The Foreign Policy Consensus


If you had any doubt about it, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs documents the gap between the views of the foreign policy elite and those of ordinary Americans:

The 2016 election has been widely read as a populist revolt, with average Americans rising up to reject the political elite, particularly on issues of immigration and trade. As the Council’s parallel survey results show, there is an element of truth in this argument: the American public and opinion leaders are in fact divided over several key issues, including the importance of protecting American jobs, US immigration policy, and the importance of protecting US allies’ security. Perhaps not coincidentally, these areas where elite-public gaps exist are also the issue areas where Donald Trump’s message has resounded the loudest.

Is there a consensus? Not only do we have a consensus, we have two of them: a consensus among leaders regardless of party affiliation and a consensus among Americans also regardless of party affiliation. They are not the same.

So, what is to be done? As I see it there are several alternatives:

  1. Continue to follow the leaders.
  2. The leaders can change course to strike some middle ground.
  3. Leaders can do a much better job of persuading the people.
  4. Dump the leaders. Change course.

Keep in mind that the track record of our foreign policy leadership has been awful for a very long time. Depending on how you reckon it, we’ve been at war continually in the Middle East over the period of the last 25 years with very little to show for it.

7 comments… add one
  • steve Link

    You are more optimistic than I am. There isn’t enough distance between these two groups. The majority of Americans, even it isn’t 99%, believe in intervention. We love to bomb things and are too willing to kill people in order to make them “free”.

    Steve

  • We love to bomb things and are too willing to kill people in order to make them “free”.

    That’s the foreign policy leadership. If attacked the first inclination of Jacksonians is to bomb foreigners to smithereens. If not attacked they’d rather have nothing to do with them.

  • CStanley Link

    I’d vote for a combination of #2 and #3. The leaders need to formulate an overall strategic vision that is coherent, sensible, and possible, and then communicate it in a compelling manner so that the people will be persuaded.

    The problem as I see it is that no one really has that strategic vision. We’ve been floundering for one since the end of the Cold War, when the loss of the stabilizing bipolarity of two superpowers left a vacuum in the MENA.

  • bob sykes Link

    As to number 4, we tried that, could our candidate in, and the Deep State rolled him. We have a sham democracy, and elections do not matter in the least. If change comes, it will come through revolution.

  • when the loss of the stabilizing bipolarity of two superpowers left a vacuum in the MENA.

    That formulation removes agency from the people of the region. Regardless of propaganda, they’re mostly responsible for their own plight. Not colonialism. Not post-colonialism. Not Jews. Not Americans. The fraction and factionalism of Arab society.

  • CStanley Link

    removes agency

    Well yes, and I’d even say that the superpower structure propped up that system and stunted the growth of those societies. But I do realize this is an American-centric way of looking at it, hard to avoid because I don’t know enough about the societies themselves and I’m looking at it from the perspeciptive of how we should interact.

    Basically I’m of the opinion that the Cold War (and the realpolitik that went along with it, embrace of Saudi Arabia while we ignored the seeds they were sowing) was good for promoting stability and prosperity for us, but its flaws were always there and then were laid bare when the overriding global power structure disintegrated. And we should have been better prepared for that, and pivoted to some other foreign policy paradigm. In the absence of that we lurch between the extremes of benign neglect (with reactionary measures) and unwelcome meddling.

  • embrace of Saudi Arabia while we ignored the seeds they were sowing

    It was called the “twin pillars strategy”. The other pillar was Iran and the strategy became inoperative in 1979.

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