That Foreign Policy Bumper Sticker
We hear a lot about the need for a single concept and phrase like containment both to win the “big ideas” debate and work politically as a bumper sticker. This has been part of the discussion of the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS) over on The Book Club, both with some critics saying the PPNS Report has too many issues and priorities and not one overarching one, and Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry making the case for “Liberty Under Law” as their core organizing concept and integrating strategy.
While we do need core ideas and strategies that are not just laundry lists of position papers, they need to strike the tricky balance of being simple but not simplistic. Clear and integrating enough to be the forest, and not just the trees of this and that issue, but also not denying the complexity that is reality. I have some differences with Liberty Under Law as a core macro-idea and strategy, for later discussion. Here my point is more addressed to the PPNS critics who lapse into rose-colored history about how much and how well containment really worked as the Cold War’s single organizing concept.
George Kennan, the father of containment, had intended his original conception to be the basis for U.S. strategy against the Soviet threat in Europe. He did not intend for it to be applied to all places all the time in all ways. He strongly objected both generally to containment as a global strategy and with regard to key applications like Vietnam. Containment worked well in Europe but much less so in the Third World. Lestwe forget how much political protest there was to Third World containment (Vietnam in the 1960s-70s, Central America in the 1980s)? Moreover, so many of today’s problems and threats had their roots in this supposedly so successful single organizing concept: Iran and the 1953 coup, African countries like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo in which post-Cold War instabilities and tragedies in significant part trace back to the dictators we supported in the name of containment, Afghanistan and the enemy of my enemy is my friend logic for supporting fundamentalist forces that ended up having them as our enemy, too. Containment was not the bumper sticker that we now see it as.
Well said. And compare the dictators we supported to the regime change we are attempting in Iraq. The Iraqi people may not know exactly what they want and may even be somewhat misguided in what they do. They do however know what they don't want, US Occupation. This is much in the same way as citizens in the dictatorships may have been misguided about Marxist rebels but the certainly knew they didn't want the current dictator. Until the people of Iraq's differing factions settle their collective issues peace will be at best uneasy, all we are doing is delaying the inevitable civil war and giving them a target on which to vent their collective ire.
Just Saying,
Carlton Noles
October 26, 2006 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bringing the benefits of the Enlightenment to the undeveloped world is a Utopian ideal not a prescription for useful policy goals.
How about having the Princeton gang, Beinart and all the other neo-liberals state what they hope to achieve with their new softer type of foreign policy?
At least with the Cheney gang we understood that behind all the rhetoric about democracy, WMD's, terrorists and the like the goal was oil.
Why do we care if Iraq is a democracy or not? And if this is really so important to us why aren't we doing anything about Sudan, Chad, Congo or the many other non-democratic and failed states? Could it be because they don't have any resources that we want and/or their market is too small for us to sell too?
At least when Bush says controlling Iraq is in our national interest he is being truthful, even if he is using a euphemism.
(National interest = oil).
The neo-liberals need to stop hiding behind their update of the white man's burden. Either they are deluded in thinking this is going to work, or they are hypocrites.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
October 26, 2006 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Ikenberry/Slaughter proposal should serve as a warning: ask qualified academics who should know better to create a bumper stick, and you end up with something longer and harder to understand than the serious analysis of the present or set of policy proposals you feared were too difficult for those who do their reading while tailgating.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 26, 2006 12:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Quite simply, containment in the last century meant containment of communism because communism threatened capitalism.
Marx said, if I remember correctly, that for communism to work optimally, the whole world had to adopt the communist system. For the same reason, yesterday and today, the foreign policies of the United States have been and are designed to spread capitalism world-wide.
Putting the capitalistic wolf in the sheep's clothing of democracy isn't selling very well in under-developed, rich in natural resources countries anymore.
The industrialized world can continue to pose as the magnanimous, caring big brother of the oppressed and marginalized or it can bite the bullet, tell the truth, take a cut in profits and be benefactors rather than exploiters of the disadvantaged.
Or, we can repeat the folly that is Iraq - the ultimate irony being that in the process we are consuming to exhaustion the very resources that we are killing people to acquire.
October 26, 2006 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Containment" -- that is, the foreign policy game of maximizing the size of the geopolitical field upon which American corporate power and influence can be freely deployed -- worked rather well -- at least until the '70s when others, Germany, Japan, and especially, OPEC, began playing on that same field much to our two decade long dismay.
Since our sole interest in Muslim societies must be their ability to affect our access to our oil (principally, in the Persian Gulf but also, in the Stans), "containment" -- here, defined as the constraining of radical Islamic energies within those societies -- will (should?) still be our policy.
October 26, 2006 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here's my bumper sticker:
America: Strong, Peaceful, Free
Americans want a very strong national defense, one that is sufficient to deter and punish aggression against us, above all so that that aggression doesn't occur. And they want to be economically strong and healthy.
They want that strong defense so that aggression by others is unthinkable, and so they can remain at peace. They don't want their children dying violent deaths abroad; they don't want to live under conditions of permanent wartime, with all the restrictions on liberty that historically entails. They want to breathe again.
They want freedom from fear: including the fear of attacks from overseas and the fear of their own government and its many snoops and spooks. They want to be free of unnecessary foreign burdens which bring them no clear benefits. They want to be free to trade, and to travel, and to speak freely and to enjoy themselves as they see fit. They want the freedom to govern themselves, rather than being governed by the wealthy and the privileged and by their self-appointed betters. And they want freedom from increasingly mounting economic cares and strains that make life in America so much more stressful and worrisome and insecure than it once was.
October 26, 2006 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Containment was far from universally accepted, merely exploited as needed. Hawks derided it as accomodation.
Remember that containment was portrayed as inadequate for Saddam?
October 26, 2006 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bruce makes an excellent point in his essay. We read 'containment' with 50 years of hindsight, not what it was orginally designed to be.
To their credit, the PPNS did point to 5 or 6 criteria that cd be used to judge and guide a progressive foreign policy framework - basically, recognizing complexity as well as integration, and a few other items. The criteria were fine, but as I hope Bruce tells us, Liberty under Law isnt quite it... and the biggest challenge is not a single bumper sticker, nor is it the tedious laundry lists, but can we show how a serious framework can be used in X or Y case to generate particular policies that advance the priorities and purposes of the framework.
Having said that, I sort of like "America: Strong, Peaceful, Free" -- and "A Responsible Neighbor"...
October 26, 2006 8:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
A bumper sticker type slogan? How 'bout "live and let live" even though that is already being used. Maybe "Every country has the right of Self Determination".
And I have always felt that self determination was one of those certain inalienable rights our founders spoke of...
October 27, 2006 5:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . can we show how a serious framework can be used in X or Y case . . . .
And as Insp. Harry Callahan might ask, "Well, punk, can you?"
October 27, 2006 2:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's divide the job based on expertise. A thinker is not the best one to craft a short slogan.
I want academics, thinkers and policy makers to discuss and articulate what principles should be the foundation of a foreign policy.
I want them to layout what we want to achieve in US foreign policy. I want them to think through what we want to achieve in different parts of the world.
I want them to identify what particular strategies we should follow in the near term.
Then and only then, do I want those who have expertise in crafting succinct statements to distill a simple core idea that is understandable to a wide national and international public.
In the Clinton era James Carville created a memorable electoral slogan fit for speeches and bumpers, but I don't want folks him to craft the underlying policy and governing strategies. Division of labor.
October 28, 2006 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink