Everybody has their own diagnosis for why American foreign
policy seems to be failing: here is mine – we need a lot less utopian idealism
and a lot more hard-headed realism!
Here are my top 5 principles that it seems to me our ruling
class have lost sight of:
1. American-style
democratic government is not exportable. It requires a particular set of
cultural and institutional and historical underpinnings which simply don’t exist
in many of the nations and cultures we keep trying to “nation-build” into
replicas of America. Realistically it
just doesn’t work, and by now we have had enough failed attempts that one would
think even the densest ideologues would be beginning to get the message. We need
to drop this persistent dream of turning the whole world into a democratic
utopia – it just isn’t going to happen. Countries that choose themselves to
move toward democracy will do it in their own way, in their own time, and will
probably develop a form of democracy of their own, reflecting the peculiarities
of their own culture and history – and it probably won’t look like American democracy.
2. We can’t right all
the wrongs in the world, and we shouldn’t try to. Lots of very nasty things
go on around the world all the time – massive poverty, brutal dictatorships,
plagues, famines, wars, genocides, etc, etc.
They always have and they always will. There is no way America can “fix”
all of them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can to improve the world
in the long term, but this business of picking the odd injustice here and there
(based largely on the whims of what the news media happens to choose to report
in the nightly news) and basing our foreign policy on it is ineffective,
counterproductive, and frankly just plain stupid.
3. Any government’s
first duty is to keep its own people safe and prosperous. As I have written before, “it’s the economy,
stupid”. American power – hard and soft –
flows entirely from its economic strength.
Not from its moral posturing or religious base, not from its supposed ”exceptionalism”,
certainly not from the brilliance of its statesmen and politicians, not even
from its fortunate geographic position – but only from its massive economic
strength, which means we can afford a powerful well-trained and well-equipped military,
a good national infrastructure, good public
health services, good public education, with enough money left over to buy
goodwill from our allies. If our economy went south, our influence in the world
would follow it right down the drain. A wise government would, as a matter of foreign policy and national security, look first and
foremost toward keeping our own economy as vibrant and powerful as possible.
4. A rational foreign
policy for a superpower like America would seek first and foremost to try to
keep any other hostile nation, or coalition of hostile nations, from becoming powerful enough
to become an existential threat to America. We did that successfully through
the post-war Soviet era. It ought to remain the central guiding principle of
our foreign policy. This requires (a) that we keep ourselves strong economically
and militarily, and (b) that we build and maintain an effective coalition of
nations who see it in their own clear self-interest to support us.
5. Current public sentiment
is not a reliable guide to effective foreign policy. It is an effective
leader’s job to lead his/her people where they need to go, not to just follow
the polls and try to tell them what they want to hear (and will get her/him
re-elected). An effective foreign policy in a democracy requires that the
government educate and lead the people toward rational policies, rather than
just reacting to the passing whims of the public (or, more likely, the news
media that shapes the public whims).
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