Foreign Policy

The Defense Department has long praised a support program for troubled troops. That wasn't enough to save it from the budget axe.

Victoria Nuland, America’s top diplomat for Europe, has tapped an experienced Capitol Hill staffer as her new senior adviser, officials tell Foreign Policy.

Nearly every day, it seems, a new report arrives of hundreds of migrants being pulled out of the sea or drowning in anonymity. Both in the Mediterranean Sea and the waters of South East Asia, desperate migrants are being packed into rickety boats and transported across dangerous waterways toward the hope of a new life, ...

Some financial companies in the U.S. resort to carrying cash on airplanes to keep remittances flowing to needy Somalis.

A federal jury in Massachusetts sentenced Tsarnaev to death on six of 17 counts.

The country's bold strategy to fight maternal mortality flouts conventional wisdom and relies on a controversial drug -- and in the wake of the devastating earthquake, it could be more important than ever.

Islamic State fighters are pushing deeper into the key Iraqi city of Ramadi while launching new attacks against the sprawling Baiji oil refinery, but a top U.S. military official involved in the Pentagon’s training and advising mission there says that the group remains “on the defensive.” Speaking by phone from his headquarters in the Middle ...

Thousands of Nepali workers in Qatar struggle to find a way to go home -- and give back -- to a country in crisis.

The 15-year-old diarist was a singular talent. Let’s stop pretending every young woman tweeting her life under fire is doing the same.

It took 17 years, but federal prosecutors have finally won a conviction for a militant linked to the devastating al Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 224 dead and 4,000 injured and marked the group’s emergence as America’s top terrorist adversary.

A federal judge Friday sentenced Khaled al-Fawwaz, a top former advisor to Osama bin Laden, to life in prison. He was convicted in February on four conspiracy counts in connection to the 1998 attack, which killed 12 Americans.

The twin truck bomb attacks in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi prompted then-President Bill Clinton to launch Operation Infinite Reach, which consisted of cruise missile strikes in Somalia and Afghanistan. The missiles fired into east Africa destroyed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Somalia, a facility that ended up having no connection to al Qaeda or bin Laden.

Strikes in Afghanistan destroyed four training camps and were an effort to kill bin Laden, who was believed to be at the Zhawar Kili al-Badr base. He left hours before the missiles struck.

After 9/11, Clinton came under fierce criticism for not having mounted a more muscular attempt to kill bin Laden.

The bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were the second attack by al Qaeda against American targets. In 1992, the group bombed a hotel in Yemen, where U.S. troops had been staying in route to Somalia. The service members were not at the hotel when a series of bombs went off, but two American tourists were killed.

Fawwaz was not convicted for planning the embassy bombing, but on four conspiracy counts. A the time of the attacks, he was in London disseminating bin Laden’s messages and sending supplies to terror cells in Africa. He was arrested in London in 1998, then extradited to the United States in 2012 after a long legal fight.

Lawyers for Fawwaz said he deserved less than life in prison because he was not as responsible for the attacks as other al Qaeda leaders. But prosecutors argued to Judge Lewis Kaplan that Fawwaz was the leader of a terrorist cell in Kenya in the 1990s who was once the ninth most powerful person in al Qaeda.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said he is the 10th person to be convicted or to plead guilty in connection to the bombings.

Photo Credit: Alexander Joe/Getty Images

After a brief but frightening setback for proponents, U.S. congressional leaders looked set on May 13 to pass legislation for an eventual up-or-down (“fast-track”) vote on what would be one of the world’s largest trade accords, the U.S-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The accord, a project behind which U.S. President Barack Obama has thrown his full support, would originally join together 12 countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. Significantly, China isn’t on that list; in fact, in the months leading up to fast-track voting, U.S. officials have been selling the pact internationally and domestically as a deal to counter Chinese influence. But whether TPP becomes reality or not, China has already moved on. And the anti-China rhetoric the United States has deployed has ultimately done more harm than good.

TPP is more than just a trade agreement, at least to hear the Obama administration tell it. In recent months, U.S. officials seeking to win domestic support among skeptical democrats have promoted it as a geostrategic cudgel to fend off a rising China. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on April 27, President Barack Obama asserted, “If we do not write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region,” meaning the Asia-Pacific. “We will be shut out.” When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met President Obama to discuss TPP, their explicit and implicit messages were “all about China,” according to Patrick L. Smith, a long-time correspondent in Tokyo.

By continuing and intensifying the anti-China rhetoric in TPP discourse, administration officials have only made it more likely that the trade regime, if it becomes reality, will alienate China.

None of this was inevitable. As recently as two years ago, China was nervous about being shut out of the TPP. Li Xiangyang, dean of the Global Strategy Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top government-linked think tank, remarked in 2012 that “TPP represents the gravest challenge China faces” on its upward trajectory, given its popularity in Asia and its exclusion of China. Scholar Fan Libo also argued in an article published in December 2012 that “the benefits of joining TPP outweigh the costs for China.” In May 2013, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced that China would “assiduously study” the pros and cons of TPP. Then in March 2014, at the conclusion of China’s National Party’s Congress and National People’s Congress, an annual event that directs major policy moves, Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng spoke to domestic and international reporters. “We think the TPP is an important negotiation, and also a high-quality trade regime,” Gao said. “China is always open and accommodating to regional cooperation.” He also made it clear that China was well-informed of TPP negotiations through Sino-U.S bilateral dialogue mechanisms.

When the United States spun the TPP as a high-standard trade regime, with its inclusion of rigorous labor and environmental clauses, it also resonated with those wishing to push China to reform. Long Yongtu, the former Chinese trade minister who negotiated the country’s entry into the WTO, argued in November 2014 that “TPP has to include China sooner or later.” Long and other reformists saw the TPP’s standards as potentially creating an external lever to, as Long wrote, “help China’s badly-needed reform in the state sector, labor, and environmental areas.” In November 2014, China announced a landmark climate accord with the United States. And the Xi administration has designated “deepening market reform” a top policy in the coming years – a fine fit for the TPP’s requirements.

In late 2014, moderate voices were supported by a set of serious investigations into how key terms in the TPP are likely to affect China. Researchers at Chinese universities and government think tanks concluded that China could manage the short-term costs that TPP would incur on their country, whether it joined or not. These include state-owned enterprises, supply chain manufacturing, intellectual property rights, textiles, exports, environment, and labor markets in China. The findings suggested that China could manage the costs via reforms in tax rates, expanding outbound investment, and reform in relevant legal and environmental regulations.

Of course, China was not going to wait for the United States to come around. Quietly, China began searching for new ways to bolster its influence in Asia. In late 2013 Xi publicly announced for the first time what he called the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21 Century Maritime Silk Road,” comprising what was later known as China’s New Silk Road in Eurasia. Things have been moving fast since. In Kazakhstan, China has signed economic projects in the areas of trade, industry, energy, technology, and finance, totaling $23.6 billion. In Belarus, in addition to a massive Sino-Belarus Industrial Park, modeled after the Suzhou Industrial Park near Shanghai, eight Chinese provinces and seven localities in Belarus have signed development projects with each other. In Russia, China has just finalized 30 economic projects, with a total worth of around $20 billion.

China’s confidence in regional politics has also been boosted by its progress assembling the charter member ranks for its Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, or AIIB. China proposed the AIIB in October 2013; a year later, 21 nations, all Asian, gathered in Beijing and signed the memorandum establishing the bank. Six months later, the membership has expanded to 57, including traditional U.S allies in the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Korea. Embarrassingly, U.S efforts to stop close allies like the United Kingdom from joining have failed. 

With these recent successes in their proverbial back pockets, Chinese officials and scholars no longer care as much about TPP. Li Xiangyang, a dean at CASS who was deeply concerned about TPP two years ago, now spends most of his time promoting the Silk Road. The initiative is “diverse and open,” he said; in contrast, “TPP uses high-standards to exclude nations,” and is “not real openness.” Scholars also argue that TPP imposes United States-drafted terms on others. “It has too much politics,” they noted, “while AIIB was driven by market principles.” Of course, the future is critically uncertain. China has been generally silent as the TPP debate goes on in America.

There’s a lesson here for U.S. policymakers: there are profound merits to staking trade standards on solid policy grounds, as opposed to the very different terrain of realpolitik. When the U.S speaks for labor, environment, and small inventors, it attracts reform-minded Chinese who can do much of the internal sales job themselves. When it lards initiatives like TPP with geopolitical significance, it only pushes China to focus on the same.

After all the exhaustive back-and-forth on fast-track authority, the years of negotiation, and the recent, coordinated drum-beating about containing a rising China, the TPP may ultimately come to pass. But it’s too late to win hearts and minds in China. The world’s largest country has already moved on.

AFP/Getty Images

Driving through Sittwe, the dusty provincial capital of Rahkine state in northwest Burma, you notice a small poster affixed to nearly every shop and home. In English these signs read “white card,” and they alert anyone passing by that the building’s occupant sides with recent government efforts to prevent Burma’s most threatened ethnic and religious minority group, the Rohingya, from participating in the upcoming national elections. Most of Burma’s Rohingya are, in fact, stateless, and “white card” refers to the special identity documents issued to them by the government in lieu of the papers held by Burmese citizens. A few months ago officials decided that white card holders would not be allowed to participate in the national vote scheduled for this fall — effectively excluding the overwhelming majority of Rohingya.

As you drive on, the cacophony of bustling markets and careening tuk-tuks gradually gives way to the quiet of unpaved jungle roads and, eventually, a makeshift barbed wire roadblock that now separates nearly 150,000 Rohingya from the outside world. My Buddhist driver, from the state’s majority Rahkine ethnic group, refused to take me past the fence line into one of the world’s largest collections of internment camps — an implicit acknowledgement that he didn’t feel safe proceeding into a Rohingya community. Similarly, on the other side, my Rohingya guide refused to try to leave, too fearful of the consequences of being found outside the camps. “They just want us all to go away,” was the best explanation one camp dweller could give for his three years of internment.

The Rohingya we met inside the camp referred to it as an “open prison.” They have been interned here since a spate of inter-communal violence in 2012 killed scores of Rohingya and destroyed the homes and businesses of 140,000 more. Many people described how their Rakhine neighbors perpetrated the abuses, while others recounted that police officers or other local government actors were also involved. One woman remembered a fire brigade that approached when Rohingya houses were ablaze. Instead of extinguishing the fires, the firefighters poured gasoline and helped them spread.

Small wonder that many Rohingya are fleeing the country in desperation, taking to ramshackle boats which often become death traps. Their grim story stands in stark contrast to the official narrative emerging from Burma. After decades of military dictatorship and international sanctions, Burma has been haltingly shifting to civilian government and re-engaging with the international community since 2010. This slow liberalization has started to feel like a success — and from Washington, London, and Brussels it looks like one: scores of prominent opposition political figures have been released from imprisonment and are now preparing to participate this fall’s general election. Some sanctions have been lifted and foreign investment is flowing in. The space for civil society groups is expanding.

But one local activist cautioned against the “euphoria of change,” stressing that a real and lasting transition cannot occur unless it happens for everyone in society — regardless of ethnicity or religion.

The Rohingya — a community of just over one million Muslims at the bottom of Burma’s ethnic caste system — are not feeling the euphoria. In fact, they are now increasingly at risk of being eliminated entirely from the country’s political, social and economic life. While only about 10 percent of the Rohingya population are interned in camps and suffering from insufficient food and a lack of health care, the entire population is at risk of elimination.

The first step towards the Rohingya’s destruction is the increasingly aggressive application of a 1982 citizenship law requiring them to accept the label “Bengali” — a reference to neighboring Bangladesh and an assertion that they are not really Burmese — or else have their citizenship and basic rights and freedoms revoked. Under either scenario, the intention is clear: to deny Rohingya their legal place in Burmese society. “By denying us citizenship,” one Rohingya advocate told me, “they are denying our entire existence, our struggle, and our survival.” The move has made the Rohingya the world’s largest stateless people and now serves as the justification for every indignity and transgression inflicted upon the community — from denying them freedom of movement and ability to hold jobs to the basic right get an education, receive government services, or hold property.

This targeted nature of the attacks against the Rohingya have drawn increasingly worried references to the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as the “attempt to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” and have prompted warnings that the Rohingya could become the latest victims of this crime of crimes.

Subject to hate speech sponsored by both state and religious figures, targeted attacks, forced internment, and arbitrary detention, the Rohingya have now become targets of national legislation reminiscent of the Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship rights based on their presumed “ethnic” origins. In similar fashion, the latest Burmese laws aspire to limit Rohingya birth rates and their ability to marry. One Rohingya leader described this de facto apartheid system as “an attempt to depopulate the Rohingya people” through their “soft elimination.” This is quite literally what the government’s recently proposed and ominously sounding “Population Control Bill” would do.

Perhaps even more alarming is seeing how official discrimination has given way to popular hatred of the Rohingya by the country’s Burman ethnic majority and other ethnic groups. Even Burma’s Western-backed, pro-democracy advocates like Aung San Suu Kyi have remained silent on the persecution of their compatriots, as coming to their defense now would run counter to the popular will.

Added together, this potent climate of racism, xenophobia, and hate has primed Burma for further rounds of deadly violence, as was last seen in 2012. Though the official death toll remains relatively low, in the hundreds, many human rights groups believe the true number to be substantially higher. As national elections approach later this year, the warning signs for massive atrocities grow ever more conspicuous. The Rohingya’s disenfranchisement could serve as the spark that sets the country ablaze.

To its credit, the Obama administration has taken notice of these disturbing developments and has signaled to the Burmese government that it should take steps to protect and strengthen minority rights as a precondition for a deepening of the relationship. Military assistance, something Burmese officials have made a top priority, has rightfully been put on hold.

Meanwhile, the president’s new Atrocities Prevention Board has helped ensure that the threats to Rohingya remain a central component of the deepening bilateral discussion with Burmese officials. The president raised their plight in meetings with his counterpart last November and has implemented initiatives to detect early warning signs of new violence against the Rohingya — something not done for the Tutsis of Rwanda two decades before. But will it suffice?

As Burma’s opening continues, growing numbers of European and U.S. investors are rushing to get a piece of the country’s investment bonanza. But with the opening of every new Mercedes dealership or luxury high-rise, Western leverage to achieve adequate protections for the most vulnerable of Burma’s citizens erodes.

In a 2012 conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, then-Secretary of State Clinton warned that “the United States and our partners must act before the wood is stacked or the match is struck, because when the fire is at full blaze, our options for responding are considerably costlier and more difficult.” So much wood is already stacked in Burma. The crimes and injustices that have already been perpetrated against the Rohingya represent some of the core preconditions for genocide that analysts and advocates look for — but it is not yet too late to do something about it.

Conditioning future concessional lending, military assistance, and development packages on the creation of new legislative protections for the Rohingya is a meaningful step the international community could take to ensure the rush to declare Burma a democratic success does not exclude the Rohingya. So, too, would pressing the current and future governments to hold accountable local, national, and religious authorities who have helped to incite, direct, or condone past and any future violence against Rohingya.

When we asked what could be done to improve their situation, some Rohingya told us that the national and local authorities should allow more humanitarian assistance to reach them. Some called for greater international pressure on the government. Others called for efforts to change hateful mindsets within society against Rohingya and other Muslims. In the meantime, one woman I met in a Rohingya internment camp said simply, “We can just stay here, pray, and wait.” One thing is for certain: if violence does erupt and Burma’s leaders and people do decide to seek a “final solution” for the Rohingya, it will be impossible for anyone to revive the tired refrain of past generations of genocide apologists — “we didn’t know.”

In the photo, Rohingya refugees stand at an IDP camp on the outskirts of Sittwe, Myanmar.
Photo Credit: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Let’s imagine for a moment, that in some massively devastating economic disaster, the entire population of Canada, roughly 35 million people, loses its jobs. The country’s infrastructure implodes — no functioning trains or reliable electricity — and then these people also lose their homes, their schools, and their belongings. Poverty begins to take root, and lines for food stretch around blocks. There’s a shortage of resources and shelter. Ensuing conflict erupts in a war, complete with bombs exploding overhead, snipers firing rifles, and soldiers going from house to house making arrests.

Clearly, it’s not safe to stay in Canada.

So now take lots of these millions of Canadians and move them across the border into the United States. Oh, wait — that’s not going to work (the United States doesn’t want millions of immigrants seeking asylum, does it?). Instead, picture these people fleeing to relatively safer areas within the country, building makeshift shelters out of tarps and cardboard in parks or renting rundown apartments with the little money they were able to take with them. And now, you can begin to imagine what it’s like for internally displaced people stuck within their own borders.

According to a report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) in Geneva, the number of people forced to flee their homes but remain within their own borders because of war and general violence was, as of the end of 2014, a record-breaking 38 million. During the past year alone, 11 million people were displaced. That’s 30,000 people per day.

On top of that, the report found that in 2014, in about 90 percent of the 60 countries IDMC monitors, people were living in protracted displacement (and bearing children into displacement) for a period of at least 10 years. And in most cases, these internal refugees are not perfectly welcomed within the communities to which they flee. They face long-term hardships like lack of access to health care, ethnic discrimination, trauma from what they’ve seen and fled, and an inability to find jobs.

Unlike refugees, internally displaced people are dependent on their governments, which are often themselves in turmoil and are either unable or unwilling to help, and are usually responsible for the displacement in the first place. (Think Syria.)

Displaced people are the unseen byproducts of war: Living beyond the reach of aid organizations or even protection of the Geneva Conventions, unlike refugees. Finally, however, with the new numbers from IDMC, we can measure and name the problem, and distinguish these lost millions’ plight from that of those who manage to make it to surrounding countries.

But considering the main drivers of war, which then leads to dislocation — as well as poverty and overall inequality — it’s hard to imagine how to truly help the ever-increasing number of IDPs who are stuck in a kind of purgatory that lasts … no one knows how long. “The problem is really so huge that no one knows where to start,” says Alexandra Bilak, one of the authors of the report.

Unlike in the past though, intricate country breakdowns show five countries that account for 60 percent of new displacement worldwide: Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria, with Syria holding the largest number of IDPs in the world, at 7.6 million. We now know specifically where attention is needed. And we know the issue needs solving, the key to which, says the center, is to get people to sit up and finally see the problem — and then start coughing up funding.

“We are like the weathermen,” says Alfredo Zamudio, director of the IDMC. “We are telling people that it’s raining.”

Still, attention to the IDP crisis remains scant in international donor circles. People trapped within their own borders remain unseen by dominant donor countries, unlike the migrants who are drowning off the Italian coast or those queuing up at the Jordanian border.

Although if you were to ask “a Lebanese or a Syrian or an Ethiopian or a Sudanese they wouldn’t talk about a few thousand asylum seekers. They would talk about the millions of refugees and internally displaced people, and so should we,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that aids those affected by displacement and the umbrella group under which the IDMC operates. Then add on a term like “protracted displacement” and you have perhaps the most un-media-friendly story possible: people staying put. That doesn’t sell newspapers. Altogether, “IDPs have just become forgotten,” says Zamudio.

There is some good news, however, says Egeland, because mass displacement is a political problem (something Egeland calls “a cancer of international politics”), which means there are political solutions. While there are (unenforceable) guiding principles on internal displacement codified by the U.N. in 1998, it might be time for a new conversation on them.

“We need to get back to countries sitting down together and saying we have a common problem and we need to pull in the same direction,” he says. On the plus side, he points out that “there are many more nations and many more millionaires in many more countries that could invest in hope, and a fewer number of truly miserable places.”

Zamudio agrees, adding that, “there are good people in these governments trying to do the right thing.”

Egeland does, however, point his finger at countries that are not pulling their financial weight, and says they’re not just “the usual suspects.” He’s mainly critical of countries that have enough wealth to help, but choose not to: “How come three tiny Scandinavian countries can still be among the top 10 donors in the world? Where are all of the Asian tigers? Where are all of these incredibly oil-rich countries among donors?”

“All of those of us who are in the top 2 to 3 billion of the world population have more than enough to share. Much more.”

Beyond increasing funding, Egeland also says we need more “witnesses” — aid workers and journalists to take stock of the crisis working inside countries with large numbers of IDPs — inside Syria, inside Yemen, something that he recognizes as both costly and dangerous. He says much of the reason people are unable to go home during displacement is because of a “protection crisis.” That assistance may reach those in need, but does not provide protection. There needs to be “much more effective and coherent peacekeeping and diplomacy. Much more effective sanctions to award good behavior and punish bad behavior.” He specifies that he does not mean further military actions from the West. Instead, Egeland wants “more systematic possibilities for relocation of refugees in the areas of greatest tension,” he says. “It’s as easy and as difficult as that.”

For the 38 million people in this liminal state, life can be desperate, and the snail’s pace of action to help them devastating. Bilak describes an erosion of resilience when there is a long-term lack of support.

Consider just one example of someone living in dislocation. Pikas Kapi belongs to a family displaced by low-level conflict between Papua, New Guinea, and the Indonesian government that has been flaring since independence from the Dutch in 1962. He and his family have been in a care center for almost four years, “living in broken tents and with no one helping us,” he told the IDMC. “Life is very difficult, particularly for our children. Many are still traumatized by the fighting and don’t want to go back to school.” Many, Kapi says, become ill because they don’t get enough to eat and water quality is poor. “We have to hope for rain if we want to drink. … We feel abandoned.”

In some places, people are living for years away from their homes, forced to move over and over again as conflict comes nearer. A look at the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which has 2.8 million IDPs after 20 years of war, shows one of the most complex situations of displacement in the world, says Bilak, one in which people are exhausted from having to move so many times because of violence. They are forced to keep switching work to feed themselves; women who only know how to farm have to leave their fields because they are being raped, only to have to learn how to mine, where they are abused, only to have to accept that there is no easy place or life for them.

For Bilak, the answer to ending mass internal displacement, especially the protracted kind, is to shift thinking from classifying it as a short-term humanitarian crisis to an entrenched development issue. “We need to bridge the relief to development gap,” she says. But with an ironic laugh she adds, “I don’t think anyone really knows how to do that.”

Looking closely at stories like Kapi’s should be enough to move hearts to give money to assist with resettlement, peacekeeping, job training, etc. But since that hasn’t been enough to make change thus far, Egeland has other incentives to draw donors.

“It’s not just because of our ideals we should care,” he says. “It’s because it’s in our interests too. If we take millions and millions of teenagers in and around Syria and we say, ‘No, we will not give you an education nor a job nor a future,’ would we still expect them to be moderate and well-behaving and never flirt with extremism or join terrorist groups?”

“Of course they will be angry,” Egeland says. “And of course they can be recruited in all sorts of directions. So we have to invest in hope.”

It’s as easy and as difficult as that.

MOHAMMED SAWAF/AFP/Getty Images

If you’ve paid even tangential attention to the debate over the role of drones in the United States’ wars of the 21st century, director Andrew Niccol’s new movie “Good Kill” will have virtually nothing new to tell you. If you haven’t, read any of these informative articles to catch up and spare yourself 102 minutes of hackneyed dialogue and factual inaccuracy.

Set in 2010, the movie stars Ethan Hawke as Maj. Thomas Egan, a pilot forced to abandon his F-16 to fly drones. After experiencing warfare from his cockpit while flying above the battlefield, the abrupt shift to a metal box at an Air Force base outside Las Vegas threatens Egan’s sense of self. He becomes increasingly distanced from his wife and reliant on booze as a result.

Niccol and Hawke clearly wanted to make a movie that prompts a national conversation about a future of warfare by remote control. “The [U.S.] soldiers might eventually leave Afghanistan, but the drones aren’t going to,” Niccol told my Foreign Policy colleague Seyward Darby in an interview.

“The things that usually end a war are expense, body bags or conquering a country,” Hawke said in the same interview. “With a drone, it’s inexpensive, there aren’t body bags, and you can’t conquer the country because you aren’t even there. So it creates a real possibility for perpetual war.”

These are pertinent observations, but Niccol’s effort to bring them to life in the film is handicapped by his own screenplay, which is weighted down with so many cliches that it becomes hard to take seriously. Several of these involve Egan’s character, who misses the risks that came with spending his professional life in the air. “The most dangerous thing I do is drive home on the freeway,” he laments in one scene.

Buried in the movie are a few plot twists that are plucked from the headlines and, in different hands, might actually incite a genuine debate among the film’s audience: a drone strike that Egan and his team intentionally conduct on the funeral of the target of a previous drone attack, and repeated strikes conducted in which it’s clear to Egan’s team ahead of time that civilians will die.

But instead of making a movie that revolves around one such episode, Niccol has tried to cram every remotely controversial type of incident associated with drones into one film, the moral core of which is provided by Egan and a young enlisted female airman. The rest of the team consists of a pair of junior officers that are little more than two-dimensional characters whose purpose in the film is simply to provide hard line answers to the junior airman’s questions about the dubious morality of some of the drone strikes.

But at least their characters get to be two-dimensional. Some of the most disturbing strikes are undertaken on behalf of the CIA. But perhaps because Niccol wanted to keep the movie tightly focused on the handful of Air Force personnel in Nevada, the CIA is represented only by a disembodied voice coming out of a speaker. Rather than purely mission-focused conversations about the targets to be prosecuted, the discussions between the team and “Langley” veer into philosophical discussions on the nature of drone warfare that are completely unrealistic in the context of a time-sensitive lethal mission.

To a reporter who has spent more than 25 years covering the military, those scenes are far from the most egregious departures from realism that the movie makes. Egan’s commander, Lt. Col. Jack Johns (whose character exists largely to deliver stilted exposition on the background of the drone war), is played by Bruce Greenwood, who at 58 is (and looks) about 15 years too old to be playing a lieutenant colonel. A small infantry or special operations element asks the drone crew to provide overwatch while they take a nap in the middle of a long patrol, but none of the ground-pounders appears to be even carrying a rucksack. The most jarring error comes when Egan speaks wistfully of the challenges of landing his F-16 on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. F-16s are Air Force jets that don’t land on Navy carriers.

The critical role played by drones in the wars of the post-9/11 era demands to be examined by a worthwhile movie. “Good Kill” isn’t it.

Below is the full text of the interview conducted by Seyward Darby with Ethan Hawke and Andrew Niccol:

SD: It strikes me that so many of your movies are about the impact technology can have on our humanity — Gattaca, In Time, The Truman Show. I’m curious why this story of technology in particular drew you in, and what made you want to make this movie.

AN: Because of his character — because we’ve never had a soldier like this before. He’s the first generation of what will be many generations of soldiers who will go to war at home. It’s fascinating: What does that do to the psyche, what toll does it take when you’re going to war with a country but never go to the country? How do you possibly decompress when you’ve got a 40-minute drive down the freeway to your home in the Vegas suburbs?

SD: You met with some drone operators in preparation for this movie. What did you find were their methods of coping, of thinking about doing a job that is at once at home but also far away?

EH: It’s almost a schizophrenic level of detachment. They would never say that, they have their own things they say that they think are funny — the way they process their feelings or try to swallow their feelings, of whatever it is that they do. For me, as an actor, someone who’s often asked to compartmentalize feelings, asked to work with them on film one hour then later be normal at lunch of taking my kids of school, I understand that feeling of compartmentalization or schizophrenia. And I don’t know how they handled it. But I know it’s a dangerous thing to do, to become so detached from your feelings.

AN: Some of the younger drone pilots would fly by remote control for hours, then go back to their apartment and play video games. How do you not get desensitized to what you’re doing when you’re looking at screens?

SD: Did you find that they knew or had studied much about the cultures they were surveilling—that they knew a lot about, say, Yemen or Pakistan?

EH: In my experience, yeah.

AN: As you see in the film, they spend sometimes months watching a compound. And they really start to identify with the people they’re watching. They know their routine.

EH: They have likes and dislikes: “Oh, he’s cool,” or, “Oh, I hate him,” or “Oh, she’s attractive.”

AN: His character is watching a woman working, caring for a kid, and he almost falls in love with her. He spends more time with her than he does with his wife.

EH: And then the husband comes home and you have to blow them all up.

SD: In that respect, you could make the argument that this form of warfare has brought soldiers closer to the people they’re targeting. They’re not looking at them across tanks or battle lines.

AN: Perhaps that makes it worse. Because they’re not these anonymous people anymore.

EH: My grandfather dropped bombs on Germany, but he never had to circle back and count the dead. He never knew what happened to the bombs he let out of that B-52. Did he feel guilt about it? Really, no — you could say, maybe we blew up that bomb plant and saved the war.

AN: But to know exactly whom you’ve killed, and what you’ve done to them, how you blew them apart. We’ve never asked soldiers to watch what they do in hi-def. On the battlefield, I’m going to shoot you, but I’m not going to stick around because I’m worried about getting shot. That threat doesn’t exist [with drones]. It makes you feel cowardly, because you’re not a warrior anymore.

SD: That raises the question of whether the United States should be doing this at all. Having made this film, what do you think?

AN: It’s not up to me to answer that, it’s up to the audience who sees it. But it’s really a complicated question because you have to ask, doing what exactly? The soldiers might eventually leave Afghanistan, but the drones aren’t going to. Many would argue perhaps validly they should stay and police it, because do we want another 9/11? Is that the risk if we declare victory and go home?

EH: There’s a line in the film, that it might be the least worst option. If we stop killing them, will they stop killing us? The really dangerous thing about the drone program is where it’s leading us into the future. It’s obviously a very useful tool — but it’s how we use it. The things that usually ends a war are expense, body bags, or conquering a country. With a drone, it’s inexpensive, there aren’t body bags, and you can’t conquer the country because you aren’t even there. So it creates a real possibility for perpetual war. We used to think of that as a futuristic idea. Now here we are, 14 years into this, and it’s not so far-fetched.

SD: In speaking to the drone operators, where was their mentality with regard to the program? Did they articulate concerns about, say, when their job would end?

AN: One phrase that really stuck in my mind was this drone pilot who said, “When the commander says to fire, to press the button, once they say fire, they bought the bomb. So even if a kid runs into the impact zone, that’s not my responsibility. My job was to press the button.” So that is how they could compartmentalize that aspect of it.

EH: When you talk to the soldiers, they’re so consumed with the details. They would say, “I never really felt bad about what I did, but there was so much paperwork, endless paper work the military makes you do.”

AN: When you asked that guy about video games….

EH: He said, “It’s exactly like a video game if it was the most boring video game in the world.” When you only get to press the fire button about once a year.

AN: To them it’s long moments of boredom, punctuated by moments of horror.

SD: In the movie, the CIA is a detached voice on a telephone, talking to the pilots. In speaking to soldiers who presumably came up through the military, how did they feel about taking orders from the CIA?

EH: Thy wouldn’t say that word, those three letters.

AN: When I asked the drone operators, “You guys flew missions for the CIA?” They would say, “We can’t talk about that.” It’s well documented that the CIA contracts out the Air Force to fly for them, because they can’t fly. These guys would just call them OGA: “other goverment agency.”

SD: I read that you think some of your best sources for the movie were Wikileaks and the Chelsea Manning leaks. What interaction if any did you have with the government in producing the movie — or is coming to D.C. your first real contact?

AN: Yeah, I’m curious how the Q&A will go tonight [after the movie screening]. The script was submitted to the Department of Defense, but I didn’t get any official military cooperation.

SD: Having made this movie, when you read a news story like that of Warren Weinstein, a U.S. hostage recently killed by a drone strike, do you see it differently?

EH: You know, I’ve played police officers, Interpol agents, CIA agents, done enough research that the news doesn’t surprise me. The public is always way behind on what info they’re getting and how they’re getting it. Normal audience members think this movie is almost science fiction, but this is a period piece, set five years ago — this is no longer cutting edge.

SD: That leads me to ask about public opinion. Polling agencies only started asking questions about drones a few years ago.

EH: But they’re polling people who have such little information. If the average person is half as ignorant as I am on these subjects, I don’t think most people have enough information to even ask the right question, much less give an opinion that matters.

AN: The thing is that it’s a very easy sale to the public. As soon as you say, “The troops are out.”

EH: And, “We’re going to get those ISIS guys!” Why wouldn’t that sound great?

AN: But then you have no idea what’s happening to the targeted, or to the targeters.

EH: We also have no idea what precedent we’re setting. We [the United States] are some of the only people who have this weapon. How are you going to feel when every first-world country is covering the globe with drones? Your opinion on whether that’s OK or not is going to change. We [Americans] have a kind of leadership role to play here as well.

SD: Your movie is one of the first films about this program. It might reach a wide audience and give people more information. But do you think the government too should be pulling the program more out of shadows — telling the public more about it?

AN: Well I’m a filmmaker….

SD: But your opinion matters.

EH: The public in general, when faced with really looking at violence, even the toughest talkers, when they see pictures of dead children and women with arms blown off, immediately start asking, “Wasn’t there another way?” That’s what ended the Vietnam War.

AN: There’s talk about making the program more transparent. But there is a video record of every single drone strike, because that’s how it’s done — with video. I’m curious why the public doesn’t see more. Why do I only see this on Wikileaks? The war with ISIS is interesting. If there wasn’t video of the beheadings, I’m not sure we would be at war. Maybe that’s why we don’t see drone strikes, because the video is so powerful.

SD: When you were doing research, did you speak to victims’ groups, people who’ve lost loved ones to drones elsewhere in the world?

AN: No, but I was really touched when I was reading about drones, about kids who grow up hating blue skies. That’s why I include it [the idea] in the film. It’s a fundamental change to humanity, that a kid would wake up and say, “It’s a beautiful day, it’s a gray sky,” which is not ideal conditions for a drone. That’s where you run the risk that the war on terror is causing terror.

SD: Coming at the end of a day of interviews, have you been surprised about questions asked here in D.C., a government town, as opposed to elsewhere?

EH: People are so informed. It’s a much more interesting dialogue. We showed it at Toronto and Venice [film festivals]. While the criticism for the movie was good, I found that most people seemed terrified to talk about it. They seemed scared of coming off as anti-nationalistic or anti-military, of being critical. And you can’t have a dialogue if you aren’t critical. But people just don’t have enough information. They aren’t scared to talk about it — they’re scared of looking stupid, of being wrong about such serious subject matter.

AN: We just hope people don’t forget about this movie by the time they get to the parking lot.

 

In the summer of 2009, John Anari, a young political activist from the Indonesian region of West Papua, created a Facebook page. He did it using an old desktop computer with a dial-up Internet connection, in a one-room apartment in Manokwari, the provincial capital situated on West Papua’s northeastern coast. The page wasn’t a personal profile. Anari, who prides himself on being tech savvy, had created one of those the year before. The page was the first of what would become several online outposts for the West Papua Liberation Organization (WPLO), a group that Anari had founded to agitate for his homeland’s independence.

 

“Most freedom groups in Papua cannot access the Internet or don’t know how to use it,” Anari, now 35, said recently. “I wanted to show the world Indonesia’s crimes.”

 

On the WPLO page, Anari posted unclassified diplomatic cables related to West Papua’s colonial past, updates from exiled independence activists, and videos of defiant rebel leaders training for armed struggle in remote highland camps. He also shared gruesome photos of West Papuans who reportedly had been beaten, shot, or tortured by the Indonesian security forces that have controlled the western half of New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island, since 1962. Because foreign journalists and NGOs are rarely granted entry to West Papua and are closely monitored when they are, the page opened a rare, real-time window into one of the bloodiest and best-kept secrets of the South Pacific.

 

As social media does, this window also functioned as a global drive-thru. Anari, who had never traveled outside Indonesia, began cultivating friendships with a motley mix of international sympathizers. To educate them about West Papua, he posted comments about international treaties and resolutions that he described as evidence of the region’s right to independence. Most people who reached out to him pledged moral support or promised to write letters to world leaders on West Papua’s behalf. But a minority of Anari’s new contacts—quixotic adventure seekers, soldiers of fortune, and crackpots claiming to represent foreign armies and intelligence agencies—volunteered a deeper commitment to the WPLO’s mission. To them, Anari emphasized his ambition to build an army from West Papua’s fractious rebel cells. Although he had no formal military training (by day he worked as an IT contractor), Anari presented himself as a man capable of leading a full-blown insurrection.

 

One of Anari’s first online friends credulous of his revolutionary potential was Tom Bleming, a longtime mercenary living in Wyoming. Unlike Anari, Bleming had been everywhere: After serving in Vietnam, the American became a free agent, aiding independence movements and coup plots around the globe. In 1979, he landed in a Panamanian military jail for attempting to blow up Manuel Noriega’s entourage with dynamite and diesel. When Anari contacted him for the first time, via a Facebook message in 2009, Bleming had just returned from a pro bono stint advising and supplying nonmilitary aid to the Karen National Liberation Army, a rebel group in eastern Myanmar. Then 63 and living on veteran disability payments, Bleming was considering retiring. But the West Papuan cause fired the boiler of his moral and military imagination; he later described it to me as his “last hurrah.” Over several years’ worth of messages and phone calls, Bleming offered to help Anari however he could, from making introductions to arms dealers to providing room and board in the United States.

 

By 2014, a room was exactly what Anari needed: He was planning a trip to New York to meet with contacts at the United Nations and with NGOs lobbying the international body. He wanted a base of operations anywhere in the United States, and Bleming offered one with benefits. “The rebel groups in West Papua do not understand modern unconventional warfare,” Anari later told me. “Tom and his friends offered to educate me.”

 

Thanks to Bleming’s financial help, Anari landed in Casper, Wyoming, on an unseasonably warm afternoon in October 2014. Bleming was waiting near the airport, leaning against his beater Oldsmobile that’s plastered with bumper stickers; one bears the silhouette of an AK-47, while another sports Che Guevara’s face. He greeted his guest with military formality: “General Anari, welcome.”

 

Bleming lives in Lusk, an old ranching town about 100 miles southeast of Casper, best known these days for its stagecoach museum, a women’s prison, and an annual pioneer-days re-enactment called the “Legend of Rawhide.” On the drive to Bleming’s house, the pair stopped for lunch at the Ghost Town Fuel Stop & Restaurant. Over bowls of chili, they agreed that the old mercenary would serve as Anari’s unofficial military advisor, as well as his “chief protocol officer,” handling the West Papuan’s security, travel, and scheduling. Bleming invited Anari to stay in Lusk as long as he liked.

 

When I visited Wyoming this January, Anari was in the middle of what became a four-month stay. Our first meeting took place around a flaming oil drum on the rolling prairie; every Sunday, on 80 acres that the former gunrunner owns just beyond Lusk’s town limits, Anari and Bleming burned the trash they’d generated the previous week. Wearing his leather jacket, sunglasses, and military beret, Anari, who also carried a compact pistol, evoked a paunchy Black Panther leader circa 1965, mysteriously transported to the emptiest county in America’s emptiest state. Only the shiny emblem on his beret betrayed his even more unlikely origin. It featured the mascot of the West Papuan rebels, the cassowary: a flightless bird that can grow to 6 feet tall and that has been known to fatally attack humans with its knife-like middle claw.

 

The men’s fireside talk of war and independence was by then familiar to many of Lusk’s townsfolk. Since Anari’s arrival, the pair had discussed martial and diplomatic strategy in the town’s bars, in meet-and-greets with Bleming’s friends—mostly fellow ex-military and mercenary types—and with local journalists. “We’re lining up people to handle everything from refineries to civil aviation, grid, radar,” Bleming proclaimed as the trash blackened.

 

For Bleming, West Papua is more than an injustice. It is a screen for projecting long-held fantasies of winning a good fight on behalf of an oppressed underdog. Outraged by what he sees as the plundering violence of Indonesian rule, Bleming spoke in Patton-esque bursts of bravado. “We’re going to win in Papua. Win faster than anyone thinks,” he insisted.

 

Anari more than tolerated his friend’s theatrical self-assurance; he gently encouraged it. And why not? In Lusk, nothing could stop Anari from role-playing a general on the cusp of certain victory. It was a tempting indulgence, given murky and tragic truths in West Papua. Indonesia’s military is more powerful by magnitudes than the likes of Anari’s planned army could ever become. The country’s strongest allies include the United States, which sees Indonesia as a key economic and military partner in Asia. And far from the commander he aspires to be, Anari is just one self-styled player among many in the disarray of activists and organizations pushing for West Papua’s freedom.

 

“Anari represents a long tradition of the fragmentation and organizational weakness of the independence movement,” said Richard Chauvel, a historian of West Papuan nationalism at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. “These activists that pop up hither and thither—and they’re ‘presidents,’ ‘ministers,’ or ‘generals’—know that West Papua hasn’t had the capacity to threaten Indonesian control at any time since 1963. The more modestly titled activists often have a stronger basis of support in West Papua.”

 

Whatever his true influence, it’s possible that Anari’s winter journey to the United States could place him in danger back home. According to Ed McWilliams, a former political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesian intelligence regularly monitors critics of the state’s iron grip on West Papua. “[Anari’s] seeming support for armed struggle would make him especially vulnerable to legal or extra-legal retaliation,” McWilliams wrote in an email.

 

But in Wyoming, Anari and Bleming told a very different story, one of an impending, triumphant return. “We can’t tell you the details because they’re classified, but the general has a devastating strategy he’s going to unleash on the Indonesian forces,” Bleming said as the fire died down that January evening. “It’ll be a historic rout. Right, John?”

 

The question caught Anari entranced with a dome of starry sky. He straightened himself and assumed a stern look. “If the world abandons us again, then, yes, we will fight,” he said. “We will kick the Indos out.”

 

“That’s right,” Bleming said. “They won’t know what hit ’em.”

 

The modern history of West Papua is one of uninterrupted foreign domination. In 1824, the British and Dutch East India companies split the island of New Guinea down the middle. Its rich soils and cloud forests provided industrializing Europe with coffee, rubber, spices, and cocoa; its natives offered the enduring tropical “savage” tropes of grass skirts, phallic gourd-sheaths, headhunting, and cannibalism found in Western ethnographies and newspapers of the day.

 

After World War II, the island’s colonial masters began preparing to transfer control to New Guinea’s native Melanesian population, who share physical features and origins with Australia’s Aborigines. On the island’s eastern half, this culminated in the establishment of Papua New Guinea, a free country, in 1975. Meanwhile, on the western half, Indonesia brought the process to a halt when it invaded in 1962. (Jakarta knew that the fledgling state was weak and that it was rich with natural resources.) The Soviet Union made a play for Indonesian allegiance by backing the country’s claim on West Papua. In true Cold War fashion, U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s administration decided to compete for President Sukarno’s loyalty, and America brokered a deal that put West Papua under de facto Indonesian control. In 1965, a military coup placed General Suharto in power. In addition to deepening military ties with Washington, Suharto signed lucrative, long-term development deals with American mining and oil companies. Some of the largest of these projects were in West Papua.

 

In anticipation of statehood, West Papua had begun building a national army. Following the Indonesian invasion, many troops went underground. They established bases under the banner of the Free Papua Movement, or OPM (the acronym for the group’s Indonesian name), including training camps and parade grounds in the mountains. They drilled with spears and arrows, colonial Dutch bolt-actions, and M16s stripped from dead Indonesian soldiers (and some purchased from living ones). Organized into “cassowary battalions,” OPM fighters carried out wildcat strikes on Indonesian troops. Suharto responded by brutally suppressing all independence activity, using assassination campaigns and village-wide revenge sweeps. In 1969, the Indonesian government organized an independence referendum, and the army forced about 1,000 hand-selected West Papuans to cast ballots at gunpoint. The locals voted unanimously against freedom.

 

By the 1970s, many independence leaders were in exile, and thousands of West Papuans had fled to neighboring Papua New Guinea. During the more than three decades that Suharto ruled Indonesia, the OPM maintained a ragtag resistance amid a permanent crackdown. But the violence was largely invisible to the world due to tight travel and media restrictions in West Papua. “Because of the long effort to draw a curtain around Papua, not much is known about the blood bath that has been underway since the early 1960s,” said McWilliams, formerly of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta.

 

Anari was born behind this curtain in 1979 and raised in Manokwari. Despite family ties to the OPM—he says his father and maternal uncle are both veterans—he was shielded as a child from the dangerous world of rebel activity. “They stopped talking politics when I walked into the room,” he recalled. “I heard only pieces. But I put the pieces together. My uncle could not hide the bullet scar on his stomach.”

 

Anari’s activism began as a teenager, when Internet cafes popped up in local cities. His research into his homeland’s past allowed him to understand the violence around which he’d grown up. “The OPM fighters in the mountains did not know the global politics of why New Guinea got decolonization, and we got recolonization,” he said. “The schools teach only official Indonesian history.”

 

When the Asian financial crisis walloped Indonesia, triggering a wave of violent unrest that forced Suharto from power in May 1998, Anari was a 19-year-old student activist studying computers at a university in Central Java province. He joined the tumult by linking up with other young West Papuans who saw opportunity in the chaos. Anari says he organized protests at the Dutch and U.S. embassies in Jakarta. “The army always attacked us,” he told me. In 1999, he helped found a Papuan student group, the Independent Network for Kejora Action. Its name was a reference to West Papua’s red, white, and blue national flag, known as Bintang Kejora (Morning Star).

 

Simultaneously, the wider independence movement stirred with new life in what became known as the Papuan Spring. On Dec. 1, 1999, two generations of West Papuan activists and fighters, many fresh back from exile, gathered in Jayapura, a provincial capital, to raise the Morning Star in an event that had all the trappings of a state ceremony. OPM soldiers in tribal headdresses and ragged fatigues stood in formation next to black-uniformed members of a new 5,000-member, student-based militia called Satgas Papua (Papuan Task Force). By 2001, pro-independence groups had unified under the leadership of the new Papuan Presidium Council.

 

But even without Suharto in power, the army kept tight control of West Papua, and raisings of the Morning Star often resulted in bloodshed. (In July 1998, in response to a protest involving the flag, Indonesian troops killed scores of West Papuans and dumped their bodies into the sea.) In 2001, Jakarta unleashed units from Kopassus, the country’s special forces command, in a campaign of targeted assassinations and arrests. The clampdown was in full swing by November of that year, when Papuan Presidium Council Chairman Theys Eluay attended a dinner at Kopassus headquarters. Days later, his decapitated corpse was found with its heart carved out. The chief of the Indonesian army publicly hailed the soldiers who committed the murder as “heroes.”

 

“Eluay’s assassination effectively ended the Papuan Spring,” said Chauvel, the historian at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. “The detention of his colleagues further dispersed the reasonably cohesive independence movement.”

 

In the vacuum that emerged, rebels continued to carry out occasional, small-scale attacks on Indonesian forces, while activists fractured into dozens of pro-
independence organizations and coalitions. In July 2002, according to Anari, he founded a new group, more radical and militant than his first one, that sought to unite student activists: the Association of West Papua Indigenous Students and Youth. Six years later, he expanded it to include representatives from armed groups and renamed it the WPLO. Anari had big ambitions for his organization. Abroad, he would use it to build awareness of and international solidarity with West Papua. At home, he would unify rebel factions into a national liberation army. Today, according to its organizers, the WPLO has about 500 members in leadership roles and many thousands in its broader membership. (Its Facebook group had just over 1,600 members as of press time.)

 

But it is no easy task to understand the network of West Papua’s pro-independence groups. The region, which Indonesia split into two legal provinces in 2003 in an effort to dampen rebellious sentiment, contains numerous tribes and dialects. There are also constantly shifting alliances among liberation forces. “The key problem with movement mapping is that membership is fluid,” Nick Chesterfield of West Papua Media, an online news source, noted in an email. “We have been trying to map them accurately for years, but every time we are almost there, it changes.”

 

All this complicates attempts to differentiate influential leaders from poseurs. Anari is no exception to this rule.

 

Anari and Bleming had a regular routine at the old mercenary’s modest, single-story home, which smells of stale cigarettes and whose closets are stuffed with AK-47s, Uzis, and M16s. (A storage room abutting the kitchen is lined with metal ammo boxes stacked four high, the way a retired baker might keep sugar stock.) Anari woke daily around 4 p.m., as Wyoming’s winter light faded and dawn broke over West Papua. He ambled from his sparse guest room to a dining table crowded with maps, printouts, and back issues of magazines such as Working Ranch, Cowboys & Indians, and Guns & Ammo. A Morning Star blocked a nearby window.

 

Bleming served coffee, toast, peanut butter, and bananas. After breakfast, Anari booted up his old Toshiba laptop and spent hours writing and Skyping with activists in the diaspora, as well as comrades in West Papua. His most frequent contact was Ben Kaisiepo, the leader of Kobe Oser (“United”), a Netherlands-based exile group. Anari calls Kaisiepo “Father.”

 

“The general talks to Kaisiepo for hours,” Bleming said one day. “It’s a job just keeping him stocked with Skype gift cards. Man, does he go through those things like butter.” (I reached out to Kaisiepo for this article, but he declined to comment unless I transferred a minimum of 1,000 euros to Kobe Oser’s Dutch bank account. In an email, he wrote that the money would be used for “our important U.N.-lobby work.”)

 

When Anari ventured out to meet with reporters or Bleming’s friends, some of whom opened their checkbooks in support, he wore his fatigues and beret and presented himself as a military chief. “I feel that we will have to resort to armed struggle to win our freedom,” he told the Lusk Herald. Most locals seemed bemused, if not charmed. A woman at the desk of Lusk’s visitors office said, “He seems like a very sweet man, and it’s just awful what’s happening to his people over there.” Others took Anari’s presence less kindly. A red-faced retiree at the Silver Dollar Bar told me the West Papuan had no business in Lusk. “The whole thing is some kind of—frankly, it’s just communist horseshit,” he sputtered.

 

At Bleming’s house one evening, Anari elaborated on his military efforts. The army he is building will eventually have 10,000 rebels, managed through a complex hierarchy down to the village level. Its tactics will combine ancient West Papuan fighting techniques, such as bamboo-arrow archery assaults, with modern guerrilla warfare. “I am preparing them to attack,” he told me bluntly.

 

Ten thousand men, however, is a far cry from any credible estimate of current rebel strength. Leaked Indonesian intelligence reports from the 2000s put the number of active fighters at around 1,000, most still armed with stone-tipped spears, bamboo arrows, and antiquated rifles. “Papua’s rebel forces are tiny,” Chauvel said, “maybe a couple thousand.”

 

Benny Wenda, a prominent, Oxford-based West Papuan exile, similarly downplayed Anari’s talk of a military solution. Wenda’s Free West Papua Campaign advocates an independence referendum to end the crisis in his homeland. He is also the spokesman of the recently formed United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a coordinating body for several of the larger pro-independence groups. Anari’s organization is not one of them. “The WPLO is just an affiliation group, a small group,” Wenda told me. He noted, “All leaders [of independence factions] have a full mandate to advance the freedom cause. We are very weak at the moment, and it is important that we speak in one voice to demand the right of self-determination, the same as any nation.” In a separate conversation, though, Wenda seemed to reserve the final voice of authority for himself. “If Anari tells you anything,” he said, “call me and I will clarify.”

 

“The situation of ‘who speaks for whom’ has been highly fraught for years,” wrote Chesterfield of West Papua Media. “[M]any people have claimed leadership of the movement, and many groups claim supremacy, such as Anari’s. We call it the ‘I’m the President of the World!’ complex.”

 

In Lusk, there was little talk of competition among West Papua’s pro-independence forces. Rather, Bleming and Anari welcomed company who shared the conviction that a WPLO-led revolution in West Papua is a foregone conclusion. One evening, a wiry man with a bushy gray beard and camo cap pulled low came to the house. His name was R.D. Saathoff. A former Special Forces training officer, he was visiting from his underground bunker in Wyoming’s Red Desert, where he lives six miles from the nearest neighbor. “My specialty is tactical assault,” he said, his words slurred by the absence of several front teeth lost during what he called a “rough weekend” long ago in the jungles of southern Colombia.

 

Bleming served coffee as his friend lectured Anari. “Guerrilla groups often forget key steps and concepts, ya’ see,” Saathoff said. “You have to spend time on target analysis; you don’t want to destroy the house you’re going to have to live in. You don’t blow up the oil tanker—you take out the driver, ya’ see. You don’t take out the bridge—you blow a hole in front of it, so the local people can still use it and you don’t have to rebuild it.”

 

Later, Bleming and Saathoff debated the timetable for Anari’s victory. “I’ll be there for the official surrender this summer,” Bleming said. Anari, in turn, reasserted his commitment to struggle. “Our tactics will surprise the Indonesians,” he said. “We are fierce people.”

 

Neither ferocity nor dining-table strategy sessions, however, can diminish the long odds faced by advocates for West Papua’s freedom. Unlike East Timor and Aceh, two provinces that struggled, to some success, against Indonesian control—the former gained independence, the latter partial autonomy—West Papua has enormous economic value. It is larger than Japan and holds a third of Indonesia’s forest area, including some of Asia’s deepest remaining tracts of virgin rain forest. In the south, a mine owned by the U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan controls some of the Earth’s largest deposits of gold and copper. The region’s waters contain gigantic offshore stores of natural gas. According to McWilliams, “Papua is an important source of income for the military, providing a large portion of its budget…. They’d be very reluctant to let it slip away.”

 

Geopolitics are no more favorable to West Papua’s independence prospects. In 2010, the United States and Indonesia signed a “comprehensive partnership” agreement that ended restrictions on weapons sales and included the transfer of F-16s and Maverick missiles. The deal reflected an alignment of strategic interests over Indonesian power projection in the Pacific. “Relations with Indonesia are increasingly regarded as an important component of the U.S. ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalance’ to Asia,” said Lynn Kyuk, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Brookings Institution. “Indonesia has a strong tradition of nonalignment, but it shares growing concerns about China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea.”

 

In 2013, a coalition of nearly 100 international NGOs urged Washington to block Indonesia’s pending purchase of eight Apache helicopters. The signees had history on their side when they warned, “Providing these helicopters would pose a direct threat to Papuan civilians.” Nonetheless, the deal went through without a hitch.

 

Against this bleak picture, some activists are focused on raising West Papua’s profile as a human rights emergency in hopes of at least mitigating bloodshed. The past several years have seen ongoing political arrests and state violence against indigenous people, intensifying a half-century pattern estimated to have caused 500,000 deaths. Papuans Behind Bars, a civil society monitoring collective in London, estimates that Indonesian police made 369 political arrests in West Papua in 2014, most at peaceful demonstrations. The group recorded 212 cases of reported torture and ill treatment; nearly a third involved members of the West Papua National Committee, a pro-independence group. (Martinus Yohame, a leader of one of the organization’s branches, was abducted and murdered in 2014.)

 

Wenda, of the ULMWP, is on the international front lines of the human rights approach. He has persuaded almost 100 politicians in a dozen countries to join an international parliamentary campaign for West Papuan independence. His personal story is an asset: As a child, Wenda survived numerous Indonesian air raids and witnessed state soldiers kill his aunts and infant cousins. He was arrested during the crackdown on the Papuan Spring, escaped prison, and in 2002 found asylum in Britain. Today, he shares a lawyer with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In early February, Wenda organized the ULMWP’s application for West Papua to join the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), an organization based in Vanuatu that promotes the shared interests of small, ethnically bound nations in the South Pacific. Wenda hopes MSG membership would give West Papua an institutional foothold that might allow it to join larger cooperative groups. “We must convince the world we’re united to end Indonesian colonization,” Wenda told me. “For decades, Indonesia has treated us as subhumans.”

 

It may not sound like much, but from solidarity saplings, trees do grow. Jakarta remembers well the explosion of global support for East Timor in the 1990s, which hastened independence. In February, around the same time the MSG application was filed, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it is establishing a task force to shape global opinion of the situation in West Papua. “We have to engage … all instruments involved in the spread of information, including politicians, media, and groups affiliated with separatist organizations,” an Indonesian official told the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

 

Despite his talk of military assaults, Anari is also enamored with diplomacy, and he shifts his tone based on his audience. In 2010, he began communicating with U.N. offices focused on indigenous issues and self-rule. He sent them human rights reports written in broken English, typed on WPLO letterhead featuring elaborate fonts, including one that dripped like the title on a 1950s horror movie poster. The reports began and ended with a request to include West Papua on the agenda of a U.N. General Assembly meeting.

 

A series of events encouraged his efforts. In 2011, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a reporter that he supported the idea of West Papua being discussed by the U.N. Special Committee on Decolonization, which was created in 1961 to oversee and assist the post-World War II wave of independence movements. In 2012, a U.N. team studying Pacific decolonization also recommended that West Papua be included on the committee’s agenda. (No official decision on the recommendation has been made.)

 

Anari was eager to get to New York. Spurring him on was a new coalition of indigenous movements called the Decolonization Alliance, which in the spring of 2014 opened a small office on the eighth floor of a building at the U.N. Plaza, with support from the World Council of Churches. Ringing the walls are the desks of five members, situated under the flags of each: the Hawaiian Kingdom, the Republic of the South Moluccas, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Alaskan Eskimos, and West Papua.

 

Anari had to see with his own eyes this glorious site—a Morning Star hanging a long stone’s throw from the famous First Avenue display of the world’s sovereign flags. (Although the alliance has no formal standing at the United Nations, Anari calls it “the representative office of the Transitional Government of West Papua.”) So in late October 2014, he shed the pseudo-military pomp and circumstance he’d adopted in Lusk and flew to New York. During a three-week trip, he donned civilian clothes, including a white polo shirt with a U.N. logo that he wore with pride. He stayed at a no-frills midtown hotel with funds Bleming had raised.

 

When Anari arrived and sat at West Papua’s desk, he wept. “I felt something must happen now,” he said. “To be at the U.N. was a 52-year struggle for us.”

 

During his visit, Anari was able to speak to Alfred de Zayas, the U.N. independent expert on the right of self-determination. In an email, de Zayas’s spokesperson described the details of the conversation as “not information the Independent Expert would be in a position to share with you.” (In an interview with the online journal Current Concerns, published in December 2014, de Zayas described West Papua as an example of why putting “the right to self-determination into practice” is important; the “fundamental norm of international law constitutes a preventive strategy to avoid armed conflicts.”)

 

In arguably the perfect encapsulation of fact and fiction, of his earnest but limited activism and his superficially militant aesthetic, Anari produced a short documentary about his New York trip in order to share its triumphs with people back home. The film begins with a staged, slow-motion explosion behind a Morning Star, setting the tone of a revolutionary recruitment video. Then it segues lovingly into shots of the West Papuan coast and banal details of the Decolonization Alliance’s office, from a shared kitchen to a bathroom down the hall. Anari is seen on screen happily chatting with de Zayas, and at one point he pans the camera across the General Assembly building and the East River behind it, sparkling in the sun.

 

After layering in a soundtrack, including West Papuan tribal music, Anari posted the video on Facebook and YouTube. As of this writing, it had more than 1,000 YouTube views.

 

Following his New York excursion, Anari returned to his high-plains idyll in Wyoming. Bleming resumed cooking his meals, more guests cycled through to talk shop about insurgencies, and Anari spent time on his Toshiba designing special forces logos for his future liberation army.

 

On my last night in Lusk, I stopped by Bleming’s around midnight to say goodbye. He was sitting in the dark with a cigar, watching a videotape of Fidel, a B-grade Showtime biopic about young Castro. “I watch this movie a lot for inspiration,” Bleming said. “I started off years ago on the far right, but I’ve seen enough poverty around the world to believe people run over by greed should be given their just place in the sun. Fidel was a patriot, just like John over there.” (According to the U.N. Development Programme, the poverty rate in Anari’s homeland is more than double Indonesia’s national average of roughly 11 percent.)

 

Anari, who had been on yet another Skype call with Kaisiepo of Kobe Oser, eventually joined us in front of the television. “I was talking with Father,” he said. “Father will be interim president until we hold elections.”

 

Bleming interjected, “I’m signed on to handle palace security. But you guys better get to work; I’m not going to live to a thousand. I’m not Methuselah.”

 

As I prepared to leave, Bleming handed me copies of his self-published memoirs, Panama: Echoes From a Revolution and War in Karen Country. On the title page of the latter he had written, “I certainly enjoyed meeting with you in Wyoming. One day you and I shall meet again, in a free and independent West Papua.”

 

Anari too had prepared a parting gift: a stack of OPM combat-seal stickers, on which two crossed machetes frame a cassowary above the Latin slogan “Persevero.” He also offered me a job in the transitional government, a proposition he sweetened by throwing in a private beach. “You can help us explain West Papua’s positions to the world and live in a house on the water,” he said. “The Raja Ampat islands”—located off the region’s northern coast—“are very beautiful.”

 

To illustrate the point, Anari grabbed his laptop and opened a folder of photos. In stark contrast to the bloody pictures on the WPLO’s Facebook page, these looked like touched-up images from a travel brochure: palm-lined cays outlined by white sand and surrounded by emerald sea.

 

A month later, I received a Facebook message from Anari saying that he had not yet returned to West Papua. The promised revolution, it seemed, would have to wait. After leaving Wyoming in March, Anari had traveled to Los Angeles to visit distant relatives who emigrated from West Papua to escape persecution in the 1970s. He told me he was making plans to return to New York and address an April session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. “I am going to push [the U.N.] about their responsibility for not overseeing independence for West Papua,” he told me over the phone. “I will tell them, ‘If you do not take seriously your responsibility, then the responsibility will be left on our shoulders, to foment action and to fight.’”

 

“One way or the other,” he concluded, “we will get the world’s attention.”

On May 11, nine ships from the Russian Navy and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) kicked off 10 days of combined exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, for their first joint naval war games in European waters. What does this nautical confab, dubbed “Joint Sea 2015,” entail? “Maritime defense, maritime replenishment, escort actions, joint operations to safeguard navigation security as well as real weapon firing drill,” according to Sr. Col. Geng Yansheng, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry. The aim of the exercises is to “further deepen friendly and practical interaction between the two countries,” maintained the Russian Defense Ministry. Moscow added that the drills “are not aimed against any third country.”

Despite the soothing words, some Western commentators opined that Europe’s middle sea constitutes an “unlikely and provocative venue” for this venture. Yes, Moscow and Beijing chose the venue precisely to be provocative — the exercise is a throwback to Soviet maneuvers in the Mediterranean 40 years ago. It was predictable that an allied fleet would eventually put in an appearance off NATO’s southern, nautical flank.

Does a Sino-Russian naval presence off NATO seaboards sound frightening to you? It shouldn’t — there’s nothing new nor especially worrisome here. It represents normalcy in a world of geostrategic competition — the kind of world that’s making a comeback following a quarter-century of seaborne U.S. hegemony. The United States wants to preserve its primacy, along with the liberal maritime order over which it has presided since the end of World War II. Challengers such as China and Russia want to amend that system while carving out their own places in the sun of great naval power. Irreconcilable differences over purposes and power beget open-ended strategic competition.

Hence deployments like Joint Sea 2015. Yes, exercises have functional uses like those outlined by Geng. But navies can also shape global and national opinion by constructing impressive warships, aircraft, and armaments. Showmanship plays a part when commanders display gee-whiz hardware to important audiences. Mariners impress by showing up in far-flung regions in sizable numbers, and by handling their ships and planes with skill and panache. And a seafaring state creates an even bigger sensation if its fleet deploys in concert with allies, backing their common cause with steel. Competitors, like China and the United States, can one-up one another through peacetime maneuvers — bucking up morale among allies and friends, helping court would-be partners, and disheartening rival alliances.

That’s the essence of great-power naval diplomacy, and it can pay off handsomely. The three-ship PLAN contingent — guided-missile frigates Linyi and Weifang, accompanied by fleet oiler Weishanhu — are taking a break from counterpiracy duty in the Gulf of Aden for Joint Sea 2015. The PLAN flotilla wended its way from the western Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, through the Eastern Mediterranean, and into the Black Sea. It tarried at the Russian seaport of Novorossiysk for Victory Day commemorations before exiting back into the Mediterranean in company with Russian Black Sea Fleet ships.

The interoperability challenge

Why go to the time, expense, and bother of assembling a fleet in European waters — so far from East Asia, the natural theater for Sino-Russian escapades? Let’s start with the obvious motive, and the official one. Russia and China are doubtless sincere about harvesting the dividends that come from steaming around together and practicing routine operations. Both navies need to learn, and they can learn from each other. China is constructing its first world-class navy since the 15th century. Russia is recovering from the dreary post-Cold War years when ships rusted at their moorings and sailors went unpaid. Both countries’ sea services are now trying to put things right following protracted intervals of decay — a lapse of centuries in China’s case, decades in Russia’s. So where does this newfound strength come from? Materiel — reliable, technologically sophisticated hardware and weaponry — and the proficiency of its users. Maneuvers like Joint Sea 2015 help the navies improve along both the material and human axes.

In material terms, the Russian and Chinese navies need to bolster their equipment “interoperability” — their capacity to back up the Sino-Russian partnership’s policies efficiently and effectively. Call it a form of multinational gunboat diplomacy. Armed services order their kit from defense manufacturers. Such firms may — or, more likely, may not — build their products to a common standard. Their wares are far from interchangeable. Dissimilar hardware makes it hard to work together, even for armed forces flying the same national flag. To take a workaday example: think about trying to use tools designed for English and metric measurements together.

Such widgets just don’t fit — or at least not without workarounds. It’s just not easy to fight together when two air forces use different airframes, communicate or exchange data on different frequencies, or sport different weaponry with unlike characteristics. Procuring hardware from multiple suppliers in multiple countries exacerbates the interoperability challenge.

Take India, for example. Asia’s other rising military power imports ships, aircraft, and weapons from firms in Russia, France, and the United States while also manufacturing its own naval armaments. At present, the Indian Navy operates British- and Soviet-built aircraft carriers, while in the future it will operate a Soviet-built aircraft carrier alongside indigenously built flattops. Diesel submarines of French, German, Russian, and Indian design; a nuclear-powered attack sub leased from Russia; an Indian-built nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine; and a Russian-built nuclear-powered cruise-missile sub will constitute the undersea fleet. U.S.-built maritime patrol aircraft will fly for the same naval air force as MiG fighters imported from Russia. You get the point: this is a virtual Tower of Babel of armed forces. Getting such disparate platforms to work together has proved troublesome for India, to say the least.

Interoperability, then, is the process of devising procedures or material fixes to make incompatible machinery compatible. Yes, the PLAN and Russian Navy have a fair amount of equipment in common: China imported Soviet-built weaponry to help kick start its naval renaissance in the 1990s. But at the same time, Chinese industry started building ships, planes, and armaments with zest — even as Russia fields newfangled hardware of its own. Consequently, the navies are drifting apart in compatibility terms. Interoperability is on the decline. Exercises help restore it. (Moscow is reportedly mulling a purchase of Chinese frigates like the Linyi and Weifang; reciprocal arms sales help narrow the gap as well.)

Eating soup together

Then there’s the human factor. Ameliorating equipment interoperability challenges is well and good, but the finest implement is no better than its user. Napoleon once quipped that soldiers have to eat soup together for a long time before they can fight as a unit. Same goes for seamen. Armed forces are teams: Their members have to learn common tactics, techniques, and procedures. And they have to practice tactics and routine operations, over and over again. Repetition is the soul of combat effectiveness.

Crewmen also need get to know one another, acquainting themselves with their shipmates’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles. Strangers seldom collaborate smoothly in the hothouse environment of combat. That’s doubly true in alliances, where linguistic barriers, disparate histories and cultures, and countless other impediments work against military efficiency. Seafarers learn by doing: if you want to work well together, then work together early and often. Eat soup together — and refine seamanship, tactical acumen, and élan in the bargain.

That’s the tactical and strategic logic behind Joint Sea 2015 — if we take Moscow’s and Beijing’s words at face value. But are there ulterior motives impelling this Mediterranean adventure?

Of course. For one, it’s a reply to the U.S. pivot to Asia. As Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained in November when announcing a slate of Sino-Russian undertakings, including Joint Sea 2015, the two partners are worried about “attempts to strengthen [U.S.] military and political clout” in the Asia-Pacific.

That’s a worrisome trend from their standpoint. The U.S. Navy has mounted a standing presence in China’s and Russia’s near seas since World War II, manifest in the Japan-based Seventh Fleet. It’s augmenting that presence as it rebalances to the Far East. By staging a show of force in the Mediterranean, to NATO’s immediate south, Moscow and Beijing proclaim, sotto voce, that what’s good for the U.S. Navy is good for the Russian Navy and PLAN.

Learning from the best

But there’s more to the Mediterranean expedition than jabbing NATO in the eye. Contesting control of Eurasian waters is sound strategy backed up by history. During World War II, Yale professor Nicholas Spykman ascribed the age of British maritime supremacy to the Royal Navy’s control of the “girdle of marginal seas” ringing Eurasia’s coastlines. He called the South China Sea — the site of territorial disputes among China and several other nations — the “Asiatic Mediterranean.” Seagoing forces could flit around the periphery quickly and economically relative to land transport — radiating power and influence into the Eurasian rimlands from the sea. Mobility and seaborne firepower let Britannia rule. By cruising the Mediterranean Sea, the Russian and Chinese fleets project power into European waters – much as the Royal Navy projected power into Asian waters via the South China Sea and other littoral expanses. The logic works both ways.

To Chinese and Russian eyes, surrendering control of offshore waters to the U.S. Navy looks like surrendering control to the Royal Navy and fellow imperial powers a century ago. Historical memory is especially acute for China, which lost control of its seaboard and internal waterways to waterborne conquerors. But Russia endured traumas of its own: It watched the Imperial Japanese Navy demolish the Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. China and Russia hope to banish such memories while turning Spykman’s logic of nautical supremacy to their advantage. If successful, they’ll stiff-arm the United States in Asia while projecting power into NATO waters.

Vying for control of these seas puts important Eurasian audiences — prospective allies, prospective foes, fence-sitters — on notice that China and Russia are sea powers to be reckoned with. And on a global level, Joint Sea 2015 could be a forerunner to bigger things. In 1970, for example, the Soviet Navy executed a deployment titled Okean (ocean), which stunned Western navies through its geographical scale and the sheer number of assets deployed. Indeed, some 200 Soviet warships and hundreds of aircraft took to the Baltic Sea, Norwegian Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Western Pacific.

It was an armada, mounting a presence across an enormous swathe of the world’s oceans and seas. Soviet ships weren’t just plentiful in numbers but youthful, generally under 20-years-old. Okean made it plain that the Soviet Navy was outbuilding its Western rivals at a time when the United States was in a funk over the Vietnam War and the U.S. Navy was under strain. The exercise made the statement that the Soviet Navy was a serious contender for mastery of the seas. It could defend Warsaw Pact shores while competing against the U.S. Navy on the vasty main.

However gratifying for Moscow, though, such capers set the law of unintended consequences in motion. By the 1980s, the Soviet naval rise jolted the United States into a naval buildup of its own — a buildup that empowered the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to reassert their supremacy in Eurasian waters while setting the stage for the United States’ post-Cold War preeminence. In short, Moscow’s propaganda coup backfired badly: it goaded Washington into action, prompting the Carter and Reagan administrations to fashion a new, offensive-minded maritime strategy prosecuted by a nearly 600-ship navy. That’s what strategists call self-defeating behavior. So be careful what you wish for, Russia and China.

Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Thursday we brought you the story of actor Johnny Depp’s two Yorkshire terriers, which Australian authorities believed he had brought into the country illegally and threatened to euthanize if they were not sent back to the United States. The affair has now reached a happy ending, and the dogs, Pistol and Boo, are on their way back to the United States.

Australian Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce has been vocal in his efforts to enforce his country’s biosecurity laws against the superstar and celebrated the victory on Twitter:

Dogs gone.

— Barnaby Joyce (@Barnaby_Joyce) May 15, 2015

“Two dogs that were brought into Australia without meeting our import requirements have now been exported back to their country of origin. A Department of Agriculture officer has escorted the two dogs from the property in Queensland, where they had been held under quarantine order, to the airport for their flight home,” Joyce said in a statement. “All costs associated with returning the dogs were met by the owners.”

Australia has strict requirement on the importation of animals in order to prevent the spread of disease and invasive species. While the threats to euthanize Pistol and Boo might seem extreme, Australia has in recent years seen several invasive species arrive on its shores. The Department of Agriculture’s hardline response, in light of such incidents, doesn’t seem so extreme.

The international reaction to the incident however has included anything but a serious contemplation of the bio-risks inherent to an interconnected world and has boiled down to the hashtag #WarOnTerriers:

As you were, Australia. The #WarOnTerriers is over. Depp's dogs have finally left Australia http://t.co/dYjA3JVkko pic.twitter.com/fqiV97USTE

— Greg Barila (@GregBarila) May 15, 2015

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Marco Rubio, the Republican presidential hopeful from Florida, opened his remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) earlier this week by quoting from the last speech President John F. Kennedy gave before his assassination. Kennedy had insisted that by making America stronger he had advanced the cause of world peace. By contrast, Rubio observed, President Barack Obama had entered office believing that “America was too hard on our adversaries,” and that the world would benefit if “America took a step back.”

It was a deft bit of oratory. Kennedy, after all, was, like the 43-year-old Rubio, young, brash, optimistic — and a member of the U.S. Senate. Citing a Democrat allowed Rubio to imply to CFR, a nonpartisan body whose centrist internationalism constitutes a heresy for Republican ideologues, that he represents an older, bipartisan tradition. Republican presidential candidates don’t go to CFR to win votes, after all, but to acquire a sheen of elite legitimacy. The boyish Rubio knows he needs that.

If that was the goal, Rubio succeeded. Though the crowd listened to his prepared remarks in dead silence, the consensus afterwards was that he had addressed a wide range of subjects with a high degree of fluency, and had said nothing he would later need to retract. Rubio has made himself CFR’s favorite Republican candidate — though I doubt he’ll note that on the stump in South Carolina.

I am not convinced, however, that John F. Kennedy — the Kennedy who famously promised in his inaugural address to “pay any price, bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty” — is the right metaphor for our time.

Kennedy was wrong even for his own time. In his blithe self-confidence, Kennedy utterly miscalculated the effect that his military build-up and zest for geopolitical competition would produce on the Soviet Union, and thus brought us to the verge of World War III. Only thanks to the wisdom and restraint of a generation “tempered by war,” as he also put it, did Kennedy see his way past his own triumphal pieties to a less cocky and combative stance. Those historians who argue that Kennedy would not, in fact, have enmeshed the United States in a land war in Vietnam, assume that by the time of his death JFK had assimilated hard lessons about the limits of U.S. power.

I am tempted to quote Lloyd Bentsen: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Our presidential candidates are no longer tempered by war; if only for this reason, we should wish them to err on the side of peace. Both in his speech and in the subsequent Q&A with Charlie Rose, Rubio argued for a more interventionist stance everywhere. He favors embedding Special Forces in Yemen to help with the Saudi-directed air war there, providing weaponry to the government in Ukraine, stepping up aid to the rebels in Syria, and expanding airstrikes over Iraq. He would re-impose sanctions on Cuba, and end discussions of a two-state solution in Israel. Rubio hasn’t yet discovered a “missile gap” with Russia, but he does argue that the United States is unilaterally disarming in the face of growing threat.

Strictly as a matter of political calculus, I don’t see how “rollback,” to use the old Cold War phrase, holds wide appeal. It’s Republican audiences, not Democratic ones, who are taxing Jeb Bush with his brother’s ill-fated decision to intervene in Iraq. Rubio has a perfectly sound answer to this critique — I wouldn’t have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now, and President Bush has said that wouldn’t have either — but the persistence of the issue reflects ongoing skepticism about military adventures abroad. Where is the groundswell, outside the Weekly Standard, for deeper American military engagement in the Middle East?

I very much doubt that the growing anxiety over America’s loss of influence in the world, and the rise of competitors like China and Iran, constitutes the sort of crisis that makes foreign affairs a first-order electoral issue. But even if it does, I suspect that the sweet spot will lie elsewhere. An effective anti-Obama agenda, even if it’s substantively wrong, would stress traditional statecraft, managerial competence, sober oratory — Bush I rather than Bush II. be a good moment for Colin Powell, but he’s not running. It’s not such a bad moment for Hillary Clinton, who is.

Whatever its political merits, Rubio’s chesty worldview would make the world less safe rather than more. He would have the United States throw in its lot with Saudi Arabia in its growing proxy war with Iran by putting boots on the ground in Yemen. President Obama is trying to use the current Camp David summit to assure Gulf States that the U.S. fully recognizes the threat of Iranian adventurism while at the same time restraining the headlong rush to confrontation. That requires a degree of balance and prudence to which our budding Kennedy seems immune. Rubio would encourage Ukraine to join NATO, though he argued that the American failure to bolster Ukrainian military capability over the last few years has left it currently unsuitable for membership. That kind of brinksmanship would only provoke reciprocal aggression from President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The actual, as opposed to cartoon-version, John F. Kennedy, made just that mistake.

Rubio is quite prepared to say perfectly inane things for perceived political advantage — most notably, his proposal to require Iranian recognition of Israel as a condition for Senate approval of a nuclear deal. (He did not repeat that formulation before the CFR.) Nevertheless, it’s obvious that he thinks seriously about policy issues, foreign as well as domestic. He asserted that early intervention on behalf of the Syrian rebels might have stemmed the rise of the Islamic State there, which is at the very least an arguable proposition. Intriguingly, he mocked Obama’s preference for “nation-building at home,” implying that he sees at least some merit to nation-building abroad — a neoconservative shibboleth that few of Rubio’s rivals would endorse. He advocated “transparent and effective” foreign assistance, whatever that means.

Rubio has positioned himself to be the champion of the “pay any price, bear any burden” wing of the GOP. It will be highly entertaining to watch him spar with Rand Paul, the isolationist standard-bearer, or with halfwits like Rick Perry. And nothing will beat watching him torture Jeb Bush, his former mentor, over the failures of brother George. Should Jeb falter, Rubio would have a good shot at the Republican nomination. Given his youth and his “story” — child of impoverished Cuban immigrants — he might match up quite well against Clinton.

Rubio is adroit enough that he could tone down his bellicosity in order to mount an effective attack against Obama’s foreign policy, as embodied in Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. That, too, would be fun to watch. Nevertheless, the world of 2016, with its emerging powers and disintegrating international order, its sub-state actors and transnational problems, does not need John Kennedy circa 1960. That would not be fun to watch.

 Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Wesley Clark, once a four star officer, next a failed presidential candidate, and then involved in some kind of reality TV show, has become “a penny stock general,” says Bloomberg News. In an impressive story, Zachary Mider and Zeke Faux write that:

“Since he ran for president in 2004, Clark has joined the boards of at least 18 public companies, 10 of them penny-stock outfits, whose shares trade in the ‘over the counter’ markets, a corner of Wall Street where fraud and manipulation are common.”

All but one of the 10 lost value during Clark’s tenure. Three went bankrupt shortly after he left their boards, and the chief executive officer of one pleaded guilty to fraud.”

In the department of picking Army generals: I have never met the new Army chief of staff, Mark Milley, that I can recall. But I am hearing some very bad vibes about him, real unhappiness with this selection. People wonder how it happened that of all the available candidates, it was Milley, kind of a non-entity, was tapped.

In other officer news, the commander of the Air Force “boneyard” in Arizona got fired.

John Foster/DefenseLink Multimedia/Flickr

President Barack Obama promised Thursday to stand by Gulf allies against any “external attack,” capping the end of a one-day summit at Camp David that ended without a formal defense pact.

“The United States is prepared to work jointly with [Gulf Cooperation Council] member states to deter and confront an external threat to any GCC state’s territorial integrity,” he said at a press conference.

The word “external,” repeated six times in the joint statement released by the White House, is widely understood to allude to Iran, which has expanded its influence in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq to the alarm of the six GCC countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman.

But the word is also significant in that it unburdens the White House from committing itself to lending military assistance to Gulf allies in the event of an internal uprising in the authoritarian countries — an issue the White Houses agonized over during the Arab Spring protests of 2010 that upended governments in Egypt, Tunisia, and beyond.

The issue, a sensitive one given that the Gulf states are monarchies with widely varying degrees of freedom and inclusiveness, resurfaced controversially last month, when the president gave an interview to the New York Times  highlighting the risk of internal uprisings by disenfranchised citizens.

“I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading,” Obama told columnist Thomas Friedman. “It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. … That’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”

That remark reverberated across the Arab world and angered a number of Gulf allies who consider such public criticisms meddling in the internal affairs of their countries.

When asked about the comment during an Atlantic Council event last week, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the U.S. suggested the remark was not suitable for public consumption.  “It’s a conversation we welcome in private,” said Yousef Al Otaiba.

He emphasized that the UAE had assisted the U.S. in six military conflicts, including in the current war against Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria.

“A country that doesn’t share your values fought with you six times,” he said. “We still don’t share your democratic values, but we are great partners.”

In the joint statement released at the end of the summit, the nations also committed to working more closely on missile defense, military exercises and training, counterterrorism and maritime security.

The White House would not commit to the formal defense pact that some Gulf nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had wanted.

The U.S. hopes to win the GCC’s diplomatic backing for an Iran nuclear deal currently being negotiated with Tehran and five other world powers. Just prior to the summit, the monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, announced his plans to skip the high-level meeting, a move widely perceived as a snub to Obama.

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