Wanted: a Coherent Foreign Policy

I’ve complained before that you can’t come up with a coherent foreign policy by oscillating back and forth between idealism and realism or, more precisely, you reduce the effectiveness of either policy by oscillating back and forth between them. They’re mutually undermining. If the focus of your foreign policy is the idealistic notion of fostering democracy, you must take actions that foster democracy and avoid actions that don’t. You can’t advocate democracy on the one hand and support an autocrat on the other because his mines are the only source of the upsidaisium you need to keep your industries running. Or because you need his acquiescence to fly over his territory or you want put a military base in his country.

Realism has its pitfalls, too. By and large it isn’t American idealism that people in the Middle East complain about:

The unfortunate fact is that there is no good reason for the average Arab or Muslim to think that we are “inherently good” or, for that matter, even just “good.” All they have to go on is our actions, and those actions certainly speak louder than our words, increasingly hollow as they’ve become. Much of the misery they encounter on a daily basis is at least partly attributable to our policies. After all, the dictatorial regimes that oppress, torture, and even kill them are often supported or funded by us (Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco. And that’s not even including the rest of the Muslim world, i.e. the Kissinger-supported bloodbath that was Suharto’s Indonesia).

What’s being complained about here isn’t American support of democracy or human rights. It’s the particular sort of realist policies that have been operative in our foreign policy for much of the last half century.

The idea of a policy of non-interference is unmitigated claptrap. Trade is interference as surely as a military base is and there’s also such a thing as cultural interference. Cultural interference may be an exercise of soft power rather than hard but it’s still interference.

I think it’s possible for us to implement a foreign policy that is realistic in the sense that it promotes our nearterm national interests, is consistent with our putative ideals, and plays to our demonstrated strengths by promoting economic liberalization around the world but it will simultaneously require harder noses and more finesse than we’ve demonstrated recently. And it’s completely inconsistent with the “fair trade” policies that are being touted by some in Washington these days which in my view are simply isolationists looking around for excuses for why they don’t want to trade with other countries.