As Prepared:
GSR presentation, September 2011
Dr. Dana H. Allin, IISS Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs
Our topic being foreign policy and the US elections, I don’t want to stray too far from the political. I will try to briefly touch upon the question of whether there is something like an Obama Doctrine that Republican candidates can challenge and American voters can either reject or ratify. But if American voters do either, it will only be in the most indirect manner, because this election, like most elections but even more so, will be decided on the basis of the domestic concerns of the American people. Which means, above all, the still dire state of the American economy.
The economic problem puts Obama’s reelection very much in doubt, even though he remains personally very popular, and even though his policies, in the components, are more popular than the Republican alternatives. But the economic problem overshadows and infuses every other issue, including every foreign policy issue and what I will call the Obama doctrine.
Doctrine may seem like too grand a word for what is arguably just a conventionally realist foreign policy. Still – from a determined withdrawal from Iraq, to the constrained escalation in Afghanistan, to the limited engagement in support of the Libya operation, to the stepped up drone strikes and killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I do think we can describe – at least for the purposes of political debate – a kind of doctrine.
It is a doctrine of strategic restraint, which is to say muscular but more narrowly focused pursuit of American interests. It rests on Obama’s apparent conviction that the United States has become strategically overextended, and needs a process of managed retrenchment that will help it to achieve an economic restoration at home.
This is a kind of small-c conservatism that was perhaps best expressed at West Point in December 2009, where President Obama announced an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, but also said: “As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don’t have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I’m mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, ‘Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs’”.
Hence President Obama escalated in Afghanistan at the same time that he set clear limits to the extent of our commitment. Hence the United States provided the enabling sinews of an international action against Gadhafi but would not weigh in with overwhelming American power.
Look, the drawbacks of applying military power at the same you advertise its limits are obvious. But a big, fractious and transparent democracy like the United States cannot easily bluff about the magnitude of its interest in any particular conflict. And if we take seriously any idea of a nascent international community embracing, for example, a responsibility to protect, then occasions of “leading from behind” – to repeat a perhaps unfortunate joke – are inevitable. Because not every place where the international community needs American power is a place where supreme US interests are at stake. Libya is one clear example.
Could the United States have done a better job more quickly if it hadn’t let France and Britain take the lead? Maybe. But a determination to share the burden stems, I think, from a recognition that the United States has to manage a continuing process of relative decline in its power vis a vis other world powers.
Now, for reasons that go well beyond domestic politics, this American president will not be talking about American decline. Perhaps the word is analytically as well as politically incorrect. Yet relative decline is both inevitable and benign insofar as it is the inevitable consequence of a strategy that America has pursued since World War II – that is, helping other countries to become richer and more successful. I suppose the United States could pursue a goal of trying to keep China mired in poverty, but I don’t know what a strategy for pursuing that goal would look like, I fear it could have dangerous consequences, and I feel it would be immoral and un-American.
Relative American decline is a benign future compared to likely alternatives, but it is not unproblematic strategically, because it suggests that, over the long term, American strategic hegemony is difficult to sustain. The long term is the long term, of course. Right now the US spends about as much on defence as the rest of the world combined. When it comes to deterring war on the Korean Peninsula or, god forbid, fighting that war, the United States remains the indispensable nation, which is how this administration, like other administrations, sees things. But when it comes to determining, rather than just influencing, how women are treated in Afghanistan, I think this administration recognizes the limits of American power.
Now, a corollary to this strategic restraint has been a certain rhetorical restraint, and a concern for restoring rather than just asserting the legitimacy of American power. That legitimacy was strained if not squandered in Iraq, at Abu Ghraib, and with the water-boarding of terrorist suspects. Rhetorical restraint has been a conscious policy when Iranian dissidents were risking their lives in the streets of Tehran, and more recently regarding the Arab awakening, because this president believes, sincerely I think, that self-empowerment is preferable to the accusation of American meddling.
And it is this restraint and this approach to legitimacy that has provided, up till now, the main foreign policy target for Republican candidates. The president has been accused of conducting a grand apology tour. He is accused of not believing in American exceptionalism.
A useful aspect of the exceptionalism attack is that it fits seamlessly with the Republican attack on Obama’s domestic policies. Here too, Obama is accused of renouncing American exceptionalism and trying to convert the United States into a version of Europe – this barren, socialist, totalitarian dystopia that you can see for yourselves if any of you are brave enough to step outside this hotel.
So far I have spoken in terms of doctrine and philosophy and rhetoric, because it is mainly in these general terms that foreign policy has been debated in the campaign so far. I would like to go into detail about more specific foreign policy consequences of a Republican or Democratic victory a year from now, but my time is running out. Let me just flag three issues, which I hope we might revisit in Q&A
First, at the outset of his term President Obama tried to definitively renounce torture, and end the debate over it. Many of his opponents insisted on keeping the debate open, in a way that I think is deeply inimical to American interests.
Second, climate change, where I will just observe how infuriating and frightening it is to watch Republican candidates engage in Galileo-like renunciations of their previous, science-based views.
Third, Israel/Palestine, where I will simply assert that to my ears, President Obama sounds like a better friend to Israel than any Republican candidate – a friend being defined as someone who tries to stop his friend from self-destructive behaviour, rather than extolling and encouraging it.
But I have to leave that for Q&A, because I need to take three minutes to talk about what will in fact be the big issues of this election.
First, and by far most important, is the unemployment emergency in the United States. We are trying to get out of a balance-sheet recession, the worst since World War II. Individuals have too much debt and are trying, properly to save rather than spend. So the government needs to step in and fill the hole.
The government did so at the outset of the administration and averted a much greater depression. But it wasn’t enough. Thursday night the president proposed 450 billion in further spending and tax breaks, which would help, but which won’t happen because the Republicans now say they don’t believe in Keynesian solutions. This disbelief fits snugly with their narrow political interest, which is to delay economic recovery until after President Obama is defeated. Please ask me in Q&A exactly what I’m implying about Republican motives here, because the answer is slightly more complicated than it may sound.
The second issue is the federal debt. This is a long-term problem. The United States is not bankrupt in any common-sense meaning of the term. It can borrow money at very low rates of interest. But the long-term problem is serious.
The solution will have to involve a combination of defence cuts – or at least restraint in defence spending – restraint in the growth of health care costs, and tax increases.
Now, of the first two, it is the case that health-care spending is going to be more important than defence, because it is the growth in these costs that is the main driver of the long-term deficit. Still, defence is the biggest item of discretionary spending, and I think it is just politically implausible that you can cut spending on Medicare – that is, government-funded healthcare for the elderly – without touching defence.
The biggest problem is taxes, and here we come to the surreal and frankly terrifying crisis of American politics, played out in this summer’s hostage negotiations over the federal debt ceiling. The medium term deficit problem would be mostly erased if we returned to Clinton-era tax rates. But almost every Republican member of the US Congress has signed a pledge that he or she will never, under any circumstances, vote for a bill that increases net revenue to the US government.
And they mean it. President Obama, in talks with House Speaker John Boehner, offered to reach a huge debt-reduction deal of almost $4 trillion that would have entailed 3 dollars in spending cuts for every 1 dollar in increased revenue. Boehner walked away – and so the deal raising the debt limit entailed a comparatively small reduction in the long-term debt.
So, to conclude on a very pessimistic note, I will say just two things:
First, although you don’t really see it in his current campaign rhetoric, I can conceive of a President Romney pursuing pragmatic, sensible policies on a range of issues, including climate change and Israel-Palestine. What I find harder to imagine is that he will go against this Republican orthodoxy on taxes.
Second, if I’m correct in this fear, the relative decline of American power that I described earlier as inevitable and manageable could turn into a real decline that is both avoidable and tragic. And it could happen very quickly.
