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HENRY R . NAU
^ y ^ y M E R i C A N FOREIGN POLICY Swings like a pendulum. / Under President George W. Bush, U.S. foreign policy proim moted a democracy agenda, used force readily to buttress / and at times even displace diplomacy, championed free %^^ %/ markets, and risked if not relished unilateralism. Under President Barrack Obama, U.S. foreign policy has swung decisively in the opposite direction. Now, U.S. security interests matter more than democracy, force is a last resort, substantial regulations are needed to end the booms and busts of global capitalism, and multilateralism is the sine qua non of U.S. diplomacy. After more than a year, it is not too early to evaluate the pendulum swings in American foreign policy and ask whether or not Obama is likely to stop the pendulum this time around. Successful American presidents have stopped the pendulum to achieve novel and lasting contributions to American security and ideals. Franklin Henry R. Nau is professor of political science and international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. A more extensively footnoted version of this article can be requested by writing to nau@gwu.edu.
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Roosevelt and Harry Truman ended pendulum swings between ambitious internationalism under Woodrow Wilson and isolationist nationalism under Harding and Coolidge. Roosevelt blended internationalist and nationalist concepts to commit the United States to multilateral participation in the United Nations while reserving sovereign veto rights for the United States and other great powers on the UN Security Council. When the UN system failed, Truman adapted Roosevelt's formula to regional security and created the Western institutions of NATO, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, the European Community, and Bretton Woods that defended and rebuilt postwar Europe and Japan. Ronald Reagan stopped Cold War pendulum swings between containment and detente. He rejected both the balance of Ronald Reasan power antics of Richard Nixon and human rights initiatives of Jimmy Carter. Like Roosevelt and rejected OOtlO Truman he combined realism and idealism to conthe balance of front and reassure the Soviet Union at the same r time. Reagan's military and economic buildups lyoijer antics OT ^ ^ ^ ^ ' upped the ante in a competition the Soviets could Richard Nixon not win while his diplomacy of expanding freedom atid humnfi ^"*^ reducing reliance on offensive nuclear weapons offered a cooperative alternative the Soviet Union rights and its satellites could not resist. The effect of initiatives of Reagan's strategy was to narrow Soviet economic and military options and encourage Soviet domestic Jimmy Carter. reforms. In that sense Reagan helped bring reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev to power in Moscow. He and Gorbachev then ended not only the Cold War but also the Soviet Union. As John Lewis Gaddis points out in Strategies of Containment, "no administration prior to Reagan had deliberately sought to exploit those tensions [in the Soviet Union] with a view to destabilizing the Kremlin leadership and accelerating the decline of the regime it ran." Since Reagan, American presidents have been less successful at stopping the pendulum. George H.W Bush in the first Persian Gulf War, and Bill Clinton in Somalia, swung American policy decisively toward the UN and assertive multilateralism. Then, after the UN flopped in Bosnia and Kosovo, George W. Bush pushed the pendulum in the opposite direction. In response to 9/11, he eschewed UN multilateralism altogether and disdained NATO help in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. He made a virtue of unilateralism and lost worldwide credibility. All three presidents suffered reversals, tacking back and forth between engagement and withdrawal without a clear sense of where the pendulum stops. Will Obama experience the same fate? The chances are good that he will. He has swung the pendulum decisively against George W Bush. After more than a year^ he continues to blame Bush shamelessly for every problem he faces. This reactive tendency is not just partisan; it is part of a broader intel28 Policy Review
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Let's look more closely at the four areas in which American foreign policy swings, and at where Obama seems to be heading.
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State Department denies funds appropriated by Congress to circumvent the Chinese firewall. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set the policy on her first trip to China: "We already know what they are going to say [about human rights] because I've had those kinds of conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders. We have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis." Shared interests take precedence over sovereign ones. North Korea takes a turn for the worse fires off long-range test missiles at the very moment Obama calls for nuclear disarmament in Prague, tests another nuclear device six weeks later, launches seven medium-range missiles as Obama presses for nuclear disarmament in Moscow, and for good measure fires off five short-range missiles shortly after Obama's UN address in September. U.S. journalists are captured, tried, and sentenced to the gulag in North Korea. Obama dispatches former President Clinton to Pyongyang to free hostage American journalists. As Henry Kissinger asked in the New York Times, "Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a prominent American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hands?" Iran may have been hstening, because only days after Clinton's Pyongyang visit, Tehran arrested three American students who wandered across the border from Iraq and now threatens to try them or exchange them for Iranians held in American prisons. Obama embraces Hugo Chavez at a G-20 meeting, while Chavez drives political opponents into exile, seizes foreign companies without compensation, pushes through referenda that make him electable for life, and exports his brand of despotism to Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Obama sides with Chavez in the dispute over the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was exiled from the country by the Honduran military after he violated the nation's constitution. Embarrassed, the United States then backed elections which Zelaya boycotted, even though all other major powers in the region opposed the U.S. position. Arguably, in the space of a few weeks, Obama's new foreign policy opposed both democratic processes in Honduras and multilateral cooperation in Latin America. Obama reacts defensively to the voting fraud and turmoil in Iran, more afraid to meddle in Iranian politics than to stand by Iranian protestors calling for greater freedom. Amnesty International reports that Iranian security forces rape, torture, and increasingly execute dissidents to crush anti-government protests, creating a "climate of impunity" that has plunged human rights in the country to their lowest point in 20 years.
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"without the high moral ground [of democracy building], the [German] Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan would never have started." Finally, there are political costs at home. How long will the American people, especially Obama's own party, accept the stepped-up fighting in Afghanistan if the goal is mere stability? Perhaps Obama plans to talk less about promoting democracy but do more. Maybe, but his talk is revealing. He does not see the battle between democracy and despotism as the great struggle of our times. He sees the world in comprehensive, mechanistic terms, not in competitive, political terms. At the UN General Assembly in September, he discussed "four pillars" of future engagement: nonproliferation and disarmament; the promotion of peace and security; the preservation of our planet; and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. Democracy is missing. The reason apparently is that, in Obama's mind, the spread of democracy is not a shared global interest or task. It is rather a task and struggle for each country. "The essential truth of democracy," Obama said, "is that each nation determines its own destiny." America will assist, but history will decide. And, as he repeated in Ghana, Oslo, and at the UN, "history is on our side." Apparently, the spread of democracy is only a matter of time. Is this the Obama doctrine? The goals of foreign policy are mutual and material, not competitive and moral. Shared interests trump sovereign ones. Gountries of any political persuasion can and must cooperate with one another to deal with problems of common interest. Those common interests include getting rid of arms, restoring economic growth, and saving the planet. While all nations tend to these tasks, individual nations cultivate their own political ideology. History takes over from there. In the Obama doctrine there is no global struggle for freedom that parallels and limits the prospects for cooperation. Gooperation emerges from shared interests not from shared values. But what if ideological differences impede global cooperation? What if regime types democracies vs. despots matter more than shared interests? Then the cause of democracy is as much a global task as arms control or climate change. Bill Clinton believed that "democratic enlargement" was the best national security policy for America because democracies do not fight wars against one another or even threaten one another with military force. The more democracies America can midwife, the more secure and stable the world will be. The best proof of that proposition is modern-day Europe and Japan. Imagine what the world would be like today if there were as few democracies as there were in 1 9 0 0 . Promoting democracy enhances American security. That's not to say that democracies and despots do not and cannot cooperate. Gountries always share interests, especially in a nuclear world. But shared interests with despots cannot be the centerpiece of American diplomacy. Such cooperation is inevitably short-lived and always morally compromising. What's more, it is never enough. The Gold War did not end when
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around to acknowledge the need to use force (in Clinton's case, in Bosnia and Kosovo; in Carter's case, in a military rescue operation in Iran). Getting the right balance between force and diplomacy eludes many if not most American presidents. Will it elude Obama? George W. Bush clearly emphasized "military surges," responding to 9/11 with a "war against terror" that led to two ongoing U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama, on the other hand, emphasizes "diplomatic surges," seeking to exit militarily from Iraq, shift the focus from war to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and perhaps counterterrorism in future interventions, and find regional diplomatic solutions for Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and other trouble spots. In his first year, he dispatched an army of diplomatic In Ubama s envoys throughout the world to the Middle East world of shared (George Mitchell), Iran (Dennis Ross), North Korea (Steve Bosworth), Sudan/Darfur (Scott Gration), and interests, threats Afghanistan-Pakistan (Richard Holbrooke). come from, arms Obama talks more about the limits of power than I .1 the uses of power the need to reduce arms, espeand other ... ,^ , , r cially nuclear arms, and the importance of nonviomaterial sources, lent action to oppose oppression. In his world of not from shared interests, threats come from arms and other material sources, not from ideological adversaries Ideological ^\^^^ ^ j . ^ ^Q pursue conflicting objectives. In fact, as adversaries. ^^ ^^^^ ^^ Prague, "when nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens." Obama subscribes to what political scientists call a constructivist view of threats. Threats do not stem from real differences which provoke armaments for self-defense but rather from constructions of our minds which we are free to shape in significant measure deciding whether to see others as enemies or friends and having it be so. He shies away from differences and confrontation, and the armaments they provoke, because, in his woridview, these things create or exacerbate but do not resolve conflicts. The most useful force is nonviolent protest. In Moscow, he said that the Cold War ended when the people of Russia and Eastern Europe "stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful." And in Prague, he said that the Prague Spring of 1968 "shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of the people" and taught us the value of "peaceful protest" that "moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon." That's an odd way to explain the end of the Cold War and the Prague Spring. The Cold War ended in 1991, not because people protested peacefully but because the Soviet Union lost a material and moral competition with the United States that left it bankrupt and discredited. And the Prague Spring did not shame those who relied on tanks and arms; Soviet tanks and arms crushed the Prague Spring. Where is the role of weapons and deterrence
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acquiring nuclear weapons rose. Perhaps the incentives work the other way. As nuclear powers disarm, the benefits for nonnuclear states to acquire nuclear arms increase. Now, at increasingly low levels of nuclear arms, some experts worry as Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press did in the NovemberDecember 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs that cutting further is too risky, especially before we think through the macabre yet necessary scenarios and capabilities that might be needed to deter future powers that insist on spheres of influence. It is probably too early to label Obama a dove like Jimmy Carter. His first full defense budget raises expenditures by 4 percent for fiscal year 2010-11 and then holds them flat over the next ten years adjusted for inflation. While it cuts a number of significant weapons systems, WrJtle tne including missile defenses, it increases outlays for superpowers counter-insurgency operations.^ And Obama has J J , committed significant additional forces to reduced nuclear Afghanistan twice 17,000 after the first review stockpiles in and another 30,000 after the second. What's in yprP'nt AprnAp<i question is his understanding of the role defense policies play as leverage to arm his ambitious diplothe number of matic undertakings. countries that ^^^ negotiations are partly matters of understanding (outreach) and partly matters of leverage (relaacquired nuclear ^^^^ power). Frederick the Great said it best: "negoweapons rose. tiations without arms are like music without instruments." Richard Holbrooke, Obama's envoy to South Asia, boasts that "diplomacy is like jazz an improvisation on a theme." If so, Obama may be gambling that diplomacy is all about improvisation and not much about concussion all about understanding, empathy, reaching out, and compromising and not much about building up forces, pushing back on the ground in regional disputes, narrowing an opponent's options away from the bargaining table, and standing up for one side or the other when conflicts break out. At three levels, Obama seems unaware of the leverage that military power exerts in foreign policy. He does not identify with his defense budget, an important source of background leverage; he agonizes over deploying forces as ground leverage to narrow an opponent's options away from the bargaining table; and he depends primarily on UN sanctions for negotiating leverage at the diplomatic table. In all three areas, Ronald Reagan was a master at exerting military leverage: using his defense budget to challenge the Soviet
2. For example, Obama capped production of F-22. stealth fighter planes and delayed plans for a nextgeneration long-range bomljer. He made deep cuts in missile defense and did little to expand a navy fleet that is down to roughly one half its size at the end of the Cold War. Such decisions have consequences. Containment of China, for example, depends heavily on American air and sea power. Since 1995, China has increased the number of its submarines by 3 8, while the U.S. has cut the number of its submarines by
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vince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms." But, again, which Obama is the true Obama? Obama's diplomacy is flaccid. He packs few arrows in his quiver. He is content to downplay force, even as Iran, North Korea, and other extremists use force and show no sign of being "shamed" into honoring international norms and principles to stop proliferation or the use of violence. And when he supports the use of force, it seems to be only when force is "absolutely necessary" meaning apparently after America has been attacked (Afghanistan) but not before (Iraq). He assumes that if America does not use force, others will not either. But there's the problem. If the United States does not push back to stop nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Asia, others may. Israel is close to that point already, and, if North Korea acquires nuclear weapons, Japan may demand more extensive U.S. nuclear protection or decide to acquire nuclear weapons on its own. The use of force only when it is absolutely necessary does not minimize risks; it leads to much bigger risks later on.
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the Washington consensus and market policies. Obama pledges to end the boom and bust cycle of capitalism and compares the present crisis to the Great Depression. In truth, the current slump comes nowhere near the levels of the Great Depression (which led to real GDP losses of 30 percent and unemployment rates of 25 percent) and does not even equal the Reagan recession of 1981-82 in either maximum unemployment (10.2 compared to 10.8) or inflation rates (2 percent compared to 13 percent). So far, by only two measures, the decline of industrial output and number of jobs lost (not unemployment rate), has the current recession exceeded the Reagan downturn. And, ironically, this result is a consequence of the fact that the current recession started at much higher levels of production and employment than in 1981-82, a testament to the success of Obama pledges economic policies over the past 3 o years. '^ By hypmg the current crisis and pandering to to end the boom populism on such issues as bank bonuses, Obama and bust cycle of ''^^^^ overreacting to the current economic crisis, encouraging the pendulum to swing completely out capitalism and Q control. Of course, mistakes were made during f compares the ^^^ Washington consensus era by all administrations . . the Reagan years left behind massive budget present crisis deficits, the Clinton years blessed the unregulated to the Great growth of global banking and derivative markets, p. and the Bush years compounded errors of excessive ' spending as well as unmonitored financial markets. Yet the benefits remain for all to see, and now the trick is to correct the errors without reducing the benefits. The real economy in the United States today the industrial and productivity base is solid and does not require a major overhaul. Not only are anti-market regulations unnecessary; they were a major cause, along with private banking, of the current crisis. Government housing agencies especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added $5 trillion to the national debt, and they too awarded "fat cat" bonuses and received bailout funds that exceeded $100 billion and are still climbing. So governments fail, just as markets do. Obama needs to stop the pendulum of anti-market sentiment before we overregulate and recreate the twin specters of slower growth and higher inflation, the scourges of the 1970s which the Washington consensus ended. Make no mistake: Reducing excessive risk in financial markets is necessary to sustain long-term growth. But reducing risk means reducing growth over the short run, and increasing regulations means raising prices over the long run. The main challenges for Obama are threefold. First, can his overall economic program work? On its premises, it seems doubtful. The program raises costs to the private sector while expanding investment in the public sector. Small businesses, which provide most private sector jobs, face higher taxes (rescinding tax cuts for annual incomes above $250,000), increasing energy
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3. One typical example: Duferco Furrell Corporation near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, manufactures steel coils from imported slabs not sold in the U.S. After the stimulus package passed, its largest client canceled orders so it could buy from companies with l o o percent U.S. production. Duferco Furrell, which employs oo people, furloughed 80 percent of its work force.
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given his party's preferences, would he be likely to get it if he did ask. Meanwhile, according to early estimates, world trade dropped by i o percent in 2009. Third, can Obama lead a sensible effort to regulate risks in new global financial markets without strangling competitive markets which mobilized capital for unprecedented expansion after 1980? In short, can he create a regulatory regime for global finance like the one the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade created for global trade in the 1950s and 1960s? The GATT regime greatly expanded, not restricted, international economic exchanges. While financial regulation is complex, two choke points seem crucial. The first is leverage ratios. Leverage ratios specify the T/i tt rl f amount of capital financial institutions are required ^ to hold to support lending. Domestic banks have has coddled been regulated in this area since the 1930s, and Protectionist international banks came under similar regulation after 1980 through the Basel Accords. But nonbank supporters on institutions including investment houses, insurance the Hill and companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and struc11 J r J tured investment vehicles (sivs) set up by banks off Stalled free trade agreements with ^^^^^ j^^j^^^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ regulated, and they now account for a larger and larger share of
between unilateralism and multilateralism. George W. Bush became the poster child for unilateralism and assertive American leadership. Obama is now the global rock star for a new era of multilateralism. The tension between unilateralism and multilateralism is not a tradeoff; it is a matter of leadership. How aggressively does the United States act, sometimes without the full support of domestic, allied, or international partners, and how often does it defer to a consensus from domestic and international opinion before it acts? The objective in either case is to bring other partners along. Bush tripped the wire toward debilitating unilateralism. Obama may trip it toward paralyzing multilateralism. So far Obama has gone the extra mile to solicit the support of the American people, allies, and the international community. To his credit, he has improved America's standing abroad. According to Pew polls in July 2009, Europe's confidence that America will do the right thing soared from below 20 percent under Bush in 2008 to well over 85 percent under Obama in 2009. If such polls mean anything, Obama should now get something in return. So far he has gotten very little. What if Obama cannot get UN agreement on tougher sanctions against Iran? What if the NATO allies balk at supporting the AfghanistanPakistan campaign? What if the Chinese decide that they have no real interest in stopping North Korea's nuclear weapons program, especially if it threatens North Korea's domestic stabihty (a position that some believe the Chinese have always held)? What if Russia meddles successfully to weaken and eventually replace NATO-friendly governments in
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Georgia and Ukraine and perhaps even to extend its influence in the Baltic NATO states? Where will Obama stop the pendulum between assertive American leadership, which involves some degree of unilateralism, and accommodating American multilateralism, which risks action too late or no action at all? On many issues, as we see in his deliberations on a second strategy for Afghanistan, he struggles to find a middle ground which satisfies everyone a little bit and dissatisfies no one too much. He often defers to other partners, as he does to the UN on Iran or to Congress on the stimulus and health care legislation. He likes to "wait to see how the dust settles." But deferring to international institutions is usually a prescription for delay if not default. Soon, the heat will be turned up on Obama and his numerous diplomatic initiatives. Will he be willing to pull the trigger and act without consensus if necessary? Or will he instead define his objectives down, disarm his diplomacy, default to nationalistic economic forces, and defer to multilateral solutions? We have little to guide our speculation. His Afghanistan policy offers some evidence of resolve, but the test is yet to come, both from the left wing of his own party and from entrenched extremists in the AfghanistanPakistan region. His redlines for acting alone or with less than majority support are well concealed. This is perhaps the biggest mystery about a man who has always led by community more than by conviction.
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