Kraft Ch 12: Foreign Policy and Homeland Security

introduction

• Department of Homeland Security (DHS). created through an executive agency reorganization in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, need to be thoroughly examined to make sure they are as capable as they can be of carrying out U.S. policy and protecting the nation from security threats.

• Terrorism. International terrorism, often defined as the unconventional use of violence for political 647 gain.

Background and Policy Evolution

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• Foreign policy. collection of government actions that affect or attempt to affect U.S. national security, as well as the economic and political goals associated with it. Foreign policy can deal with matters as diverse as international trade, economic assistance to poor nations, immigration to the United States, building of political alliances with other nations, action on human rights abuses around the world, global environmental and energy issues such as climate change, and strategic military actions abroad.A

• Involves diverse policy actors.the president, the secretary of state, the president’s national security adviser, the National Security Council, and key congressional committees.

• Most commonly used policy tools. diplomacy (high-level communication among policymakers), economic relations (such as imposing trade restraints or providing economic assistance), and threats of military intervention.

• Foreign policymaking, distinctive qualities. secrecy or a lack of transparency, more of a reliance on policy professionals (for example, in the State Department and in intelligence and defense agencies), considerably less opportunity for public input, greater involvement by foreign policy actors, and dominance by the president over Congress.

Background and Policy Evolution

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• Defense policy. The goals set (usually by civilian policymakers in the White House and Congress) and the actions taken by government officials directed at the conduct of military affairs.

• National Security Council (NSC), chaired by the president, and the regular attendees (both statutory and nonstatutory) include the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of the Treasury, secretary of defense, and assistant to the president for national security affairs (also called the president’s national security adviser).

• Chief purpose of foreign policy. promotion of national security through a diversified economic, political, and military strategy.

Background and Policy Evolution

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The Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Cold War

• Marshall Plan. Named after Secretary of State George Marshall, was authorized by the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 to help rebuild Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces, which included the United States and the Soviet Union.

• Realpolitik.a hardheaded or practical appraisal of national interests that emphasizes competition among nation-states.

• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).1949, in response to the threat of aggression by the Soviet Union, the United States and Western European nations created a formal alliance to pursue their security interests cooperatively: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), also called the North Atlantic Alliance or the Western Alliance, which was signed in Washington, D.C., in April

• Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union never emerged into direct military confrontation between the two, or a “hot” war. Rather, the conflicts that were fought were between surrogate nations, such as North and South Korea in the early 1950s and North and South Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Background and Policy Evolution

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The United Nations and Globalization

• United Nations (UN). 1945, headquartered in New York City and governed under the United Nations Charter, its constitution. global association of governments facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, and social equity.

• World Bank. The World Bank was created at about the same time as the UN, in 1945, and loans money to developing nations for certain kinds of development projects

• International Monetary Fund.

• Globalization.

Background and Policy Evolution

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The United Nations and Globalization an attempt to manage the effects of globalization, defined here as the growing interrelationship of all nations through global trade and other kinds of interaction and communication.

• World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO was established in 1995 and administers trade agreements among 164 nations (as of 2017), representing about 97 percent of the world’s population, to settle conflicts over trade disputes, such as imposing unreasonable restrictions on other nations’ trade with the United States.

• UN Security Council. the membership of the UN Security Council—the most important of the UN policymaking bodies—reflects the history of the UN’s formation. The council has a rotating membership of ten nations selected from the UN General Assembly (which consists of all member states) in addition to five permanent members: China, France, the Russian Federation (Russia, replacing the former Soviet Union), the United Kingdom, and the United States; each of the five has veto power over the council’s actions

• UN General Assembly.

Background and Policy Evolution

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Military Buildup and Nuclear Weapons

• Military spending following WWII. Following the end of World War II, the most expensive war in U.S. history, military spending declined somewhat but remained high for decades.

• Technologically advanced weapons systems.

• Defense contractors, members of

Congress/Pentagon. Today, defense contractors work closely with members of Congress and the Pentagon and continue to press for costly weapons systems, even when the Pentagon seeks to shift spending to newer and more appropriate technologies.

• Authorization, acquisition, and management of

weapons/systems. A 2009 Government Accountability Office study of ninety-six major defense acquisition programs found that nearly two-thirds of them involved significant cost overruns and delays that cost close to $300 billion.17 A similar comprehensive study by Reuters in 2013 concluded that the Pentagon is “largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies,” because it relies on a “tangle of thousands of disparate, obsolete, largely incompatible accounting and business-management systems.”

Background and Policy Evolution

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Military Buildup and Nuclear Weapons

• Use of nuclear weapons issues. Issues related to the use of nuclear weapons no longer get the attention they once did, with the exception of concern over their possible use by rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea, yet they remain among the most important in foreign and defense policy.

• International actors’ interests, perceptions,

motivations. policymakers need to understand the interests, perceptions, and motivations of nation-states and other international actors, whether they are terrorists or multinational corporations.

• Mutually assured destruction. The assumption is that a strike by one nation would likely be followed by an equal strike by the other, so that both nations are assured of destruction. If the nations are rational actors, neither should be motivated to engage in a first strike.

• Deterrence. Having sufficient weapons would promote deterrence, and there would be no nuclear war.

Background and Policy Evolution

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Military Buildup and Nuclear Weapons

• Military secrets, defense strategy. The number, increasing power, and location of these weapons on land and on or under the sea were some of the most closely protected military secrets during the Cold War and a vital component of defense strategy.

• Nuclear proliferation. spread of nuclear weapons knowledge and technology to new nations such as India and Pakistan.

• Enormous buildup of nuclear stockpiles. The enormous buildup of nuclear stockpiles led over time to a number of talks and treaties to try to reduce their numbers. The manufacture and maintenance of those weapons were costly and inefficient uses of defense funds, and their numbers posed a continuing security risk.

• Arms limitations. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had a reason to favor arms limitations, but they also distrusted each other, so the various arms talks went slowly and yielded mixed results. Eventually, the United States and the Russian government agreed to limit their nuclear weapons arsenals to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads each.

Background and Policy Evolution

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The Intelligence Agencies and the Wars in

Iraq and Afghanistan

• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to replace the Office of Strategic Services that had performed more limited operations during World War II.

• National Security Agency (NSA). coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems and produce foreign signals intelligence information.

Background and Policy Evolution

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The Intelligence Agencies and the Wars in Iraq

and Afghanistan

• Until 2001, considered highly

professional/effective. It reported in July 2003 with a scathing critique of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA, saying they had failed to pay attention to repeated warnings that the terrorist organization al-Qaeda was planning to attack the United States. It said the attacks might have been prevented if the agencies had been more alert to such information and had conducted more thorough analysis of intelligence data.

• 9/11 Commission report. It too focused on the many failures of the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the NSC, and almost every other agency charged with defending the nation. The commission called for a major overhaul of the intelligence agencies, and it argued that without such a restructuring the United States would be vulnerable to an even more damaging attack in the future.

• Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention

Act. In 2004, the law focused on establishing a new management structure to coordinate and oversee the disparate agencies.

• Changes needed to improve performance. The agencies themselves are to improve their analysis of intelligence data and develop mechanisms for coordinating activities and sharing their information with one another. The law also calls for a variety of new efforts to improve transportation and border security and to better protect the nation against terrorism.

Background and Policy Evolution

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The Intelligence Agencies and the Wars in

Iraq and Afghanistan

• Weaknesses affected the war on terrorism. serious weaknesses in the intelligence agencies also played a large role in U.S. decisions regarding how to mount the global war on terrorism.

• Operation Enduring Freedom. United States sent troops to Afghanistan in what the U.S. military called Operation Enduring Freedom. It was the beginning of the U.S. war on terrorism. U.S. forces sought to remove the Taliban organization from power and to track down and capture the leaders of al-Qaeda responsible for the 9/11 attacks, especially Osama bin Laden.

• Iraq War. The Iraq war itself was equally if not more controversial during its turbulent eight years. On March 20, 2003, after Iraqi president Saddam Hussein refused to agree to U.S. terms (particularly to surrender suspected weapons of mass destruction) or to adhere to a UN demand for disarmament, the United States invaded Iraq.

• U.S. failure to understand adversaries. By 2016, critics pointed to the U.S. failure to deal adequately with the aftermath of the Iraq war as one reason for the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or ISIS, also known as ISIL.

Background and Policy Evolution 665

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Economic and Military Assistance: Foreign

Aid

• The U.S. helped countries in need.

• Assistance served the nation’s strategic

interests. U.S. assistance more often than not has also served the nation’s strategic interests. That is, aid often is given to nations where it can help to support U.S. foreign policy goals.

• U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID). the principal vehicle for the distribution and management of what is called bilateral economic aid—that is, money the United States sends directly to other nations.

Background and Policy Evolution

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Economic and Military Assistance: Foreign

Aid

• Misunderstanding of foreign aid today. Polls taken over the past decade have shown that most people think the amount the nation spends on foreign aid is too much; however, they have also believed that the nation devotes far more than it does to such programs.

• The nation spends too much.Over the past three decades, the United States spent between one-quarter and one-half of 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) on foreign aid; the Congressional Research Service puts this amount at about 1.3 percent of total federal budget authority.

• Reasons findings are important. . People tend to argue that unmet needs at home (e.g., health care, education, job training, improving the nation’s highways, and much more) require that the money be spent here rather than abroad. There is also a widely shared belief that foreign aid does not reach those in need abroad but goes instead to corrupt officials or is simply wasted on inefficient and ineffective projects.

• Solution: improve the way resources are

used. particularly to fund only those projects with measurable, provable results (called “paying for results”). There are many such projects in developing nations that could meet such a test in areas as diverse as ensuring primary education for children, providing essential childhood vaccinations, delivery of vital health care services, supplying clean water, and improving agricultural productivity.

Selected Issues in Homeland

Security (1 of 3) 671

Comparing Homeland Security Threats: How

Vulnerable Are We?

• Troubling vulnerabilities not yet addressed. Large chemical plants that could endanger one million or more individuals in a worst-case attack.

Use of a so-called dirty bomb, a compact nuclear device, in a major urban center.

Nuclear power plants or nuclear waste storage facilities that could become the focus of an attack from the air or ground.

Hazardous waste transport, in trucks and on rails, much of it through populated urban areas. Bioterrorism, especially release of a deadly toxin in an urban area.

• DHS supports expressions of concern.

• National Planning Scenarios, fifteen

threats. The National Planning Scenarios identified fifteen possible threats to the nation, some by terrorists, some by natural disasters, and some by disease outbreaks. It then estimated the likely economic and human costs of each. At the upper end of the scenarios was a biological disease outbreak not related to terrorism, a flu pandemic that could kill eighty-seven thousand people, hospitalize three hundred thousand, and cost the nation $70 to $160 billion in economic impacts.

Selected Issues in Homeland

Security (2 of 3)

Comparing Homeland Security Threats: How

Vulnerable Are We?

• Annual Threat Assessment.

• Challenges with less media coverage.

• Cyberterrorism. Increasingly, analysts also worry about new kinds of threats, such as cyberterrorism, where terrorists gain access to governmental or private sector computer networks that are critical to maintaining the nation’s economy and infrastructure. Possible targets include power plants, trains, oil and gas pipelines, financial institutions, and the electrical grid.

Selected Issues in Homeland

Security (3 of 3)

The Case of Transportation Security

• High priority following 9/11 attacks. airport security has undergone a dramatic transformation, as anyone who has traveled by air in recent years is well aware. Airport security was federalized, and the number of airport security agents increased substantially.

• No further hijackings, airport incidents. As of early 2017, there have been no further hijackings of U.S. aircraft and no terrorist incidents at airports, although there have been such incidents at other airports around the world.

• Substantial price of added security. in the 2000s, it spent nearly $5 billion on aviation security but only a small fraction of that amount on passenger rail service, buses, and other modes of surface transportation.

• Protection of borders, similar concerns. Do you think we should do more to scan or inspect containers reaching U.S. ports? Can government agencies enhance security by doing so without harming the import of goods

Focused Discussion: Civil Liberties

in an Age of Terrorism (1 of 3)

Effectiveness and Efficiency

• Improve homeland security, surveillance

technology. government agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA make thousands of decisions and accumulate untold quantities of data on possible terrorists and their activities.

• Evaluating antiterrorist policy efforts

effectiveness.The vast majority of actions taken by the NSA and FBI, including the kind of surveillance of citizens’ e-mail and web browsing that has become common since the terrorist attacks of 2001, are not very effective in producing useful knowledge, but a few of them turn out to be critically important in identifying and apprehending suspected terrorists. Would you say that the overall effort is effective, or at least defensible?

• Implications of difficulty evaluating

effectiveness.

Focused Discussion: Civil Liberties

in an Age of Terrorism (2 of 3)

Legal and Ethical Concerns

• Legality of current law, Constitution. policy debates turn on questions of legality with respect to several elements of current law and the Constitution.

• Concerns over individual rights.

• The USA PATRIOT Act. emphasized empowering the government to monitor communications, detect signs of terrorist activities, and take action against suspected terrorists.

• Implications for civil liberties. many critics of the PATRIOT Act had voiced these concerns about civil liberties. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pointed to a “lack of due process and accountability [that] violates the rights extended to all persons, citizens and non-citizens, by the Bill of Rights.

Focused Discussion: Civil Liberties

in an Age of Terrorism (3 of 3)

Legal and Ethical Concerns

• Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). When the controversies both in 2005 and in 2013 hit the newspapers, many members of Congress raised other legal and political issues. For one thing, some charged that the president’s actions were illegal under current law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA)

• Conflicts between Bush administration,

Congress. President Bush’s defense of his actions in 2005 did little to convince his opponents in Congress, and the year ended with only a temporary extension of the act.

• Liberals, conservatives agree improvements

necessary. both liberals and conservatives agree that it is imperative that the nation improve its gathering of information related to possible terrorism, including domestic intelligence.

• Competing security, civil liberties needs. As the nation’s intelligence agencies chart a new path under the reorganization plans discussed earlier, both the agencies and their overseers in Congress and the White House will be struggling to figure out how to combat the threat of terrorism without weakening the nation’s historic commitment to citizens’ rights.