by Glenn N. Holliman
Readers: do check for comments at the end of this article. Some very thoughtful persons in the world. And a note of congratulations to one of our respondents!
My son, Christopher S. Holliman, is a rabid reader of politics and current events. He found the following article by Gideon Rose, and passed it along to me. This tome makes encouraging reading for those who recognize the strengths as well as the limits of American power and influence in the world. The article is long, but telling. Below, a photograph of Chris, a professional librarian, on a weekend in New York. He is the father of two of my grandchildren.
What Obama Gets Right
Keep Calm and Carry the Liberal Order On
How should one judge a president’s handling of foreign policy?
Some focus on what happens in a few lonely moments of crisis, casting the
nation’s leader as Horatius at the bridge or Casey at the bat. But a better
analogy would be a member of a relay team or a middle relief pitcher: somebody
who takes over from a predecessor, does a hard job for a while, and then passes
things on to the next guy.
In baseball, there are special statistics used to judge such
players, the hold and the blown save, which essentially tally whether the
pitcher’s team keeps or loses the lead while he’s in the game.
Looked at in
such a light, Barack Obama has done pretty well. Having inherited two wars and
a global economic crisis from the George W. Bush administration—the foreign
policy equivalent of runners on base with no outs—Obama has extricated the
country from some old problems, avoided getting trapped in some new ones, and
made some solid pickups on the side.
There have been errors, wild pitches, and lost opportunities. But
like George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Obama will likely pass on to his
successor an overall foreign policy agenda and national power position in
better shape than when he entered office, ones that the next administration can
build on to improve things further. Given how many administrations fail even
that limited test, such an accomplishment is worthy of praise rather than the
contempt the administration’s foreign policy often receives.
The key to Obama’s success has been his grasp of the big picture:
his appreciation of the liberal international order that the United States has
nurtured over the last seven decades, together with his recognition that the
core of that order needed to be salvaged by pulling back from misguided
adventures and feuds in the global periphery. The president is variously
painted as a softheaded idealist, a cold-blooded realist, or a naive
incompetent.
But he is actually best understood as an ideological liberal with
a conservative temperament—somebody who felt that after a period of reckless
over expansion and belligerent unilateralism,
the country’s long-term foreign policy goals could best be furthered by
short-term retrenchment. In this, he was almost certainly correct, and with the
necessary backpedaling having been accomplished, Washington can turn its
attention to figuring out how to
get the
liberal order moving forward once again.
PRIMACY AND WORLD ORDER
For generations, the central challenge for U.S. foreign policy has
been straightforward: consolidate, protect, and extend the liberal
international order that the United States helped create after World War II.
Reflecting on the nightmares of the interwar period, when unregulated markets and
uncoordinated behavior led to economic disaster and the rise of aggressive
dictatorships, Western policymakers in the 1940s set out to construct a global
system that would prevent such problems from recurring.
They ended up doing a
masterful job, weaving together several components of domestic and
international affairs into a unified, expansive, and flexible structure that
has proved more durable and beneficial than they could ever have imagined.
Obama will likely pass on to his successor an
overall foreign policy agenda and national power position in better shape than
when he entered office.
At the core of the order are democracies with mixed economies,
peacefully cooperating and trading with one another while nestling closely
under an American security umbrella. That core is embedded in a variety of
overlapping institutional structures, from the Bretton Woods institutions and
the United Nations, to NATO and the European Union, to an endless array of
cooperative bilateral, regional, and functional groupings.
Because the order
doesn’t discriminate on grounds of geography, race, religion, or other descriptive characteristics, any country that wants to join and is prepared to
play by the rules is allowed in, making it a potentially universal alliance
that is constantly expanding. And because the order has so many aspects and
points of entry, countries not ready to sign up for the whole package at once
can ease into it over time, starting on the margins and progressing toward the
core at their own pace.
This order has been the framework within which a great deal of
economic, social, and political development has proceeded around the globe, to
the lasting benefit of both the United States and the world at large. Its basic
outlines were sketched before the postwar break with the Soviet Union, so
instead of saying that the Cold War caused or defined the order, it is more
accurate to say that the Soviet Union’s unwillingness to take part in the order
caused the Cold War.
What the superpower confrontation did was ensure that the
order was implemented on a partial, rather than universal, basis at first
and with substantial internal
cohesion thanks to the external threat. It was because the Cold War and the
Soviet Union were never the central parts of the story that their passing
changed the world less than many expected, merely paving the way for the
order’s extension into territory that was previously off-limits.
Led by
prudent, committed internationalists, the George H. W. Bush administration
handled American foreign policy well at the start of the post–Cold War era,
giving the order a new lease on life in new circumstances. The administration
used skillful diplomacy to smooth the end of decades of conflict, dampen the
possible ripple effects of the Soviet collapse, and bring a newly reunified
Germany fully inside the order’s institutional framework. It also responded to
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait by assembling a coalition to push Saddam
back and restore order in the Persian Gulf, nudged Israel and the Arabs toward
peace negotiations, and managed U.S. finances responsibly.
The
Clinton administration also handled things well. Its first National Security
Strategy explicitly stated that the country’s prime foreign policy objective
was “enlarging the community of market democracies while deterring and
containing a range of threats to our nation, our allies and our interests,” and
it was generally successful in continuing its predecessor’s efforts along those
lines.
It promoted North American economic integration; expanded NATO into
eastern Europe; maintained the containment of rogue actors such as Iraq, Iran,
and North Korea; and promoted peace processes in the Middle East, the Balkans,
and Northern Ireland. And it, too, managed U.S. finances responsibly.
From Somalia
to Rwanda, Haiti to the Balkans, both the first Bush and the Clinton
administrations committed various errors of omission and commission. They
ignored some global problems, failed to solve others, and made still others
worse. But on balance, competently executing a broadly similar course, they
left the liberal order in better shape than they found it—larger, richer, more
peaceful, more secure, more respected. At the turn of the millennium, the
United States was more powerful than any country had been since ancient Rome,
and its dominance was grudgingly accepted by many other powers because they
were being allowed, and helped, to improve their lot as well. But it was not to
last.
9/11 AND
AFTER
As the
1990s wore on, the threat of great-power conflict receded and globalization
took off. Terrorism became a growing concern, as ever-increasing waves of goods
and peoples flooded across borders, presenting both targets and cover for
rising numbers of violent nonstate actors. Handing the ball to its successor, the
Clinton team warned about the danger of freelance terrorists such as the
radical Islamist group known as al Qaeda.
The new
Bush team had its own ideas, however, and concentrated instead on other
security issues, such as Iraq and China. It kept the broad lines of U.S.
foreign policy intact at first, even though it was less enthused about
multilateralism than its predecessors and so distanced itself from various
perceived constraints on American autonomy, such as the Kyoto Protocol, the
International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Then, on
9/11, a score of terrorists from al Qaeda hijacked four civilian jets and flew
them into targets in New York and Washington, killing thousands.
The Bush administration’s post-9/11 course was
neither the heroic success story supporters claimed nor the nefarious
conspiracy its harshest critics charged.
It was
inevitable that the attacks would make the fight against radical jihadists the
top priority of American policy. And given the complexities involved, it was
inevitable that this fight would last a long time and present many
controversial policy choices.
What was not inevitable was that the attacks
would also produce a major shift in the United States’ approach to the world,
the launching of a costly war in an unrelated country, and an enduring state of
siege. Those things happened because Washington lost its head.
Bush
administration officials could have responded to the attacks with chagrin and
self-recrimination, conceding (at least tacitly) that their initial national
security priorities had been incorrect. If they had done this, they would still
have undertaken a military campaign against al Qaeda and its unrepentant Afghan
hosts, strengthened global counter terrorist operations and intelligence
gathering, and paid more attention to homeland security.
But these actions
would have been couched as defenses and expansions of the liberal order and
would have capitalized on the global outpouring of anger and sympathy that the
attacks had provoked. Instead, the administration lashed out. It clung to many
of its earlier views and incorporated Iraq and other issues into a new foreign
policy framework designed not simply to respond to the attacks or bolster the
order but, as the president put it early on, to “rid the world of evil” through
direct action.
The peculiarities of Middle Eastern politics and American hegemony
also came into play here, offering a larger intellectual and structural
context, a motive and opportunity for the deployment of U.S. power abroad.
Since
al Qaeda was
part of an ideological movement with roots in the economic, social, and
political dysfunction of the Middle East, a plausible argument could be made
that the jihadist threat would persist until the region liberalized and modernized
successfully. And the attacks occurred at precisely the moment when the United
States had amassed extraordinary relative strength but had not yet deployed
that strength in the furtherance of some truly ambitious world role.
The combination of these factors meant that the 9/11 attacks had
the psychological effect of Pearl Harbor and the geopolitical effect of the
1950 communist invasion of South Korea. They instilled fear and a desire for
revenge, loosened the domestic constraints on the deployment of American power,
and led not simply to increased counter terrorist efforts but also to a grand
campaign to achieve total security by fundamentally transforming a broad swath
of the world, often at the point of a gun.
The campaign seemed to go well
at first.
Within months, all members
of the
organization responsible for the attacks had been killed, captured, or driven
into hiding. The Afghan government that had supported the attackers was
overthrown and replaced with a pro-Western regime. And new measures to improve
security and intelligence were set up in the United States and beyond. But the
ball kept rolling.
The Bush team settled on Iraq as its next target, and to justify
its actions, it developed a new doctrine of preventive war, deployed
exaggerated and deceptive rhetoric, and turned a debatable policy choice into a
starkly politicized clash of patriotic boldness versus treasonous cowardice.
The invasion itself proceeded smoothly, but the venture ran into trouble when
it turned out that little practical planning had been done for the post-Saddam
era.
A gradual, agonizing descent into chaos ensued, made even more unpalatable
by the revelation that Saddam’s supposed prohibited weapons programs had been
largely notional. The exposure of prisoner abuse, meanwhile, in conjunction
with the administration’s embrace of torture, rendition, indefinite detention,
and ever-increasing electronic surveillance, fed suspicions that the United
States was abandoning its values in the quest to save them.
By the end of George W. Bush’s first term, his eponymous doctrine
was a dead letter, with each of its three pillars—“preemption,” regime change,
and a Manichaean division between friends and enemies—discredited and
discarded. The soaring rhetoric of his second inaugural address masked the fact
that a reaction had already set in, with many of the administration’s
hard-liners and their policies having left the building.
In his second term, Bush eventually embraced a bold course shift
in Iraq that helped turn the tide of the conflict there (at least temporarily),
and the administration ultimately made impressive progress on issues from
global health and international development to piracy, nuclear proliferation,
and regional diplomacy. But even the administration’s vaunted hawkishness
couldn’t prevent setbacks, such as North Korea’s nuclearization or Russia’s
invasion of Georgia. And the first term’s mistakes overshadowed all, tarnishing
the country’s reputation, souring its relationships, and trapping it in
thankless, seemingly endless foreign interventions. And then, to top it off,
Bush’s final months in office saw a financial collapse that sent the national
and global economy into deep recession.
The Bush administration’s post-9/11 course was neither the heroic
success story supporters claimed nor the nefarious conspiracy its harshest
critics charged. It took on enemies worth opposing. But it was deeply flawed in
both conception and execution, because it tried to muscle history forward,
regardless of resistance. It cast its net too wide, taking on too many tasks of
too great difficulty with too much haste, too few resources, and too little
deliberation. It was a classic cautionary tale of unchecked power goaded into
hubris, followed by folly, followed by nemesis.
And as a result, Bush
bequeathed to his successor a divided country, an economic catastrophe, and two
ongoing wars, one of them heading in the wrong direction.
CORE CURRICULUM
The Obama administration came into office determined to reverse
what it saw as the Bush administration’s mistakes, to “rebalance our long-term
priorities so that we successfully move beyond today’s wars, and focus our
attention and resources on a broader set of countries and challenges,” as the
administration’s initial National Security Strategy put it.
The new team’s first major order of business was dealing with the
financial crisis, which it was able to master with the help of a creative and
activist Federal Reserve. In Iraq, Obama traded the calm generated by the surge
for an orderly and complete military withdrawal, gambling (incorrectly, as it
turned out) that the gains recently made could be sustained indefinitely even
absent a significant U.S. presence or major U.S. involvement.
And in
Afghanistan, for all of the president’s anguished huffing and puffing, he did
essentially the same thing on a later schedule, putting in place his own surge
to gain some stability before heading toward the exit.
Presented with new opportunities for major military interventions
in later years, moreover, the president either refused or authorized only the
minimum necessary to achieve limited goals. From Syria to Ukraine, Yemen to
Iran, the Obama administration has been determined to avoid getting sucked into
yet another quagmire. Rather than boots on the ground or usually even bombers
in the air, this president’s national security tools of choice have been
drones, sanctions, and negotiations.
Obama is best understood as an ideological
liberal with a conservative temperament—somebody who felt that after a period
of reckless overexpansion and belligerent unilateralism,
the country’s long-term foreign policy goals could best be
furthered by short-term retrenchment.
Obama’s critics have cast all of this as naiveté, weakness, or
self-hatred. The president just doesn’t understand the dangers of an unruly
world, the thinking runs, or is too incompetent to prevent such a world’s
emergence, or is actually eager to bring it about because he thinks American
power has done more harm than good. Obama deliberately chose “a foreign policy
designed to produce American decline,” sums up the columnist Charles
Krauthammer. But instead of being mollified, the nation’s enemies are being
emboldened and are surging forward. Retreat is turning into rout, the argument
goes, and the administration will pass on to its successor a newly contentious
world in which American interests and values will increasingly be challenged.
The critics are right about the downsizing of the U.S. global role
and the withdrawal from exposed forward positions. But what they miss is that
Obama’s retrenchment is not universal, his diffidence not complete. The
administration has not abandoned traditional U.S. grand strategy; it has tried
to rescue it from its predecessor’s mismanagement. Obama is prepared to save
the core of the liberal order—but to do so, he is willing to sacrifice the
periphery, both functional and regional.
The United States, he noted in 2010, has “created webs of
commerce, supported an international architecture of laws and institutions, and
spilled American blood in foreign lands, not to build an empire, but to shape a
world in which more individuals and nations could determine their own destiny, and
live with the peace and dignity they deserve.” In order to get back to that
task, however, the nation needed to “pursue a strategy of national renewal and
global leadership—a strategy that rebuilds the foundation of American strength
and influence.” Above all, that meant distinguishing between wants and needs,
and letting some issues and areas slip to the back burner.
As Obama put it when addressing the UN General Assembly in 2013,
talking about the Middle East in particular:
The United States of America is
prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure
our core interests. . . . We will confront external aggression against our
allies and partners. . . . We will ensure the free flow of energy. . . . We
will dismantle terrorist networks that threaten our people. . . . And finally,
we will not tolerate the development or use of weapons of mass destruction.
“To say that these are America’s core interests,” Obama continued,
“is not to say that they are our only interests.” Other goals, such as regional
peace, prosperity, democracy, and human rights, were also important. “But . . .
we can rarely achieve these objectives through
unilateral American action, particularly through military action,” he said. Instead, they could and should be pursued through
longer, broader group efforts—policies that would erect sustainable incentive
structures to nudge things forward over time.
THE DOCTRINE IN PRACTICE
The distinction between core and periphery helps make sense of the
administration’s actions across a range of different cases. In late 2013, for
example, Ukraine was about to improve its relations with Europe. Worried that a
crucial ally might change its orientation, Russian President Vladimir Putin
bribed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych not to make the move. That
triggered a series of popular protests that brought down the Yanukovych
government—at which point Putin sent in Russian forces to seize the Crimean
Peninsula and began giving military support to Russian-allied rebels in eastern
Ukraine.
Shocked by the Russian leader’s brazen brutality, some hawks
argued that this was a replay of the 1930s and called for a bold military
response to stop Russian revanchism in its tracks. But the Obama administration
demurred, content to refuse recognition of the land grab, organize targeted
sanctions against Russia, support the government in Kiev, and keep the
situation contained.
The reason for this balanced reaction—neither fighting nor
appeasing—was that Obama recognized that Ukraine was a core interest for Russia
but a peripheral one for the West. So while it was necessary for Russia to pay
a price for its aggression, it was not necessary for the United States to go to
war itself over the issue.
This policy seems eminently sensible: NATO members have an
ironclad security guarantee of American protection, which Washington will
unquestionably enforce if necessary. But Ukraine is not a member of NATO; it is
still part of Europe’s strategic periphery, rather than part of its core. The
United States did not intervene in similar situations in Hungary in 1956,
Czechoslovakia in 1968, or Poland in 1981; why should it be expected to do so
in Ukraine in 2014? Like those other countries have, Ukraine will probably join
the liberal order eventually, when circumstances permit. But it is not the
United States’ job to fight to bring it in before then.
With regard to the Middle East, similarly, hawks fault Obama for
letting conflict rage and turbulence spread. And it is true that the American
withdrawal from Iraq and nonintervention in Syria were ultimately followed by
the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS, a vicious terrorist ministate, in the
badlands of those countries.
But looking at recent history, the president concluded that the
region’s various domestic problems are neither easily solvable nor his to
solve. After all, as the former administration official Philip Gordon has
noted, “In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly
disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was
a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the
result is a costly disaster.” And in Yemen, one might add, the United States
relied on drone strikes and active diplomacy, and the result is a costly
disaster.
If the Middle East is bent on convulsing itself in costly disasters,
as seems unfortunately true these days, trying to play a constructive role from
the sidelines rather than getting embroiled directly represents not weakness
but prudence.
As for the administration’s signature diplomatic achievement, the
Iran nuclear deal, it exemplifies Obama’s broader approach to foreign policy.
Having pledged as a candidate to be willing to talk to any country without
preconditions to see if relations could be improved, once elected, Obama spent
years doggedly pursuing a less conflictual relationship with Tehran. Judging
that the Islamic Republic was not about to collapse, he gave a cold shoulder to
the opposition Green Movement that sprang up after Iran’s disputed 2009
presidential election. When the Iranian government rebuffed his initial efforts
at reconciliation, he worked with other countries to craft a tightened net of
economic and financial sanctions. And when Iran decided it did want to
negotiate after all, he invested substantial effort and political capital in
trying to make the talks succeed.
The result was a solid arms control agreement
trading sanctions relief for a decade long pause in Iran’s quest for a bomb. No
war, no appeasement, a team effort with other great powers to try to come up
with a practical solution to a significant but limited problem, and the
creation of conditions in which progress might be made on broader issues over
time—all vintage Obama.
In Asia,
finally, the United States has long provided for regional security and
stability, creating an environment in which countries from Japan and South
Korea to Taiwan and the Philippines could reap the economic, social, and
political benefits of hard work and self-discipline.
China’s spectacular rise
in recent decades has created both opportunities for and threats to this
system: the successful and peaceful incorporation of the People’s Republic
further into the order would bring vast benefits, but military conflict with
China could bring equally vast costs. And so here the Obama team has tried to
present both a welcome and a warning, telling China to play by the rules or else.
Asia’s
main sea-lanes are crucial parts of the global commons that the United States
has to protect to maintain the order as a whole, and the region is home to many
important U.S. allies. So following on the efforts of its predecessor (which
were unusually nuanced and constructive in this part of the world), the Obama
administration has tried to reassure U.S. allies that Washington will remain
engaged and protect them over the long term. It signed ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity
and Cooperation. And the president has spent a great deal of effort and
political capital to negotiate and secure passage of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a major trade deal that will not only deepen the liberal order in
general but also bolster and lock in strong relationships with the countries
involved—and which will remain open to Chinese participation whenever China is
prepared to meet the criteria for entry. Whether this delicately constructed
matrix of incentives and disincentives can keep Chinese behavior on a
constructive course over a long period of time is unclear, but no other
approach seems more likely to do so.
Presented with new opportunities for major
military interventions in later years, Obama either refused or authorized only
the minimum necessary to achieve limited goals.
Obama has
certainly made his share of foreign policy mistakes, and he has been better at
strategy than at implementation. He came into office overly confident that his
mere presence and speechifying could dramatically improve matters, and the gap
between his words and his deeds has been a repeatedly self-inflicted wound. His
initial flirtation with leftist pieties about nuclear disarmament predictably
came to nothing.
His handling of the “redline” on Syria’s use of chemical
weapons—first casually announcing a major commitment, then dithering about
living up to it, then frantically tossing the ball to Congress for a
decision—was a case study in embarrassingly amateurish improvisation.
His
failure to try harder to keep Iraq on track after the U.S. withdrawal helped
speed the disintegration there (a mistake the administration has tacitly
learned from and is trying to avoid repeating in Afghanistan). And his attempt
at an immaculate intervention in Libya ended up repeating in miniature the Bush
administration’s basic mistake in Iraq (toppling a government without a plan
for what comes next, thus trading tyranny for chaos).
But even
taken together, these mistakes do not outweigh the improvements Obama has made
in the United States’ global situation. Refusing to accept responsibility for
domestic political outcomes in troubled countries in the developing world has
been understandably controversial, but it is
a
necessary step toward cutting losses and bringing American commitments into
line with American capabilities.
Using diplomacy to successfully reestablish
relations with countries such as Iran and Cuba and give them what might be
thought of as a “path to citizenship” in the order helps strengthen rather than
weaken it. And having the self-assurance to recognize that in the long run,
open societies will beat closed ones—so that countries such as Russia, China,
and Iran will see their positions weaken rather than strengthen eventually, if
only the fort can be held—represents a rediscovery of the best lessons of past
American diplomacy.
THIS TIME
IS NOT DIFFERENT
Listening
to discussions of American national security these days, one would think the
country were in truly dire straits. “The world has never been more dangerous
than it is today,” according to Senator Marco Rubio. “The world is literally
about to blow up,” says Senator Lindsey Graham. Even people who are not running
for the Republican presidential nomination apparently agree. In 2012, General
Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared, “In my
personal military judgment, formed over 38 years, we are living in the most
dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.” In 2014, Secretary of Defense Chuck
Hagel said that the threat
from ISIS
“is beyond
anything that we’ve seen.”
To use a
technical term, this is hogwash.
The United States today may be richer,
stronger, and safer than it has ever been; if not, it is certainly close to it.
It has a defense budget equivalent to those of the next seven countries
combined and together with its allies accounts for three-quarters of all global
defense spending.
It has unparalleled power-projection capabilities and a
globe-spanning intelligence network.
It has the world’s reserve currency, the
world’s largest economy, and the highest growth rate of any major developed
country.
It has good demographics, manageable debt, and dynamic, innovating
companies that are the envy of the world.
And it is at the center of an
ever-expanding liberal order that has outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted every
rival for three-quarters
of a century.
But the
gloom-and-doom talk should not come as a surprise, because it has been a
recurring refrain throughout the country’s modern history. There seems to be
something psychologically appealing about fear and pessimism, as they never go
away, no matter what the circumstances. In 1961, for example, during the heyday
of the American century, Henry Kissinger was moved to start a book on U.S.
foreign policy with this declaration:
The United States cannot
afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a
half. Fifteen years more of a deterioration of our position in the world such
as we have experienced since World War II would find us reduced to Fortress
America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.
A less
excitable former official writing pseudonymously in Daedalus the
following year was closer to the mark:
The fruit of fifteen years
of American policy is at hand: political and economic unity and economic
progress in Western Europe. If an integrated Europe and the United States join
together for the common defense of the free world, if we collaborate in
constructing a sound international financial system, if we provide from the
vast resources of the Atlantic region the capital and markets for the less
developed countries of the world, then the conditions that make possible a
secure and increasingly prosperous world will have been created.
Add
eastern Europe, much of Asia and Latin America, and parts of Africa and the
Middle East to “the Atlantic region,” as we can now do, and the point should
come through even more strongly.
The
genius of Western policymakers in the 1940s was to recognize—finally, after so
much treasure had been wasted and so much blood spilt—that international
relations could be a team sport rather than an individual one. The dense
network of partnerships they created rested not on charity, altruism, or
self-abnegation but on what Tocqueville called “self-interest rightly
understood.” They realized that isolation and autarky led to weakness rather
than strength, poverty rather than riches, and vulnerability rather than
security.
And so they started to coordinate their actions, pool their
resources, and forgo the quest for short-term relative gains vis-à-vis one
another. As the order’s leading theorist, John Ikenberry, argues, instead of
seeing cooperation as an alternative to U.S. leadership, American strategists
came to see that “alliances, partnerships, multilateralism, [and] democracy . .
. [were] the tools of U.S. leadership.”
Backed by
American wealth and power, more often than not deployed on behalf of the team
as a whole rather than narrow U.S. concerns, the liberal order has proved
capacious and resilient. It has faced repeated external challenges over the
years but has managed to beat them back and hold the field. It has also faced
repeated internal challenges, from policymakers and publics too shortsighted or
reckless or imprudent to maintain it in good working order.
Obama
took office convinced that many of his predecessor’s poor choices had let the
order down; he was determined to get it back on track and avoid major new
missteps. His seemingly modest second-term goals—“don’t do stupid shit”; hit
“singles” and “doubles”—rest on an immodest but justified sense that time and
tide are generally on the side of the order rather than the side of its few remaining
enemies. History suggests that’s a good bet to make.
And the comments:
From a member of the legal profession in Pennsylvania, September 7, 2015
"A very good article and fairly well balanced. My main
criticism of the Obama administration's foreign policy was not mentioned
in the article. Prudence does seem to be the essence of that policy,
but Obama has not done a very good job articulating that policy to the
American people and to the world.
Perhaps I am
looking for an overarching foreign policy theme from a very articulate,
very rational, very sensible President. I think, however, I am right in
saying that Obama gets mediocre grades from historians in light of his
inability to convince the American people that his prudent policy is in
America's best interest and is working.
There
was a very good article in yesterday's NYT Magazine about American
foreign policy in the Middle East since 9/11 and I quote an advisor to
Jeb Bush:
"In Iraq, we toppled the government and did an
occupation and everything went to hell. In Libya, we toppled the
government and didn't do an occupation and everything went to hell. In
Syria, we didn't topple the government and didn't do an occupation and
everything went to hell. So broadly, this is the Middle East. Things
go to hell. And we've got to make our way through that fact to protect
our national interests, on the back of a war-weary public that doesn't
want to invest our treasure in this."
Two additional foreign policy questions:
American
foreign policy since 1948 in the Middle East has rested on two
pillars: the survival of the state of Israel and America's need for
oil. In 2015, what are our national interests in the Middle East in
light of an Israeli government that has been for the last 6 months
determined to undermine American foreign policy in the Middle East and
in light of our decreasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil?
Also,
the closer we get to the election in November 2016, I hope someone asks
the various candidates this crucial question: what lessons have you
learned from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003?
Glenn, once again, thanks and happy Labor Day."
From the web site of the President of Kosovo, September 7, 2015
Left, Ambassador Anne Huhtamaki of Finland presented her papers this morning as the new representative to the Republic of Kosovo. This photographs as posted on the Kosovo's Presidential web site. Anne was an exchange student with my family. She has used her linguistic and diplomatic talents to serve her country well. Congratulations to Anne and her family!
From a Pennsylvania agriculturalist:
"Hubris
is a good word. It can be used both ways equally effectively. Bush
being one example of a person who tried to do too much to intervene.
The doomsayers being an example of those who claim too much American
responsibility for the world's problems. Both are signs of pride."
From another Pennsylvania barrister of the Court:
"Liked the article you recently forwarded about foreign policy. So great discussion material."
