Matt also wonders why it is the US treats Egypt with kid's gloves, despite tough talk about democracy-promotion. Let's remember some realpolitik:
Egypt agreed to a US-negotiated peace treaty with Israel.
Egypt provided the largest number of troops from any Arab Nation in the 1991 Gulf War. This was seen as critical to building international support and legitimacy for the war.
We still give Egypt money because of both these actions.
Whether or not we are still being too nice to Egypt for some nice things she did 10 and 20 years ago is a separate question. But our relationship with Egypt is at least based on actions Egypt has taken, unlike the situation in Uzbekistan or even Pakistan where we seem to be cozying up to anti-democratic rulers without getting much in exchange.
Big Media Matt has a meaty post on new the CIA's long-term security forecasts. Some observations that may take a bit of air out of his "there's really not that much to worry about" view of the National Intellligence Council's analysis:
The EU may lift its arms embargo with China at some point in the near future. That would give China access to more than "outdated Russian [and Israeli] equipment".
Already President Chirac and to a lesser extent Chancellor Schroeder are supporting an end to the arms embargo.
So the day China acquires more advanced weapons may not be far off. But it's still not clear that this is an appreciable threat.
Matt seems to think it's the NIC's job to come up with plausible scenarios that represent real threats to national security, like "China raises an army and takes over the West Coast. Would you believe Oregon? How about Guam? How about half of a fishing villiage on the shore of Guam?". That's not its job. The NIC's job is to assess risk and find points of uncertainty. So long as you don't think the US will go to war with Europe any time soon, the largest points of uncertainty in the world are in India and China. The troubling thing about the rise of China and India is that they don't know what will happen. There isn't some country we can use as a case study for bringing a third-world country out of poverty at the scale and rate that China and India are improving.
The most basic risk stemming from the rise of China and India, to security wonks, is their increasing energy demand. What happens when global oil demand is greater than global production? Again, no one knows, but if Chinese and Indian oil consumption continues to rise at the breakneck pace it rose at in 2004, we may find out soon. Therefore the real Nightmare Scenario is an not a regional alliance of east asian countries -- China, Japan, South Korea, etc. -- but alliance between China and various petrostates, as outlined by Paul Roberts in The End of Oil. In this forecast, the combination of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, coupled with China's energy appetite, result in an oil embargo or semi-embargo against the US. Havoc ensues. This doesn't need to be military havoc in order to threaten US interests; OPEC managed to cause a lot of economic distress without a particularly large or well-equipped army. The threat of an Chinese-to-Arab arms supply might also raise the casualty rate of a hypothetical military action in the Mideast to point of being morally or politically unacceptable, especially in a case where we are clearly going to war for oil and not for ... well, I've lost count of the various reasons given for our "splendid little war".
Matt makes one very high-quality insight [emphasis mine]:
The main thing to worry about, I think, is not that putative rivals will grow too strong, but that potential friends won't be as strong as they could be. American military spending should probably shrink over the medium to long term. It would be nice if that didn't just result in a global anarchy. If the other rich democracies spent a sum somewhere between what they're spending now and what we're spending now, then the overall capabilities of the free world would be enhanced, the burden on America lessened, and we could have a more even sharing of the decision-making, less crazy overreactions on our part, less resentments and blowback from elsewhere, and a bunch of other good stuff.
The gap between US defense spending an EU defence [sic] spending is in fact the Real Problem, but George Bush unintentionally stumbled upon a solution: bluntly, he pissed of Europe. This has accelerated the call for an integrated EU military and foreign policy, to provide a counterbalance to the United States. Today, the rest of the world has very little real leverage to prevent the US from doing whatever it wants militarily, as seen by the Balkan intervention and the Iraq War.
The only solution is to create a military that has enough strength that it can act as a credible bargaining chip. Imagine if the EU army were three-fifths the size of the US army. In that case, it could reasonably commit between 80,000 and 120,000 troops, depending on the size of the other defence commitments this hypothetical has. It would be tough for a sitting President to justify turning down that many "free" troops and thus force the US to accept some European demands with regard to conduct of the war, post-conflict reconstructions, etc.
Such a day is still a long way off. If Europe upped its defense spending to US levels tomorrow, it would still take years, perhaps a decade or two, to reach parity with the US military, because the US is so far ahead in both training and military capital (tanks, boats, planes, hi-tech foot soldier gadgets, communications gear, etc.).
But Matt should be pleased that various anti-Bush leaders are getting tired of Texan Foreign Policy[1] and are banding together to do something about it.
I read only the Executive Summary, but I'm surprised potential conflict between India and Pakistan not particularly high on the list of threats. In fact it's not mentioned specifically at all.
I'm not sure what alliances a large-scale conflict would trigger, but I'm pretty sure the whole world would respond to The Bomb going off.
[1] LBJ may have the most impressive domestic accomplishments of any president since Franklin Roosevelt, which we should not forget when evaluating his presidency. But there must be something in the water in Texas when it comes to foreign policy.
