I found this characterization, which appeared in David Ignatius’s Washington Post column, of Robert Gates’s analysis of the Obama foreign policy singularly unhelpful:
The interview with Gates followed a speech he gave the previous night in which he parsed the long-standing dispute over whether “realism†or “idealism†should govern U.S. foreign policy. A wise strategy has a measure of both, Gates told the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is neither hypocrisy nor cynicism to believe fervently in freedom while adopting different approaches to advancing freedom at different times along the way — including temporarily making common cause with despots to defeat greater or more urgent threats,†he said in his speech.
In general “foreign policy realism” means a foreign policy grounded in the material interests of your country, e.g. security, trade, and an acknowledgement that other countries pursue their own interests while “foreign policy idealism” means the pursuit of objectives like the promotion of democracy or human rights, taking less account of the material interests.
No president operates purely from a position of realism or idealism. Every president combines both, sometimes in adjacent sentences, a habit dismaying to our allies and adversaries alike. Rather than getting into a discussion of how many diplomats can dance on the head of a pin, let’s phrase the question another way. Was ousting Moammar Qaddafi, something U. S. action was instrumental in, in our material national interests or not? Has leaving as many troops in Afghanistan as we have for as long as we have been in our national interests or not? Would removing them be in our national interest?
My own view is that for administration after administration we’ve been relying too heavily on military force as a sort of Maslow’s hammer. Is interventionism really in our national interest or not?
There is a disconnect between the big, bad world out there and the swaddled comfort of the American people. The problem is fundamentally with the citizenry which knows almost nothing about foreign policy and only cares when there’s a terrorist attack or a dead GI. The American people sort of just want “all that” to go away, which is why the people look for binaries – massive intervention or isolationism – simple solutions to complex problems.
Unfortunately the people don’t really have the stomach for either. We won’t take on the burden of long occupations, and we won’t ignore heartbreaking pictures of dying children. George W. Bush couldn’t get the people to play jackbooted imperialists, and Barack Obama can’t get them to sit quietly and watch him play chess.
Ultimately this is a failure of the educational system. The American people only have about 300 years of history and they know a little about exactly three events: The Revolution, the Civil War and WW2. What they know about those three events is wrong, of course, but at least they understand in a vague sort of way that those things happened. We generally do not know the first thing about European history (aside from WW2 and maybe Agincourt for the Shakespeare lovers) and we know less than nothing about the middle-east. Africa and South America are effectively invisible. The sum total of American knowledge about China is, ‘they’re taking our jobs!’
So in this extraordinarily complex world, a world that would make Bismarck weep from the sheer number of competing claims and issues, the world’s only superpower has a foreign policy that is constrained, redirected, and often capriciously abandoned by a voting population that actually manages to know less than Trump.
You want coherent foreign policy? Then someone needs to remove the voters from the equation because the voters are ignoramuses.
So, who will be the first party to tell the voters they are too ignorant to understand things and “just trust me I’ll take care of it”.
To topic, we are always going to have a mix of realism and idealism, the task will be to keep the butchers bill as low as possible, which means voters have to pay attention.
We have always been way too ready to use the military. Look at theist of US military interventions. If the neocons had been in charge, we would likely have been at war with Iran, and have troops on the ground in Libya. Syria too, or maybe just two out of three as even they might realize we can overcommit our troops. The thing is, they generally get support for the initial invasion. We are going to go liberate and bring freedom to someone after all. The fact that we don’t handle long term occupations well isn’t even considered at the beginning.
I have come to believe that the best we can hope for is to minimize this tendency. Maybe only invade 1/3 of the countries that the interventionists want. Minimal use of troops an spending instead of thousands on the ground. That is the best we can do. Anything less, and the party in charge will be declared too weak to run the country.
Steve
@steve
I am always amazed that a blood thirsty country seems to be unable to detect a non-blood thirsty politician, and apparently, the non-support of invasion of Libya, Syria, or Iran has actually been their way to trick the peaceniks into sending troops into those places.
Luckily, we have you to detect these otherwise undetectable signals. If it were not for progressives, we would know nothing about the world that does not exist, but unfortunately, most of us must live in the real world.
And, I wonder about the invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam. President Bush had his own personal reason to do so, regarding the plot on his fathers life.
He had to go to congress for an authorization of force. Present evidence of yellowcake, weapons of mass destruction, hellofa catchall phrase.
But he put the whole trillion on the credit card.
What I wonder, would have happened if he had had to go to the American people and make his case for a tax hike to pay for this adventure.
What if he had to go to the American people and present his case for reinstituting military draft instead of calling up 45 year old pharmacists and clerks, and young mothers in the National Guard?
Surely we would have gladly ponied up since it was all in the national interest.