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Visions of the World and the
U.S. Role in It
Remarks to the Myra Kraft Open Classroom at Northeastern
University
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
25
October 2016, Boston, Massachusetts
Chris has asked me to lay out the
foreign policy issues the next president will face upon taking office this
coming January. If you go by what each
candidate has said, she or he just needs
to kill a few foreign leaders and renegotiate some alliances and trade
deals. But there are some other urgent decisions
to be made:
√ whether to implement or scuttle
the Paris climate agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran or abandon these accords to
their congressional and other saboteurs;
√ what to do about north Korea’s
emerging capability to fire nuclear warheads at U.S. cities:
√ whether to follow up or cancel
our partial opening to Cuba;
√ how to conduct our foreign
policies in the face of a likely avalanche of foreign law suits reciprocating
those just authorized under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act
(JASTA) and seeking damages from the United States, Israel, the U.K. and their
officials for multiple alleged acts of state terrorism;
√ whether to escalate U.S.
intervention in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere in the Muslim
world or try some other means of neutralizing the threat of Islamist terrorists
to our country:
√ what to do about Ukraine, its
relationship to the rest of Europe and Russia,
the role of Russia to the European state system, and the rising danger
of U.S. nuclear war with Russia;
√ whether to continue to escalate
our military confrontation with China in its near seas and how to react to the
Philippines' apparent decision to drop out of that confrontation;
√ what to do about Brexit and the
progressive unraveling of the European project;
√ how to restructure our European
and Asian alliances and the division of labor within them:
√ how to deal with alienated American
allies and protectorates like Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt;
√ whether and how we can continue
to protect the State of Israel from international condemnation and punitive
sanctions directed at its flagrant violations of human rights and international
law in Palestine;
√ what to do about our
co-belligerent complicity in alleged war crimes in Yemen and Syria; and
√ whatever the crisis du jour turns out to be, plus all the
issues the incumbent administration and its predecessors have sought to finesse
rather than resolve – like climate change and arms control. There’s quite a list of such issues. So the new administration will have its hands
full.
I look forward to discussing all
these issues and others with my fellow panelists and you when we get to the Q
& A period.
But, rather than going through a
checklist of specific issues now, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about
the broad question of what kind of statecraft the United States must develop
and practice to deal with the new world disorder. The specific issues I’ve listed (and I could
have gone on) strike me as microcosms of structural changes in the world
political-economy that need to be put in broader perspective. So bear with me as I spend a few minutes
talking about the changing world order and some of its implications for our foreign policies.
I was born after the failure of
isolationism, in the middle of our country's initially reluctant involvement in
World War II. When the war ended, it
fell to the United States -- which then accounted for about half of the world
economy -- and to the Russian-led Soviet Union -- which accounted for about
one-eighth -- to shape a new international system. In practice, Washington and Moscow set aside
the vision of great-power management of a harmonious world through the United
Nations and divided the world between us.
In its sphere of influence, each superpower enforced its
politico-economic ideology and – to one extent or another – disciplined the
foreign and domestic behavior of component states and their leaders.
Within the U.S. sphere, with
British help, Americans created and led institutions like the International
Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT, later the World Trade Organization).
These enshrined the U.S. dollar as a universal, benchmark currency,
promoted market economics, and sustained the capitalist system in the so-called
“free world.” The U.S. armed forces did
not come home. They remained abroad to
man the ramparts of the worldwide American sphere of influence, composed of NATO in Europe, bilateral protectorates over
Japan and Korea in Northeast Asia, and the inclusion of many Southeast, South,
and West Asian countries in the now-forgotten Southeast Asian and Central
Treaty Organizations (SEATO and CENTO).
Despite occasional talk of
“rollback,” both the stated and operative objectives of U.S. policy were “containment,” a strategy of active diplomatic
and military defense calculated to preclude any shift in the borders between
the U.S. and Soviet spheres and to wall up the Soviet Union until the inherent
defects of its system eventually brought it down. It took a two generations for the USSR actually
to fulfill this destiny by imploding.
That was plenty of time for a distinctive American school of hegemonic
statecraft to take shape. During the
Cold War, the United States came:
√ to insist on its own natural
right of leadership and to oppose the prospect of change instigated by others
as a potential zero-sum disturbance of the global balance and order;
√ to make deterrence (i.e. the use
of threats to freeze potentially explosive situations) and military
intervention its habitual responses to efforts by others to alter the status
quo in any region of the world;
√ to see “diplomacy” between great
powers primarily as a way of communicating determination to obstruct or preempt
efforts by others to assert themselves internationally, not as a means of
resolving problems to eliminate their eventual explosion or emergence as a
casus belli;
√ to lump together all states it
had pledged to protect as so-called “allies,” erasing traditionally vital
distinctions between “allies” with reciprocal, contractual defense obligations,
“protectorates” with no such obligations, dependent “client states” with little
or no capacity for effective self-defense, and geopolitically important but
strategically uncooperative “non-aligned states;”
√ to apply coercive measures like
sanctions and threats to use force against recalcitrant states in preference to
relying on influence born of diplomatic empathy, allurement, or incentives to
motivate them to cooperate; and
√ to resort habitually to the overt
or covert use of force as the most expedient and efficient way to overcome
objectionable foreign behavior, unless doing so might risk nuclear retaliation.
The norms of American statecraft
that I have just outlined were shaped during undeniably anomalous periods – the
Cold War and the “unipolar moment” that followed it. They are notably militaristic. The world order they addressed was relatively
simple.
The Soviet ideological and
geopolitical challenge was the main factor guiding the U.S. response to
regional and local events. And fear of
the USSR was the principal stimulus to the consolidation by the industrialized
democracies of an identity centered on the United States, enforcing the
necessity for U.S. leadership. But now
the Soviet Union and, with it, the bipolar US-Soviet order, are both gone. A
multipolar international state system – with all its complexities – has succeeded bipolarity. The old ways don’t serve us well in a new context
they were not designed to address.
The United States came out of the
Cold War as both global hegemon and political-economic role model. In the two decades between the Soviet
collapse and the global disillusionment with America that accompanied the Wall Street-induced financial crisis of
2008 - 2009, the United States thought it had all the answers and acted
unilaterally – without regard to international law or the views of its
strategic partners abroad.
The complacent assumption of a
world perpetually dominated by purposive U.S. centrality, Western unity, and
American omnipotence has now been succeeded by American confusion about the
appropriate role of the United States in world affairs, the progressive
disintegration of the West, the enervation of Western-led global governance,
and the attachment of a growing sense of futility to military intervention in
other states and cultures. In this
context, stepped-up military spending and more boots on the ground abroad are
an emotionally satisfying but unrealistic evasion, not an effective response to
change.
The policy approaches the United
States developed in the very different circumstances of the late 20th
and very early 21st centuries demonstrably do not suit the fluid
strategic environment of the post-Cold War, post-bipolar world order. To be effective, American statecraft and
diplomacy must revise the doctrines that guide them.
The model of global governance
created by visionary American statesmen after World War II has belatedly
conquered the whole world. No great
power now proposes an alternative to it.
Much as some alarmists would like to posit such a thing, there is no
existential ideological or strategic challenge to the inherited rules of the
US-backed international system, even if some, like China and India, seek to
tinker with these rules to serve their interests and aspirations better and
others, like Russia, feel unjustly excluded from their protections.
Countries that were willing
rule-takers under the Pax Americana now understandably aspire to be rule-makers
as well. If they are not admitted to
such a role, they will use their growing power to work around the legacy
system. If sufficiently frustrated, they
can and will seek to supplant it.
To put it starkly: The United States is now part of a globalized
world in which we are often not in a position to call the shots and sometimes
not even first among equals. Americans
developed institutions, policies, and practices to deal with a set of
challenges that has vanished. We must
now adapt the system we created to accommodate, incorporate, and leverage the
growing wealth and power of countries like China, India, and post-Soviet
Russia. If we don’t do this, we will see
the progressive displacement into irrelevance of what we created. In short, to ensure that the international
state system we once dominated will continue to protect our interests and
values, we must facilitate rather
than oppose its evolution so that it becomes a multilaterally directed
worldwide order. This will require
leadership of a quality that, frankly, does not appear to be on offer in this
election.
Americans are now challenged to
redesign our statecraft to cope with a multipolar state system in which power
is decentralizing and devolving to the regional level. World orders in which many powers compete are
the historical norm. But our country has
never actively participated in such an order.
Americans are uncomfortable with a world in which our “allies” do not
feel obliged to defend our interests and values across the board or to follow
us automatically where we choose to lead.
“Alliances:” are no longer
assemblies of nations united to address a common fear or promote shared
values. They have become mechanisms to
assure interoperability and support ad
hoc coalitions in times of need.
In the new world disorder, an ally
or partner on one issue may be an enemy or adversary on yet another. Shifting coalitions rather than standing
alliances are the norm. This new reality
challenges American diplomatic doctrine to transform itself by recognizing:
√ that American interests may be
permanent but, given constant shifts in international alignments and balances
of political, economic, and military power in the post-Cold War world, the
coalitions and relationships we need to support them cannot be. Our international partnerships require
constant reassessment and adjustment;
√ that efforts to resolve problems
through diplomacy, especially when one’s bargaining position is likely to
weaken over time, are wiser than the issuance of military threats to deter and
thus defer decisions by an adversary with respect to these problems, as this just
bottles them up to explode later under less favorable circumstances and with greater
injury;
√ that limited rather than general
partnerships or across-the-board alliances are now the international norm. Even when in most respects our relationship
with another country is adversarial, Americans must be willing and able to work
with it to realize or defend a shared interest of importance to us;
√ that relationships and
commitments to other countries, like the international transactions they
facilitate, must be evaluated in terms of what’s in them for the United States
and adjusted accordingly;
√ that unconditional commitments
enable risk-taking and burden-shirking by foreign partners rather than
responsible behavior ;
√ that diplomatic relations are not
a favor we confer on other governments but a means for us to understand and
influence their perceptions and behavior.
In an increasingly competitive and disorderly world, the absence or
suspension of diplomatic dialog is a form of unilateral disarmament; and
√ that the use of force must
invariably be the last – not the first – resort of statecraft because it is so
costly in blood and treasure, unpredictable in its outcomes and consequences,
and destructive of domestic liberty.
To conclude: The diplomatic terrain
has changed. There is no longer an
American sphere of influence to defend against one organized by a hostile
power. China and Russia are to one
degree or another (China more than Russia) integrated into the globalized
version of the old American-led system.
Neither is or can be isolated.
Nor are local and regional conflicts necessarily connected to great-power
rivalry as they were during the Cold War, when all issues weighed in the
balance between the contending U.S. and communist blocs.
As an example, consider north
Korea. U.S. deterrence of Pyongyang is no longer linked to apprehension about
Chinese or Russian control of the peninsula.
(Whether Korea is divided or unified has international implications, but
is of vital concern only to Koreans.
China has better relations with Seoul than with Pyongyang. And the nationalism of a united Korea –
however unification was achieved – would more likely check than enlarge Chinese
influence in northeast Asia.) Having
responded to menacing U.S. containment policies by developing the capability to
strike the United States directly with nuclear weapons, North Korea is now a
problem for the United States in its own right, without regard to its
relationships with other great powers.
Or consider Iran. U.S. tensions with Iran have to do with the
history of our bilateral relations and the evolution of regional balances of
power in the Middle East, including a potential nuclear balance between Israel
and Iran. Russia and China have been
partners with the United States in trying to mitigate the problems posed by
Iran’s completely independent foreign policies.
Israel and Saudi Arabia have been opponents of this process. The obstacles to US-Iranian détente and
rapprochement are sui generis, not
derived from any global contest.
In the new circumstances, American
diplomacy must be agile, seeking out opportunities to promote change and solve
problems in ways that benefit the United States and its long-term interests,
rather than attempting to frustrate proposals because they originate with or
also benefit others. Our policies must
derive from self-interest rather than residual paternalism or nostalgia for
leadership of a sphere of influence that no longer exists. Our diplomats must be no less professional
than our military. And our diplomats,
not our military, must man the front lines of our defense.
One of the two major party
presidential candidates is clearly committed to the problematic statecraft and
militarized diplomacy of the past. The
other represents an uncouth eruption of nativist complaints and politically
resonant assertions unaccompanied by feasible policies or plans. Neither has offered a coherent answer to the
specific issues with which I began. And
neither has evidenced awareness of the
need to adjust Washington's approach to our foreign relations to deal with the
structural changes in the world order I have described.
The world is watching the United
States and both candidates. And,
frankly, it is dismayed. The damage to America's foreign relations
from this election is substantial and likely to last.
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