By John Mearsheimer
Frank Rich had an excellent column in the Sunday New York Times in which he suggested that
President Obama's economic team is unsuited to deal with the financial crisis. "I
fear," he wrote, "that too many of the administration's officials are too
marinated in the insiders' culture to police it, reform it or own up to their
own past complicity with it." Let's hope his fears are proven wrong.
But Rich's column points to a larger and possibly more
disturbing feature of our predicament: very few of the country's economic
experts foresaw the tsunami that is now upon us. Indeed, most of them thought
that the global economy was working well and needed nothing more than some
tweaking here and there. This is why Obama ended up appointing a team of
economic experts who not only failed to see the storm coming, but in the case
of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, promoted policies that helped cause it. Simply
put, there were hardly any sagacious business people, economists, or policymakers
who he could have turned to for help.
Rich quotes a speech the president made last week that
captures the essence of the problem. Talking about the controversial AIG
bonuses, Obama said that they were a symptom of "a culture where people made
enormous sums of money taking irresponsible risks that have now put the entire
economy at risk." In other words, the problem was not just a few bad apples;
the culture itself was rotten. That is a remarkable indictment of our economic
elite.
One could make a similar case against Obama's national
security team. The two most daunting foreign policy problems facing the United
States are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is difficult to see how we can
achieve a meaningful victory in either conflict. The Bush administration
started off brilliantly in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 by toppling the
Taliban from power without having to mount a large-scale invasion with U.S.
troops. Afghanistan is the last place on earth that a great power wants to
occupy. But before consolidating its victory in Afghanistan and capturing Osama
bin Laden, the United States marched off to invade Iraq, which was supposed to
be the first step in a radical scheme to transform the Middle East into a sea
of democracies. There was even serious talk at the time about creating an American
empire in the region.
The end result, of course, is that the United States got bogged down in a bloody war in
Iraq, while the situation in
Afghanistan has deteriorated
to the point where the Taliban now controls more than 50 percent of that
country, and the United
States has turned into an occupier. Consider
that there were roughly 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in December 2001, and
there are now almost 40,000 U.S. troops plus another 20,000 NATO troops -- to
which Obama plans to add another 17,000 U.S. troops. And while there is no
question that the level of murder and mayhem in Iraq has been reduced over the
past two years, the all-important constellation of political forces there remains
so unstable that we cannot leave without risking that war will break out as we go
out the door.
The Bush administration is principally responsible for these
twin disasters, but the fact is that most of the Democratic Party's foreign
policy experts -- certainly the more senior ones -- supported President Bush's
decision to invade Iraq and
to do massive social engineering across the Middle East. Consider, for example, Hillary Clinton,
Richard Holbrooke, and Dennis Ross -- three key players on the Obama team. They were all strong supporters of the Iraq war, and they had little inkling that we
would end up getting bogged down in Iraq
or that we would squander our initial success in Afghanistan. In fact, not one of Obama's principal foreign
policy advisors opposed the Iraq
war, although the president did. It
seems that almost all of the senior foreign policy experts in the Democratic
Party have been "marinated in the [same] inside culture" as their Republican
Party counterparts. What this
effectively means is that Obama and the country will have to depend on a group
of individuals who helped create the Afghanistan and Iraq disasters -- albeit in
a small way -- to get us out of them. That
is not a reassuring thought.
One wonders why our elites have failed us so badly. What went wrong? How could so many economic experts and so
many foreign policy experts have been so mistaken about such important matters? Why weren't there lots of prominent
economists and bankers standing on the rooftops warning that the economy was
heading for the precipice? Why were all
those Nobel Prize winners so clueless about the potential dangers of derivatives
and de-regulation?
Why were there so few people inside the Beltway warning that
Iraq was likely to be a
disaster and that it was a fool's errand to try to use the U.S. military to re-make the Middle East in America's
image? Why was there a serious conversation about creating an American empire
among adults who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century, when all of
the European empires turned to dust? Why
did those same adults, who saw the United States
lose in Vietnam and the
Soviet Union lose in Afghanistan,
not seriously contemplate the possibility that the same thing might happen in Iraq?
Many trees will be cut down to produce the paper that will
be needed for all the articles and books that will be written to try to explain
how the United States lost its collective mind shortly after the Cold War
ended, when so many thought that our elites were the best and the brightest in
the world.
Brendan Smialowski-Pool/Getty Images
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