Back in what for most people is now known as ancient history, the disarmament movement used a number of slogans (now known as "sound bites") to encapsulate their opposition to war and various and sundry other "bad things." This post title was one of the slogans featured. The slogan may need to be amended.
Consider the shape of our emerging foreign policy as articulated by Hillary Clinton and propounded by Tom Barnett:
The New Rules: Clinton's Blueprint for a Multi-Partner World
Last week's major policy address by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was as noteworthy for the strategic concepts she dismissed as for the ones she embraced. Clinton provided Americans with a strong sense of how she plans to conduct U.S. foreign policy: not merely as "the indispensable nation" that assumes international leadership, but rather as the global rule-set convener that aggressively builds partnerships across a strategic landscape pulsating with rising players -- both state-based and transnational.
In doing so, Secretary Clinton explicitly rejected the emerging -- and yet painfully antiquated -- conventional wisdom that portrays a world inevitably divided into antagonistic poles.
The shift in vision is both profound and important.
Following 9/11, the Bush-Cheney neocons accurately diagnosed a global architecture that needed dramatic restructuring, but they set about doing so with a strategic impatience that was startling. Hard-power wars were expected to trigger immediate regional transformation (i.e., southwest Asia), with follow-on nation-building a brief afterthought to be outsourced to government contractors. Worse, we did it all largely alone, drawing upon our demographically moribund -- and thus rapidly aging -- Western allies, while defending our "primacy" among the world's rising powers.
Why such unilateralism?
In the minds of the neocons, those rising powers were one day bound to fight us for influence and resources across the world's developing regions, essentially replaying the balance-of-power politics and colonial-era warfare of the late 19th century. In short, no "near-peer competitors" could be allowed, even as we sought to remake the world around them.
The result of such strategic hubris was predictable enough. America quickly became overextended and its citizenry exhausted. And in the subsequent disillusionment, we reflexively imagined ourselves to be reliving the past -- doomed to perpetual warfare.
Secretary Clinton is having none of that:Our approach to foreign policy must reflect the world as it is, not as it used to be. It does not make sense to adapt a 19th century concert of powers, or a 20th century balance of power strategy. We cannot go back to Cold War containment or to unilateralism.
Today, we must acknowledge two inescapable facts that define our world:
First, no nation can meet the world's challenges alone. . . . Second, most nations worry about the same global threats. . . .
So these two facts demand a different global architecture -- one in which states have clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division. . . .
And here's how we'll do it . . . We'll use our power to convene, our ability to connect countries around the world, and sound foreign policy strategies to create partnerships aimed at solving problems. We'll go beyond states to create opportunities for non-state actors and individuals to contribute to solutions. . . .
In short, we will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world.
The outline here is correct. We cannot expect to remain a hyper-power for long, and if nothing else, Iraq should have taught us that even a hyper-power, unless it is willing to act in ways which are no longer culturally tolerable, can never hope to impose its will upon other populations. (At the same time I think Tom Barnett allows his antipathy to the Bush administration to color his perspective. We went into Iraq with our old allies because those where the allies we had. To paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld, who was lambasted for telling the truth, "you go to war with the allies you have, not the allies you would like to have.")
Judah Grunstein added some texture to Tom Barnett's article:
The Three Layers of Obama's Foreign Policy
In preparation for a France 24 panel discussion program yesterday -- which unfortunately hasn't been put online yet (Note: Part I now available here, Part II here) -- I tried to dial in a bit more closely this idea of President Barack Obama's foreign policy so far representing a great deal of continuity with the final two years of the Bush administration. And what I came up with, and had the pleasure of discussing with some very insightful fellow panelists, was not so much an either/or comparison between the two, but rather a multi-layered model of Obama's foreign policy.
The surface layer is the much-vaunted Communicator-in-Chief who, through his extraordinary oratorical skills and personal history, has very distinctly changed the tone of American diplomacy and reversed negative global perceptions of the United States. As we agreed yesterday, this layer has had an immediate impact, in terms of global opinion, but also a long-term impact, because Obama directs it so often at the world's younger generation (the insistence on speeches at universities, for instance).
Beneath that surface layer, there is a more concrete policy layer. This is where there is a good deal of continuity with George W. Bush's "third term," for the reasons I discussed previously. This is a slower, less immediate track, with a short- to medium-term horizon.
Beneath that, however, is an even deeper, third layer, which I described yesterday as the "genetic code" of Obama's foreign policy, and functions as the long-term conceptual foundation from which it logically flows. For me, Hillary Clinton's speech to the CFR is the clearest expression of this vision. It involves both institutional transformation in terms of U.S. diplomacy, but also in terms of the global governance architecture. For me, it boils down to replacing the declinists' "multi-polar" world (terminology I've been guilty of using) with what Clinton dubbed the "multi-partner" world. Thomas P.M. Barnett examined why this is so significant in his recent WPR column.
It is an axiom of Psychoanalysis that when freely associating, two ideas that come up together are usually related. I look upon my blog reading as a bit like free association and blogs are often constructed in such a way as to encourage more immediate, freer communications. (Like all analogies this is quite limited, but gives a view of how I try to understand the various metacommunications that are inherent in the Weltanschauung I am constantly re-working.) While reading two posts in succession (separated by brief announcement posts) from Michael Anissimov, my Psychoanalytic antennae lit up.
The first post concerned an outbreak of politically hostility and vitriol in the Transhumanist field. The key point of Phil Bowermaster’s Response to Mike Treder is how quickly the discussion leads to regression:
One area where transhumanists consistently disappointment me is politics. We can talk about accelerating change and singularities and human enhancement and the possibilities are endless, but when the subject comes to politics, everyone seems to revert to one of a very small number of philosophical templates, most of them created in the 19th century or earlier. And for some reason those are inviolate. But that’s not to say that technology has played no role in the recent evolution of political discourse. The rise of the blogosphere and sites like Daily Kos and Free Republic have established a new “accelerated” rhetorical framework for politics which now seems to be more or less universally applied. The basic assumption behind the framework is that there is Our Group and then there is the Other. Any ideas from the Other are subjected to a three-step analysis and response: 1. Hysteria / overreaction 2. Vilification 3. Condemnation (See Kingraven, above.) This process has worked great for the political blogs in drawing in huge masses of eager readers, mostly the same people who think they’re up to date on current events because they watch The Colbert Report or listen to Rush Limbaugh. Personally, I’d like to see a group such as IEET take a different approach. Maybe they could look for some kind of, oh I don’t know, Middle Way that transcends opposites? Or maybe that’s too ambitious. To use Brian’s analogy, maybe they could at least come up with a middle way that transcends Pepsi and Coke? Frankly, I would expect that sort of thing to be more in line with their world view than all this (both figurative and now literal) fire and brimstone talk. High stress, which occurs in disagreements when the opponents have a powerful emotional investment in their arguments easily lead to regression, which long time readers of this blog appreciate. This occurs even in a community that prides itself on its rationality. Michael's follow on post was Chance of Nuclear War is Greater Than You Think: Stanford Engineer Makes Risk Analysis. I thought the Engineer's (Stanford Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman) assumptions were so difficult to quantify as to leave his conclusion nearly worthless, but what I would take from the chain of associations in this post is that there is a powerful tendency to regress under stress, this tendency is being neglected by a foreign policy that imagines itself to be based on realism and rationality, and that the risk of a nuclear exchange is not nearly as small as one might wish. And, please note that Professor Hellman pointedly omits the risk of terrorist bomb (or a terrorist state bomb.) As David Foster notes, Deterrence is problematic when it comes to Iran. I would add that a nuclear exchange, even the loss of one city to a terrorist nuclear weapon (and this is exponentially true of an actual, effective EMP attack) will lead to a regression to primitive thinking that could well risk the entirety of civilization. Yet, even an unused Iranian bomb would almost certainly destroy Clinton/Obama's new multipolar concept. (You cannot harness people's interests when they do not share any of your interests. The Iranians do not play by our rule set and have little interest in stability; in fact, stability represents their death.) President Obama has not yet been truly tested, but that test is coming.
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