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Progressive Grand Strategy
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Can America develop a grand strategy that’s above ideology? According to Georgetown professor Charles Kupchan, maybe not. In a symposium on “America and the World” from the current issue of Democracy, Kupchan argues for a "progressive grand strategy."
After the collapse of the bipartisan Cold War consensus, Kupchan says, only Democrats are well equipped to lead on foreign affairs. Republicans are in two camps: isolationist Tea Partiers and neoconservatives, with the latter now discredited in the wake of Iraq. Watching the recent primary campaign suggests that Kupchan is correct; besides ineffective attempts by Jon Huntsman, Republicans have offered no foreign policy outside these two extremes.
But for a progressive, Kupchan is remarkably unimaginative about the future of American politics. What if the Democratic Party someday also evinces more isolationist sentiment? Might conservatives eventually reconcile their split personality on international affairs? They could even look to a realist grand strategy, accepting limited interventions while avoiding the neocon overextensions. And wouldn't progressives benefit from a genuine sparring partner, a school of engagement more compatible with political conservatism?
The obvious template for a "conservative grand strategy” is realism. Kupchan co-opts realism's central theme, formulating "a progressive combination of power and partnership to safeguard the national interest while improving the world." But can a holy tandem of enlightened progress and national interest coexist in a grand strategy that easily? Progressives who cannot separate their domestic policy preferences from a clear-headed analysis of the national interest risk depleting the country's resources—the very thing for which Kupchan excoriates neoconservatives.
Kupchan’s invocation of Atlanticism might provide common ground with conservatives, who often see the health of European cousins as a central U.S. interest. But Kupchan's transatlantic solidarity is only accessible to progressives, who are the "natural political allies of Europeans and would therefore provide the Atlantic community a much firmer foundation of affinity and interest." So much for appealing to the common heritage of Western civilization—it's already on the ash heap.
Kupchan is right that conservatives are currently schizophrenic on foreign policy, but his narrow, partisan vision for grand strategy is flawed.
Exposing Earmarks
The February 7 Washington Post had a front-page story on how members of Congress have used those ubiquitous "earmarks"—federal monies directed by Congress to specific purposes—to foster public projects right near the homes or investment properties of those very members of Congress. The piece jumps to the inside, with two full pages of investigative prose and mini-profiles of sixteen specific examples. Earmarks are a scourge on American democracy, not because they represent a material amount of money in the bloated federal budget but because they are a recipe for corruption.
Heretofore the focus has been on members helping favored constituents who then contribute significantly to those members’ campaigns. The Post, in a bit of really probing journalism, shows that the corruption goes beyond that. There’s no particular reason this should be surprising. It should be a rule of thumb in politics that entrenched power always gets abused. That’s what this story is all about.
Of course, the members deny that there is any corruption here—or that there is any connection at all between the earmarked funds and their own interests. As the Post said, "Any potential personal benefit—financial or otherwise—is nonexistent, minimal or secondary to the needs of the public, they said."
That rings hollow, of course, and is likely to seem even more hollow after the next installment in this two-part series—a look at money delivered to institutions connected to lawmakers’ relatives.
This is the kind of journalism for which newspapers were once famous. There’s less of it now because these venerable institutions have less money to invest in it. But the Post, while hardly the robust daily feast of news and commentary it once was, still demonstrates an occasional capacity to rise to the heights of journalism. This is one example of that, and it’s very smart.
Appeasing Assad
The last thing anyone wants to do is offer Bashar al-Assad a carrot. The idea of granting concessions to the brutal dictator is enough to make one’s stomach turn. But the implications of failing to do so are more dire than anyone cares to admit.
In a thoughtful New York Times op-ed, Nicholas Noe makes the case for negotiating with Assad—for “bargaining with the devil.” His point, well made and well-taken, is that the United States and its allies are currently operating as if they can somehow engineer a controlled collapse of the Assad government. In fact, for a number of reasons that Noe puts forth, the far likelier scenario is “a bloody last-ditch effort by Mr. Assad, Iran and Hezbollah to save the Syrian government, which they have the means to do.”
The crucial part of Noe’s piece is his insistence that Washington—not Russia, not China, not even Assad himself, although these actors certainly deserve their fair shares of blame—should be held accountable for jettisoning its “inconsistent maxim that bargaining is morally prohibited when a leader is deemed to have gone beyond the pale—especially when bargaining could actually mitigate future fallout, while eventually securing one’s interests and values.” Sanctions aren’t working. Threats aren’t working. The UN Security Council resolution is dead in its tracks. Washington should be willing to seriously consider the option of negotiating, even if it will produce a less-than-ideal outcome and even if it entails granting concessions to the devil.
The details of Noe’s proposed bargain are murky—it’s probably unfeasible to base a deal on Israel’s willingness to return the Golan Heights, for example, or to expect that the Syrian insurgents will suspend their operations if America asks nicely—but his point about accountability is pivotal. Before pointing the finger at Moscow and Beijing for their UN vetoes, Washington should acknowledge that it is equally unwilling to take a course that, however distasteful, may produce acceptable results and help avoid a catastrophe. Noe’s analysis isn’t perfect, but his central argument is notable.
A Tortured Comparison on Drones
Some say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Andrew Cohen says—perhaps blinded by his own exhaust—where fire was, fire will be.
In a theatrical Atlantic editorial, “The Torture Memos, 10 Years Later,” contributing editor Cohen marks the ten-year anniversary of the Bush administration’s ironic memo on “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda Detainees.” He claims the same obfuscation and legal malfeasance that marked that fiasco is now occurring on Obama’s drone program.
Let’s be clear. There is no question that the U.S. government needs to make greater efforts on transparency. But more information needs to be learned about the drone program before it can be compared to a document that abandoned America’s commitment to crucial provisions of the Geneva Convention and allowed the brutalizing torture of terror-law detainees.
Cohen argues that we remember the detainee memo anniversary “because it may help us muster the courage today to ask the right questions of the Obama White House.” Fair enough, but his undoing is buried later in his very argument, “Yet we cannot even see the legal memos upon which the drone program is based, much less evaluate the documents for their loyalty to the Constitution and to the rule of law.”
And not having seen them, how can we possibly make a prudent judgment, no less compare the drone program to one of the most embarrassing American foreign policy episodes in recent history? This reckless howler shoots first and asks questions later.
Bursting the Chinese Bubble
America is finished as a superpower. Or so you might think from the recent discussion in the U.S. media. Popular books lament that “that used to be us” and that the United States is committing “suicide.” Meanwhile, a majority of Americans believe that China has already passed Washington as “the leading economic power in the world today,” according to a 2011 Gallup poll.
In the latest issue of International Security, Michael Beckley argues strongly that this is all wrong—as his title, “China’s Century? Why America’s Edge Will Endure,” indicates. Beckley, a research fellow at Harvard, brings empirical facts and cool analysis to an issue often dominated by overheated rhetoric. His main target is the idea that we can measure China’s rise solely based on its rising levels of GDP.
GDP, Beckley says, “correlates poorly with national power,” noting that China “was the largest economy in the world throughout most of its ‘century of humiliation,’ when it was ripped apart by Western powers and Japan.” Instead, Beckley marshals a wide range of statistics in several categories and concludes that the United States “is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991.”
Beckley also pays close attention to demographic trends. One statistic in particular is worth highlighting: as a result of the one-child policy, it is projected that China will go from a ratio of workers per retiree of 8:1 today to 2:1 by 2040. He also cuts through the hype about China’s growing expertise in science and technology, noting that China is succeeding in producing extremely large numbers of scientists and engineers, but only at the cost of rampant falsification and copying of research.
The only downside is Beckley’s brief closing section on policy prescriptions, which is somewhat thin. Nevertheless, this is an important and notable piece that shows how rigorous academic research can inform our understanding of major policy debates.
A Neocon by Any Other Name
In his piece for the January/February 2012 edition of World Affairs, Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane sets out to evaluate the foreign-policy stances of the GOP hopefuls. He comes to two major conclusions: Republicans will not “enjoy their customary edge over the Democrats as the party of national security,” and “the ‘neoconservative’ movement has no obvious candidate in this race.” (The one possible exception, he claims, is Rick Santorum, who Lane must be forgiven for writing off as having “little chance of winning” before the surprising Iowa-caucus results.)
The first conclusion seems solid, albeit arrived at through a series of oft-repeated observations: voters care more about the economy; the contenders don’t know what they’re talking about; the new threats are ill-defined; the public is generally content with Obama’s foreign-policy record.
The second is where Lane encounters difficulties.
He claims the GOP hopefuls eschew a neoconservative agenda of democracy promotion in favor of a “narrowed-down version” of Bush’s foreign policy “whose central concern is not so much expanding democracy across the Middle East as protecting its one outpost—Israel.” There's something to Lane’s notion that protecting Israel has supplanted spreading democracy as the top Republican foreign-policy priority. There can be no doubt that the race for the nomination has been marked by a sort of Israel one-upmanship.
But Lane offers up a case that undermines his central point: Iran. Calls for war with Iran echo from every GOP debate, with only Paul (and previously Huntsman) expressing reticence. Former hopeful Rick Perry announced he would send American troops back into Iraq to counter Iranian influence. Such claims hew close to the neoconservative line, and though Israel’s safety has been repeatedly cited as a concern (although arguably not significantly more often than when Iraq was in the crosshairs), the end result is neoconservative to the core. Lane is correct to note a shift in rhetoric, but in substance the foreign-policy stances of the GOP hopefuls are far more Bushian than he seems prepared to admit. As a result, his analysis is a mixed bag.
The Polemical Economist
Paul Krugman’s polemical bulldozer rolls along, smashing buildings, automobiles and anything else that evinces even a hint of conservatism. On Friday, the New York Times columnist turned his bulldozer toward GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The issue was Romney’s unfortunate word choice in talking about where he would place his economic focus. The now-famous quote: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
What Romney was trying to say was that his primary economic goal as president would be to get the economy growing in order to extricate the middle class from its current squeeze. As he said, “I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” And ultimately he says the goal is to “get this economy going for them.” Eureka! He actually got to economic growth. But, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, the wait was “excruciating.”
So Romney asked for it with his artless articulation, and he certainly got it. Liberals went after him like foxhounds on the scent. As for Krugman, most of his column offers a solid liberal critique that focuses on past Romney expressions regarding that safety net, a defense of federal transfer payments and an attack on the distribution of largess in Romney’s tax plan. So far, fine.
But then he broadens his assault based on his vast discovery in Romney’s words that he and fellow Republicans no longer even pretend to care about the poor. And so soon we will see conservatives “who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.”
Wow. So this isn’t a debate about what’s best for America but rather a debate between pristine, caring people such as Krugman and disguised misanthropes who really don’t care about America or Americans at all. It seems that Krugman is trying to match in print what Rachel Maddow does on the tube. In the process he once again becomes a self-parody—and rates a howler.
Zakaria's Alternate Reality
Writing in the Washington Post, foreign-policy writer Fareed Zakaria touts his own book, The Post-American World, in a column addressed to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He suggests Romney should rethink is oft-expressed criticism of President Obama for believing “that this next century is the post-American century.”
The theme of America moving into a less hospitable world less subject to American power is getting a lot of attention. And, based on Zakaria’s past writings, it’s safe to speculate that his book makes a worthy contribution to this literature.
But he pulls from the book a quote that should give any geopolitical analyst pause: “This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else.”
This can’t be. While societies can generate new wealth through wise economic policies, they can’t generate political power. A fundamental rule of politics, as ironclad as the law of gravity, is that every polity has a finite quantity of political power. The only question is how it will be distributed. This is true of the local school board, the Vermont legislature, the United States of America and the world of nations.
An appreciation of this fundamental power reality is a prerequisite to understanding the workings of politics, including the workings of the geopolitics of the globe. If Zakaria’s “everybody else” is on the rise, that means this “everybody else” is gaining power. That can only happen at the expense of some other entity that inevitably will have to lose power. That other entity most likely will be the United States. Theoretically, it could be, say, Switzerland, but Switzerland doesn’t have much power to relinquish.
So Zakaria can seek to swaddle his analysis in these niceties of concept as a way of shrouding the stark realities of our time. But those realities won’t become any less stark as a result.
Zakaria is a smart guy, and his Post column did a good job of bundling up the elements of an effective argument. But the quote from his book reflects an outlook that misses reality—and hence is flawed.
How Romney Made It
Thursday’s Washington Post contains a Dan Balz column that demonstrates why Balz remains one of the country’s most respected campaign analysts. He makes the point that, yes, this has been a singularly unpredictable political year, as many have noted over the months of fluctuations in the political fortunes of Republican presidential candidates. But one thing has remained constant—the campaign strategy and operational discipline of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Now, says Balz, this constancy has paid off in Romney’s position as the almost prohibitive front-runner.
There are two noteworthy aspects of this piece. The first is Balz’s smart and sharply analytical portrayal of the thinking of Romney and his campaign operatives, from the beginning, through the early contests and down to the present. No retrospective revisionism. Few political writers have Balz’s breadth of knowledge on the inner workings of politics, and almost nobody spends more time traversing the country in pursuit of inside interviews on the unfolding drama. Thus his rendition of what the Romney folks were thinking during the planning stages has credibility.
The second notweworthy aspect is Balz’s suggestion that Romney now enjoys a commanding lead that will be difficult for anyone to obliterate—except perhaps Romney. At this stage in any presidential nomination battle, when a front-runner seems emergent, many commentators and pols cast about for possible scenarios that could upend that front-runner—possible stumbles, a dramatic change of fortune in Illinois or some such place, a late entry into the race, a late surge by someone already in the race. Yet these things never seem to materialize.
That’s because there is a psychological component—along with the mathematical component— in the multiprimary nomination process of our time. Once such a front-runner emerges, the challengers’ money dries up. Voters begin to embrace what seems like the inevitable. The front-runner picks up momentum while everybody else loses it. This is a reality of the current system, for good or ill.
Not from Balz will we get commentary that misses this fundamental political reality—or any other political reality. This piece reflects smart reporting.
Economic Pipe Dreams
“Take a vacation!” “Buy more yachts!” “Hire everyone!”
No, these responses aren’t the fodder of impulsive, giggling adolescents when asked how to solve the myriad issues of our global economy. They are reactions from thirteen esteemed thinkers and intellectuals in Foreign Policy’s January/February 2012 special feature “13 Out-of-the-Tinderbox Ways to Save the Economy.”
The allusion to quick, “out-of-the-box” solutions shouldn’t have permitted suggestions so theoretical and unrealistic that they can never be applied. Tinderboxes fell out of use when matches were invented because they were unwieldy and impractical. This feature’s ideas are equally useless when one gets down to the real work necessary to “firestart” the global economic system. They range from tangential (Daniel Dennett’s three-month-long vacation for everyone), to unrealistic (James Galbraith’s nearly doubling minimum wage), to the unthinkable (Paul Kedrosky’s mass default).
All of these minds are accomplished. The central problem of this symposium lies in what must have been an overly-simplistic prompt: The global economy is a fragile, complex system. Please craft an unusual, decidedly unwonky solution in 1,500 words or less.
When the responses aren’t absurdly large in scope or esoteric, they almost admit their own infeasibility. For example, after arguing for governments in Europe and the United States to guarantee employment for young people as a three-to-five-year-long emergency measure, Diane Coyle admits, “Of course, it would be better for the private sector to create enough jobs instead, and in the end it will have to: Structural government deficits clearly need to be eliminated.”
This special feature from Foreign Policy was framed in such a way that creating a realistic idea to improve the global economy was not only discouraged but perhaps not entirely possible. It is thus flawed, a weightless, overly romantic attempt at economic analysis, special only in that it is not an entirely boring read.
