All Posts Tagged With: "foreign policy"

The New York Times reports today that the Pakistani coalition that had coalesced around anti-Musharraf sentiment has split apart in the wake of Musharraf’s resignation. Now that the government is entirely civilian in composition, it’s not particularly surprising that the Zardari-led PPP and the Sharif-led PML-N would transform from coalition into government-and-opposition. Blake Hounshell provides some info here on what this means for Pakistani politics, the bottom line being that Zardari and the PPP are likely to hang onto power.

How the United States responds to these developments is still up in the air. The PPP is the more “pro-American” of the two parties, and because they are likely to retain control of the government, that makes things somewhat easier for the US for the time being. But these things are unstable and change rapidly. The smart thing to do is develop an American policy toward Pakistan (and the rest of the world) that is aimed at supporting peaceful, stable, democratic institutions rather than at allying ourselves with a particular government. We’ve not been too successful at this so far (see: Hamas), particularly in Pakistan (see: Musharraf).

John McCain, incidentally, has always taken a strongly pro-Musharraf stance, saying in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, “I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job,” but that “Benazir Bhutto and Sharif presided over failed states, there was corruption, there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf took charge.” Obama at the same time was calling Musharraf “a president who has acted in an anti-democratic fashion,” which is in line with statements he made before Bhutto’s assassination.

McCain, by the way, is not at all wrong to note that Bhutto’s government was riddled with corruption and other problems. The point, however, is that by tying American policy to a particular foreign leader or political party, as McCain (and Bush) did with Musharraf, we are undermining the development of both stable alliances and stable democratic institutions that can peacefully survive political transitions. (The EU, incidentally, has done a much better job of this than the US, particularly in its near-abroad, where it can use EU membership to lure countries into creating stable democratic institutions.)

I just got home from a night of drinking and am a little bit off-kilter, but I discovered that the Democratic ticket will include one Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware. I have not always been a fan of the idea of selecting Sen. Biden as a VP, because I’ve generally seen it as a concession that Obama lacks the foreign policy chops to be president, which I think is flat-out untrue and particularly ridiculous when compared to John McCain. But in any case, I have come around to the idea of a Biden vice presidency, in part because I think I was wrong about my intuition and Biden may in fact be a signal from the Obama camp that their campaign is ready to get into the game when it comes to foreign policy debate. Take, for example, this clip of Joe Biden talking about Rudy Giuliani, which made me laugh for about five minutes straight:

Combine that clip with the vision of a Biden vs. Romney VP debate, and I am going to bed happy tonight. :-)

I hope you’ve all been enjoying the many-houses-of-McCain wonderfulness as much as I have. It’s been truly entertaining stuff, as has the ravenous frenzy Obama has whipped up by not announcing his VP candidate yet.

As delightful as these stories have been, though, the all-consuming media coverage they’re getting is causing many to miss a couple relatively important happenings in Iraq.

First we have the news that the Iraqi government and the Bush administration are close to agreement on a timetable for withdrawal of American troops. According to the deal, troops will be out of Iraq’s cities by 2009 and out of the entire country by 2011. This is not particularly surprising news, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Bush administration to paint this as anything but what it is: a timetable for withdrawal. And that makes for increased political problems for the McCain campaign. Obama has already issued a statement saying he’s glad the Bush administration has finally come around to embracing his Iraq policy. This is the sort of argument that people aren’t going to be paying much attention to right now, but when Obama makes it at the convention and in particular at the debates, it’s going to be money in the bank. It’s also the sort of argument I love: true, important, and effective (in contrast to, say, the many-houses-of-McCain, which is true and effective, but not particularly important – though of course what it lacks in importance it more than makes up for in hilarity).

Beyond the political consequences, of course, the embrace of a timetable is an important policy shift for the Bush administration. Importantly, virtually nobody seems willing to disagree with it. The debate over Iraq’s troop withdrawal has not merely transitioned from “whether” to “how,” but from “how” to “how-to-phrase-it”: the Bush administration wishes to emphasize the importance of “conditions on the ground,” while the Democrats wish to emphasize the withdrawal itself. Either way, the Bush administration still supports withdrawal, and the Democrats still support allowing for adjustments depending on conditions on the ground. Everything else is spin and obfuscation.

The other important Iraq story is this New York Times report that Maliki’s Shi’ite-dominated government has started to target the Sunni groups that recently joined forces with U.S. troops to target al-Qaeda in the so-called Anbar Awakening. If true, it would seem that Maliki is prepared to make a dangerous play for power. The reality of the Anbar Awakening, as well as the “surge” of American troops, was always that it served as a band-aid to mitigate the damage of the fundamental strategic blunder of the initial invasion. The power dynamics between Shi’a and Sunni remain the same, as does the impossibility of establishing democratic institutions and norms through military force. That’s not to say Iraq is necessarily doomed to chaos: the relevant parties might make decisions that lead to peace or that lead to war. It’s just that the United States is not one of those relevant parties. Americans get uncomfortable when that’s the case, as is demonstrated by the sound-and-fury that has been coming out of McCain’s mouth throughout the Georgia-Russia conflict. But in any number of areas there’s simply nothing we can do to help in any kind of direct way. We can either get used to that reality and adjust, or kick and scream as we refuse to accept it, ultimately only making things worse.

“People don’t want to go to war…. But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Actually, this quote is from Hermann Göering during his trial at Nuremberg. It is eerily chilling how fully his words apply to the Bush/McCain crusade to war.

I promised to write some extended thoughts on this response to my post on Obama’s Berlin speech over at friend-of-Urbanagora Josh Xiong’s new-ish blog, so here goes. It seems I left him unconvinced:

Look, it’s not hard to recognize there are a lot of collective action problems in the world and that multilateral institutions require work and cooperation. Nor does it seem clear that Bush or McCain have rejected tackling these collective action problems. Bush has worked with the EU3 and the Six-Party framework to tackle Iranian and North Korean nukes; he has worked with the G8 to increase aid to Africa (more so than any other president before him). McCain has called for a strengthening of our alliance with rising democracies such as Brazil and India; he is for greater multilateral cooperation through a concert of democracies; and he is a staunch defender of free trade, something necessary if you want genuine global cooperation.

With the exception of isolationists, nobody with half an ounce of internationalist in them denies that collective action problems are important. It does not take a lot of courage or acumen to reocognize this point. But doing so does not preclude judgement, prioritization, and selectivity.

It’s true that not everything Bush has done has been anti-internationalist. Josh is right to point out the success of the multilateral approach to North Korea, and to celebrate the increase in aid to Africa. I’d also point out that Bush’s policy toward China has been appropriately constrained, in contrast to McCain’s seeming desire to be increasingly belligerent. But all that demonstrates is that to the extent that Bush has embraced liberal internationalism, his foreign policy has been a success. When he abandoned that approach, the most notable example of course being Iraq, his policy has been a disaster.

More importantly, the only distinction in foreign policy theory that Josh seems to want to recognize is that between isolationists and internationalists. But this is the same kind of muddled thinking that led many liberal hawks (including myself) to support the invasion of Iraq in the first place. It’s true that if you were to exclude isolationists from the equation, some of Obama’s speech would turn into superfluous fluff. But there isn’t just one big school of thought called “internationalism” out there. Rather, there is one group that some like to call “neoconservatives” but who might also be termed “nationalists” or “imperialists,” and another group that I’ll call “liberal internationalists” (both groups could be further divided, and these various schools of thought are obviously not hermetically sealed off from one another, but these divisions provide a useful guide).

Both groups believe the United States should play an active role in the world, but there is a vitally important difference in terms of how each thinks that should be done. Neoconservatives are far more comfortable acting unilaterally. They tend to take the view that the US is in some way exceptional. According to this view, international law and international institutions like the UN are at best not particularly important and are at worst completely meaningless and expendable. Alliances may be helpful, a neoconservative would concede, but the United States is powerful and dominant enough to discard them, particularly when it comes to states that are not democratic (which gives rise to McCain’s wrongheaded embrace of a “League of Democracies,” his profoundly stupid desire to kick Russia out of the G8, his unwillingness to negotiate with Iran, and his above-mentioned hostility toward China).

Liberal internationalists, by contrast, strive as much as possible for a rule-based international order. This means strengthening institutions like the UN and the ICC. It means submitting to imperfect international agreements in the recognition that trading off short-term national interests can reap long-term benefits. It means recognizing the growing influence of smaller states, including those with unsavory governments. Above all else, it means a very strong disinclination toward exempting the United States from the rules of the international order, whether in the form of permitting torture, holding prisoners indefinitely in Guantanamo, or waging aggressive war. (And, yes, it also means a commitment to free trade, and I’m perfectly willing to concede that to the extent a President Obama reneges on free trade agreements, he will be disappointing me, though it seems far more likely that Obama’s anti-free trade rhetoric is political pandering rather than an expression of any genuine intention to, for example, renegotiate NAFTA).

While Obama’s Berlin speech was not as politically groundbreaking as his speech on race, it did reflect, to anybody willing to pay attention, a commitment to liberal internationalism and a condemnation of neoconservatism. And that’s a vitally important distinction between him and John McCain, regardless of whom you support.