Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament

China’s recent push to renew the Six Party Talks, stalled since 2008, has raised hopes for progress on the peninsula despite worries that Pyongyang may have restarted its old nuclear reactor.

President Barack Obama stuck to the anticipated script in his UN General Assembly address, focusing on diplomatic openings in the Middle East. He outlined U.S. hopes to: disarm Syria of its chemical weapons and end that country’s civil war;  resolve the longstanding nuclear impasse with Iran and; advance final status talks between Israelis and Palestinians. He conceded that each was a high-stakes wager. But he committed his administration to go for the trifecta, despite considerable odds. The President used this high-profile occasion to offer his most detailed comments to date on the recent exchange of peace feelers between the United States and Iran. While reminding the world that Iran was in violation of non-proliferation agreements and had brought ostracism on itself by its aggressive designs and export of terrorism, Obama’s line was in other important respects conciliatory. He acknowledged the “deep roots” of mutual mistrust, obliquely referencing the U.S. role in overthrowing the Mossadegh government during the 1950s, and allowed that this “difficult history” would not be “overcome overnight.” More positively, he described his exchange of letters with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Iran’s repeated assurances that it will never develop a nuclear weapon, as “the basis for a meaningful agreement.” He announced that he had directed Secretary of State John Kerry “to pursue this effort with the Iranian government,” in close cooperation with European allies, as well as Russia and China. As noteworthy as Obama’s subject matter was his pragmatic tone and his recognition of the inherent limits of U.S. power. To be sure, the president’s ultimate vision for world order remains liberal and internationalist. “These are extraordinary times, with extraordinary opportunities,” he declared. And he outlined a hopeful future in which all countries governed democratically, traded peacefully, and settled their disputes pacifically. But by his fifth year on the job, Obama is no starry-eyed idealist. Indeed, his comments betrayed the weariness of a statesman acutely aware that although forces and events may be nudged incrementally in a positive direction, there is no making the world anew. “The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries,” he observed. The lessons of Iraq had guided his own administration’s policies towards Egypt, he suggested. The U.S. government had avoided choosing sides between the Morsi government and its political opponents, and between the succeeding military government and the Muslim Brotherhood, because it recognized that the fundamental decisions about that country’s future would be made by Egyptians themselves. What the United States would continue to insist on, he said, was movement toward an inclusive, democratic government “that legitimately reflects the will of the Egyptian people.” The president also spoke wistfully of the inevitable criticism lobbed America’s way. Given its immense power, the United States was alternately criticized in the Middle East either for adopting a “hands off” policy or for throwing its weight around. Such critiques bore bitter fruit at home and abroad, he noted—making U.S. citizens wonder why they should bother with the troubles of far-off lands, and letting demagogues in the Middle East blame the United States for their own failings as leaders. The United States has no desire to be an empire, Obama declared, but nor could it afford retreat and detachment, as some Americans counsel. Borrowing a line from his own domestic critics (and one sure to annoy Vladimir Putin), the president declared  that indeed, “America is exceptional,” in part because it had repeatedly shown a willingness “to stand up not only for our own narrow self-interest, but for the interests of all.” It was often difficult, Obama acknowledged, to translate universal ideals into practical foreign policy. To preserve its “core interests,” the United States would sometimes need to engage unsavory regimes—like the military junta ruling Egypt—that “do not meet the highest international expectations,” particularly when it comes to human rights. So doing, the United States would inevitably “be accused of hypocrisy or inconsistency.” But such is the nature of international politics. “We live in a world of imperfect choices,” the president declared, in the line that summarizes his speech more than any other. As a case in point, Obama’s audience could look no further than his diplomatic overtures to an Iranian regime that continues to abuse the rights of its citizens and crush dissent. In a phrase guaranteed to disappoint neo-conservative critics at home, the president assured the Iranians, “We are not seeking regime change, and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access to peaceful nuclear energy.” The implicit message in Obama’s mollifying tone: Sometimes, you need to cut deals with tyrants. The tensions between prudence and idealism are starkest when it comes to responding to crimes against humanity. “How do we address the choice of standing callously by while children are subjected to nerve gas, or embroiling ourselves in someone else’s civil war?” he asked. The international system continues to be organized on the principle of national sovereignty, the president noted, and independent nations will often disagree on the need for action. The world cannot “remedy every evil," he said, but neither should it accept “the cold logic of mass graves.” How to square this circle—how to narrow the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would have it be—is the essence of twenty-first century statecraft. It will demand leaders with soft hearts and hard heads, rather than the reverse.

Commencement addresses have figured prominently in American foreign policy. Whether it was FDR ending the pretense that the United States would remain rigidly neutral in World War II in a speech at the University of Virginia, or George W. Bush warning Americans of the growing need for preemptive (actually, preventive) action abroad in an address at West Point, major foreign policy turning points are sometimes announced on college campuses. So which of the many foreign-policy themed commencement addresses was the most significant? My money is on Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s address to Harvard’s graduating class of  1947—it unveiled the Marshall Plan that would rebuild Europe. But plenty of others would vote for a commencement address given sixteen years later: John F. Kennedy’s arms control speech to the graduating class of American University, which he gave on June 10, 1963. Kennedy’s speech that morning doesn’t contain any especially memorable lines, certainly nothing that could compete with “ask not what your country can do for you” or  "Ich bin ein Berliner." Officially titled “The Strategy for Peace,” the speech was significant because it asked Americans to rethink the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union and support finding ways for the two countries to co-exist peacefully: If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. That was a bold statement to make in 1963. The crushing of liberty in Eastern Europe, the communist victory in China, the Korean war, and Khrushchev boasting that “We will bury you!” were just a few of the events that had convinced most Americans that the Soviet Union was an implacable foe. Just two years earlier Kennedy had told Americans that: Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger, as weapons spread and hostile forces grow stronger….the tide of events has been running out and time has not been our friend. By 1963, however, JFK’s concern had changed. He was no longer worried about missile gaps and Soviet military superiority. Having survived the Cuban missile crisis, he worried about the risk of nuclear war, a risk that would grow as nuclear weapons spread. He wanted to find a way to lift the nuclear sword of Damocles from above the world’s head before it was too late. In March, he told reporters: I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty…I see the possibility in the 1970s of the President of the United States having to face a world in which fifteen or twenty nations have these weapons. I regard that as the greatest possible danger. In late May, Kennedy tasked Ted Sorensen with writing a speech that would do two things: lay out his vision of how the United States could live in peace with its major adversary, and reinvigorate the foundering eight-year effort to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty. The Pentagon and State Department were kept in the dark about the speech’s content until the last moment, lest they attempt to scuttle it. As Sorensen worked on the speech, White House officials scrambled to find an appropriate venue. They approached AU to gauge its interest in hosting Kennedy. The university already had a scheduled commencement speaker, Pauline Frederick, a journalist who had graduated from AU. But a presidential address is hard to pass up, and Ms. Frederick graciously stepped aside. Kennedy traveled the five miles to AU’s campus by helicopter. When he addressed the graduates, he did not gloss over the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. But he asked his audience to focus on the common danger facing both countries: Today, should total war ever break out again—no matter how—our two countries will be the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the cold war—which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies—our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could better be devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons. In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours -- and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations and only those treaty obligations which are in their own interest. So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal. The speech also contained one new substantive proposal—a unilateral offer to Soviets: I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty—but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament—but I hope it will help us achieve it. Kennedy’s speech pleased many Americans and alarmed others. (The Columbus Dispatch called it an “appeasement cue.”) But it made a decidedly positive impression on the one person JFK most hoped to reach: Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader subsequently told Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman that it was “the greatest speech by any American president since Roosevelt.” Ten days later, U.S. and Soviet negotiators reached a deal to set up a hotline between Washington and Moscow. The once moribund test-ban talks also picked up momentum. A little more than a month later, on July 25, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom agreed to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which barred nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. The foreign ministers of all three countries formally signed the treaty in Moscow on August 5, 1963. So it is easy to see why Ted Sorensen later called Kennedy’s AU speech “the most important and the best speech he ever gave” and why Time magazine named it to its list of the top ten commencement speeches.

Happy Earth Day! Today marks its forty-third anniversary. The idea for the first Earth Day came from Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI). Appalled by the tragic 1969 oil spill near Santa Barbara, California, he wanted a way to bring attention to the problem of environmental degradation. His initial 1970 effort turned out 20 million people across the United States. Four-plus decades later, some one billion people around the world are participating in activities ranging from cleaning up parks and beaches to an environmental flash-mob in Seoul, which turned Psy’s “Gangnam Style” into “Eco-Style.”  So how are we doing at protecting the Earth? According to my colleagues in CFR’s International Institutions and Global Governance Program (IIGG), not well at all. They celebrated Earth Day by releasing a Global Governance Report Card on climate change. They give the international fight against greenhouse gas emissions a D. Here is how they broke the grade down among various elements of the climate change issue: A few countries and organizations received some praise. IIGG deemed the World Bank and the European Union to be “leaders,” and gave Australia a nod as “most improved.” But the rest of the class came in for criticism. China and the United States were marked down as “laggards,” Russia was designated a “truant,” and Canada was earmarked for “detention.” Like any good grader, IIGG did more than just hand out grades and labels. It also provided detailed explanations of the why the grades are so low, and it identified what countries need to do to make a dent in climate change. If you like grades, you should know that IIGG today released Global Governance Report Cards on five other global challenges: nuclear weapons proliferation; transnational terrorism; violent conflict; financial instability; and threats to global health. The purpose of the effort is to think systematically about whether countries and international institutions are doing what needs to be done to tackle the significant transnational challenges that the world faces.

As Mayor of New York, the late Edward Koch famously asked constituents, “How’m I doing?” He got an earful. But he valued the instant feedback and even adjusted occasionally. As we commemorate Earth Day, we might ask the same question of ourselves – but on a planetary scale. When it comes to addressing the world’s gravest ills, how are we doing? Not so well. That is the big takeaway from the first Global Governance Report Card, released today by the Council on Foreign Relations. Designed in the old grade school style, Report Card grades the international community and the United States on how they are responding to six big challenges: global warming, nuclear proliferation, violent conflict, global health, transnational terrorism, and financial instability. Click here to continue reading this article on CNN: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/22/grading-the-world-on-our-biggest-problems/