Even as U.S. and Indian diplomats squabble over Iran, cooperation between their counterparts in the military continues apace. 

The Indian and U.S. navies began their 16^th annual “Malabar” exercise last Saturday in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu that borders on the Bay of Bengal. The 10-day joint exercise, which will conclude on April 16, consists of both ashore and at-sea training.

The harbor phase took place April 7 to 9 in Chennai, and was supposed to feature seminars on everything from air defense and integrated anti-submarine warfare operations, to carrier aviation operations and counter-piracy operations. The U.S. 7th Fleet released a statement saying that Malabar’s at-sea phase will include, “liaison officer exchanges and embarks, communications exercises, surface action group operations, helicopter cross-deck evolutions and gunnery exercises.”

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North Korea is preparing to launch a satellite in the coming days to coincide with the 100th birthday of its founder Kim Il-sung. Its satellite carrying rocket is based on a long-range missile, and world leaders have urged Pyongyang to scrap the launch, stating that it violates U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, which demands that Pyongyang “not conduct any further nuclear test or any launch using ballistic missile technology.”

But the reality is that an excessively punitive response will do little to halt North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Instead, it could well be followed by a familiar cycle of North Korean provocations and more international sanctions. This would disrupt the prospects for North Korean restraint on three vital nuclear issues – refraining from further nuclear tests so that it doesn’t develop a compact missile-deliverable nuclear warhead; freezing its uranium enrichment and plutonium production so that its nuclear inventory is limited to less than ten nuclear weapons; and allowing international inspections to monitor such a freeze.

Yet it’s important to maintain these critical restraints, while devising diplomatic approaches for curbing North Korea’s missile activities.

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The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan has pinned its hopes on a new local-militia program to help shore up street-level security ahead of the coalition’s planned 2014 departure after more than a decade of war.

Now the Taliban has belatedly recognized the importance of the so-called “Afghan Local Police.” Last week, the insurgent group targeted two ALP commanders, one of them a prominent former Taliban member who had left the group in order to join the coalition and command a local police unit.

The local police initiative, which aims to raise several thousand volunteers to defend key towns against Taliban attack, has suffered other setbacks. In January, a combined U.S. Army and Afghan Army force deployed into Marzak, a remote town in Paktika Province, along the border with Pakistan, with the goal of recruiting 100 local police.

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Last week, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) released its annual evaluation of the international environment, which included a review of 2011 and forecasts of dynamic challenges for the country for the remainder of 2012. The condensed diplomatic text, nicknamed the “Blue Book,” is MOFA’s annual policy statement and helps to drive Tokyo’s international engagement.

The “Blue Book” predictably targets North Korea as the chief international security threat to Japan, with its maverick nuclear weapons program and its determination to continue missile tests in the region. The text refers to the new leadership in the North under Kim Jong-un as “unpredictable.” Pyongyang and Tokyo have been at loggerheads over the former’s announcement of an Unha-3 rocket launch that is slated to take place sometime between April 12 and 16. North Korea claims that the launch is a satellite and will be used for its space program. Japan, as well as the United States and South Korea, has condemned the test as a poorly camouflaged ballistic missile test that contravenes U.N. Security Council resolutions.

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A March 12 U.S. drone strike in Waziristan killed 15 militants, including two senior commanders of the Maulvi Nazir faction of the Tehrik-i-Taliban. This was the ninth drone strike this year that we know about, and many more such strikes are expected in the coming weeks and months.

On March 20, the all-party parliamentary committee in Pakistan called for an end to U.S. drone attacks as well as to “hot pursuit or boots on Pakistani territory,” declaring them a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. The committee has also rejected the U.S. offer of providing advance notice for drone attacks and limiting the types of likely targets. Indeed, the idea of advance notice appears to be a desperate attempt by the U.S. to avoid a total stoppage of its drone operations; hitherto, it has been highly secretive about its drone operations in order to prevent any last minute tip off to the militants by elements in the Pakistani intelligence establishment.

Notwithstanding the 2010 WikiLeaks cables’ claims that the drone strikes have the tacit seal of approval of the Pakistani government and the military, they have certainly created extensive agitation and anti-Americanism in Pakistan. According to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies (PIPS), more than 220 civilians have been killed in drone strikes since 2004, although the American Foundation puts this figure at over 700 – either way enough to arouse public anger and upset government sensitivities. Further, the PIPS data also notes that the United States has eliminated over 2,500 suspected militants from the Taliban and al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, Ilyas Kashmiri, Baitullah Mehsud and Nek Muhammad, including in drone operations. Clearly, the drones have yielded rich dividends for the U.S.

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Pity me. The International Studies Association annual convention met in San Diego last week, and duty demanded that I represent our College there. I co-presented an article critiquing scholars’ idea that “offshore balancing” should form the hub of U.S. grand strategy. That’s a story for another day. While in San Diego I stole away to Balboa Park for a few hours. It was my first visit to the park since 1984, when Midshipman Holmes rendezvoused with aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) at North Island Naval Air Station for a Pacific deployment. The place is as beguiling as I remember from those thrilling days of yesteryear.

For me, three things stand out about Balboa Park: its setting, its history, and what that history says about the American geographical perspective. First, the setting. The architects’ buoyant mix of Spanish Baroque, Mission Revival, and Indian architecture, with the occasional Islamic accent thrown in for good measure, remains as fresh as it was when the park constituted the centerpiece of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. The exhibition took its name from Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean from North American shores. Balboa claimed the ocean for the king of Spain. The park, fittingly, takes its maritime character from the Spanish adventurer. Nautical themes abound.

The exposition marked the opening of the Panama Canal after decades of off-again, on-again construction efforts. Starting around midcentury, French, British, and ultimately American engineers had a go at digging a canal across Nicaragua or Panama. The new waterway finally admitted its first interoceanic ship in August 1914. The Panama-California Exposition was San Diego’s way of advertising itself as the southernmost U.S. port of call for coastwise shipping passing hither and yon along the West Coast. The city’s predominantly southern gaze explains why the exhibition’s designers chose to depart from the neoclassical architecture then in vogue for world’s fairs and expositions. It set San Diego apart from San Francisco, at the time California’s most populous and influential city, which – then as now – tended to face more toward Asia than Latin America.

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Does U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton want confrontation and war in the Middle East, or dialogue, reconciliation and peace?

Her pronouncements and policies during her visit to the region last weekend suggest impatient belligerence. Indeed, she seems intent on spreading mayhem, to the puzzlement and anxiety of many of the locals, as I discovered on a visit that coincided with hers.

In Riyadh last Saturday, she returned to her now familiar theme of seeking to incite the Gulf Arabs against Iran, a country she insists on demonizing as “a regional and global threat.” At a meeting with foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman) she proposed erecting a strong missile shield to protect the Arab states of the Gulf. “It is a U.S. priority” she declared “to help the GCC build a regional missile defense architecture” against what she saw as a looming ballistic missile threat from Iran. 

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It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic shift of tactics. Less than five years ago, the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw, greeted popular calls for change with batons and bullets, crushing the “saffron revolution” with its trademark brutality. But at the weekend, the men in khaki were conspicuous by their absence during elections that were relatively free and that appear to have swept Aung San Suu Kyi and other National League for Democracy (NLD) candidates into parliament.

Nonetheless, it would be naïve to imagine that an institution that held absolute power for the last half century would now meekly accept the role of wallflower at Burma’s democracy party. The military remains a key actor in national affairs, and the reform process can only succeed if the Tatmadaw is made to feel that it, too, stands to be one of the winners in the country’s transformation. And that means two things: that the Tatmadaw has to be compensated for its loss of political power; and that the civilian government has to refrain from crossing any of the military leadership’s red lines.

If the Burmese economy is poised to grow at the pace that some economists are now predicting, then paying off the military should be straightforward enough. The national budget announced in March included a large pay rise for the Tatmadaw: that’s a good incentive for the top brass to stick with Thein Sein’s government, especially given the miserable pay and conditions that Burmese troops currently have to put up with. No less important than the official defense budget are the off-the-books business ventures that the Burmese military engages in. These will become even more profitable as the national economy begins to open up, and, if the Indonesian precedent is anything to go by, turning a blind eye to these often shady money-making schemes will be a necessary evil for the reformist government in the short to medium term.

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Last week, the U.S. Navy released its annually-updated 30-year shipbuilding plan. The document confirms what analysts have expected since the January publication of the Pentagon's new Strategic Defense Guidance: the world's leading naval power is no longer planning a major expansion from today's 285 warships to 313 or more, as was expected as recently as last year. Instead, the U.S. combat fleet will slightly shrink to a low of 276 vessels in 2015 before modestly expanding, peaking at a planned 307 ships in the late 2030s.

Lower shipbuilding rates account for the smaller projected fleet. The Navy anticipates buying between seven and nine warships during most years, while retaining most vessels for around 40 years of service.

The cuts are inconsistent with the Obama administration's much-touted "Pacific pivot," says Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "This is a pivot in name only," Eaglen wrote at AOL Defense.

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Last week, Japanese Defense Minister Naoki Tanaka indicated to the Diet that the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) are preparing to deploy Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC) missiles to potentially intercept North Korea’s planned “satellite” launch. The statement came after Pyongyang had announced earlier this month that the launch will take place sometime between April 12-16, to mark the 100^th anniversary of founder Kim Il-sung’s birth. The North Korean move over the expected test has been roundly condemned by Japan – as well as South Korea and the United States – as a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718.

This week, Tanaka followed up on his earlier pledge by telling the Japanese press that the SDF was preparing to take “destruction measures against (North Korea’s) ballistic missiles.” Cabinet approval for a potential strike was authorized on March 30. Tanaka rebuffed criticism that the deployment was merely rhetorical posturing, stating that the SDF “will expend all possible means to securely implement the necessary preparations in order to protect the lives and property of the people.”

The trajectory of the launch – or whether it will even go forward – remains unclear. Early signals and intelligence indicated that the missile’s path could cross Western Japan, but now reports are pointing to the possibility of the launch covering Japan’s southern islands, including Okinawa.

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