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| Author: | Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy |
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October 12, 2007
New Republic Online
Nothing in the field of international affairs is as scandalous and as perplexing as the fact of American power. From Revolutionary times to the present, virtually all observers foreign and domestic have agreed that Americans don’t do foreign policy well. Moralistic, uninformed, unsubtle, alternately isolationist and hyperactive, hamstrung by a clumsy constitutional process and a public that oscillates between fatuous idealism and ignorant bellicosity, U.S. foreign policy has been shocking the world for more than 200 years.
And, worse still, we win. For two centuries, the United States has astounded critics with its bad foreign policy—and, for two centuries, the United States has steadily risen to an unprecedented level of power and influence in the international system. Why does the team with the worst skills in the league end up with so many pennants?
The spectacle is often surreal. The United States seems to wander nearsightedly but relatively unscathed past one hazard after another—like a version of the chronically oblivious cartoon character Mr. Magoo. Thomas Jefferson’s embargoes against Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars crippled U.S. trade and lowered our prestige; the episode remains a textbook example of moralistic illusions effecting poor foreign policy choices. But Jefferson’s America escaped a generation of devastating world conflict with few scratches, and no country emerged with gains that truly matched the Louisiana Purchase. The pattern continued, as a blundering, often racist foreign policy allowed the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean and assert a hemispheric hegemony that endures to this day, overcoming the opposition of European powers that had larger armies and navies, better-organized policy-making, a more nuanced view of the world, and a less cumbersome political structure.
The pattern continued in the twentieth century. Historians—notably George F. Kennan—have justly excoriated the profound ignorance, moralism, and wishful thinking of American statesmen in the last century. A strong commitment to the European balance of power before World War I would probably have prevented that terrible conflict; Germany would have realized that a well-armed United States, prepared to support Britain and France, made victory impossible. Wilson’s disastrous conduct at Versailles, the Washington establishment’s equally contemptible failure to integrate the United States into the interwar global security system, the passive and mindless acquiescence in Franco-British containment of Hitler—America’s contribution to the suffering of World War II is much greater than most of us even now are willing to acknowledge.
But, devastating and horrible as the two world wars were, the net result for the United States was surprisingly benign. We sustained serious casualties and we spent a lot of money, but Mr. Magoo suffered far less than either his allies or his enemies; indeed, economically, technologically, and politically, the United States emerged from both world wars stronger than when we entered them.
The cold war went much the same way. From the Berlin airlift to the fall of the Berlin Wall, American presidents from Truman to George H.W. Bush were criticized, often correctly, for policies that were by turns unsubtle, weak, ill-informed, inconsistent, and naive. The United States blundered into the Korean war, and our involvement in Indochina comprised one long series of mistakes. Our Latin American policies were often not only shortsighted but self-defeating. In Africa, we managed to combine the worst of both worlds, supporting white apartheid South Africa while also supporting black dictators, like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. We supported the Shah in Iran against the moderate Mossadegh, with whom we might well have learned to work; and we abandoned the Shah in the face of the implacable enemies we face now.
All this and more happened during the cold war, but, at the end of the day, the United States won, and, once again, we emerged from the conflict as an economic and technological powerhouse.
Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America. That remark gave me the title for a book, Special Providence, in which I argued that American society has developed its own distinct method for conducting foreign policy. In a classic Bismarckian state, a single genius masters the complexities of the international system, calculates the national interest, and pursues it in a multidimensional chess game, matching his wits against the ministers of rival states. By contrast, in the American system, bureaucracies, parties, industry groups, advocacy organizations, ethnic lobbies, and others wrestle over foreign policy. We don’t have a single pilot steering our ship of state; we have a brawl on the poop deck as everyone on board scrambles for the chance to get his or her hands on the wheel. The result often looks messy but works reasonably well because, over time, the resulting foreign policy generally reflects the views and interests of American society as a whole.
But there is another dimension to our special providence, one that has come into greater prominence during the Bush administration. U.S. foreign policy isn’t successful just because our process reflects the varied interests and priorities of our diverse and dynamic society. We also succeed because our core strategic interests—liberal society, global economic growth, geopolitical stability—fit well with the interests and aspirations of other people around the world. They remain popular even when U.S. policy is widely disliked; when we fail to achieve our goals, others often do the work for us.
The Bush administration has certainly put America’s resilience to the test. Rarely has the national and international consensus about the shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy been so wide or so bitter. Rarely has a U.S. administration promised so much and achieved so little—as if Babe Ruth had pointed to the centerfield bleachers and then struck out. With poll after poll showing the United States plumbing the depths of unpopularity in key parts of the world; with U.S. pressure for elections on the West Bank and Gaza resulting in a victory for Hamas and a Palestinian civil war; with WMD undiscovered in Iraq, Iran on a roll, and Osama bin Laden on the loose, few would use the words “Mission Accomplished” to describe the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Yet we will survive this presidency and likely prosper afterward. True, Bush’s successor will inherit an ugly war in the Middle East, and American credibility and popularity have been damaged. But America’s alliances remain strong, and the tides of history continue to flow our way. God does indeed have a special providence for the United States of America—even when it is led by George W. Bush.
Despite the best efforts of Donald “Old Europe” Rumsfeld, the transatlantic alliance has survived the Bush administration in remarkably good shape. The election victories of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have put pragmatists and pro-U.S. politicians in charge of the two largest EU members, and the gaps between the United States and Europe have perceptibly narrowed. On Iran, likely to be the thorniest issue the allies will face in the near term, European support for strong sanctions continues to grow, and both President Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner have whispered that, if diplomacy fails, the alternative is war. Iran’s behavior deeply troubles Europeans, not least because Iranian missiles can reach much of the EU.
In its second term, the Bush administration appears to have developed the elementary tact required to avoid gratuitously insulting our European allies, but the true forces driving the rapprochement have less to do with U.S. policy than with the realities of the outside world. Russia’s crude mix of bluster and threats over exports of oil and gas has reminded Europeans across the continent that the United States is not the worst thing in the world—and has also exposed the naivete and illusions of those who, like former German chancellor and current Gazprom hired gun Gerhard Schroeder, proposed that Russia was a reliable international partner. Angela Merkel has reminded Germans of their strong historical ties to Israel and their special responsibilities to world Jewry. European leaders, rebuffed by rapidly industrializing Asian countries on environmental issues, understand that, despite its opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the United States is closer to core European environmental convictions than are growth-hungry emerging superpowers like China andIndia.
The rise of anti-American opinion across Europe, and especially in Germany and Turkey, is a deeply troubling development that the next administration will have to address. Both public and elite opinion will be more skeptical of American claims and quicker to question American leadership for some time to come. Nevertheless, it seems that, on balance, the leading European governments have decided that the United States, warts and all, remains Europe’s best strategic partner in a dangerous world.
In Latin America, the United States has also survived the Bush administration with relatively little damage. Once again, this is not necessarily because Mr. Magoo knew what he was doing. If the Bush administration had not been bogged down in Iraq, it might have undertaken much more confrontational policies in the region. As it is, the United States has largely ignored various headline-grabbing provocations from the ankle-biting Hugo Chavez. Not even the progress of the Chavez steamroller into such strategically pointless countries as landlocked Boliviaand impoverished Nicaragua roused the administration into the self-defeating overreactions that Fidel Castro can still routinely elicit. In the absence of polarizing U.S. policy, the two major players in contemporary Latin America—Mexico and Brazil—have distanced themselves from Chavez and continued the hard, slow work of institutional and economic modernization. Brazil’s popular center-left president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has combined serious efforts to alleviate poverty with market-oriented economic reforms and tough anti-inflationary measures. The economy is growing, living standards of the poor are improving, Lula won reelection, and Latin America is now beginning to acquire something it has sorely lacked: a left-of-center political leadership able to combine its mission of serving the poor with a firm commitment to currency stability, the rule of law, and the development of a favorable business climate. Again, this is due more to Latin American choices than U.S. foresight; Lula’s political program was developed in Brazil by Brazilians, not imposed on the country by the International Monetary Fund or Bush’s Treasury Department.
Critics of American power like Chavez and Noam Chomsky believe that the U.S. system thrives on the poverty and marginalization of much of the world. In reality, U.S. interests are best served by the rise of stable, prosperous, middle-class societies. Despite U.S. policy failures in the 1990s, despite Bush’s failure to advance the Free Trade Area of the Americas, despite his failure to deepen our relationship with Mexico, countries like Chile, Mexico, and Brazil continue to pursue market-driven economic policies that hasten the day when Latin America will be as boring and bourgeois as Europe. The strategic interests of the United States benefit from a peaceful and prosperous Latin America; this is also what most Latin Americans want for themselves.
Mr. Magoo has also done reasonably well in sub-Saharan Africa. The rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity across much of the region has created substantial reservoirs of pro-American sentiment. Since 1900, the number of Christians in Africa has exploded from less than ten million to almost 400 million, with most of this growth coming in the last 50 years. Since the 1950s, Christians have doubled as a percentage of the population in Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous and most energy-rich country. A recent poll showed that a majority of Nigerian Christians support both the U.S.-led war on terrorism and the state of Israel. Overall, 51 percent of Nigerians—Christian and Muslim—told pollsters last summer that it was a good thing that American ideas and customs are spreading in Nigeria, and 75 percent saw the United States as an important source of democratic values. Although plagued by election fraud, Nigeria has just witnessed its first democratic change of power from one elected leader to another since independence.
There are tentative but hopeful signs of progress across the region. While the antics of Robert Mugabe and the agony of Zimbabwe dominate the headlines, many African countries are moving toward economic and political reform. The average rate of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa has been around 5 percent for the last three years and is approaching the 7 percent rate of growth that would put the continent on the road to a rapid reduction in its poverty rate. Rwanda’s post-genocide government is working closely with public and private U.S. interests to accelerate economic development. Kenya’s emerging democracy is rowdy and robust.
The basis for a new U.S. policy in Africa stands on two legs: a growing appreciation of the importance of the continent’s energy resources to the United States and the growing ties developing between African and American Christians— especially conservative ones like the American Episcopalians, who have turned to bishops from Rwanda and Nigeria for support in their fight against the ordination of gay bishops. Evangelicals formed a key element of the political coalitions that won substantial increases in U.S.development aid to Africa during the Bush years, and, with the active engagement of both black and white megachurch and denominational leaders, evangelical and Pentecostal links with Africa are rapidly growing.
The linkage of oil and energy firms with evangelical Christians will be an odd and sometimes tense pairing of forces in American politics, and it will cause problems as well as solve them—for example, among sub-Saharan Africa’s many Muslims. But, even if U.S. policy toward Africa is sometimes wrongheaded— and history suggests that it often will be—the strengthening of economic and civil society ties and the establishment of what I believe will be long-term bipartisan support to increase U.S. aid to Africa will probably succeed in cementing relations between the United States and the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, promoting its integration into the global political and economic system.
Mr. Magoo faces his sternest long-term tests in Asia. As Henry Kissinger tells us, from the standpoint of history, the unification of Germany is more important than the rise of the European Union, the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union. So earthshaking is the rise of Asia that many analysts believe that the end of America’s global power is likely to come from an emerging Asian superpower—the most likely candidate being China.
The future holds many surprises, and nothing can be ruled out, but the rise of Asia does not necessarily entail an American decline. In fact, the United States seems less likely to be marginalized by rising Asian powers today than it did in 2001. The administration’s policy has not always been brilliant, and there have been some significant wobbles, but, on the whole, this is the part of the world where Bush’s foreign policy record is strongest. The United States has better relations with virtually every significant Asian power today than it did in 2001. The Bush administration has successfully strengthened U.S.-Japan ties without causing a crisis with China; it has stepped up cooperation on a number of fronts with both India and Pakistan; it has continued to support the emergence of democracy in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population; and it has prevented Taiwan from derailing our increasingly smooth relationship with Beijing. While the North Korean nuclear problem has not been fully resolved, the United States has used the crisis to lay the foundations for consensus among the great powers in a vital part of the world.
However, once again the main forces protecting U.S. interests in the region have less to do with the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy than with the way that the region is developing on its own. The rise of Asia is a much broader and more benign phenomenon than the rise of China alone would be. The Asia of the twenty-first century looks more and more like a multipolar region too big and too complex for any single country, even China, to dominate. With India as a second nuclear-armed superpower home to more than a billion people, with Japan enduring as a major economic and political force, and with the healthy and rapid development of substantial regional powers like Australia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, Asia is more likely to contain many important regional powers and superpowers, rather than fall under a single, dominant power.
Moreover, Asia’s economic development tends to reduce anti-Americanism in the region and promote the idea that peaceful cooperation with the American-led world order is the key to growth. In India, China, Vietnam, and other Asian countries, millions of ordinary people know that their newfound prosperity stems from trade with the United States. As long as that holds true, American relations with the Asian superpowers and their neighbors are likely to improve.
In the Middle East and central Asia, where disaster has struck in the form of two difficult wars, bad policy has not only ruined the Bush administration and perhaps the Republican Party, it has weakened U.S. foreign policy more than any event since the Vietnam war. With nearly 4,000 U.S. military deaths and Iraqi fatalities at least 20 times that number, the authors of the Iraq war cannot escape a historical reckoning. Combined with the economic, political, and opportunity costs, the bill is a heavy one. If one adds the abortive break with conservative Arab governments in an ill-considered dash for democracy, the failure to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process so catastrophically derailed in the last months of the Clinton administration, the failure to detach Syria from Iran, and the poorly judged support for Israel’s bungled war with Hezbollah, U.S. foreign policy in the vital and volatile Middle East has been a spectacle of extraordinary failure. The United States has never been so hated in the region; radical forms of Islam have never been so popular.
Yet, even in the Middle East, it appears that the consequences are less dire than we deserve. Administration policy, for example, has been widely criticized for increasing Iranian power in the region. This is true, and the looming confrontation with Iran is the most serious item on the current political agenda; yet, at the same time, the perceived threat from Iran has caused conservative Sunni Arab regimes, led by the Saudis, to tighten their links with the United States and even to edge closer toward normalizing relations with Israel. In recent months, the Saudis have supported moves to reopen peace talks with Israel, renewed their conditional offer to recognize the Jewish state, and deepened their strategic links with the United States by moving toward one of the largest arms deals in history.
Even in Iraq itself, the United States has made significant alliances with Sunni Arab tribal leaders, who played an important role in both the nationalist and the jihadist resistance to coalition forces after Saddam’s fall. Those alliances are the basis for the recent U.S. military successes in Iraq, and Sunni participation in the Iraqi political process is enhancing the prospects for the kind of compromise, however ugly, that could keep Iraq from falling into Iran’s orbit while enhancing stability as U.S.forces gradually withdraw.
Once again, it is neither the moral beauty nor the practical wisdom of U.S. policy that recommends us to these new allies. It is their perception that we are their allies against something even worse. Among Sunni Arabs in Iraq, that something worse is not only the domination of Iraq by revenge-minded radical Shia parties and militias linked to Iran but the domination of the fanatical (and increasingly foreign) jihadis.
There is more good news. The same polls that demonstrate the widespread unpopularity of the United States show a major shift in Muslim opinion away from terrorism and the ideas of Al Qaeda. Terrorism in Iraq—where the victims are almost always Arab Muslims, and many are women and children—may have made the horror and inhumanity of such attacks apparent to mass audiences throughout the Arab world. In seven of eight Muslim countries surveyed in one study, the proportion of the population that considers suicide bombing a legitimate tactic has fallen. In 2002, 33 percent of Pakistanis told pollsters that suicide bombing was often or sometimes justified; by 2007, only 9 percent held that point of view. Seven of seven Muslim countries surveyed showed declines in the proportion of the population that had confidence in Osama bin Laden.
Although the bungled occupation has obscured this, the U.S.position in the region continues to benefit from Saddam’s ouster. Since the 1950s, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been aimed at preventing two things: We have tried to keep any other outside power from dominating the region, and we have tried to prevent any single regional power or leader from dominating the sensitive Gulf. This meant, among other things, that the United States has consistently opposed the Arab leaders and movements who sought to unite the Arab peoples into a single political entity. American unpopularity in the region is based not only on our support for Israel; it is based on the (accurate) perception that our support for Israel has been part of a much larger policy of containing Arab nationalism.
The Arab nationalist dream was always unrealistic, but the idea of a single people in a single state under a single leader dominated the political culture of Arab nationalism from the time of Nasser through the fall of Saddam. The end of Saddam Hussein and the rise of the Iraqi Shia signals a change in Arab politics whose impact will reverberate and grow through the coming years. The Shia Arabs of Iraq, and, indeed, on both sides of the Persian Gulf, are an important if historically ignored and marginalized part of the Arab people. Now that the Shia have assumed control of their own political destiny, any serious future movements toward Arab unity must be based on a deeper understanding and acceptance of the diversity of Arab identity and experience.
The importance of this development for the future of U.S.-Arab relations may well outweigh other consequences of the war in Iraq. While the United States has been unalterably opposed to the aspiring Bismarcksof the Arab world, perhaps we can now support any Jean Monnet-like figures seeking to help the Arab world’s many nations and peoples find a suitable international expression for their common identity. The United States played a substantial role in encouraging the birth of what became the European Union; we can now begin to look for ways of assisting rather than opposing Arab dreams.
This is an analysis of power, not a defense of failure. Had the Bush administration made different choices at key points, both the United States and the world would be much better off than they are. But, fortunately or unfortunately, the foundations of American power have less to do with the wisdom of particular policies than with the way that the priorities of American society and the strategic requirements of American power intersect with the realities of international life. It is not how smart we are; it is how well we fit.
The role that we play in the world today is very similar to the role that the British played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and which the Dutch were beginning to play as early as the seventeenth. All three built an open society at home based on religious tolerance, economic and political freedom, and the rule of law. All three developed worldwide trading interests and supported these interests by building navies that could maintain order on key sea routes. They then used the wealth from this international trading system to support a balance of power, seeking to prevent any hostile land power from gaining the kind of regional supremacy that would allow such a power to build a navy strong enough to contest control of the seas. For the British in the nineteenth century and the Americans over the last 100 years, that “maritime system” of trading and sea power had another dimension. In peace, other countries were able to participate in the system, integrating their economies into the emerging global networks. This kept, and keeps, many countries on good terms with the leading powers of the maritime system, but, should war come, the British and the Americans could deny the resources and finance of the global networks to their opponents. Finally, both the British and the Americans have promoted the spread of liberal institutions (if not always democracy) among other countries. Such institutions (the rule of law, independent central banks, protections for civil liberties and private property) make the maritime system more profitable for Anglo-Americans, provide ideological justification and a “higher purpose” for their power—and enable the countries who adopt them to compete more successfully in the global economy.
This system is incredibly strong. Either Britain or the United States has won every major international conflict since the end of the seventeenth century. Spain, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union—every great power that has challenged the system has gone down in defeat.
As it happens, this grand strategy meshes well with America’s abilities and priorities. It is the openness and dynamism of our society, more than the clever economic policies of the government, that give U.S. corporations the technology, organizational skills, and financial acumen that make them such formidable and profitable global entities. The rapid growth of American commerce—and missionary endeavors—created a strong public demand at home for U.S. forces, naval and otherwise, that could protect Americans in their overseas activities. The gradual decline of the British Empire forced Americans, much against their will, to pick up the old British global role and adapt the system for our purposes. The inclusion of other countries in the economic system is so obviously in our own economic interest that powerful lobbies push the government to build the U.S. trading network into an ever-growing global economic network—and the promotion of liberal values abroad meshes with the priorities of American business and American philanthropic idealism.
We do not always execute this grand strategy well, and we have rarely been fully conscious of what we are doing. But the strategy fits the interests and the ideals of the American people so well that we can follow it in our sleep. We blunder forward even when we can’t see where we are going—exactly like Mr. Magoo.
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