http://susaneisenhower.com/
October 3, 2013
by Susan Eisenhower
In transformational times, assessing and reassessing one’s basic assumptions is critical for navigating the confusing and dangerous shoals of public and foreign affairs. Like those who perpetually "fight the last war,” far too many people are inclined to view every development through the lens of their own experience. The conflict in Syria and the U.S. government shutdown may be two differing but relevant cases in point.
The United States and Russia may have agreed to a framework for identifying and destroying Syria’s chemical weapons, but for all of the difficulties associated with getting rid of this arsenal it is no longer the critical issue it once was in determining the outcome of the conflict. The nature of the opposition to Bashar al-Assad is. With a Geneva II peace conference in the works, the international community is grappling with the inherent problems of assessing and making progress with a dangerously fractured opposition.
Despite the U.S.-Russian agreement, these two countries have yet to have a full meeting of the minds on the nature of the Syrian opposition and what that means for the outcome of the civil war and the future of the region.
It appears from the outset that the United States has downplayed the growing role of al-Qaeda- linked groups among the anti-Assad opposition. Just last month, Secretary of State John Kerry said, "I just don’t agree that a majority are al-Qaeda and the bad guys. That’s not true. There are about 70,000 to 100,000 oppositionists…Maybe 15 percent to 25 percent might be in one group or another who are what we would deem to be bad guys.”
Secretary Kerry also suggested that the United States would somehow end up as the power broker were Assad to be ousted — going on to say that this would require a negotiation on who would eventually run Syria.
The Russians have been at best skeptical of American assumptions and at worst shocked by what they might describe as U.S. naiveté. Rightly or wrongly, their take on the what they regard as an opposition riddled with Islamist radicals has led them to support the Syrian government at all costs –as their way of keeping a lid on the growing extremism in that country, and the potential for it to further destabilize the region.
The differences in Russian and American perspectives on this says a lot about the way our respective cultures interpret facts—not surprisingly, largely through the lens of our own historical experiences.
The potential for a minority faction takeover of an opposition movement is is infused in the Russian mind. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the minority Bolshevik faction in the opposition Russian Social Democratic Worker’s Party, staged a successful coup in 1917. This power grab marginalized the majority of his party, the Mensheviks, and overturned a nascent parliamentary government in Russia—thus ushering in communism and the establishment of the Soviet Union, which lasted for more than seventy years.
The power of a radical minority, as the Russians well know, garners its strength and capability from its utter devotion to its cause and a willingness to use any means whatsoever to accumulate and ultimately seize power. With such determination, others who are unwilling or unable to be similarly focused and ruthless often have virtually no leverage at the end of the day.
On the U.S. home front we enjoy the blessings of stable government. The prevailing mood of the majority has largely triumphed. But due to continuing standoffs over fiscal matters, many people in America are beginning to wonder if we may have inaccurately analyzed a developing brand of domestic extremism. While they do not necessarily advocate violence, fringe elements on the right and left are extremists nonetheless as they do not accept any form of compromise; they get their energy from the unwavering righteousness of their causes.
At the moment, a faction of the Tea Party movement has provided the "leadership,” albeit one with a radical agenda, to shut down the United States government for the first time in 17 years. Moderates and traditional conservatives, fearful of their political tactics, have only just begun to realize the true danger posed by this dedicated and unyielding group.
Until now moderate Republicans have tolerated this minority in their ranks, assuming that in the end they could control, if not appease, this small faction. But the GOP establishment’s gamble may fail, threatening the party’s prospects for the mid-term elections and possibly damaging its longer term viability. The attention-seeking Senator Ted Cruz and his ilk are not dedicated to defunding the Affordable Care Act as much as they seek to dismantle much of the federal government. It appears that they will stop at nothing short of getting their way, since they have no strategy for ending this stalemate. While it is inconceivable that this minority’s tactics could extend beyond legislative measures, the potential to do catastrophic harm to our economy looms with the coming debt ceiling negotiations.
While the situation in Syria and the United States are in no way contextually similar, there is at least one lesson we can learn from what is now unfolding. Our collective experience of "majority rules” is the lens through which the United States often reflexively evaluates developments – at home and abroad. In the 20th century our system largely shielded us from political and sectarian violence. Even with a fortunate history, however, we are living in a fast-moving era that requires us to keep an open mind – constantly reevaluating the true nature of what is really happening. The United States should not underestimate people who have a fanatical passion to prevail – not overseas, and apparently not even in the halls of Congress.
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from → Commentary
The Russian Proposal: Two Questions about the Syria Crisis that Matter
September 11, 2013
tags: Barack Obama, Bashar al-Assad, chemical weapons, russia, security council, syria, united nations
by Susan Eisenhower
Last night, President Obama confirmed that he is in favor of giving diplomacy a chance to succeed in defusing a potential conflict with Syria. It was a relief for most people to think that there might be an alternative to a U.S. military strike, which could have brought with it a cascade of unintended consequences. However, it was somewhat disheartening that the president did not say more in recognition of the Russians’ initiative. Their proposal is not just a tactical opening, its a strategic one.
Earlier this week the Russians gave President Obama a gift — a way out of a potentially embarrassing failure to garner support in Congress for striking Syria. The president tried to spin the diplomatic development last night by saying it was a direct result of the administration’s "tough” position on strikes. This does not ring entirely true. The president’s campaign to gain authority to strike Syria was not a credible threat. Russia had only to read the public opinion polls, as well as the Washington Post to see the daily head count on Congressional votes. The support simply wasn’t (and isn’t) there. Given the budget, sequester and debt ceiling talks that are in the offing, it is unimaginable that Obama could have ordered air strikes over the objections of Congress.
Now that this proposal is on the table there are two important questions that arise: Are the Russians sincere in trying to find a solution to this crisis? And is their proposal to identify and dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons feasible, given the magnitude of the undertaking, especially in a war zone?
As someone who has spent more than twenty-five years of my career travelling to the former Soviet Union, I can offer one overarching principle regarding the Russians—an observation shared by nearly every person who knows them well. The Russians are not easy to work with when they are being forced to comply with orders from elsewhere and when they feel they are being treated in a patronizing or disrespectful way. But, they can be counted on in big ways when they feel that a plan or a proposal is truly in their best interests. (For further reading on this see my book, Partners in Space: U.S.-Russian Cooperation after the Cold War—only one book among many that makes this point.)
Is the effort to identify and destroy Syrian stockpiles of chemical weapons, then, seen by the Russians as decidedly in their interest? I think so.
First, the Russians would probably like to know for sure where all those weapons sites are. Right now we may overestimate how much they know about the exact whereabouts of this material. They have an overarching interest in the country as well. There are Russians living there and they have an important naval port at Tartus, on the Mediterranean coast.
Second, the Russians would want to make sure that those stockpiles don’t end up in the hands of Sunni Islamic radicals, fearing that in a worst-case scenario these extremists – with probable ties to Islamic radicals in Chechnya and the former Soviet Union – would pose a threat to Central Asia and Russia.
Finally, the Russians would like to reestablish themselves as players on the international scene. This episode has put President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, back into the public eye as diplomats – in contrast to the shoot-first-and-ask-for-the-UN-report-later Americans.
Contrary to the credit the president took for himself last night, the Russian initiative is not the result of a warm or particularly constructive relationship between the two presidents. It was an agile attempt by the Russians to take up Secretary Kerry on his off- hand comment that dismantlement might be the one thing that would avert the strikes. Whatever the reason for it, it is a welcomed effort. And it is that effort that holds the key to the second question: is such a proposal feasible?
Disarmament experts have warned about the complexity of identifying and destroying Assad’s chemical weapons—and they are correct in that. It is a very big tactical consideration, which would entail a great deal of time, resources, and personnel. But the Russian initiative has uncovered two factors of strategic importance. First, the Syrian government has finally admitted the existence of its stockpile, and second, the Russians, if given an incentive to do so, are apparently willing to leverage their relationship with the Assad regime to find a resolution to the current crisis. These are not necessarily the intransigent Russians National Security Advisor Susan Rice and UN Ambassador Samantha Power say they are.
In the last fifteen to twenty years Russia has been largely ignored on the international stage. There is no real downside to making them feel important again. The last two decades of U.S./Western interaction with the Russians have been rife with perverse incentives. Let’s now work with the Russians to see if, through them, we can bring to closure the arrangements with Assad on chemical weapons and move toward a broader approach to ending the civil war– not to mention helping to make the UN Security Council functional again. If they have some "skin in the game” they are more likely to use the United Nations in a constructive way.
Let’s try and restore the spirit of cooperation with Russia that made it possible for us to successfully meet earlier U.S. goals: to build an international space station; to secure weapons of mass destruction with Russia through the Cooperative Threat Reduction programs under the Nunn-Lugar initiatives; and to negotiate and ratify the New START Treaty. With the right diplomatic approach to the Russians, we can use their Syrian initiative as a way to meet our larger more enduring objectives. It will be challenging, but as the old adage goes: you can get anything done if you don’t care who gets the credit for it.
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from → Commentary, Former USSR / Russia
The Battle of Gettysburg: Reflections on 150 Years
September 4, 2013
tags: abraham lincoln, civil war, Dwight D. Eisenhower, first-year walk, gettysburg address, gettysburg college
by Susan Eisenhower
The long days of summer are coming to an end. In palpable ways the beginning of fall has been felt by a reenergized pace and fast-moving political and international developments – which I will write on in the coming weeks and months.
This summer, however, I had moments to reflect on what has gone before and what this might mean to rising generations. I was honored to be asked to give the First-Year Walk address for incoming first-year students at Gettysburg College. For nearly a decade, these undergraduates have retraced the steps of Gettysburg students who walked from the College in 1863 to the National Cemetery that November day when Abraham Lincoln came to dedicate the gravesite and deliver a speech. As part of this new tradition, a speaker is asked to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from the very pavilion where Lincoln uttered his immortal words – and then offer some reflections on the 16th’s president’s remarks.
It was a daunting assignment. After reading Lincoln’s original address, I offered some personal thoughts to the class of 2017. This class is fortunate, as other Gettysburg College students and graduates have been, to be surrounded by a century of history that transformed our nation and the world:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
What a humbling experience it is to read Lincoln’s unforgettable speech. And it is with a sense of honor, and some unworthiness, that I read it this evening from the very spot where Lincoln spoke those words.
The honor is even more meaningful for me because the nation’s attention has been turned, in recent times, to history and specifically to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg. The scale of destruction, and the suffering endured on these surrounding fields, defies the imagination – even that of the most creative of minds.
The importance of Lincoln’s words were their inspirational qualities, and they survive today primarily because they so eloquently frame the nation’s imperfect ideal. Lincoln presents us with a timeless challenge to the living – to be better than we are.
Much about this speech, this place and what happened here has shaped my own view of the world. I was living as a young school girl in Gettysburg during the 100th anniversary events, and even before the commemorations began every year on May 30 – Memorial Day – the school children from Gettysburg area schools would walk to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves.
In addition, I grew up on a property adjacent to my grandparents’ farm – located on an important part of the battlefield, near Longstreet’s headquarters. My grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, was a five-star general and two-term president. Despite the demands on his time, he made a point of taking his family and close associates onto the battlefield. Many of the greatest figures of the 20th century who came to visit Eisenhower were the beneficiaries of his personalized tour – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, French President Charles de Gaulle, and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, to name a few. They reflected on the past as they visited the town’s famous ridges, and came back to Eisenhower’s farm to talk about a new world in the making – after the devastation of another war; the fight against Nazi Germany.
Eisenhower knew the Gettysburg story well. Before World War I, he and his generation of West Point cadets had learned military strategy on the Gettysburg battlefield, and before graduation they came and studied the terrain and immersed themselves in the battle’s events. They saw and learned of:
the strategic importance of occupying the high ground;
technological advancements and their impact on strategy and tactics—and ultimately on the outcome of any war;
the importance of pursuing a weakened enemy;
the value of military surprise; and
the essential elements of leadership that are necessary to inspire bravery and valor in any fighting man.
After America’s entry into World War II, almost thirty years after first Gettysburg visit, the class of 1915 produced more generals than any other. Under Dwight Eisenhower’s supreme command, they went on to take some of the highest ground of all – that of the Atlantic wall on the Normandy coast. From there they fought their way to the heart of Germany, ultimately to assure the Nazis’ defeat.
Years later, Dwight Eisenhower returned to Gettysburg. As President of the United States he continued Lincoln’s vision by pursuing a path toward "a more perfect union,” that offered steps to a "new birth of freedom” – by passing in 1957 the first civil rights legislation since reconstruction, and initiating other landmark civil rights measures.
The story of Gettysburg has personal meaning for all of us who take the time to reflect on it. This is a multifaceted place. To me, Gettysburg is synonymous with commitment – the assertion of freewill to do a duty, imbedded in which is self-sacrifice, tenacity and bravery. The battle is not just about leadership at all levels – though it is that – but there were failures and miscalculations that led to futility and bloodshed of epic proportions.
Commitment, as a human value, is now under siege today in ways too numerous to mention. Contemporary life celebrates freedom – but not in the way that Abraham Lincoln would have used that word. Today, freedom has been informally redefined as "keeping your options open” – about your career, your relationships, and the course of what you will do with your life. Freedom is now seen as a privilege, as a way to avoid being "pinned down.” It is often the mantra of those who really want the license to put themselves first.
Even in this transformational time, I believe that people are not afraid of change as much as they are afraid of making commitments.
Commitment. Look around this cemetery, take in this scene. Countless soldiers lying in these graves had been volunteers for their causes. The neighbors and brothers of both sides fought with every ounce of their beings. Six-thousand and six-hundred (6,600) Americans lost their lives in those three days, and as many as 50,000 were casualties of this tragic debacle. Right or wrong, they died as part of a great spiritual impulse, and their commitments changed the trajectory of history.
It was at this very spot that America’s 16th president—one of our very greatest – stood among the newly dug graves and uttered the words that have become the expression of who we are as a united people.
And just down the road from this site, there is a farm where our nation’s 34th President and his wife lived – also devoted public servants. Eisenhower, as a cadet, and later as commander of the WWI-era Camp Colt at Gettysburg, was deeply inspired by all that had happened here at Gettysburg in 1863. And he, too, went on to become the leader of another great cause – the liberation of Europe.
You are at the beginning. You too can devote yourself. You too can make a difference and be counted on when the crisis comes. You too can stand for something larger than yourself. Commit yourself here at Gettysburg College to preparing yourself for the future. Make your life count for something. Help our country be better than it is—this was Lincoln’s charge.
Help make our country be better than it is—for this remains our most enduring national challenge.
Congratulations and good luck to you.
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