U.S. Foreign Policy

President Obama didn't get any concessions during his recent visit to the People's Republic of China, and no one should be surprised. One of the most important lessons in life is that if you make a series of big mistakes, you should expect to pay a price for them. Back in 2000, the United States was running a budget surplus, our military was second-to-none, our image in most parts of the world was quite positive, and our economy had been growing steadily for nearly a decade. Some of that growth may have been illusory, however, and the next eight years featured a daunting combination of misfortunes (9/11, Hurricane Katrina), and self-inflicted wounds (e.g., the financial crisis, the invasion of Iraq, the endless war in Afghanistan, the abandonment of any sense of fiscal responsibility, etc.). There's no magic button or clever diplomatic sleight of hand that will allow the United States to retrieve its former position without some real sacrifices, and so far, nobody seems eager to make the changes that might be necessary.

Hence Obama's modest demeanor in Beijing. No president is going to be able to lay down the law on human rights, exchange rates, or sanctions on Iran when China owns over a trillion dollars in U.S. assets, when the U.S. economy is on life support, and when the American military Is mired in two losing wars. Until we get our house in order over here, nobody should expect China to be especially responsive to our wishes or expect its leaders to view the "American model" as especially appealing. An wide-open marketplace of ideas hardly looks attractive when the result is the intellectual ascendancy of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.  

The follies of the past eight years were the greatest gift the United States could have given Beijing, and Obama's conduct in Beijing was the inevitable result. And if we keep doing what we've been doing (see under: Afghanistan, Middle East, etc.), I wouldn't expect things to change.

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What should we make of the news that President Obama is still not happy with the proposed strategy for Afghanistan, and that his doubts are being reinforced by a skeptical report from retired general Karl Eikenberry, who is now the U.S. ambassador in Kabul?

First, I think it's a sign that deep down, Obama knows he has no good options. He’s figured out that the stakes aren’t as great as he may have once thought, that the commitment is potentially endless, that we have no local partner for the kind of centralized, "state-building" approach that remains at the heart of U.S. strategy, and that going all in will commit him to a war we won't win. No wonder he keeps looking for an alternative.

Second, he's painted himself into a corner with his earlier tough talk, and he’s worried that the GOP and FoxNews and various armchair generals will all accuse him of appeasement if he gives McChrystal anything less than what the general asked for, or if he dares to put a time limit on a continued U.S. effort. So all those recent news stories stressing how seriously Obama is taking this and how much he’s grilling his advisors are designed to convince us that he’s looked really, really hard at all the options. The goal is to build support for whatever decision he ultimately makes, even if everyone secretly knows it’s not likely to work.

Third, this is an issue where Obama's instinct for compromise and his natural gift for reconciling conflicting positions is not serving him well. Given the range of problems that the United States is facing at home and abroad, bold action is badly needed. Not the sort of unthinking, shoot-from-the-hip fantasies that drove Bush's foreign policy during his first term, but rather a ruthless, hardnosed set of choices about priorities. Obama did a little bit of that during his first couple of months -- mostly about the economy -- but well-entrenched interests and conventional wisdom began to take over.  

With respect to Afghanistan: it is either a worth a prolonged and costly investment of lives and money or it isn't. Either we go all in -- which in my view is still a very bad idea -- or we should get out. Trying to split the difference on this issue is not leadership; in fact, it is a recipe for failure.

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I'm still preoccupied with finishing a conference paper (the topic: Why it is so hard for states to "cut their losses" in wars of choice, and how they can do so more effectively?), and so I can't do a lengthy blog post today. But in addition to the excellent commentary provided by FP's Marc Lynch, I recently came across two short pieces that are well worth reading and I wanted to alert you to them.

The first is Tony ("Rootless Cosmopolitan") Karon's analysis of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's announcement that he is not going to run for re-election. Karon suggests that this is partly "political theater," but makes it clear that it is a setback for Obama's increasingly incoherent Middle East "peace effort." 

The second is by Robert Dreyfuss on The Nation's blog, right here. It is, to say the least, a rather damning indictment of U.S. Middle East policy since Obama took office. And the obvious question is: Why has Obama's team caved so fast and so quickly, after its promising start? 

I never thought I'd write the following words, but is it possible that Obama's handling of the I-P peace process might actually end up being worse than George Bush's? It's still too soon to go there, but the fact that the question even occurred to me ain't exactly encouraging.

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I'm crashing to finish a conference paper on why "wars of choice" last so long (and how to end them), so blogging will be fairly light this week. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the CSPAN broadcast of a conference on Capitol Hill last week on Afghanistan policy, sponsored by the RAND Corporation's Center for Middle East Public Policy. Most of the speakers were thoughtful and worth a listen, although I was struck by how even the advocates of "staying the course" did not seem very confident of success. The "outside the box" perspective (in other words, disengagement) was represented by Chris Preble of CATO and yours truly. If you're interested in what we had to say, my presentation begins at about 2:35.00 into the broadcast, and Chris is right after me.

Back in 2007, we wrote that AIPAC has an "almost unchallenged hold on Congress." Little has happened since then to alter that conclusion, and we will probably get another demonstration of Congressional spinelessness this week. On Tuesday, the House is scheduled to vote on H.R. 867, an AIPAC-sponsored resolution denouncing the recent Goldstone Report on possible war crimes by Hamas and Israel during the Gaza War last year. You can read the resolution here. You should then read Judge Goldstone's response here, which points out the errors in the House resolution. And then read historian Tony Judt's eloquent statement here. If you're convinced that the resolution makes a mockery of America's professed commitment to justice and human rights, then you might express that sentiment here or here. Or just call your Congressman's office and tell him/her to grow a backbone and vote against it.

Meanwhile, over in Israel itself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is completing the Obama administration's humiliating retreat from the principles set forth in the president's Cairo speech of less than five months ago. In a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton did not criticize continued Israeli home demolitions in East Jerusalem (a practice she had previously denounced), and praised Netanyahu for making "unprecedented concessions" on settlement expansion. Huh? This is Clintonian double-talk worthy of her husband. Netanyahu's "concession" was to insist that Israel would keep building whatever and wherever it wished in East Jerusalem, and would also continue the "natural growth" of settlements in the West Bank, but would not start any completely new settlements for awhile. Bear in mind that virtually every country in the world regards all of the settlements -- both the unauthorized outposts and the vast neighborhoods built by the Israeli government -- as illegal under international law, and the United States used to say this too. And for this "concession" the Palestinians are supposed to enter into another meaningless round of discussions, while the bulldozers and construction crews continue to eat away at the land on which they hope to establish a state of their own. To praise Netanyahu's position as an "unprecedented concession" is like discovering someone is robbing your house, and then expressing gratitude when they offer to do it a bit more slowly.

The two-state solution was on life-support when Obama took office, and at first it appeared he might make a serious effort to nurse it back to health and make it a reality. At least, that's what he said he was going to do.  Instead, he and his Secretary of State are in the process of pulling out the plug. But what will they do when "two states for two peoples" isn't an option and everybody finally admits it, and the Palestinians begin to demand equal rights in "greater Israel?" Will the United States support their claims for equality, democracy, and individual rights, or will it continue to defend and subsidize what will then be an apartheid state? Well, if it's up to our courageous reps in Congress, you know what the answer will be.

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Halloween is a big event in my neighborhood, and tomorrow night our street will be filled with lots of scary monsters. They aren't really monsters, of course; it will just be a bunch of kids trying to look as frightening as possible. And that got me thinking: what are the "scary monsters" that have haunted foreign policy debates in the past, and which turned out to be not so scary after all?

So, in honor of tomorrow night's revels, here's my Halloween list of "scary monsters:" those overblown threats, dubious nightmares, and (mostly) fictitious demons that people dreamed up to frighten us unnecessarily.

1. The "Domino Theory."  This hardy perennial posits that a single defeat in one area will trigger a cascade of similar defeats elsewhere, either because allies "bandwagon" with the enemy, enemies become emboldened, or status quo forces become disheartened. It was famously used to justify prolonged U.S. involvement in Indochina, but variants were also invoked in Central America and the basic idea is making something of a comeback in debates about the war in Afghanistan. If we win, Islamic radicals will be on the run everywhere; if we lose, it will be hailed as a great victory and will spawn new troubles throughout the region and beyond. As Jerome Slater and others showed, both the internal logic and the empirical evidence for the theory was always paltry, but the idea that the fate of the entire free world might hinge on a single marginal event in some far-away land was an effective way to scare people into overstating the importance of otherwise peripheral conflicts.

2. Y2K. Remember the widespread fear that the world's computers would simply stop working at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, when their internal clocks ran out of digits? Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre called it "the computer equivalent of El Nino" and said there would be "nasty surprises" around the world. In fact, it was a virtual non-event, even in countries that hadn't taken significant precautions. It's one of those episodees that makes me suspect that the growing hype over "cyberwarfare" and "cyberterror" is being exaggerated too. It's a legitimate concern, but watch it get over-sold in the months and years to come.

3. "Rogue States."  This phrase become popular in the 1990s, in a period when the U.S. faced essentially no significant great power threats. So national security worriers started to talk about the threat from "rogue states" like Cuba, Libya, Syria, Iran, or Iraq, even though their combined capabilities were paltry compared with the United States (let alone the U.S. plus its allies).  Specifically, the combined GDP of all the potential "rogues" was less than the size of the U.S. defense budget, and most of these states weren't even in cahoots with each other. The same was true (but even more so) for the Bush administration's famous "Axis of Evil," a conceptual monstrosity intended solely to scare the American people into launching an unnecessary and tragic war.

4. "Monolithic Communism."  The Cold War was a fertile source of exaggerated dangers, and this dubious idea was one of the best. Many people in the West believed that all Marxists (and maybe even a few socialists) were reliable tools of the Kremlin, despite the abundant evidence of deep rifts within the international Communist movement and the repeated tensions between Moscow and its various clients. The belief that the Kremlin controlled a potent world-wide revolutionary movement fueled the insane fear of communist subversion during the McCarthy period, and even led some highly placed U.S. officials to view the Sino-Soviet split as a clever communist plot to lull us into a false sense of security. Not only did we exaggerate the threat, but we missed opportunities to wean leftists away from Moscow and fought foolish wars in places that didn't matter, like Indochina.

5. "Strategic Minerals and Resource Dependence."  The United States and other industrial powers have repeatedly exaggerated their dependence on so-called strategic minerals (cobalt, chromium, manganese, platinum, etc.), and used the fear of cartels or cutoffs to justify a more interventionist foreign policy and greater power-projection capabilities. Alarmists point to the fact the United States imports most of its consumption of these materials from Africa and other conflict-ridden places, but this simplistic view ignores the reasons why this is the case and the various options we have for dealing with possibility of a cutoff. One option is stockpiles (which the U.S. possesses), and another is the fact that additional supplies often exist, albeit at higher prices. We import most of our consumption because these sources are the cheapest, not because they are the only ones available. Moreover, the danger of a complete and lasting cutoff is remote. With the (partial) exception of oil, strategic minerals are an issue that deserves a modest degree of attention, but are hardly cause for alarm.

6. Immigration.  Throughout U.S. history, people who had made it here from abroad have tended to panic over the next group to arrive after them.  The Anglo-Americans opposed the large-scale German migration in the mid-19th century, and every subsequent group -- Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Muslims,. etc. -- seems to have provoked nativist alarm declaring that this latest group will never assimilate and will gradually destroy whatever it is that past immigrants have come to value. This sort of thing can even lead formerly sensible people like newsman Lou Dobbs to rail against illegal immigration now, and it inspires militia groups seeking to patrol our southern borders.

In fact, immigration has long been a great source of strength for the United States, and it will probably remain so for many years to come.  And the dirty little secret here is that American society -- and especially certain American businesses -- aren't upset at all about having a low-wage workforce to exploit.  Keeping a lot more people out of the United States wouldn't be that difficult if we really wanted to do it-but we don't.  That's a good thing, by the way, because it means the United States won't face the same demographic problems that Japan, Europe, and Russia will (i.e., a shrinking and progressively older population).

7. Soviet Military Power. Don't get me wrong: the Soviet Union was a serious adversary and it possessed considerable military power. But lots of people tended to portray it as a monster that was ten feet tall, and capable of seemingly magical feats of military deering-do. Richard Pipes famously told readers that the Soviet leadership genuinely believed it "could fight and win a nuclear war," other hawks seriously declared that the Red Army could easily defeat NATO and overrun Western Europe (in perhaps as little as two weeks), and Caspar Weinberger's Pentagon used to use U.S. tax dollars to produce a glossy document -- Soviet Military Power -- containing various ominous descriptions of Soviet weaponry and capabilities, much of it exaggerated.  Of course, what they portrayed as the ultimate scary monster turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay.

8. "Bogeymen from Latin America"  As befits a regional hegemon, the United States has long exaggerated the threat from various not-very-powerful forces in the Western hemisphere.  The list of bogeymen is a long one: Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa in Mexico, Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua,  Fidel Castro in Cuba, Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Salvador Allende in Chile, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, etc., etc., right on up to Hugo Chavez in contemporary Venezuela. One might concede that some of these individuals or groups were an annoyance or even a regional problem, but U.S. officials often depicted them as mortal threats to U.S. security. Remember when Ronald Reagan declared that the Sandinistas were but "a two-day march from Harlingen, Texas?"  In other words, we were supposed to fear an invasion from an impoverished country whose total population was less than that of New York City. What's really scary is that some of Reagan's listeners probably believed him.

9.  "Declinism."  Fueled by books like Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, many Americans thought that "imperial overstretch" in the 1980s was going to lead to the rapid erosion in America's global position.  A corollary to this argument was the fear of Japanese dominance, as illustrated by Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One and other similar works.  This view even infected the international relations literature, as when Robert Keohane called his major work on institutions After Hegemony and realist Robert Gilpin offered a similarly gloomy forecast in War and Change in World Politics.

Of course, we now know that it was the Soviet Union whose decline was imminent (as others realists, notably Kenneth Waltz, had foreseen) and the Japanese Godzilla that many feared soon succumbed to a combination of speculative bubble at home and a sclerotic political system.  But might one sound a cautionary note: were these fears dead wrong, or just premature? I'd say wrong, unless we keep doing a lot of stupid things abroad and don't get our economic house in order back home.

10. "Islamofascism."   No list of scary monsters would be complete without neoconservativism's bedrock bogeyman: the claim that there is a powerful, cohesive, ideologically united movement of Islamic radicals, backed by assorted Islamic governments, seeking to re-establish the medieval caliphate, subjugate the West, and impose Islam on all of us. One thing is clear: the people who make this claim don't understand Islam very well and don't understand fascism at all; "Islamofascism" may in fact be the most misleading neologism in contemporary political discourse.  

Sure, some Islamic radicals harbor wild fantasies about transforming and uniting the entire Muslim world under their banner; the good news is that they are as likely to accomplish this goal as I am to flap my arms and fly to the moon.  Let's remember that Osama bin Laden isn't leading an vast army of followers to overthrow the existing Arab governments; he's hiding in some remote part of Pakistan and praying we don't find him. And surveys suggest that Al Qaeda's efforts aren't winning them any mass support; just recruits among a small number of disaffected.  But the more we fear this monster and overreact to it, the more sympathy they may win and the more trouble they can cause....even if its nowhere near the amount they would like.

I could go on and discuss the fear of fluoridation and flu vaccines, paranoia about foreign ownership of U.S. assets, the "window of vulnerability," China's "foreign aid offensive" in Africa, the fear of subversion that led to the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and so forth.   But I'll stop with these ten, and just make two final points. 

First, we are often told that international politics is a dangerous business, and that it makes sense to prepare for the worst case. This is nonsense, because there are real costs to exaggerating various potential threats. Not only may this policy lead us to ignore more likely and more legitimate problems and to waste resources addressing fantasies, but it can also lead a country to take active steps that either make minor problems worse or lead to enormous self-inflicted wounds (see under: Iraq). Fixating on scary monsters can leave you ill-prepared when real problems arise.

Second, even if these foolish fears led us to undertake various boneheaded policies on occasion, we should nonetheless be thankful that these various monsters turned out to be far less fearsome than we often believed. But given that Nov. 26 is the official day to give thanks this year, maybe I'll just hold that thought until that holiday arrives.

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Building on Robert Farley, Matt Yglesias has a smart post about the value of playing "hard to get" in American diplomacy. The basic idea is simple: the United States is very powerful and fairly secure, and so our allies usually need our support more than we need theirs. If we understand that fact, we gain a lot of leverage over their conduct by making it clear that our support depends on their cooperation. If we forget that fact, or we start obsessing about our own credibility and need to demonstrate "toughness," we lose that leverage and others start taking advantage of us.

Of course, I think this point is smart because I made the same argument in the conclusion of Taming American Power. Check out pp. 240-243. And I'm glad Robert and Matt are resurrecting this line of argument, because new ideas don't catch on unless people repeating them over and over and over ...

One of the pleasant frustrations of modern life is that there are far more good books out there than any of us have time to read. Browsing the Brookline Booksmith -- the wonderful local bookstore in my hometown -- is simultaneously delightful and depressing: I get intrigued and excited by all sorts of titles, but then I have trouble deciding which to buy and which to read first.

I'm know I'm not the only person with that problem -- which is why book reviews exist -- so I thought I'd help out by suggesting a few books I've recently read that got my own synapses humming.

The first is John Mueller's Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, which relentlessly punctures the various ways that analysts of all persuasions have overstated the dangers and the importance of nuclear weapons. (For a preview of Mueller's argument, see the FP excerpt here). It is an equal-opportunity critique, as Mueller goes after hawks, doves, realists, and other Cassandras with equal relish and a playful but pungent wit. He emphasizes that nuclear weapons are in fact highly destructive and need to be handled with great care, but convincingly shows that policymakers and pundits have 1) routinely exaggerated their destructive power (i.e., by suggesting they can "destroy the world"), 2) inflated their importance in deterring war, imparting influence, or enhancing status, and 3) overstated the risk of nuclear accidents, nuclear terrorism, or other very low-probability events. And instead of encouraging a useful prudence, Mueller argues that our "atomic obsession" has led us to adopt various policies that wasted a lot of money and may have actually made the situation more dangerous rather than less. Not everyone will be convinced by Mueller's arguments, but the book will certainly make you think. Added bonus: It's immensely fun to read.

My second recommendation is Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall's America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. This is a creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union. There are plenty of good books on this topic already, but Craig and Logevall's is one of the best, and their interpretation has important implications for contemporary strategic debates. In brief, they argue that America's initial response to the Soviet threat in Europe was both necessary and successful, but overselling by early Cold Warriors also put in place a worldview and a set of domestic institutions that consistently exaggerated U.S. insecurity and led to costly and counterproductive excesses over the next 40 years. The Soviet Union is now gone, but that worldview and those institutions remain in place today. Which is why the United States spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, why we find ourselves bogged down in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, and why we panic over countries like Iran (whose defense spending in 2007 was a whopping $7.5 billion, or about 1 percent of America's).

My third suggestion is Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, which I read on my recent trip to Norway. Based on a series of invited lectures, it is a set of pointed reflections on history, historians, and the ways in which the past is employed (and distorted) for both noble and ignoble purposes. If not quite the intellectual tour de force of a book like David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, her reflections nonetheless provide a smart and eminently sensible set of warnings for citizens and leaders alike. History is essential to our identities, but it can also a dangerous weapon in the hands of anyone with a political agenda.

And speaking of history, my last recommendation is Eugene Rogan's The Arabs, which I acquired last week. I haven't finished it, but so far it's an entertaining, gracefully written, and eye-opening look at a diverse people whose history, culture and character are often badly misunderstood (if not actively distorted) here in the United States. Read it. You'll learn a lot.

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