There are unmistakable signs coming out of Iran that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei is laying the groundwork for a possible deal with the United States. This shift began in February, when Khamenei reaffirmed his opposition to nuclear weapons on both religious and strategic grounds. The following month, Khamenei praised President Barack Obama’s “good and wise statement” at AIPAC that time for diplomacy still existed, conveniently ignoring that the U.S. leader had also indicated his willingness to undertake military action if necessary. As negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 got underway, Khamenei’s appointees in the clergy, judiciary, and media all sounded a note of optimism. It’s now being reported that Iran is willing to limit the scope of its uranium enrichment.

Most have speculated that Khamenei’s sudden willingness to compromise is the result of his desire to avoid the looming sanctions against Iran’s oil exports. Although there may be some truth to this, at least as important is surely Khamenei’s recent consolidation of power at home. By purging his political competitors, the Supreme Leader has eliminated a significant source of his past opposition to a deal – his fear that his internal opponents would most benefit from it.

When the Islamic Republic’s Constitution was amended in 1989, it simultaneously invested executive power in the Supreme Leader and the president, creating a fierce rivalry that has persisted to this day. Although the Office of the Supreme Leader was by far the more powerful of the two, its current occupant, Ali Khamenei, lacks the religious stature and charisma to be sure of his position. One consequence of this, as Iran scholar Said Amir Arjomand has noted, is that the leader and presidents’ policy preferences have become “increasingly determined by the constitutionally defined vested interest of the office they each held, rather than their personal will.”

Read more...

Within 18 months of conducting its nuclear tests in May 1998, India’s National Security Advisory Board presented a draft nuclear doctrine to the government. This document premised India’s nuclear deterrence on the country’s ability to carry out punitive retaliation to inflict damage deemed unacceptable to an aggressor. Commitment to a “retaliation only” policy mandated the development of a capability consistent with five key factors – maximum credibility, survivability, effectiveness, safety and security.

In support of the first three requirements, India’s nuclear doctrine further stipulated that nuclear forces be based on a triad of aircraft, mobile land-based missiles and sea-based assetsof adequate ranges and reliability. Over the years, India has been steadily moving to develop and induct these capabilities – not as part of a race with anyone, but in pursuit of establishing credible nuclear deterrence.

It’s in this context that the testing of the Agni-V on April 19 was a small but critical step. The success of the test elicited widespread international comment.  Yet the actual decision to conduct the test should have come as no surprise to anyone, given that notice to this effect had been given well in advance. More such tests will follow, including of submarine launched missiles with increased ranges, until such time as India acquires what it perceives as a credible deterrence against nuclear threats.

Read more...

What’s in a word? Quite a lot, sometimes. Exhibit A: “management.” U.S. officials and pundits oftentimes talk about “managing” China’s rise to great power. Are they guilty of hubris – the outrageous arrogance that the Greeks of classical antiquity insisted goes before a fall? To what extent may one nation oversee another’s rise to great power?

Good question. One of my department’s gray-haired eminences raised it during a recent faculty meeting. His point of departure was a famous – or was it infamous? – Pentagon memorandum compiled in 1992 under the supervision of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Written shortly after the Soviet Union’s demise and leaked to the press, the draft Defense Planning Guidance enjoined the United States to “endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and Southwest Asia.”

The language in which the Pentagon document was phrased set the foreign-policy community atwitter. Sen. Robert C. Byrd pronounced it “myopic, shallow and disappointing.” For Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. the memo represented “literally a Pax Americana.” Biden prophesied that “It won’t work. You can be the world superpower and still be unable to maintain peace throughout the world.” Today, though, the idea that the United States should supervise the emergence of China, India, or some other new contender occasions scarcely a murmur. It may now be woven into the assumptions protagonists bring to strategic debates. It’s an axiom we no longer think to question.

Read more...

China has good reasons for supporting North Korea: Pyongyang’s implosion would be an almighty headache, with potentially millions of half-starved refugees pouring across the border looking for Beijing to solve their problems. China’s policy, understandably, is to keep the North’s humanitarian horrors on the far side of the Yalu River.

Beijing therefore turns a blind eye to the cross-border black-market activities that keep the North Korean economy on life support, despite their drain on China’s own resources. It plays its tired part in boosting the North Korean leader’s status, doing what it can to help stave off regime collapse by hosting the Kims in Beijing and offering quotable assurances of solidarity. It also jumps, with impressive patience, through the diplomatic hoops of having constantly to fight North Korea’s losing corner at the United Nations and other international forums.

But when it comes to last week’s revelation that China may be supplying North Korea with technology in contravention of U.N. sanctions, the rationale is much less obvious. It was reported by Jane’s Defence Weekly that a new transporter erector launcher (TEL) system debuted by North Korea at a recent military parade looked suspiciously like a known Chinese system. Following the report, the U.S. government, among others, admitted that they, too, had noticed the similarity. The U.N. Security Council committee whose job it is to monitor these sanctions – a job, some have noted, that it doesn’t seem terribly good at – is reportedly investigating.

Read more...

The U.S. isn’t “returning” to the Asia-Pacific, it never left in the first place. Here, in the world’s most strategically and economically dynamic region, China is already demonstrating great potential to undermine American strategic interests and the efficacy of the global sys­tem – and is doing so in practice. Though Beijing and Washington have considerable shared interests and potential for cooperation, the most difficult period for them to achieve “competitive coexistence” may already have begun. Assuming that high-intensity kinetic conflict can be avoided – fortunately, a highly likely prospect – China’s greatest challenge to U.S. interests and the global system might thus be the already unfolding strategic competition, friction, pres­suring, and occasional crises in the three “Near Seas” (the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas).

China is already a world-class military power – but not in the ways that many have charged. Beijing’s “blue water” naval expansion beyond the Second Island Chain, which isn’t proceeding at the highest level, does not pose a serious problem for Washington. Indeed, as a growing great power, it is only natural for China to develop an increasing pres­ence in this realm, and in many respects it should be welcomed.

Read more...

The U.S. military’s more than decade-old effort to produce a hypersonic global strike weapon just took a big step forward and a big step back. On April 20, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, published the results of an engineering review of a key hypersonic vehicle test.

On August 11, Darpa launched Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2, a wedge-shaped robotic craft meant to reach 20 times the speed of sound and travel for 30 minutes. HTV-2, boosted into the upper atmosphere by a Minotaur rocket, flew for only nine minutes before crashing into the Pacific Ocean. A previous test in 2010 using a similar test vehicle also ended in failure nine minutes into the flight.

The engineering study concluded that the heat generated by air friction ripped away HTV-2’s skin. “The resulting gaps created strong, impulsive shock waves around the vehicle as it travelled nearly 13,000 miles per hour, causing the vehicle to roll abruptly. Based on knowledge gained from the first flight in 2010 and incorporated into the second flight, the vehicle’s aerodynamic stability allowed it to right itself successfully after several shockwave-induced rolls. Eventually, however, the severity of the continued disturbances finally exceeded the vehicle’s ability to recover.”

Read more...

South Korea doesn’t usually dignify the North’s shows of force by responding in kind. However, North Korea’s launch of the Unha-3 rocket earlier this month ultimately proved to be more a show of weakness than a show of force, the rocket’s failure alerting the world to little more than Pyongyang’s technological deficiencies.

Seoul evidently couldn’t resist the temptation to highlight the contrast between its own cutting-edge military systems and Pyongyang’s dull blades: while the North makes a lot of noise about systems that don’t work, the South quietly but effectively develops systems that do.

So Seoul’s unveiling of the Hyunmu-3C cruise missile on April 19 was basically an almighty put-down, a rebuke to the misguided fanfare that the North had whipped up around its non-functioning rocket. The missile has a range of up 1,000 to 1,500 kilometers, enabling it to strike anywhere within North Korean territory and giving Seoul the ability to knock out rockets like the Unha-3 on the launch pad. Kim Jong-un probably wishes the South had made use of this capability before the Unha-3 had the chance to blast off.

Read more...

Following a 15-month hiatus, the latest round of talks in Istanbul between the P5+1 and Iran appear to have momentarily dampened the bluster surrounding the latter’s alleged nuclear program. Skeptics, of course, remain understandably convinced that this is merely another of Tehran’s tactical prevarications. In any case, assuming all this guarded optimism bears fruit and both sides reach an improbable understanding, the nuclear issue still remains only the tip of a (far) deeper issue.

Since the Islamic Revolution took all of the Shah’s men by storm, Iran has found itself – often even by its own doing – shunned, contained and demonized by the status quo powers and, let’s face it, forced into a role hardly commensurate with its territorial, demographic and historical weight. The facts need no retelling: Iran occupies strategic prime estate between Central-Southwestern Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East where, excluding North Africa, it ranks second both in land area (after Saudi Arabia) and population (after Egypt). Iran is also the world’s number two energy superpower in proven oil and gas reserves combined following Saudi Arabia, and commands the critical Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows. And at one point, the Achaemenid Empire founded by that humanist Cyrus the Great encompassed no less than 44% of the world’s population – nearly equivalent to China, India, the United States and Indonesia.

And yet, Iran is rarely consulted or even included in regional fora concerning issues directly affecting its national interests, and on which it can easily bring positive influence to bear. On closer scrutiny, the ongoing nuclear standoff also in some way stems from Iran’s deliberate exclusion from the regional decision-making processes.

Read more...

In all the discussion concerning the contingent of some 200 U.S. marines arriving in Darwin, a force that will plateau to around 2,500 by 2016 to 17, and the enhanced military use of the Cocos Islands, there’s been a fundamental issue missing from Australia’s national strategic debate: how does the Australian  military’s core business extend beyond the war fighting mission.

Chief of the Australian Army Gen. David Morrison recently observed that he agreed with writer George Santayana, “that only the dead have seen an end to war.”

Morrison noted that the fundamental force development principle is that military operations against a credible, technologically enabled opponent – possessing war fighting capabilities similar to our own – must remain the foundation of all planning.

Read more...

On the eve of North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket launch, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) were on high alert. They installed interceptors in Okinawa and sent destroyers to the East China Sea – maneuvers that haven’t been seen for a decade. In the end, the rocket didn’t even make it into the field of the SDF’s radars, and the damage to Japan came not from the rocket, but from the fact that it took an embarrassing 45 minutes for Tokyo to announce that the launch had taken place at all.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world was, and continues to be, preoccupied elsewhere. The United States has been unable to escape the Middle East, where the most urgent challenges to global security are emanating from the nuclear ambitions of Iran and a sectarian disintegration in Syria. Beijing is wholly occupied with the rollercoaster political drama unfolding in Chongqing with the downfall of populist Party Secretary Bo Xilai and the implications for the leadership transition later this year. And the launch took place almost in parallel with South Korea’s parliamentary elections, the campaigns for which were striking for the fact that there was hardly any mention of North Korea. It’s therefore understandable that the international community’s response to North Korea’s not-so-big-bang has been to make a few statements and then get on with more pressing matters. 

But precisely because its rocket failed, the threat from North Korea is reason for concern – not just in Tokyo, but globally. Success, or even just a convincing pretense of it (as with the 1993 and 2009 launches), would have gone a long way toward satiating the need of the North Korean regime to consolidate its precarious grip on power.

Read more...