Richard Cohen may be showing early signs of senility. But at least he is showing some of his core beliefs. For Cohen, policy is unimportant. What matters is whether the rest of the world bows down to American hegemony, right or wrong. Should the Palestinian Authority come to some unity arrangement with Hamas? Not if Congress threatens to cut off their funding as a result. Does the administration have the right policy towards Egypt? Well, if so, why is Egypt threatening to prosecute 19 Americans. Is our embassy in Baghdad needlessly big and offensive to Iraqi sensibilities? How dare we downsize it? What should we do about Syria? All that matters is that Russia and China aren’t playing ball. Is our Iran policy working? All that matters is that Russia and China aren’t playing ball. We’re weak because Pakistan is complicated. Did we do the right thing in Libya? No, because we didn’t do it all by ourselves. Should Israel stop building in the Occupied Territories? All that matters is that Netanyahu gave us the shrug-off.
Cohen’s premise is that all of these things demonstrate that America is in decline, which would seem to be something beyond a president’s control. Yet, the column is constructed as a rebuke of the president and his policies. No thought is given to the president’s many accomplishments. Vladimir Putin is cast as opposing us on every front, but no mention is made of the New StART treaty or Russia’s reluctant cooperation in our Libyan intervention. No credit is given for the way the administration managed to pull Europe, the Arab League, and the United Nations together to authorize our actions in Libya. No credit is given for how the administration got Europe to impose oil sanctions on Iran. No kudos are on offer for the end of the war in Iraq. No mention is made of Obama’s willingness to ignore Pakistan’s sovereignty to go get bin-Laden and kill most of al-Qaeda’s leadership. Cohen obviously doesn’t think our free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama constitute foreign policy successes. What about this observation from Fareed Zakaria:
If the war against al Qaeda is the most visible and dramatic success story, the most significant long-term success might be in Asia, where Obama has pivoted. Asia is the new arena of global wealth, power, and power politics, and Obama decided to expand American presence in the region with a flurry of diplomatic moves over the last six months.
He did so carefully and skillfully so that Asia countries saw it as a response to their requests rather than an unilateral assertion of American power. When historians write about an Obama Doctrine, they might point to his new Asian strategy – his declaration that America is a “Pacific Power” that is here to stay.
I guess our new US Marine Task Force in Australia isn’t a projection of power.
America is plenty powerful. We’ll know that we’re in decline when the people of our country force our political elites to vastly scale back our foreign commitments and reduce of military capabilities. And that won’t happen until we are in severe economic pain. The Great Recession obviously wash’t enough.
Personally, I don’t agree with many of the ways Obama has projected US strength in the world. I think we’re over-committed and we’re not drawing back quickly enough. I support a robust lead-role for America in maintaining the international system of collective security, but I want us to intelligently and gradually work to pass off more of the responsibilities for peacekeeping, humanitarian work, and even military intervention. We need to encourage allies to devote more resources to developing capabilities for this type of work, even though it would represent less freedom of action in US foreign policy. I view it like teaching a toddler to ride a bike. In 1945, the world wasn’t ready to police itself or to use a system of collective security to avoid warfare and crimes against humanity. Today, the world doesn’t need us to spot them anymore. We built the post-war system to make the world safe in a nuclear age. We shouldn’t pervert its purpose so that it only serves to perpetuate our hegemony. My progressive vision for U.S. foreign policy is that we commit to making the UN stronger than ever, and ever-less reliant on our resources and leadership. I don’t see this as a decline, but as the fulfillment of our mission.
“I view it like teaching a toddler to ride a bike.“
I didn’t think you were being nearly patronizing enough. Then you said this.
I’m with Hurria. How sad is it that for 50 years this is, in essence, the mainstream liberal vision of American foreign policy – the conservative vision being much more interested in the hegemony you mention, with public justifications mixing the two as is most useful to rally the rabble.
The era when lands decimated by WWII needed help rebuilding their economies and institutions was over by about 1955. For another 30 years, American self-interest was justified by its rivalry with the USSR. Since then, the major strands of US foreign policy – a huge military buildup and expansion of arms sales, and free trade policies and a shipping out of American jobs – have pretty much been a function of the naked self-interest of financial elites, mixed with the ever-present fealty to Israel, plus the messiahism of the Bush years.
The genuine progressive position – self-determination for all peoples, regardless of whether it serves US interests – is left in the US to all-but-dead peace and human rights movements on the left, and more influential but still marginalized (and entirely self-absorbed) Paulistas on the right. Any nods in this direction from the DC policy establishment are rarely more than convenient rhetorical flourishes used to sell more pragmatic geopolitical goals. The conventional DC wisdom constrains what is actually possible in US foreign policy at the moment, and analysis should reflect that. But you should never, ever forget that what is politically possible is not the same as what is right.
Boo, your attitude smacks of the rationalizations in the 19th century about the need to make good Christians out of the Indians. We know how that turned out for the Indians, and we also know who got all the land. Funny how that always works.
You’d probably have to flesh out your critique for me to really respond.
But I’ll note a couple of things. I don’t look at institutions and policies solely by what they are at the moment, but also in how they got that way.
For me, the United Nations is our project. It’s our response to the two world wars. And it is about self-determination. It’s about self-determination, collective security, arbitration and conflict resolution, human rights, humanitarian relief, non-proliferation, and keeping us all from blowing up the world.
When we started out in 1945, these were not norms. Today, they are norms that are routinely used to judge us in a negative light because we don’t live up to them all the time. This, for me, is our great gift to the world, even if we have come to view it suspiciously as it interferes with our freedom of action and limits our power.
It’s not about rebuilding Europe and Japan. It’s about creating a world in which a European War is almost unthinkable (at least, outside of the Balkans). It’s a world in which the kind of imperialism displayed by Japan and European powers isn’t really possible anymore. A world in which trying to gobble up your neighbor backfires.
Yes, economic exploitation goes on somewhat unabated but most change is in the direction of representative government and more self-determination. From the creation of South Sudan to the peace in the new nation-states of the Balkans, to the Arab Spring movement, to the democratization of Latin America in the 1990’s, the world continues to improve its human rights record and to increase self-determination, precisely because these values were set up in the United Nations scheme.
Think of it in the same way as the Declaration of Independence. Did we live up to that for the first eight years of our country? Or even the first 180 years? No. No, we didn’t. But the values enshrined in the Declaration were what guided us to end slavery and end Jim Crow.
The progressive view, in my opinion, should be larger than a critique of this system. It should always seek to hold us to the highest standard, but never give up on the project.
What I am saying is that we have been fabulously successful and that we need to recognize that and begin preparations for stepping back to take less of the lead-role. We ought to want to be essentially one nation among equals, while of course maintaining a defense establishment that can remain strong enough to prevent any other nation from resorting to the kinds of behavior we saw in the first half of the 20th-century. We also have to be very vigilant about nuclear non-proliferation, and not let Cheney’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq leave us unwilling to be aggressive about the importance of that job.
That’s why the New START Treaty was a big deal, and it’s why Europe is slapping sanctions in Iran. It’s why we should be working to reduce nuclear stockpiles just as aggressively as we work to prevent new countries from acquiring them.
One way of looking at this is that I view American Exceptionalism as being valid in a narrow, and closing time frame. But our job should be to perpetuate it. Our job should be to obviate it.
Job shouldn’t be to perpetuate it.
“this is, in essence, the mainstream liberal vision of American foreign policy…“
But BooMan claims to be a progressive.
OK, yours is the progressive vision of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mine is that of William Jennings Bryan and Robert M. La Follette.
The “rise to globalism” was a mistake beginning with Spanish-American War, though it was only to be expected after the will to power had driven us across the entire continent, to the purchase of Seward’s Icebox, and then most recently halfway across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands.
It has never brought us anything but enormous loss of blood and treasure – and enormous vainglory to warm the hearts not only of our globe-bestriding leaders but likely of the majority of the American people.
I’m willing to give back Texas, but not California. And I’m keeping Alaska, too. it’s beautiful. And it hasn’t cost us any blood or treasure.
In the Age of the Internet, how is globalization optional? Isn’t a matter of managing globalization, which involves both national economies and collective security?
Ha, Ha.
Oh, and ask Ron Paul.
Or Sweden.
The “rise to globalism” was a mistake
It didn’t look so when the US embarked on it. And a lot of the information and values that inform that bleak judgment are those that would not exist without the US’s rise to globalism.
Until World War II, national ambitions of empire were normative and celebrated. Kingdoms and nations at their beginnings were focused on empire. International relations was the collision of wanna-be empires. Classical education focused as much on empires as on the brief period of Athenian democracy.
In the 1990s, the US was seen globally as the sole superpower. The eight years of the Bush administration exposed that power as mostly smoke, mirrors, and lots of shiny things that go boom. The illusion was the power; using the military recklessly destroyed the illusion.
But it is not ambitions that drive US foreign policy now, it is economic interests. The GOP wants a strong military because that is the only remaining employers of size in many of their districts. And because the military has become the servant of “US” transnational corporations.
We desperately need a good discussion about what exactly American foreign policy should be, given the current state of the world after the collapse of American imperial hubris. And that should start with questioning the whole relevance of forward military deployment of US troops to global security. And the seeming current search for a post-al-Quaeda enemy, whether in Iran or China.
“It [the rise to globalism] didn’t look so when the US embarked on it.”
Clearly not, to those who chose it.
“And a lot of the information and values that inform that bleak judgment are those that would not exist without the US’s rise to globalism.”
Twain. Bryan. La Follette. William James. And lots of others.
The US dominated post WW2 world order has a lot to be said for it. At the very least it has prevented a WW3 and the routine clash of competing empires and reduced the crass colonialism that came with them. What wars there were were kept well away from the US and European heartlands even if they were spawned by attempts at further US domination in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq or fuelled by the “free” arms trade which led to millions more deaths in Africa. It has also helped facilitate unprecedented world growth even if it has failed to address the key issues of climate change, over population, resource depletion, and crass inequality of resources.
But like many good things, it has also come at a price: Overweening US arrogance, a likely Israeli initiated Nuclear war in the mid-East, and a global corporate erosion of democracy world-wide. I’m surprised you laud the Libyan intervention as an Obama accomplishment having criticised his role in it, but there is no doubt that Obama is a damn sight better than his predecessor. Unfortunately the pronouncements of GOP Presidential candidate – which have real consequences outside the US – serve only to illustrate how perilous the US hold on sanity really is.
Someone like Cohen is well capable of destroying all he claims to applaud.
I am not exactly lauding our intervention in Libya. I am responding to the idea that intervening there showed weakness.
WHAT?
/sputters
If the Israelis decide to destroy Iran underground nuclear facilities, they will probably have to use either Nuclear or very large conventional bunker buster bombs to do so. Republican bombast is not cost free. A Santorum Presidency would probably embolden Bibi to take that step.
.
Israel can’t destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities in bunkers. See (many) of my diaries where I make the argument for a likely joint Allied attack on Iran with the U.S. leading because the largest GBU-57A/B MOP bunker busters can be delivered only by the B-52 and B-2a stealth bombers. Since August 2011 Netanyahu and Obama have an agreement on a number of Middle-East issues including Iran.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Without access to US bunker buster bombs, the only way Israel could effectively attack Iranian nuclear facilities is to use its own nuclear weapons. No doubt they will try to bounce Obama into precipitive action, but with a President Santorum, they would be pushing an open door.
“At the very least it has prevented a WW3“
That’s debatable.
“The US dominated post WW2 world order has a lot to be said for it.”
The Cold War didn’t happen on your Earth?
Had we skipped it, who would have fought your WW3?
The sporadic wars of decolonization were going to threaten the US how?
Sorry, that world growth you speak of depended on US military global interventionism how?
As for me, if there actually is a nuclear war in the Middle East I would prefer the US could just stay the hell out of it.
The Middle East, after all, is very far away.
Had we skipped it, who would have fought your WW3?
A scramble of competing European powers, just like World Wars One and Two.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the longest period in history without a European land war took place at the same time that France, England, West Germany, Italy, Spain, and Austria were joined together into a mutual defensive alliance.
always want to do “something”. This something is usually ill defined. Doing something about Iran, for example. So Cohen says that the world is thumbing their nose at us, and says this:
I have absolutely no idea what these means. “Unlimited possibilities and solemn responsibilities”.
What the fuck does that mean? What policies should be followed that are not currently being followed?
He wants Obama to do something. Not what he is doing now, but something. He doesn’t say what this something is – because I doubt he knows.
The article is really quite incoherent.
It’s the same incoherence behind “Suck. On. This.” and “throw some shitty little country up against a wall.”
It isn’t a particular policy that Cohen wants, but a general orientation. He wants us to get out there and kick more asses, and it misses the point to focus on the lack of specificity.
the short explanation of the article is this:
Richard Cohen wants a magical unicorn.
Even Booman thinks a certain percentage of our grandchildren have to die in remote wars without importance to our own country because interventionism for the good of others is part of his – er, the – progressive vision for America.
Don’t pin it all on Cohen or the Republicans, dominated as they have been since the start of the Cold War by aggressive interventionist ideology.
Neither Woodrow Wilson (WW1, the League) nor Eleanor Roosevelt (the UN) nor Harry Truman (NATO) was a Republican.
Nor LBJ, come to that.
Nor Clinton (the Balkans) nor Obama (lots of places), both of whom favored expanding NATO rather than getting out of it.
without importance to our own country
A foreign policy based solely on national interest, without the incorporation of values or consideration of the well-being of others, is an abdication of moral thought, and the international equivalent of the libertarian “screw you, I got mine” philosophy.
Joe from Lowell,
You are mistaken as to my intent and the victim of a false dichotomy.
The choice is not between costly, vain, and often useless altruism (liberal interventionism, as it sees itself) on the one side and, on the other, selfish indifference to the wellbeing or values of others.
To put it another way, the choice is not between altruistic interventionism on the one side and egoistic interventionism on the other.
Hitler’s interventionist policy toward the Slavs of Eastern Europe whom he intended to reduce to the condition of Helots was a foreign policy based on the national egoism of the German Volk without consideration for the well-being or values of others.
The American interventionist policies in the Spanish-American War, the American conquest of the Philippines, and the American annexation of Hawaii were sold as serving American national egoism – to enhance the power and prestige of America and serve its commercial interests – and showed total disregard for the wellbeing and values of the Cubans, Filipinos, or Hawaiians.
Pretty much all of America’s 20th Century interventions in Latin America were equally egoistic and disdainful of the wellbeing and values of others, being aimed almost exclusively at subjugating the locals to the aims and needs of American corporations.
No anti-interventionist would countenance any such policies as those.
By the way, as for moral thought, far from “abdicating” it I simply don’t believe in it.
Morality is a delusion every bit as pernicious as but far more widespread than religion, appealing to much the same base motives.
Just as the lack of a religious basis is no reasonable complaint against anyone’s conduct or political preferences the lack of a moral basis is likewise per se no cause for alarm.
Only fools – and in some cases very untrustworthy individuals – protest that if they were atheists they would rob banks and kill people.
And only the same kinds of folks make similar complaints against moral disbelief.
Oh, and do you think that badly of the Swedes, the Swiss, the Japanese, and the many others who are officially and in many cases genuinely committed to non-interventionism and staying out of other peoples’ wars?
Do you mock them for selfishness and accuse them of “abdicating moral thought”?
Ah, well.
Sticks and stones, I suppose.
How about a comment on a topic other than your untoward ideological deviationism in saying that the United States is not an unmitigated evil, but has actually has something to offer the world?
I think we’re over-committed and we’re not drawing back quickly enough. I support a robust lead-role for America in maintaining the international system of collective security, but I want us to intelligently and gradually work to pass off more of the responsibilities for peacekeeping, humanitarian work, and even military intervention.
Obama is really the first President to demonstrate any interest in this vision, so he’s trying turn around an aircraft carrier. Let’s not forget that Bush’s Iraq War was intended to allow us to establish a new location for basing our military assets to project power in the MENA region. Remember all of those confident assertions about why we’d never withdraw from Iraq? Those people, while they turned out to be wrong, had a point. We really did pour billions of dollars into building bases there. The military and the more hawkish elements in our government were deeply committed to making Iraq central to our power projection. The abandonment of this vision is a BFD, the equivalent of withdrawing our forces from West Germany or Japan in the 1980s.
In addition to this, he has also put on ice the global missile defense program, canceling the bases in Eastern Europe. Add to this our refusal to lift a finger to help longtime clients like the dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen when they were challenged by a bunch of DFHs, and it adds up to a major departure not just from George W. Bush, but from more than a century of American foreign policy orientation.
Cohen is half right; we’re not going out looking to start fights and bring new areas under our domination like we used to. Where he errs is in thinking that this change is either a result of weakness, or a cause of it.
Booman Tribune ~ Wanker of the Day: Richard Cohen
hardly… just regular folks, all backgrounds, ages and faiths. that was its strength, (numbers), no easy pigeon-holing.