[Kabar-indonesia] 2 of 2: NYRB: The Foreign Policy the US Needs

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The New York Review of Books
The Foreign Policy the US Needs
continues...

The US has an undeniable, overwhelming superiority in
raw military might and in the capacity to project it.
But as soon as we turn to other kinds of power—"hard"
economic power, which is the power to reward, or
bribe, and to coerce; "soft power"; and what I would
call "building power," the power to help others
construct their institutions —we see that we live in
an increasingly multipolar world. This has become all
the clearer in view of the recovery of Japan, the
spectacular rise of China and India, and the growth of
the EU, notwithstanding the current sluggishness of
the European economy.

Global economic competition is now a clash of
varieties of capitalisms, each one expressing a
specific, mainly national, conception. And in recent
years the US has lost ground, whether in its influence
in international economic organizations such as the
WTO or in its generally inadequate efforts to help
nations like East Timor and Sri Lanka and Haiti to
build badly needed national institutions. This is the
result of many factors: the war in Iraq, the war on
terrorism, and the US ideological hostility to
"nation-building," a view that is overtly expressed by
the US military but is generally supported by the
conservative American preference for the market.

In fact, if we switch from a consideration of the
ingredients of power to whether it can actually be
deployed, we find that much American military power is
practically unusable because of international risks
(as with nuclear weapons) and domestic opposition both
to the draft and to protracted wars with high
casualties. Finally, even when US military power can
be used, it is often ineffective or worse, as is shown
by US failures to anticipate political problems in
Iraq and to protect the population there from
insurgent and sectarian violence. Military power, in
short, can serve as a deterrent, but America should
avoid using it to destroy cities, people, and regimes.
For the most part, only soft power, and the power of
state-building and of promoting economic development,
can have beneficial results.

Even if America's power were as enormous as US
politicians assert, there is a huge difference between
American hegemony now and past empires.
Nineteenth-century Britain had much less military
power than the US today, but it had much more ability
to get things done within its empire than the US in
today's world. Hence the need for shifting from a
policy of primacy (however cautious and considerate,
as in Walt's analysis) to a genuine policy of
partnership based on reciprocity and compromise. No
doubt a world of 191 UN members and thousands of
nongovernmental organizations requires leadership but
this can be exerted by more than one nation (as has
usually been the case in the EU); and that one nation
should not always be the US. The leader, or group of
leaders, needs to work by means of persuasion and
diplomacy, not command. The world political system too
needs a degree of democratization.[8]

A true partnership is particularly necessary
concerning several major issues. The first, and most
urgent, is the Middle East. Two conflicts there have
bred terrorism, jihadism, and hatred of the West,
particularly of America. First, the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been scandalously
neglected since the fiasco of Camp David in 2000,
despite the "road map" which has remained largely
fictional. By now it should be clear that the
occupation has long been the root of the trouble. It
does not justify Arab terrorism aimed at civilians,
but it goes a long way toward explaining it. Cutting
off aid to the Palestinians because they voted for
Hamas was exactly the wrong thing to do: it was
punishment for exercising democratic choice. A
unilateral "solution" imposed by Israel is no solution
at all, only a recipe for continuing war.

The US and its partners—the so-called Quartet—need to
work hard for a two-state solution close to the one
almost reached at Taba in early 2001. Then and now, a
settlement would require that the Palestinians give
up, in practice, the right of return to Israel, but it
would provide them with a workable state that is not
truncated or walled-in and has financial support. In
arriving at such a settlement, Hamas— obviously
divided between extremity and moderation—could be
legitimately pressured to recognize Israel explicitly
and to condemn terrorism unequivocally. In the
immediate future, what is needed is a cease-fire based
on a Palestinian declaration renouncing rocket attacks
on Israel, and an Israeli declaration renouncing
incursions and air strikes in Gaza. Moreover, the
Palestinians would release the Israeli corporal held
by their gunmen, Hezbollah would release the soldiers
captured during its cross-border attack, and the
Israelis would release the Palestinian officials they
have seized.[9] To achieve these outcomes, as war
spreads in Lebanon, would require far more active
American participation than has been the case so far.
The destruction of Hamas by disproportionate Israeli
reprisals would have the same effects as destruction
of the Palestinian Authority by Sharon earlier: it
would escalate violence, further radicalize the
Palestinians and much of the Arab world, and encourage
further attacks on American passivity or
"complicitly."

In dealing with Iraq, what I proposed in these pages
two years ago seems all the more necessary[10] —a
deliberately and carefully planned American withdrawal
that would force the feuding politicians and the
conflicting ethnic and religious factions to confront
the reality of civil war and continued killing, and to
try to find a political solution to the insurgency and
to sectarian conflict. As long as American forces stay
there, they both exacerbate the discord and terror and
provide Iraqis with an alibi for ceaseless haggling.
If the Iraqis want peace and unity as much as the
American champions of "staying the course" assert, it
is up to them to act accordingly. The argument about
how much good we could still do by staying is, to put
it mildly, undermined by how little we have done to
provide protection and essential services to a
population that the US invasion exposed to bitter
violence and hardships. We need to pull out
completely, leaving behind no imperial residues.
Whatever protection (of Sunnis, for example) will be
needed should be entrusted to UN peacekeeping forces
to whose creation and support we should be prepared to
contribute both money and weapons. We should also get
out of Afghanistan soon: our presence has not deterred
a Taliban revival or the emergence of an opium economy
dominated by the Taliban and warlords; non-American
NATO forces should be supplemented by non-European
forces under UN command.

Secondly, what is needed for the US is—as Walt
suggests—a drastic long-term policy of
demilitarization carried out in collaboration with
foreign partners. It should begin at home. The US
military and domestic security budget exceeds $550
billion and amounts to almost 20 percent of US
expenditures. It seems more like a program of public
works than one of national security, and the American
economy has other badly neglected domestic needs. Our
military budget is more likely to be a provocation
than a deterrent to America's current rivalry with
China. A reduction of 50 percent in military
expenditures would allow the US to take better care of
its poor, to establish a decent health care system, to
improve education, and to invest in conversion to more
efficient fuels. It would also liberate funds for
urgently needed nation- building, health care, and
development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This
drastic change ought to be part of a plan that would
aim, globally and regionally, at reductions in the
nuclear arsenals of the established powers and at a
new policy against nuclear proliferation.

This policy would include security guarantees to
powers such as North Korea and Iran that have
plausible fears of attack provoked by the hostility of
their neighbors and the US. The guarantees would
entail nonaggression pacts, the reduction or departure
of American forces near these countries' borders, and
the kinds of arms control agreements that were worked
out in the later phases of the cold war between the US
and the Soviet Union. Such agreements would reassert
the right of all signers of the nonproliferation
treaty to nuclear energy for civilian uses—a right
many more states may want to use so they would not
have to depend on foreign oil supplies. It would offer
them a range of choices including the transfer of
uranium enrichment activities to foreign suppliers
that already have them. If a country insists on
enriching nuclear fuel itself, it should come under
strong international pressures to accept a very strict
and intrusive inspection regime.

General rules are needed to prevent ad hoc deals, such
as the new US–Indian agreement accepting India's
nuclear weapons programs. Nevertheless, a serious
recent study of nuclear proliferation concludes that
US policy should be "more flexible, not less," and
take into account the preferences of states for
different "levels of commitment" and different kinds
of non-proliferation schemes.[11] A policy of
demilitarization would aim not only at putting an end
to preventive war— which the 2006 US National Security
Strategy statement still supports[12] — but at
ultimately eliminating most weapons of mass
destruction, and in the meantime at narrowing the gap
between those who possess them and those who do not.

Thirdly, as for the UN, any useful changes in its
structure are being blocked by the unholy combination
of John Bolton and a number of developing countries,
such as Brazil, India, Egypt, and South Africa, that
are suspicious of the UN Secretariat's potential
power. They are now opposing the reform plan endorsed
by Kofi Annan. But in view of the poverty and
instability of many states, the UN is in great need of
more funds, more military forces, and more efficient
and authoritative governance. It will be essential to
reinforce existing international and regional
organizations and to establish new ones in economic
matters now unregulated (such as capital movements),
as well as measures to ensure their accountability to
the people they serve.

Another component of a new policy would be an effort,
in association with other states, to consolidate the
progress made in such states as East Timor, Georgia,
and Uganda, and to rescue failed states such as
Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic, Haiti, and
Chad, which have been disastrous for their citizens
and for other states, not only because, in most cases,
of extremely bad leaders but because, as Lawrence
Freedman has put it, of "sudden population movements,
environmental disasters, [and] local conflicts being
exported through expatriate communities."[13]

A new policy should also provide for a concentrated
effort to protect human rights: while democracy cannot
and should not be imposed from the outside, widespread
violations of human rights, as in Darfur today, should
be, along with defense against aggression, the only
legitimate cause for collective armed intervention,
preferably through forces put at the disposal of the
Security Council. Removing genocidal regimes should be
legitimate if authorized by the UN or, if the UN is
paralyzed, by an association of genuine
democracies.[14]

Most challenging of all is the need to form a new
"partnership" of advanced countries for the economic
development of the underdeveloped ones. For many
reasons—political, economic, and philosophical
disagreements—this will be difficult to organize; the
attempt to eliminate absolute poverty and to prevent
the poor from succumbing to epidemics would be a
worthy first step. At the same time national and
international action to prevent the destruction and
mass migration expected from global warming should
become an urgent priority. An issue that threatens all
countries, it requires energetic, diverse, and
imaginative measures for the curtailment of CO2
emissions. A revised and strengthened version of the
Kyoto Protocol would be a beginning.[15] Most other
problems shrink compared to this one.

These proposals may appear utopian. And yet striving
to realize them would make for a safer world; they
would not abandon or damage any of America's main
interests; they would allow regional disputes to be
dealt with primarily by the members of the regions,
and with the assistance of international and regional
agencies. The US would not be the only "indispensable
nation," or the nation that knows best what the real
interests of others are. There is always a danger when
dependent nations gain autonomy, but autonomy is the
condition of responsibility. A world in which several
large or middle-sized powers would have a larger say
than they do now does not mean a return to the balance
of power mechanisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, in which war decided disputes. Competition
has to continue, but—as Kant speculated—it should be
constrained by the ever-increasing costs of war, and
by the benefits (as well as the dangers) of
interdependence. As Kiesling puts it, "Morality and
self interest are inseparable, provided we persuade
our politicians to take a long enough view of these
interests. In the long run, security cannot be
purchased at the expense of justice."

—July 13, 2006

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Notes

[1] I have discussed many of these issues in Gulliver
Unbound: The Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), America Goes Backward
(New York Review Books, 2004), and Chaos and Violence:
What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean
for US Foreign Policy (Rowman and Littlefield,
forthcoming 2006).

[2] Samantha Power, in 'A Problem from Hell': America
and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002) and in her
subsequent writings about Darfur, has been an eloquent
voice against America's failure to protect the victims
of genocide. So has Nicholas Kristof on Darfur.

[3] My analysis of the "American style" in Gulliver's
Troubles: Or, the Setting of American Foreign Policy
(McGraw-Hill, 1968) remains, alas, valid almost forty
years later.

[4] The most recent is Crimes of War: Iraq, edited by
Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton
(Nation Books, 2006).

[5] "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," London
Review of Books, March 23, 2006; Michael Massing "The
Storm Over the Israel Lobby," The New York Review,
June 8, 2006.

[6] Brady Kiesling, "Iraq: A Letter of Resignation,"
The New York Review, April 10, 2003.

[7] Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its
Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006), Chapter
6—a thoughtful and erudite exploration. See also the
review by Robert Skidelsky, The New York Review, July
13, 2006.

[8] See Dominique de Villepin's remarks in Le Requin
et la mouette (Paris: Plon, 2004).

[9] See Gareth Evans and Robert Malley, "A Proposal to
Curb the Escalating Tensions in Gaza," Financial
Times, July 6, 2006.

[10] See "Out of Iraq," The New York Review, October
21, 2004.

[11] Jacques E.C. Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear
Proliferation (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.
220– 221. His arguments against the adoption by the
foes of nuclear proliferation of a principle of a
"duty to prevent" it by force if necessary are
convincing.

[12] See The National Security Strategy of the United
States (March 2006), Vol. 4. Henry Kissinger has
commented that "if each nation claims the right to
define its pre-emptive rights, the absence of any
rules would spell international chaos" (International
Herald Tribune, April 13, 2006).

[13] The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, Adelphi
Paper 379 (Routledge/ International Institute for
Strategic Studies, 2006), p. 32.

[14] I have suggested such an association in Gulliver
Unbound, and Fukuyama makes a similar proposal in
America at the Crossroads. "Regime change" requires,
however, remembering Auguste Comte's precept: "one can
only destroy what one can replace"; it is the
replacement of a genocidal regime that is the most
difficult task.

[15] In addition to Al Gore's movie and book, An
Inconvenient Truth(Rodale, 2006), see Tim Flannery,
The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), and
Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe
(Bloomsbury, 2006) all reviewed by James Hansen in The
New York Review, July 13, 2006.

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