America in the World | Notable arguments

Being popular abroad does not necessarily bring America influence

John Bolton for The American Blog:

"The justifiable disgust over Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi’s release underlines what amounts to a spectacular failure of American diplomacy. “Obamamania” overseas is a dominant theme of the media, which endlessly recounts how the U.S. position in the world has improved since President Bush’s departure. “Engagement” with friend and adversary alike is the Obama administration’s hallmark, with diplomatic advances expected to flow like wine.  So what happened? The State Department said on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked “for weeks and months” to persuade Britain not to release the murderer. Both Washington and London all but begged Gaddafi not to hold public celebrations on Megrahi’s arrival in Tripoli. Yet Britain, the other half of the “special relationship,” ignored Clinton’s efforts, as did Libya, which only recently resumed full diplomatic relations with America."

Gideon Rachman: Obama will be a splitter on the Middle East

Gideon Rachman writes for the Financial Times:

"Historians are sometimes divided into lumpers and splitters. The splitters like to chop problems up into lots of small bits. The lumpers like to link them altogether.

"Would-be Middle East peacemakers can be categorised in the same way. The lumpers want a "comprehensive peace settlement" that links together all the problems in the region - Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel-Palestine, even Iran. The splitters want to deal with all these problems separately."

"The attractions of lumping are obvious. The idea of fixing the whole of the Middle East in one go is delightful. And it is true that all of these problems are linked. To take just one example, Iran's poisonous relationship with the US has encouraged it to make trouble in Lebanon and Palestine, by sponsoring Hizbollah and Hamas.

"But while lumping works as an argument, it risks failing as a policy. There are three obvious problems. First, there is the risk of being over-ambitious. If nothing is resolved until everything is resolved there is a risk that you will end up with nothing.

"Second, there is the problem of which end of the lump you attack first. The much-reviled neoconservatives were also lumpers. But they thought that change in Iraq was the key to the transformation of the Middle East. Mr Miliband, in common with most mainstream European politicians, sees an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement as the key to the lump.

"This brings us to the third problem with the lump thesis. It is not clear that progress in one area will necessarily unlock the others. Let us say that the Iranians are miraculously persuaded to abandon their nuclear ambitions. Does that automatically lead to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state? Clearly not. Or put it the other way round: let us say the Israelis are miraculously persuaded to grant the Palestinians a viable state. Does that persuade the Iranians to abandon all thoughts of pursuing nuclear weapons? Clearly not. In fact, linking Iran and Israel-Palestine could inadvertently do the Iranians a favour, by tacitly conceding them a legitimate role in Gaza and in Lebanon.

"What probably is true is the more modest claim: significant progress in one area would improve prospects in another. So if there were a rapprochement between Iran and the US that involved the Iranians cutting off support for Hamas, the Israelis would feel more secure - and that might make a Middle East peace settlement easier to achieve. Similarly, the establishment of a proper Palestinian state would remove a source of anger and anti-western grievance across the region, and so undermine an angry, anti-western regime such as Iran."

"I think, as a matter of practical politics, Mr Obama will have to be a splitter. The state of the American economy is going to eat up most of his working day. When he turns to foreign policy, the Israeli-Palestinian problem will come fairly low down his list of priorities - behind, in rough order of urgency, Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change, Iran, international economics and Russia."

Gideon Rose: American guarantees risk moral hazard

Gideon Rose, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, writes an important article reflecting both on US backing for Georgia and Taiwan in light of the notion of moral hazard: "offering insurance to somebody often leads them to take greater risks than they otherwise would".

"If Georgia had not been led to believe that the United States might back it in a crisis, it probably would have played its hand more carefully -- and whatever compromises it might have had to make, it would have been better off as a result. This sort of thing happens all the time, and shows why great powers need to be careful lest their dependents embroil them in unnecessary conflicts."

"It is only natural for small democratic states living in bad neighborhoods to seek American support and protection, and in certain cases it is entirely appropriate for the United States to give it to them. But when it chooses to do so, the U.S. should make clear that along with the backing comes the responsibility to act prudently -- and should, without sentiment, use all the tools at its disposal to enforce the deal. The Bush 43 team has recognized this in Asia but forgot it in the Caucasus. How forcefully it would handle a third such case in the Middle East during its final months remains unclear."

See also America in the World's commentary on this article.

John Lewis Gaddis: America must aspire to end tyranny

In the latest edition of The American Interest, Yale's John Lewis Gaddis has a comprehensive account of America's historical role in promoting democracy and opposing tyranny.

Gaddis begins by noting that the normal expectation as the Bush Administration closes ought to be that he will bequeath no foreign policy doctrine to his successors. Very few do - arguably this could be claimed only of President Monroe and President Truman. If Bush leaves a doctrine behind, it will be understood in terms of his second inaugural address: “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”.

Prerequisites for democracy
Gaddis explains some of the reasons history has shown such a doctrine can prove problematic:

"Periclean Athens, which blundered into and then lost the Peloponnesian War, and the Roman Republic, which sank so deeply into corruption and violence that its citizens welcomed the benign authoritarianism of Caesar Augustus.

"It’s not just ancient precedents, though ... World War I, which laid so much of the groundwork for despotism, began with widespread public enthusiasm. A free election brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, and he retained the support of most Germans well into the war he started. A persistent American fear throughout the Cold War was that much of the rest of the world might voluntarily choose communism; that led to enlightened counter-measures like the Marshall Plan, but also to unsavory alliances with anti-communist dictators. And the post-Cold War collapse of Yugoslavia together with the events in Rwanda evoked an even more disturbing vision: that people could hate one another to such an extent that ethnic cleansing, even genocide, might have democratic roots.

"Today it seems clear that the people of Russia, if they could have re-elected their increasingly authoritarian President, would overwhelmingly have done so ... Reasonably fair elections have at last been held in the Middle East, but the results have empowered Ahmadinejad in Iran, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and—despite the courage with which Iraqis risked their lives to vote in three successive elections in 2005—a government in Baghdad that has yet to establish order despite the full military support of the United States and its coalition allies.

"So if ending tyranny is what you want to accomplish, promoting democracy in and of itself may not be enough. Something more seems to be required."

To survive, Gaddis argues, democracy first requires the prerequisites identified by Fareed Zakaria in The Future of Freedom: "personal security, political stability, economic sustainability, the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, a working constitutional structure. You can’t just topple a tyrant, hold an election and expect a democracy to emerge. How, then, did the idea get started that democracy could sprout where it had no roots?"

Kim Holmes: The choice for America is between global leadership and deference to international consensus

In a column for the Washington Times last week, Kim Holmes of The Heritage Foundation set out his view of the choice America must make about her role in the world:

"In America, there are basically two competing visions. One -- based on our history and the ideas and founding principles embodied in our Constitution -- is of a nation that safeguards and advances the cause of liberty. The other is of an America whose leadership always defers to international bodies, including the whims of the United Nations and the European Union.

"All Americans should reflect on this: If we do not take up the burden of leadership, who will? And, who would we rather have make decisions over our lives?

"If we allow our actions to be determined by other nations that aspire to some evolving idea of 'international law' and 'international consensus,' we should not be surprised by their indifference to our security.

"In such a world, the UN could block a raid we want to conduct to destroy a terrorist camp that launched another brutal attack on America. Or our Secretary of State could be hauled up before a European court to answer charges of 'war crimes' in Iraq.

"The UN or other international body even could decide how Texas, Florida or any other state in the union convicts criminals or manages prisons."

Matthew Yglesias: The trouble with 'pro-American'

Matthew Yglesias of the Center for American Progress notes the pitfalls of assuming world leaders' attitudes towards the United States are their chief motivation:

"[There is a] tick in American discourse of labeling foreign leaders “pro-American” or “anti-American” as if America is likely to be the primary thing on their mind. But obviously when you’re talking about actors on the other side of the world they’re probably mostly worried about other stuff. People in Pakistan are thinking about India. Indians are thinking about Pakistan and China. Not that they don’t have opinions about the United States, but these kind of considerations are secondary to the main point.

"[I]t’s wrong to look at every situation around the world where some country’s perception of its interests goes against what the United States wants to see happen and then label that behavior as “anti-American.” Countries are going to do things we [Americans] don’t like, in which case it will often be appropriate for us to push-back. But absent actual evidence that the thing we don’t like is genuinely being undertaken with specific anti-American intent there’s no reason to pathologize behavior as driven by an anti-American agenda."

Fareed Zakaria argues that the next president cannot simply reverse existing policies

Writing in Newsweek, Zakaria claims:

"[B]lanket criticism of Bush misses an important reality... The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed. This has happened without acknowledgment—which is partly what drives critics crazy—and it's often been done surreptitiously. It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure; the old way simply wasn't working. But for whatever reasons and through whichever path, the foreign policies in place now are more sensible, moderate and mainstream. In many cases the next president should follow rather than reverse them."

The University of Manitoba's Lasha Tchantoridze reviews Rice's exposition of American foreign policy

She writes of Secretary Rice:

"[H]er answer to the question what guides US foreign policy, idealism or realism, appears refreshingly simple: it’s both.

"The new realism in American foreign policy, according to Rice, means that US international concerns for the last eight years have not been guided solely by pre-occupation with major powers, such as Russia and China, but with concerns of human rights and democracy as well. She acknowledges that Washington’s ability to influence strong states is limited, but in terms of enhancing “the peaceful political and economic development of weak and poorly governed states” (such as Georgia) the said ability could be considerable.

"Georgia stands as a beneficiary of such a vision in US foreign policy. American interests in Georgia, and in the Caucasus in general, have been guided by both realist considerations (energy plus strategically important location), and idealistic interests (“Rose Revolution,” democratic reforms, etc.)."