Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by Kensai on August 13, 2008 - 9:03am

So, I tend to fixate on foreign policy, it’s my specialty, it’s my thing. So, I’m going to make this a big wide angle foreign policy post. Here we go.

Lately I’ve been reading a couple of books (Haven’t finished them yet, but I’ll still bite some ideas from them) notably, Yglesias’s Heads in the Sand, and Albright’s Memo to a President Elect. Both of these books describe a United States adrift. We have lost our moorings in foreign policy, our traditional roles as leader of the “free world” and champion of the Wilsonian system have been discarded under the current administration, to be replaced with something that simply cannot be sustained. The role that the Neoconservatives and the Bush administration have attempted to carve out for the United States, that of the wrathful, avenging angel of the world, in addition to being unsustainable in this world of asymmetrical warfare, burgeoning nuclear states and significant international institutions, has also proven impossible to sell both domestically and abroad.

The concept of “Leader of the free world” is largely irrelevant today. The “Free world” no longer exists as a bloc. Without a single direct enemy, a bloc centered on the US makes no sense, and so the group that would for our sphere of influence has become too fractious to function as a purpose for our nation. Additionally, since this bloc would today consist of the entire planet, over which we can be said to exert hegemony, it would be basically impossible to unify. One ironic result of “winning” the Cold War was this: We destroyed our own bloc. Ying cannot exist without yang, and there cannot exist a single large alliance on the earth, it needs a foe to unify it. We could only return to our cold war role, if we either lost much control of the planet.

Clinton’s goal of being the strong arm of Wilsonianism isn’t quite viable either. Though the world may stand behind us, and it will give us a position of strength to work from, our own nation is unlikely to stand by it. Wilsonian internationalism demands sacrifice, something the American people are presently uncomfortable with. We cannot even muster the political will to give the UN the 0.7% they demand, how can we expect to become the paragon of the system? It would entail putting the US military into situations where the US will not directly benefit, which our people will not stand for, making this sadly impossible as a path.

The wish to use military might to enforce our will globally, which primarily comes from the neo-conservative camp, is set in nationalism. Our country, the idea goes, must pursue its own interests. And, being the exemplars of virtue, slayers of imperialism, fascism and communism, champions of democracy and the holy free market, and (If our great and noble leader is to be believed) chosen of God, our will is always going to be the path of justice. I won’t spend the time refuting all of this, if you want me to, just ask in the comments. The critical truth here is that even if we were archons of justice, we still could not go it alone. We cannot simply use our might to enforce our will, whether you see that will as inherently right or not. We lack both the drive and the strength. There is both too much genuine evil in the world, and too many who “defy” us. We play something akin to a foreign policy game of whack-a-mole when we try to use unilateral force to get our way. For every Afghanistan, there is an Iraq and a Darfur, once we start to address those, there is North Korea, Zimbabwe, Somalia, and Pakistan, once we move toward those, we see eight more problems, and once we have fixed those problems or at least begun to move in that direction, we will have stretched too thin and will have to move back around against Afghanistan again. It’s akin to the myth of Hercules and the Hydra, for every head destroyed, two more replace it, an eternal challenge that will wear out even that demigod and paragon of strength in the end.

Then there is isolationism, which, with the demands of the international system and the threat of terrorism from abroad, seems as impossible as any of these other ideas.

So, it seems that we will have to forge a new way forward. I, yet again, find myself much better equipped for normative than for prescriptive analysis, and I’m not sure that I have any answer quite yet.

What do you think?