Messy Realities and the Unhelpful Debate on U.S. Foreign Policy
08/11/14
Paul R. Pillar
Security, United States
Much
current debate in the United States about foreign policy can be boiled
down—at the risk of the sort of oversimplification that too often
characterizes the debate itself—to the following. On one side are calls
for the United States to do more (exactly what it is supposed to do more
of often does not seem to matter) in response to untoward happenings in
hot spots such as Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine. On the other side, which
includes most of the time the Obama administration, is a tempered
restraint based on the limitations and complications of trying to do
anything more in such places.
This
line-up has some similarities to age-old confrontations between
hedgehogs, who know (or think they know) one big thing, and foxes, who
pay attention to a lot of things without having any one big idea. The
nature of the debate has even more to do with the highly asymmetric
nature of any argument between incumbent policy-makers, who have the
burden of taking real action with real consequences and of dealing with
all the messy and costly details, and of outside critics, who have the
luxury of bemoaning bad things happening in the world without actually
having to take any practical steps to do anything about them, and
without having responsibility for the consequences.
This
asymmetry has seemed especially marked with the current president, and
not only because some of the biggest burdens of his foreign policy have
involved cleaning up leftovers from his predecessor's foreign policy
(including the premiere threat du jour, the group usually known
as ISIS, whose birth was a direct consequence of the Iraq War). The
current clear preference of the American public to avoid new entangling
military encounters naturally gives rise to the charge that President
Obama is merely bowing to that public opinion rather than exerting
leadership.
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/messy-realities-the-unhelpful-debate-us-foreign-policy-11055
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