A conversation with incoming FSI Fellow and former Obama National Security official Colin Kahl

Dr. Colin Kahl recently came to Stanford as the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow, an endowed faculty chair at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Previously, Dr. Kahl served as National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden and a deputy assistant to the President. Kahl also served in the Obama administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon, responsible for advising the Secretary on Middle East policy.

On Feb. 5th, SP sat down with Dr. Kahl to discuss his views on President Trump’s foreign policy, the situation on the Korean peninsula, and perspectives on the legacy of President Obama’s foreign policy.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.

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Jake Dow: It’s been reported that former Bush official Victor Cha, the prospective Ambassador to South Korea, was dropped because he wouldn’t support a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea. How concerned are you by these developments, do you think that the Trump administration is seriously considering a first strike?

Colin Kahl: I’m very concerned about the North Korea situation in general. I do think that there are elements within the Trump administration that may be attracted to the notion of some type of preventive military strike. There is reporting, and I have separate information as well, that suggests that the NSC staff did task the Pentagon to provide a range of military options to include limited strikes, and while I’m not privy to the exact contingency planning, may be considering a limited strike against a missile in preparation for launch, or a less limited but not all out strike that goes after subset of North Korea’s missile infrastructure.

I do not think that the majority of of folks in the Trump administration support this. I see no indication that Secretary Mattis or Chairman Dunford supports it or that Secretary of State Tillerson supports it. I would say that the thing that concerns me the most is that some of the most prominent folks in the Trump administration, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and the CIA Director Pompeo, have made arguments which seem to justify the logic of a preventive military strike to prevent North Korea from crossing certain red lines.

JD: Regarding the concept of a limited strike on North Korea, how do you explain this view that North Korea is rational enough to not escalate after a limited strike, but they are too irrational to be dealt with through deterrence?

CK: I don’t think there’s actually a good answer to that.

What concerned me about things that McMaster and Pompeo said is that they essentially made the argument that Kim Jong Un is a fundamentally irrational actor. He’s a brutal dictator who’s massacred large numbers of his people and he wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons. Similar arguments were made against Saddam Hussein. They’ve also made the argument that North Korea might sell their weapons or the technology, and as a consequence, there is no situation where the United States can live with or default back to a deterrence posture towards North Korea like we had towards the Soviet Union or Communist China during the Cold War.

I think the problem with that argument is that most North Korea analysts believe Kim Jong Un is fundamentally rational. It doesn’t mean he’s not brutal. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin were brutal too, and they were deterrable. The prime objective that Kim Jong Un has is regime survival and to keep his family in power in North Korea. All of that would be put at risk to use nuclear weapons against the United States or one of our treaty allies. But if you’re convinced that he’s not rational and not deterrable then a preventive military strike suddenly starts to look like the lesser of two evils, that if we’re going to have a war it’s better to have the war now before he has the ability to reach the continental United States.

People might ask if Kim is rational and can deterred outside of a crisis, why couldn’t he be deterred inside a crisis? The concern there is if you believe the Kim Jong Un is rational and values regime survival over all else, that’s consistent with him escalating in the face of a limited strike because he’ll have no confidence that it is only a limited war. He may also feel that failure to retaliate in kind would put his regime in danger domestically. It’s consistent to make the argument that he’s rational enough to be deterred from using nuclear weapons but would still retaliate against limited limited strike.

JD: There’s a variety of Congressional efforts to limit in some way the President’s ability to launch a first strike against North Korea. What do you think the proper role is of Congress in overseeing or asserting authority in this issue? How do you balance the President’s Commander in Chief authority with the genuine worries of massive conflict?

CK: On one hand Presidents of the United States should have a lot of discretion to be able to use force in extreme circumstances to respond to threats to the national interest. On the other hand, we do live in a democracy and you know it’s important that when we launch wars, especially ones that could have severe consequences, that it’s done with the informed consent of the American people. Even a war that was limited to the Korean Peninsula could put at risk tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of American lives. If we’re talking about a preventive war, it’s my firm belief that the President of the United States should be required to seek the informed consent of the American public through the Congress, getting an Authorization of the Use of Military Force. I think the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was probably the greatest foreign policy blunder of my lifetime, but the Bush administration at least understood that they needed to have the informed consent of Congress if they were going to launch a preventive war. And I think that there’s no indication that the Trump administration feels similarly. So I’m sympathetic to the desire of Congress to impose that requirement on the president.

JD: Moving to Iran, we’ve recently seen big waves of protests in a way that we haven’t since Green Revolution, but manifesting in a different way. How do you assess the genesis of this movement? Where is this political emotion coming from that from the American perspective seemed to come of out of the blue?

CK: It was a surprise to everybody, including folks who focus on the country much more intensely than I do. I don’t know that anybody in our intelligence community anticipated it either. The big difference between the protests over the last couple several weeks and during the fraudulent elections in 2009 is that in 2009, the trigger for the protests was the perception that the regime had rigged the election to make sure that Ahmadinejad came back in power, and that his reformist opponent was defeated. It was a protest that was largely oriented around a political movement that was already existing in the lead up to the elections. It was very urban centric, very Tehran centric, much more elitist .

There’s a sense that these protests are different, that they are for the most part not happening in Tehran, they’re happening in smaller towns and cities and in rural areas throughout Iran and are being driven by average Iranians who are fed up with their system. In some ways analysts see this as an indication that these protests are actually a graver threat to the regime because they are emanating in places that the regime  takes for granted.  There’s a lot of pent up frustration in the system. All of that said, at least for the moment, the protests appear to have kind of gone down somewhat, which suggests to me that there may be a latent possibility for a resurgence of this. There were a lot of people a couple weeks ago who thought that we were in a revolutionary moment in Iran, but I think that was a bunch of Western analysts who were understandably enthusiastic for this regime entering the dustbin of history, but that seems to have been a little premature

JD:  In Obama administration’s policy towards Iran, there was a conscious effort to not link the nuclear issue to the other issues, whether regional activity, domestic politics, etc. Critics of Obama and the JCPOA or “Iran Deal” say this was the wrong decision, pointing to protesters and accelerating regional assertiveness. How do you reassess the non linkage policy in hindsight?

CK: It’s a little bit of revisionist history because if you actually go back and look at the debates during the beginning of the Obama administration in 2009 through 2015, when the nuclear deal was struck, you will find that every Iran analyst was making the argument that whatever threat Iran posed in a general sense, no aspect of the threat was more problematic for the United States and our allies than the nuclear issue.  The notion that Obama kind of foolishly prioritized the nuclear issue to the detriment of everything else strikes me as crazy because as the official in charge of the Iran portfolio and many other countries in the Middle East at the beginning of the the Obama administration, most of my time was spent thinking about what happens if we go to war with Iran because of their nuclear program. Either because we would launch a war to stop them from crossing the nuclear finish line or the Israelis would launch a war and drag us in. The prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear armed state, the equivalent of North Korea on the Strait of Hormuz, or a major war launched by US or the Israelis to forestall that outcome, was an enormous preoccupation.

The second thing is it is true that there were that there were people who believed that only way to solve the nuclear issue was to pursue a policy of regime change. While people weren’t really signing up for a massive military invasion of Iran, a country the size of Iraq and Afghanistan put together in terms of population, there was hope that some combination of military threats and crippling economic sanctions could in essence bankrupt the regime into collapse.

Our analysts in the entire period that I was there in the Obama administration never thought that the regime was on the brink of economic collapse, even just before the Iran nuclear deal struck. One interesting data point for people to keep in mind is at the point that the Iran nuclear deal was struck, the sanctions that we imposed on Iran had done something like 200 billion dollars of damage to the Iranian economy. But this same regime suffered 600 billion dollars of damage and nearly a million casualties during the Iran-Iraq war and it still took him eight years to settle for a tie. This was not a regime that was teetering on the brink of collapse. And the problem with the regime change folks was that if you made regime change your policy, you were likely to increase the motivation of the regime to pursue nuclear weapons.

The last point that people make is that we should have insisted that with the nuclear deal we wouldn’t lift the accompanying sanctions unless Iran stopped all its support for terrorism, regional militancy, its ballistic missile program and everything else. There is just no evidence that Iran was willing to do that. And I think one concern was that there wasn’t any international support for making for conditioning a lifting of nuclear sanctions on non nuclear activities. Unless we had international support we couldn’t keep the sanctions regime in place. There was also a concern by the international community and our negotiators that if you tried to fold all of Iran’s regional behavior into the negotiations it would actually transfer leverage to Iran.

JD: Specifically in the national security space, what’s something that you don’t think the Obama administration gets enough credit for and then what’s one regret, something that you wish had gone differently?

CK: The Obama’s administration doesn’t get enough credit for is restoring a much more balanced approach to U.S. leadership. There’s a tendency in Washington especially to define American engagement in leadership is very militaristic terms, that is we’re only leading if we’re bombing a place and also to say that if we’re not overinvested in the Middle East, that we’ve somehow retreated from the rest of the world.  What Obama understood is that we’re actually much more effective as a leader if we are tending to our economy at home, our alliances abroad, the overall architecture of the liberal international order, existing international institutions, building new agreements and thinking of engagement as leading with diplomacy and not just the use or not principally the use of force.

If you actually look at the Obama administration’s achievements in that light it makes a lot more sense:the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal which addressed the the most proximate threat to the nonproliferation regime, the normalization of relations with Cuba which opened up a new chapter in our relations with the Western Hemisphere, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which was the biggest trade accord in a generation stitching together the economies of 12 different countries making up 40 percent global GDP and a very high standards agreement that would have given the United States much more skin in the game in Asia to compete with China in all sorts of ways. Obama thought about American leadership in a much more comprehensive way that wasn’t just about using using military force and it wasn’t just about the Middle East.

A lot of the anxiety that people have currently about President Trump is precisely that he’s overcorrected to the other direction, the only form of American leadership he appears to be comfortable with is the military instrument. He doesn’t care at all about diplomacy, certainly not resourcing or staffing the State Department for that purpose, and they don’t have strategies for any of the problems that we’re talking about, North Korea or Iran, conflicts in Yemen, Syria and how to deal with Russia and China.

I think where in retrospect the Obama administration may have seen as being less successful is in the great power competition category. From the end of the Cold War through the Obama years, there was a hope in the convergence hypothesis, we’d moved past the point of great power competition, that other countries were either too weak or had so many common interests with the United States and the overall liberal international order that we had constructed that there would be more of a convergence between US and would-be great powers. I think for the most part that is true among the advanced industrial democracies: the United States, the countries of Europe, the democratic actors in Asia. But it has proved not to be true with China and Russia.

While engagement by the Obama administration of both Russia, in the form of the Reset at the beginning and China throughout, paid huge dividends, because we prioritized engagement over competition with the Russians and the Chinese, they probably crept closer to a sphere of influence in their regions then we should be comfortable with. I think the notion that there’s been a return of great power politics, that we have to take it seriously and that we need to think of it in terms of a competitive frame is probably right.

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Jake Dow is the managing editor of Stanford Politics. This interview appears in the April 2018 issue of Stanford Politics Magazine.