Democratic Presidential Nominee, Senator Barack Obama (Il)
Fouad Ajami had an interesting piece recently in the WSJ. He made the case that the prospect of an Obama presidency represents the most profound ideological shift in American foreign policy since WWII.
So the Obama candidacy must be judged on its own merits, and it can be reckoned as the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II. This is not only a matter of Sen. Obama’s own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America’s claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama’s rise.
Down a little further, he entertains Obama’s gut instincts about American power.
Though the staging in Denver was the obligatory attempt to present the Obama Democrats as men and women of the political center, the Illinois senator and his devotees are disaffected with American power. In their view, we can make our way in the world without the encumbrance of “hard” power. We would offer other nations apologies for the way we carried ourselves in the aftermath of 9/11, and the foreign world would be glad for a reprieve from the time of American certitude.
And finally, he describes Obama’s cultural and political intuitions, and contrasts them against the McCain candidacy.
Mr. Obama truly believes that he can offer the world beyond America’s shores his biography, his sympathies with strangers. In the great debate over anti-Americanism and its sources, the two candidates couldn’t be more different. Mr. Obama proceeds from the notion of American guilt: We called up the furies, he believes. Our war on terror and our war in Iraq triggered more animus. He proposes to repair for that, and offers himself (again, the biography) as a bridge to the world.
Mr. McCain, well, he’s not particularly articulate on this question. But he shares the widespread attitude of broad swaths of the country that are not consumed with worries about America’s standing in foreign lands. Mr. McCain is not eager to be loved by foreigners. In November, the country will have a choice between a Republican candidate forged in the verities of the 1950s, and a Democratic rival who walks out of the 1990s.
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Now, Ajami strikes some familiar chords here and some of them resonate with me. America is, as Ajami writes, an imperial republic with myriad hard power responsibilities across the globe.
Barack Obama is too embarrassed over Bush’s presidency and wears his discomfort with American global military dominance on his sleeve. And I don’t like it.
But. It is also not clear to me that Obama represents the most profound ideological sea-change in post-war American foreign policy. Is there not a case to be made that perhaps President Bush the Younger has a legitimate claim here?
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Ivo Daalder, former Clinton administration national security staffer and Brookings Institution think-tanker makes just this case in America Unbound.
On pages 12-13, Daalder lays out the foundational beliefs of the Bush Doctrine.
… first… in a dangerous world the best – if not the only – way to ensure America’s security was to shed the constraints imposed by friends, allies and international institutions…. Moreover, formal arrangements would inevitably constrain America’s ability to make the most of its primacy.
…
The second belief was that an America unbound should use its strength to change the status quo in the world…. The Bush philosophy instead turned John Quincy Adams on his head and argued that the United States should aggressively go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. That was the logic behind the Iraq War, and it animated the administration’s efforts to deal with other rogue states.
The Bush Doctrine – whether you love it, hate it, or some of both – represents a significant departure from post-war US foreign policy. (Though I am not yet convinced it constitutes a veritable revolution.) As promient IR scholar in the realist tradition, John Mearscheimer, persuasivey wrotein his contribution to openDemocracy:
The American military, in their (the neo-conservatives’) view, would swoop down out of the sky, finish off a regime, pull back and reload the shotgun for the next target. There might be a need for US ground troops in some cases, but that force would be small in number. The Bush doctrine did not call for a large army. Indeed, heavy reliance on a big army was antithetical to the strategy, because it would rob the military of the nimbleness and flexibility essential to make the strategy work.
And this strategy, enabled by the Revolution in Military Affairs, writes Mearscheimer, in turn enables Big Stick Diplomacy, which in turn facilitates a bandwagoning effect in international realations, whereby countries the world over are in awe of American will and power and her ability to replace regimes relatively effortlessly, and therefore fall in line when the situation turns critical.
But the Bush administration’s Big Stick diplomacy doesn’t seem to rival Obama’s IR agenda for the “major ideological departure” award in Ajami’s view?
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It seems to me that Mr. Ajami’s real beef is with Obama’s rhetoric – not so much his policies. Ajami’s second thesis – that Obama’s deepest intutions about American culture and power are very different from those of most president(ial nominee)s, is spot on. But Obama has articulated a pretty standard liberal-realist foreign policy agenda.
From what the Obama campaign has said so far, the Democratic nominee endorses an agenda that neither normalises pre-emption and preventative military actions nor explicticaly eschews them in principle; an agenda which seeks to further embed American power within the existing political, security and economic global order, as a means to integrate potentially belligerent great power competitors into the community of responsible nations. It is an agenda which affirms US exceptionalism (“… if Musharaff won’t act – we will.”), whilst acknowledging that perception and prestige are real, honest-to-goodness power assets in the mdoern global security environment, and that for America to abuse her prerogatives is to weaken the appeal and political viability of the Anglo-American order.
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Mr. Obama’s rhetoric on foreign policy is troubling to the tradtional American patriot – to the Andrew Jackson crowd, august bevy that it is. For his own good, and that of America should he win in November, he ought to frame his IR policies less as a promise tod eliver the world from the Bush administration and more to defend the nation he loves in the best way he can according to the best traditions he knows. More Truman, less Dukakis.
But to suggest Obama’s IR policies are radically out of sync with post-war American foreign policy in general is to overstate the case. Ajami has a bone to pick with the Obama-Biden communications team – not the IR advisors.
