Yesterday TomDispatch had a short, succinct article, authored by Andrew Bacevich, about the utter failure of Bush the Younger’s foreign. In addition to being one of the most thoughtful conservative critics of the current Administration’s foreign policy Bacevich is an Obama supporter and an excellent writer. I have only one quibble with his otherwise fine piece. Bacevich writes:
The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable — a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.
That’s his opening paragraph but the italics are mine. Bacevich’s complaint is that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has articulated his own vision for what American foreign policy should look like and he’s right, they haven’t. It points to something deeper though, beyond the standard complaints about the shallowness of our political discourse. We have no idea - none - what an Obama or McCain foreign policy will really look like. We know that they’ll be different from each other, and at least in Obama’s case we can be sure that it would look a lot less like the current one, but we don’t know which countries or issues truly interest either man. We can’t know those things because when it comes to foreign policy it’s still Bush the Younger’s world and the rest of us are just living in it.
If there was a universal media tag cloud for 2008 electoral foreign policy debate it would have “Iraq” in about 48-point font, “Afghanistan” at around 18-point and everything else at a microscopic 4-point. (”Georgia” blazed briefly across the headlines but seems to have settled in just above the din of everything else.) There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, Iraq and Afghanistan remain the main foreign problems with which we must contend even if they do often obscure more substantive discussions we should maybe be having. What deserves some thought though is that we’re now in an era where foreign policy can change radically from one Administration to the next.
During the Cold War, which has been over for almost two decades now, there were certainly arguments over foreign policy but the overarching goal of the United States never varied from confronting and containing the Soviet Union. There were heated arguments over tactics and whether or not a specific country or other was worth US involvement or attention, but the basic outline was, in hindsight, quite stable.
We’ve now had two post Cold War presidents, each lasting two terms, and their foreign policies have been almost polar opposites. Some of this can no doubt be chalked up to ideology, but without the constraints of the Cold War the already huge foreign policy leeway granted an American President grows even larger. The President decides which foreign countries to visit, which foreign leaders to speak with; the Defense Department’s soldiers and the State Department’s diplomats act on his orders. There is, of course, Congressional influence and oversight, but the President has tremendous latitude to set his own agenda and act on it.
No matter who takes over in January, the United States will still be the premier economic, cultural and military power in the world. Seventeen years after the Soviet Union fell apart there remains no coherent doctrine for how to use all that power and influence. Clinton was willing to use force in Europe to pacify the Balkans (twice) but other than our undeclared air war over Iraq and the lobbing of some cruise missiles at bin Laden his foreign policy was primarily economic, pressing formerly third world countries to open their capital and labor markets, sometimes with disastrous results.
It can be hard to remember, given all that’s happened since, but during the 2000 campaign candidate Bush repeatedly made a lot of hay out of the idea that Clinton had neglected the military, that many Army divisions were not combat ready. Candidate Bush also campaigned against nation building. Those facts are often brought up to highlight the hypocrisy of Bush the Younger (the Army is now in far worse shape than it was eight years ago and nation building is the primary cause) but it reveals something else as well. The foreign policy campaign issues that seemed so relevant in 2000 are distant memories just eight years later.
Some of that can be ascribed to 11 September, but certainly not all of it. The electorate, the commentariat, and the world at large are now accustomed to Bush the Younger’s policies as they once were to Clinton’s. Would a sitting Defense Secretary ever have dared disparage France and Germany as “old Europe” if Soviet tanks were still poised to roll West? Of course not! I certainly agree that the Bush Administration has abused this newfound freedom of action in uncountably costly ways, but the next administration is going to have the same freedom.
Obama and McCain have to define their policies within the context Bush has created and largely that consists of reacting to things that Bush has already done (invade Iraq) or failed to do (capture bin Laden). (Even worse, they must simplify things to fit a teevee commercial or a sound bite.) Once one of them becomes President he will have the power to act for himself instead of merely to react to what someone else has already done. The context in which they are campaigning, Bush’s foreign policy, is going to start permanently receding very soon. By the time we’re at this again in four years there will be a completely new backdrop.
Bacevich is certainly correct that neither candidate is talking much about the foreign policy of the future, but I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about that. It is Bush the Younger’s foreign policy that we’re debating, and one way or another that won’t be what we’re getting. This is not to suggest that there is no difference between the two, there are huge differences, but the tenor of the foreign policy debate in America will be wildly different four or eight years from now and there isn’t a way to have that debate today.
