Thursday, December 29, 2011

US (Fucked-up) Foreign Policy and I

Jersey Shore: Snooki Takes Over US Foreign Policy
December 28, 2011
Tags: Saleh, Shah, Yemen
Posted in: Democracy
For those too young to remember when Iran was America’s 51st state in the Middle East, it once was. The CIA helped overthrow one government there in 1953 and installed a monarch, The Shah (not his real name but it’s like on Jersey Shore) who bought American weapons, sold America oil and sucked up to the US like a tipsy Snooki with lips pursed from eating pickled lemons. That, kids, was regime change old-school style.
Then there was an Islamic Revolution that swept through Iran, flawed in its own right, but appealing to a people who had long been kept in line by the Shah’s security apparatus and tired of playing Snooki to the US’ Vinnie or whoever, I’m bored with the guido satire. The Shah was reviled by many of his country people and, to avoid facing their justice for his actions, fled to the US for “medical care.” “Medical care” is what dictators say when they need to blow town; for domestic US politicians, the correct phrase is “spend more time with my family.”
The Shah came to the US, Iran went spunky wild and stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, taking US diplomats hostage. That crisis lasted 444 days, brought down the Carter Administration and messed relations in the Middle East up for pretty much forever.
So…
The current dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, aka “The Predicament,” (last Jersey reference, this is where the article turns serious) is unpopular and needs to blow town before his own people shred him in the village square. So he now needs “medical treatment” and it appears the Obama administration may issue him a visa to enter the US. Saleh had previously sought medical care in Saudi Arabia, but must have not had insurance because he left to go right back to Yemen. Apparently there are no other doctors available anywhere in the entire world, must be some sort of strike or big convention or something.
What could possibly go wrong?
Hey, Obama, did you sleep through 2011? Remember the Arab Spring Break? By accepting another non-democratic dictator formerly pals with the US for “medical care,” the US denies the events of 2011 and essentially blows party chunks in the face of the ideals it publicly supported during the Spring. Hillary, this is not about Twitter or social media saving democracy– the US has the chance to stand up, for once, for its long-term goals of supporting people who wish to throw off a dictator. Instead, it looks like we’ll let him into the US for safe haven, once again choosing expediency over morality. The image of the US among Yemenis will be nothing more than the country that gave shelter to their former dictator. US policy in the Middle East will again be clearly little more than oil and back slapping dictators who feed our counterterrorism fetish.
Welcome to 1979, President Obama ~~Carter~~.
(No gratuitous Jersey Shoe concluding reference. This is like serious!)
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The Unintended Empire

By Outside the Box, on December 28th, 2011 in US & World

A new year is almost upon us, so now seems like a perfect time to step back from the (many) crises at hand and take stock of the big picture. According to my friend & fellow thinker George Friedman, the big picture of the next 10 years is this: America will dominate, and the American president will have to figure out how to act as global emperor without admitting that’s what he is.George’s newest book, The Next Decade, comes out in paperback in January; and he’s graciously agreed to let me send you the first chapter, which backs up the bold statements above. We don’t always agree, but I have to give George credit. He’s an expert at constructing an argument.
If the first chapter whets your appetite, you can <<get a free copy of the book>> when you subscribe to STRATFOR, a geopolitical intelligence company founded and led by George. It is the publication to read if you’re interested in foreign affairs. Plus, OTB readers can get a hefty discount.
Your really glad I’m not a global emperor analyst,
John Mauldin
Outside the Box & Thoughts From the Frontline
johnmauldin@investorsinsight.com
John Mauldin, best-selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts from the Frontline and Outside the Box e-letters that go to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economics letters, go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore

The Unintended Empire
By George Friedman, STRATFOR
The American president is the most important political leader in the world. The reason is simple: he governs a nation whose economic and military policies shape the lives of people in every country on every continent. The president can and does order invasions, embargos, and sanctions. The economic policies he shapes will resonate in billions of lives, perhaps over many generations. During the next decade, who the president is and what he (or she) chooses to do will often affect the lives of non-Americans more than the decisions of their own governments.
This was driven home to me on the night of the most recent U.S. presidential election, when I tried to phone one of my staff in Brussels and reached her at a bar filled with Belgians celebrating Barack Obama’s victory. I later found that such Obama parties had taken place in dozens of cities around the world. People everywhere seemed to feel that the outcome of the American election mattered greatly to them, and many appeared personally moved by Obama’s rise to power.
Before the end of Obama’s first year in office, five Norwegian politicians awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, to the consternation of many who thought that he had not yet done anything to earn it. But according to the committee’s chair, Obama had immediately and dramatically changed the world’s perception of the United States, and this change alone merited the prize. George W. Bush had been hated because he was seen as an imperialist bully. Obama was being celebrated because he signaled that he would not be an imperialist bully.
From the Nobel Prize committee to the bars of Singapore and São Paolo, what was being unintentionally acknowledged was the uniqueness of the American presidency itself, as well as a new reality that Americans are reluctant to admit. The new American regime mattered so much to the Norwegians and to the Belgians and to the Poles and to the Chileans and to the billions of other people around the globe because the American president is now in the sometimes awkward (and never explicitly stated) role of global emperor, a reality that the world—and the president—will struggle with in the decade to come.

The American Emperor

The American president’s unique status and influence are not derived from conquest, design, or divine ordination but ipso facto are the result of the United States being the only global military power in the world. The U.S. economy is also more than three times the size of the next largest sovereign economy. These realities give the United States power that is disproportionate to its population, to its size, or, for that matter, to what many might consider just or prudent. But the United States didn’t intend to become an empire. This unintentional arrangement was a consequence of events, few of them under American control.
Certainly there was talk of empire before this. Between Manifest Destiny and the Spanish American War, the nineteenth century was filled with visions of empire that were remarkably modest compared to what has emerged. The empire I am talking about has little to do with those earlier thoughts. Indeed, my argument is that the latest version emerged without planning or intention.
From World War II through the end of the Cold War, the United States inched toward this preeminence, but preeminence did not arrive until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the U.S. alone as a colossus without a counterweight.
In 1796, Washington made his farewell address and announced this principle: "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible." The United States had the option of standing apart from the world at that time. It was a small country, geographically isolated. Today, no matter how much the rest of the world might wish us to be less intrusive or how tempting the prospect might seem to Americans, it is simply impossible for a nation whose economy is so vast to have commercial relations without political entanglements or consequences. Washington’s anti-political impulse befitted the anti-imperialist founder of the republic. Ironically, the extraordinary success of that republic made this vision impossible.
The American economy is like a whirlpool, drawing everything into its vortex, with imperceptible eddies that can devastate small countries or enrich them. When the U.S. economy is doing well, it is the engine driving the whole machine; when it sputters, the entire machine can break down. There is no single economy that affects the world as deeply or ties it together as effectively.
When we look at the world from the standpoint of exports and imports, it is striking how many countries depend on the United States for 5 or even 10 percent of their Gross Domestic Product, a tremendous amount of interdependence. While there are bilateral economic relations and even multilateral ones that do not include the United States, there are none that are unaffected by the United States. Everyone watches and waits to see what the United States will do. Everyone tries to shape American behavior, at least a little bit, in order to gain some advantage or avoid some disadvantage.
Historically, this degree of interdependence has bred friction and even war. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France and Germany feared each other’s power, so each tried to shape the other’s behavior. The result was that the two countries went to war with each other three times in seventy years. Prior to World War I, the English journalist (later a member of Parliament) Norman Angell wrote a widely read book called The Great Illusion, in which he demonstrated the high degree of economic interdependence in Europe and asserted that this made war impossible. Obviously, the two World Wars proved that that wasn’t the case. Advocates for free trade continue to use this argument. Yet, as we will see, a high degree of global interdependence, with the United States at the center, actually increases—rather than diminishes—the danger of war.
That the world is no longer filled with relatively equal powers easily tempted into military adventures mitigates this danger somewhat. Certainly the dominance of American military power is such that no one country can hope to use main force to fundamentally redefine its relationship with the United States. At the same time, however, we can see that resistance to American power is substantial and that wars have been frequent since 1991.
While America’s imperial power might degrade, power of this magnitude does not collapse quickly except through war. German, Japanese, French, and British power declined not because of debt but because of wars that devastated those countries’ economies, producing debt as one of war’s many by-products. The Great Depression, which swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, had its roots in the devastation of the German economy as a result of World War I and the disruption of trade and financial relations that ultimately spread to encompass the world. Conversely, the great prosperity of the American alliance after 1950 resulted from the economic power that the United States built up—undamaged—during World War II.
Absent a major, devastating war, any realignment of international influence based on economics will be a process that takes generations, if it happens at all. China is said to be the coming power. Perhaps so. But the U.S. economy is 3.3 times larger than China’s. China must sustain an extraordinarily high growth rate for a long time in order to close its gap with the United States. In 2009, the United States accounted for 22.5 percent of all foreign direct investment in the world, which, according to the United Nations Council on Trade and Development, makes it the world’s single largest source of investment. China, by comparison, accounted for 4.4 percent.
The United States also may well be the largest borrower in the world, but that indebtedness does not reduce its ability to affect the international system. Whether it stops borrowing, increases borrowing, or decreases it, the American economy constantly shapes global markets. It is the power to shape that is important. Of course, it should also be remembered that every dollar the United States borrows, others lend. If the market is to be trusted, it is saying that lending to the United States, even at currently low interest rates, is a good move.
Many countries have impacts on other countries. What makes the United States an empire is the number of countries it affects, the intensity of the impact, and the number of people in those countries affected by these economic processes and decisions.
In recent years, for instance, Americans had a rising appetite for shrimp. This ripple in the U.S. market caused fish farmers in the Mekong Delta to adjust their production to meet the new demand. When the American economy declined in 2008, luxury foods like shrimp were the first to be cut back, a retrenchment that was felt as far away as those fish farms in the Mekong Delta. Following a similar pattern, the computer maker Dell built a large facility in Ireland, but when labor costs rose there, Dell shifted operations to Poland, even at a time when Ireland was under severe economic pressure. The United States is similarly shaped by other countries, as were Britain and Rome. But the United States is at the center of the web, not on the periphery, and its economy is augmented by its military. Add to that the technological advantage and we can see the structure of America’s deep power.
Empires can be formal, with a clear structure of authority, but some can be more subtle and complex. The British controlled Egypt, but Britain’s formal power was less than clear. The United States has the global reach to shape the course of many other countries, but because it refuses to think of itself as an imperial power, it has not created a formal, rational structure for managing the power that it clearly has.
The fact that the United States has faced reverses in the Middle East in no way undermines the argument that it is an empire, albeit an immature one. Failure and empire are not incompatible, and in the course of imperial growth and expansion, disasters are not infrequent. Britain lost most of its North American colonies to rebellion a century before the empire reached its apex. The Romans faced civil wars in recurring cycles.
While the core of U.S. power is economic—battered though it might seem at the moment—standing behind that economic power is its military might. The purpose of the American military is to prevent any nation aggrieved by U.S. economic influence, or any coalition of such nations, from using force to redress the conditions that put it (or them) at a disadvantage. Like Rome’s legions, American troops are deployed preemptively around the world, simply because the most efficient way to use military power is to disrupt emerging powers before they can become even marginally threatening.
The map below, in fact, substantially understates the American military presence. It does not, for instance, track U.S. Special Operations teams operating covertly in many regions, notably Africa. Nor does it include training missions, technical support, and similar functions. Some U.S. troops are fighting wars, some are interdicting drugs, some are protecting their host countries from potential attacks, and some are using their host countries as staging areas in case American troops are needed in another country nearby. In some cases these troops help support Americans who are involved in governing the country, directly or indirectly. In other cases, the troops are simply present, without controlling anything. Troops based in the United States are here not to protect the homeland as much as to be available for what the military calls power projection. This means that they are ready to serve anywhere the president sees fit to deploy them.
As befits a global empire, the United States aligns its economic system and its military system to stand as the guarantor of the global economy. The United States simultaneously provides technologies and other goods and services to buy, an enormous market into which to sell, and armed forces to keep the sea-lanes open. If need be, it moves in to police unruly areas, but it does this not for the benefit of other countries but for itself. Ultimately, the power of the American economy and the distribution of American military force make alignment with the United States a necessity for many countries. It is this necessity that binds countries to the United States more tightly than any formal imperial system could hope to accomplish.
Empires, the unintended consequence of power accumulated for ends far removed from dreams of empire, are usually recognized long after they have emerged. As they become self-aware, they use their momentum to consciously expand, adding an ideology of imperialism—think of Pax Romana or the British "white man’s burden"—to empire’s reality. An empire gets writers like Virgil and poets like Rudyard Kipling after it is well established, not before. And, as in both Rome and Britain, the celebrants of American empire coexist with those who are appalled by it and who yearn for the earlier, more authentic days.
Rome and Britain were trapped in the world of empire but learned to celebrate the trap. The United States is still at the point where it refuses to see the empire that it has become, and whenever it senses the trappings of empire, it is repelled. But the time has come to acknowledge that the president of the United States manages an empire of unprecedented power and influence, even while it may be informal and undocumented. Only then can we formulate policies over the next decade that will allow us to properly manage the world we find ourselves in charge of.

Managing the Imperial Reality

Over the past twenty years, the United States has struggled to come to grips with the reverberations of being "last man standing" after the fall of the Soviet Union. The task of the president in the next decade is to move from being reactive to having a systematic method of managing the world that he dominates, a method that faces honestly and without flinching the realities of how the world operates. This means turning the American empire from undocumented disorder into an orderly system, a Pax Americana—not because this is the president’s free choice, but precisely because he has no choice.
Bringing order to empire is a necessity because even though the United States is overwhelmingly powerful, it is far from omnipotent, and having singular power creates singular dangers. The United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, for example, precisely because of its unique power. The president’s task is to manage that kind of power in a way that acknowledges the risks as well as the opportunities, then minimizes the risks and maximizes the benefits.
For those who are made squeamish by any talk of empire, much less talk of bringing order to imperial control, I would point out that the realities of geopolitics do not give presidents the luxury of exercising virtue in the way we think of it when applied to ordinary citizens. Two presidents who attempted to pursue virtue directly, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, failed spectacularly. Conversely, other presidents, such as Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, who were much more ruthless, failed because their actions were not directed at and unified by any overriding moral purpose.
In bringing order to empire, I propose that future presidents follow the example of three of our most strikingly effective leaders, men who managed to be utterly ruthless in executing a strategy that was nonetheless guided by moral principle. In these cases, moral ends did in fact justify means that were not only immoral but unconstitutional.
Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union and abolished slavery by initiating a concerted program of deception and by trampling on civil liberties. To maintain the loyalty of the border states, he never owned up to his intention to abolish slavery made clear in the great debates of 1858. Instead he dissembled, claiming that while he opposed the spread of slavery beyond the South, he had no intention of abolishing the right to own slaves in states where owning them was already legal.
But Lincoln did more than prevaricate. He suspended the right to habeas corpus throughout the country and authorized the arrest of pro-secession legislators in Maryland. He made no attempt to justify these actions, except to say that if Maryland and the other border states seceded, the war would be lost and the nation would be dismembered, leaving the Constitution meaningless.
Seventy-five years later, in the midst of another grave crisis for the nation, Franklin Roosevelt also did what needed to be done while lying to hide his actions from a public that was not yet ready to follow his lead. In the late 1930s, Congress and the public wanted to maintain strict neutrality as Europe prepared for war, but Roosevelt understood that the survival of democracy itself was at stake. He secretly arranged for the sale of arms to the French and made a commitment to Winston Churchill to use the U.S. Navy to protect merchant ships taking supplies to England—a clear violation of neutrality.
Like Lincoln, Roosevelt was motivated by moral purpose, which meant a moral vision for global strategy. He was offended by Nazi Germany, and he was dedicated to the concept of democracy. Yet to preserve American interests and institutions, he formed an alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union, a regime that in moral terms was every bit as depraved as the Nazis. At home he defied a Supreme Court ruling and authorized wiretapping without warrants as well as the interception and opening of mail. Yet his most egregious violation of civil liberties was to approve the detention and relocation of ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. Roosevelt had no illusions about what he was doing. He was ruthlessly violating rules of decency in pursuit of moral necessity.
Ronald Reagan also pursued a ruthless path toward a moral purpose. His goal was destruction of what he called the evil empire of the Soviet Union, and he pursued it—in part by ramping up the arms race, which he knew the Soviets could not afford. He then went to elaborate and devious lengths to block Soviet support for national liberation movements in the Third World. He invaded Grenada in 1983 and supported insurgents fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua. This led to the elaborate ruse of engaging Israel to sell arms to Iran in its war with Iraq and then funneling the profits to the Nicaraguan insurgents, as a way of bypassing a law specifically designed to prevent such intervention. We should also remember Reagan’s active support for Muslim jihadists in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. As with Roosevelt and Stalin, a future enemy can be useful to defeat a current one.
The decade ahead will not be a time of great moral crusades. Instead, it will be an era of process, a time in which the realities of the world as presented by facts on the ground will be incorporated more formally into our institutions.
During the past decade, the United States has waged a passionate crusade against terrorism. In the next decade, the need will be for less passion and for more meticulous adjustments in relations with countries such as Israel and Iran. The time also calls for the creation of alliance systems to include nations such as Poland and Turkey that have newly defined relations with the United States. This is the hard and detailed work of imperial strategy. Yet the president cannot afford the illusion that the world will simply accept the reality of overwhelming American hegemony, any more than he can afford to abandon the power. He can never forget that despite his quasi-imperial status, he is president of one country and not of the world.
That is why the one word he must never use is empire. The anti-imperial ethos of America’s founding continues to undergird the country’s political culture. Moreover, the pretense that power is distributed more evenly is useful, not just for other countries but for the United States as well. Even so, in the decade ahead, the informal reality of America’s global empire must start to take on coherent form.
Because a president must not force the public to confront directly realities that it isn’t ready to confront, he must become a master at managing illusions. Slavery could not have survived much beyond the 1860s, no matter how much the South wanted it to. World War II could not have been avoided, regardless of public leanings toward isolationism. Confrontation with the Soviet Union had to take place, even if the public was frightened by those crises. In each case, a strong president created a fabric of illusions to enable him to do what was necessary without causing a huge revolt from the public. In Reagan’s case, when his weapons-dealing machinations came to light as "the Iran-contra affair," complete with congressional hearings and indictments and convictions for many of the participants, his well-maintained persona as a simpleminded fellow shielded his power and his image from the fallout. The goings-on in Israel, Iran, and Nicaragua were so complex that even his critics had trouble believing that he could have been responsible.

A Global Strategy of Regions

America’s fundamental interests are the physical security of the United States and a relatively untrammeled international economic system. As we will see when we turn to the current state of the world economy, this by no means implies a free trade regime in the sense that free-market ideologues might think of it. It simply means an international system that permits the vast American economy to interact with most, if not all, of the world. Whatever the regulatory regime might be, the United States needs to buy and sell, lend and borrow, be invested in and invest, with a global reach.
One quarter of the world’s economy can’t flourish in isolation, nor can the consequences of interaction be confined to pure economics. The American economy is built on technological and organizational innovation, up to and including what the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter called "creative destruction": the process by which the economy continually destroys and rebuilds itself, largely through the advance of disruptive technologies.
When American economic culture touches other countries, those affected have the choice of adapting or being submerged. Computers, for example, along with the companies organized around them, have had profoundly disruptive consequences on cultural life throughout the world, from Bangalore to Ireland. American culture is comfortable with this kind of flux, whereas other cultures may not be. China has taken on the additional burden of trying to adapt to a market economy while retaining the political institutions of a Communist state. Germany and France have struggled to limit the American impact, to insulate themselves from what they call "Anglo-Saxon economics." The Russians reeled from their first unbuffered exposure to this force in the 1990s and sought to find their balance in the following decade.
In response to the American whirlpool, the world’s attitude, not surprisingly, is often sullen and resistant, as countries try to take advantage of or evade the consequences. President Obama sensed this resistance and capitalized on it. Domestically, he addressed the American need to be admired and liked, while overseas he addressed the need for the United States to be more conciliatory and less overbearing.
While Obama identified the problem and tried to manage it, resistance to imperial power remains a problem without a permanent solution. This is because ultimately it derives not from the policies of the United States but from the inherent nature of imperial power.
The United States has been in this position of near hegemonic power for only twenty years. The first decade of this imperial period was a giddy fantasy in which the end of the Cold War was assumed to mean the end of war itself—a delusion that surfaces at the end of every major conflict. The first years of the new century were the decade in which the American people discovered that this was still a dangerous planet and the American president led a frantic effort to produce an ad hoc response. The years from 2011 to 2021 will be the decade in which the United States begins to learn how to manage the world’s hostility.
Presidents in the coming decade must craft a strategy that acknowledges that the threats that resurfaced in the past ten years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism were one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced. The president can and should speak of foreseeing an era in which these threats don’t exist, but he must not believe his own rhetoric. To the contrary, he must gradually ease the country away from the idea that threats to imperial power will ever subside, then lead it to an understanding that these threats are the price Americans pay for the wealth and power they hold. All the same, he must plan and execute the strategy without necessarily admitting that it is there.
Facing no rival for global hegemony, the president must think of the world in terms of distinct regions, and in doing so set about creating regional balances of power, along with coalition partners and contingency plans for intervention. The strategic goal must be to prevent the emergence of any power that can challenge the United States in any given corner of the world.
Whereas Roosevelt and Reagan had the luxury of playing a single integrated global hand—vast but unitary—presidents in the decade ahead will be playing multiple hands at a highly fragmented table. The time when everything revolved around one or a few global threats is over. The balance of power in Europe is not intimately connected to that of Asia and is distinct from the balance of power that maintains the peace in Latin America. So even if the world isn’t as dangerous to the United States as it was during World War II or the Cold War, it is far more complicated.
American foreign policy has already fragmented regionally, of course, as reflected in the series of regional commands under which our military forces are organized. Now it is necessary to openly recognize the same fragmentation in our strategic thinking and deal with it accordingly. We must recognize that there is no global alliance supporting the United States and that the U.S. has no special historical relationships with anyone. Another quote from Washington’s farewell address is useful here: "The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." This means that NATO no longer has unique meaning for the United States outside of the European context and that Europe cannot be regarded as more important than any other part of the world. Nostalgia for "the special relationship" notwithstanding, the simple reality today is that Europe is not more important.
Even so, President Obama ran a campaign focused on the Europeans. His travels before the 2008 election symbolized that what he meant by multilateralism was recommitting the United States to Europe, consulting Europe on U.S. actions abroad, and accepting Europe’s cautions (now that they have lost their empires, Europeans always speak in terms of caution). Obama’s gestures succeeded. The Europeans were wildly enthusiastic, and many Americans were pleased to be liked again. Of course, the enthusiasm dissipated rapidly as the Europeans discovered that Obama was an American president after all, pursuing American ends.
All of which brings us to the president’s challenge in the decade ahead: to conduct a ruthless, unsentimental foreign policy in a nation that still has unreasonable fantasies of being loved, or at least of being left alone. He must play to the public’s sentimentality while moving policy beyond it.
An unsentimental foreign policy means that in the coming decade, the president must identify with a clear and cold eye the most dangerous enemies, then create coalitions to manage them. This unsentimental approach means breaking free of the entire Cold War system of alliances and institutions, including NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. These Cold War relics are all insufficiently flexible to deal with the diversity of today’s world, which redefined itself in 1991, making the old institutions obsolete. Some may have continuing value, but only in the context of new institutions that must emerge. These need to be regional, serving the strategic interests of the United States under the following three principles:
1. To the extent possible, to enable the balance of power in the world and in each region to consume energies and divert threats from the United States.
2. To create alliances in which the United States maneuvers other countries into bearing the major burden of confrontation or conflict, supporting these countries with economic benefits, military technology, and promises of military intervention if required.
3. To use military intervention only as a last resort, when the balance of power breaks down and allies can no longer cope with the problem.
At the height of the British Empire, Lord Palmerston said, "It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." This is the kind of policy the president will need to institutionalize in the coming decade. Recognizing that the United States will generate resentment or hostility, he must harbor no illusions that he can simply persuade other nations to think better of us without surrendering interests that are essential to the United States. He must try to seduce these nations as much as possible with glittering promises, but in the end he must accept that efforts at seduction will eventually fail. Where he cannot fail is in his responsibility to guide the United States in a hostile world.

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18 winter 2012
with NATO membership, but its supporters would at least in principle welcome
institutions that might be able to pick up the slack as they orchestrate the retraction
of America’s geopolitical commitments.
Nonetheless, the policies pursued by conservatives are likely to do more
harm than good to the Atlantic partnership. Europeans have little stomach for
the brash unilateralism favored by neoconservatives. Nor do they deem wise
calls from the right for NATO to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, a
move that would provoke Russia and saddle the alliance with new and onerous
commitments. As for the Tea Party, mainstream conservatives in Europe do not
relate to either the isolationism or the social and fiscal conservatism of America’s
far right. Simply put, an America that plays by conservative rules abroad and
at home is not an appealing partner for Europe. American progressives are the
natural political allies of Europeans and would therefore provide the Atlantic
community a much firmer foundation of affinity and interest.
Progressive leadership at home is essential to the nation’s political and economic
renewal, which in turn is the foundation for progressive leadership abroad.
Since World War II, the United States has been dramatically successful in making
the globe more stable, prosperous, and liberal. The recipe for ongoing success
in this mission is no different than in the past: a solvent and centrist America
reliant on a progressive combination of power and partnership to safeguard the
national interest while improving the world. d
Democracy Promotion: Done Right,
A Progressive Cause
Rosa Brooks
By the beginning of the Obama Administration, democracy promotion
had become a rather tarnished idea, and understandably so. Like Islam
or Christianity, much blood has been shed beneath its banner. It may be
true that democracies don’t go to war with one another, but they certainly go to
war, and their wars kill people just as dead as the wars undertaken by illiberal
regimes. Anyone on the political left can tell the story: During the Cold War, the
United States fought endless proxy wars and engaged in a great deal of overt
and covert mischief, all in the name of democracy. During the Bush Administrarosa
brooks
rosa brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and
a Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. From April
2009 to June 2011, she served in a senior position at the Department of Defens

Steve Clemons - Steve Clemons is Washington editor at large for The Atlantic and editor in chief of Atlantic Live. He writes frequently about politics and foreign affairs.
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Rebuilding America's Stock of Power

By Steve Clemons

Dec 28 2011, 10:13 AM ET 25

In the latest issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, former Clinton administration National Security Council staffer and Georgetown University international affairs professor Charles Kupchan has published an interesting essay titled "Grand Strategy: The Four Pillars of the Future."The Kupchan essay is partnered in a set considering the future of US grand strategy featuring contributions by Rosa Brooks of the Georgetown University and Law Center and New America Foundation; Truman National Security Project co-founder Rachel Kleinfeld; former Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello; and Duke University professor and co-author of The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas Bruce Jentleson. I will be chairing a session with several of these thinkers along with Democracy editor Michael Tomasky from 12-2 on 11 January 2012 at the New America Foundation. (Those interested, drop me a note, and I'll forward an invitation.)
Kupchan suggests a recipe to rebuild American leadership and power in the world. His four pillars:

1. Restore the domestic consensus on national security and rebuild the economy at home
2. America must judiciously retrench and deal with the problem that its commitments abroad have extended far beyond its interests
3. The US needs to work with emerging powers (like the BRICS plus Turkey) to create a more representative global order that preserves a rules-based international system
4. The US should resuscitate a flagging, choking Transatlantic relationship

Kupchan concludes his grand strategy contribution with this graph:

Progressive leadership at home is essential to the nation's political and economic renewal, which in turn is the foundation for progressive leadership abroad. Since World War II, the United States has been dramatically successful in making the globe more stable, prosperous, and liberal. The recipe for ongoing success in this mission is no different than in the past: a solvent and centrist America reliant on a progressive combination of power and partnership to safeguard the national interest while improving the world.

My sense of what America's strategic course needs to be rides closely to Charles Kupchan's thinking -- but his neatly drawn pillars distract I think from the dire situation America finds itself in today.
First, there are no magic wands to remedy the ailments Kupchan has outlined. Building out the US economy and resuscitating America's social contract with workers and the non-financial sector will require a massive shift in thinking and policy about industrial and domestic innovation policy. China is is driving realities in the global economic sphere today; not the United States -- and America, to revive its economy, needs to figure out how to drive Chinese-held dollars (along with German and Arab state held reserves) into productive capacity inside the United States while not giving away everything.
America must knock back Chinese predatory behaviors by becoming more shrewdly predatory and defensive of America's core economic capacities. Without a shift in America's economic stewardship -- which also means a shift in the macro-focused, neoliberal oriented, market fundamentalist staff of the current Obama team -- the US economy will flounder and on a relative basis, sink compared to the rise of the rest.
Also, while I strongly support Kupchan's call for a principled, centrist, non-partisan approach to foreign policy affairs -- the problem is not one between progressives and conservatives, or Democrats and Republicans. The problem is that both parties are deeply divided within, split among five and perhaps more camps. Realists or some version of the school of thought that thinks that America must tend to its stock of power first and judiciously apply its national security and economic capacity in a way that either advances US national interests, or at a minimum, doesn't diminish its power capacity, populate both political parties. Realists today are one of the buried, subordinate personalities of America's schizophrenic national security psyche today.
The dominant personality of the Republican and Democratic parties runs under two monikers -- but is essentially tied to the notion that the US has a moral responsibility to re-order the internal workings of other nations that constrain the freedoms and rights of their citizens. The liberal (or humanitarian) interventionist school dominates the progressive foreign policy establishment and more significantly populates the power positions of the Democratic Party today than its rivals; and in the Republican Party, various strains of neoconservatism (there is now competition among the heirs of Irving Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter and other founding fathers) dominate. Neoconservatives and liberal interventionists put a premium on morality, on reacting and moving in the world along lines determined by an emotional and sentimental commitment to the basic human rights of other citizens -- with little regard to the stock of means and resources the US has to achieve the great moral ends they seek.
I would put the late Richard Holbrooke in this school of liberal interventionists -- but what made Holbrooke such an outstanding global policy practitioner was his willingness to deal with the devil and to hammer out playbooks that were tenaciously committed to results. Holbrooke was a Nixonian progressive -- and this is what both the neoconservative and liberal interventionist schools have been too short of, a results oriented global progressivism that assured that US national power grew with its achievements and was not squandered on high cost, low return causes that may have been morally gratifying for policymakers to pursue -- but disasters when it came to the national bottom line. Think Iraq and Afghanistan.
On his second point, Kupchan is absolutely right. America must judiciously retrench and strategically re-organize its national security assets. Isolationism is not the answer here -- but extracting America from commitments that make its allies doubt its ability to help them in times of need or that embolden the ambitions of foes is a vital step.
Withdrawing from Iraq has already been painful. Perhaps the political deal-making among Iraq's various hate-thy-neighbor factions that Vice President Biden and his team, particularly Antony Blinken, along with former UN Iraq Representative Ad Melkert will hold, but the Iraq invasion and then nation-building enterprise there was nonetheless a major strategic mistake that helped undermine the US economy while removing the cork in the bottle that is Iran and its growing regional aspirations. Iraq has cost trillions of dollars and never mattered nearly as much as Iran does -- and today, America is in a significantly worse position to deal with an ambitious and not easily deterred Iran. Afghanistan needs to be next.
When the Obama administration came into office, I believed that his rhetoric about laying new track where other US political leaders had not gone was correct. Obama talked about outreach to leaders in Cuba, North Korea, Iran and elsewhere. But what he mustered on the whole were halfway efforts. His Cuba policy doesn't surpass that which was in place during the Clinton administration -- and if he goes back and looks at the secret files historian Peter Kornbluh is assembling is of what every US president since Gerald Ford (except G.W. Bush) wanted to do on Cuba, Barack Obama will see that despite his lofty pre-presidential vision for a new US-Cuba relationship, his vision pales in comparison to what they were trying then to orchestrate.
Whether it was with Cuba, or setting solid track on Israel-Palestine peace, Barack Obama had an opportunity to show that he was setting the terms of a new global gravity -- starting with some of the seemingly intractables and solving them. This could have contributed to the perception of revitalized US power in the world. It is true that Obama and Joe Biden did successfully reset US-Russia relations. Also with Biden's back room orchestration, Obama pulled off a key global nuclear materials and WMD summit that is far more important historically and internationally than many have issued credit for. But at the same time, Obama has repeatedly let Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly embarrass him and show his weaknesses. When Obama did flex US muscles on one occasion, it was over inane posturing about Futenma Air Station in Okinawa, Japan which eventually knocked out Japan's then prime minister Yukio Hatoyama and undermined Japan's first real test of genuine democracy and transition between political parties. Obama took out the wrong prime minister.
Thus, strategic, judicious retrenchment only solves part of America's geostrategic mess. Smarter policies, deployed well, must replace what has been a line of mistakes not all of which were inherited from the Bush administration.
Kupchan is right that it would be wise for the US to work with the rising powers -- but history is showing that calamity and shocks are what drive America's limited innovation on global governance. The shift to the G20 was out of necessity given the global financial crisis -- not smart advance planning. My sense is that Brazil, Turkey, China, and India are not waiting for the US and the West to cede them seats at the table. They are taking them through new economic might and a 21st century rationalization of what is right. America's influence on global problems has diminished rapidly in the last decade -- and the relevance of the rising powers increased. Striking a new "global social contract" with these powers would be smart and forward-looking but there is little chance of this happening short of the emergence of new crises that focus the mind of warring factions inside Congress and the Executive Branch.
Lastly, on Kupchan's point about reviving Transatlantic relations. OK. Sure. Would be nice. But the bottom line is that Europe is internally dissolving and becoming more fragile, less dependable and a drag on global economic growth and stability. I hope Europe changes these trends and saves itself -- but Germany has decided to engage in a one-upsmanship with its siblings and has driven a deadly internal mercantilism within Europe that will consume the passions and attention of Europe for a very long time.
Chalmers Johnson used to lampoon NAFTA by pointing out that an economic alliance including the world's then two largest net debtor nations, Mexico and the US, hardly sounded like a threat to other economic powerhouses at that time. To some degree, restoring and revitalizing a Transatlantic relationship that produced the world's last great global institutions to which they have been overly devoted to preserving is not a recipe for the kind of change and institutional innovation needed today.
In my mind, getting things right with the BRICS plus Turkey are vital to all national security challenges in the future -- and managing the reality that China matters more than all the rest -- is the vital challenge that matters. Whether or not the US has a track to restoring the Transatlantic relationship is second tier to this much more important task.
Again, I will be discussing the Kupchan paper and others of the series in a program that will stream live on this site from 12-2 pm on the 11th of January.

Presented by

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mark wilk 16 hours ago

Also, end the stupid Cuban Embargo, which is nothing more than an archaic Cold War relic and a tool to be exploited for personal gain by corrupt Cuban American politicians in Florida. End the stupid and ineffective "War on Drugs" and treat drug abuse primarily as a domestic public health issue. Restructure the "War on Terror" as a long term security problem against a handful of fanatics, rather than us against a large fraction of the world.

4 people liked this.
Don_Bacon 15 hours ago

In a democracy these things are not properly discussed by "thinkers" and decided upon by the rulers. Properly these matters belong to the citizens and their representatives.Elitist decision-making hasn't worked because it doesn't work. Before any changes can be made it must be recognized that the problem is not one between progressives and conservatives, or Democrats and Republicans, or even that both parties are deeply divided (they aren't) . In fact many in congress consistently support the wrongful policies you mention, have supported them for a long time and will continue to support them as long as they are in office.
The division comes between the citizens and their representatives. Currently, congressional job approval is at 12.7 approve, 84.0 disapprove (RCP ave.). That's pitiful. That's the problem and there's no indication that it will ever change. Congress has been bought-and-paid-for by you know who.
If change is expected then the citizens must be involved and congress must be purged of incumbents.

1 person liked this.
Zhuubaajie 14 hours ago in reply to Don_Bacon

It has worked for over 200 years for America, and 5,000 years for China. ALL countries are ran by elites, for a good reason: the elites know more, and they know better. Assuming that the methodology for choosing elites actually work, what you need then is to have a system to rein in the greed (Ayn Rand ran wild) so that the elites would be a little more public minded, all would be well.Not to say that Americans would likely consider anything other than a dual party system, but looking in from the outside, it is rather puzzling. Voting means little in the American system, not because voting means little, but because of the system. Looking at the system of choosing leaders in America, as perhaps an offplanet alien first arriving on Earth: Every few years, perfectly coiffed politicians get into open TV contests to see who can best carry soundbites, and who can best tell lies (campaign promises being such a well recognized oxymoron, NOBODY expects actual delivery of these promises). Based SOLELY on such performance and pageantry, aided by dirty, demagogic attack ads for months on end, society decides on who gets to assume power and lead. After they take office, the "leaders" take care of their real constituents - those who paid.
Why you would expect results that are different, surely puzzles.
Whatever the leaders do, whatever amount of bribes (at least it is now legalized, as "campaign contributions), it is probably OK if the government promotes the most important human right that a government works on - enabling the largest number of citizens to IMPROVE their lives year after year. Mayhap at least there should be mandatory training of the leaders (either before or after taking office) to make sure there is substance, so they can at least take care of the important business of running the richest nation in human history.
Don_Bacon 8 hours ago in reply to Zhuubaajie

You are correct, of course, and lucidly so, but I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"I'm old enough to remember the advent of television. This new medium was going to not only amuse but also educate the public, and thereby create a more egalitarian society and a more responsive government. It didn't work. Years ago the FCC chairman Newton Minnow called TV a vast wasteland. It still is.
Now we have the internet, with millions of people piped into it, getting smarter by the day, and bouncing ideas -- and we still need sessions of thinkers to help determine strategic policy? There is no shortage of thinkers. There are many posting here. But still we have sessions of elite thinkers.
Some people see things that are and ask, Why?
Zhuubaajie 8 hours ago in reply to Don_Bacon

The elites do better marketing than the plebs?
Don_Bacon 7 hours ago in reply to Zhuubaajie

There's an erroneous belief in the land that while the citizenry is fully capable of piping up on domestic policy, via polls etc., these same people just aren't wise enough to handle foreign policy. So we need thinkers to help formulate policy. Experts, so-called.Senator Wayne Morse cleared up this misconception as well as anyone could I think, as seen here.
seashell 6 hours ago in reply to Don_Bacon

If change is expected then the citizens must be involved and congress must be purged of incumbents.In general, I agree with everything you write. But until campaign financing and lobbying activities are reformed, I'm not sure that it makes any difference who is holding office. The new ones are just as owned, especially by the financial sector, as the old ones. Thus, no change.
Zhuubaajie 14 hours ago

Plotting America's grand strategy without addressing the nation's festering economic cancer, is like an opium addict who is clearly wasting, blithely planning the rebuilding of his once grandiose mansion with his own labor. The mind wants; the body won't.BIPARTISAN consensus, with full cooperation by most national politicians and the administration, has promulgated a national economic policy of gambling at a level of $700 TRILLION (50 times the American GDP). This number was reported by Bloomberg, as the size of the derivatives casino in America as of June, 2011. Regrettably, no American mainstream media (including the Atlantic) followed up with analyzing the effects and risks of this festering financial cancer, that is affecting not only the American economy, but that of the entire world.
When you consider that the American banking sector has only $16 Trillion in
total balance sheet assets (much of which is questionable due to the
fact that most derivatives cannot be priced), gambling at a level of
$700 Trillion (about 44 TIMES assets) is RECKLESS to the extreme. And
yet Washington acts as if the irresponsibility is a good thing.
The world's economic malady since 2008 was basically caused by an American decision about 15 years ago, to enable massive OTC derivatives trading, as the nation's industrial policy in a post industrial world. The policy is imposed on the rest of the world through a new form of American "banking", which eventually led to the 2008 debacle. Since then, only two major economies (Germany and China), BOTH of which resisted the continued predatory practices by American banksters, had recovered. Most other developed nations were not as vigilant, and have no hope of recovering.
Today, American banking is synonymous with "trading". Trading what? Mostly unregulated OTC derivatives. I believe it was reported that B of A made 90% of its profits in 2010 on trading; the number of SBA loans made also dropped by about 90% from previous levels. American banks don't bank (lend) anymore, they trade. They are not really banks anymore, but malignant forms of their former selves.
On its face, as a grand national strategy, derivatives look brilliant. As a postindustrial move, derivatives are not constrained by natural resources, not limited by labor, and restricted only by the salesmen’s ability to sell. Upside growth looks unlimited, as "derivatives trading" is based solely on the "ingenuity" of the new-fangled breed of financial engineers.
The "minor detail" is that unlike most other business endeavors, derivatives do not produce anything. $700 Trillion in derivatives did not produce a single shirt, a single tire, or even a hamburger. It is purely redistributive - one side wins, and the other loses, with the croupier (banker) taking a cut as intermediary. Derivatives, in other words, is pure gambling.
One can not create or maintain stability by pushing a national policy of rounding up all the major banks and financial institutions of the nation, and have them GAMBLE as a principal occupation, at a scale 50 times the GDP of the entire nation. Worse yet, this irresponsibility is further forced upon the world, on all other nations that wish to trade with America, in the name of FREE TRADE. Trying to achieve stability and prosperity for the world that way, is like walking north from Atlanta, in order to reach New Orleans. I think the Oriental saying is "climbing the tree to catch fish."
According to Bloomberg, by June 2011, the derivatives casino was already at $700 Trillion (that is 2,000 TIMES the trade deficit with China). American and British banks play croupier, and make money coming and going in this casino. Of course it is not beneath them to bet against a customer or two (or all or them), using contracts that even the salesmen cannot explain, and have to sell them based on the good ol' "trust me" confidence game. Foreign central bankers and major insurance houses, sick and tired of 2.5% returns on Treasuries, are prime customers (victims).
With the American mutual funds industry pushing for massive adoption of derivatives, and the Commodities Commission promulgating regulations to allow the small guys to join the fun, the derivatives casino is going to be US$1.5 QUADRILLION in no time. That would be 100 times the size of the American GDP, and even multiple times the size of the entire world's total GDP!! That is sheer MADNESS. What is scary is that many in Washington believe that there is method (and good) in that madness.
2008 complicated things a bit. The world witnessed how even 100 year old financial houses can go belly up overnight. Lehman Bros. had $60 Billion of derivatives on its books, lost 3% or $2 Billion, which wiped out its equity. WHAT is the significance of that? 3% of $700 Trillion is $21 Trillion, which is more than the TOTAL equity of ALL American financial companies. AND you would never know when it would hit, or even which bank it might hit. So for the plan to work, foreigners MUST be convinced to open up their markets, in order to feed the meat grinder.
You think that would stabilize the world economy?
2008 complicated things, as I said. Both Germany and China ordered their banks to stop massive gambling in derivatives. Both of their economies recovered. America bet the farm, and counted on EXPANDING the scope of the casino, betting heavily that (a) other countries will be forced to open their markets to this contagion, and (b) the American banks would always win against foreigners, as they did in the decade before.
The $7.77 TRILLION in subsidies (in the form of no cost or very low cost loans) to the American banking industry also complicated things (Bloomberg reported the practice after 2 years of FOIA requests). Now the foreigners are going to point to that as an violation of WTO rules, and refuse to allow the American banks to come in and maraud.
As an aside, against that backdrop, disputes over merchandise trade (a billion here, a few hundred millions there) are rather irrelevant. The real economic "battleground" in this 21st century is going to be over industrial policies in a post industrial world - mostly over the financial industry. It is absolutely necessary to discuss and compare risks in various nations' banking and financial systems, to identify systemic risks and frauds that could infect the whole world. When is the Atlantic going to also objectively analyze the US$700 Trillion (going on to $1.5 Quadrillion) risk and its effect on the world?

2 people liked this.
nscarroll 9 hours ago in reply to Zhuubaajie

Yes, derivatives do not produce anything. But don't expect the Obama administration to notice. The distinction between productive and unproductive economic activity is lost on them. They say straight-faced that government jobs are better than private sector jobs, completely unaware that government jobs do not produce anything, and if anything, restrict production in the rest of the economy.
Zhuubaajie 8 hours ago in reply to nscarroll

Government jobs, no matter how many there are, can only be a fraction of the GDP in any given year. So the exposures is limited. Derivatives gambling at 50 times the GDP is a totally different animal. It is well and good that the net is zero (but for the small fraction that goes to the "croupier" or broker). But it is the unpredictability of who wins and who loses that is the risky part. For all we know, ALL of the American banks could very well be broke today, while they still pay out billions in bonuses to their senior execs.The whole shebang looks and smells like fraud.

1 person liked this.
nscarroll 2 hours ago in reply to Zhuubaajie

It was those government jobs which allowed the derivatives gambling, was it not? Government jobs can have an outsize effect on the economies they regulate.
seashell 7 hours ago in reply to Zhuubaajie

What is scary is that many in Washington believe that there is method (and good) in that madness.Ahhh, you mean those 'innovative products' the idiots leaders in Washington love to crow about?
I just read where Brazil's economy is now 6th largest in the world economies, bumping the UK's place down a notch.
From what I have read about Basel III, I'm not hopeful that much is going to change from that direction.
This comment should be headlined as a column in The Atlantic. Thank you.

1 person liked this.
Daniel Warren DuPre 13 hours ago

Really, Steve? Restore the domestic consensus on national security and rebuild the economy at home? Well, duh! I always thought the path to renewal involved endless petty bickering and economic implosion. Who knew? This is a mindlessly idealistic middle school civics essay with slightly bigger words.
Steven Clemons 12 hours ago in reply to Daniel Warren DuPre

Daniel -- I don't think you read the piece. I critiqued Charlie Kupchan's view that a domestic consensus was unlikely and that most of the pivots we would make would unfortunately be shock driven. Come back and play when you have read what I have written -- and then happy to have an informed discussion with you. I know you can do it.
nscarroll 9 hours ago in reply to Steven Clemons

The Kupchan article was a nice piece of advice for a party out of power. Unfortunately, Obama has been in power for three years, including control of both houses of Congress for the first two years. He has had his turn at bat, with less than stellar results, to put it mildly.
Nikolas_Gvosdev 11 hours ago

Steve,A key part of this discussion has to be a frank debate over the degree of risk the United States is prepared to assume in the future. Kori Schake's recent article in Orbis ("Margin Call") may be a useful piece to read in preparing for this debate. As she has noted, there remains considerable resistance in U.S. policy circles to accepting more risk and accepting risk in different ways.
These themes also were discussed at the Ruger Conference up here at the Naval War College earlier in November. The United States cannot continue to pay for its curernt national security edifice--so can the U.S. government, beginning with Congress, enact reductions in a “smart way”—based on an assessment of U.S. strategic need—or in a “stupid way”—one driven by short-term domestic political considerations that ignore the international situation and realities on the ground? Should the United States scale back its activities in some parts of the world in order to concentrate effort and resources on the most significant regions, beginning with Asia? Or is the better approach for the United States to focus on only certain types of missions, and give up capabilities and roles that we expect others to pick up? Hopefully you will pose some of these questions to your panelists.
Finally, the discussion you plan to host should examine why these ideas are hard to enact. Scanning some of the pieces you cited, I cannot help but think it sounds very familiar. How different are these proposals from what Justine Rosenthal wrote in 2007 in National Interest? Charlie Kupchan's piece seems to echo many of her sentiments. It might be interesting to probe why these positions--about restraint, a focus on setting priorities, etc.--continue to find so little traction within the political process.
Zhuubaajie 11 hours ago in reply to Nikolas_Gvosdev

"It might be interesting to probe why these positions--about restraint, a
focus on setting priorities, etc.--continue to find so little traction
within the political process."Er, because those are the issues that do not drive campaign contributions? They might be beneficial to the nation as low prices are beneficial to consumers. But because the benefits are more diversely distributed, there is no concentrated pockets of special interest to fund the lobbying.
No pay, no play. That is how America works.

1 person liked this.
A_Lee 10 hours ago

While this "progressive foreign policy" sounds reasonable and respectable, it's worth remembering that our current world is not a product of it. This article and the essay it links to fails to mention the two most important events since 1945.First, the containment and collapse of the Soviet Union, despite "progressive" (read: Leftist) opposition. It was Truman and Eisenhower who formulated containment, and Reagan and Thatcher who administered the final blow. Had it been left to the progressives, like Ted Kennedy, we would still be negotiating a "third way" with the Soviets.
Second, the opening of China to the West, by Nixon and Kissinger. Hardly progressive thinkers, they were old-school realpolitik grand-strategists, who were willing to cut deals with dictators for incremental gains against Communism. They would have strongly opposed the ousting of Qaddafi in exchange for anarchy followed by fundamentalist Islamic rule.
The bi-modal isolationist/militarist conservative foreign policy strategy is not schizophrenic. They are two sides of a coherent whole: isolationism in the absence of pressing security needs, and aggressive militarism in the face of an urgent threat. Fight sparingly, but when you do, fight to win thoroughly. The neoconservative wave was simply the militarist response to radical Islamic terrorism. Whether it was good strategy is an open question.
This "progressive grand strategy" is simply the same status-quo, conventional-wisdom, muddling-along like we had during the Clinton years. But history doesn't stand still, as we found out in the first Bush year. We should not pretend that this progressive strategy has any history or experience to commend it. This foreign-policy-by-multilateral-consensus-and-talking may have made for interesting policy papers, but it wasn't the EU, the UN, or even NATO that ended the Cold War. It was jelly-bean-eating conservative cowboy diplomacy.

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Zhuubaajie 9 hours ago in reply to A_Lee

Jelly bean eating conservative cowboy diplomacy also almost led to a nuclear WW III. It was just as likely that a failing USSR could have chosen to end it all, betting that it has lots more liveable land than America, and thus could better survive a full scale nukes exchange.McArthur also bet big in Korea. Did he win that one too?
The grand strategy that might work (or not) HAS to involve not just cowboy militarism. If the economy does not recover, there will not be money to pay for it all.
A_Lee 1 hour ago in reply to Zhuubaajie

Well, the only way to insure that nuclear war doesn't happen is to surrender unilaterally to anyone who has nuclear weapons. Anything else risks war. What do you think the vaunted liberal-hero JFK did in the Cuban missile crisis?Deterrence is a careful dance of managed perception and risk. You can characterize it however you want.
I see you're a fan of Journey to the West. Surely Sun Wukong required both a mix of restraint and violence to achieve his goals.
seashell 6 hours ago in reply to A_Lee

First, the containment and collapse of the Soviet Union, despite "progressive" (read: Leftist) opposition. It was Truman and Eisenhower who formulated containment, and Reagan and Thatcher who administered the final blow. Had it been left to the progressives, like Ted Kennedy, we would still be negotiating a "third way" with the Soviets.Whoa. How do you square this belief with Thatcher's opposition to the wall coming down? A few months before the wall fell, in Sept. 1989, Thatcher met with Gorbachevin a secret meeting:

Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the NATO communiqué may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany. It would lead to changes in the post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the entire international situation and could lead to threats to our security.
A_Lee 1 hour ago in reply to seashell

Easily. Vasiliy Mitrokhin, a defector to Britain in 1992, produced top-secret KGB documents showing that Ted Kennedy sought a secret channel of communication with Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the USSR, during Reagan's administration, including a secret memo in 1983. Kennedy sought to coordinate with Moscow to "manage" Reagan, and to increase favorable public perception for the Kremlin, and to paint Reagan as a dangerous warmonger. In other words, disseminate propaganda for the Soviet Union.That a US Senator would seek to create secret communications with a foreign government for the explicit purpose of undermining the sitting US president is quite a different level of communication than Thatcher's legitimate worry about post Cold War balance of power in Continental Europe.
These memos are public knowledge, first published in the London Times at the time of Mitrokhin's defection in 1992.
Don_Bacon 6 hours ago

In my mind, getting things right with the BRICS plus Turkey are vital to all national security challenges in the future -- and managing the reality that China matters more than all the rest -- is the vital challenge that matters.
Very true, with the "IC" part coinciding with the administration's recently announced rollout of "America's Pacific Century."

State: "The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action."
In practice, however, the administration is acting against China with its new the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the “NAFTA for Asia” which includes the smaller Pacific states but not China (or India). The U.S. has cozied up to India but has been unfriendly to Russia. Brazil is a no-show, Turkey has pluses and minuses. Economically the BRICS are slowing but still doing well, better than the U.S. and Europe.

news report: Average economic growth in the BRIC countries will decelerate to 6.1% next year from a high of 9.7% in 2007, according to September estimates by the International Monetary Fund. That would narrow the gap over America’s expansion to 4.3 percentage points, the smallest since 2004, the IMF data show. Global GDP may increase 4% next year, restrained by 1.1% growth in the euro area, the Washington-based fund said.

1 person liked this.
DonS 5 hours ago

"The dominant personality of the Republican and Democratic parties runs
under two monikers -- but is essentially tied to the notion that the US
has a moral responsibility to re-order the internal workings of other
nations that constrain the freedoms and rights of their citizens. " (SC)This wildly messianic version of US destiny deserves not just reportage -- it deserves refutation - unless one subscribes to the "exceptionalist" vision of the the US. Reporting isn't enough; refutation is called for. There is no way to simply report this version without accepting the perverted 'religification ' of American foreign policy. I know Steve is not a convinced religionist. So why the reluctance to go the logical next step, draw out the implicit assumptions ?
" Neoconservatives and liberal interventionists put a premium on morality, on reacting and
moving in the world along lines determined by an emotional and
sentimental commitment to the basic human rights of other citizens --
with little regard to the stock of means and resources the US has to
achieve the great moral ends they seek. " (SC)
Ditto my initial objection. The argument is not fundamentally a choice BETWEEN means/resource and moral ends. The fabricated "moral ends" deserve criticism and destruction on their own ethnocentirc hubris, not simply because their perverted goals are economically not reasonable.
Or is Steve making another argument that eludes me?
Don_Bacon 4 hours ago in reply to DonS

Steve is okay with liberal interventionists except they haven't been smart, so he is making a pitch for "smarter policies." (He liked Holbrooke, who accomplished what, exactly?)
Thus, strategic, judicious retrenchment only solves part of America's geostrategic mess. Smarter policies, deployed well, must replace what has been a line of mistakes not all of which were inherited from the Bush administration. (SC)
This reminds me of the neoliberal interventionists' "Smart Power" which I once wrote about here.

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Grand Strategy: The Four Pillars of the Future

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Tectonic shifts in international affairs and in political and economic conditions within the United States call for reconsideration of the first principles of American grand strategy—the fundamental tenets guiding the nation's statecraft. The global landscape is fast changing due to the ongoing diffusion of wealth from the West to the rest and the social awakenings taking place in the Middle East and beyond. At home, Democrats and Republicans are locking horns on most foreign policy issues and on how to control debt and stimulate growth; the resulting political stalemate risks compromising the purposeful exercise of U.S. power and eroding the economic foundations of national strength. Meanwhile, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a shrinking defense budget have diminished the political appetite for sustaining the full portfolio of America's global commitments.
American grand strategy needs to adjust to these potent international and domestic constraints. The alternative is an erratic statecraft that switches direction as power changes hands in Washington. Worse still, partisan paralysis, especially when coupled with economic duress, has the potential to stoke isolationist sentiment, just as it did during the 1930s. A world in the midst of tectonic change can ill afford an America that is not up to the task of providing steady and enlightened leadership.
In this new era, a progressive grand strategy for safeguarding the nation's interests should rest on four first principles. To begin, grand strategy and national power start at home—with political and economic solvency. Only if the United States recovers consensus and prosperity will it have the political purpose needed to provide effective leadership in a changing world. Second, the United States must rebalance means and ends by pursuing a judicious retrenchment; the nation needs to bring its strategic commitments back into line with its interests, resources, and public will. Third, Washington should work with emerging powers to fashion a more inclusive and representative global order—one that updates, but preserves, a rules-based international system. Fourth, the United States should breathe new life into the Atlantic community. As countries that practice authoritarian capitalism rise in power and influence, the democracies of the West need to continue to serve as the anchor of liberal values and progressive change.
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