Decline and Multipolarity
As usual, Nikolas Gvosdev has written an excellent analysis of the foreign and economic policy divergences between emerging-market democracies and the leading European and North American democracies. (Via Kevin Sullivan) Gvosdev makes many of the points I have been making on Iran policy, democratization, and the increasing anti-hegemonic effects of globalization for the last year and more, but I would like to go in a slightly different direction this time.
Hawkish critics of Obama want to make two contradictory arguments against the administration. On the one hand, they say that he is too accommodating and too willing to believe that there are common interests among major powers that will lead to cooperation on supposedly “global” issues. This is one of the standard complaints against the administration by Robert Kagan in any one of a half-dozen articles and op-eds in the last year. The complaint goes something like this: “Doesn’t Obama realize that states have divergent interests? How can he be so naive as to expect cooperation from other great powers?”
To take their criticism seriously, we would have to believe that his critics accept the reality and inevitability of multipolarity, and we would have to believe that they also accept the relative decline in American power that this entails. Of course, they don’t really accept either of these things. For the most part, they do not acknowledge the structural political reasons for resistance to Obama’s initiatives, and they recoil from any suggestion that America needs to adjust to a changing world. They locate the fault for any American decline entirely with Obama, because he fails to be sufficiently strong in championing U.S. interests. “Decline is a choice,” Krauthammer says, and he accuses Obama of having chosen it. Such critics are not bothered by the reality that the Iran sanctions they want Obama to pursue are not possible without the cooperation of other states that they argue (correctly!) he will never be able to get. Naturally, this has no effect on what they think Iran policy should be. It simply becomes fodder for their next anti-Obama article.
At the same time, they obsessively ridicule Obama’s supposed conceit that all of America’s international problems were going to start disappearing once he became President, and they are always ready to point out that Obama has not somehow magically eliminated the divergent state interests that prevent him from succeeding in his foreign policy initiatives. They insist Obama is blind to structural barriers and divergent state interests, and in the next breath they mock him for not having dissolved them through force of personality. Here the complaint goes something like this: “The world still doesn’t love us, and Obama promised us that they would! Wah!” Once again, America is in decline and Obama is supposedly to blame, but this is simply because of “the arrogance of the president and his top advisers.” Oh, yes, and because Obama simply “doesn’t care whether [the nations of the world are] with us or against us.” At this point, we can probably cue up the moronic arguments about his rejection of American exceptionalism.
The only complaint I have is that you write too much to keep up with! I’ve been spending my time commenting on Walter Russell Mead’s recent series of posts on …. well, start here and work backwards: The Israel Lobby and Gentile Power. Is that an attention grabber, or what!
G K Chesterton brilliantly remarked that some people can not see the trees for the forest The Weakly Splutter – National Greatness crowd refuses to accept that there are other countries in their world with interests of their own, some even mattering to them.
Furthermore, they refuse to acknowledge that if America is “in decline”, a dangerous idiom of propaganda if ever there was one, it is because their favored president in the course of his 8 years, by following their belligerent advice, screwed up 2 wars, 1 world economy and his political party. On to Iraq, my aching a..!
It is worth noting that in the first decade of the Long War, events on the Islamofascist Front have not gone at all well. The Kagenhammer’s favored instrumentality of power projection, the military industrial complex, gorges at the trough but has been able to bring nothing to a satisfactory and durable conclusion. When Goliath stumbles it gets noticed.
Finally one is left wondering why the Kagenhammer’s don’t lament the disappearance of our influence in say, Tel Aviv, with the same enthusiasm as they do its absence in Tehran; unless, of course, they believe that the Territorial Settlements bureau in Israel represents our interests better than we do.
A very concise well reasoned analysis. If the American public understood that we are destined to live in a multi-polar world, not due to our diminution but due to the inevitable rise of other powers, they would adjust. Unfortunately those who wish to manipulate American power to their own ends have the megaphone. If we accepted the idea of becoming a “normal” power like others, we would be better able to make common cause with powers of similar interests. The belief that every contretemps on the planet is our concern and every rising power must be checked will be our downfall.
In typing the need for us to become a “normal” country it occures to me that Germany and the USA share a similar problem. For Germany, becoming a normal country means getting beyond it’s history of aggression. For the USA becoming normal will consist of getting beyond the role of global savior and arbiter.
I do think that our size and commercial interests abroad will keep us engaged overseas to a degree that will be uncomfortable for you and some of the alt-right authors here. But it is unquestionable that we are over extended, over committed and poorly advised/aligned.
One can only hope that our penury will force us to prune some of this excess.
Thanks for the comments. Part of being normal is engaging in a full range of diplomatic, commercial and political contacts. I can even imagine how we might become a normal commercial republic and nonetheless occasionally have to resort to force to protect some concrete, limited, definable national interest in certain cases. Autarchy is not an option, and actual isolation is not desirable. This is why I often bristle at the use of the word isolationist, no matter who uses it, because no one really believes in such a thing.
Libertarian non-interventionists certainly don’t want us to disengage from the world, and neither do I. Most restrictionists and economic nationalists do not want to shut off the U.S. from the world, either. They want the U.S. government to pursue the interests of American labor and domestic industry first. The idea of so-called “Fortress America” would be a “fortress” only in the sense that the government’s overriding security responsibility would be to this country.
What I would ideally like to see is a policy of either neutrality or temporary alliances negotiated for specific purposes, but I could probably live with anything reasonably close to that.
Amen. Still, I have a sentimental attachment to a collaborative Anglosphere.
First, I want to say I appreciate your extensive efforts to defend Obama from idiotic criticism that fails to appreciate the reality of these matters.
Second, I think Obama does believe that, overall, there are more areas in which major states have interests in common than areas in which they diverge or differ, and it’s not fruitful to sacrifice those common collective efforts in the pursuit of persuading states to act against their interests. So we see Obama trying to mend relations with Russia, and not entirely caring if it results in their joining in on the stupid idea of punishing Iran with huge sanctions. This is criticized by those who see the only point in engaging other major powers as for the purpose of cajoling them into supporting something only we think is useful or meaningul, and which actually works against even our own interests. The Iraq war, for example, was a case where we tried to convince others to join in something we wanted to do, that might not have been in their interests, when it wasn’t even in our own interests.
And similarly, Iran sanctions aren’t even in our own interests, it’s just an ideological hammering point for certain domestic political groups. So Obama’s failure to get Russia to go along is somehow viewed as a reason to think it’s a failure to engage Russia intelligently and in the areas that are of mutual benefit. They don’t seem to grasp that it helps both of us to be engaged with one another in that larger sphere of issues we have mutual interests in, and to avoid those areas that are of dubious meaning to anyone but our ideological in-groups.
I also think that engagement with Iran is certainly possible in all kinds of areas that really do matter to us both, and that the real problem with that is the ideological in-groups that tend to control foreign policy in both camps. Iran is hampered in its ability to deal with the US because it’s useful for those in power to demonize the US to keep their grip on power. But that actually works against those groups, meaning the current government, because it actually holds Iran back in all kinds of ways from assuming its rightful place as the major power in the middle east. Opposition to the US helps those factions retain control over the government, but it hampers the government from actually achieve its real national goals. This is the major reason I think the government will eventually fall. The people sense that it just can’t bring Iran into the 21st century and create the modern Iran that is trying to emerge, so they will eventually dump it, one way or another.
These silly attacks on diplomacy also fail to grasp where America’s real power in the world lies – it is in our economic clout, which is diminishing every year do to factors that have nothing to do with “failing to project American strength”, but often quite the opposite. Our endless projection of strength only seems to weaken us further, both financially and diplomatically. To regain our strength, we have to rebuild or failing economic base, and return to a sane foreign policy that doesn’t constantly weaken us by focusing on non-essential matters of pride and success at bullying, and instead focuses on what can mutually benefit ourselves and other major powers in the world.