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Washington’s Bad Foreign Policy Habits

Paul Pillar comments on the push for NATO expansion over the last twenty years as an example of a number of bad American foreign policy habits: But a significant part of this story is how the West cornered the Russian bear before the bear bit back. More specifically, an important element in that story was […]

Paul Pillar comments on the push for NATO expansion over the last twenty years as an example of a number of bad American foreign policy habits:

But a significant part of this story is how the West cornered the Russian bear before the bear bit back.

More specifically, an important element in that story was the eastward expansion of NATO into what had been the Soviet empire, as well as talk about expanding it even further to embrace Ukraine and Georgia. We should not only understand the importance of that development for getting to the current crisis, but also what that development exhibited about American habits of thought and action in foreign affairs.

Pillar’s argument is a familiar one to readers of this blog, and I recommend reading his post in its entirety. His list of unfortunate foreign policy habits and attitudes on display in the last twenty years is a good one, but I would add a few more. The first and perhaps most obvious is a tendency to ignore the likely negative consequences of Washington’s preferred course of action. The U.S. has a habit of acting in ways that other states predictably find threatening or hostile while assuming that these states can’t or won’t ever be able to respond in kind. Along the same lines, there is a tendency to insist on making “credible” military threats against other states that Washington would treat as proof of another state’s implacable hostility if they were made against the U.S. Another is the habit of asserting the right to have an extraordinary role in the affairs of other states while denying that other states can legitimately have any such role.

Related to that is the assumption that the U.S. can and should have expansive spheres of influence in other regions of the world, but otherwise spheres of influence are to be opposed and condemned. One of the more dangerous habits on display over the years has been the tendency to confuse expressions of local nationalist or religious ideology and hostility to a neighboring regional or major power with “pro-Western” attitudes and political values. This frequently blinds many in America to the significant flaws of the leaders and governments that Washington chooses to support in much the same way that shared anticommunism once trumped all other considerations during the Cold War, and drags it into confrontations with other states that it could easily avoid. These are some of Washington’s bad foreign policy habits, but the U.S. would be much better off if it managed to break just a few of them.

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