Nation-Building

There's a new foreign policy group in town called the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy , and they have written a letter to President Obama urging him to "focus US strategy more clearly on Al Qaeda" instead of explicit nation-building. The text of the letter follows: Dear Mr. President: During your campaign for the Presidency, Americans around the country appreciated your skepticism of the rationales for the Iraq war. In 2002, you had warned that such an endeavor would yield "a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, and with unintended consequences." You pointed out the dangers of fighting such a war "without a clear rationale and without strong international support." As scholars of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, many of us issued similar warnings before the war, unfortunately to little avail. Today, we are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is growing increasingly detached from considerations of leng...

Earlier, I posted my thoughts about whether terrorism was still a threat , noting that in one sense the answer was obviously yes, but asking whether 9-11 was the outlier it seemed to be. My post was intended to provoke a discussion, and the best response was by Dave Schuler, reproduced here in full: The question reminds me of the story of the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building. As he passed the 30th floor, someone yelled to him "How are you doing?" to which he responded "So far, so good." Of course 9/11 is an outlier. Unfortunately, from a political standpoint that's irrelevant. Any resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will necessarily respond to such an event (my view is that President Gore would have done virtually everything that President George W. Bush did , including invading Iraq, but I seem to be an outlier in that belief). Yes, terrorism is a threat. As I pointed out in my memorial post , we haven't really responded prudently to the threat...

Josh Trevino makes an impassioned plea against the inevitable , ie the pending declaration of independence by the province of Kosovo from Serbia. The following nugget of argument is in a sense the real heart of his argument: The old Wilsonian idea that a geographically-bounded majority population deserves its own sovereignty dies hard. In this decade, with American foreign policy predicated more than ever on quasi-Wilsonian principles, it is especially formidable. It is also a recipe for disaster: with the United States engaged in two wars in multiethnic states, to explicitly affirm this precedent in Kosovo invites more serious problems and bloodshed elsewhere. With Kosovo independent, what grounds do we have for dissuading the independence aspirations of the Kurds, the Pashtuns, the Baluchis, the Assyrians, the Arab Shi’a, et al.? Furthermore, what prevents Russia from seizing upon this precedent to cause trouble in the Caucasus and Moldova? (They say they won’t — for now — but why gi...

Blake succinctly summarizes the problem : for all our rhetoric about freedom, in practice our foreign policy has been pro-Western instead: The United States says it supports democracy, but ends up backing pro-Western leaders when push comes to shove. Take the case of Pervez Musharraf, whom U.S. President George W. Bush described Tuesday as "somebody who believes in democracy" despite the fact that the Pakistani leader has suspended the Constitution, thrown many of his opponents in jail, and gone after independent media outlets. Or consider the Palestinian territories, where the White House called for elections and then blanched when the distasteful Hamas won them fair and square. Is it any wonder that U.S. rhetoric on democracy isn't taken seriously? The policy has been consistent across political parties and presidential administrations, though only the Bush Administration has staked so much rhetorical capital on freedom. As The Arabist notes, we are essentially pursuing...

It's six years since 9-11. Everyone has their own stories about what they were doing that day when time stopped and a nation turned to CNN. It was a day that truly changed the world, like a catalyst. It is time now to accept the new world we have and stop worrying about why it is so. That also means letting go of 9-11 to some extent. What about 9-12? What world do we want to create? From the beginning, 9-11 has been politicized by the Bush Administration and the Republican Party. It's become a substitute for debate, a massive black hole on the horizon of our political discourse. Contrast this with the soaring rhetoric by President Bush to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks: "Some speak of an age of terror...But this country will define our times...As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world." But what is the actual legacy of 9-11 thin...

I think it's probably necessary to preface this post with the following disclosures: I was against invading Iraq; I am a pragmatic liberal interventionist as regards to foreign policy; I think that the argument for total and complete withdrawal from Iraq is a. genuinely harmful to America's self-interest (in a global sense) and b. not on the table, regardless of who wins the election in 2008. The very term "withdrawal" is in fact meaningless, but there's some irony in the fact that the rabid Article III/Section 3-quoting right-wingers and the reflexively anti-military ultra-leftists define the term in precisely the same way. Rather analogous to how Islamophobes and Al Qaeda interpret the Qur'an the same way, in fact, but that's truly tangential. Small-w withdrawal can take many forms, and there are costs and benefits accordingly. For the sake of discussion, let's define Withdrawal with a capital W as the total Vietnam-esque withdrawal of every last sol...

Atrios has been on a snark roll recently lampooning what he calls the club of "very serious people" aka the VSP who dominate foreign policy debate. Glenn Greenwald recently alluded to the same, arguing that the sacred cow of American foreign policy is that America has a right to intervene around the world in its own interests . He casts this as a " rigid pro-war ideology " but frankly, this is a perfectly reasonable prime motivator for any nation's self-interest; given that America has the most power of all nations in the world (and more than the rest combined), a truly liberal and moral foreign policy demands not that we have the right to intervene, but rather that we have the obligation to intervene. Pragmatic and liberal intervention , of course - and always firmly within the bounds of international law. (It bears repeating that the Iraq war was perfectly legal and bore UN sanction). I kind of like the acronym, VSP. Might as well adopt it - as Very Seriou...