America the Isolated? By Fareed Zakaria. Time, May 27, 2013. Video at GPS.
The Kissinger Question. By Brett Stephens. Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013.
Zakaria:
Conservatives
are—of course—mad at Barack Obama, but they are also outraged at a country that
isn't outraged enough at him. This frustration is now taking over mainstream
and intelligent voices within the movement.
Bret
Stephens, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, laments that President Obama
is not paying a price for a foreign policy that Stephens describes as “isolationist.”
The problem, he writes, is that Americans have no sense of history, don’t see
the importance of an active American foreign policy and are about to repeat the
lessons of the 1930s, when isolationism led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.
Our
isolationism will surely come as a surprise to the diplomats, soldiers and
intelligence officers working on American foreign policy. Washington spends
more on defense than the next 10 great powers put together—and more on
intelligence than most nations spend on their militaries. We have tens of
thousands of troops stationed at dozens of bases abroad, from Germany to Turkey
to Bahrain to Japan to South Korea. We have formal commitments to defend our
most important allies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
And our
vast footprint has been expanded under the Obama Administration. The White
House has extended America’s security umbrella to include defending Israel and
the moderate Arab states against the threat posed by Iran's possible
development of nuclear weapons. It is enlarging the U.S. military presence in
Asia with a new base in Australia to deal with China's rise. To call this
isolationism is to mangle both language and logic.
In
fact, President Obama’s worldview is rooted in American exceptionalism. The
fundamental pattern of international relations is that as a country becomes
powerful and asserts itself, others gang up to bring it down. That's what
happened to the Habsburg Empire, Napoleonic France, Germany and the Soviet
Union.
There
is one great exception to this rule in modern history: the United States.
America has risen to global might, and yet it has not produced the kind of
opposition that many would have predicted. In fact, today it is in the
astonishing position of being the world's dominant power while many of the
world's next most powerful nations—Britain, France, Germany, Japan—are all
allied with it. This is the exception that needs to be explained.
The
reason surely has something to do with the nature of American hegemony. We do
not seek colonies or conquest. After World War II, we helped revive and rebuild
our enemies and turned them into allies. For all the carping, people around the
world do see the U. S. as different from other, older empires.
But it
also has something to do with the way that the U.S. has exercised power:
reluctantly. Historically, America was not eager to jump into the global arena.
It entered World War I at the tail end of the war, late enough to avoid the
worst bloodshed but still tipping the balance in favor of Britain and France.
It entered World War II only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It contained
Soviet aggression in Europe but was careful not to push too far in other
places. And when it did, as in Vietnam, it paid a price.
There is
a long and distinguished school of American statesmen—from Dwight Eisenhower to
Henry Kissinger to Robert Gates—who believe that America helps enlarge the
scope of freedom around the world by staying strong; husbanding its power;
creating a stable, liberal order; and encouraging economic and political
reform. (The most brilliant academic exponent of this view, Kenneth Waltz, died
May 13 at 88.) It is central to this mission that America is disciplined about
its military interventions.
Perhaps
because the U.S. has had no rival since the end of the Cold War, some seem to
believe that any bad thing that happens in the world could be stopped if only
the American President would act. Stephens bemoans the fact that Vladimir Putin
is putting opponents in prison. What exactly should the U.S. do about this,
other than protest, which it has done? President Bush was not able to stop the
Iraqi government—while the entire country was under American occupation—from
doing the very same thing.
We have
just gone through a decade devoted to a very different idea: that American
power must be used actively, pre-emptively and in pursuit of expansive goals
beyond the narrow national interest. The result was thousands of American
soldiers dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead and millions
ethnically cleansed, $2 trillion spent and the erosion of American influence
and goodwill across the globe. Can we get a few years of respite to rebuild our
economic, political and moral capital?
