Previously: Is the World Too Big to Fail? The Contours of Global Order (same author).
While the principles of imperial domination have undergone little change, the capacity to implement them has markedly declined as power has become more broadly distributed in a diversifying world. Consequences are many. It is, however, very important to bear in mind that -- unfortunately -- none lifts the two dark clouds that hover over all consideration of global order: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both literally threatening the decent survival of the species.
Quite the contrary. Both threats are ominous, and increasing.
As other states rise in prominence, the United States' undisciplined spending habits and open-ended foreign policy commitments are catching up with the country. Spurred on by skyrocketing government debt and the emergence of the Tea Party movement, budget hawks are circling Washington. Before leaving office earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced cuts to the tune of $78 billion over the next five years, and the recent debt-ceiling deal could trigger another $350 billion in cuts from the defense budget over ten years. In addition to fiscal discipline, Washington appears to have rediscovered the virtues of multilateralism and a restrained foreign policy. It has narrowed its war aims in Afghanistan and Iraq, taken NATO expansion off its agenda, and let France and the United Kingdom lead the intervention in Libya.My take is that it perhaps focuses too much on material factors (economic and military), failing to consider less tangible factors (like not torturing people), but it's still sensible and worth reading.
... a policy of prudent retrenchment would not only reduce the costs of U.S. foreign policy but also result in a more coherent and sustainable strategy. In the past, great powers that scaled back their goals in the face of their diminishing means were able to navigate the shoals of power politics better than those that clung to expensive and overly ambitious commitments. Today, a reduction in U.S. forward deployments could mollify U.S. adversaries, eliminate potential flashpoints, and encourage U.S. allies to contribute more to collective defense -- all while easing the burden on the United States of maintaining geopolitical dominance. A policy of retrenchment need not invite international instability or fuel partisan rancor in Washington. If anything, it could help provide breathing room for reforms and recovery, increase strategic flexibility, and renew the legitimacy of U.S. leadership.
... To implement a retrenchment policy, the United States would have to take three main steps: reduce its global military footprint, change the size and composition of the U.S. military, and use the resulting "retrenchment dividend" to foster economic recovery at home.
We saw, in the preceding chapters, some examples of the failures and unsolved problems of our society. There are others that could have been mentioned. Until these inadequacies are overcome, the task of overcoming them will have to have first claim on our resources. Comprehensive programs of reform in several areas of our life will have to be devised, put in motion, and carried through. Until this is done, we will not know what resources we can spare for foreign policy; and those we find it imperative to continue to devote to that purpose will have to be cut to the bone. What we should want, in these circumstances, is the minimum, not the maximum, of external involvement.Parent and MacDonald have a paper on past examples of Great Power retrenchment: Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment (PDF).
All of this seems to me to call for a very modest and restrained foreign policy, directed to the curtailment of external undertakings and involvements wherever this is in any way possible, and to the avoidance of any assumption of new ones. This means a policy far less pretentious in word and deed than the ones we have been following in recent years.
... even as Obama was politely listening to lectures about China’s new superiority [while visiting Shanghai and Beijing in November 2009], members of his administration were executing an elaborate pincer movement to reestablish American influence, real and perceived, among the growing economies of Asia. In practically every formal statement by U.S. officials, from President Obama to Secretaries Clinton, Geithner, and Gates, U.S. representatives hammered home a single message. The message was that America welcomed rather than feared China’s continued rise. This was directed at a widespread Chinese suspicion: that America would try to thwart China’s continued development because it viewed any increase in Chinese influence as a flat-out loss for the United States.Fallows also notes the dramatic recovery in the international standing of the US:
Many Chinese officials remained skeptical, but the reassurances set the stage for the next phase of the administration’s message: we welcome your rise, but we disagree on the following things—censorship, currency, and pollution, all matters that could be presented as containable items for discussion rather than as inherently threatening aspects of China’s ascent.
In the few months after Obama’s visit to China, some Chinese military and diplomatic officials began believing their own adulatory press clips. China entered its period of what was broadly described as overreach: challenging the Japanese, South Korean, Vietnamese, and Philippine navies with expanded claims of coming supremacy in the South China Sea and the broader Pacific; antagonizing trading partners from Russia to Burma to Australia with more-aggressive practices and claims. Through this period, the U.S. government was stitching up relations with every one of these countries. Part of the message was that with its inevitable extraction from the mire of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States could reassert its presence in the fastest-growing economic region of the world; the other part was that, for all its excesses, the United States was an easier regional power to live with than the Chinese would be.
Two years after Obama’s “humiliating” visit to Shanghai and Beijing, U.S. relations with China were a mix of cooperation and tension, as they had been through the post-Nixon years. But American relations with most other nations in the region were better than since before the Iraq War. In a visit to Australia late in 2011, Obama startled the Chinese leadership but won compliments elsewhere with the announcement of a new permanent U.S. Marine presence in Darwin, on Australia’s northern coast.
The strategy was Sun Tzu–like in its patient pursuit of an objective: reestablishing American hard and soft power while presenting a smiling “We welcome your rise!” face to the Chinese.
The daily reports about American problems around the world, the crises in U.S. relations with Pakistan and a few other countries, the ongoing worldwide bull session about whether the U.S. is “in decline”—all of these things mask the broad and dramatic improvement in America’s “soft power” and international standing during Obama’s time. For instance: according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in 2008 the positive view of the United States in Germany was 31 percent, in France it was 42 percent, and in Japan it was 50 percent. Last year, it was 62 percent in Germany, 75 percent in France, and 85 percent in Japan (the dramatic improvement in Japan was partly in response to U.S. aid after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident early in the year). These changes can make a real difference for American ideals and interests.On Iran, Fallows' assessment is less optimistic. He quotes an anonymous source who worked in the State Department in 2009:
The language that Republicans on the Hill used about Iran was absolutely stunning to someone new to D.C.. Every time they held a hearing on how to ratchet up sanctions, most of the politicians and "experts" compared Iran to the next Nazi Germany and invoked clear, but not perfectly explicit imagery of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the United States and a second Holocaust.posted by russilwvong at 11:00 PM on February 19, 2012 [11 favorites]
While I was at State, it seemed to be policy that it would be preferable to keep Congress out of foreign relations with Iran because our European allies were irritated at our attempts to force sanctions on their business and political institutions. But the administration never really came out and did anything to push back on the rhetoric. And despite multiple national intelligence estimates that publicly stated that it was unknown whether Iran was developing a nuclear weapons program, Hillary Clinton was going around claiming that Iran was building a weapons program. By the time I finished my stint there, it became clear to me that the administration was going to give in to any type of war mongering from Republicans because the fight wasn't politically worth it.
... the only answer to the question increasingly debated by the public of whether the United States can preserve its existing position is 'no'--for it simply has not been given to any one society to remain permanently ahead of all the others, because that would imply a freezing of the differentiated pattern of growth rates, technological advance, and military developments which has existed since time immemorial.And what would be the foreign policy objectives of a less powerful United States? I've quoted Kennan on this subject so many times that I should probably put it in my profile. From American Diplomacy 1900-1950:
On the other hand, this reference to historical precedents does not imply that the United States is destined to shrink to the relative obscurity of former leading powers such as Spain or the Netherlands, or to disintegrate like the Roman and Austro-Hungarian empires; it is simply too large to do the former, and presumably too homogenous to do the latter. Even the British analogy, much favoured in the current political-science literature, is not a good one if it ignores the differences in scale.
This can be put another way: the geographical size, population, and natural resources of the British Isles would suggest that it ought to possess roughly 3 or 4 per cent of the world's wealth and power, all other things being equal; but it is precisely because all other things are never equal that a peculiar set of historical and technological circumstances permitted the British Isles to expand to possess, say, 25 per cent of the world's wealth and power in its prime; and since those favourable circumstances have disappeared, all that it has been doing is returning down to its more 'natural' size.
In the same way, it may be argued that the geographical extent, population, and natural resources of the United States suggest that it ought to possess perhaps 16 or 18 per cent of the world's wealth and power, but because of historical and technical circumstances favourable to it, that share rose to 40 per cent or more by 1945; and what we are witnessing at the moment is the early decades of the ebbing away from that extraordinarily high figure to a more 'natural' share. That decline is being masked by the country's enormous military capabilities at present, and also by its success in 'internationalizing' American capitalism and culture. Yet even when it declines to occupy its 'natural' share of the world's wealth and power, a long time in the future, the United States will still be a very significant power in a multipolar world, simply because of its size.
Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter—as in these circumstances it certainly would—on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia.Hence the enduring US alliances with NATO (especially Britain) and Japan.
It is a characteristic aspect of all politics, domestic as well as international, that frequently its basic manifestations do not appear as what they actually are--manifestations of a struggle for power. Rather, the element of power as the immediate goal of the policy pursued is explained and justified in ethical, legal, or biological terms. That is to say: the true nature of the policy is concealed by ideological justifications and rationalizations.In particular, a policy aimed at expansion (as opposed to a policy of maintaining the status quo) always requires such a mask.
A policy of imperialism [Morgenthau's term for expansionist policy] is always in need of an ideology; for, in contrast to a policy of the status quo, imperialism always has the burden of proof. It must prove that the status quo it seeks to overthrow deserves to be overthrown and that the moral legitimacy which in the minds of many attaches to things as they are ought to yield to a higher principle of morality calling for a new distribution of power. Thus, in the words of Gibbon: "For every war a motive of safety or revenge, of honor or zeal, of right or convenience, may be readily found in the jurisprudence of conquerors."What are the ideologies opposed to retrenchment?
Conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role.To this mindset, any suggestion that the US ought to adopt a more modest role will be regarded as weakness or treason. Be prepared for a lot of shouting over the coming decades.
What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the "evil empire," the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.
... In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence.
There is no escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does. Whenever we act with reference to our fellow men, we must sin, and we must still sin when we refuse to act; for the refusal to be involved in the evil of action carries with it the breach of the obligation to do one’s duty. No ivory tower is remote enough to offer protection against the guilt in which the actor and the bystander, the oppressor and the oppressed, the murderer and his victim are inextricably enmeshed. Political ethics is indeed the ethics of doing evil. While it condemns politics as the domain of evil par excellence, it must reconcile itself to the enduring presence of evil in all political action. Its last resort, then, is the endeavor to choose, since evil there must be, among several possible actions the one that is least evil.War is an extremely blunt instrument. When you go to war, no matter what your intentions, you're going to end up killing people.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....I would argue that the US ought to pursue a conscious policy of limited self-interest (in particular, maintaining its alliances with Europe and Japan), using limited means. Kennan, Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience, The Atlantic, May 1959:
most foreign peoples do not believe that governments do things for selfless and altruistic motives; and if we do not reveal to them a good solid motive of self-interest for anything we do with regard to them, they are apt to invent one. This can be a more sinister one than we ever dreamed of, and their belief in it can cause serious confusion in our mutual relations.Regarding the importance of limited means:
The government cannot fully know what it is doing, but it can always know how it is doing it; and it can be as sure that good methods will be in some way useful as that bad ones will be in some way pernicious. A government can pursue its purpose in a patient and conciliatory and understanding way, respecting the interests of others and infusing its behavior with a high standard of decency and honesty and humanity, or it can show itself petty, exacting, devious, and self-righteous. If it behaves badly, even the most worthy of purposes will be apt to be polluted; whereas sheer good manners will bring some measure of redemption to even the most disastrous undertaking. The Christian citizen will be on sound ground, therefore, in looking sharply to the methods of his government's diplomacy, even when he is uncertain about its purposes.In particular, given the destructiveness of modern warfare, war should be a last resort. Instead, the US should use the instruments of diplomacy: persuasion, compromise, and--when necessary--threats.
There are also experts about football, but these people don't defer to them. The people who call in talk with complete confidence. They don't care if they disagree with the coach or whoever the local expert is. They have their own opinion and they conduct intelligent discussions. Now I don't think that international or domestic affairs are much more complicated. And what passes for serious intellectual discourse on these matters does not reflect any deeper level of understanding or knowledge.russilwvong: You set up so many straw men in your essay it's hard to know where to start and frankly I'm the wrong person to give a critique. Agree or disagree with Chomsky, the biggest problem is that you don't really understand the "anarchist" context he is writing in and it's relation with marxisms: doctrinaire, communist or other. It really starts with your reading list: reading just Orwell doesn't cut it. Anyway, my point is that, what I think Chomsky has to contribute is the firm opinion "foreign policy" is really made by an elite group of people, with little responsibility to the demos as commonly understood. Whether they act strictly in their own economic self-interest is a total straw man.
The question that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer still -- really, I don't know any other people who have answers to them -- is, "It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer." The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any answer other than, "Get to work on it."posted by memebake at 2:13 PM on February 20, 2012 [8 favorites]
There are a thousand different ways to get to work on it. For one thing, there's no "it." There's lots of different things. You can think of long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that's what you're focused on, you're going to have to take steps towards them. The steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment's in serious danger. There's no one thing that's the right thing to do. It depends on what your interests are and what's going on and what the problems are, and so on. And you have to deal with them. There's very little that anybody can do about these things alone. Occasionally somebody can, but it's marginal. Mainly you work with other people to try to develop ideas and learn more about it and figure out appropriate tactics for the situation in question and deal with them and try to develop more support. That's the way everything happens, whether it's small changes or huge changes.
If there is a magic answer, I don't know it. But it sounds to me as if the tone of the questions and part of the disparity between listening and acting suggests -- I'm sure this is unfair -- "Tell me something that's going to work pretty soon or else I'm not going to bother, because I've got other things to do." Nothing is going to work pretty soon, at least if it's worth doing, nor has that ever been the case.
The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.Every expression of the anarchist tradition in our culture is continually met with willful incomprehension. People hear "dismantle authoritarian structures" and refuse to even acknowledge it, instead demanding the critique be transmuted into policy prescriptions for the status quo that they can criticize as being "impractical". It's a form of ideological boundary enforcement.
One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow -- the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive. - wikiposted by phrontist at 2:26 PM on February 21, 2012
« Older The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparenc... | In the 1930s in Chicago, it st... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 4:57 PM on February 19, 2012