Our So-Called Foreign Policy: When Things Went Wrong

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Cold War, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, grand strategy, Great Britain, interventionism, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, U.S. foreign policy, Walter Lippmann, World War II

As winter, 2014-15 approaches, the United States finds itself

>struggling to avert another 9-11-type attack by fighting a half-hearted campaign in the Middle East that even hawks fear could last decades;

>slowly getting drawn into a potentially terrifying game of chicken in the skies over Europe with a nuclear-armed Russia:

>tying itself up in knots over protecting the public from an Africa-born disease;

>trapped in a strategy of fighting nuclear wars to defend protectionist Asian powers that have decimated its productive economy; and

>heavily reliant on foreign powers – friendly and otherwise – for everything from energy to industrial machinery to credit itself.

Nor are these predicaments at all exceptional over a period spanning decades. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have plunged the nation into military ventures in countries as far-flung and as poor and weak as Vietnam, Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia, and fought proxy wars in equally peripheral Cental America and Angola. The United States has been so completely addicted to foreign, and therefore Middle East, oil for so long that it has preferred military intervention in this distant, politically dysfunctional, and deeply anti-American region rather than developing home-grown alternatives. Meanwhile, domestic and international deficits, along with debt-led growth, have been economic constants for the immensely wealthy American economy since the early 1970s.

Yet despite these vulnerabilities and dependencies, this same United States remains located thousands of miles from its greatest potential adversaries. As a result, it remains fully capable of deterring any form of attack on its own territory and of controlling its borders, and is still endowed with nearly all the human and material resources to prosper through its own efforts and devices.

Of course, any strategic disconnect this massive, costly, dangerous, and long-lasting owes to numerous culprits. But I’d like to add a name that’s probably found on few, if any lists: Walter Lippmann. I know that I’ve probably startled anyone who’s just read that sentence and knows a thing or two about modern U.S. foreign policy. The great journalist, philosopher, and advisor to presidents and numerous other leading politicians from the 1910s through his death in 1974 is usually regarded as a founding father of realist thinking in American diplomacy.

In so many ways Lippmann deserves this reputation. His main contribution to the cause of sound foreign policymaking was his observation that the indispensable ingredient for preserving security and other vital goals was bringing a nation’s power into a sustainable balance with its commitments, and maintaining this balance.

All the same, I also hold Lippmann uniquely responsible for the conviction held by of all wings of the nation’s foreign policy establishment that, despite the clearest lessons of geography and history, America is exquisitely sensitive to all manner of events all over the world. In his seminal 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Lippmann told his countrymen that they were tragically and dangerously mistaken in viewing the United States as a continent-sized nation with game-changing advantages like multi-thousand mile wide ocean barriers and a treasure trove of minerals.

Instead, according to this supposedly quintessential diplomatic pragmatist, the United States is an island. And not just the United States. The entire Western Hemisphere is an island. It floats in “an immense oceanic lake of which the other great powers control the shores.” As a result, both North and South America are as totally at the mercy of potential aggressors from the rest of the world as other islands like the Philippines and Australia.

Lippmann argued that America’s potential enemies on the world lake shore enjoy an unbeatable combination of geographic advantage, boast combined military potential far greater than America’s, and in an age of long-range air power, are located much closer in strategic terms than his complacent countrymen realized.

Two related policy imperatives flowed from Lippmann’s analysis. First, Americans can not achieve adequate levels of security simply through a strategy of “passive defense” of the Western Hemisphere. In the new age of intercontinental air power in particular, they need to prevent the control by hostile or possibly hostile forces of “all the trans-oceanic lands from which an attack by sea or by air can be launched.” (Emphasis added.) Second, because the global power balance would always be so unfavorable, the nation needs “dependable” allies and must actively cooperate with them in creating and maintaining strategic parity or superiority.

In fairness to Lippmann, he did not portray America’s choice as either active global engagement or military defeat. The likeliest consequence of relying on passive defense, he seemed to believe, would be “remaining in an advanced stage of mobilization” similar to that toward which the nation was moving in the early post-Pearl Harbor years when he was writing. At the same time, the author made clear his grave doubts both on economic and military grounds that this approach could succeed for any significant stretch of time.

In fairness also, Lippmann can not be faulted for failing to foresee the creation of nuclear weapons and especially platforms with intercontinental range – which in sufficient numbers simply take off the table the threat of conventional attack on America. After all, how many minutes would an enemy invasion fleet be at sea – assuming it could even set sail – before it would be wiped out by U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles? And even before the atomic age, an airborne invasion force would have required enemies to control a hopelessly huge amount of airspace.

Nonetheless, there’s no sign that the advent of nuclear weapons changed Lippmann’s thinking significantly. Much more important, his fundamental island analysis not only survived, but unmistakably contained the seeds of the global containment strategy eventually adopted following World War II.

Why did the island analysis not only remain in favor, but become hugely more popular once the nuclear age arrived? My sense is that it’s for much the same reason that it occurred to Lippmann in the first place: the almost complete extent to which the overlapping American political, economic and social establishments in the first half of the 20^th century – and the national foreign policy establishment it spawned – identified with Britain.

It’s widely accepted that the perceived affinity with Britain – which in turn reflected numerous actual family ties as well as broader shared English heritage – was so intensely felt that it produced not only common political, cultural, and social values, but common views on foreign policy goals and global missions. But I suspect this affinity also shaped perceptions of America’s strategic circumstances.

That is, in those decisive early Cold War years, America’s foreign policy mandarins so closely identified with Britain that they considered their own gargantuan, naturally wealthy, remote country to be comparable geopolitically with a small, resource-poor nation located 20 miles from countries that had historically been deadly enemies. They were incapable of recognizing that if, in some technical sense, the Western Hemisphere is an island, it’s one that extends from pole to pole – and that, combined with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, it enjoys what some international relations scholars call existential security.

More recently, of course, the foreign policy establishment has become far more diverse in every conceivable way. Yet its members remain as instinctively interventionist as ever, differing at best on specific modes and tactics, not on the more fundamental need to engage and on the alleged impossibility of qualitative alternatives. These views, moreover, are wholeheartedly accepted by the media organizations that tightly control the nation’s foreign policy debate, and thus at least implicitly decide which ideas are acceptable and which are taboo.  As a result, the only reasonable forecast for U.S. foreign policy for the foreseeable future is more needless cost, danger, and dependence, and zero fresh thought from practitioners and even America’s most prominent strategists.

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Following Up: The Irresponsibility of Foreign Policy Responsibilities

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Following Up, national interests, Obama, responsibilities, U.S. foreign policy

Critics have complained that President Obama likes to talk about the foreign policy challenges he faces, and about how difficult they are, more than he likes doing something about them. But in at least one important respect, talking by a president is better than nothing – because on occasions like Friday’s press conference, Mr. Obama keeps making clear just how thoroughly divorced his administration’s foreign policy agenda remains from a sensible, realistic definition of U.S. national interests. During that appearance, moreover, he again unwittingly demonstrated the perils of basing American actions on the idea that the nation has international responsibilities – the subject of July 22’s post.

In the president’s words on Friday, “the fact of the matter is, is that in all these crises that have been mentioned, there may be some tangential risks to the United States. In some cases, as in Iraq and ISIS, those are dangers that have to be addressed right now, and we have to take them very seriously. But for the most part, these are not — the rockets aren’t being fired into the United States. The reason we are concerned is because we recognize we’ve got some special responsibilities.”

Mr. Obama’s views on America’s stakes in most of the conflicts roiling the world today should have headlined press accounts of his news conference. For he stated unmistakably that neither the violence and suffering engulfing places like Ukraine and Gaza nor all the news coverage they have generated makes them matters that significantly affect Americans’ security, freedom, or prosperity.

The president’s claim regarding U.S. interests is a matter of legitimate debate of course. Ditto for the question of why Washington should act at all in cases with no major effects on the nation’s well-being. But at least these are debates that can, for the most part, reflect knowables and measurables. This Obama definition of U.S. interests also raises an important tactical question. As long as the president has decided that he’s going to involve the United States in resolving these crises, is it wise to admit tacitly to allies and adversaries alike that this involvement will never entail America running many risks or bearing many coats?

Unfortunately, no productive, rational debate is possible over the president’s belief – and it is no more than that – in America’s “special responsibilities” in these hotspots. For starters, why does the president believe the nation perceives these responsibilities? Every bit of polling data available shows exactly the opposite – that most of his countrymen want him to stay out. And if this is the case, what right does the chief executive have to incur any risks to U.S. security or spend any taxpayer dollars pursuing out his own personal concept of American obligations? Has any U.S. leader ever proclaimed this as part of his job definition?

And let’s say that Mr. Obama does have every right to commandeer national resources and conduct foreign policy thusly. Just where does his view of America’s responsibilities come from? What is it based on? Does it have any objective, concrete basis? Where in his own mind do these responsibilities begin and end? What is their relationship to U.S. interests – however he defines them? When do these responsibilities start to impinge on interests? What makes certain responsibilities “special.” Just how special are they?

Complicating matters much further: The president’s definition of U.S. interests themselves seems pretty muddled. Right after his implicit press conference acknowledgement that the Ukraine crisis doesn’t directly affect the United States, he told The Economist that “we have to respond with resolve in what are effectively regional challenges that Russia presents. We have to make sure that they don’t escalate where suddenly nuclear weapons are back in the discussion of foreign policy. And as long as we do that, then I think history is on our side.”

But if these Russian challenges are only “regional,” and if history is indeed “on our side,” then why not wait Vladimir Putin’s government out? Why put up much of a fuss to begin with? And that nuclear weapons reference – where did that come from? Who would put them ”back in the discussion”? Certainly not Putin — who could take over Ukraine without them. Certainly not Europe’s nuclear powers, France and Britain – which had been inking new arms deals with Russia until the latest round of sanctions. Is the president suggesting that he would rattle the nuclear saber?

Here are two propositions that everyone in the U.S. foreign policy debate – including the president — should be able to agree on: First, whether the pursuit of foreign policy responsibilities deserves any importance, the pursuit and defense of interests deserves more importance. Second, before American leaders try to carry out its responsibilities, their definition of interests should be at least minimally coherent.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Limits to Morality

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China, morality, national interests, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, realism, Russia, U.S. foreign policy, Ukraine

One reason for starting this blog was my desire to resume analyzing U.S. foreign policy – a career hat I wore for many years.   The timing is great for me, if not for the country, because the confusion surrounding this realm at least rivals that created by trade and other aspects of U.S. economic policy. So in this first post on this subject, I’ll tackle an issue with which Americans from President Obama on down are struggling unproductively – the extent to which moral questions should influence the nation’s diplomacy.  

A short, and surprisingly helpful answer is “As much as the American people feel like.”  After all, the Unied States is a sovereign state, meaning that it is legally and politically accountable to no authority other than its own government (even when it signs treaties).  And however imperfect our representative form of government is, its main purpose remains carrying out the public’s wishes.  So if the American people want more moral considerations injected into foreign policymaking, they have every right to do so, and numerous means of making these wishes known to their leaders.  

Of course, this conclusion raises its own important moral questions.  For example, doesn’t morality dictate that this foreign policy be financed in a financially moral way — that is, by paying for at least much of it in the here and now, rather than by foisting heavy costs onto future generations lacking any say in the original decision?  And shouldn’t financial and military sacrifices be shared throughout the body politic?  Former President George W. Bush sure flunked those tests, when he paid for the Iraq war (which I still broadly endorse) by borrowing (and worse, cutting taxes in the process), and fought it with a volunteer military.

But there are two even more fundamental, and related, reasons to be wary of morality as a guide to American foreign policy.  First, the nation needs to answer the question, “Whose morality?”  The easy answers are “The President’s,” or “The President’s and Congress'” (depending on your views on war powers issues in particular).  But those answers are anything but conclusive.  The Constitution, for example, clearly places some checks on the President’s ability to send U.S. military forces into combat and to expend resources on foreign policy.  As for Congress, the Constitution denies it operational control over the military, and any authority to carry out the laws it passes (except for the rules by which it governs and regulates itself).  

These obstacles throw the question back to the public, which only makes deciding “Whose Morality?” infinitely more vexing.  Further compounding these difficulties is figuring out how to decide which version of morality should be selected, and when it applies.  Unless the morality camp’s position is that there’s a single variety and a single set of rules for translating it into concrete policy steps in every circumstance?  

Often when debating policy, Americans reasonably rely at least in part on expertise – on certain individuals or groups they reasonably believe possess some combination of special knowledge and experience that merits special respect.  But who are the morality experts?  Clerics?  From which religion?  And from which sect or denomination of that religion?  And  when did priests, ministers, rabbis master the public policy side of the equation?  Does anyone suppose that elected politicians are morality experts?  Academic philosophers?  Any academics at all?  Media pundits or newspaper editorial writers?  Hollywood stars?          

Those last few categories understandably invite snickering, but too often, opinions from those quarters are taken with the utmost seriousness in our foreign policy debate.  This prominence should be a clear warning:  No one’s a widely recognized expert on morality.  And therefore everyone is (arguably except for convicted criminals).  In other words, it’s certainly interesting that, say, President Obama, or UN Ambassador Power, or Congress’ leaders, or the Pope, or the Washington Post editorial board, or Bill O’Reilly, or George Clooney believe that the United States has or doesn’t have certain obligations to address some particular outrage on the world stage.  But their views are intrinsically no more interesting – and certainly no more important – than my views, or my wife’s views.  Or your views.  

The second reason for doubting morality’s use flows from the first.  Since no one has any special expertise on moral questions, it seems impossible to think that enough of a national consensus on morality can emerge to create a useful guide for foreign policymakers.  Of course, it will always be difficult to create a national consensus on defining U.S. foreign policy interests – and especially those interests that warrant costs and risks.  Just as obvious, those generally considered experts often disagree strongly among themselves on courses of action.  But can anyone doubt that it’s ultimately going to be easier to reach consensus on interests than on morality?

After all, calculating interests depends on evaluating information that is reasonably uncontroversial – e.g., about geography, about resource endowments, about size of markets, about the relative strength of different national militaries.  These facts rarely speak for themselves to policymakers or the public, largely because actions usually involve tradeoffs among interests, and therefore judgment calls can rarely be avoided.  But using the prism of interests at least requires thinking of information that can be mastered and measured with considerable precision.  That simply isn’t the case with the prism of morality.

I hope that this kind of thinking on morality and foreign policy strikes you the way it strikes me – as the height of common sense.  I also hope that, when you read about current international crises in places like Russia’s neighborhood, East Asia, or South Sudan, you start asking why our political leaders and our supposed opinion leaders either seem so unaware of it, or so determined to wish it away.