Transition 2012

Cabinet Update: John Brennan Nominated to Head the CIA

Toni Johnson — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:09:52 +0000

President Obama has nominated John Brennan (Politico) to be head of the CIA, a post that has remained vacant since David Petraeus resigned in November (NBC) after disclosing an extramarital affair. Brennan is currently a chief White House aide on counterterrorism.

Brennan has worked in a number of major national security positions (AP) including as deputy executive director for the CIA for the Bush administration from 2001 to 2003.

He has been at the forefront in the Obama administration’s expansion of targeted killings in non-battlefield settings, and his nomination to head the CIA could inflame human rights advocates, writes CFR’s Micah Zenko. Employed by both the Pentagon and the CIA, targeted killings are a central component of U.S. counterterrorism operations around the globe, as this CFR backgrounder explains.

In August 2012, Brennan told a CFR meeting about triggers for targeted killings:

[T]here are individuals within al-Qaeda that are determined to kill Americans, whether it’d be in the U.S. homeland or in Yemen or in other parts of the world. We go to great extent to try to thwart those attacks, and we very much hope that we’re able to do it short of the use of any type of direct action or lethal force, either by our partners or by us or in concert one another.

When we don’t have those opportunities to, in fact, prevent these individuals from carrying out those attacks, if our only recourse is to take lethal action in concert with partners and provide our partners some assistance in that regard or to do things with them that we’ll mitigate threat, we do it, but it’s because it presents a terrorist threat to U.S. persons, properties, entities.

Cabinet Update: Chuck Hagel Nominated for Defense

Newsteam Staff — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:11:19 +0000

President Barack Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel (Politico) for secretary of Defense to replace outgoing secretary, Lean Panetta.

Hagel is a former Republican senator from Nebraska and is considered by Obama to be a “trusted ally whose willingness to defy party loyalty and conventional wisdom won his admiration both in the Senate and on a 2008 tour of war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan,” reports the New York Times.

The Washington Post reports his confirmation will likely be “quick and painless,” however a number of analysts say that it will face opposition, including from the Israel lobby to gay rights advocates to fellow Republicans.

Jacob Heilbrunn writes in Foreign Policy that, at the risk of further alienating Republicans, Hagel could help Obama in cutting the defense budget. In Foreign Policy, J. Dana Stuster writes that in Hagel’s 2008 book, America: Our Next Chapter, he presents himself as “an Eisenhower conservative — low budgets and no wars.”

Hagel was first elected to the Senate in 1996 and served two terms. While in the Senate, he worked on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. He currently serves as co-chairman of Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board and is a member of the Secretary of Defense’s Policy Board.

In 2005, Hagel, a veteran of the Vietnam War, told CFR President Richard N. Haass that:

Trust and confidence in America is about more than our military might or economic power. Power alone will not build coalitions, will not inspire trust, will not demonstrate confident leadership, will not resolve complicated problems, and will not defeat the threats that the United States will confront in the 21st century.

He went on to say that the “complexities of the 21st century demand strategic, over-the-horizon American thinking, diplomacy and leadership.” Hagel has been a strong supporter for the international affairs budget and has “spoken out in favor of the importance of development and diplomacy,” according to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

In 2011 at a CFR event, Hagel said of the military:

I always got along very well with all the generals. I disagreed with a lot of them, but I always put the generals in a little different category because the way it’s supposed to work — but I’m not sure it’s really worked out this way in the last 20 years, I think the military has become far more politically influential, setting policy, in our country than is healthy for democracy.

I think the military have been in a very difficult spot. And I’ll give you an example. During the Bush years — the Bush years, in trying to sell and continue to sell Iraq — they would bring up as witnesses before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, other committees, generals as their witnesses, which in fact was really unprecedented.

And the reason they did that, of course, was very smart. Who was going to pick on the poor general, because in those days, not very long ago — and everybody knows this — the military was the most trusted, the most admired institution in America for many years. And they’re still very high. They’ve lost some of it. But considering other institutions, and relevant to other institutions, the military is still stratospheric.

In Politico, Stephen M. Walt lists five reasons why he believes Hagel is a good choice for the nomination. The Politico also compiled these ten facts about him.

–Contributing Editor Kirsti Itameri and Deputy Editor Toni Johnson

Fiscal Cliff Update: The Lingering Uncertainty

Toni Johnson — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:54:33 +0000

Congress was able to come to a last minute deal to stave off going over the so-called fiscal cliff, with President Obama signing a compromise fiscal package into law on January 2, 2013.

This chart compares several alternative fiscal cliff proposals with the final compromise legislation courtesy of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog:

The full text of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 signed by the president can be read here.

Yet, with a debate on the debt ceiling looming and the (now-delayed) budget sequester coming down the road in the next several weeks, experts say things remain uncertain as Obama enters his second term.

CFR’s Robert Kahn, in a recent blog post, says the cliff is dead, long live the cliff:

This deal avoids hard choices and ensures continued policy uncertainty that will be a drag on the economy. It produces a small amount of revenue and makes permanent tax rates that are too low for the long term. For all these negatives, give this deal a grade of incomplete.

The Politico reports President Obama will not enjoy much of a victory lap from his win over congressional Republicans on the fiscal cliff fight in last days of his first term, for about 16 trillion reasons:

The staggering national debt — up about 60 percent from the $10 trillion Obama inherited when he took office in January 2009 — is the single biggest blemish on Obama’s record, even if the rapid descent into red began under President George W. Bush.

Obama has long emphasized Bush’s role in digging the immense hole. But he owns it now, and it’s a significant political liability as he girds for a fast-approaching brawl with the GOP over how to deal with converging deadlines of a new debt ceiling fight and the need to come up with $1 trillion in deficit reduction mandated by the so-called “sequester.”

Though a number of analysts have criticized the performance of 112th Congress, which ended on January 3, CFR’s Edward Alden, in recent blog post, says maybe they shouldn’t get as much blame as they have, since “this Congress actually got many of the big things right”:

It is unquestionably true that difficult decisions about how to bring revenues and spending into balance with an aging population have yet to be made. But it’s hard to single out the 112th Congress here. Various commissions have warned for two decades now that the United States needs to reform its entitlement programs, and many Congresses have failed to step up even in much stronger economic times when the decisions would have been easier politically. It’s also true that the new Congress and the President will be revisiting the fight over taxes and spending cuts almost immediately, which is a spectacle all of us would prefer not to watch again and again. But politics are rarely pretty.

The best that can be said of the 112th is that it muddled through. It was ugly, but the results were not half-bad. That’s an accomplishment worth acknowledging.

Read CFR’s Backgrounder on the debt ceiling debate here, and this CFR Backgrounder looks more broadly at U.S. deficits and national debt.

Video Brief Roundup: India, Africa, and Latin America

Newsteam Staff — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:54:16 +0000

These videos are from a series with CFR fellows on vital foreign policy and national security topics that will face President Barack Obama in his second term. They were recorded during the campaign and originally posted as part of the President’s Inbox, a collection of materials on issues that will face the next president beginning next year.

Daniel Markey on India

The incoming administration must be prepared for “a significant potential for near-term crisis” between India and its historical rival Pakistan, says CFR’s Daniel Markey. The president will also have to engage with India on top foreign policy priorities including Iran’s nuclear program and the U.S. departure from Afghanistan, Markey says.