Foreign Policy Fueled by Fantasy. By Peter Berkowitz. Real Clear Politics, April 5, 2016.
Berkowitz:
In an extensive interview with Barack Obama in the April issue of The Atlantic, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg recounts a rebuke that the president delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader had been explaining “the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives,” when Obama cut in.
“Bibi,
you have to understand something,” the president said. “I’m the
African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live
in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States.
You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”
Obama
apparently not only believes that his distinctive background and powers of
persuasion—rather than, say, a solid grounding in foreign languages,
comparative politics and economics, and diplomatic and military history—equip
him to understand the geopolitical
complexities of tumultuous, faraway regions. Moreover, he and his inner circle
also seem to have been convinced since before he was elected president that his
personal qualities and special experiences would enable him to change the world. In February 2015 in Foreign Policy, James Traub reported,
“Obama, and those closest to him, believed that his voice, his (non-white)
face, his story, could help usher the people of the world to a higher plane.”
Notwithstanding
his pretensions to have inaugurated a new era in America’s foreign affairs, the
44th president’s conduct of foreign policy represents an unwitting continuation
of, and also brings an unintended close to, an era that encompasses the
administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
That
surprising claim is central to Michael Mandelbaum’s superb new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era. Mandelbaum’s bold
title evokes Bush’s speech on May 1, 2003, on the deck of the USS Abraham
Lincoln—an aircraft carrier recently returned from the Persian Gulf. Scarcely
six weeks after American-led forces opened fire against Saddam Hussein’s regime,
Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The banner behind
the president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” As Iraq descended into
sectarian and religious violence, the banner became a symbol for many of Bush
administration naiveté and hubris.
Mandelbaum
contends, however, that the failure to bring democracy to Iraq does not
distinguish the Bush administration from the preceding post-Cold War
administration or the one that followed. Like Bush, Mandelbaum shows, Clinton
and Obama pursued foreign policies that elevated the advancement of American
values over the pursuit of vital national security interests. In their efforts
to transform regimes, Mandelbaum concludes, all three presidents failed.
Mandelbaum
is a professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies, a prolific author of serious and
accessible books on American foreign policy, and—having been educated at Yale,
King’s College, Cambridge, and Harvard, and having enjoyed a long tenure as a
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—a product of the American
foreign policy establishment. Yet Mandelbaum’s trenchant assessment of American
foreign policy from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to the
Russian conquest of the Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a
series of failures could not be better calculated to outrage the foreign policy
establishment.
The
U.S. inclination to use “the formidable power with which it emerged from the
conflict with the Soviet Union” to liberalize and democratize regimes was,
according to Mandelbaum, “distinctive and unprecedented.” To be sure, the
American impulse to improve others stretches back to the nation’s Puritan
forebears who sought to build a political order that would serve as a model to
the world, and it extends through the whole of American history. But the
traditional aim of foreign policy—to provide security in a dangerous
world—dominated American thinking from the nation’s founding through the Cold
War, when the aim was “containment” of Soviet communism. The tremendous new
power America enjoyed as a result of its victory in the Cold War and its
emergence as the world’s lone superpower, however, provided the luxury of
embracing a new goal—“transformation.”
Mandelbaum
deftly recounts the numerous missions across three presidencies in which
America has sought to transform other countries’ internal politics. The Clinton
administration sought to foster human rights in China, democracy in Russia, and
regime change in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. It failed in every case.
The
Bush administration endeavored to build free and democratic governments in
Afghanistan and Iraq in the hope of transforming the greater Middle East. It
failed.
Like
the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Obama administration strove to bring
peace to the Israelis and the Palestinians. And it failed.
Mandelbaum
appreciates the benefits that would accrue to the United States from success in
such missions. The problem with the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations
and the foreign policy elites that advised them, he argues, is that they
overestimated America’s capacity to accomplish these goals.
In
China and Russia the missions failed, according to Mandelbaum, because Beijing
and Moscow “were able to resist the kinds of changes the United States was
trying to introduce.” In Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq,
the mission failure “stemmed from the absence of the social conditions
necessary to support the public institutions the United States hoped to
install.”
With
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, three presidential administrations failed
because Palestinian leadership—first under Yasser Arafat and for the last 11
years under Mahmoud Abbas—declined to build transparent and accountable
political institutions and even encouraged fellow Palestinians to regard a
Jewish state of any size or shape in the land of Israel as irredeemably
illegitimate.
In sum,
three successive administrations have too often viewed the world not as it is
but as they wish it to be. Obama’s and his team’s conviction that his
multicultural background and electoral success uniquely enable him to conduct
America foreign policy is only the latest source of such error.
If
Mandelbaum is correct that the rise of Chinese adventurism and Russian
irredentism reaffirms the primacy of power politics even as America retains an
interest in prudently employing the nation’s highly limited tools to back the
forces of freedom around the world, then the United States can ill afford a
foreign policy nourished by fantasy.
