I found Steve Postrel’s post at Strategy Profs interesting, if only because it reinforced for me in the foreign policy sphere what I think is the case for the president’s policies in the domestic arena. After quoting a WSJ piece that recounted how, following the 2012 election, the president convened his foreign policy team and asked that they blue sky foreign policy objectives for a second term. Here’s what they came up with:
What emerged was a sweeping and fundamental re-orientation of U.S. foreign policy, highlighted by four initiatives: conclude a nuclear deal with Iran; renew diplomatic relations with Cuba; elevate climate change to a national-security issue; and complete a free-trade deal with Asia.
to which Steve responds:
This set of four disconnected initiatives, whatever their individual merit (my personal scoring vector: -10, -1, -2, 5) does not add up to anything like a coherent foreign policy or national security strategy. Not surprisingly, the WSJ article goes on in great detail to describe how the actual imperatives of the United States’s foreign environment–aggression and irredentism from Russia, China, and Islamic State, as well as the continuing battle with militant Islamic supremacists globally–impinged on and “crowded out†much of Obama’s agenda.
This dog’s breakfast of random objectives, even if achieved, would do little or nothing to make the U.S. stronger or safer or to advance American ideals. It is not attached to a serious diagnosis of threats and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses, or adversary and allied incentives. None of the four objectives materially reinforces another, nor do they work together to accomplish a coherent foreign-policy goal.
but what they are, very much like the “stimulus package” and “healthcare reform”, are a grab bag of Democratic Party nostrums, some going back decades.
Hat tip: memeorandum
Read the whole statement. It says “a sweeping and fundamental re-orientation of U.S. foreign policy”. The 4 initiatives were concrete steps they were taking towards their re-orientation, or so I would guess since the article is sufficiently vague to allow for criticism and no defense since it never defines the re-orientation.
Really. The guy repeats the tiresome tripe about Obama not being able to negotiate a better SOFA agreement. If his team wanted one, they should have done so when we actually had the leverage to do it. And, of course, you will never find someone like Postrel committing to how long we should stay in a place like Iraq and what we would get out of it.
Steve
I think you’ve missed his point which is that it is not a strategy but a set of disconnected policy goals. If it’s a strategy, what is the strategy?
Yes, it could not be more obvious that we don’t have a foreign policy strategy. Instead we have what Mark Safranski calls “tactical geopolitics.”
Dave- I don’t know, he just discusses the initiatives after claiming we were having a fundamental re-orientation. I don’t think we have really have a comprehensive strategy, unless you want to count the neocon “invade and/or bomb everything.” Not sure a democracy really can have one.
Steve