DEMOCRACY

111 Trust Me, You FoolThat gibe about the “stupidity of the American voter” is as old

as Athens and as modern as a federal technocrat. By Bruce S.

Thornton.

116 Still Springing ForwardDespite terrorism in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab

Spring, the democracy movement in the Arab world lives on.

But its successes are fragile. By Larry Diamond .

WARFARE

121 The Drone AgeThe drone revolution will pose new threats—but also better

ways to counter them. By Amy B. Zegart .



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EUROPE

125 Medicine for What Ails EuropeFive steps toward restoring economic sanity in the eurozone.

By Michael J. Boskin.

RUSSIA

128 Autocrat for Life Vladimir Putin, with his genius for tapping the country’s

pathologies, has come to embody Russia itself. By Stephen

Kotkin.

141 Putin’s Recipe for PowerLarge parts aggression and calculation, a helping of insecurity,

and many dollops of resentment. By Victor Davis Hanson.

146 Sanctions Aren’t WorkingEconomic pressure is a slow, unpredictable weapon at best.

Sanctions not only have failed to deter Putin but might

prompt him to behave even worse. By Mark Harrison.

152 A New Economic WebRussia’s new Eurasian Economic Union is also an instrument

of Putin’s political power. By Sam Rebo and Norman M.

Naimark .

INTERVIEW

158 “Find Your Fit”Born creators, people are everywhere in creative chains:

David Kelley, founder of the Stanford design school, wants to

free your inner innovator. By Peter Robinson.



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VALUES

168 The Honesty GapThe clamor over male-female pay disparities persists not

because the clamor accomplishes anything but because it’spolitically useful. By Thomas Sowell .

HISTORY AND CULTURE

171 One of the Very Few A review of Shame , the new book by Hoover fellow Shelby

Steele, which presents a portrait of Steele himself. By Joseph

Epstein.

HOOVER ARCHIVES

178 Chiang’s Secret AdvisersDriven from the Chinese mainland, Chiang Kai-shek turned to

Japanese and German military officers, once his bitter foes, to

help him defend Taiwan. By Hsiao-ting Lin.

186 On the Cover



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TERRORISM

Sledgehammers of Ideology

Jihadists are trying to destroy history—in the halls

of Iraq’s museums, quite literally. Standing in theirway: a civilization that cherishes both political andartistic freedom.

By Charles Hill

Scenes of Islamic State smashing ancient statues—one a winged bull

from ninth-century BC Assyria—in a museum in Mosul and in the

ancient city of Nimrud reveal a profound new dimension in radical

Islam’s twenty-first-century war on world civilization. When the

slaughter, enslavement, and genocidal designs on other religious groups are

joined by culturally catastrophic destruction of non-Islamic arts and artifacts,

then the world faces a fully totalitarian enemy whose rationale is directly

declared: “Oh, Muslims, these artifacts that are behind me were idols and gods

who lived centuries ago [and were] worshipped instead of Allah,” the smasher

said to the camera. “Our Prophet,” he continued, “ordered us to remove all

these statues as his followers did when they conquered nations.”

Such cultural devastation has been evident all across this new twenty-first

century, from the Taliban’s mortaring and dynamiting the giant sculpted

Buddhas carved into the rock face at Bamiyan on the ancient Silk Road

to the Islamist devastation of the mausoleum, shrines, and library of the

Charles Hill is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoover’s

Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.



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fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muslim center of learning at Timbuktu,

a world cultural heritage site. The devastation is also apparent in Saudi

Arabia’s systematic destruction of the traditional surroundings of the Kaaba

and the Grand Mosque of Mecca. The government has obliterated significant

Ottoman-era structures to put up high-rise glass and steel hotels of indistin-

guishable modern facelessness, a demonstration that such cultural ravages

can be carried out by legitimate, internationally recognized Muslim state

regimes as well as by the radical jihadis who aim to overthrow those same

state regimes as abominations in the eyes of Islamism.

If these depredations of Islamism are an atavistic reawakening of the

seventh-century Islamic rise in order to command the future, it is necessary

to review the devastations generated by the modern age itself all through the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the Enlightenment, as Kant and

Hegel made clear, history replaced theology and religion as the arena where

the greatest challenges of the human condition would have to be played out.

With religion relegated to the sidelines, ideology was invented as its substi-

tute. Ideology became a totalistic, answer-all-questions compulsory atheistic

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest ]



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faith. Like most religions, once inaugurated, the ideology begins the world

anew: the French Revolution as the year zero, or Mao’s Tiananmen architec-

turally declaring that nothing good happened before 1949. Thus history itself

was destroyed or transformed with a scientific certainty, a railroad along

which the ideology would inevitably ride.

THE TYRANNY O F IDEOLOGY

The zenith of ideology’s catastrophic destruction of culture came in Mao’s

Cultural Revolution, launched to eradicate traditional Chinese culture by

burning books, outlawing the Peking Opera and all theatrical productions,

suppressing academic and intellectual life, and tearing down pagodas and

temples. Any structure or creative-arts manifestation had to be destroyed.

All this was produced in accordance with Mao’s perception that Marxism

had to be turned upside down. Materialism, the economic base that, when

communized, was supposed to change the culture, had not worked. Mao saw

culture—and he was correct—as the determinative human factor, so China’s

great cultural past had to go. Confucius was reviled; Mao reveled in being

compared to China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, who burned books and

buried scholars alive.

What we are witnessing today in Islamism’s war on the world’s cultures isnot unconnected to this modern revolutionary upheaval. The “history” that

replaced religion in the

Enlightenment and which

was in turn comman-

deered by ideology has,

with the Islamic Republic

of Iran’s revolutionary

seizure of state powerin 1979 and the Islamic

State’s taking of extensive territorial power in 2014–15, amalgamated religion

and ideology as a new stage in the war against history. No wonder, therefore,

that the radical jihadists revel in their conviction that the ultimate apocalyp-

tic moment has been placed in their hands.

However grotesque and despicable is Islamist vandalism in the service

of imagined divine instructions, there is more at stake in this phenomenon.

Something of world-historical consequence is going on, because this jihadi

assault threatens a global development which may stand comparison with

the axial age, a transformation in human consciousness discerned by the

philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). In the middle centuries of the first

The museum met Edmund Burke’s

definition of the social contract: a

partnership among the dead, the living,

and those yet to be born—a gain for the

common good of humanity.



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millennium BC, a trans-civilizational shift in mentalities took place across a

great swath of the globe from the Eastern Mediterranean to Persia to South

Asia to China. Sharply contested, the axial theory nonetheless does provide

coherence to the emergence of cultural expressions that contain both indi-

vidualist and universalist characteristics at the same time. A new axial age,

which can at least hypothetically be tracked from the early modern age to

the present, is still in an emerging phase of development, one that centers on

cultural art and artifacts.

Start with the reality that the sixteenth-century Reformation, a key

moment in the history of modernity, produced religiously driven iconoclasm;

a smashing of the images, altars, and sculptures on the grounds that such

“idolatry” had caused humanity to be afflicted by the wrath of God.

The 1648 Westphalian settlement of the Thirty Years’ War—a war of

religions—would subdue this inclination to cultural mayhem by gaining an

informal international understand-

ing that religious convictions should

be sidelined when it came to dip-

lomatic negotiations among

states. The Treaty of



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Westphalia would lead to an international system based on procedural rather

than substantive requirements; it thus could, and did, evolve into a light

structural framework for interactive world affairs while leaving each nation’s

culture, religion, and politics legitimately its own business.

Countervailing events followed. Lord Elgin (the seventh earl) in the early 1800s

removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon to England for safekeeping

in the British Museum—otherwise they certainly would have been destroyed.

Lord Elgin (the eighth Earl) invaded China and burned and plundered treasures

of the Summer Palace for the larger purpose of forcing the Qing court to accept

the procedures—resident ambassadors—of the Westphalian international state

system; this was certainly a cultural crime of great magnitude.

Yet a parallel and positive cultural course was also emerging. British

scholar-adventurer-archeologists discovered lost or discarded sites and

images of the Buddha in northern India; it is not too much to say that Bud-

dhism itself might have

vanished without this project

and subsequent British pres-

ervation and interpretation

of ancient Buddhist scrolls.

A similar story can be foundregarding Islam, as in Oxford

University’s study of the

Amiriya at Rada, a sixteenth-

century madrasah in Yemen, the archeological interpretation of which

revealed commercial-religious-civilizational contacts between India and the

Arabian Peninsula. And some cultural scholarship and preservation efforts

were cross-culturally collaborative, notably the use by Chinese scholars of

Western training and techniques gained at the University of Pennsylvania toinitiate the study and preservation of China’s architectural heritage, identify-

ing the T’ang dynasty era wooden Buddhist temple in the Wu Tai mountains,

later a victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Such measures were accompanied by the Western institutionalization of

the museum, an idea as old as fifth-century BC Delphi but emerging as a

globe-spanning phenomenon in the modern eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies, places where an unlimited diversity of works of art would be gathered

and available to the public as the object of study and comparison for an ever-

greater understanding of mankind. Here was Edmund Burke’s definition of

the social contract: a partnership among the dead, the living, and those yet to

be born, a gain for the common good of all humanity.

The great civilizations of the world,

however remote to each other in

time and place, each expresses in

art, literature, philosophy, and spiri-tuality some foundational truths of

the human condition.



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AN EXPANDING MOSAIC

Notable figures in modern intellectual history caught the importance of this

expanding mosaic of the artworks of the world’s cultures. How could Burke be

for the American Revolution and against the French Revolution? The answer isthat each culture must be seen as its own intelligible field of study. In describ-

ing the American whaling ships and crew, Burke notes that while seemingly

indistinguishable from the English, the Americans had formed their own

unique culture. Like the ancient Athenians, “they

were born to take no rest and to give none to

others” and so were ungovernable from London.

In contrast, the French Revolution had torn off

“all the decent drapery” of French culture andreplaced it with blood running in the gutters,

hangings from lampposts, and, to come, a mil-

itary dictator on horseback.



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As for India, the historian Thomas Macaulay described Burke’s apprecia-

tion for Indian culture and the impact he made on the House of Commons:

India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen,

mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people.The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the coca

tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul

empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched

roof of the peasant’s hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the

imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and

gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden,

with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the river-

side, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect,the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces,

the elephants with canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the

prince, and the close litter of the noble lady, all these things were to

Burke as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield

and St. James’s Street. . . . Oppression in Bengal was to him the

same thing as oppression in the streets of London.

Here may be sensed the opening of a new axial age, a general elevation ofconsciousness that the great civilizations of the world, however remote to

each other in time and place, each expressed in its art, literature, philosophy,

and spirituality some foundational truths of the human condition of all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson explicitly caught this new age in his essay “His-

tory.” Emerson realized that it now was possible, for the first time ever, to

survey something close to the full range and corpus of history’s multiplicity

of civilizations across time and place. He and Henry David Thoreau already

had been sending away for boxes of the classic texts of India (for example,the Rig Veda) and China (Confucius’s Analects). These works made a power-

ful impact: “How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,

of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity

in them. They are mine as much as theirs.” Here Emerson is conducting a

reconnaissance of the works of the first axial age to set forth a manifesto for

the new axial age:

There is ONE MIND common to all individual men. . . . Who hathaccess to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be

done. . . . Of the universal mind each individual man is one more

incarnation.



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The opportunity and responsibility presented by the new availability of the

world’s vast diversity of thought is to encounter these works as a whole and

remake, retell them of oneself; not to be guided by them but to write our own

annals broader and deeper: “I have no expectation that any man will read

history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose

names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.”

What Emerson understood as the incorporation and reworking of creative

thought in philosophy, literature, and metaphysics would be recognized in the

visual arts as well. Walter Benjamin analyzed it negatively in his 1936 essay

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The ubiquity of

reproductions of past works of great art, Benjamin wrote, deprives them of

their unique authenticity in time and space; deprived of context, they lost

their aura and authenticity too.

André Malraux, the French adventurer, novelist, and minister of culture

in the time of Charles de Gaulle, gave the phenomenon a positive turn, doing

for works of art what Emerson had done for written classics. In his “Museum

Without Walls,” he granted that the effect of the museum was “to divest

works of art of their function. . . . other than that of being a work of art.”

But “the assemblage of so many masterpieces—from which, nevertheless,

so many are missing—conjures up in the mind’s eye all the world’s master-pieces.” Malraux elaborates: “It is in terms of a worldwide order that we

are sorting out, tentatively as yet, the successive resuscitations of the whole

world’s pas. . . . with the result that a large share of our art heritage is now

derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even

from people to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.”

The next phase of recognition comes serendipitously in the Metropolitan

Museum of Art’s bulletin depicting a selection of recent acquisitions. A ran-

dom selection makes the point that a new realm of consciousness has openedand calls for new interpretations:

Lakshmi, Goddess of Prosperity, India, Late 7th century;

Wall Painting, Mexico, 650–750;

Appliqued Quilt, Illinois, ca. 1875

Shia Processional Standard for the martyrdom of Husain, ca.

1700;

Head of Demosthenes, Roman, 2nd century A.D.:Photograph: Sojourner Truth, 1864

To move back and forth across these images is to encounter the world’s

cultures at a new level and scale for study by the humanities. The selection



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amassed has a meaning of its own, yet the real object, its museum context, its

provenance, originating story, and particular civilizational significance draws

us in. The destruction of any one of these objects is an attack not only on its

own unique meaning but also on the newly emerging potential for a deepened

understanding of humanity through comparative art.

There is a democratic

dimension as well. Democ-

racy within a state is essen-

tial for human freedom

and cultural flourishing;

the more democracies the

better. A consensus holds,

however, that the interna-

tional system, with its organizations and processes, cannot and should not be

democratic; “global governance” would suffocate a nation’s cultural expres-

sions. But the international heritage in artworks is otherwise, because the

artist is individual and aesthetic assessments cannot be confined or dictated;

Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist attempts to do so were risible and rejected. Thus

the “new axial” possibilities are democratic in an international way that

government cannot commandeer. Artistic and political freedoms go together;their deadly, dark ages–bringing enemy is the sledgehammer.

Reprinted from Defining Ideas(www.hoover.org/publications/defining-

ideas), a Hoover Institution journal. © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of

the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

The destruction of any of these

objects is an attack not only on its

own unique meaning but also on the

emerging potential for a deepened

understanding of humanity.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Weaver’s Lost Art, by Charles Hill. To order, call (800) 888-4741

or visit www.hooverpress.org.



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TERRORISM

State of TerrorJessica Stern, a member of Hoover’s Task Force onNational Security and Law, shows how ISIS uses

a slick, media-savvy campaign to lure vulnerableyouth to its end-times army.

By Christina Pazzanese

F

amily and friends describe them not as radicals but as well-

behaved, diligent students at a private high school in London.

So it came as a shock when the three British girls slipped their

passports into handbags, casually walked out of their homes, and

boarded a flight to Istanbul to join the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria.

British authorities believe that the teenagers, who disappeared in Febru-

ary, were probably aided by Aqsa Mahmood, a young woman originally from

Scotland who recruits for the extremist group.

The young women’s highly publicized defection to Syria, as well as the

arrest of three young British men in Istanbul as they headed to join ISIS

in March, are among the latest cases of teenagers and young adults from

middle-class, educated, often suburban backgrounds in Britain, the United

States, Canada, and various European nations who have been enticed to

abandon their comfortable lives and join the Islamic State. In late February,

the Washington Post identified “Jihadi John,” the masked man seen in several

ISIS videos beheading hostages, as a college-educated computer program-

mer from a well-off family in West London. James Clapper, director of US

Jessica Stern is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Jean Perkins Task Force on

National Security and Law. She is the co-author, with J. M. Berger, of ISIS: The

State of Terror (Ecco, 2015). Christina Pazzanese is a staff writer for the Har-

vard Gazette.



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national intelligence, told Congress earlier this year that an estimated 3,400

citizens from Western countries have traveled to Iraq and Syria, presumably

to join ISIS.

Jessica Stern serves on the Hoover Institution’s Jean Perkins Task Force on

National Security and Law and was a member of the National Security Council

staff during the Clinton administration. She is also fellow at the FXB Center for

Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

and a lecturer in government at Harvard. Stern has written extensively about

terrorism and violent extremists. Her latest book is ISIS: The State of Terror ,

co-written with J. M. Berger. Stern spoke with the Gazette about how and why

ISIS has succeeded at luring young Westerners to its side.

Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette: We know that the so-called IslamicState is extraordinarily media-savvy. What social media platforms have been

most effective in reaching Western recruits?

Jessica Stern: There’s been a lot of activity on Twitter. Aqsa Mahmood is a

good example. She’s been accused of enticing the three young women from

London who apparently left their homes to join the Islamic State. She’s also

known as Umm Layth, which means “mother of the lion.” She spoke to them

on Twitter, and then theyended up moving to an

encrypted platform to con-

tinue their discussion, which

is a common recruitment

tactic. [Mahmood] also

answers questions on ask.fm. Somehow her postings are attracting young

women, some of them very high-achieving, to leave home to join the jihad.

There’s a big debate about what should be taken off Twitter and whetherTwitter is inadvertently facilitating terrorist recruitment. Twitter’s auto-

mated list of “who to follow” makes it easy for a person interested in ISIS

to rapidly find additional ISIS supporters. Sometimes, ISIS accounts are

suspended, but often, shortly afterward, a new account with a new name

appears, which serious followers can find.

There’s a debate among those who think we should allow those accounts to

remain active and those who think that Twitter should be suspending terror-

ist accounts. Those who say that the accounts should be left alone argue that

they’re a good way to gather intelligence, and that removing them would only

result in recruiters moving to a less-transparent platform. Those who want

the accounts shut down say that private companies should not allow ISIS

“I think there’s got to be an element

of thrill-seeking as well, perhaps

even an attraction to violence.”



22/196

and other groups to use social media to recruit followers, and that terrorists’

use of social media to promote violence does not constitute protected speech.

Twitter recently suspended over two thousand ISIS-related accounts. ISIS

has now declared war against Twitter, threatening the lives of its staff.

Pazzanese: What is the pitch to male and female potential recruits?

Stern: For the men, it’s “Come and fight if you can fight; if you can’t fight we

also need doctors, we need social-media experts, engineers. . . . We’re running

a state, and so if you feel you can’t handle fighting, we can still use you.” The

women are often recruited to marry jihadists: “You can participate in the jihad

by marrying. You can

be the mother of the

next generation.” It

is a fairly traditional

female role.

There are tremen-

dous social benefits

for recruits: you’re

making the world a

better place, or sothe group claims,

which provides a kind

of spiritual reward.

There’s financial

reward for the fight-

ers. ISIS actually pays

the fighters, gives

them free housing,offers to provide them

wives. Hence, the

need to recruit young

women. There’s also

the tremendous lure

of extreme fundamen-

talism. I think we can

all understand the

appeal: wouldn’t it

be nice to have easy

answers to every [Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest ]



23/196

morally complex question? Inside a group like ISIS, life becomes morally

simple. The rules are clear. Good and evil come out in stark relief.

IN SEARCH OF LOST YOUTH

Pazzanese: What’s the psychological profile of those people most susceptible

to their message?

Stern: We don’t have a profile of the Westerners joining ISIS yet because there

haven’t been large studies. But I can tell you that [British intelligence agency]

MI5 did a study of Westerners who were involved in or closely associated with

extremist activity, prior to

ISIS’s recent recruitmentdrive. They found that a

surprisingly high number

of them were converts to

Islam. Many in the MI5

study were relatively

ignorant of Islam, even if they were Muslim. Umm Layth is a good example.

She grew up in a secular Muslim family and went from relative ignorance

about Islam to recruiting for ISIS.

An important factor seems to be the desire to forge a new identity, an iden-

tity with dignity. I interviewed terrorists for many years and I can tell you

that identity is often absolutely key. We also know that there is a higher rate

of mental illness among so-called lone wolves, people who are inspired (often

online) to commit terrorist actions without physically joining an extremist

group. Studies of Westerners joining jihadi organizations, prior to ISIS’s

recruitment drive, have shown that foreign fighters tend to be alienated or

marginalized within their own societies; they may have had a bad encounter

with police or distrust local authorities. They tend to disapprove of their

nation’s foreign policies. If they’re living in an ethnic enclave, they’re likely

to be alienated from people living alongside them, as well as the country as a

whole, whether it’s the United States or the UK or elsewhere in the West.

For those who join ISIS, I think that there’s got to be an element of thrill-

seeking as well, perhaps even an attraction to violence. It’s hard for me to

imagine that anybody who gets recruited today doesn’t know about ISIS’sextreme brutality.

Pazzanese: Is the impulse to join the Islamic State very different from,

say, the idealistic impulse of young people to join the Peace Corps or a

“Twitter recently suspended over two

thousand ISIS-related accounts. ISIS

has now declared war against Twitter,

threatening the lives of its staff.”



24/196

nongovernmental organization, or any global organization they believe is

doing important and uplifting work?

Stern: Many of the people who join terrorist organizations believe they

are making the world a better place. They see pictures of [Syrian leaderBashar] al-Assad’s brutality against his own people and they feel the desire

to help. That sense of righteousness is a very appealing aspect of joining a

terrorist group, for some. But I would say in some ways it’s more like joining

the Weather Underground than the Peace Corps. At this point, it’s hard to

imagine anyone joining without knowing that they’re going to be involved in

real atrocities.

Pazzanese: But in their minds, those actions are righteous.

Stern: Absolutely.

Pazzanese: How effec-

tive is Mahmood as

a recruiter, and what

makes these Western

recruiters so success-

ful? Do they tend to betrue believers or mere

cynical mercenaries?

Stern: She is very

effective. My guess is

that it’s partly because

she knows how to

relate to young women

like herself. She knows

their lives. ISIS is

using Westerners to

run the social media

campaign to recruit

Westerners.

Pazzanese: The State

Department has

recently announced

that it has stepped up

its countermessaging



25/196

efforts. What are they doing, and is that likely to be sufficient, given the

sophisticated and prolific nature of the Islamic State?

Stern: They have a program called “Think Again Turn Away,” and if you look

at what they’ve been doing and compare it with what ISIS has been doing, it’sso boring. ISIS has professional cameramen . . .

Pazzanese: The ISIS production values are quite high. It’s not like the old Al-

Qaeda training videos we used to see.

Stern: No, it’s not. If you look at what the State Department puts out, sadly,

you can tell that they didn’t have a lot of money. But the guy who ran that

program told me, “Look, I know we can’t compete with the video imagery

showing, ‘Here’s your chance to create this very pure state, and you’re goingto get to kill infidels and Shiites.’ ”

Pazzanese: They can’t compete on the messaging or on the production

values?

Stern: Both. ISIS has made an enemy of the entire world, other than those

who join it. I hope that we’re going to get much more serious—we outside

the government—to find ways to respond. There is a program that I’d like to

bring to Harvard. I’ve been advocating for years to have young people design

countermessaging programs, rather than State Department employees or

Madison Avenue. There is an organization, EdVenture Partners, that cre-

ated a curriculum for students around the world to compete to create the

most effective coun-

termessaging. The

students will create

digital platforms to

amplify the messages

of clerics who can

argue against ISIS’s interpretation of Islam, or of former members of ISIS

who turned against the organization. Those are just two examples; there are

all kinds of things that can be done. The initiative is called “P2P: Challenging

Extremism.” I would love to get students from across the university, students

in engineering, students in political science, students who speak languages,

or who are very good at communication. . . . ideally we want a completelyinterdisciplinary group. I’m just so excited about this.

Pazzanese: Besides better coordinating the State Department’s fragmented

messaging efforts, I wonder if that’s ever going to be sufficient compared to

“We can all understand the appeal:

wouldn’t it be nice to have easy answersto every morally complex question?”



26/196

the prolific nature of ISIS. I understand they’re sending out as many as two

hundred thousand social media messages per day.

Stern: No. It’s never going to be enough. I think the private sector has to get

involved.

ISIS’S END GAME—LITERALLY

Pazzanese: What is the Islamic State’s endgame? Is it to provoke global

Armageddon, or does it want to control the world and have everyone live

under its terms?

Stern: They want to establish a worldwide caliphate. The dream is to take

over the world. They are also obsessed with the Apocalypse. Although ISISclaims to justify its actions by referring to religious texts, ordinary Muslims

have no idea what ISIS

is talking about. The

Quran is not an apoca-

lyptic book, so ISIS has

to borrow from different

apocalyptic narratives.

Their online English-

language magazine is called Dabiq , which is the name of the town where ISIS

believes the final battle of the Apocalypse will take place.

They believe that sexually enslaving women who are from religious minori-

ties is a good thing; it’s a sign that the end times are coming. They also justify

sexual slavery as a way of avoiding the sin of adultery or premarital sex,

because if you have sex with a slave, it’s not really sex, or so they claim. They

can be pedophiles.

Pazzanese: Why is religion such a useful framework or pretext for terrorism,

subjugation, and genocide?

Stern: ISIS is a millenarian movement. They want to create a new human

being the same way the Soviets wanted to create a new human being. They

want to re-create humanity and they want to create a purified world. It’s a

cosmic battle to them. It’s not totally different from communism or other

ideologies, but God is a pretty compelling citation.

Pazzanese: Does religion give it a patina of righteousness or defuse any accu-

sations that this is a mere power grab?

“I’ve been advocating for years to have

young people design countermessaging

programs, rather than State Department

employees or Madison Avenue.”



27/196

Stern: I think religion is often a patina or marketing strategy for terrorists to

accomplish more worldly goals. In the case of ISIS, many of the leaders are

former Baathists, the secular political party that ruled Iraq prior to the 2003

invasion. [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, the “caliph” of the Islamic State, recruited

former military and intelligence personnel from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

They have important, useful skills. ISIS’s religious agenda is clearly inter-

mingled with its more secular goals. ISIS is capitalizing on the feeling among

Sunni Muslims that they are under threat in the new Iraq, and that ISIS is

the only protection they have from the Iraqi leadership’s anti-Sunni, sectar-

ian policies.

Pazzanese: In human history, where does ISIS rank in terms of what they’ve

been able to accomplish—their lethality and their organizational strength—in such a brief amount of time?

Stern: Compared with modern terrorist organizations that we know, they

rank very high. However, compared with the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the

communists, they rank pretty low both in terms of their accomplishments

and even in terms of their brutality. We’ve seen much worse. ISIS is not just

a terrorist group; it is also an insurgent army. While it’s shocking to see how

much territory ISIS acquired so quickly, we’re comparing it with terroristgroups that weren’t necessarily trying to acquire large amounts of territory.

The ideology, the brutality of this group—I have to think they’re going to self-

destruct before they manage to spread as far as, say, the communists or the

Nazis. The Nazis weren’t advertising their atrocities; ISIS is publicizing its

atrocities, flaunting its brutality. It’s part of the end-times narrative that ISIS

hopes to spin.

Reprinted by permission of the Harvard Gazette (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette). © 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. All

rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Struggle

for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent, by Fouad Ajami. To

order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.

org.



28/196

TERRORISM

Escape fromGitmoThe legal path out of our long Guantánamo

nightmare.

By Jane Harman and Jack Goldsmith

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama

reiterated his determination to shut down the detention facility at

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Some in Congress are resolved to stop him.

Even Senator John McCain, who has supported closing the prison in

the past, joined a recent congressional effort to slow releases from Guantá-

namo on the grounds that the president has never presented Congress with a

“concrete or coherent plan.”

Both sides are right. Guantánamo should be closed, but not until the presi-

dent presents a realistic plan and makes his case to Congress and the nation.

Any blueprint must address very real issues related to the island facility’s 122

remaining detainees.

The easiest question is whether to release the 54 who the administration

has determined aren’t dangerous. Many in Congress worry that these prison-

ers will return to the fight. Since 2009, Congress has restricted transfers

from Guantánamo, and in recent years has required the defense secretary to

certify that they are “no longer a threat to the national security of the United

Jane Harman is president and chief executive of the Woodrow Wilson Interna-

tional Center for Scholars. Jack Goldsmith is a senior fellow at the Hoover In-

stitution and a member of Hoover’s Jean Perkins Task Force on National Security

and Law. He is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School.



29/196

States” or, at a minimum, to craft a plan to “substantially mitigate the risk”

of a return to the battlefield. This insistence on individualized, security-pro-

tective releases has significantly reduced the recidivism rate that resulted

from bulk releases before 2009. But as the exchange last year of five Taliban

members for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl showed, this standard might need

tightening to limit releases to only those persons who pose no threat.

A tougher issue is where to send the remaining non-dangerous detainees.

Many come from Yemen, a cauldron of instability. The administration has

already persuaded third-party countries to take a hundred or so of these

detainees. Still, finding a place to send the remaining non-dangerous detain-

ees will be hard; options have narrowed.

The biggest problem is a group of up to 68 higher-risk detainees. Seven are

being tried in military commissions. But as Obama noted six years ago, the

others “pose a clear danger to the American people.” The men in this cat-

egory, the president explained, “received extensive explosives training at Al-

Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed

their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they

want to kill Americans.”

Guantánamo cannot and should not be closed until there is a concrete plan

to prosecute these men, or, if necessary, detain them in a lawful way thatensures they can never inflict grievous harm again.

Federal courts have ruled that these detainees can be lawfully held until

the end of the relevant conflict, whenever that might be. But many cannot be

criminally pros-

ecuted because of

evidence tainted by

abusive interroga-

tions, limitationsin federal criminal

law, and other

problems of fitting

the demanding standards of criminal justice to the messiness of the terrorist

battlefield. Scores of lawyers in two administrations have scoured the case

files and case law and (reluctantly) agree.

What to do? Closing Guantánamo must not mean ending detention of these

dangerous men, though the two are often confused. The main question is,

where will they be incarcerated—in Cuba or in the United States?

The case for sending them to a secure but humane prison in the United

States is that keeping them in Cuba, on balance, hurts US interests.

Legislation to bring Guantánamo detain-

ees to the United States could create a form

of administrative detention akin to civil

commitment, one that could apply even

after the end of hostilities.



30/196

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest ]


31/196

Guantánamo was established to be beyond the reach of US law, a premise the

Supreme Court rejected in Rasul v. Bush and Boumediene v. Bush. The facility

is “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies,” as for-

mer president George W.

Bush said in a memoir in

the course of explaining

why his administration

“worked to find a way

to close the prison.” For

similar reasons, closing Guantánamo remains high on Obama’s agenda.

There are no appealing solutions, but members of Congress who dispute

the national security assessment of two commanders in chief should consider

this: Transferring the detainees to the United States is an opportunity to

strengthen the legal basis for their long-term detention, which becomes more

fraught as the armed conflicts in Afghanistan and against some components

of Al-Qaeda wind down.

The legislation needed to bring Guantánamo detainees to the United

States could supplement the military rationale for holding non-prosecut-

able—but very dangerous—terrorists with a form of administrative deten-

tion akin to civil commitment, one that could apply after the end of therelevant hostilities. Such a statute could prescribe the definition of danger-

ousness that warrants detention, the processes for determining a continued

threat to public safety over time, and the standards for judicial review.

This approach is, in our view, the least bad option for dealing with detain-

ees. Keeping hardened terrorists incarcerated is essential; keeping them

detained at Guantánamo Bay is untenable. The president and Congress must

be partners in finding a secure solution.

Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2015 Washington Post

Co. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is In Retreat:

America’s Withdrawal from the Middle East, by

Russell A. Berman. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or

visit www.hooverpress.org.

The remaining high-risk detainees

“made it clear that they want to kill

Americans,” the president pointed out.



32/196

FOREIGN POLICY

Weak, in ReviewWhen the Cold War ended, strategists becamedistracted by the dangers of the “weak state.”

Powerful adversaries used the opportunity to groweven more powerful.

By Amy B. Zegart

F

or twenty-five years now, a weak-state fixa-

tion has transfixed US foreign policy. It all

started with the humanitarian interventions

of the 1990s, which advanced the idea that

American power in a post–Cold War world could and

should bring justice, peace, and prosperity to places

like Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Freed from the

security constraints of superpower conflict, US foreign

policy assumed a more muscular moralism during

Bill Clinton’s years. After the 9/11 attacks, shoring up

weak states became a vital security interest, not just

a humanitarian ideal. The Freedom Agenda of George

W. Bush’s administration sought not only to strengthen

states but to transform them, spreading democracy

abroad to protect democracy and security at home.

Amy B. Zegart is a Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-

chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and amember of the Hoover task forces focusing on national security and law, Arctic

security, military history, and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the

co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford

University.

Key points

» Weak states

aren’t the hotbedsof transnational

terrorism they

once seemed.

» The worst cy-

berthreats come

from strong states

behaving badly.

» Clashes

between strongstates can spread

harm far beyond

their borders.



33/196

The world’s weakest states have

not produced the world’s worst

international terrorists.

Today, this focus on weak states looks increasingly—what’s the word?—

weak. Sure, some weak states (Pakistan, Pakistan, and Pakistan) loom

large, posing serious challenges to US interests. But the vast majority of

weak states don’t. Instead, the most serious threats to American interests

stem, as they always have, from states with sufficient capacity and power

to do bad things in the world, not from states so weak that bad things hap-

pen within them.

WHERE IS THE DANGER?

It is worth stepping back and asking: How exactly do weak states threaten

the global order or the United States’ vital interests? The weak-state crowd

has offered three related but distinct arguments.

» Fragile states can become terrorist strongholds that pose existential

threats to Western ways of life. This is the most compelling argument. If

Al-Qaeda could carry out the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor by

setting up shop in the lawless rubble of Afghanistan, the thinking goes, other

lawless spaces could, similarly, devolve into sanctuaries for the recruitment,

training, and deployment of terrorists. Most frightening of all: the specter of

terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.

» Poorly governed spaces function as incubators for other global“bads.” This less-convincing argument focuses on disease, conflict, human

rights violations, drug and human trafficking, and criminal networks. In

this view, weak states generate unwanted outcomes, not existential threats.

That’s a big difference. The central purpose of US foreign policy is not to

eliminate global suffering, however horrible. It is to protect vital national

interests from grave dangers.

» Globalization connects citizens throughout the world in unprec-

edented ways, binding the fates of strong states to weak states. Thisfuzziest argument of the weak-state crowd is more aspirational than real.

Although it is certainly true

that ideas, goods, and people

can cross borders faster and

more densely than at any

time in history, we are still a

long way from a world where

the well-being and security of Nashville hinges on the stability of Ngozi. Yet

Barack Obama’s administration has been making this argument for years.

As candidate Obama wrote in a signature 2007 Foreign Affairs article, “the

security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security



34/196

and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. . . . We have a signifi-

cant stake in ensuring that those who live in fear and want today can live

with dignity and opportunity tomorrow.” The administration’s 2015 National

Security Strategy proclaimed yet again that weak states are one of the “top

strategic risks to our interests,” putting transnational organized crime right

alongside the use of nuclear weapons. Incredibly, the strategy proclaims that

it “establishes. . . . a diversified and balanced set of priorities appropriate for

the world’s leading global power with interests in every part of an increas-

ingly interconnected world.”

But a “diversified and balanced set of priorities” is no priority list at all.

The United States does not have interests in every part of an increasingly

interconnected world. It does not risk American lives and spend American

political capital everywhere. Nor should it. Global leadership is about identi-

fying what matters most and deploying resources to succeed. And evidence

increasingly suggests that weak states should not be so high on the list.

WAS 9/11 AN OUTLIER?

Even the strongest weak-state claims don’t look so strong anymore.

Nearly fourteen years after 9/11, Islamist terrorism has yet to morph

into anything close to an existential threat. That’s not to say it couldn’tgrow into one—catastrophic terrorist attacks may be black swan events

that defy easy prediction. And it is impossible to know whether we have

successfully countered terrorism thanks to the war on terror or because

terrorists were never such a big danger in the first place. Yet it is hard

to dismiss the gnawing, emerging evidence that 9/11 may have been more

outlier than harbinger.

In 2012, John Mueller, senior research scientist at the Mershon Center

for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, and Mark Stew-art, director at the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability

at the University of Newcastle, noted that Islamist terrorism was respon-

sible for two hundred to four hundred deaths worldwide each year, outside

of war zones. That’s roughly the same number of Americans who die from

drowning in bathtubs annually. Harvard University’s Graham Allison darkly

warned in 2004 that there was at least a 50 percent chance the world would

suffer a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years. It has now been

eleven years and counting. The string of failed and foiled attacks on US soil

since 9/11, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, “underwear bomber”

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad,

more closely resembles the work of knuckleheads than masterminds.



35/196

The connection between weak states and transnational terrorism

appears more tenuous too. Terrorism experts have found that the vast

majority of terrorist attacks strike local targets, not foreign ones. What’s

more, the world’s weakest states have not produced the world’s most or

worst international terrorists. The 2014 Fragile States Index from For-eign Policy listed five countries in its worst-of-the-worst category: South

Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Repub-

lic of the Congo, and Sudan. None is a major inspiration base, training

center, breeding ground, or exporter of terrorism directed at Western

cities. Indeed, the January attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie

Hebdo—France’s deadliest terrorist attack in fifty years—was perpetrated

by two brothers born, raised, and radicalized almost entirely in the terror-

ist safe haven of France, which came in at number 160 of 178 countries on

the Fragile State Index.

Consider interstate war. Between weak states, wars can be destructive

and destabilizing for local populations. Between strong states, wars can be

“PEACEFUL RISE”: Chinese sailors aboard the destroyer Qingdao arrive for a port visit at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 2006. Long-standing US security commitments to Japan and Taiwan make China’s assertive military modernization

and posturing in regional waters a potential flash point. [US Navy / Mass Commu-nication Specialist Joe Kane]



36/196

destructive and destabilizing for the world. The war between Ethiopia and

Eritrea was one thing; World War II was quite another. Even in a twenty-

first-century interconnected world, conflict between powerful countries

with large economies poses far greater direct threats to the global economy,

international order, and American interests than wars between fragile states.

Ethiopia and Eritrea posted a combined GDP of $51 billion in 2013—less than

the revenues of Google.

While the Cold War’s end led many to believe that wars between great

powers had been rendered to the dustbin of history, Russia’s recent invasion

of Ukraine and China’s ongoing provocations in the South and East China

seas should remind us that great powers can still behave badly. Conflicts

between powerful countries are not such distant possibilities after all.

Had NATO enlarge-

ment grown a little larger,

Ukraine would today be

a member of the alliance,

and the United States could

very well have found itself

locked in a European land

war with Russia. Similarly, America’s long-standing security commitments to Japan and Taiwan make

China’s aggressive military modernization and belligerent posturing in the

region a potential flash point for future conflict between the world’s largest

economies. Beijing’s naval maneuvering around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands

(also claimed by Japan), its aggressive claims to territory in the South China

Sea (contested by Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia),

its 2013 declaration of an air-defense identification zone, and its two decades

of double-digit defense spending increases all raise the odds of conflict withthe United States and its regional allies through deliberate action, miscalcu-

lation, accidental escalation, or some combination.

The specter of conflict between these powerful states may be unwanted,

but that doesn’t make it unlikely. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed

unimaginable until President Vladimir Putin imagined it. China’s “peaceful

rise” may also turn out to be more wishful thinking. And that’s to say noth-

ing of the risk and impact of interstate war between India and Pakistan,

two nuclear powers with deep grievances and a history of miscalculation.

The most serious cyberthreats also appear to require substantial state

capacity. Sure, Russian criminal networks and teenage hackers are busy

stealing and selling millions of credit card numbers, and the Target and

The most important nuclear bomb

ingredient, fissile material, can’t be

developed in remote terrorist hide-

outs in ungoverned spaces that lack

basic Internet or plumbing.



37/196

Home Depot breaches were certainly serious threats to Target and Home

Depot customers. But not all cyberattacks are created equal.

Three types of cyberattacks most directly threaten US national interests:

large-scale theft of intellectual property, which can undermine national

economic competitiveness and sap the source of American power; disabling

attacks on military communications and operations that could impair the

country’s capacity to attack and defend itself; and attacks on critical infra-

structure that could disrupt the US economy and society on a massive scale.

Evidence suggests that all three types require state capacity far beyond what

Cheetos-eating kids or criminals can muster.

The massive theft of intellectual property from American companies is

directed, aided, and abetted principally by the Chinese government. The

recent Sony hack was attributed to the government of North Korea. The

most damaging cyberattacks abroad have also been sourced to organized

states, not ungoverned spaces. The 2012 Saudi Aramco attack, which erased

data from thirty thousand computers—three-quarters of the company’s

PCs—was traced back to Tehran. And the Stuxnet virus that disabled Iran’s

nuclear centrifuges is estimated to have taken months to create, required

fifteen thousand lines of code (120 times longer than your typical malware),

and demanded the dedicated efforts of the best cyberwarriors in the Israeliand US governments.

THE NUCLEAR DI STRACTION

Finally, even the most frightening weak-state scenario, nuclear terrorism,

isn’t even really about weak

states. For years, Islamist

terrorist groups have

declared their fervent desireto obtain and use nuclear

weapons. Why haven’t they

succeeded? Because the most important ingredient, fissile material, can-

not be developed in remote terrorist hideouts in ungoverned spaces that

lack basic Internet or plumbing. Instead, readily usable fissile material rests

in the hands of a small number of states with substantial governance and

scientific capacity. Of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, five—the United

States, Britain, France, Israel, and India—are strong and stable democra-

cies. China and Russia may lack democracy, but not the capacity to govern.

Pakistan and North Korea are worryingly weak and rightly rise to the top of

the counterproliferation agenda.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed

unimaginable until Vladimir Putin imagined it.



38/196

But the point is this: nuclear terrorism is not a “weak-states” problem.

It is a specific-states problem, where a handful of countries play an outsize

role in producing, spreading, and securing fissile material—whether it is

Iran’s development of a covert nuclear weapons program, Russia’s efforts

to secure its loose nukes, Pakistan’s command and control of its mobile

nuclear weapons, or North Korea’s nuclear recklessness. Some of the states

that we need to keep fissile material out of the hands of terrorists are weak.

Most are not.

Weak states pose a number of challenges, and Washington must do what

it can to address them. But the emphasis must be on “do what it can.” The

world is too dangerous a place to combat state weakness wherever it lives,

to conflate ideals with interests, or to make the analytical mistake of treat-

ing so many threats as “weak-state problems.” Increasingly, it appears that

the most serious threats to American national interests emanate from states

with capacity, not states without it.

Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com). ©

2015 Foreign Policy Group LLC. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is The War

that Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear

Deterrence, edited by George P. Shultz and James E.

Goodby. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.

hooverpress.org.



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FOREIGN POLICY

Flip the ScriptAbandoned friends and defiant foes: what thepresident’s foreign policy has wrought.

By Kimberly Kagan

The United States does not have an image problem in the Middle

East. It has a reality problem. The United States has lost cred-

ibility in the Middle East by abandoning its friends and reaching

out to its enemies.

The United States has also lost sight of its core interests as well as its prin-

ciples. America’s interests in the Middle East include countering Al-Qaeda,

its affiliates, and its major splinters such as the Islamic State; ensuring the

preservation of sovereign states and the states system; preventing Iran from

achieving regional hegemony and nuclear capability; and ensuring the free

flow of oil and other resources essential to the global economy. Its principles

include opposing genocide and other mass atrocities, opposing and punishing

the use of weapons of mass destruction, supporting international law, and

standing by its allies. We have abandoned all of these, to our great detriment.

Recovering our stature in the region requires recommitting ourselves to

pursue our values and our needs.

Iraq is one former friend the United States abandoned. The withdrawal of

US forces from Iraq in 2011, followed by more than two years of American

neglect of the country, allowed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)

to arise unchallenged. The United States took no action after ISIS captured

Kimberly Kagan is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on the

Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. She is founder and president of

the Institute for the Study of War.



40/196

POWER BY PROXY: Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani is being hailed as the “savior of Iraq” for his role fighting ISIS. Iranian trainers and proxies are deeply interwoven within the Iraqi Security Forces, which has become a highly sectarian Shia force. [AY-Collection / SIPA / Newscom]


41/196

Fallujah in January 2014, waited several months after the fall of Mosul to

assess the situation, and by August 2014 reactively targeted ISIS positions

in Iraq and Syria through airstrikes. These engagements have parried the

Islamic State’s offensive in Arbil, Iraq, and Kobani, Syria. But ISIS is still

fighting fiercely elsewhere.

The Syrian moderate opposition was another such potential friend.

American inaction in Syria led to the marginalization of Syria’s moderate

opposition and its eclipse by

more effective and powerful

radical groups. The target-

ing of Islamic State and

the internationally focused

Al-Qaeda-backed Khorasan group in Syria, in particular, have seemed to

opposition elements to empower the Assad regime, which continues its bru-

tal targeting of its population.

The narrative throughout the region, indeed, is that the United States

is flipping its traditional alliance structure away from the Sunni and Arab

states and toward Iran and its Shia proxies. The Obama administration may

not have intended any such flip, but its policies in Iraq and Syria provide

ample evidence to prove to fearful allies that we have abandoned them.The Iranian regime is the chief backer of Bashar al-Assad and has provided

advising, assistance, and proxy militias to stabilize the Iraqi Security Forces

(ISF). Iranian media daily hail Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian

Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force, as the “savior of Iraq.” Iranian trainers

and proxies are deeply interwoven within the ISF, which has become a highly

sectarian Shia force since the United States abandoned it in 2011. The stated US

policy of supporting and partnering only with the ISF looks to many Sunnis in

Iraq and throughout the region like a de facto alliance with Iran.The integration of Iranian, Hezbollah, and other proxy elements in Assad’s

forces makes the American refusal to take any serious action against Assad

look like tacit support to Iran in that theater. One does not have to be a

conspiracy theorist to see in these policies a determination to back Tehran

against America’s traditional Arab partners.

The United States also has relaxed sanctions against the Iranian regime,

accepted the principle that Iran will have a significant indigenous uranium-

enrichment capability, and allowed Iran to conceal the history of its nuclear

program. In doing so, the United States has adopted a negotiating position

at odds with numerous UN Security Council resolutions, the requirements

of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (to which Iran is a signatory), and

Iraq is one former friend the United

States abandoned.



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many agreements with other members of the P5+1 about the red lines to be

drawn in negotiations.

Again, to the eyes of worried Sunni Arabs, it appears that the Obama

administration is more concerned with some kind of rapprochement with

Iran than it is with stand-

ing by its commitments

under international law and

treaty—to say nothing of

standing by its alliances.

The United States needs

to restore its credibility

by pursuing its interests with strength: actually defeating and destroying

Islamic State, supporting strongly the indigenous Iraqi and Syrian Sunni

resistance to this hateful ideology and militancy, targeting Assad’s capabili-

ties to attack his people, leveraging its military assistance in Iraq to remove

Iranian military advisers from that country, and strongly supporting its

national interests in opposing the Iranian nuclear program in accord with

international law and UN resolutions.

We must wrench ourselves away from the policy of drifting toward a

chimerical rapprochement with Iran and reorient ourselves in support of ourtraditional partners and allies.

Subscribe to the Hoover Institution’s online journal Strategika (www.

hoover.org/publications/strategika), where this essay first appeared. ©

2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is The

Consequences of Syria, by Lee Smith. To order, call

(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

The American refusal to take any

serious action against Syria’s Assad

looks like tacit support to Iran.



43/196

IRAN

No Sign of Restraint

Properly understood, the Iran nuclear deal is at

best only a beginning, not an end—and regionalstability may be farther away than ever.

By George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger

The announced framework for an agree-

ment on Iran’s nuclear program has the

potential to generate a seminal national

debate. Advocates exult over the nuclear

constraints it would impose on Iran. Critics question

the verifiability of these constraints and their longer-

term impact on regional and world stability. The

historic significance of the agreement and indeed its

sustainability depend on whether these emotions, valid

by themselves, can be reconciled.

Debate regarding technical details of the deal has

thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regard-

ing its deeper implications. For twenty years, three

presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an

Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and

George P. Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at

the Hoover Institution, the chair of Hoover’s Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on En-

ergy Policy, and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy. Henry

A. Kissinger is chairman of Kissinger Associates.

Key points » A “prolifer-

ated” Middle East

would demand

new, and yet

unknown, forms

of deterrence.

» No one knows

if the deal will

foster Iranianmoderation or

cooperation.

» Ultimately, the

US must develop

a new strategic

doctrine for the

region.



44/196

global interests—and that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet

negotiations that began twelve years ago as an international effort to prevent

an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agree-

ment that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the

first ten years.Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of UN resolutions, Iran has

gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Iran’s centrifuges have mul-

tiplied from about a hundred at the beginning of the negotiation to almost

twenty thousand today. The threat of war now constrains the West more

than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate

as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a

new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point offi-

cially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear

weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for ten years Iran will never be

further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be

significantly closer.

NO REST: Secretary of State John Kerry and other US officials leave a meet- ing with the Iranian delegation in Montreux, Switzerland, in March. Under a proposed agreement, Iran would permanently give up none of its equipment,

facilities, or fissile material. [EPA / Newscom / Jean-Christophe Bott]



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INSPECTIONS AND ENFORCEMENT

The president deserves respect for the commitment with which he has pur-

sued the objective of reducing nuclear peril, as does Secretary of State John

Kerry for the persistence, patience, and ingenuity with which he has striven

to impose significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program.

Progress has been made on shrinking the size of Iran’s enriched stockpile,

confining the enrichment of uranium to one facility, and limiting aspects of

the enrichment process. Still, the ultimate significance of the framework will

depend on its verifiability and enforceability.

Negotiating the final agreement will be extremely challenging. The so-

called framework represents a unilateral American interpretation. Some of

its clauses have been dismissed by the principal Iranian negotiator as “spin.”

A joint EU-Iran statement differs in important respects, especially with

regard to the lifting of sanctions and permitted research and development.

Comparable ambiguities apply to the one-year window for a presumed

Iranian breakout. Emerging at a relatively late stage in the negotiation, this

concept replaced the previous baseline—that Iran might be permitted a

technical capacity compatible with a plausible civilian nuclear program. The

new approach complicates verification and makes it more political because of

the vagueness of the criteria.Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment,

facilities, or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places

them under temporary restriction and safeguard—amounting in many cases

to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared

sites. The physical magnitude of the effort is daunting. Is the International

Atomic Energy Agency technically, and in terms of human resources, up to

so complex and vast an assignment?

In a large country with multiple facilities and ample experience in nuclearconcealment, violations will be inherently difficult to detect. Devising

theoretical models of inspection is one thing. Enforcing compliance, week

after week, despite competing international crises and domestic distrac-

tions, is another. Any report of a violation is likely to prompt debate over its

significance—or even calls for new talks with Tehran to explore the issue.

The experience of Iran’s work on a heavy-water reactor during the “interim

agreement” period—when suspect activity was identified but played down in

the interest of a positive negotiating atmosphere—is not encouraging.

Compounding the difficulty is the unlikelihood that breakout will be a

clear-cut event. More likely it will occur, if it does, via the gradual accumula-

tion of ambiguous evasions.



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When inevitable disagreements arise over the scope and intrusiveness of

inspections, on what criteria are we prepared to insist and up to what point?

If evidence is imperfect, who bears the burden of

hoover digest, 2015, no. 3, summer

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