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My Fellow Americans: Let’s Pick a Foreign Policy Model and Stick With It
Claire’s post this morning reminds us just what an unbelievable mess our foreign policy has become under this administration. While President Obama bears an enormous amount of blame for that situation, I’d like to channel Jay Nordlinger by pointing that a majority of the American people elected Obama on a platform of withdrawal from Iraq. The president’s blunders and missteps have clearly made the situation even worse than it might have been under a more competent commander-in-chief, but responsibility primarily lies with the electorate for selecting him and, implicitly, the policies he promised. This wasn’t primarily a matter of competence, but of vision.
Indeed, the American people seem to have no clear idea about the kind of relationship we want with a post-Cold War world, and we seem to change our strategic vision at least as often as we change presidents. The Bush-Obama transition is the sharpest to date, but it may well be eclipsed by the difference between what we have now and the policy of whomever is sworn in next January. These sorts of national mood swings are not only unbecoming of a great nation, but also extremely dangerous; tactical flexibility is good, but strategic incoherence is always, always bad news.
There are — as there have been for a very long time — a variety of options for us to chose among, ranging from building a moat around Fortress America, to being the World’s Policeman, to becoming an occasional dragon slayer, to liberal imperialism, to multinational dithering. All of these have their smarter and stupider manifestations, as well as their moderate and extreme versions, and I’ve got my own highly-opinionated judgments about each (more on that another time), including a rather low opinion of our current preferences. But oscillating from one to the other and back again is a very bad idea. We need to pick a policy, soon, and stick with it.
No policy should ever be permanent, and any smart strategist regularly reevaluates and adjusts as circumstances change. But some degree of consistency that extends beyond predictable eight-year cycles will not only be greatly to our advantage, but the world’s.
Good leadership from on top should help, but the real answer will have to come from within the hearts and minds of 300 million citizens.
Published in Foreign Policy
Tom,
We are a republic! Republics do not have stable foreign policies. Empires have stable foreign policies.
They only way to have a stable foreign policy is to transform into something different. Now, I am all more a strong, imperialist foreign policy, with the motto: All nations are sovereign, but some are more sovereign than others.
Alas, the voters do not agree.
This is why we have historically had “Doctrines” to keep the strategic priorities clear.
Revive the Monroe Doctrine!
Explain? I’m not quite following.
The Stephens Doctrine would be things like:
Someone violates US Airspace = Act of War
US violates someone’s airspace = Tough
Policies change when the leaders change. It’s far easier for a dictatorship (which may or may not be an empire) to have stable policies – both foreign and domestic. Once upon a time, the two parties largely agreed on foreign policy issues. Clearly, that is no longer the case. In this new world, I would hope that our leaders take that into account and not start anything that they cannot finish in four years.
Your main thrust is the fickle nature of our foreign policy. That is to be expected with voters. Athens once voted to put to death the men of a city, and then the next day changed their minds and sent rowers to countermand their order. They only arrived just in time. Sparta, on the other hand, had a much more stable policy.
The voter does not want American power used in naked self-interest. We want our power to keep us safe We want safe travel and shipping. We want hungry people to get fed and we want to help in disasters. Those things are pretty consistent parts of our character.
However, when something like Somolia happens, we sour. From the American stand point, we were helping to feed people and take out some bad guys. When the whole city comes out and shoots up our guys, we are ready to say “Forget this, these people are not worth it”. When it becomes clear that the other guy is not like us in his thoughts and attitudes, we recoil and think better of our help.
Unless we see a direct threat, we just don’t want to spend blood and treasure. Our whole existence at home is that problems are solved with rules, laws and talk. Between nations, this is a fantasy, but the American voter does not live in that world. It is a naive optimism about humanity. It is what got us into trouble with Iraq. We thought that we could help plant a democratic nation. That proved harder and more work than we wanted. We only did it to German and Japan because the USSR was a threat..
So we bounce around as our emotions see fit. An Imperial foreign policy would be more about what is best for America, more long term thinking, and more active plotting against enemies. It takes someone in place a long time to guide it. Having a monarch or a life time aristocracy helps.
The main practical problem that I have with “nation building” is the long-obvious fickleness of the American electorate. It was predictable in 2002 that the plan to build a stable democracy in Iraq was unlikely to turn out well. The public would eventually, I believed, tire of the war effort and demand we declare victory go home.
The only question in my mind was whether Bush would be able to stay the course beyond the 2004 election (I figured that he would), in which case I predicted that he’d be replaced by a Democrat in 2008 who promised to end the war.
This is who we are and what we do. Foreign policy decisions must account for this immutable fact.
Let’s not forget that the public was lied to with regard to Obama. No due diligence was done by the media nor by the party. They, of course, knew better than to look deeply into his red-diaper background because they wanted a hard leftist as president.
The real problem with Obama is the media — they are unprofessional and they are Democratic Party operatives. The public needs to know this and to demand professional reporters and editors and producers.
I don’t get it. What was the gigantic change from Bush to Obama?
It’s not just what we should try to do, it is what we can do. We lost sight of that, and I’m afraid a lot of it was Bush’s fault because we were beginning to learn our limits. Of course progressives and liberal Democrats never knew what those limits were. Since they think they can centrally plan our economy or at least guide the minutia of every sector with clever regulation, and believe they can manipulate cultures positively with top down materialism, they are quick to believe we can do the same abroad. We can’t, and most certainly we cannot create societies, cultures economies and political systems abroad by just wanting to and spending a lot of money or control events and directions undertaken by foreign governments, peoples and historical economic political and forces. Once we ingest that reality into our political and intellectual leadership we can be far more forward leaning and sustain the kind of support we had during the cold war. Getting this vast heterogeneous easily distracted population behind a foreign policy requires a very simple vision, a coherent doctrine that makes sense to folks who really don’t have time nor inclination to learn about the world and a foreign policy establishment like we had in the post war world.
What are the missteps? Obama believes that a weakened and impotent America will bring peace. He told the voters we’d step away…and we have.
I think we largely agree on what our policy should be. The problem is that we keep electing leaders who adopt ideas different from this, and very different from each other. As such we go in four years from Bush’s second inaugural to Obama and then…. who knows?
In terms of nation building we learned important lessons in Iraq (although some of us worried about it before the war): there are levels of cultural development, and you can’t skip over stages, e.g., moving from tribalism to democracy. A country has to have a sufficiently strong “elite” (strong in terms of cultural and political development) to be able to make this kind of change. And I don’t think we spearhead the movement, although some level of support might be appropriate. I can’t help thinking about the Blue Revolution (is that the right color) in Iran. I still think we could have helped them in the background to succeed. But it started from within Iran.
Leaving Iraq under the circumstances we did and at the time we did. Obama has fairly explicitly renounced nation-building in favor of extremely air limited campaigns, with the possible exception of Afghanistan.
For the record, I don’t like either of these models.
a friendly amendment?
As Dear Leader has said, elections have consequences. One of the consequences is that if you disagree with current foreign policy you get to replace it with your own. If we want a consistent foreign policy, we need to elect consistent leaders. At this point that would probably be Hilarity. I don’t think that is a better answer than a wholesale change of foreign policy.
For starters, Bush got into Iraq and Obama got out. Unfortunately, Obama got out before Iraq was a going concern.
Hopefully, we also learned that we need the administration in power to ensure that his State Department and military commanders follow a consistent policy. Under George W., the two were at war with each other.
It’s seems to me that foreign policy should be pretty straightforward. Clarity is a very important characteristic of foreign policy. To that end:
In short, other countries should realize that they have a lot to gain by allying with the U.S., and a lot to lose by joining those who refuse to be good citizens of the world. Attacks of American allies should result in immediate offers of military aid to the attacked. Countries under threat from aggressive neighbors should be solicited as potential allies and defended. Countries that join alliances with the enemies of the U.S. should be punished economically. Military deployments should be used to threaten those who use military force first. That sort of thing.
One specific short-term proposal: The U.S. needs to re-adopt the policy of being able to fight a two-front war at any time, and to build up whatever military assets are required to achieve that goal. Without that capability, any time the U.S. gets bogged down in a region it destabilizes the world as bad actors realize they have a window of opportunity for shenanigans.
You mean following the Iraq exit schedule that the Bush administration negotiated?
I’ll grant you that the Obama administration hasn’t done as much nation building, but the almost limitless, unchecked interventionism of the Bush years has continued under Obama.
Policy should acknowledge political reality.
The plain reality is that American voters haven’t supported any war for more than a few years in many decades. So it is foolish to enter a conflict with a plan that extends well beyond that timeframe.
The plain reality is that even the last Republican President failed to establish clear, measurable, and achievable objectives; that even Republicans generally are susceptible to mission creep. So voters would be fools to trust them. So policy must take this distrust into account and, again, restrict itself to quick and clear objectives.
Also, if we are to continue to employ our military in philanthropic pursuits not directly related to our own national security (as it seems Americans still generally believe we should), then we need a generally agreed set of principles to determine which of the endless victims of genocide and tyranny around the world take priority.
Also…
Come on, Fred – you’re repeating a cheap talking point the left uses. That exit schedule was always subject to conditions on the ground and open to re-negotiation. That’s how these deals always work – you set a deadline, and then when the deadline arrives you sit down and renegotiate.
The Obama administration engaged in a half-hearted attempt to re-negotiate and then bailed as soon as it was feasible to do so. It was not a requirement – it was a failure of diplomacy from a President who very much wanted to get all troops out of there for political reasons. Then he blamed it on Bush.
How they “always” work?
You have other examples of the US involved in a decade-long war and then negotiating a withdrawal with the sovereign government of the country involved?
I’m genuinely curious. If you have an example (or several), I’d be interested in reading it.
That is what I mean by “Tough”.
I should do a post that is my desired foreign policy. It could be long and detailed or it could be the word “Tough”
Vietnam
Yeah. The voters just don’t want to use might to make right nearly enough. :(
More seriously, American voters really are big on long wars. In fact, even the sainted WWII, the greatest generation was growing restless. If you are not directly threatened, it is hard to keep fighting.
We were also negotiating with the North Vietnamese government at the time of the withdraw. They were party to the Paris Peace Accords.
The situation was not analogous in any way to Iraq.
Japan, South Korea, West Germany, etc.