• Scorecard co-editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Justin Vaïsse!
• Former head of UN peacekeeping and foreign affairs guru Jean-Marie Guéhenno!!
• James Traub, superstar essayist for the New York Times and Foreign Policy!!!
• Me.

This is an open event.  Fuller details and an address for RSVPs are available here.

 

ECFR has just launched the second edition of its European Foreign Policy Scorecard, which gives the EU grades for how it dealt with different international challenges over the last year (full disclosure: I am a minor contributor to the project).  Here are the headline scores and analyses:

• China (overall grade ‘C’) – Europe hoped to strengthen its approach to China in 2011, but Europe’s crisis turned into China’s opportunity, with European nations fighting each for Chinese markets, investments and cash.
• Middle East and North Africa (C+) – The Arab Awakening took everybody by surprise, but EU member states have so far failed to deliver on the promised ‘money, markets and mobility’. Libya highlighted some European divisions, and EU leaders have not yet developed a long term approach to the region.
• Russia (C+) – The EU achieved an impressive degree of unity when dealing with Moscow, and there were concrete results in areas like trade. The impending return of Vladimir Putin, however, is ending a period of wishful thinking over its engagement with Russia.
• United States (B-) – The US ‘leadership from behind’ in Libya showed that some European countries could play a dynamic international role and cooperate with the US. But it also revealed serious shortcomings in European capabilities, as the US starts pursuing its Asia First strategy at the expense of interest in Europe.
• Wider Europe (C+) – The EU achieved progress on issues such as enlargement in the Western Balkans, but relations with key regional player Turkey were (again) deeply troubled. There were only limited results in relations with Eastern Partnership countries.
• Multilateral issues and crisis management (B) – Securing a legally binding deal on reducing carbon emissions at Durban was one of several qualified European successes. But the efforts to stabilise the euro zone overshadowed these, for instance in the troubled G20 summit in Cannes.

There’s a great interactive website for the report here.  Enjoy!

Tuesday should be a dramatic day in the UN Security Council.  Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alan Juppé are all jetting in for a debate on Syria and the Europeans are set to table a resolution calling for a political transition in Damascus that Russia is determined to veto.  China will probably do so too.  Smash, bang, wallop.

What are the Europeans up to here?  Last week, I published a commentary for the EU Institute for Security Studies summarizing the European strategy towards Syria:

European policymakers have recognised that they are not best-placed to mediate a final political settlement to the crisis. Instead, they have ceded political responsibility to the Arab League, which has gradually hardened its stance against Assad and has even called for him to stand aside (although the League has not been firm enough for some of members, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia). Meanwhile the EU’s policies have included (i) backing UN and League attempts to monitor the situation in Syria in an effort to restrain the Assad government; (ii) putting pressure on Damascus through sanctions; and (iii) using debates at the Security Council and the wider UN system to reinforce the case for pressure. 

Even though the Security Council debates have rendered almost nothing concrete (except for a mildly worded presidential statement cooked up by the IBSA countries last August) the Europeans have arguably utilized the UN route quite cleverly:

Although frustrated by Sino-Russian obstructionism, European diplomats have chosen to use the Security Council as a platform to publicise the case against Assad. In October, having tried to find compromise language on sanctions, they tabled a mildly-worded resolution in the knowledge that China and Russia would veto it. This ostensibly self-defeating strategy (which the U.S. had doubts about) has at least pushed Moscow and Beijing to try and legitimise their defense of Damascus. Russia has served up a series of resolutions of its own, calling for an end to violence but making no reference to sanctions. 

In the meantime, resolutions condemning Syria’s actions have been passed by large majorities in both the Human Right Council and UN General Assembly – forums that are usually hostile to Western positions. In the final quarter of 2011, the Arab League used the threat of pushing for Security Council action (as it did very effectively over Libya) to persuade Assad to accept its observer mission. 

So even if Russia and China use their veto again this week, the Europeans will keep coming back to the Council for public relations reasons.  I think this is a cunning strategy, although it will fuel talk about the decline of the Council as a serious decision-making body.  It’s remarkable to think that it’s only ten months since the Council was being praised for OK-ing the Libyan campaign.

Good news: Ban Ki-moon will save Antarctica!

Ban Ki-moon has just set out his plans for his second five year term. He is not unambitious:

“Today I want to share with you an action agenda for the coming five years,” he told the Assembly as he returned to the rostrum to brief Member States on his vision for his second term.

“A plan to make the most of the opportunities before us. A plan to help create a safer, more secure, more sustainable, more equitable future. A plan to build the future we want,” he said.

The “action agenda” presented today describes specific measures regarding each of the five imperatives, including an unprecedented campaign to wipe out five of the world’s major killers – malaria, polio, paediatric HIV infections, maternal and neonatal tetanus, and measles.

Mr. Ban also announced that the UN will work with Member States to make Antarctica a World Nature Preserve and that he will appoint a new special representative for youth.

Hm… a year ago, I published an article in which I noted that “Ban has oscillated between bouts of fatalism about the UN’s decline and curious bursts of overheated rhetoric about its importance.”  We seem to be in one the latter periods:

“Waves of change are surging around us,” he told the Assembly. “If we navigate wisely, we can create a more secure and sustainable future for all. The United Nations is the ship to navigate these waters…

“We are the venue for partnerships and action. Now is our moment. Now is the time to create the future we want,” he stated.

Interestingly, Ban didn’t use the words “South Sudan” once in his main speech (he nodded to it in a post-speech press conference) despite the evidence that the country may be falling apart on the UN’s watch.  But then he didn’t mention Syria either.  Still, he didn’t overlook the UN’s crisis management operations completely:

Our operations build bridges — literally and among communities.

Clever, huh?

Two weeks ago, I blogged about the Arab League’s observer mission in Syria, and argued that it was likely to struggle.  And struggle it certainly has.  Last Friday, I wrote a short piece for Foreign Policy summarizing the mission’s numerous woes:

The Syrian opposition claims that the roughly 100 monitors, deployed to oversee the army’s withdrawal from urban areas, have been manipulated and fed disinformation by the government. There have been accusations that the military has used the observers’ presence as a cover for increased violence. Perhaps most notoriously, the League selected a Sudanese general associated with the war in Darfur to lead the mission. The observers, dressed in brightly-colored waistcoats and armed only with digital cameras, often look lost and ineffectual.

In any plausible scenario, the monitors were never going to have a decisive impact on Syria. Although the Syrian government promised that it would halt military operations against civilians in December, few analysts took this promise seriously. A handful of observers were not going to change political calculations in Damascus, especially as they have neither their own guards nor secure communications equipment — leaving them excessively reliant on Syrian assistance to monitor and report anything at all.

But one week ago, it still seemed too early to write off the mission.  Since then, however, the operation has given a very good impression of imploding.  One observer has publicly condemned the mission:

An Arab League official has launched a scathing attack on the regional body’s mission to Syria, claiming it has been powerless to prevent “multiple crimes against humanity” from being committed by troops loyal to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  Anwar Malek, an Algerian member of the team, said the observer mission was becoming a farce. He said it was not acting independently and was serving the regime’s interests.

And even the Arab League’s top man sounds defeatist:

The Arab League chief has cast further doubt on the delegation his organisation has sent to monitor the crisis in Syria, describing ongoing violence as “very worrisome” and saying the mission was not going to plan.

Even the Syrian government hates the damn thing:

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has also condemned the delegation, describing it as ineffective and a key element of a broad international conspiracy against his embattled country.

So the mission, which is meant to produce a full report by 19 January, may struggle to keep going until then.   But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  As I argued in my Foreign Policy piece, the mission’s true role may not to be oversee a (now entirely discredited) peace agreement, but to concentrate international attention on just how awful things are in Syria:

While the observers may be failing in their stated goal — to help ensure that the Syrian army halts attacks on civilians — they have already played a significant role in underlining the brutality and untrustworthiness of the Syrian regime. There was previously copious evidence of the regime’s violence from refugees, human rights activists, undercover journalists, and U.N. reports. But the observer mission’s presence has magnified outside awareness of these abuses, especially because the media have tracked the observers’ every move. Although the mission’s leadership has mishandled relations with the press, individual observers have been frank with journalists about abuses they have witnessed and the limitations they are under — effectively circumnavigating the constraints on their formal reporting lines.

The fact that atrocities appear to be ongoing while the observers are in place also raises the diplomatic stakes. Arab politicians and commentators have already demanded that the mission should withdraw in protest at Syria’s behavior, and the monitors’ public difficulties will surely increase tensions between Damascus and the rest of the League. It is a sad truth of international politics that governments and international organizations are often far more concerned about attacks on their own credibility than human rights abuses. The Arab League, having won a new degree of credibility by taking a tough stance on Libya nearly a year ago, now finds its reputation tied to its observers’ performance in Syria.

If the Arab League wants to maintain some respect, it should now make a point of stating quite clearly that the Syrian government has made the observers’ work impossible – and call on the UN to take action as a consequence.  The League’s mission has been a mess, but I still believe it may have an important role in triggering a real response to this grim crisis.

Can this type of mission, which is only able to observe and report rather than directly protect civilians, make a difference?  Just before Christmas, the U.S. Institute of Peace published a paper by me entitled Political Missions and Preventive Diplomacy, which looks at what international missions can do to avert potential conflicts in periods of latent and escalating tension.  In Syria, the situation has shifted from “escalation” to the verge of civil war.  What can observers achieve at a moment like this?  In the paper, I highlight one precedent: the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1998. The mission observed but could not stop the violence that led to NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign:

In October 1998, the OSCE was mandated to deploy the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) to oversee a cease-fire and supervise elections in the then Yugoslav province after a year of mounting violence. The request followed negotiations between Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke, but American-led talks were still ongoing. Both the Yugoslav security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas continued to operate, and Yugoslav atrocities eventually made it impossible to continue talks. In these unpromising circumstances, the KVM was expected to deploy “2,000 unarmed verifiers.”

The operation stumbled along unhappily…

The KVM initially had a high level of access to Yugoslav military facilities, but its presence proved insufficient to halt continuing violence. The head of mission, U.S. diplomat William Walker, tried to involve the mission in human rights and political affairs. But its personnel tended to focus more narrowly on military matters, and less than a tenth of the verifiers were assigned to human rights duties. This is unsurprising given the instability of the situation. Concerns for the mission’s safety also resulted in the deployment of a NATO extraction force in neighboring FYROM. The mission’s detachment from the faltering diplomatic process meant that it never developed a clear sense of purpose [and it was] withdrawn from Kosovo in January 1999 prior to NATO’s air campaign against Yugoslavia. The KVM did, however, continue to assist refugees from Kosovo in FYROM for some months, both advising humanitarian agencies and compiling a record of human rights abuses that had taken place during the crisis. The KVM experience suggests that once a crisis has reached its peak, the presence of external monitors alone is unlikely to affect decision makers’ choices.

This precedent doesn’t exactly suggest that the Arab League observers can make a great impact on Syria – not least because they will have far fewer personnel to cover a significantly greater area, and there is no extraction force to help in a crisis.  Looking at the lessons from the KVM and other missions in my USIP report, I’d have three bits of advice to the League:

(1) Ensure that observers’ reports are full, clear and detailed – and get to the top levels of the League fast.  It’s all too easy to let reporting standards drop under pressure or for officials in the field to succumb to “happy reporting” (emphasizing positive aspects of cooperating with the authorities in an effort to sustain access).

(2) Maintain political pressure while the observers are at work.  It’s important that the Syrian authorities don’t exploit the presence of observers on their territory to slow down negotiations towards a lasting political settlement.  It would be very easy for Damascus to drag out negotiations by arguing over details of the observers’ mandate (by repeatedly blocking access to sensitive sites for example).  Arab diplomats must keep up political pressure for a lasting deal between the government and opposition, rather than hoping that the presence of the observers will restore calm.

(3) Have a credible exit strategy.  League officials must make it clear to Damascus that they will withdraw the observers if their freedom of movement is curtailed or their ability to report objectively is compromised.  The Syrian leaders should be aware that there will be strong penalties for failing to meet their commitments, and that the observers are only a temporary mechanism for confirming that they do so.   Having the observers in Syria is not an end in itself, and should never become one.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said a council-mandated investigation was essential “given the fact that initially we were led to believe by Nato leaders there are zero civilian casualties of their bombing campaign”.

US ambassador Susan Rice, who stepped to the microphone after Mr Churkin, responded: “Oh, the bombast and bogus claims. Is everyone sufficiently distracted from Syria now and the killing that is happening before our very eyes?  I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that this is something of a cheap stunt to divert attention from other issues and to obscure the success of Nato and its partners – and indeed the security council – in protecting the people of Libya.”

And just in case anyone had missed that episode, Russia enlivened matters on Friday by tabling the latest draft of a cunning resolution on Syria that expresses concern about the situation without imposing any penalties on Damascus.

Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow had limits on how much it would accommodate the demands of the European and U.S. delegations, which would like the 15-nation council to threaten sanctions on Damascus over its nine-month-old crackdown on protesters.

“If the requirement is that we drop all reference to violence coming from extreme opposition, that’s not going to happen,” Churkin told reporters.  “If they expect us to have arms embargo, that’s not going to happen.  We know what arms embargo means these days. It means that – we saw it in Libya – that you cannot supply weapons to the government but everybody else can supply weapons to various opposition groups.”

This is like a family Christmas from hell.  If you want to understand why it’s so nasty, turn to a short paper I published with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung this week entitled The Security Council’s Credibility Problem.  It explains how the Libyan and Syrian crises left the Council divided, with everyone having something to be cross about:

(1) Western officials believe that China and Russia’s refusal to countenance serious Council action against Syria has made the Council look impotent. They also complain that Brazil, South Africa and India have avoided tough decisions at the UN, abstaining in important votes on Libya and Syria. They conclude that these five BRICS countries are more concerned with constraining the West than resolving crises through the Council, and that giving them more power in the UN would be risky.

(2) Non-Western officials counter that the U.S. and its NATO allies did greater damage this year by converting the Council’s mandate for a humanitarian intervention in Libya as a pretext for regime change. They claim that their refusal to support even mild UN sanctions against Syria stems from the Libyan experience, and that the West cannot be trusted to implement UN mandates faithfully.

(3) For those who value the Council as a mechanism for ensuring international peace and security, the last year has been depressing for more fundamental reasons. Its limitations as a crisis management tool have been obvious. In recent years, there has been much talk in Council debates of shifting from “reaction” to “prevention”. Yet in the Libya case, its efforts to prevent the conflict escalating failed miserably and the Council’s only option was to mandate an ad hoc military campaign. It is unclear that the Council would have performed any better over Syria, even if there had been a consensus on how to act. The crises of 2011 have revealed major gaps in the Council’s capabilities.

This soap opera will, I suspect, continue to throw up surprises in 2012.

If it’s a choice between keeping the euro together or keeping the Conservative Party together. It’s in the national interest to keep the Conservative Party together.