Under the Influence: The Unthinkable in Foreign Policy Andrew Bast

Under the Influence: The Unthinkable in Foreign Policy
Andrew Bast 13 Apr 2009
World Politics Review

As if terrorists, drug cartels and rogue nuclear states weren't enough to worry about, the United States is now under cyberattack. Spies from China, Russia and elsewhere have broken into the country's electrical grid, gathering intelligence and perhaps even planning for an unprecedented blitz: buckling the country's energy infrastructure.

Worried, aghast and surprised? Of course. But in another sense, the report falls in line with the rapidly transforming nature of international threats: What yesterday seemed inconceivable is today commonplace. Some scoffed when former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld talked about the difference between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." But from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to today's cyberthreats, the unimaginable represents the fundamental challenge confronting U.S. national security, and foreign-policy institutions are ill-equipped to deal with it.

In his probing and brilliant new book, "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It," Joshua Cooper Ramo offers a variety of imaginative solutions for remedying that situation, among the boldest being quite simply to replace the Department of Homeland Security with the Department of Resilience.

The book's two parts represent a one-two punch: The first kicks the chair out from under contemporary thinking about international relations, while the second offers a slew of solutions based around what Ramo calls "deep security." Ramo's manifesto topples much of the lazy thinking that portrays American influence as wobbling around the world. To achieve security in an unpredictable world, Ramo -- a former foreign editor of Time magazine and now a managing director of Kissinger Associates -- advocates for what few in the world of the foreign policy establishment like to do: taking risks.

Standing in the way of dynamic thinking, Ramo suggests, are longstanding theories of international relations -- such as realism and democratic peace theory -- that are no longer relevant. "I didn't really need to tear down much of anything," he writes. "Those out-of-date ideas are collapsing under their own weight every day."

Realism, which posits that nation-states are constantly vying for power, has yet to accept that today, not only nation-states, but also drug syndicates and terror networks wage war. Likewise, democratic peace theory, which says that democracies don't make war against each other, never accounted for the divisive effects of ballots, parties and elections. More broadly, Ramo rails against political scientists who cook up theories in isolation from the complicated politics on the ground.

Ramo argues that the first step towards more dynamic thinking is to see the world for what it is, not as the U.S. wishes it to be. The most damning example he offers of the latter is George W. Bush's declaration days after September 11th that "[t]his conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing." Yet, as Roma points out, international politics does not simply begin and end. It is dynamic. Both the battlefield and the diplomatic stage are always shifting, as are the warriors and political actors inhabiting them. The most significant consequence of Roma's approach is that crisis and instability become a certainty. More sobering still, attacks on the U.S. homeland are seen as inevitable.

The solution, for Roma, revolves around what he calls "resilience." According to this line of argument, strengthening U.S. national security depends less on deterring threats from abroad, and more on making the country more adaptive and able to absorb unexpected shocks -- whether in the form of an armed attack, financial disaster or cyberassault on the electric grid. In other words, national defense should be less like a wall and more like an immune system. As Ramo puts it, the country ought to replace Henry Kissinger's longstanding concept of deterrence with an attitude of resilience.

Ramo arms his imaginative outlook with real-world insights, such as his comparison of Hezbollah, which he calls "arguably the best-run Islamic militant group in the world," and Silicon Valley firms like Google. Both, he explains, owe their success to a relentless willingness to innovate and reinvent themselves, qualities difficult to find in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. In his boldest assessment, Ramo explains how "deep security" would tackle, of all things, the Israel-Palestine conflict. A successful strategy, he suggests, would do away with big names and grand pronouncements, substituting instead "effects diplomacy" that works under the radar to create NGOs, to empower teachers and to improve policing.

"The Age of the Unthinkable" isn't without its faults. Although Ramo rightly dismisses much of the conventional wisdom prevailing in the academy, and consequently in the halls of the Departments of State and Defense, he fails to acknowledge the dissent -- albeit quite muted -- within the field of political science that has been making these critiques for a while. Though realism has prevailed especially in the last few years of policymaking in Washington, it is but one of three schools of international relations theory, along with liberalism and constructivism.

As for the shortcomings of democratic peace theory, books like William Robinson's "Promoting Polyarchy" have already revealed that much of what passes for U.S. democracy promotion amounts to backing elites over popular will. Roland Paris' "At War's End," meanwhile, was a scathing indictment of elections in post-conflict countries. So dynamic thinking is out there. It is just not at the top of the wider discussion.

Ramo also plays fast and loose with phrases that drown in cliché. He has a penchant for characterizing all successful innovation -- technological, political or otherwise -- as "revolutionary." Not to sound like a stodgy political scientist, but revolutions have clear causes, processes and effects, and Ramo risks gutting the term. Likewise, harping on the fact that "everything is connected," as Ramo does throughout the text, runs dangerously close to either a bland relativism or an "anything goes" mentality and sounds more like a sales pitch than a prescient evaluation of complicated global politics.

But in the end, Ramo offers a salient critique of the dated lens that much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment -- this columnist included -- often uses in an attempt to bring today's blurry new landscape into focus. "Deep security" as a concept is worth developing further. After reading Ramo, one could easily imagine a new conceptual apparatus at the State Department designed to break free of habits of thought that reinforce traditional approaches. As an example, clusters of 10-person think tanks working independently -- or even in competition with each other -- could collectively produce an array of novel approaches to given situations.

Call it the Critical School of foreign policy , where smart minds try to prepare not just for the thinkable, but for the unthinkable as well. That's exactly the kind of "deep security" endeavor worth pursuing.

Andrew Bast has reported from four continents for several publications, including Newsweek and the New York Times, and lectures on American foreign policy at Baruch College. His weekly WPR column, Under the Influence, appears every Monday.
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