British prime minister David Cameron, American president Barack Obama and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso observe a moment of silence in honor of NATO military personnel that have lost their lives, Lisbon, Portugal, November 19, 2010 (White House/Pete Souza)

The key for the future of NATO is to once again establish a clear strategic rationale for its existence.

This was a relatively easy task during the Cold War, when the threat of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was very real and perceived as existential. In the years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this is no longer the case and it has forced NATO to evaluate exactly what role it should play in the twenty-first century.

While it seems that many in Europe and the United States have a desire to turn NATO into some sort of “GloboCop” looking perennially abroad for new monsters to slay, NATO’s actions since the conclusion of the Cold War raise serious questions about the wisdom of such a course. Its use of military force against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis in the 1990s, its extensive work in Afghanistan and, most recently, in Libya illustrate how NATO can work and how it really cannot.

The key question is this: Should NATO in this century be used primarily to defend Europe from external aggression while facilitating intra-European stability or is it to be a platform for external stabilizing missions in other geographic regions, such as the Middle East or East Asia? 


The answer is that it should remain focused on what it can do and do well.

If NATO was largely created “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down,” as stated memorably by the alliance’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, this should in large measure be maintained as a raison d’etre.

The questions of Russia and Germany continue to be, as they always have been, of paramount importance to European stability. NATO can and should deal with this.

The alliance should remain a serious player in Europe, capable of defending against any potential external aggression. It should also retain the ability to maintain a sense of order in the continually tumultuous southern side of Europe, especially the Balkan tinderbox. 



Meanwhile, NATO must reexamine its capacity to engage in missions outside of Europe and should probably scale back any extra-European ambitions. The fiscal and military resources are not available to engage in global operations and the scarce resources that are available are better spent in the European neighborhood.

Referring again to the Kosovo air campaign, it appears that NATO can use force effectively when deployed against malefactors within the general European area.

By contrast, although NATO has played a significant role in Afghanistan, the ambiguities of general policy toward that nation and the larger issues pertaining in particular to stability in Pakistan have made it a far less successful endeavor.

Granted, much of this is due to internal policy divisions within the United States, which is quite evidently the largest player in the Afghan theater. However, the projection capabilities of NATO are not all that impressive when looking at the difficulty in doing what is necessary to win a small scale conflict beyond Europe.

The Libyan intervention reinforces this impression. Aside from the question of whether the regime crackdown in Syria is of more strategic importance to the region than whatever Colonel Muammar Gaddafi did, the point is, if one is to engage, one must engage fully. That NATO proved only half willing to do so elongated the conflict and could have facilitated the stealing of many weapons that are now finding their way into a myriad of other conflict zones like Mali.

The take away from this state of affairs is that NATO should remain focused on European stability, not out of theater operations. Efforts to use NATO outside of Europe leave much to be desired and fundamentally risk making the Atlantic alliance look weaker, not stronger

Attempting to bolster NATO in order that it essentially becomes some kind of global constabulary force seems unwise. Each region of the world will require its own multilateral (though not panglobal) institutions.

The United States will, for as long as it remains the single most powerful nation in the world, play a key role in each of these regional institutions. Yet these institutions should remain regional, focusing on their own neighborhoods so that they can be more effective, rather than morphing into grandiose institutions with ambitions far exceeding capabilities. That is a sure fire recipe for ineffective institutions that spend more time talking than acting on the imperatives of the moment.

Europe and the United States are the pillars of transatlanticism and the “West” more broadly conceived. They must hang together or they will hang separately. Narrowing NATO’s focus in such a way that it maintains stability in the European heartland is a key step to making sure they hang together even if economic power seems to be shifting eastward in the twenty-first century.

At the end of the day, NATO leaders should say no to “GloboCop” and yes to their own backyard.

This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared at the Atlantic Community, September 3, 2010.

President Barack Obama and Angela Merkel discuss policy during the G20 summit in Seoul, South Korea, November 11, 2010

German chancellor Angela Merkel will likely be isolated among G8 leaders in Camp David this weekend. With the possible exception of Canada’s Stephen Harper, the leaders of the world’s other major industrial nations are all growing weary of austerity.

The divide is a familiar one. American president Barack Obama has urged his overseas counterparts to do more to stimulate economic recovery in the eurozone for two years while the Germans are adamantly opposed to more deficit spending as well as an expansionary monetary policy as has been pursued in the United States.

Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner lamented Europe’s “negative spiral of growth killing austerity” this week. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, was exasperated. “One cannot now seriously demand taking on even more debt to solve the crisis,” he told Focus magazine earlier in the month.

The Germans regard America’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus program with disbelief and insist that Europe’s approach should be different. Solid public finances, they say, is a key condition for consumer and investor confidence and therefore growth.

Transatlantic discord over austerity has become a recurring theme at international summits. President Obama urged Europe to do more stimulus at the G20 summit held in Toronto, Canada in 2010 and reiterated that call in Seoul the next year. The Germans opposed him both times and were able to sway other major powers their way.

In Toronto, the G20 countries agreed to cut their deficits in half by 2013, a targets which the Americans are almost certain to miss. Nations failed to reach agreement on monetary policy however. China and Germany remain critical of America’s willingness to print money, even if the European Central Bank has since done the same to finance Italian and Spanish deficit spending.

The difference for Merkel this weekend is that she has lost two allies. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy was replaced by socialist François Hollande this week who brings with him an agenda for “growth” (which means more public spending) while British prime minister David Cameron is now in favor of issuing Eurobonds or joint sovereign debt paper in the eurozone—so the United Kingdom wouldn’t have to participate.

The German high court preempted this proposal in September of last year when it decreed that parliament would have to consent to such a joint issuance of bonds. It is unlikely to. The Germans fear “transferunion,” the permanent bailing out of weaker states in the single currency union at Germany’s expensive if they’re able to free ride on Germany’s pristine creditworthiness.

Merkel is no stranger to isolation. She has few allies among Europe’s leaders. Italy’s Mario Monti and Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, both conservative prime ministers, try to reduce their deficits and introduce market reforms to make their nations more competitive relative to Germany—as Merkel put it in Seoul two years ago, “the benchmark has to be the countries that have been most competitive, not to reduce to the lowest common denominator”—but they also support a more expansionary monetary policy on the part of the European Central Banks which the German chancellor rejects for fear of inflation.

It may be convenient for the Germans if China were finally let into the G8. Until that happens, Merkel will stand her ground, alone.

House speaker John Boehner answers questions from reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, February 2 (Bryant Avondoglio)

American president Barack Obama asked Republican leader John Boehner for a “clean” increase in the nation’s legal debt limit on Wednesday, one that is not conditioned on a plan for deficit reduction. The conservative House speaker said “no” but has also ruled out tax increases which the president believes must be part of a “balanced approach” to fiscal consolidation.

White House spokesman Jay Carney blamed Boehner and his Republican Party for jeopardizing the country’s financial credibility. “The president does not believe that the full faith and credit of the United States, its commitment to pay its bills and its obligations, should be held hostage to a political ideology,” he said after Wednesday’s meeting.

Republicans argue that they are looking for pragmatic solutions to solving the nation’s debt crisis when Democrats have rejected any proposed spending reductions and reforms.

To demonstrate Democrats’ intransigence, Republicans brought the president’s own budget proposal for fiscal year 2013 up for a vote again. As expected, it was overwhelmingly defeated in both the House and Senate.

The Democratic majority in the upper chamber hasn’t produced a proper budget throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. The conservative majority in the House of Representatives, this year and last, introduced budgets that were voted down in the Senate.

For three years, the United States have had to borrow more than $1 trillion annually to balance their budget. The national debt is approaching $16 trillion, several hundreds of billions of dollars short of the legal debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion.

The cap was most recently raised by $900 billion in July 2011 after weeks of strenuous negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. As part of their agreement, federal spending projections for the next ten years were reduced by $917 billion with $21 billion worth of cuts implemented in 2012.

A congressional committee was tasked with finding up to $1.2 trillion in additional savings over the 2013-2021 time period. Because the parties failed to reach a compromise, $1.2 trillion in cuts, split between defense and domestic spending, were automatically enacted. Republicans are now scrambling to avert those reductions in national security.

The battle lines for the upcoming debt debacle have already been drawn. Republicans don’t want to cut military spending nor raise taxes. Democrats don’t want to reform entitlement programs like Medicaid, which subsidizes health care for the poor, and Medicare, which pays medical care for seniors.

With Social Security pension payments, these mandatory spending outlays are mainly responsible for America’s ballooning deficit projections.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2021, more than half of federal spending will have to be allocated to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Along with defense, interest payments on the debt and unemployment insurance, it would be nigh impossible for the Federal Government to continue to fund education and other domestic programs unless taxes are raised substantially.

Republicans have proposed to privatize Medicare and reduce Medicaid payments. Democrats have ruled out such reforms. As Nancy Pelosi, the left’s leader in the House of Representatives, put it, they will not “reduce the deficit or subsidize tax cuts for the rich on the backs of America’s seniors and working families.”

On Wednesday, Pelosi accused Republicans of “manufacturing” a crisis by demanding spending cuts for more borrowing.

“Cuts” aren’t really cuts though. They are reductions in projected spending increases. In real terms, public spending will grow every year—under the Republican plan, by 4 percent on average; under the president’s plan, by 5 percent. Republicans would spend roughly $40 trillion over the next ten years; Obama would spend $45 trillion. If neither plan is enacted, the CBO estimates outlays worth $47 trillion over the same period.

President Richard Nixon and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai toast at a banquet during Nixon's visit to China, February 25, 1972

When President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger opened up relations with China in the 1970s, it was done in the context of needing a new lever in the Cold War, especially when the United States was still mired in Vietnam. The goal was for the United States to be closer to both China and the Soviet Union than either was to each other and to be able to swing back and forth between the two powers as needed depending on what the exigencies of the balance of power dictated.

At that time, China was clearly the lesser power and required bolstering. The time for the United States to consider an inversion of that policy may soon become ripe.

The strategic environment today is vastly different than when Nixon met Mao. The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is no more and China is rapidly ascending to the position of a global superpower. Under these conditions, the United States are struggling to manage a multiplicity of strategic interests in every major region of the world. Paramount among those are relations with China.

While no one disputes outgoing World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s statement that it would be advantageous for China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs, the prospect of this not happening means that the United States need additional levers to balance against China in the soon to be economically dominant Asia.

The Obama Administration’s vaunted “pivot” shows Washington’s recognition of this need. To fully embrace this strategy, though, the United States must secure its Western flank from instability. This means securing Europe.

Inconveniently for the United States as it seeks to shift its focus to Asia, the ongoing European fiscal crisis opens the door to all kinds of medium to long term challenges. It also opens the door for Russian mischief under the nationalistic president Vladimir Putin.

Left unattended and unresolved, the Russian question could become a significant enough distraction that the United States find themselves unable to be decisive in Asia.

To the extent that the Obama Administration realized building better relations with the Russians would be essential for European stability, it should be commended. Yet, its much vaunted “reset” looks set to run aground as Putin reassumes his undisputed position on the top of the Kremlin’s power pyramid.

This can be confirmed from recent news of Russian threats of preemption against NATO missile defense sites in Europe. If the United States are not to be squeezed by a perennially dissatisfied Russia in Central Asia and Eastern Europe while trying to deal with China, they are going to have to move beyond the “reset” and seek a more comprehensive engagement.

This entails opening the door to a legitimate and wide ranging understanding with Russia that can finally deal with the lingering aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and President Putin’s taste for revanchism.

Discarding the mere symbolism of the “reset,” the United States should consider a broader and deeper outreach to Russia in order to pull it into a far less bellicose attitude vis-à-vis the West. In essence, much as Nixon and Kissinger sought the “dragon” to balance against the stronger “bear,” the United States must consider the reverse.

Doing so could minimize Russian aggression toward Europe. Even more important, having Russia ensconced in the West will offer the United States an additional lever it can employ to force China to divert its military focus from Asia.

Such a move could also expand the economic base of the West by capturing the huge hydrocarbon wealth of both Russia and Central Asia while having more ability to squeeze China’s energy supply if it is ever seen as necessary due to geopolitical tensions with the Middle Kingdom.

Such a policy has many possible pitfalls.

First, distrust pervades Western and, particularly, NATO relations with Russia. Moscow continues to believe that NATO expansion in Central and Eastern Europe violates promises made in the George H.W. Bush Administration and during the immediate aftermath of the Soviet implosion. It is essential to address this substantively, through mechanisms such as American support for NATO opening missile defense cooperation to Russia rather than insisting on two separate systems.

In addition, the United States should reduce funding to nongovernmental organizations in critical countries such as Ukraine and Georgia and quietly move from supporting the mercurial Mikheil Saakashvili.

The United States should also encourage President Putin’s push for a “Eurasian Union.” This would entail the United States no longer hectoring Russia over the slow pace of political reform. By contrast, it should simply argue for an “eventual transition to genuine multiparty democracy founded on generally liberal principles.”

Other policy options over the longer term could include an expansion of a free trade zone to encompass not only the traditional “transatlantic” partnership with the European Union but also an eventual “Eurasian Union.”

Finally, a real invitation for Russia to join NATO should eventually be considered but not made contingent upon the domestic political evolution of the Russian state.

Fundamentally, this is about changing Lord Ismay’s comments on NATO and changing its raison d’être from “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down” to “keeping both the Americans and Russians in and the rest of Europe quiet” while Asia rises.

In light of current headlines, these policy proposals seem fanciful. Yet, it is important to recollect the arc of Russian history.

Russia has long been torn between its desire enter a more Western orbit, something Russian modernizers since Peter the Great have desired, and its Byzantine based Orthodox Christian heritage, as well as a tendency towards “Oriental Despotism” as inherited from its time under the Mongol Yoke.

With its current demographic challenges and the return to great power status of multiple Asian states, Russia faces several choices: attempt to compete with China and maintain an independent pole of power based on Central Asia, embrace China and become a junior partner, or join the West. Each of those options appeals to one of Russia’s historical self images while also raising fears in certain segments of Russian society.

The jury is out as to which direction Russia will ultimately choose. It is up to the United States to incentivize Russia to make the final decision of tilting toward the West, which will also enable it to more fully realize its Central Asian goals.

A new global reality demands creativity and flexibility as opposed to rigidity. Moving to bring Russia into the West could be the most dramatic diplomatic move in a generation. Such a policy clearly runs against many American traditions. Yet, so did the Nixon policy when he traveled to Beijing in 1972. That move is now considered a powerful triumph.

President Barack Obama addresses supporters in Columbus, Ohio, May 5 (Obama for America/Christopher Dilts)

Members of President Barack Obama’s party that are running for election in November seek to frame the upcoming vote as one about income and sexual equality. The economy is still foremost on voters’ minds but Democrats are hoping to change that.

After Vice President Joe Biden told NBC News’ Sunday morning talk show Meet the Press this weekend that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, the president, too, voiced support for legalizing marriage for same sex couples.

No longer “evolving” on the issue, President Obama’s change of heart will likely endear him to young, first time voters who backed him overwhelmingly in 2008 but have since grown weary of his politics.

Among gay Americans, his support of marriage equality is unlikely produce a major shift. In 2004, after President George W. Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as one between a man and a woman, 23 percent of gay Americans voted Republican anyway. In the 2010 congressional elections, 31 percent did.

While 50 percent of the general population supports gay marriage, 70 percent of Americans under the age of thirty does. Two thirds of them voted for Obama in 2008.

The president’s election year conversion on the issue of marriage appears to be part of a concentrated effort to frame the upcoming vote as one between the progressive Barack Obama who tries to move the nation “forward” and intransigent Republicans who, on both economic and social issues, are “backward” in their opposition to his policies.

It’s not just on marriage that Republicans are supposed to be reactionary. Democrats accused conservative lawmakers of waging a “war on women” earlier this year because they did not want to force insurance companies to include birth control in their mandated coverage.

The fight over contraception was “illuminating,” the president told a group of women voters last month. “It was like being in a time machine.” He added, “The choice between going backward or moving forward has never been so clear.”

Obama is currently leading his likely Republican opponent Mitt Romney among woman 49 to 39 percent.

Besides marriage and gender equality, the president has described mounting income inequality as “the defining issue of our time.” Few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, just 2 percent of respondents listed the gap between the rich and poor as their top economic concern. But there is a sense that opportunity is increasingly denied to the middle class while the wealthy are shielded by their Republican friends from higher taxes and regulations.

So Republicans, again, have it backward when they want to lower taxes on businesses and high income earners but privatize federal health support for seniors at the same time. As the president put it, they want “everybody left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

The fact that Mitt Romney seems rather more like a character out of the popular drama series Mad Men, set in the 1960s, socially awkward and unsentimental when he talks about the economy, doesn’t help.

Voters overwhelmingly see joblessness and the ballooning national debt, areas in which the president has made markedly little progress, as the most important issues for the upcoming election. Democrats, who have resisted every Republican effort to rein in spending and not even introduced a budget in the Senate for all of Obama’s presidency, know that they cannot win on the economy. They have to change the conversation.

A majority of Americans is now on the left on most social issues, except abortion. Opposition to contraception coverage and gay marriage is concentrated in conservative states that are safely Republican. In critical swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, which will likely determine the outcome of November’s presidential election, voters lean Republican on economic issues but may well give Democrats a majority if they see the other party as backward indeed.

If Republicans fall for this trap and lose sight of their potentially winning argument—that they’ll fix the economy and get the government’s fiscal house in order—to revive the culture wars of the 1990s, this time, they will probably lose.

An American Marine patrols the surroundings of the village of Garmsir in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, April 28

Iran denounced the recently signed Strategic Partnership Agreement between Afghanistan and the United States. It sees the basing of American forces in the country and across the Persian Gulf as a security threat and has even reached out to the Sunni Taliban to balance this perceived threat.

The Iranians have long voiced discomfort with the prospect of a long term American presence on its eastern border. They have attempted to use their clout within the political system of Afghanistan and the means of bribery to influence Afghan parliamentarians to vote against any security pact with the United States.

The American forces in Afghanistan, far from being a solution to the problems of the region, are seen by Tehran as likely to intensify the regional insecurity and instability. Yet Iran’s own threat perception is in part fueling insecurity in Afghanistan and instability throughout the region.

The pact appears to have already strained relations between Afghanistan and Iran with Afghan diplomats in Tehran claiming that they are being intimidated and their movements have been severely curtailed. This may be a sign of worse things to come in the future.

Iran believes that the presence of American military bases and troops and access to military facilities in several other countries in the region such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Turkey and Qatar, is part of a deliberate strategy of encircling and containing Iran. Tehran fears that such a strategic position would enable the United States to monitor its nuclear program and launch attacks against it.

The capture of an American unmanned drone aircraft in December of last year, which was used by the United States to look for tunnels, underground facilities and other places where Iran could be producing centrifuge parts or enrichment facilities, confirm Iranian suspicions.

It has also been alleged that the United States are using their bases in Afghanistan to extend covert support to Sunni and Balochi insurgents, such as the Jundullah group, in Iran’s southeastern most Sistan and Baluchestan Province.

It is no surprise then that the Strategic Partnership Agreement is bound to enhance Iranian anxieties about the American troops in its neighbourhood, even if the pact explicitly states that America cannot use Afghanistan to launch attacks on a third country.

The mere presence of the United States in Afghanistan will pose an obstacle to the expansion of Iran’s influence in the country, particularly in its traditional sphere of influence—western Afghanistan, where Iran has spent millions of dollars over the past decade.

Iran has resorted to several means to undermine the American mission in Afghanistan, many of which are far from being positive in nature.

Iran has been accused of sending shiploads of text books into western Afghanistan with the aim of promoting the Shī’ah culture, the contents of which have been found offensive by the Sunni population. Such attempts at fueling sectarian tensions in Afghanistan make the task of managing the country much tougher for the Americans.

Similarly, it has been alleged that Iran exerts its influence over Afghanistan’s education curriculum through institutions like the Khatam-al Nabyeen Islamic University in Kabul, with the aim of promoting Iranian culture, win over the Afghan Shī’ah community and spread anti-Americanism.

Iran has also, in the past, cut off its fuel supplies to Afghanistan, which caused massive outcry in Kabul, as it believed that petrol and diesel, which was meant to be used by Afghans, was siphoned off to NATO.

However, the most intriguing development has been Iran’s measured support of the Taliban. The foreign forces in Afghanistan have often intercepted weapons, rockets and missiles that originated in Iran and were similar to the ones that were used to undermine the international counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. There have also been suspicions of Taliban fighters being trained in Iran.

The alliance with the Taliban is one of necessity as the group posed a significant security and ideological threat to Iran when it was in power in the 1990s. The two nearly went to war in 1998 following
the massacre of Iranian diplomats in Mazār-e Sharīf in northern Afghanistan. Even today, Iran would not favor a government in Kabul that is led or dominated by the Taliban.

The support for the Taliban was envisioned as a short term measure to make the Americans bleed and keep them preoccupied in Afghanistan, thereby diverting their attention from Iran.

However, as the United States look set to stay on in Afghanistan beyond 2014, albeit in reduced numbers, Iran is likely to maintain its support for the Taliban and indulge in other covert destabilizing activities, thereby prolonging the insurgency and the instability in the country.

Pingdingshan coal railway station in Henan Province, China, January 8, 2003 (Gordon Edgar)

When he was still a candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama famously predicted in 2008 that under his administration, “if someone wants to build a coal power plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

As president, Obama failed to enact the sort of cap and trade legislation that would have taxed emissions but constructing new coal plans has become virtually impossible as a result of new environmental standards.

The regulatory obstructionism of the current government is only in part to blame for coal’s struggles however. Gas’ huge success is killing the competition.

Improvements in drilling techniques are unlocking vast shale gas and oil reserves across the American northeast in states that used to be dominated by coal and steel production.

In this part of the country, also known as the Rust Belt, the coal workforce has shrunk by 90 percent in the last forty years. Now, energy companies are planning billions worth of investments to revitalize the natural gas industry.

Coal is forced to turn elsewhere and there is a huge market to be found in China. Coal fuels almost 80 percent of China’s electricity. Although it has the second largest proven coal reserves in the world after the United States, in 2009, China became a coal importer for the first time in its modern history. But a fraction of its imports are American.

China doesn’t represent a big market for the United States either. Last year, less than 7 percent of American coal exports left the country via Pacific Ocean ports. The vast majority of exports is still headed for Europe. Yet there are huge coal reserves situated nearby in the states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Plans are underway to build six major new port facilities in Oregon and Washington to ship more coal to China but again, the industry is facing pushback from environmentalists.

In the absence of a federal framework to curb emissions, the leftist state governments in the Pacific northwest will likely be tempted to impose restrictions of their own as soon as coal export terminals start appearing on their coastlines.

In Portland, Oregon on Monday, environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr. predicted that increased oil exports would leave the state “with a legacy of pollution, poison and corruption.”

Coal doesn’t share its wealth. It keeps it for itself and it makes a few people billionaires by impoverishing everyone else. Coal is crime. Do not let it come through this community.

Members of President Obama’s Democratic Party are in the majority in the state legislatures of Oregon and Washington. The governors of both states are Democrats. It’s likelier that they will listen to the likes of Kennedy than advocates of coal, whatever the cost to the industry.

Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks in Tempe, Arizona, April 20 (Gage Skidmore)

President Barack Obama and his likely Republican challenger Mitt Romney are virtually tied in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida but the incumbent retains a solid lead in Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday. The three states could determine the outcome of November’s election.

Romney has yet to be nominated by the Republican Party but lacks opposition on the right, allowing him to focus on voters in the center, the roughly 10 percent of the population which has no party preference.

The challenge for Romney is to win back states that propelled Republican George W. Bush to victory in 2000 and 2004. Besides Ohio and Florida—which wield forty-seven out of the 270 electoral votes needed to win between them—that includes Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, western states with large Latino populations that were all won by Obama in 2008. This year, they’re good for twenty electoral votes.

Recent polls give the president a narrow victory in Nevada and New Mexico while Colorado is tied. A mild swing in either direction could put these states in play.

Hispanic voters in these states, many of them Catholics, are socially more conservative than other racial minorities, which should benefit Republicans, but they tend to be wary of the party’s tough talk on illegal immigration.

Romney’s favorability among Latinos nationwide is just 23 percent compared to 42 percent unfavorable. In Florida, it’s higher. 40 percent of Latinos have a favorable view of the former Massachusetts governor but many of them are of Cuban descent and generally favor Republicans over Democrats because the former are firmly opposed to lifting sanctions on the communist regime in Cuba from which they fled.

At 11.5 percent, the unemployment rate among Latinos was higher last year than the 8 percent among whites. Out west but also in swing states across the Midwestern United States, the recession doesn’t seem to have gone away yet.

That Americans remain insecure about the future explains the president’s low approval ratings in swing states.

In the upper Midwest—industrial states like Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio which account for seventy electoral votes—the Democrat has again to win the white, blue collar, typically unionized voter whose economic prospects haven’t markedly improved during his presidency.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted last year found that 43 percent of the white working class didn’t believe that it would be better off in ten years. It was the most negative view of any of the groups polled and helps explain why, in the 2010 congressional election, blue collar voters gave Republicans 63 percent of their vote, thirty more points than for Democrats.

Romney’s main problem isn’t his record anymore (which right wing voters questioned in the primary) but his image. A former businessman and millionaire many times over, he is perceived as “out of touch” with the working man. Democrats are glad to exploit this disadvantage but the Republican candidate, for his part, has refused to apologize for his wealth.

“If people think that there is something wrong with being successful in America, then they better vote for the other guy,” Romney said in an interview with Fox News Sunday in February, “because I’ve been extraordinarily successful and I want to use that success and that knowhow to help the American people.”

He has a long way to go convince voters. As it stands, the president has a good change of winning reelection. He can afford to lose a lot.

In 2008, Obama won 359 electoral votes, including a lone elector in the state of Nebraska. Even if he loses Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, where the impact of the recession has been severest, but wins the three western states and Florida and Pennsylvania, he would still have the 270 votes needed to win. If he also lost his one vote from Nebraska, the race would be tied.

As in 2000, Florida and twenty-nine electors could decide the election if neither candidate sweeps the Midwest.

Pakistani men unload supplies delivered by a United States Army Chinook helicopter in Matlatan, Pakistan on September 28, 2010 (Sergeant Jason Bushong)

Western forces looking to exit Afghanistan over the next two years are playing a game of roulette, looking for the luckiest and cheapest way out of the warzone. Central Asian countries are scrambling to be the most attractive bet. Difficult and still closed, the road through Pakistan remains the preferred route.

Afghanistan’s neighbors stand to make huge profits as NATO countries move to withdraw their troops and equipment. Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan will remain under American control until the war is over but the base cannot handle all of the equipment which NATO forces must remove from the region. Land routes are numerous but difficult for a variety of reasons and Central Asia is poised to cash in on the scramble to depart.

Additionally, Central Asian states are more submissive to Russia than America. Russia and the United States have recently begun to negotiate a ”retrograde transit” agreement to use the Northern Distribution Network but the Kremlin may well seek to exploit the deal in order to achieve its aims elsewhere.

There are numerous options for getting into and alternatively out of Afghanistan but none are perfect bets.

The Pakistan route is the easiest and the cheapest but unreliable. In late November 2011, Pakistan closed the border to NATO traffic in protest after an American air strike killed nearly 30 Pakistani soldiers by accident. The border is still closed and Pakistan obstinate about reopening it without an American apology.

The Northern Distribution Network was developed by the Americans as an alternative to the Pakistan route but there are signs that its gatekeeper Uzbekistan will seek to raise transit fees. While Uzbekistan has by far the best road and railroad network among Afghanistan’s neighbors, its price gouging will prompt NATO powers to seek additional alternate routes.

The trouble is that difficult and pernicious as Pakistan and Uzbekistan can be, alternative land routes through Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are even more troublesome. Bad roads and bad winters are only where the problems begin.

There is discussion of selling some equipment to the Central Asian republics and thus removing the need to transport such equipment out of the region on NATO’s dime. In February, British armed forces minister Nick Harvey suggested trading military equipment for favorable transit fees. He alluded to the unspecified equipment as being potentially useful in Central Asia’s battle with narcotics and terrorism.

The United States have been more circumspect about leaving military equipment in the hands of Central Asian autocrats. Robert Blake, the American assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs said that arms transfers to countries along the Northern Distribution Network would be subject to the same restrictions that apply to regular arms transfers. Thus far, the Americans have been unwilling to sell any weapons to Uzbekistan, which has a less than pristine human rights record.

The bottom line is that Pakistan holds the lucky numbers. The average shipping cost of a container, as reported by Radio Free Europe, from Afghanistan to Karachi is $7,200. By northern routes shipping the same container would cost $17,500. When Pakistan decides to reopen the road to NATO convoys, it is likely to be at a higher price but still able to undercut the Central Asian route.

Money, power and politics all play a part in this game of supply route roulette. Money is on Pakistan and it is doubtful that by 2014 NATO powers will be interested in taking the longer, more expensive road through authoritarian Central Asia and into Russia’s arms. Islamabad will eventually reopen the border and happily usher the West out of its backyard.

President Barack Obama of the United States and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan meet in Kabul, May 1, 2012

In what proved to be a very busy day for the White House, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday. After being met and greeted by Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to the country, upon landing, the president quickly made his way to the presidential palace in Kabul to attend a joint signing ceremony with Hamid Karzai, thereby extending the American-Afghan relationship into 2024.

For President Obama, who is preparing for a tough reelection fight over the summer against the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, ceremony was an opportunity to not only convince Afghans that the United States would stand by them in the future but to assure the war weary American electorate that the fighting is close to ending.

Addressing the American people by television, Obama said, “we’ve traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the predawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of new day on the horizon.”

Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq five years ago, has become a battle that is increasingly unpopular at home. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released last month reported that two-thirds of Americans surveyed no longer thought the war was worth fighting.

Republicans, usually more hawkish in national security policy, are split over how much longer the United States should stay in. Swing voters, the constituency that will determine the entire presidential election in November, are more determined than ever to pull all American troops out as soon as possible. The American people will thus hold the president to his 2014 withdrawal promise, a date that he himself imposed.

Obama’s speech was also aimed at the Afghan people. Though tired of the foreign presence in their country, they are just as concerned about what the future holds once NATO troops have left.

The signing of the US-Afghan strategic partnership agreement was designed to mitigate much of that worry, committing the United States and its NATO allies to a continuation of support for the Afghan Government after 2014.

Afghans may not take much solace in the alliance, however, since the document is short on details and questions regarding any future troop presence in Afghanistan still needs to be negotiated.

The Taliban insurgency, in the meantime, will be sure to test the strength of the civilian government in Kabul any case. The Afghan people will expect their security forces, hampered with logistical and command problems, to respond to any such attacks quickly and efficiently.

President Obama and the American people are ready to get out. The Afghan Government and people will have to live with the outcome.