Vali Nasr Council on Foreign Relations; professor, Tufts University
I think this is much worse than any other president's inheritance. You have a war in Iraq. You have a war in Afghanistan that is getting out of hand. You have a virtual Taliban conquest of Afghanistan -- in fact, a wholesale rolling back of everything we achieved in 2001. …
You have a conflict with Iran, which is, at best, stuck and, at worse, going in the direction of a conflict. And then you also still have a great deal of suspicion towards the United States and its intentions in the Arab world. You have cynicism and disgruntlement on the Arab-Israeli issue. And you have many conflicts like the one between Turkey and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq; between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state. And all of these are, in very complicated ways, tied together. The United States is involved in all of them. And it's not winning in any of them. …
So the president inherits two very hot wars.
He inherits two hot wars and he inherits an absence or a vacuum of foreign policy and strategy in Washington as to what to do. I think that's very critical. … The next president, literally, will have to create policy in every one of these circumstances.
And the status of the military? What shape is the military in?
The U.S. military is doing fairly well in Iraq. It's got ahead of the conflict, at least. … The military has a game plan in Afghanistan, as well.
... These are problems that are not just military. These are broader, strategic foreign policy problems. And, in fact, one of the failures of the Bush administration is that it has never elevated the discussion above the military level. …
I think part of the challenge of the next president is not just to not get bogged down in the bean-counting with brigades and troops, etc., but rather, try to put his hands around what do we do with this region as a whole. How do we extricate ourselves from [an] interconnected set of conflicts and get ahead of the problems in this region? Develop a forest view of what's going on in this region.
A lot of people that we've spoken to have talked about how exhausted the military is and, therefore, the next president's hands are tied. Can you talk about that?
Without a doubt every one of these conflicts we're talking about, with the exception of the Arab-Israeli conflict, has a military component to it. …
But there's a larger problem here. The ability of the United States to persuade adversaries or friends to follow certain policies or change behaviors is being diminished. …
Our enemies are not intimidated and our friends are no longer confident in our abilities. So Iran very clearly calculates that the United States does not have the stamina to pursue a full-fledged military campaign against Iran.
Pakistan now believes that the United States really does not have the capability to either decide the fate of Afghanistan or even intimidate the Pakistani military into continuing to support the U.S. position.
So we're seeing Iran and Pakistan, basically, much more overtly following their own agendas. And then countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, who previously would have trusted the United States to keep the lid on things, no longer trusts that. …
So, in short, the next president inherits no policies that he can continue, no policies that are working right now and a military where his hands are tied, where the force is spent.
Absolutely. In other words, the next president arrives at the White House in a situation where U.S. goals in the region are still maximalist. But U.S. means are now not there to support them. So we have maximum goals with minimal means.
US think thank is completly confused how to tackle two wars at a time ,Iraq still need US presence for much longer period and Afghanistan is going out of hand
