Our So-Called Foreign Policy: (Unintentional) Gifts from the Globalists

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America First, globalism, international institutions, internationalism, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Joseph S. Nye, multilaterism, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Project-Syndicate.org, sovereignty, Trump

One of life’s great pleasures is seeing views you’ve held for decades validated by your intellectual or ideological or political opponents. And there’s a special gratification in seeing them validated unwittingly (though nothing beats outright admissions of error).

So imagine how I’m feeling today having just learned that two of America’s leading globalists have just made clear (except to themselves) that the foreign policy approaches they’ve championed for decades are, in one case, only loosely at best related to the nation’s security and prosperity and, in the other, almost suicidally moronic.

The globalist who now apparently believes that globalism is unnecessary – along with, by implication, all the costs and risks it imposes on the United States – is Harvard University political scientist and former top U.S. national security official (under Democratic presidents) Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

In an essay published yesterday on the Project Syndicate website, Nye focused on explaining why American foreign policy can never escape and should never seek to avoid efforts to advance moral objectives. I disagree – but that’s another debate. What was most intriguing to me was a central argument used to advance his case: “Some foreign policy issues relate to a nation-state’s survival, but most do not. Since World War II, the United States, for example, has been involved in several wars, but none were necessary for its survival.”

This claim may seem to be nothing more than the essence of common sense (it is). But it also happens to clash violently with the core assumption of globalism (which in the pre-Trump years was called “internationalism”). As I originally wrote here, this assumption holds that America’s security, independence, and prosperity are so completely inseparable from the security, independence, and prosperity of literally every corner of the globe that the country literally has no choice but to anchor its foreign policy to the goal of creating a world so free of security, economic, and social challenges that threats to the United States will never arise in the first place.

Subsequently, I’ve contended that, however true this argument may or may not be for other countries, it is uniquely inapplicable to the United States, due to its towering degree of geopolitical security and its equally formidable potential for economic self-sufficiency.

Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether I’m right or wrong. Nye’s acknowledgment that none – i.e., not a single one – of the (often frightfully costly) wars fought by the United States in the last seven decades was a war of necessity signals loudly and clearly that Nye (at least now) agrees with me. And if these conflicts were in fact wars of choice, then logically the various globalist policies they were intended to advance or reinforce in the name of creating that threat-free world need to be seen as optional as well – ranging from prioritizing the maintenance of international alliances and institutions to the extension of foreign aid and involvement in nation-building.

Not that their optionality means that they should always or even often be opposed. But it does mean that Americans – and especially the globalist elites that have controlled and dominated the way Americans discuss foreign policy (at least in systematic ways) – need to pay more attention to alternative approaches for achieving and maintaining adequate levels of security, independence, and prosperity. As a result, the types of America First impulses displayed by President Trump and articulated more completely by some of his like-minded compatriots (including yours truly) need to be examined carefully, not ruled out of hand with pejoratives like “isolationism” or “bullying.”

The second globalist to have made my day today is former U.S. Senator John Kerry, who of course also won the Democratic nomination for President in 2004 and then went on to serve as Secretary of State in Barack Obama’s administration.

Kerry has been campaigning for his Obama era colleague Joe Biden’s bid to win the White House this year, and this morning was shown on CNBC making the following statement while touting the former Vice President’s qualifications for the Oval Office: “He [Biden] is completely committed to the notion that before you send American troops into harm’s way, before you ask families to risk the lives of their loved ones, you owe it to everybody in the world to exhaust the capacity for diplomacy. This President has not done that.”

It’s one thing of course to support caution in using America’s military overseas. No sensible person of good will could object. But such decisions should be made with “everybody in the world” in mind? Seriously? Even national populations with absolutely no stake in the outcome? Even the population of the country being targeted? Even its leaders? Even the allies of those leaders, like Vladimir Putin? Come to think of it, what did Franklin Roosevelt owe Adolf Hitler before he declared war on Germany in 1941, beating the Nazis to that punch. Talk about a formula for endless inaction and outright paralysis – however urgent the circumstances or imminent the threat. I really try avoiding use of the word “stupid,” but if the shoe fits….

Moreover, Kerry wasn’t simply having a bad day here. He expressed almost identical views during his 2004 presidential run when he insisted that American decisions to go to war must be submitted to a “global test” of legitimacy. It’s like he either doesn’t know that the United States is a fully sovereign country, which means that according to any framework you care to use (utilitarian, legal, ethical) it is completely and unreservedly entitled to decide for itself whether its own actual or even perceived interests justify this step – or he doesn’t believe it.

I’m going with the latter answer, especially given globalism’s bottom line about the supremacy of multilateralism, – i.e., about creating, reserving, and continually strengthening international institutions as the only conceivable way to achieve that benign global environment they seek.

But my swelling head aside, let’s not forget the most important silver lining to this post. For decades, Nye and Kerry have done more than their share to push the United States into endless globalist wars, to assume needless nuclear attack risk (through the tripwire forces deployed to defend wealthy, free-riding U.S. allies), to waste massive resources on nation-building fool’s quests, and to undercut its precious sovereignty for the sake of utopian global governance dreams.

In the last 24 hours, though, they’ve strengthened the case – however unintentionally – for avoiding these blunders going forward. And I’m certainly more than happy to say “Thanks!” instead of “I told you so.”

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Kerry and the Establishment Remain Clueless About Middle East Peace

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foreign policy establishment, Israel, John Kerry, Middle East, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, Samantha Power, settlements, Six-Day War, West Bank

At the risk of appearing to pile-on, here’s a criticism of Secretary of State John Kerry’s jeremiad this week about Israel’s record in Middle East diplomacy you haven’t read yet: The speech once again makes clear that the man who’s dubbed “America’s Chief Diplomat” has no clue as to what determines the outcome of a negotiation.

I’ve been making such arguments for years. The gist is that Kerry – and his boss in the Oval Office, and most of the foreign policy establishment in the United States and the rest of the western world – have been (unwittingly, I assume) making an Israel-Palestinian peace less, not more likely with the approach they’ve been using literally since the Six-Day War in 1967. Their fundamental mistake has been seeking to award the Palestinians at the bargaining table what they have no hope of winning on the battlefield or through any other actual or conceivable developments on the ground. But since outside powers have never been able to deliver on this implicit promise in any way, the result consistently has been enabling Palestinian obstinacy that gets more self-defeating every year.

What stands out about Kerry’s speech, and the entire Obama administration approach, has been misunderstanding the role played in Middle East diplomacy by Israel’s settlements in territories it was won militarily since 1967. The Secretary of State repeated the view that much settlement activity represents an “obstacle to peace.”

Previous American administrations have stated more or less the same position – as U.S. UN Ambassador Samantha Power has stated. But that consistency doesn’t made such views any less rear-end backward. In fact, if not for the meddling of outside powers, the settlements would have been likely to produce reasonable Palestinian offers of compromise. For every bit of land that comes under Israeli control makes whatever state the Palestinians could possibly hope to create that much weaker, smaller, and less viable. Without the false hopes held out by American and other foreign diplomats, the Palestinian leadership could have experienced no stronger incentive to bargain realistically – and therefore seriously.

Ironically, Kerry’s detailed indictment of Israeli policy on this front does an excellent job of detailing just what the Palestinians have lost – and keep losing:

>“[T]here are over 80 settlements east of the separation barrier, many located in places that would make a continuous – a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Does anyone seriously think that if they just stay where they are you could still have a viable Palestinian state?”

>Crucial decisions about the West Bank are “being made unilaterally by the Israeli Government, without consultation, without the consent of the Palestinians, and without granting the Palestinians a reciprocal right to build in what will be, by most accounts, part of Palestine.”

>“[I]t’s not just a question of the overall amount of land available in the West Bank. It’s whether the land can be connected or it’s broken up into small parcels, like a Swiss cheese, that could never constitute a real state. The more outposts that are built, the more the settlements expand, the less possible it is to create a contiguous state.”

>“[A] settlement is not just the land that it’s on, it’s also what the location does to the movement of people, what it does to the ability of a road to connect people, one community to another, what it does to the sense of statehood that is chipped away with each new construction.”

>“Today, the 60 percent of the West Bank known as Area C – much of which was supposed to be transferred to Palestinian control long ago under the Oslo Accords – much of it is effectively off limits to Palestinian development.”

>“If the occupation becomes permanent, over the time the Palestinian Authority could simply dissolve, turn over all the administrative and security responsibilities to the Israelis.”

In fairness to Kerry – and the viewpoint he represents – he is convinced that a West Bank seized in this way would be unsustainable for Israel:

“[I]f there is only one state, you would have millions of Palestinians permanently living in segregated enclaves in the middle of the West Bank, with no real political rights, separate legal, education, and transportation systems, vast income disparities, under a permanent military occupation that deprives them of the most basic freedoms. Separate and unequal is what you would have. And nobody can explain how that works. Would an Israeli accept living that way? Would an American accept living that way? Will the world accept it?…Who would administer the schools and hospitals and on what basis? Does Israel want to pay for the billions of dollars of lost international assistance that the Palestinian Authority now receives? Would the Israel Defense Force police the streets of every single Palestinian city and town?

“How would Israel respond to a growing civil rights movement from Palestinians, demanding a right to vote, or widespread protests and unrest across the West Bank? How does Israel reconcile a permanent occupation with its democratic ideals? How does the U.S. continue to defend that and still live up to our own democratic ideals?”

And these are clearly serious questions for Israelis. But what Kerry and so many others have completely missed is that:

(a) It’s entirely reasonable so far from an Israeli standpoint to assume that even this likely scenario is safer and thus vastly more acceptable than the one flowing from the establishment of the kind of Palestinian state – led by the current generation of Palestinian leadership; and (much more important)

(b) These are far more serious – indeed, national life and death – questions for the Palestinians. Moreover, the answers they can realistically hope for are far worse – and worsening all the time.

President-elect Trump has indicated his interest in trying to end the conflict between Israelis and their Arab neighbors – and his confidence that he can succeed. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether he’s right. But his career has demonstrated some skill at hands-on negotiation. And he does know a thing or two about the importance of real estate.

Im-Politic: Why Trump-ism Could Have Staying Power

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2016 election, America First, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, internationalism, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, national interests, national security, Obama, Peggy Noonan, Richard Nixon, rule of law, The Wall Street Journal, Trade

Welcome to the Age of Trump!

Since ages these days come and go a lot faster than previously in history, this one could well end in November, if he loses the presidency. Who, though, can doubt that, until then, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will dominate the news cycle with his outsiders’ instincts and his matchless flair for publicity, and keep his presumptive rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, the quintessential insider, continually on the defensive?

At the same time, the reasons for supposing that what might be called “Trump-ism” in American policy (and yes, I’m aware of all the contradictory views he still needs to resolve) is no flash in the pan are much stronger than widely realized.

Even given the implacable hostility he’s generated throughout the Mainstream Media, because of all the of digital ink spilled already on Trump’s remarkable rise, it’s hard to imagine anyone recently coming up with something fundamentally new – including me. But the Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan (who gained fame as a star speechwriter for Ronald Reagan) achieved just that objective in her April 28 column, when she wrote that the key to Trump’s appeal has been his supporters’ conviction that “he is on America’s side.”

Moreover, before you say, “Duh,” Noonan’s basic analysis ultimately also explains why Trump is so detested by the nation’s policy establishment across the political spectrum, along with the establishment journalists that flack for them – and why his approach to America’s challenges and opportunities holds much more promise than the reigning framework, especially in world affairs.

As you’ll see if you read the article, Noonan’s definition of “pro-American” entails much more than an avowed determination to defend and advance the nation’s interests. Of course, all public officials will call that their goal, and nearly all will sincerely mean it. What Noonan emphasizes, however, is the tendency of mainstream liberal, conservative, and centrist politicians alike to dilute that goal with numerous other considerations. These often are compatible with what’s best for America, or could be. But they’re not necessarily or intrinsically “pro-American” and can easily – and often have – compromised U.S. security or prosperity.

Noonan’s writes that Trump’s literal America First outlook “comes as a great relief to [his backers] because they believe that for 16 years Presidents Bush and Obama were largely about ideologies. They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world. Mr. Obama’s ideological notions are leftist, and indeed he is a hero of the international left. He is about international climate-change agreements, and leftist views of gender, race and income equality. Mr. Bush’s White House was driven by a different ideology—neoconservatism, democratizing, nation building, defeating evil in the world, privatizing Social Security.

“But it was all ideology.

“Then Mr. Trump comes and in his statements radiate the idea that he’s not at all interested in ideology, only in making America great again—through border security and tough trade policy, etc. He’s saying he’s on America’s side, period.

I’d elaborate with two points. First, there’s a fundamental, bipartisan worldview and approach to world affairs underlying all these disparate positions. As I’ve explained, it’s called internationalism, and its bedrock tenet holds that America’s best bet for security and prosperity is pursuing what political scientists call milieu goals – literally trying to shape the world to make it safe for America.

As a result, especially since Pearl Harbor, this strategy has led the nation’s leaders on what I’ve called (especially in writing about national security and international economic policy) a search for abstract (a word Noonan uses in passing) standards to guide policy rather than simply asking what makes America and its people safer or wealthier. In fairness to the policy gurus and their acolytes, they insist that they’re simply taking a broader, more complex (sophisticated, etc.) and indeed more realistic view of U.S. interests. In particular, they claim to understand that the long run is more important than instant gratification.

That’s why even long before President Obama entered the White House, American leaders have been talking about strengthening peaceful global norms of behavior and the international institutions that should be administering them; about preserving relationships; about submitting to a “global test” before going to war (Secretary of State John Kerry’s words as the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate); about creating New World Orders and balances of power and “global structures of peace” (a Richard Nixon favorite); about freeing global trade and commerce to the greatest possible extent; about winning foreign “hearts and minds” (a Vietnam War campaign); about figuring out who’s on the “right side of history” (a big bone of contention during Jimmy Carter’s presidency); about eradicating global poverty; about controlling arms; about demonstrating credibility; about exercising or maintaining “global leadership.”

Of course, America and the world as a whole would indeed likely be much better off if much of this substantive progress (i.e., disarmament, trade liberalization) came to pass. But the main question facing policy-makers is rarely, “What would be advantageous” but “What is achievable at acceptable cost and risk?” Just as important is the question, “Compared to what?” For countries without alternatives, questing for a more congenial world environment is arguably the policy to follow – even though, paradoxically, however, their very lack of alternatives logically reflects a weakness that places this goal far out of reach.

As I’ve argued, however, the United States is in a different, and much more favorable, situation entirely, thanks to its geographically isolated location, its still dynamic social system, its sheer size, and its consequent economic power and potential for self-sufficiency. And logically, a policy of relying on variables that are relatively easy to control (i.e., a country’s own capabilities and actions) makes much more sense than a policy relying on variables that are relatively difficult to control (i.e., the capabilities and actions of others).

The arguments for pursuing the procedural aims of internationalism (those institutional goals) are even weaker for the United States. Given its military and economic superpower status and potential, yoking America to internationally agreed on standards of behavior seems likeliest to crimp valuable freedom of action, and hand influence over America’s fate over to powers that are either indifferent or hostile, without contributing on net to national security or well-being.

Also worth fretting about are time-frames (which are closely related to cost and risk issues). Let’s assume that even all of the above goals would benefit America sufficiently to warrant their pursuit. That still leaves the matter of how long the nation is supposed to wait for the benefits to start flowing. And nowhere is this question more important than in the international trade field, where Americans have repeatedly been told either (a) that their jobs and incomes should be sacrificed for the greater good by decisions to win and keep allies by handing them chunks of U.S. markets; and (b) that whatever economic pain liberalized trade is inflicting will eventually be more than offset by greater efficiencies or wider consumer choices or even more employment opportunities and higher wages (when foreign countries finally decide to open their markets).

It’s important to note that a “Trump-ian” crockery-breaking pursuit of greater and quicker policy benefits has no place in domestic politics. At home, Americans have developed a strong consensus on acceptable standards of behavior that justifies the supremacy of rule of law and its consequent proceduralism.  Nothing close to such a consensus is visible internationally.

But here’s something that’s at least as important to note: Even though it’s by no means certain that internationalism’s assumptions have been discredited, or that its promises have been broken, what is certain from the success this year of Trump as well as Democrat Bernie Sanders – another staunch critic of U.S. trade policy – is that Americans increasingly are out of patience. They’re demanding policies that safeguard their livelihoods and raise their wages now. And they’re in no mood to be told that such measures might violate World Trade Organization rules or antagonize allies whose own free trade bona fides are dubious at best – or offend populations in a dysfunctional Middle East that hasn’t exactly been showering Americans with affection lately.

Finally, the politics of the divide between Trump supporters and policy elites has been positively inflamed by the latter’s ability to avoid most of the costs and risks of glittering, quasi-utopian visions still all too far from panning out. Precisely because these electoral considerations dovetail so neatly with a policy shift strongly grounded in geopolitical and economic realities, unless U.S. security and international economic policies start delivering concretely for many more Americans very soon, the Age of Trump could have real legs.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Hillary Clinton’s Dangerously Muddled Iran Deal Message

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Hillary Clinton, Iran, Iran deal, John Kerry, nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy

The Middle East continues its matchless record of scrambling whatever intelligence, logic, and common sense America’s most prominent political leaders and commentators may boast. Just look at Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

Its big problem – which got no attention, as far as I can tell – was a position on using force to block illicit Iran’s bomb-building efforts that’s just as confusing and incoherent as that expressed by the president she served as Secretary of State. More important, it contained just as much potential to send Iran a message exactly the opposite of its intent – of U.S. weakness rather than resolve.

To kick off her remarks, Clinton didn’t exactly repeat Mr. Obama’s claim that it’s the deal or war (get quote.). But she came awfully close: “Either we move forward on the path of diplomacy and seize this chance to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon, or we turn down a more dangerous path leading to a far less certain and riskier future.” And as she continued explaining her support for the agreement, her reasoning inevitably raised the same fundamental and disturbing questions as the president’s – about why using military force is being treated as the last option America should use against Iran’s nuclear program, not the first.

Six weeks ago, I noted that the Obama position on the matter as stated was difficult to understand at best – even accepting (as I do) that military actions are inherently difficult to bring off successfully, and that American lives are a precious commodity. Let’s look at the issue more closely.

On the one hand, the president has emphasized that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon was so threatening to the security of the nation as a whole that it would not be allowed under any circumstances. But on the other hand, his main defenses of the deal have been that, whatever flaws critics could identify, Congress’ acceptance was imperative because keeping the allies and other negotiating parties on board with sanctions meant that no additional efforts to address these flaws was possible.  

Iranian leaders could easily be forgiven for viewing these contentions as adding up to an implicit admission Mr. Obama believed that America had no viable military option to prevent their development of a weapon, including through violating the agreement, and that he was basing all his nonproliferation hopes on the threat of “snapping back” multilateral sanctions in response to cheating by Tehran. At the same time, however, as my post noted, Mr. Obama’s current Secretary of State has said publicly that not only does the president believe that the nation’s military options are viable, but that he has actually approved the development and deployment of the weapons he thinks can get the job done.

Yet if the president thinks that the Iranian program and any prospect of cheating can indeed be bombed out of existence now, if it’s such an intolerable threat to U.S. security, and if a reasonable chance exists that Iranian cheating – or a move to break-out as the deal’s key provisions expire starting ten years from now – could result in a bomb, why not take out the facilities ASAP and remove any uncertainty? The more so because the longer America waits, in theory, the bigger and therefore harder to completely eliminate Iran’s bomb-building infrastructure will become.

Nor do the two most commonly cited objections hold much water. Although Secretary of State John Kerry is indeed right in noting that the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon can’t be bombed out of existence, there would be nothing barring America from attacking anew if Iran’s scientists began reconstructing the program. In other words, Iran’s nuclear ambitions could be one of those many international problems that can’t be completely solved, at least for the time being, but that needs to be contained or managed.

Second, it’s hard to imagine global public opinion being upset for too long – even among populations that the United States does need to care about. Far from exploding in paroxysm of anti-American protest, riots, and terrorism, the Sunni Muslim world and its governments are likely to be cheering. The European allies would surely grumble, but would they really disrupt any aspect of their relations with the United States?  

Shiite reactions of course would be dramatically different, but Israel seems to have Hezbollah under control, and Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad plainly has his hands full just clinging to power against ISIS and a host of other internal and external enemies.  Ditto for Iraq’s Shia leadership and the more anti-American Shia elements of that fragmenting country’s population.      

Russia and China would feel the sharpest sense of betrayal, but how would they react? Beijing can’t afford to jeopardize trade and broader economic ties. Would it move (even) more aggressively on disputed Asian territories and waters? Or think twice about its apparent campaign of expansionism? Similarly, would Vladimir Putin be (even) more likely to threaten or intimidate East European allies of a United States that acted so decisively? Certainly, there’s no evidence that U.S. forbearance regarding Iran has generated any Chinese or Russian restraint in their neighborhoods.

Above all, you don’t need to favor military responses at all (and that’s not the purpose of this post) to recognize that Iran’s leaders are surely making the same observations and asking themselves the same questions.  So they could also well conclude that the relative benefits of an American military strike in cold-blooded terms are so compelling that Washington’s reluctance to act reflects President Obama’s belief that his military option actually isn’t promising enough to use, especially if Tehran is clever enough to avoid backing the United States into a corner before presenting it with a fait accompli.

If anything Clinton’s Iran speech last week highlighted such internal contradictions more sharply. The former Secretary of State, for example, went out of her way to express skepticism about Iran’s motives. Her approach, she made clear, would assume that “Iran will test the next president. They’ll want to see how far they can bend the rules.” Her response would be “distrust and verify.” More specifically, and crucially, in addition to relying on sanctions, Clinton would:

“shape Iranian expectations right from the start. The Iranians and the world need to understand that we will act decisively if we need to. So here’s my message to Iran’s leaders: The United States will never allow you to acquire a nuclear weapon. As president, I will take whatever actions are necessary to protect the United States and our allies. I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon. And I will set up my successor to credibly make the same pledge. We will make clear to Iran that our national commitment to prevention will not waver depending on who’s in office. It’s permanent. And should it become necessary in the future, having exhausted peaceful alternatives, to turn to military force, we will have preserved and in some cases enhanced our capacity to act. And because we’ve proven our commitment to diplomacy first, the world will more likely join us.”

Yet there’s certainly a reasonable chance that the big takeaway in Tehran from this passage is the tension between Clinton’s suggestion that (a) America has the capability to “turn to military force” right now, and that (b) she will “exhaust peaceful alternatives” before taking that step. Fueling Iran’s confidence even more strongly might be Clinton’s acknowledgment – significantly different from the blanket defense presented by Obama – of flaws in the deal’s monitoring and inspection provisions, and especially the length of time (up to 24 days) that could pass before Iran must allow access to suspect sites and activities. To view the use of force as a last option against an untrustworthy adversary with a record of cheating simply doesn’t easily square with the view that force is an option in which Clinton has considerable faith. It could look more easily squared with a strategy of placing hope in a bluff.

None of these problems have changed my conclusion that this bad Iran deal is better than no deal at all, Yet they also leave me convinced that America’s best bet by far for security against Middle East threats is disengaging from continuous intervention in this ruined region’s chaotic affairs, and capitalizing on geography’s vast potential to keep them far from the nation’s shores.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Iran Deal, the Dollar, and Economic Power

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allies, Congress, dollar, Iran, Iran deal, John Kerry, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, reserve currency, sanctions, verification

I keep writing that the less President Obama and his top aides say about their deal to prevent Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, the better its chances of Congressional approval, and doggone it, they keep proving me right. In the latest instance, recent remarks by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry about Congress’ decision and the fate of the U.S. dollar cast doubt on both their Iran policy as such, and about their claim to have any coherent foreign policy at all.

According to the president and his top diplomat, the dollar’s global position could be endangered if, after rejecting the agreement, American lawmakers try to force the rest of the world to abide by U.S. sanctions. They seem to be right in a key sense. As they have made abundantly clear, U.S. allies, rivals, and neutrals alike have viewed resuming business with Iran as a much higher priority than concluding a nuclear agreement without gaping loopholes. Both Messrs Obama and Kerry have both all but stated that ending multilateral curbs on trading with and investing in the energy-rich country always mattered most even to the West Europeans, and the Iran deal’s lenient sanctions-lifting conditions and verification weaknesses certainly bear them out. In fact, as I’ve written, the impossibility of mustering more international support for stronger terms – which is hardly Mr. Obama’s fault alone – is why I believe that this deeply flawed deal is better than none at all.

Not that U.S. leaders have been crystal clear on what kind of pressure would both (a) fail to move other major powers whose support would be crucial to damage Iran enough to achieve a stronger deal and (b) backfire disastrously. It’s even hard to figure out how they define “backfire disastrously.” For example, in an August 5 speech, the president said:

“If, as has…been suggested, we tried to maintain unilateral sanctions, beefen them up, we would be standing alone. We cannot dictate the foreign, economic and energy policies of every major power in the world.

“In order to even try to do that, we would have to sanction, for example, some of the world’s largest banks. We’d have to cut off countries like China from the American financial system. And since they happen to be major purchasers of or our debt, such actions could trigger severe disruptions in our own economy and, by the way, raise questions internationally about the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.”

But in an interview yesterday, Kerry also suggested that simple Congressional rejection of the deal would be enough to threaten such U.S. interests: “[T]he notion that we can just sort of diss the deal, unilaterally walk away because Congress wants to, will have a profound negative impact on people’s sense of American leadership and reliability.”

More important, though, are the implications of either contention for America’s broader approach to the world, and to the issue of whether the nation’s current leaders are capable of achieving overseas goals crucial to the nation’s well-being. For both Mr. Obama and his Secretary of State are saying that the dollar-based economic clout that Congress would allegedly threaten by rejecting the Iran deal isn’t close to sufficient to ensure that the deal is genuinely satisfactory. They could be right. But if they are, then how important is this clout in the first place? And if this economic and financial power actually matters so little, does that leave America solely with the military option internationally when persuasion fails?

An obvious retort is that the power flowing from the dollar’s international role – and America’s economic strength more generally – doesn’t have to work every time in order to retain value. It’s also reasonable to argue that even if this kind of clout can’t deliver decisive results in a given situation, it can make important contributions. Then there’s the reality that power is often most effective when it’s use is only implicitly threatened.

Yet the importance attached by the administration to keeping Iran nuclear weapons-free, and the very limited potential of the Vienna agreement to ensure success (especially over any significant time period), undermines all those positions. Here’s the president himself describing the stakes in that August 5 speech:

“Among U.S. policymakers, there’s never been disagreement on the danger posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb. Democrats and Republicans alike have recognized that it would spark an arms race in the world’s most unstable region, and turn every crisis into a potential nuclear showdown. It would embolden terrorist groups, like Hezbollah, and pose an unacceptable risk to Israel, which Iranian leaders have repeatedly threatened to destroy. More broadly, it could unravel the global commitment to non-proliferation that the world has done so much to defend.”

And as Mr. Obama reminded his audience, he’s refused to rule out military options to prevent proliferation in Iran if other means fail.

All of which leaves us with two other possible explanations for the Obama analysis of economic power as well as for its potential to strengthen the Iran deal: Either his administration simply doesn’t want to use it, or it doesn’t know how. Like I said, the less we hear from the administration on this subject, the better the deal’s chances in Congress.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What Does Obama Really Think About the Iran Military Option?

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Arab Street, Bashir Al-Assad, Council on Foreign Relations, Iran, Iran deal, Iraq, ISIS, John Kerry, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Shiites, Sunnis, Syria

I’ve suggested that the less President Obama and his top advisers say about their new Iran nuclear deal, the better its chances of Congressional approval, and Secretary of State John Kerry recently provided a great example that somehow escaped even the critics’ notice.

The president plainly thinks that one of the strongest arguments on behalf of the deal is that it’s America’s best option for keeping Iran nuclear weapons-free short of war. And most of his critics plainly agree with his assumption that such a conflict would be terrible. Otherwise, why would they keep insisting despite all the evidence that tougher sanctions, or a prolonging of current sanctions, can get the job done?

I agree that a military strike could be very dangerous. It’s anything but clear that the U.S. government knows where all of Iran’s key sites are, and secret facilities would almost by definition survive American bombs and missiles. Moreover, military actions have a nasty habit of producing unexpected and harmful consequences.

But here’s the funny thing: According to Secretary of State John Kerry, the president actually isn’t so worried. And Kerry’s stated views could legitimately be interpreted as agreeing – at least if you take seriously some July 24 remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

The Council, just to remind, is a combination foreign policy education and discussion group and research organization, and its members include many of America’s top private business and financial leaders as well as current and former government officials (along with, less impressively, chattering class types like think tank staffers and journalists). So Kerry (a member himself) presumably was choosing his words even more carefully even than usual. It’s worth quoting at some length what he said about the military option:

“Now, I know there’s been a lot of railing through the years over their [Iran’s nuclear] program, and people rant and rave. And we know we’ve seen the prime minister with a cartoon of a bomb at the UN and so on and so forth. But what’s happened? What has anybody done about it? Anybody got a plan to roll it back? Anybody got a plan that’s viable beyond bombing them for one or two days or three days that might slow their program down for two years or three years? To which, as most of you as practical human beings, you know what the response will be.

“I mean, we can do it, and we haven’t taken it off the table. Let me make that absolutely clear. This President is the only president who has actually developed something called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the MOP, which has been written about publicly. And not only has he asked it to be designed, he’s deployed it.

“…And when I became Secretary of State, when he called me into the Oval Office and I sat with him, I said, ‘Mr. President, if I’m going to be your Secretary of State, I want to know that if I’m going around and talking to countries in the Middle East and I say you’re prepared to use military action, I don’t want to be a Secretary of State for whom you’ve pulled out the rug.’

“…And he looked at me and he said, ‘John, let me tell you something directly. Iran will not get a nuclear weapon and I will do whatever is necessary, but I believe diplomacy has to be put to the test first.’”

So according to Kerry, although Mr. Obama is by no means anxious to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, his position that all options needed to remain “on the table” has not simply been talk. He gave the orders to develop a weapon needed to achieve success and to put it into service.

Kerry’s own views of using force and of its consequences are at least as interesting. He told Council members that “We can do it” and that between one and three days of strikes “might slow their program down for two years or three years.” To be sure, the Secretary did add, “you know what the response will be.” In fact, though, this matter is far from clear.

For example, what Kerry didn’t mention during this appearance was the possibility of such attacks triggering a region-wide Middle East war. Nor did he bring up the prospect that the so-called “Arab Street” might rise up in anger. Maybe that’s because, if anything, Sunni Arab public opinion could well welcome action against Shia Iran. Meanwhile, the region’s other Shiites – in Iraq and Syria – seem to have their hands full with ISIS and with embattled Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad’s remaining forces.

Kerry might be referring to a point he has made elsewhere – that Iran’s knowledge of the nuclear fuel cycle can’t be “bombed away,” and that Tehran could simply start all over again. At the same time, if this is Kerry’s point, it hardly proves that military action would be futile. After all, creating enough physical destruction to slow Iran’s weaponization plans by two to three years sounds pretty impressive – especially compared with a deal whose flawed verification and sanctions snap-back provisions could easily permit Tehran to continue progressing toward weapons capability with its remaining human and physical infrastructure intact. Moreover, if the Iranian nuclear program shows signs of attaining critical mass again, it could be attacked again.  

Again, none of the above means that I favor the military option. What it does mean is that the president himself might not believe one of the main arguments for his Iran deal.  If true, that could ironically hearten many opponents – but frighten many supporters.

 

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Big Overlooked Lesson of the Iran Deal

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AIIB, allies, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, burden sharing, China, Cold War, IMF, Iran, Iran deal, John Kerry, multilateralism, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Security Council, United Nations, World Bank

Whatever you think of President Obama’s deal aimed at preventing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon, it’s vital to recognize that it greatly compounds the evidence that a key pillar of recent U.S. foreign policy is crumbling – the belief that many crucial American international objectives can successfully be pursued multilaterally. The terms of the deal powerfully indict extensive reliance on formal U.S. alliances and less formal groupings of allegedly like-minded countries. They also indict extensive reliance on international institutions like the United Nations. And they make more urgent than ever the development of alternatives.

Even President Obama has described the terms of the Iran deal as sub-optimal. But he and his aides have insisted that it is better than any feasible alternative non-military approaches to Iran’s nuclear program. The president appears to be correct on this score, and consequently, a compelling case can be made for the deal’s approval by Congress. Nonetheless, it’s imperative to understand why an agreement with genuinely disturbing weaknesses has in fact been the best peaceful option available.

The principal reason, as made clear by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, is that even the western powers involved in the Iran negotiations have decided that the economic sanctions to which they have agreed have exacted a high enough price, and that the further costs they might have to pay due to efforts to strengthen the deal are unacceptable. In other words, for Britain, France, and Germany, the desire to resume potentially lucrative commercial ties with Iran outweighs the benefits of increasing pressure on Iran’s economy in order to, say achieve the right of no-notice, “anytime, anywhere” inspections of suspect Iranian sites. Similarly, the allies judge new business opportunities to be more important than requiring Iranian compliance with the agreement’s terms for longer time spans before restoring its ability to buy arms – including ballistic missiles – on the international market.

Kerry has noted that the United Nations has been even less interested in keeping The Bomb out of Iran’s hands. He has pointed out that the Security Council had not decided to condition early ends to the weapons- and missile-buying embargoes on signing a nuclear deal with Iran. The Council conditioned these actions on nothing more than Iran’s agreement to participate in nuclear negotiations. That’s why, Kerry argues, he needed to agree to these relatively early sunsets to begin with, and why he insists that the United States will be isolated in the world community if Congress does not agree.

In other words, a goal described by the president as vital – keeping Iran nuclear weapons free – has been significantly compromised because the allies do not fully share U.S. concerns. Nor does most of the rest of the world. As a result of this fundamental disagreement, it’s difficult to understand, as I’ve written, why anyone supposes the allies or the UN membership would agree to reimposing (“snapping back”) sanctions while the agreement is in place, much less holding Iran’s feet to the fire once the deal’s various provisions lapse.

Economics just delivered a similar message to Washington. The United States had initially decided to oppose China’s decision to set up an international development bank to serve as an alternative to the existing World Bank. Chinese leaders argued that the Western-dominated Bank was too slow to finance the massive infrastructure needs of developing countries in Asia and elsewhere, but U.S. leaders suspected that China was really seeking to gain international influence at America’s expense. Washington also worried that a Chinese dominated aid bank would be managed irresponsibly from a financial and governance standpoint, and that its projects would run roughshod over the environment. Anyone who knows anything about Chinese financial, governance, and environmental practices would need to regard these fears as legitimate.

As I’ve written, however, despite this U.S. opposition, even most of its closest allies decided to join the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) anyway. They have cited two main reasons that even many prominent Americans agree with, but that turn out to be bogus on closer inspection – and that underscore the weaknesses of multilateralism. First, many of the allies themselves maintained that their participation would promote best business and environmental practices at the new institution. Second, they – and many influential Americans – describe the aid bank as an understandable Chinese reaction to the U.S. Congress’ refusal to approve increasing China’s voting power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Yet the U.S. allies that have jumped on the AIIB bandwagon are acting so eager to win new infrastructure contracts that it’s hard to believe they’ll pressure Beijing to adopt high standards. Moreover, increasing China’s IMF vote amounts to increasing the global clout of a government and economic system that’s by far the worst kleptocracy of all major countries. That’s a terrible idea, which in particular overlooks the multi-decade failure of western policies to moderate China’s behavior by integrating it into the world economy. The results to date have been a country that’s immensely stronger militarily, far more aggressive towards its neighbors, increasingly protectionist on the trade and investment fronts, and increasingly repressive towards domestic dissent.

The United States has never been especially successful at alliance management. In particular, it was never able to convince either its European or Asian allies to contribute proportionately to the common defense and security burden. And the Europeans frequently broke with Washington even on the military conflicts of the day – to the point of continuing to trade with North Vietnam during the Indochina conflict. But failures during the Cold War took place in a period when America possessed much greater relative military and economic power than today. So it needed allied cooperation much less to achieve goals it considered important. The Iran deal and AIIB failures show that a lack of allied cooperation is now enough to prevent America from achieving such goals.

Which means that, as during the Cold War, the main point is not the United States has been necessarily right and other countries necessarily wrong in these disputes. The main point is that America today finds itself in a position in which the rest of the world (including its closest allies) can – and have – fatally undermined measures needed to achieve objectives that Washington regards as deserving the utmost importance. As a result, whether its leaders know it or not, the nation faces a basic choice. It can either accept the global consensus, and decide to live in a world that its own leaders have stated will pose unacceptable risks. Or it can start figuring out ways to attain an acceptable level of security through its own devices.

The possibilities are wide-ranging, depending on how the American political system defines the nation’s overseas priorities, how much it decides to spend on achieving them, and how much wealth the economy can generate – thereby determining how intense the inevitable resource competition between “guns and butter” will be. My own hope is that U.S. leaders recognize two truths that seem to be recognized by the public already. First, foreign policy is about achieving important goals that cannot be attained through domestic policy. Second, although the United States lacks the power to become acceptably safe and secure by stabilizing, pacifying, enriching, or democratizing the rest of the world, it has ample power to survive and prosper even in the deeply flawed and indeed dangerous world it faces today.  

Worrisomely, though, President Obama doesn’t even yet seem to recognize the problem. Speaking at the West Point commencement last year, he made a point that’s become presidential boilerplate by now: “America should never ask permission to protect our people, our homeland, or our way of life.” Yet as demonstrated by his Iran diplomacy and, secondarily, by the AIIB fiasco, that’s exactly what the nation is doing.  And the rest of the world is anything but reluctant to say “No.”

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Wishful Thinking Dominates Both Sides of the Iran Nukes Debate

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airstrikes, Binyamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, John Kerry, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Susan Rice

If you want to become totally depressed, try following the heated debate over efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons – which of course came to a head today (for now) with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress over the objections of the Obama administration.

This debate is depressing because none of the major participants seem to have an especially promising strategy for keeping Iran’s dangerous regime non-nuclear, at least not for the foreseeable future. In fact, the two most prominent blueprints – advanced by President Obama and by Mr. Netanyahu – seem to place excessive faith in economic sanctions to produce a long-term solution, albeit for dramatically different reasons.

The American position in the current negotiations assumes that the best strategy to achieve a non-nuclear Iran entails (a) promising to ease and eventually end current sanctions depending on the regime’s adherence to any agreement, and (b) threatening to intensify sanctions if the present talks fail. In addition, the Obama administration insists that it has not ruled out military action against Iran’s nuclear program if it concludes that sanctions have been unsuccessful as well.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been leading the American diplomatic effort, and wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last June, “All along, these negotiations have been about a choice for Iran’s leaders. They can agree to the steps necessary to assure the world that their country’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful and not be used to build a weapon, or they can squander a historic opportunity to end Iran’s economic and diplomatic isolation and improve the lives of their people.”

In Kerry’s apparent view, this offer is too good for Iran’s leaders to pass up. As he wrote, if it agrees to forswear weaponizing their nuclear program, and to the measures needed to verify compliance, that nation “will be able to use its significant scientific know-how for international civil nuclear cooperation. Businesses could return to Iran, bringing much needed investment, jobs and many additional goods and services. Iran could have greater access to the international financial system. The result would be an Iranian economy that begins to grow at a significant and sustainable pace, boosting the standard of living among the Iranian population. If Iran is not ready to do so, international sanctions will tighten and Iran’s isolation will deepen.”

The problem is that Kerry could well be overlooking compelling reasons for Iran’s leaders to value becoming a nuclear weapons state over the benefits of reintegrating with the global economy and political system. These benefits would be especially important for an Iran determined to maximize its influence in the Middle East through means that include supporting terrorism and other forms of violence. Specifically, a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver warheads throughout the region could effectively give Tehran the retaliatory capability to deter any American or Israeli counter-strikes. Longer-range delivery systems, including those that could reach the United States, would give Iran even greater scope to pursue its agenda. As I have written, the acquisition of such intercontinental capabilities is threatening to give North Korea this degree of deterrence, and to destroy the foundations of America’s security strategy in the Far East.

Yet President Obama’s critics, including Mr. Netanyahu, may be harboring equally unrealistic expectations of sanctions. In late 2013, he criticized America’s Iran strategy for granting Iran “relief from sanctions after years of a grueling sanctions regime. They got that. They are paying nothing because they are not reducing in any way their nuclear enrichment capability.”

Speaking to American lawmakers today, Netanyahu made even clearer his confidence in both the sanctions that he believe should not have been lifted, and of those that could still be imposed:

“Iran’s nuclear program can be rolled back well-beyond the current proposal by insisting on a better deal and keeping up the pressure on a very vulnerable regime, especially given the recent collapse in the price of oil. Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff. They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do. And by maintaining the pressure on Iran and on those who do business with Iran, you have the power to make them need it even more.

And of course using the threat of harsher sanctions allegedly more effectively than the administration has was at the heart of the recent bipartisan Senate bill that was co-sponsored by 16 Senators upon its introduction.

But why does Netanyahu, who has assailed the Obama administration’s ostensibly shortsighted decade-or-so Iran time frame, believe that oil prices will remain low, especially over the long run? And why does he seem so confident that the Europeans and others, whose cooperation is essential for sanctions to exert genuine pain, will buy in for as long as is necessary? Surely he can’t be basing this optimism on Europe’s response to Russia’s campaign against Ukraine.

Scarily, this analysis seems to point – logically at least – to military strikes as the best means of preventing Iran’s nuclear-ization. And “best” here isn’t a synonym for “good” or even “feasible.” I’ll leave the purely military analysis to others with more expertise. But even recognizing the major risks and the long odds, it does seem that the Obama administration undervalues the most plausible benefits.

It’s true, as Kerry has said that, “You can’t bomb knowledge into oblivion unless you kill everybody. You can’t bomb it away.” But that’s the wrong standard for success. If Iran’s most important nuclear facilities are vulnerable to air attack (a crucial “if”), then destroying or disabling them would serve the objective – which should never to be underestimated in this tragically flawed world – of buying time. And if and whenever Iran is able to reconstitute a critical mass of its nuclear capabilities, the best option may be resuming attacks.

The military option could also move Iran’s toward the kinds of compromises that it’s so far resisted – including a massively intrusive inspection regime that, incidentally, would have to function in a much more streamlined and seat-of-the-pants manner than its predecessors, to avoid lengthy controversies about documenting violations that Tehran could exploit to make weapon-ization progress. But the case for airstrikes shouldn’t depend exclusively, or even heavily, on diplomatic hopes, much less on expectations of regime change. In other words, Americans may need to start viewing the Iran nuclear threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition that needs to be managed in forceful – and frankly dangerous – ways. And that’s if we’re lucky.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Faux Realism of Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger

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21st century rules, Arnold Wolfers, Barack Obama, foreign policy, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, milieu goals, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, Vladimir Putin

Secretary of State John Kerry – rightly – caught lots of flak for whining about Vladimir Putin’s refusal to recognize that world politics is now conducted according to what have disparagingly come to be called “21st century rules”. As pointed out by his Republican and conservative critics in particular, the ideas that most of the world’s major powers actually do agree, are on the verge of agreeing, or should agree that armed conflict is now passé and counterproductive are hopelessly naïve.

All the more reason to be grateful for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s review of a new book by one of her most respected predecessors, Henry Kissinger. Her essay in the Washington Post on World Order (unwittingly, to be sure) shows that Mr. Kerry’s views and expectations (which by all accounts are shared by President Obama) are anything but unique to him, or even to liberal Democrats. They’ve long been a mainstay of mainstream, and official, American foreign policy thinking for decades. As a result, don’t expect U.S. actions in international affairs to be motivated any time soon by the pragmatic objective of promoting or securing specific, concrete interests for decades.

Aiming foreign policy at responding to specific problems or specific opportunities in specific places might seem the height of common sense. But as observed by the late political scientist Arnold Wolfers back in the 1960s, it’s only one conceivable approach to an international strategy. Another is the pursuit of what he called “milieu goals” – efforts to transform the entire international environment in advantageous ways – and as Wolfers noted, this objective has been unusually prominent not only in American thinking on international affairs, but in the English diplomatic tradition in which it originated.

The appeal of milieu goals is clear enough: Success could relieve a country of the need to both with foreign policy at all, since the world it faced presumably would become devoid of any significant threats. The problems with this strategy, however, should be even clearer: It’s much harder to transform and indeed pacify the entire world – or enough of it to count – than to deal with it challenge by challenge or opportunity by opportunity.

With world politics now filled with menacing non-state as well as state actors, and the U.S. economy conspicuously weak and saddled with debt, pursuing milieu goals looks like the height of dangerous folly. Even worse, it looks like needlessly dangerous folly, given America’s highly secure geopolitical position (protected from any major potential adversaries by two broad oceans) and its great potential for economic self-sufficiency.

Yet as Secretary Clinton’s review of Secretary Kissinger’s book shows, a figure usually considered the personification of European-style realism in international affairs – and even ruthlessness – is now as supportive of the milieu goals strategy as the allegedly more idealistic and more numerous Woodrow Wilson acolytes that have long dominated the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s ranks.

As Mrs. Clinton notes, Dr. Kissinger’s over-arching theme is how, in today’s still-dangerous and especially confusing world, America can duplicate and expand on its ostensible Cold War success in creating “an inexorably expanding cooperative order of states observing common rules and norms, embracing liberal economic systems, forswearing territorial conquest, respecting national sovereignty, and adopting participatory and democratic systems of governance.”

More specifically, she writes, Although she and her predecessor “have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past, what comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.”

Secretary Clinton recognizes how surprising this conclusion will sound given Secretary Kissinger’s realist reputation. She explains the seeming contradiction by contending that Dr. Kissinger understands “how much the world has changed since his time in office, especially the diffusion of power and the growing influence of forces beyond national governments.” Therefore, he has presumably learned that what once seemed like head-in-the-clouds thinking has its feet firmly on the ground.

But however convenient for Mrs. Clinton and her fellow Wilsonians, this poratrayal overlooks how Wilsonian Kissinger – and his supposedly equally realist boss, Richard Nixon – always were. However cold-blooded the means they often used, their foreign policy ends were always to create what Mr. Nixon called “a structure of peace in the world in which the weak are as safe as the strong–in which each respects the right of the other to live by a different system–in which those who would influence others will do so by the strength of their ideas, and not by the force of their arms.”

Nor was this mere boilerplate. In his second Inaugural Address, Mr. Nixon – accurately – depicted this goal as a continuation of America’s strategy since the end of World War II. “By continuing to revitalize our traditional friendships, and by our missions to Peking and to Moscow, we were able to establish the base for a new and more durable pattern of relationships among the nations of the world. Because of America’s bold initiatives, 1972 will be long remembered as the year of the greatest progress since the end of World War II toward a lasting peace in the world.”

Just as important, Mr. Nixon made clear that his purpose was to seek not simply “the flimsy peace which is merely an interlude between wars, but a peace which can endure for generations to come.” In other words, he was seeking lasting global transformation.

Messrs. Kissinger and Nixon were viewed as realists no doubt because they soft-pedaled talk of promoting human rights and democracy, and because, as implied above, they admitted more forthrightly than many of their predecessors in office that achieving noble goals would inevitably entail acting in decidedly ignoble ways from time to time.

But Kissinger’s reputation for realism also benefitted from his academic works, which focused on efforts to create international order in previous eras – especially the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. But what he never seemed to realize was that, promoting order was at least a conceivable objective when all the major international actors had so much in common with each other culturally. Even in his years in office, a stabilization of great power relationships could plausibly hope to have global consequences – although the increasing importance of developing countries with completely different cultures and historical experiences was a growing complication that Messrs Nixon and Kissinger never fully appreciated.

In Secretary Clinton’s view, the new importance on the world stage of “Nongovernmental organizations, businesses and individual citizens” simply means that American statesmen need to figure out ways of giving them ownership in global stability and prosperity as well as national governments. And according to her review, Mr. Kissinger now agrees.
Mrs. Clinton insists that “There really is no viable alternative.”

As I’ve long been writing, there had better be, if America is to avoid a future of bankruptcy, exhaustion, and defeat. More encouragingly, thanks to the nation’s unique combination of strengths and advantages, there is. All the United States and its people need are leaders perceptive enough to see this.