My mother-in-law has always thought I believed Obama was a savior of some sort. That's not true. We use language in flexible ways sometimes. You know how you might say to someone, "Oh! You're my savior!", when all they've done is stop to help you fix a flat tire and get your car out of a ditch, when your kids are in the back seat miserable and hungry, and it's getting dark? Obama's that kind of savior, helping us pull the nation out of the ditch the Bush administration steered us into.
The recent reissue of the Beatles albums, vividly remastered for the digital age, has opened up a window to help me describe what I believed about Obama, and what, as his Presidency unfolds over the first year, seems to be a more accurate picture.
What it boils down to is this: Obama is not the Beatles. He's the Kinks. But, although I have friends and nieces and acquaintances who will shout and throw things at me: the Kinks just missed being as great as the Beatles. I just heard a voice in Morningside Heights yell: "What!?" I know others out there are asking: "Are you gosh-darn-it CRAZY!"
Don't come at me with your outraged sensibilities until you walk away, take a deep breath, and listen to the string of albums the Kinks put out between 1966 and 1969: Face to Face, Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Genius. And most of the weight of composing these albums rested on Ray Davies. His brother Dave wrote a few great songs along the way (Death of a Clown, for example), but the best way to understand the situation is this: it would be like John Lennon carrying the songwriting duties of the Beatles without Paul McCartney. George Harrison contributed his share, much like Dave did. I Want to Tell You and Taxman help make Revolver a great album. But strip McCartney's Eleanor Rigby, Good Day Sunshine, and Got to Get You Into My Life from Revolver and the distance between it and Something Else by the Kinks is a matter of taste, not a difference in talent. Quit your belly-aching. It's true. Here's what I am talking about:
Aside from Paul McCartney, and the resources they could command because they were a cultural and commercial phenomenon, the difference between the Beatles and the Kinks was George Martin. Obama's problem is that he hasn't found his George Martin. Who could that be? My candidate: Donna Brazile. I know she has been cast off into the Democratic wilderness, forced to spend time with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings, because she presided over the embarrassment that was the Al Gore campaign. But she is smart, strategically attuned, and commanding. Make her Chief of Staff, and suddenly Shangri-La starts to sound like A Day in the Life.
1967 is commonly understood to be the year the Beatles left their British Invasion rivals in the dust, and in the process redefined what rock and roll musicians were capable of achieving. That was the year they recorded and released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But I would claim, the next year was as important for my argument. Out of all their albums, Sgt. Pepper's was most clearly a product of the Beatles' artistic collaboration with George Martin. The strings, the depth of the recording, with layers upon layers of instrumentation and vocals, the quirky effects that were new to the recording studio: all of these were George Martin's contribution. Sgt. Pepper's, and later Abbey Road, are the albums that give my argument plausibility. Without George Martin, those albums would have never been the albums we cherish. Surely, they would have been remarkable albums, full of thoughtful and thought-provoking songs, but they wouldn't be Sgt. Pepper's and Abbey Road.
In 1968 the Beatles released the White Album, and the Kinks released The Village Green Preservation Society. The White Album was a double album which, famously, was a sprawling, all-over-the-map grab-bag. Noisy here and there, melancholy in places, outright weird in others. Ray Davies wanted Village Green to be a double album too, but his record company refused. Which tells us something else about why the Beatles were the Beatles: their prominence and commercial clout gave them the chance to do what they wanted.
Obama is more like the Kinks in this way too. He might have been a rock star on the campaign trail, but it has become clear that he is not universally loved, and the opposition party has carefully employed devices to call forth our uncertainties, our fears and our prejudices. Even more certain, he doesn't have the financial or operational resources to do the things he wants. The Bush years left our economy in shambles, the government deeply in debt, and our armed forces bogged down in two unwinnable wars. I made the argument once that Obama offered the promise of a new type of politics, setting aside incremental step-by-step gains for transformational, paradigm-shifting change. That may have been enthusiastic hyperbole on my part. Or I may have been right, but it is now impossible for Obama to move that quickly, since his administration must wade through Bush's wreckage in everything it does. Obama might want to produce the equivalent of a transformative double album, but circumstances will only allow him to slowly grind out more modest policy achievements that, while more limited in their scope, are indispensable and if passed into law will change the lives of those the policies touch.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Neocons everywhere
Just the other day I wrote a hastily tossed off defense of Obama's Peace Prize, where I argued that Obama was an inspired choice, because by turning away from the inherently destabilizing Bush-era foreign policy, which was built on the premise of U.S. dominance in a world lacking any comparable power, Obama has begun to map out a more fluid, engaged, responsive, and - yes, I'll say it - diplomatic strategy. My argument, perhaps not articulated with rhetorical or scholarly precision, was (and is) that we should never aspire to dominate the international system. We can't - the system resists the imposition of order - and we shouldn't - because other actors in the system always seek to discipline any state or actor that seeks to impose its will on the system.
In the last day or two, though, I feel like the neocons, who should have slinked away to hide under the porch after the debacles they have engineered, have taken center stage. John Bolton recently gave a high-profile talk on my campus, and now Charles Krauthammer has published a venomous and deeply misguided new essay in The Weekly Standard.
Let me point out the things that I find inexcusable in the essay, then I'll take on his claims. Krauthammer surrenders any chance he might have had to be taken on simply on the basis of his ideas by carrying forward three parallel efforts that the GOP has been marketing since last summer. By describing Obama's recent overseas visit as a hajj, Krauthammer advances the detestable narrative that Obama is (wink wink) secretly but inescapably a Muslim. Then he reaches all the way back to Obama's speech on race in March of 2008 to re-reposition Obama as an angry black man, and then uses that as a jumping off point to question Obama's patriotism and love for the country he leads. This is political work, not commentary. And it aims to inject more poison into our already venomous national conversation about our way forward out of the mess George Bush left us.
Let's focus on Krauthammer's themes. His core argument is that Obama is choosing to facilitate, even deliberately propel, America's "decline". We stand at a moment in history where, according to Krauthammer, we can choose to retain our influence and authority, or we can surrender our global dominance - and for Krauthammer this also means surrendering our power and security. In Krauthammer's view, Obama is a doing all of this, walking away from our role as the greatest power in the world, giving up our strategic gains, surrendering in the war on terror, abandoning us to harmful forces that seek to destroy our civilization.
Krauthammer argues that the U.S. has a "moral" justification to dominate global affairs. In his view, we guard the door from the wolves who will tear apart civilization. He argues that our global dominance has been benevolent, and a historical accident, resulting from two events, the destruction of the European powers in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This view that our global dominance can be justified on moral grounds links Krauthammer's neocon ambitions to some awful historical precedents - a similar view carried the crusaders to the holy lands 900 years ago, accompanied the colonialization of Africa and the New World, and motivated the Holocaust. Further, any moral claim we might have had we surrendered long ago. After World War II we played the role of a hegemon, supporting the construction of institutions and systems that laid the groundwork for a new system of global monetary policy, trade, and cooperation. All of this work served our own interests, but it also carried the promise of rebuilding a world that had collapsed under two decades of economic chaos and global conflict. But, when confronted with the rising threat of the Soviet Union, we chose to side with dictators around the world, suppressing through our own intervention (in Vietnam most disastrously) or through proxies the genuine aspirations of local populations to build more representative and just systems of government. After the fall of the Soviet Union we had a chance to adopt a braver, more principled foreign policy. But we didn't, walking away from genocides, failing to use our leverage to build sustainable peace in the Middle East, or protect Africans from a slide into dark, dark years, filled with war, famine, disease and misery. Krauthammer's belief is that Obama is walking away from our moral claim to dominate world affairs. The reality is that choice was made long ago.
My argument would be that morality is a peripheral concern in international affairs. Power is what matters. I would love to see the United States use its power to lift up those in poverty, to defend those who are persecuted because they are minorities, to make peace where aggressors make war. I don't want to see America decline, I don't want to see it become less powerful. And neither does Obama. The question isn't: Should we renounce our power in the global system? It is: How should we use that power? And: What is the best way to preserve it? Here is where Krauthammer and his neocon friends are wrong: America's decline will be guaranteed if we continue with the destabilizing foreign policy he advocates. Krauthammer seems to recognize that the geopolitical system has always risen up to punish powers that attempt to dominate. He tries this preposterous bit of sleight of hand:
There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance--as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom. And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.
Well, I don't think I have a shovel big enough to take on that steaming pile of elephant droppings. But I'll try. First of all, what was the Cold War but a historic example in counter-hegemonic confrontation? I'm not picking sides here. I'm not saying the Soviet bloc rose up to oppose our diabolical plans for the world; I think, in fact, our immediate plans after the war aimed at institution building, not wide-scale aggression. My point is there is a triggering mechanism in the system - states with enormous power are viewed with fear and suspicion and counter-hegemonic alliances emerge, formed by the states that bristle at living in the shadow of the hegemon. Secondly, what Krauthammer does here borders on defilement: he disingenuously links Bush-era preventive war unilateralism with the post-World War II "benign" institution-building hegemony that produced the U.N., the IMF and the World Bank. That earlier era of unilateral action was beneficent and widely supported by the major powers. Bush's aggressive and intimidating cowboy foreign policy has been widely opposed. There isn't a thread of continuity joining these two eras, these two fundamentally different efforts to exercise American dominance. To propose this is all part of a single beneficial impulse is laughable.
Finally, his claim that we are a "welcome" "balancer of power" and guarantor of freedom in the Middle East, the Pacific, and Latin America can only be true if you imagine that the grateful royal family in Saudi Arabia somehow reflects the mood of the Islamic world, or ignore the emergence of terrorist networks in Indonesia, or forget about the standing of Hugo Chavez in Latin America. No one salutes Chavez because he is effective - he isn't, for an effective leader Latin Americans look to Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - but powerless countries in South America applaud him for giving the U.S. the finger. America is not, as Krauthammer will want you to believe, well-loved. I suspect the reason there hasn't been a more widespread counter-hegemonic movement is because coordination of such a movement has been extremely difficult. And although it is an unwelcome truth: the radical Islamic movement that engineered 9/11 and much of the chaos and harm that came before and continued after is a counter-hegemonic response. They don't fear our freedom, as George Bush would have had you believe, nor do they aim at destroying our civilization, as Krauthammer argues, they oppose our dominance and our support of reform-resistant dictators throughout the Middle East.
Krauthammer's hysterical fears that Obama is making us less safe have no support in the available evidence. When pressed to produce evidence that Obama's foreign policy has failed, he can't point to a single strategic threat that is more relevant now than before Obama took office. In the end, all he can point to as a meaningful Obama failure is the IOC vote to send the Olympics to Brazil rather than Chicago.
Baffled by Obama's foreign policy, Krauthammer proposes that Obama has been duped into believing an "illusion that human nature has changed;" so we no longer need to be vigilant, we no longer need to protect our borders, we no longer need to invest in defenses. Wherever this Obama doctrine was published, I missed it. In fact, it doesn't exist. It is a fantasy.
Finally, near the end of his essay, Krauthammer gets something right:
The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power.
But he fundamentally misunderstands the implications of this for the U.S. at this point in history. If John McCain had been elected president, and continued Bush's reckless, destabilizing foreign policy, aimed at global dominance, we would been disciplined by a concert of nations, and a patchwork association of non-state actors. Our efforts to dominate the world would have over-extended our forces, drained our resources, and exhausted our resolve. In the Hobbesian world of global politics, our vulnerabilities would have been continuously challenged. Defeat and decline in this McCain-led era, while not inevitable, would, in my opinion, be very likely. No one in the Obama administration is asking us to renounce power, only reshape how we use it. We have a chance to retain our power and influence if we stop trying to rule the world and find ways to use our power intelligently and strategically.
In the last day or two, though, I feel like the neocons, who should have slinked away to hide under the porch after the debacles they have engineered, have taken center stage. John Bolton recently gave a high-profile talk on my campus, and now Charles Krauthammer has published a venomous and deeply misguided new essay in The Weekly Standard.
Let me point out the things that I find inexcusable in the essay, then I'll take on his claims. Krauthammer surrenders any chance he might have had to be taken on simply on the basis of his ideas by carrying forward three parallel efforts that the GOP has been marketing since last summer. By describing Obama's recent overseas visit as a hajj, Krauthammer advances the detestable narrative that Obama is (wink wink) secretly but inescapably a Muslim. Then he reaches all the way back to Obama's speech on race in March of 2008 to re-reposition Obama as an angry black man, and then uses that as a jumping off point to question Obama's patriotism and love for the country he leads. This is political work, not commentary. And it aims to inject more poison into our already venomous national conversation about our way forward out of the mess George Bush left us.
Let's focus on Krauthammer's themes. His core argument is that Obama is choosing to facilitate, even deliberately propel, America's "decline". We stand at a moment in history where, according to Krauthammer, we can choose to retain our influence and authority, or we can surrender our global dominance - and for Krauthammer this also means surrendering our power and security. In Krauthammer's view, Obama is a doing all of this, walking away from our role as the greatest power in the world, giving up our strategic gains, surrendering in the war on terror, abandoning us to harmful forces that seek to destroy our civilization.
Krauthammer argues that the U.S. has a "moral" justification to dominate global affairs. In his view, we guard the door from the wolves who will tear apart civilization. He argues that our global dominance has been benevolent, and a historical accident, resulting from two events, the destruction of the European powers in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This view that our global dominance can be justified on moral grounds links Krauthammer's neocon ambitions to some awful historical precedents - a similar view carried the crusaders to the holy lands 900 years ago, accompanied the colonialization of Africa and the New World, and motivated the Holocaust. Further, any moral claim we might have had we surrendered long ago. After World War II we played the role of a hegemon, supporting the construction of institutions and systems that laid the groundwork for a new system of global monetary policy, trade, and cooperation. All of this work served our own interests, but it also carried the promise of rebuilding a world that had collapsed under two decades of economic chaos and global conflict. But, when confronted with the rising threat of the Soviet Union, we chose to side with dictators around the world, suppressing through our own intervention (in Vietnam most disastrously) or through proxies the genuine aspirations of local populations to build more representative and just systems of government. After the fall of the Soviet Union we had a chance to adopt a braver, more principled foreign policy. But we didn't, walking away from genocides, failing to use our leverage to build sustainable peace in the Middle East, or protect Africans from a slide into dark, dark years, filled with war, famine, disease and misery. Krauthammer's belief is that Obama is walking away from our moral claim to dominate world affairs. The reality is that choice was made long ago.
My argument would be that morality is a peripheral concern in international affairs. Power is what matters. I would love to see the United States use its power to lift up those in poverty, to defend those who are persecuted because they are minorities, to make peace where aggressors make war. I don't want to see America decline, I don't want to see it become less powerful. And neither does Obama. The question isn't: Should we renounce our power in the global system? It is: How should we use that power? And: What is the best way to preserve it? Here is where Krauthammer and his neocon friends are wrong: America's decline will be guaranteed if we continue with the destabilizing foreign policy he advocates. Krauthammer seems to recognize that the geopolitical system has always risen up to punish powers that attempt to dominate. He tries this preposterous bit of sleight of hand:
There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance--as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom. And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.
Well, I don't think I have a shovel big enough to take on that steaming pile of elephant droppings. But I'll try. First of all, what was the Cold War but a historic example in counter-hegemonic confrontation? I'm not picking sides here. I'm not saying the Soviet bloc rose up to oppose our diabolical plans for the world; I think, in fact, our immediate plans after the war aimed at institution building, not wide-scale aggression. My point is there is a triggering mechanism in the system - states with enormous power are viewed with fear and suspicion and counter-hegemonic alliances emerge, formed by the states that bristle at living in the shadow of the hegemon. Secondly, what Krauthammer does here borders on defilement: he disingenuously links Bush-era preventive war unilateralism with the post-World War II "benign" institution-building hegemony that produced the U.N., the IMF and the World Bank. That earlier era of unilateral action was beneficent and widely supported by the major powers. Bush's aggressive and intimidating cowboy foreign policy has been widely opposed. There isn't a thread of continuity joining these two eras, these two fundamentally different efforts to exercise American dominance. To propose this is all part of a single beneficial impulse is laughable.
Finally, his claim that we are a "welcome" "balancer of power" and guarantor of freedom in the Middle East, the Pacific, and Latin America can only be true if you imagine that the grateful royal family in Saudi Arabia somehow reflects the mood of the Islamic world, or ignore the emergence of terrorist networks in Indonesia, or forget about the standing of Hugo Chavez in Latin America. No one salutes Chavez because he is effective - he isn't, for an effective leader Latin Americans look to Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - but powerless countries in South America applaud him for giving the U.S. the finger. America is not, as Krauthammer will want you to believe, well-loved. I suspect the reason there hasn't been a more widespread counter-hegemonic movement is because coordination of such a movement has been extremely difficult. And although it is an unwelcome truth: the radical Islamic movement that engineered 9/11 and much of the chaos and harm that came before and continued after is a counter-hegemonic response. They don't fear our freedom, as George Bush would have had you believe, nor do they aim at destroying our civilization, as Krauthammer argues, they oppose our dominance and our support of reform-resistant dictators throughout the Middle East.
Krauthammer's hysterical fears that Obama is making us less safe have no support in the available evidence. When pressed to produce evidence that Obama's foreign policy has failed, he can't point to a single strategic threat that is more relevant now than before Obama took office. In the end, all he can point to as a meaningful Obama failure is the IOC vote to send the Olympics to Brazil rather than Chicago.
Baffled by Obama's foreign policy, Krauthammer proposes that Obama has been duped into believing an "illusion that human nature has changed;" so we no longer need to be vigilant, we no longer need to protect our borders, we no longer need to invest in defenses. Wherever this Obama doctrine was published, I missed it. In fact, it doesn't exist. It is a fantasy.
Finally, near the end of his essay, Krauthammer gets something right:
The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power.
But he fundamentally misunderstands the implications of this for the U.S. at this point in history. If John McCain had been elected president, and continued Bush's reckless, destabilizing foreign policy, aimed at global dominance, we would been disciplined by a concert of nations, and a patchwork association of non-state actors. Our efforts to dominate the world would have over-extended our forces, drained our resources, and exhausted our resolve. In the Hobbesian world of global politics, our vulnerabilities would have been continuously challenged. Defeat and decline in this McCain-led era, while not inevitable, would, in my opinion, be very likely. No one in the Obama administration is asking us to renounce power, only reshape how we use it. We have a chance to retain our power and influence if we stop trying to rule the world and find ways to use our power intelligently and strategically.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Why do Republicans hate peace?
I learned that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize as I drove my kids to school this morning. The one or two of you who have read more than one or two of my postings might recall that I watched Obama's inaugural address at my son's school. Ellie, my soon to be two-year-old, started at the same school this Fall. I love their school - it is a perfect little glimpse of America's diversity.
I got back to my office and learned that conservative Republicans were already hurling ridicule and scorn at the news. Or worse. Rush Limbaugh, evidently viewing the U.S. as a huge, drooling dog - not really an unfair suggestion - characterized the award as a prize for Obama's efforts to "neuter" America. Michael Steele moaned and whined. Bizarrely, even, the New York Times declared the award "a potential political liability."
This reaction just seemed crazy to me. What kind of country views the awarding of a Peace Prize as a liability? Our country, it turns out. Or at least pockets of it. It seems pretty clear that part of this is politics. The same impulse that encouraged the right to applaud Chicago's Olympic loss, merely because Obama backed it, shaped this response. But there is more here too. This is another reaction by the right to a dim recognition that their world has been snatched from them. The age of America as the playground bully is over. It ended on 9/11, although the Bush administration, and the right, and indeed a large part of the country, didn't see it. Non-state actors, armed with nothing more than box cutters, can commandeer aircraft and turn them into cruise missles. This doesn't mean, as conservatives would have it, that we have a choice between fighting or fading away.
We need a smarter foreign policy, one that is engaged, assertive yet responsive, principled, and realist in a whole new way. In truth, American foreign policy hasn't been realist since the end of the Cold War. Bush's neo-con foreign policy was merely the last phase in an evolution of thought that led us away from realism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have been deluded by the idea that we can remake the world according to our wishes. Realists - best exemplified by Kenneth Waltz - believe that states interact in an environment best described as anarchic. That is, there is no overarching authority, no preexisting hierarchy, no defining orderliness. I haven't been dipping into the pool of readings on the topic lately, but my impression is that realist theory is still working to map out the implications of a post-Soviet world, where America is the stumbling, drunken giant in a world filled with a wide variety of beasts, some faithfully domesticated and others snarling pit-bulls ready to bite into our leg. That image, in my mind, is just about perfect. Let me, in my own misguided way, flesh this out a little.
Classic IR theory might situate the drama of international relations in a weight room. Every guy there - and don't imagine for a minute that the gym has any women around; IR theory is very guy-centric - is trying to bulk up. Some guys are massive, muscle-bound specimens, intimidating in their size, capable of bench-pressing small island nations. Others are 97 pound weaklings, hoping some work on the barbells will yield some results. But the truth is, the big guys are probably going to remain big, and the small guys won't get much bigger.
But the world we live in now is very different. It's as if someone has turned a bestiary loose in the gym. All kinds of beasts are running around. A variety of non-state actors - transnational terrorist groups and warlords - are important now, and we trip over them as we move around. If anything, the environment is more anarchic. But our policy makers haven't fully acknowledged this. To stick with my admittedly awful metaphor, scanning the gym, full of steroids and Red Bull, and seeing the weaklings all around us, we imagined we were the alphas in the room, and guessed that we could have anything we wanted. But we weren't paying attention to the snarling hounds nipping at our ankles.
This is where my metaphor falls apart, but that's OK. I'm sure we were all tired of it. My point is that the international system is still resistant to hierarchy - we can't impose order on it, just design strategies to move through it. The Bushies thought they could march into Iraq - as a first stop on a campaign of global domination - and subordinate its interests - and the interests of its people - to our own. We failed. And the very idea of commanding the world in this way failed too. An Obama foreign policy needs to be realist in the sense that it returns to the idea that international affairs mainly consists of actors with competing interests interacting in a venue where no one sets the rules. And an important part of the game is joining with others - in alliances and less formal agreements - to balance against destabilizing actors. The age of cowboy diplomacy is gone.
And Republicans regret seeing it go. Even though it never achieved anything. It appealed to a certain nostalgia they had for John Wayne's America. And, more importantly, in their view, it promised to guarantee our access to the things we wanted - oil, wealth, power - without compromise. The cowboys John Wayne played didn't trade with the Indians. Think of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He massacred them and took what he wanted. That was Bush's foreign policy. But - and this is an important fact - that type of behavior is destabilizing. And one essential truth about global politics is that destabilizing actors are disciplined. Actors ally and seek to balance or in some cases punish the destabilizing state. Republicans were foolish to think their foreign policy made sense, and we were more foolish to believe them.
Republicans hate peace because they imagine it means compromise. And, of course, it does. What the Nobel committee did was offer applause for the promise of an American foreign policy that is less destabilizing, less reckless, less blind to the realities and, it's true, more open to compromise. But Republicans like Limbaugh won't understand that, they are too reckless, too blind, too uncompromising to understand why the world was happy to see George Bush exit and Obama take the stage.
I got back to my office and learned that conservative Republicans were already hurling ridicule and scorn at the news. Or worse. Rush Limbaugh, evidently viewing the U.S. as a huge, drooling dog - not really an unfair suggestion - characterized the award as a prize for Obama's efforts to "neuter" America. Michael Steele moaned and whined. Bizarrely, even, the New York Times declared the award "a potential political liability."
This reaction just seemed crazy to me. What kind of country views the awarding of a Peace Prize as a liability? Our country, it turns out. Or at least pockets of it. It seems pretty clear that part of this is politics. The same impulse that encouraged the right to applaud Chicago's Olympic loss, merely because Obama backed it, shaped this response. But there is more here too. This is another reaction by the right to a dim recognition that their world has been snatched from them. The age of America as the playground bully is over. It ended on 9/11, although the Bush administration, and the right, and indeed a large part of the country, didn't see it. Non-state actors, armed with nothing more than box cutters, can commandeer aircraft and turn them into cruise missles. This doesn't mean, as conservatives would have it, that we have a choice between fighting or fading away.
We need a smarter foreign policy, one that is engaged, assertive yet responsive, principled, and realist in a whole new way. In truth, American foreign policy hasn't been realist since the end of the Cold War. Bush's neo-con foreign policy was merely the last phase in an evolution of thought that led us away from realism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have been deluded by the idea that we can remake the world according to our wishes. Realists - best exemplified by Kenneth Waltz - believe that states interact in an environment best described as anarchic. That is, there is no overarching authority, no preexisting hierarchy, no defining orderliness. I haven't been dipping into the pool of readings on the topic lately, but my impression is that realist theory is still working to map out the implications of a post-Soviet world, where America is the stumbling, drunken giant in a world filled with a wide variety of beasts, some faithfully domesticated and others snarling pit-bulls ready to bite into our leg. That image, in my mind, is just about perfect. Let me, in my own misguided way, flesh this out a little.
Classic IR theory might situate the drama of international relations in a weight room. Every guy there - and don't imagine for a minute that the gym has any women around; IR theory is very guy-centric - is trying to bulk up. Some guys are massive, muscle-bound specimens, intimidating in their size, capable of bench-pressing small island nations. Others are 97 pound weaklings, hoping some work on the barbells will yield some results. But the truth is, the big guys are probably going to remain big, and the small guys won't get much bigger.
But the world we live in now is very different. It's as if someone has turned a bestiary loose in the gym. All kinds of beasts are running around. A variety of non-state actors - transnational terrorist groups and warlords - are important now, and we trip over them as we move around. If anything, the environment is more anarchic. But our policy makers haven't fully acknowledged this. To stick with my admittedly awful metaphor, scanning the gym, full of steroids and Red Bull, and seeing the weaklings all around us, we imagined we were the alphas in the room, and guessed that we could have anything we wanted. But we weren't paying attention to the snarling hounds nipping at our ankles.
This is where my metaphor falls apart, but that's OK. I'm sure we were all tired of it. My point is that the international system is still resistant to hierarchy - we can't impose order on it, just design strategies to move through it. The Bushies thought they could march into Iraq - as a first stop on a campaign of global domination - and subordinate its interests - and the interests of its people - to our own. We failed. And the very idea of commanding the world in this way failed too. An Obama foreign policy needs to be realist in the sense that it returns to the idea that international affairs mainly consists of actors with competing interests interacting in a venue where no one sets the rules. And an important part of the game is joining with others - in alliances and less formal agreements - to balance against destabilizing actors. The age of cowboy diplomacy is gone.
And Republicans regret seeing it go. Even though it never achieved anything. It appealed to a certain nostalgia they had for John Wayne's America. And, more importantly, in their view, it promised to guarantee our access to the things we wanted - oil, wealth, power - without compromise. The cowboys John Wayne played didn't trade with the Indians. Think of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He massacred them and took what he wanted. That was Bush's foreign policy. But - and this is an important fact - that type of behavior is destabilizing. And one essential truth about global politics is that destabilizing actors are disciplined. Actors ally and seek to balance or in some cases punish the destabilizing state. Republicans were foolish to think their foreign policy made sense, and we were more foolish to believe them.
Republicans hate peace because they imagine it means compromise. And, of course, it does. What the Nobel committee did was offer applause for the promise of an American foreign policy that is less destabilizing, less reckless, less blind to the realities and, it's true, more open to compromise. But Republicans like Limbaugh won't understand that, they are too reckless, too blind, too uncompromising to understand why the world was happy to see George Bush exit and Obama take the stage.
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