Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Globalists Still Don’t Get It

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America First, Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, global leadership, globalism, international cooperation, international institutions, Joe Biden, multilateralism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Trump

It was tempting for me to react to Gideon Rachman’s column in yesterday’s Financial Times by noting, “At least he got it half right.” But this essay on Joe Biden’s determination to put U.S. foreign policy back on a globalist course isn’t even noteworthy by that modest standard.

For Rachman’s observation that a Biden administration is likely to find its goal of American global leadership much more difficult than expected to restore, and his conclusion that therefore the United States will have no choice to advance and protect its interests but to work via international institutions it can’t dominate and hope for the best, has been standard globalist fare for decades – as I’ve explained most recently and comprehensively here.

The crucial globalist mistake Rachman repeats entails what President Trump and his too-ragged pursuit of an America First strategy grasped in its essentials – that although the United States is far from strong (or wealthy, or wise) enough to achieve the central globalist goal of ensuring American security and prosperity by creating a fundamentally benign international environment, it is plenty strong and wealthy enough to achieve its essential interests through its own devices. The key is preserving and enhancing enough of that strength and wealth to maximize the odds of surviving and prospering in a world certain to remain dangerous or at least unstable.

To phrase this conclusion in globalist terms: The United States doesn’t need “global leadership” in the first place. It simply needs the capacity to take care of however it defines its own business.

An added virtue of this America First-y approach – success requires a lot less wisdom than globalism. That’s because (a) this strategy seeks to control what the nation can plausibly hope to control (its own affairs) instead of what it can’t plausibly hope to control (the affairs of everyone else); and (b) the United States’ favored (largely isolated) geographic position, its natural wealth, and its still formidable industrial and technoogical prowess endow it with a strong basis for withstanding and even thriving amid global turmoil that most other countries can only envy.

As I’ve also noted (in that National Interest article linked above) and elsewhere, the America First approach is needed even when working through those international institutions seems to be the nation’s best bet for coping with problems or maximizing opportunities. For as globalists (including Rachman in part) invariably miss is that the decision to foster “international cooperation” could even hope to be an automatic guarantee of favorable or even acceptable outcomes only if an objectively optimal solution for all concerned is already available and identifiable either by one or a group of the national governments involved, or by commonly accepted experts. Write me if you see any of these developments coming any time soon – even on a (rhetorically) widely agreed on worldwide “existential threat” like global warming.

In other words, for the foreseeable future, international institutions will be arenas of politics, not festivals of one-worldism, and international cooperation will have content. And if American leaders’ persuasive skills don’t suffice, for the best possible odds of mastering these politics and securing outcomes reflecting their country’s own distinctive interests and priorities, they’ll need to recognize that the former exist to begin with, and bring to bear the power (in all of its dimensions) needed to prevail satisfactorily. To cite a concept even globalists sometimes use, Washington will need to build and maintain and negotiate from “situations of strength.” But they’ll need to realize that these advantages are just as important in dealing with long-time allies and relatively benign neutrals as with adversaries like China and Russia.

The half of this cluster of issues Rachman gets right also includes his understanding that the American people will probably like the return to globalist-style multilateralism and cooperation even less than a Biden administration. But this insight isn’t exceptional, either, as his ultimate explanation for this resentment seems to be a neanderthal attachment to sovereignty by an electorate long viewed by globalists as too ignorant and unrealistic to acknowledge their superior wisdom.

And since, as Rachman correctly points out, Biden’s globalism is not only staunch, but pretty clueless itself, the nation will need considerable luck if his term in office avoids the debacles that so many of his pre-Trump predecessors created.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s Potentially Dangerous Nonsense on Global Rules

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international cooperation, international law, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, power, United Nations

Usually, the most compelling criticisms of presidential speeches before the UN General Assembly are that they’re cynical exercises in idealistic rhetoric delivered for public relations purposes, and that they tell us almost nothing useful about a particular administration’s foreign policy. The most compelling criticism of President Obama’s latest speech before the UN General Assembly is very different: It seems likely that he really believes the platitudes he spouted about the need to conduct American diplomacy and international relations in general according to the rule of law. In the process, at least, Mr. Obama made abundantly clear why his own foreign policy record has been so ineffective.

The president’s brief for continuing to build “a system of international rules and norms that are better and stronger and more consistent” was impressively detailed. But it ignored all the big obstacles that have kept world affairs an endless and often bloody struggle for power and advantage. It presented no plausible ideas for getting the world from here to there. And it ignored the even more compelling reasons for the United States in particular to reject the president’s seemingly unimpeachable goals.

As Mr. Obama noted, the Hobbesian system he condemns has set the mold for world politics “for most of human history.” But he never even broached the question of “Why?” Had he been the slightest bit curious, he surely would have recognized that no effective system of global rules has ever existed in the security realm because the international sphere completely lacks the essential condition that makes meaningful legal systems possible in the first place: a strong consensus on what represents acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Groups of individuals that develop this consensus are naturally able to create the two main defining characteristics of genuinely legal systems. First, they can turn this consensus into a set of specific do’s and don’ts that apply equally to all, regardless of power, wealth, or status. Second, they can agree on procedures to resolve disputes peacefully and figure out how to apply these rules to specific sets of circumstances when questions arise.

Although documents such as the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights indicate that acceptable behavior has in fact been defined, the story of the post-World War II period shows that it’s a paper creation. In fact, no actual consensus whatever exists even on whether these principles should apply equally to all countries, much less on binding dispute-resolution mechanisms. And as President Obama should have noted, the United States has been one of the prime culprits. Along with the other major victors of World War II, it insisted that the UN accord them special status via creation of a Security Council in which each could veto any decision made by the organization even if every other member supported it.

But before you condemn that era’s American leaders for ending a new golden age of international law before it even began, ask yourself why Washington should have agreed to to permit its actions to be checked by any other countries or groups of countries. Should it have trusted in the superior wisdom or virtue of the Soviet Union? Of Britain and France, who were reeling economically and who were still struggling to maintain empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East? Of Latin American countries geographically isolated from most impending world crises, too poor and weak to make significant contributions to resolving them, and generally ruled by dictators?

Further, even if a respectable argument could be made for taking international consensus into account in a major way in American foreign policy-making, what’s the moral argument for deciding that the opinions and judgments of other government should always or usually trump that of the leaders elected by the American people? And what was the pragmatic argument for accepting this kind of system, given that the early postwar United States was amply capable of providing for its own security and prosperity?

Decades later, America’s relative power in world politics clearly has waned. But the nation is still more than able to ensure its safety and prosperity through its own devices, especially if it defines its major interests realistically. And who are the foreign intellectual and ethical paragons to which the U.S. government should defer today? Dictators like Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping? European leaders who keep shirking their appropriate share of the common western defense burden, and who are always happy to do business with rogue states in apparent confidence that American can always be trusted to deal with any dangers that emerge? Third world countries ruled by various kinds of autocrats and/or dependent on various forms of U.S. and other foreign aid?

Equally mysterious: How would Mr. Obama proceed to create a global legal system out of the chaos that exists today, and which his own words indicate has taken a turn for the worse lately? His rhetoric – including this speech – continually reveals a conviction that expelling power considerations from world politics would benefit all countries, even the large ones. But where is the evidence that he’s making converts? Is he considering setting an example by voluntarily yielding America’s prerogatives in the UN and other international organizations? Does he want the UN Secretary-General to serve as some kind of de facto or de jure world president? Does he have someone or something else in mind? And if, as appears, he has no blueprint, why should anyone take his words seriously?

But at least those questions are hypothetical. Another big question surrounding the president’s approach to foreign policy constantly comes up in the here and now, and needs to be answered satisfactorily for anyone to have any legitimate faith in his diplomacy: Does he recognize that mustering superior power and wealth is necessary for American success even in dealing with those threats he rightly noted “no nation…can insulate itself from”? From all appearances, the answer is “No,” and this failure to understand that national wherewithal must be available and applied even to meet shared global challenges raises the prospect that America’s legitimate interests will get rolled repeatedly.

Here’s why. It’s true that “the risk of financial contagion; the flow of migrants, or the danger of a warming planet,” and similar problems, potentially affect all countries, and create powerful incentives for cooperation. But the president seems to have no clear idea of how that cooperation gets created. Hopefully, he isn’t counting on some group of allegedly disinterested experts to come up with answers so brilliant that all governments will simply acknowledge their merits. It seems evident that he’s not counting on the rest of the world to believe that the United States will come up with ideal solutions on its own. So how does he propose to achieve any progress?

My distinct impression is that he has no such strategy here, either, and that he’s overlooking the reality that the highly diverse states that comprise the international sphere bring to all negotiations and other cooperative endeavors different historical experiences, cultural traditions, locations, and economic strengths and weaknesses. As a result, they (including the United States) inevitably are going to define acceptable, let alone ideal, outcomes from their national standpoint in equally diverse ways, at least much of the time.

The possibility of persuasion can’t be ruled out in world politics. But in those many instances where the force of American ideas is not sufficient to prevail at the bargaining table, and where American preferences matter, the force of American force – and wealth – will be vital for increasing the odds that solutions significantly reflect American interests and preferences. Therefore, whether sticks or carrots are used most often, it should be evident that those countries with the most wherewithal will be able to use those devices most effectively, and that consequently maximizing power in all of its usable dimensions needs to be among the nation’s top foreign policy priorities.

In a country with representative, accountable government, one of the most important functions that leaders can serve is educational – not in a high handed, lecturing sense, but in terms of identifying plausible, desirable objectives, the trade-offs involved in achieving or forgoing them, and the pluses and minuses of various available policy tools. With his oratorical gifts and his smarts, Mr. Obama’s potential to play this role was undeniable. That’s why it’s so tragic that he’s chosen, in so many of his big-think exercises in foreign affairs, to propagate myths and homilies that are not only gauzy and empty, but potentially dangerous.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Power Remains Paramount

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Brookings Institution, civil society, climate change, foreign policy, international cooperation, international law, international organizations, internationalism, James Traub, nation-states, non-state actors, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, poverty, power politics, Russia, terrorism, transnational threats

It’s tempting to conclude that nothing could be less important than a Brookings Institution conference on “International Peace and Cooperation in an Age of Global Competition” even if invitees did include “senior foreign policy officials, scholars, and experts from G-20 member states and other pivotal countries.” After all, why would representatives of foreign governments disclose to an audience comprised of representatives of other foreign governments anything of consequence that was previously unknown?

At the same time, what’s learned about such gabfests can usefully remind the rest of us plebeians how completely out to lunch these supposed luminaries tend to be – especially regarding the main questions and choices they think they face. So FOREIGN POLICY magazine contributor James Traub deserves a big shout out for reporting the gist of this off this record session. For his account (unwittingly, to be sure) strongly indicated that those assembled (presumably including some American leaders) have totally forgotten the key enduring truth about international affairs.

It’s a maxim that prevails even in these turbulent times, and indeed especially in these turbulent times: As long as the world contains multiple, independent forces or parties of any kind, their hopes for success (however defined) will depend overwhelmingly on their relative power.

According to Traub, the attendees were all but consumed with the question of whether world affairs are still dominated by the kinds of nation-states that emerged centuries ago, or by the bewildering array of non-state actors and forces that seem to be popping up everywhere nowadays, ranging from terrorists to religious movements to civil society groups to the simple “demand of ordinary people for a better life than their government now affords them.”

The author quite rightly notes the dramatically different sets of policy implications that flow, at least logically, from either answer: the former militating for continuing to seek advantage over rival states, and win and keep allies; the latter pointing to a new, more cooperative agenda of solving or at least ameliorating a series of common problems underlying growing turmoil and transcending national borders (e.g., poverty, autocracy, and climate change).

Of course, anyone with a lick of intelligence (including the conferees) will recognize that life never divides so neatly. Indeed, as I’ve written, the internationalist ideology that’s governed U.S. foreign policy-making since Pearl Harbor has always sought to eliminate the social and economic conditions considered key to the appeal of its communist adversaries. Similarly, Traub reports that many of the conferees arrived at answers essentially amounting to “all of the above.” That is to say, a revival of traditional power politics, epitomized by Russia’s muscle-flexing in its immediate neighborhood, was being accompanied by the rise of transnational threats that are best handled cooperatively. And all the while, nation-states as a whole “are much weaker than they were,” with the United States either unable or unwilling “to reassure allies or scare off adversaries as it once could.”

But what apparently went unrecognized is that national power will remain decisive whether cooperative or conflictive impulses and dynamics wind up on top. The importance of power in a completely rough-and-tumble world should be obvious. Its importance in a world where more positive-sum logic is more widespread is admittedly more difficult to identify, but no less paramount.

The reason is that even within communities that have developed commonly recognized authorities for organizing action, cooperation will always have a structure, and that structure will tend to have significantly different effects on different parts of that community. To the extent that these differences matter (which is often the case), various community members will usually have different preferences for moving ahead. The winners and losers are often determined by the amounts of resources (economic power) they can mobilize on behalf of their causes, by the the bounds of existing law and policy, and by their relative persuasive gifts. Often outcomes result from some combination of all of these.

When no commonly recognized authority exists, as with international politics today, persuasion can sometimes work also. Existing policies rarely count for much, law for even less, but relative power typically plays the biggest role. Consequently, as long as it matters to Americans that their priorities (or something close) prevail in international cooperative ventures or negotiations, their leaders will need to bring as much power as possible, in all of its forms, to bear on the relevant planning or bargaining sessions at the relevant international organizations or other venues  – whether to pressure, to induce, or to threaten credibly or exercise the option of walking away if their course isn’t satisfactory.

A final argument for focusing on cultivating power should be especially compelling for those Brookings invitees – and others – who have had actual policy-making experience. They should know better than anyone else how suddenly unpredictably international challenges and opportunities can arise. Power is no guarantee of coping successfully. But who can doubt that the strong and the wealthy will fare much better, mainly because they enjoy more relatively good options, than the weak and poor?