The Next Decade (6 page)
American foreign policy has already fragmented regionally, of course, as reflected in the series of regional commands under which our military forces are organized. Now it is necessary to openly recognize the same fragmentation in our strategic thinking and deal with it accordingly. We must recognize that there is no global alliance supporting the United States and that the U.S. has no special historical relationships with anyone. Another quote from Washington’s farewell address is useful here: “The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.” This means that NATO no longer has unique meaning for the United States outside of the European context and that Europe cannot be regarded as more important than any other part of the world. Nostalgia for “the special relationship” notwithstanding, the simple reality today is that Europe is not more important.
Even so, President Obama ran a campaign focused on the Europeans. His travels before the 2008 election symbolized that what he meant by multilateralism was recommitting the United States to Europe, consulting Europe on U.S. actions abroad, and accepting Europe’s cautions (now that they have lost their empires, Europeans always speak in terms of caution). Obama’s gestures succeeded. The Europeans were wildly enthusiastic, and many Americans were pleased to be liked again. Of course, the enthusiasm dissipated rapidly as the Europeans discovered that Obama was an American president after all, pursuing American ends.
All of which brings us to the president’s challenge in the decade ahead: to conduct a ruthless, unsentimental foreign policy in a nation that still has unreasonable fantasies of being loved, or at least of being left alone. He must play to the public’s sentimentality while moving policy beyond it.
An unsentimental foreign policy means that in the coming decade, the president must identify with a clear and cold eye the most dangerous enemies, then create coalitions to manage them. This unsentimental approach means breaking free of the entire Cold War system of alliances and institutions, including NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. These Cold War relics are all insufficiently flexible to deal with the diversity of today’s world, which redefined itself in 1991, making the old institutions obsolete. Some may have continuing value, but only in the context of new institutions that must emerge. These need to be regional, serving the strategic interests of the United States under the following three principles:
- To the extent possible, to enable the balance of power in the world and in each region to consume energies and divert threats from the United States.
- To create alliances in which the United States maneuvers other countries into bearing the major burden of confrontation or conflict, supporting these countries with economic benefits, military technology, and promises of military intervention if required.
- To use military intervention only as a last resort, when the balance of power breaks down and allies can no longer cope with the problem.
At the height of the British Empire, Lord Palmerston said, “It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” This is the kind of policy the president will need to institutionalize in the coming decade. Recognizing that the United States will generate resentment or hostility, he must harbor no illusions that he can simply persuade other nations to think better of us without surrendering interests that are essential to the United States. He must try to seduce these nations as much as possible with glittering promises, but in the end he must accept that efforts at seduction will eventually fail. Where he cannot fail is in his responsibility to guide the United States in a hostile world.
CHAPTER 2
REPUBLIC, EMPIRE, AND THE
MACHIAVELLIAN PRESIDENT
T
he greatest challenge to managing an empire over the next decade will be the same challenge that Rome faced: having become an empire, how can the republic be preserved? The founders of the United States were anti-imperialists by moral conviction. They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defeat the British Empire and found a republic based on the principles of national self-determination and natural rights. An imperial relationship with other countries, whether intended or not, poses a challenge to those foundational principles.
If you believe that universal principles have meaning, it follows that an anti-imperial republic can’t be an empire and retain its moral character. This has been an argument made in the United States as far back as the 1840s and the Mexican-American war. Today both ends of the political spectrum make the argument against foreign adventures. On the left, there is a long tradition of anti-imperialism. But if you look at some of the rhetoric emanating from the right, from libertarians as well as from some in the Tea Party, you see the same opposition to military involvement in other countries. The fear is linked to Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to beware of the “military-industrial complex.” If a career military officer and war hero such as Ike could voice this fear, you can see how deeply embedded it is in American political culture. I suspect that this will become a powerful strand in American politics over the next ten years, in a country where, across the political spectrum, the citizenry is weary of foreign involvement.
The fear of imperial ambition is completely justified. The Roman Republic was overwhelmed by empire. Empire created an ambition for money and power that devastated the republican virtues that were the greatest pride of Roman citizenship. Even if that pride wasn’t fully justified, there is no question but that the Republic was destroyed not just by military rivalries that led to a coup d’état but by the vast amounts of money flowing into the imperial capital from citizens and foreigners trying to buy favor.
The same danger exists for the United States. American global power generates constant threats and ever greater temptations. It has been observed that ever since World War II, the United States has created a national security apparatus so shrouded in official secrecy that it cannot be easily overseen or even understood. This hugely expensive and cumbersome apparatus, along with the vast amounts of foreign economic activity—from immense trade to the foreign investments that drive global markets—creates a system that is not readily managed by democratic institutions and that is not always easily reconciled with American moral principles. It is not unimaginable that together these forces could render American democracy meaningless.
The problem is that like Rome in the time of Caesar, the United States has reached a point where it doesn’t have a choice as to whether to have an empire or not. The vastness of the American economy, its entanglement in countries around the world, the power and worldwide presence of the American military, are in effect imperial in scope. Disentangling the United States from this global system is almost impossible, and if it were attempted, it would destabilize not only the American economy but the global system as well. When the price of anti-imperialism was understood, there would be scant support for it. Indeed, many foreign countries are less opposed to the American presence than they are to the way in which that presence is felt. They accept American power; they simply want it to serve their own national interests.
The dangers of imperial power are substantial, and these dangers will become increasingly contentious issues in American politics, just as they are already hotly debated around the world. In retrospect, the non-interventionism of the republic the founders created was rooted in the fact that the republic was weak, not that it was virtuous. The United States of thirteen former colonies could not engage in foreign entanglements without being crushed. The United States of 300 million people cannot avoid foreign entanglements.
Managing the unintended empire while retaining the virtues of the republic will be an important priority of the United States for a very long time, but certainly, in the wake of the jihadist wars, it will be a particularly intense challenge. Most of the discussion will be wishful thinking. There is no going back, and there are no neat solutions. The paradox is that the best chance of retaining the republic is not institutional but personal, and it will depend on a definition of virtue that violates our common notions of what virtue is. I don’t look to the balance of power to save the republic, but to the cunning and wisdom of the president. The president certainly has a vast bureaucracy that he controls, and that controls him, but in the end it is the Lincolns, Roosevelts, and Reagans we remember, not bureaucrats or senators or justices. The reason is simple. Along with power, presidents exercise leadership. That leadership can be decisive, in the context of a decade or less.
Individual personalities would seem to be a thin reed on which to base a country’s future. At the same time, the founders created the office of the president for a reason, and at the heart of that reason was leadership. The presidency is unique in that it is the only structure in which an institution and an individual are identical. Congress and the Supreme Court are aggregations of people who will rarely speak with a single voice. The presidency is the president alone, the only official elected by representatives of all the people. That is why we need to consider him as the primary agent for managing the relationship between empire and republic.
Let’s begin by considering the character of presidents in general. Presidents differ from many other people in that they, by definition, take pleasure in power. They place its acquisition and use before other things, and they devote a good portion of their lives to its pursuit. A president’s knowledge and instincts are so finely honed toward power that he understands it in ways that those of us who have never truly had it could not appreciate. The worst president is closer by nature to the best than either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.
The degree and scope of the power that modern American presidents achieve inevitably make them see the world differently, even in comparison with other heads of state. No other leader must confront so much of the world in so many different ways. In our democracy, the president must achieve this position while pretending to be indistinguishable from his fellow citizens, a thought both impossible to imagine and frightening if true. The danger is that as the challenges of empire become greater and the potential threats more real, leaders will emerge who will need and demand a degree of power that slips beyond the constraints imposed by the Constitution.
It is both fortunate and ironic that in creating an anti-imperial government, the founders provided a possible road map for imperial leadership with republican constraints. They created the American presidency as an alternative both to dictatorship and to aristocracy, an executive that is weak at home but immensely powerful outside the United States. In domestic affairs, the Constitution dictates an executive that is hemmed in by an inherently unmanageable Congress and by a Supreme Court that is fairly inscrutable. The economy is in the hands of investors, managers, and consumers, as well as those of the Federal Reserve Bank (if not by the Constitution, then certainly by legislation and practice). The states hold substantial power, and much of civil society—religion, the press, pop culture, the arts—is beyond the president’s control. This is exactly what the founders wanted: someone to preside over the country but not to rule it. Yet when the United States faces the world through its foreign policy, there is no more powerful individual than the occupant of the White House.
Article Two, Section Two, of the Constitution states, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” This is the only power given to the president that he does not share with Congress. Treaties, appointments, the budget, and the actual declaration of war require congressional approval, but the command of the military is the president’s alone.
Yet over the years, the constitutional limitations that reined in the diplomatic prerogatives of earlier presidents have fallen by the wayside. Treaties require the approval of the Senate, but today treaties are rare and foreign policy is conducted with agreements and understandings, many arrived at secretly. Thus the conduct of foreign policy as a whole is now effectively in the hands of the president. Similarly, while Congress has declared war only five times, presidents have sent U.S. forces into conflicts around the world many more times than that. The reality of the American regime in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that the president’s power on the world stage is almost beyond checks and balances, limited only by his skill in exercising that power.