John Mearsheimer has published a thorough article at the National Interest addressing American foreign policy, which he accurately describes as being "in a world of trouble." He argues that American grand strategy should shift from the global dominance model, partly conceived by Krauthammer and Fukuyama and adopted by Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, to the offshore balancing model, which has usually served the country much better.
Mearsheimer focuses on the two major security threats to the U.S. - terrorism and nuclear proliferation - as well as the potential threat embodied by China the superpower, arguing that offshore balancing is a better way to achieve desired outcomes on all three of these than a strategy of global dominance. Somewhat ironically, he concludes that continued U.S. global dominance is, in fact, best assured by a strategy of offshore balancing, showing that even Mearsheimer has not fully escaped the American preoccupation with being #1.
I think Mearsheimer's conception of offshore balancing offers a good starting point for building a truly progressive foreign policy, a creature which has stubbornly evaded description, despite the rise of progressivism on the left in the U.S.
Mearsheimer is right that President Obama has simply continued the Clinton-Bush global dominance strategy, including the element of global democracy promotion that so blatantly contradicts the fundamental democratic principle of self-determination. He paid lip service to a strategy based on the "soft power" espoused by Joe Nye at his Boston alma mater, but Obama's continuance of all manner of militant imperialism, from Guantanamo Bay to government-sanctioned assassinations of U.S. citizens, shows that lip service was the extent of that change.
To bring America beyond such a feckless, ass-backwards foreign policy, the president needs to craft a different, PROGRESSIVE foreign policy for the next decade and beyond. If Obama simply takes heed of enlightened, informed academics like Nye, Mearsheimer, Amitai Etzioni, and other liberal realists, that won't be too difficult a task. Mostly, it involves throttling back and refocusing the militant, classically imperialist elements of American foreign policy, while revitalizing the diplomatic and economic elements.
Take terrorism as an example. Most intelligent observers note that the threat from international terrorism has been vastly overblown, much to the detriment of the United States. The U.S. has literally killed twice as many of its own citizens with its reaction to 9/11 (in Iraq alone) as were killed on that day. Beyond the deaths caused by anti-terror hysteria, there is the drastic erosion in American civil rights (PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo Bay, black sites, waterboarding, domestic surveillance, state-sanctioned murders, need I go on?).
Rather than attempting to kill, capture and torture its way to peace on every continent while sexually molesting every one of its citizen who opts to fly in an airplane, the U.S. should remove its troops from Muslim lands (a provocation Mearsheimer correctly notes as being primarily responsible for terrorist attacks) and treat terrorism for what it is: a law enforcement problem.
This means beefing up America's human capital - linguists, accountants, spies - and downsizing the military industrial complex that has grown so incalculably bloated over the last decade. It means engaging the Muslim-American community for help, not surveilling and entrapping its members in order to justify inflated domestic security budgets. It means closing down Gitmo immediately and apologizing to our own citizens and the world for the national disgrace and compromise of democratic principles that it represents. It means being willing to recognize that not every development in a foreign country touches upon one of our "national security interests," and therefore, that we do not necessarily have a right to interfere.
There resides in this collective vision a new, progressive foreign policy that can help America negotiate the treacherous shoals of the future, when its relative power will decline and the power of other states will rise. It is a vision of an America that has been humbled, has regained its conscience and its footing, and has rededicated itself to the NONVIOLENT promotion of stable, free, prosperous societies all over the world. Will Obama be smart and savvy enough to make this progressive vision a reality? Not likely.
0 comments:
Post a Comment