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Obama’s Foreign Policy

David Adesnik and Jamie Kirchick have contributed to a Doublethink symposium in which I am also participating. My essay will be up fairly soon, and I’ll announce when it appears. Adesnik and Kirchick are both addressing the state of foreign policy realism. Adesnik has provided the broader overview, and Kirchick has applied his usual critique […]

David Adesnik and Jamie Kirchick have contributed to a Doublethink symposium in which I am also participating. My essay will be up fairly soon, and I’ll announce when it appears. Adesnik and Kirchick are both addressing the state of foreign policy realism. Adesnik has provided the broader overview, and Kirchick has applied his usual critique of realism to Obama’s policies. As I hope my essay will explain, the relationship between realism and Obama’s policies is far more tenuous than realists or interventionists would like. So many of the arguments over the place of realism in the Obama administration take for granted that it actually has a significant place in the administration’s conduct of foreign policy. I am finding that assumption less and less tenable as time goes by.

On a related topic, via Andrew I see that Foreign Policy asked Walt, Rothkopf, Drezner and Clemons to respond to Paul Wolfowitz’s tired attack on realism. Rothkopf first objects to the abusive deployment of vague and/or meaningless labels and then proceeds to endorse a strongly interventionist view. Drezner distinguishes a kind of pragmatic recognition of hard truths from a grander theory of “Realism.” Walt and Clemons naturally engage in more polemical refutations of Wolfowitz as the most prominent and identifiable realists among the four.

On the question of whether realists should be concerned with regime type and altering the nature of other states, Rothkopf writes:

If the objective is to advance the national interest and influence states and our ability to do so is limited and different from circumstance to circumstance, shouldn’t we use every tool at our disposal to do so (assuming the use of the tool provides a net gain toward achieving our goals)? If so, influencing the nature of states or the internal workings of states is not off bounds for realism — it is the beginning of realism — it is the place where the effort to influence states begins.

If realists were simply interested in the most cynical Machtpolitik imaginable, this would be true. What is strange about this passage is that Rothkopf insists that realists pretend that state sovereignty and international law are ultimately irrelevant in the calculation of the national interest. Even though we have repeatedly seen from the 17th to the 21st centuries that wars fought to change the internal constitutions of other states produce profoundly negative consequences for all parties, respect for state sovereignty and international law appear nowhere in this analysis. If a government respects the principle of state sovereignty, which ours is bound by treaty to respect, it ought to be concerned overwhelmingly with relations between itself and other governments rather than working constantly to subvert them from within. There is no guarantee that changing regime type will change a regime’s behavior in our favor, and if we believe that there are permanent state interests that persist despite major internal political change there is no use in changing regime type. As I have said before, a liberal, pluralistic, democratic Russian government that meets all of the expectations of Westerners concerning its internal behavior will nonetheless still be a Russian government interested in the same strategic goals and wary of the same potential threats. Indeed, a more liberalized Russia could easily justify its interventions in neighboring states, whether on behalf of ethnic Russians or not, with the language of “responsibility to protect,” “human rights” and, of course, “freedom.” Even now Moscow mimics our use of this propaganda to justify its presence in the separatist enclaves in Georgia–imagine what “liberations” it might carry out if it had credibility as a full-fledged liberal, constitutional regime. Obsessing over the ideological orientation and constitutional organization of other states has powerfully destabilizing effects when that obsession is made into the basis for policy and the justification for the use of force. That ought to be enough of a reason for realists and everyone else to reject it as folly.

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