Strategic Flexibility: the Obama Administration after Egypt

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Baraack Obama visits the Sphinx, 2009

Official White House photo by Pete Souza

This post first appeared on the LSE IDEAS Blog

A month on from President Ben Ali’s ouster in Tunisia, a wave of protest has swept across the Arab world. With varying degrees of popular support, protests against ruling elites have sprung up in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Iran, and of course Egypt, where weeks of protest culminated in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.

Whilst the motivations of the protesters in each of these countries reflect their specific political contexts, the inspiration drawn from Tunisia and Egypt points to more general grievances across the region. The core dynamics: ageing leaders who have held on to power too long; corruption, censorship and a lack of accountability; youthful populations; and most significantly, economic malaise that has rendered much of that youth jobless and poverty-stricken. Combine these structural features of regional politics with the opportunities afforded by the communications technology which is increasingly becoming a defining element of interaction in the international system, and there exists the potential for rapid and widespread political change in the Arab world, with profound strategic consequences.

Nowhere would those consequences be felt more sharply than the United States, which has regarded the balance of power in Middle East as  a key strategic interest at least since Britain’s withdrawal from the region was confirmed by Suez. Over the past two decades, America’s alliances with ageing autocrats in the region have brought stability, although at no small cost both to the US taxpayer and to the United States’ standing on the Arab street, costs that led The Economist late last year to wonder whether America’s obsession with the region had been worth it.

A distinctly difficult relationship

The United States’ highly sensitised and simultaneously ambivalent relationship with the region has been reflected by the commentariat’s response to the Obama administration’s reaction to and handling of the Egypt crisis. Condalezza Rice sought to credit the policies of the Bush administration for encouraging the aspirations for freedom of the Egyptian people that precipitated the fall of the Mubarak regime while Anne-Marie Slaughter, the recently departed Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, pointedly noted that the roots of the Egyptian uprising were wholly internal and essentially ‘leaderless’.

The neoconservative (for want to a more accurate designation) strand on the right were particularly excised by events in Egypt, with my colleague Niall Ferguson simultaneously lamenting Obama’s twin failures to ride the wave of popular and democratic dissent on the one hand and to risk Israeli and Saudi disgust by failing to prop up Mubarak on the other. Professor Ferguson’s somewhat schizophrenic reaction reflects the deep uncertainty on one part of the American right between their admirable support for human freedom and democratic governance on the one hand and their exaggerated sense of fear of Muslim opinion on the other. Citing Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009, in which the President stated that ‘America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition’, Professor Ferguson demurs:

“Those lines will come back to haunt Obama if, as cannot be ruled out, the ultimate beneficiary of his bungling in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains by far the best organized opposition force in the country—and wholly committed to the restoration of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia. Would such an outcome advance “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings” in Egypt? Somehow, I don’t think so.”

Without wanting to dwell on Ferguson’s characterisation of the Muslim Brotherhood, inaccurate though it surely is, his broader complaint that the Obama administration lacks a strategy for the Middle East is worth considering. If it is true that, as reported by the New York Times, the administration had failed to think strategically about the possibility that unrest in Egypt might endanger Mubarak’s regime, then that represents a major failure of strategic planning, however unpredictable events in the region may have been. Yet predefined strategies can close off options when what is required is tactical flexibility in responding to events.

In this respect the Obama administration has managed the crisis rather well. Rather than sending out mixed messages – as the critics alleged – the administration kept its options open, and got on the right side of history only when the direction that events were taking became clear. Had the United States been seen to be actively interfering – either by Arab publics in terms of propping up Mubarak, or by nervous allies in terms of attempting to force democratisation – it might have created further difficulties for American policy in the region. Yet for all the administration’s tactical adroitness in co-opting the Egyptian army, whose status past and future depends on American largesse, gauging the broader impact on America’s strategic posture of revolutionary change in the Arab world is more difficult.

The United States in the Arab World

That the United States has important interests in the region is not in doubt. According to figures from the US Department of Energy, 15% of the US’s total crude and liquid oil product imports come from the Persian Gulf. Saudia Arabia alone accounts for 8.5%.

The reality may be a long way from some of the rhetoric of American ‘dependence’ on Middle Eastern oil, but the imports nonetheless remain significant, and the free operation of the oil industry in the region reflects broader American strategic interests in an open global economic system. It is to ensure the unfettered movement of these oil resources that the U.S. Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain, itself now the subject of significant protests directed at absolute monarchy government of Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

Alongside these resource issues three clear and linked strategic priorities loom large over the United States’ relationships in the region: the state of Israel; Islamic terrorism and Iran.

Israel, the most domestically sacrosanct of America’s special relationships, is also a profoundly inconvenient alliance for the United States. The United States’ moral and strategic support for Israel translates in practice into a near-unconditional support for Israeli policies which infects all aspects of America’s interests in the Middle East.

It has been America’s relationship with Israel that has largely defined its partners and enemies in the region, leading the United States to support regimes that though undemocratic could be prevailed upon to accept Israel as a fait accompli. The refusal of Iran to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist is in turn the source of its enmity with the United States. The condition of Palestine, which endures as a result of America’s ultimate acquiescence to its junior partner, remains the strongest recruiting tool of Al Qaeda and Islamist groups.

A Strategy of Flexibilty

Popular protest in the Arab world would then seem to be the worst of all possible worlds, as pro-American leaders give way to the expression of popular sentiment that decries US support for Israel and aligns itself with Iran and Islamists. This, at least is the received wisdom in the West among commentators who value regional stability and American material interests over ideals of democracy and universal liberty.

But the received wisdom may be wrong. One does not have to subscribe to notions of democratic peace to believe that the spread of democracy in the Arab world might actually suit American interests. The wave of protests have been fundamentally built around specific nationalisms and expressions of domestic political discontent than they have relied on anti-Israeli, anti-American or Islamist ideology, so much so that in Tahrir Square, protestors chanted “Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Now Seyed Ali,” in reference to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. The flaring up again of the Green Revolution there, and the continuation of protests in Libya despite Gaddaffi’s ruthless crackdowns, reinforces the fact that it is autocratic dominance of political discourse, rather than the promise of Islamism or fury at the West, that is spurring the current wave of protest.

The United States should therefore be relatively sanguine about the strategic consequences of regime alterations in the region. Certainly, regime change bought about by broad-based popular protest predicated on internal discontent is preferable to having to play an active role in the succession of ageing autocratic leaders. Three principles should therefore guide American diplomacy in the weeks and months ahead:

First, be flexible. As in Egypt, play cautiously and don’t overcommit the diplomatic hand. There are certain to be different outcomes in different countries, don’t attempt or expect for there to be a one-size fits all policy. The United States does not need to assert a doctrine.

Second, as in Egypt embrace those democratic revolutions that are succeeding, and commit resources to ensuring that transitions are managed in the spirit of emancipation rather than rancour.

Third, and crucially, commit to support the new democracies in the region for the long-term. Decades of authoritarian neglect must be reversed with sustained investment so that the young populations that have brought about these political upheavals may see the fruit of their labours in increasing economic prosperity. Significant development policies – a Marshall Plan for the Arab world – will be required to ensure that once the euphoria of revolution fades it is not replaced by discontent that creates space for extremists.

One size fits none

A policy of strategic flexibility is all the more important given the different levels of influence that the United States has across the region. In Libya, there is surely nothing that the United States can offer the regime that would persuade it to halt its repression of the demonstrations and embark on a political transition that takes account of popular opinion. The same is surely true of Iran. In Bahrain, on the other hand, as in Egypt, America’s diplomatic ties have allowed it to pressurise the authorities into acting with relative restraint and undertaking reforms. There is no uniform ‘leadership option’ towards this wave of protests, any more than there will be identikit political outcomes across the countries currently experiencing political turmoil.

Ultimately, the United States should not feel its interests threatened by popular protest and democratisation, even where interests are as delicately poised as in the Middle East and even when the autocrats under siege have long been useful allies. Rather, the spread of democratic governance, and the evidence of people’s desire for it, should be of more concern to the governments of Beijing and Moscow, and most significantly Iran. The US can ride this wave out, it is for others to fear on whose shores it might break.

“The Connection Was Reset”: Google goes to War for the West

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Internet users in China last night discovered that the domain Google.cn redirected to Google.com.hk, as the world’s largest search engine shut down its Chinese servers and redirected traffic to Hong Kong, where – crucially – the search engine results would be uncensored by Google themselves.  Of course, users with IP addresses in mainland China attempting to search for material deemed ‘sensitive’ by the Chinese authorities would still be prevented from accessing information by the ‘Great Firewall’, with its tell-tale error message: ‘the connection was reset’.

Yet Google’s decision is of limited significance to Chinese surfers.  Experienced activists in China have ways and means of getting round the authorities’ controls, for example by using IP blocking, VPNs and proxy severs.  Indeed, within China Google accounts for only around 20% of searches, with the home-grown search engine Baidu holding the kind of dominance Google is used to enjoying, with 75% of all searches.  Having said that, China’s technology for blocking and filtering web results is less sophisticated and effective than the rules Google voluntarily applied to its Chinese ‘spiders’ four years ago, so the move does represent a very small, but nonetheless welcome, boost fro freedom of information in China.

Nor is Google’s decision of particular significance for the finances of the company itself in the short term, even if the decision has been taken – as was the case in 2006 when Google decided to filter its results in China – very much from a business perspective.  China accounts for less than 1% of Google’s total income: whilst companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been eager to gain access to a rapidly-growing market with up to a billion new customers, the fact is that currently revenues from China are insignificant.  Indeed the business decision that Google appears to have taken is that their stance on China has begun to erode their position in other markets.  Google’s idealistic founders may have based the company around the slogan ‘don’t be evil’, but that clever piece of marketing disguised the essential truth behind the search engine’s success: yes Google was fast; yes it returned different, and ultimately better, results; but the key to Google’s dominance was that their users had trust in it.  And user trust is all the more important as firms compete to control user data as more and more computing takes place ‘in the cloud’.  So whilst Google’s decision is based on a long-term business argument that has brought it great success to date, it risks little in the short term in the Chinese market.  Google also clearly believes that Chinese censorship is unsustainable, and that once controls are removed it will be able to return to that market victorious, able to generate user trust quickly on the basis that it – unlike Microsoft or Yahoo – has a genuine commitment to open information, that it had not been evil.

And here is the rub: by revealing the Chinese government’s widespread hacking regime – a fairly open secret in the IT world – and by withdrawing from China, Google has raised the stakes in the ideological conflict surrounding the rights of people versus the rights of governments; it has essentially gone to war for liberalism.  Whilst China may have embraced the economic tenets of liberal capitalism fairly convincingly over the last two decades, its attitudes to political liberalism lag far behind.  Ultimately – as Google rightly believes – sociologically the two cannot be separated: free consumption requires political freedom and vice-versa, and the progress of Chinese economic growth, particularly as it seeks to develop its economy past the core manufacturing stage to focus on R&D and information services, cannot hope to proceed smoothly without political liberalisation.  Google’s actions, however, are a spur to that process, which will both embolden activists, weak though they remain in the face of the Chinese state, and more importantly detract from China’s ability to continue to progress its economy into more advanced sectors.

It is, as well, inconceivable that Google would have taken this move without consultation with the United States government.  Whilst the administration is truly a ‘team of rivals’ with regards to policy on China, with Hilary Clinton significantly more hawkish than the President and Vice-President, the government’s enlisting of Twitter as a policy adjunct during the Green protests in Iran demonstrates that the administration understands the power of open information in driving social and political change conducive to US interests.  So while China is able to defy the diplomatic demands of the US on the level of the Yuan, on sanctions for Iran, or on human rights, in Google it may encounter an irresistible force for the spread of political liberalism.

Understanding the End of the Cold War

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The end of the Cold War is arguably the most important event to hit the discipline of international relations since the first chair in the subject was created at Aberystwyth in 1919. Academics in the field almost universally failed to predict it and our theories didn’t appear to explain it, and this spawned both heated debate and new thinking within the field. What follows is a brief sketch with pointers to resources on the topic – some well known, others less so.

John Gaddis’ “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War” is a good place to start. Gaddis places the blame for IR failing to predict the Cold War ending as it did squarely with the deterministic social-science approach to the discipline that failed to accept indeterminacy, even as the sciences themselves were embracing unpredictability. Ted Hopf’s response and their correspondence the next volume is worth reading too, particularly for his more fundamental critique that it was not so much the theories themselves as the sociology of the discipline that prevented scholars asking the right questions.

Michael Cox, in contrast, focuses his contribution for Volume 3 of Sage’s Twentieth Century International Relations on the empirical reasons for the failure. The implication of Cox’s argument is that it was poor information rather than poor theory that lay at the heart of IR’s inability to forsee peaceful Soviet collapse.

Of course, some scholars did get close to predicting the way in which the Cold War would end, notably the macro-sociologist Randall Collins. In his “What Theories Predicted the State Breakdowns and Revolutions of the Soviet Bloc?” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 14 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992) he critically evaluates the quality of both his own and others’ predictions.

Of course, in assessing the causes of failure to predict the end of the Cold War, a great proletarian spanner is thrown in the works by the degree of disagreement as to the direct causes of that event itself. Was it Reagan’s policies, as Patman contends? The effects of the Afghanistan War, and not anything intrinsic to the Cold War itself, that precipitated a collapse of empire, a thesis advanced by Reuveney and Prakash? A shift in ideas within Soviet elites, as per Matthew Evangelista among others, or shifts in the external environment as proposed by Deudney and Ikenberry? Indeed, such is the complexity of the event that Ned Lebow and Stein resort to ‘non-linear confluence’ as their preferred model of causation to explain the events of 1989-91 in Richard Hermann’s volume ‘Ending the Cold War’. Such is the confusion that James Lee Ray and Bruce Russet feel the need to reassure us that despite appearances, the end of the Cold War doesn’t render scientific prediction in international politics obsolete.

The main target of this plethora of explanations and acknowledgement of complexity is neorealist theory. The classic hatchet-job is done by Richard Ned Lebow in his “The Long Peace, the end of the Cold War and the failure of Realism”. Constructivist explanations, such as those from Koslowski and Kratochwil and Tuomas Forsberg, reflect the boom in this post-positivist approach. Innepolitik is back in vogue in Matthew Evangelista’s “Paradox of State Strength”.

However, it is not for nothing that realism has been the dominant paradigm of international relations since the Peloponnesian War. Despite having taken quite a beating, realism fights back off the ropes. Stephen Walt provides a strong defense of realism in light of the end of the Cold War and Brooks and Wohlforth first reevaluate the supposed ‘landmark case for ideas’ and later emphasise the role of economic constraints in Wohlforth’s edited volume Cold War Endgame. However, perhaps the most perceptive of all the realist defences is Wohlforth’s first attempt in 1995-6, which despite constructing a realist account chides realists for thinking that because such an explanation is possible that somehow realism stands unbowed.

The end of the Cold War ensures that IR theory is a more plural and epistemologically varied place. Risse-Kappen and Grunberry therefore accurately call the end of the Cold War “A Time of Reckoning” in Allan and Goldmann’s edited volume, and for Wohlforth it was certainly a “Reality Check”. Hopmann’s review essay provides excellent coverage of recent theoretical developments.

International Relations is surely a better place for these developments and the debate that produced them. The ‘neo-neo’ debate that obsessed the discipline for so long now seems as irrelevant and obscure as it surely was. Whether IR theory is in any better prediction to predict major events in international politics is debateable, probably doubtful, but that International Relations is better equipped to explain those events when they happen is indisputable.

Historical Revisionism and George W. Bush

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Reading today Mark Tractenberg’s typically thorough piece on Preventative War and US Foreign Policy, (Security Studies 16. 1) I was struck by just how much scholarship there now is that revises the initial assessments of the Bush Doctrine – that it was a radical (and unwelcome) departure from the American Foreign Policy tradition.

Off the top of my head, as well as Tractenberg’s demonstration of the prevalence of preventative war discussion within US elites during the Cold War (he could have gone back to the very founding of the American republic and found the same trends), there is also Adam Quinn’s excellent “The Deal” (International Studies Perspectives 9.1) and of course, Rob Singh and Tim Lynch’s After Bush.

There is a real case to be made that the Bush administration’s foreign policy has much in keeping with the general traditions of US diplomacy.  Indeed, I have argued myself that American foreign policy is continually balancing itslef between two schools of thought – those who believe that American liberty at home (and so American identity) can be best protected by avoiding the foreign entanglements that may pervert it; and those who believe that for America not to internationalise its liberal principles is to betray them, and therefore to undermine the very notion of America itself.

However, the existence of such enduring ideological debate should not lead us down the road of a historical revisionism that would justify the Bush Administration by reference to similarities with previous presidents.  The Bush Doctrine as set out in the 2002 National Security Strategy actually amounted to little in terms of actual policy.  It can hardly be said that the Afghan War was preventative, it was punitive, designed to remove the Taliban and leave a stable government.  The 2003 Iraq invasion was not a preventative war either, no matter how much leeway we are prepared to allow for the beliefs that all Western governments held that Saddam was continuing to develop WMD.  It was a war to remake the Middle East into a region more ameliorable to America’s interests (not incidentally, an oil grab, but more to reduce US dependence on problematic relationships with Saudi Arabia and Israel for oil and democracy respectively).

The Bush administration’s actual foreign policy, at least until 2005, was one that simultaneously combined withdrawal from the world, and a determined undermining of the institutions of the American system, with imperial world-making.  The nearest one can come to a similar kind of policy is the progressive imperialism around the time of the Spanish-American War, but there are no correlates of this type of isolationist-imperialism since the United States became a great power.

President Obama is attempting to return the United States to an internationalist position that is coherent with American diplomatic traditions.  The fact that he has to move so far, and convince so many people that the United States is indeed prepared to return to the table, shows that the initial assessment of Bush Administration was correct – an outlier in the American diplomatic tradition.  The revisionists have it wrong.

UPDATE:  A couple of days after I wrote this piece Christopher Fettweis published ‘Dangerous Revisionism: On the Founders, ‘Neocons’ and the Importance of History’ in Orbis which makes – in a more substantive, peer-reviewed kind of way – the same point, rightly emphasising the dangers to future American strategy from a revisionist history of George W. Bush

One Hundred days, but is it the President?

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You pretty much can’t move for assessments of President Obama’s first hundred days, a ‘milestone’ that the American media have obsessed over since FDR turned around a New Deal in the space of three months (even if his second hundred days were arguably more significant).  Most of the coverage has been complimentary, and the polls certainly suggest that the public at large agrees, despite the ridiculously high expectations this administration came to power with.  The rightwing has continued its hysterical reaction, led, somewhat counter-productively for the reorganistaion and rehabilitation of the GOP, by the unapologetic torturer-in-chief former Vice-President.  Amongst it though, an impressive piece of conservative commentary from the Heritage Foundation arguing that in foreign policy, for all his overtures, handshakes and offers of a new partnership, the world has not really met Obama halfway.

There is much to this.  Europe didn’t produce, in addition to its typical list of demands, a list of provisions, such as a significant and coordinated commitment to Afghanistan (and Pakistan), a situation which threatens European security interests far more than it threatens the United States.  Nor were the Chinese or the Europeans prepared to go along with all of the Brown-Obama plan for recapitalising and stimulating the global economy, realising perhaps that the UK and the US need it more than anyone else.  But it is not true that the test of leadership is how you get people to come along when they don’t want to.  That’s the test of bullying.  Leadership is long-term, it’s about commanding respect and willing acquiescence because the utility of your leadership is appreciated as an asset and others act accordingly.  So let us not be too swift to judge Obama’s diplomacy as a failure, or the Europeans as intransigent, or the Chinese as opportunistic.  Legitimacy and authority are all too easily squandered for the time and effort they take to build.

There is of course a second dimension.  If we take the charge at face-value, and Obama really is unable to get what he wants from his foreign policy leadership, is that really the fault of his particular brand of diplomacy?  America’s authority declined every time the Bush administration ignored others; America’s military power has been shown up as an expensive blend of Cold War era fireworks that can’t get the jobs it needs to do done in Iraq and Afghanistan; and most spectacularly, the American economy has imploded.  America, in short, is in decline, and Europe, China and the rest are simply acting in accordance with the structure of the international system that now confronts them.

Aspects of this analysis may well be true, but at the same time the structural aspects of American power make American leadership a genuine public good in the international system.  Obama can restore this leadership, but it will take time and it will be of a different nature to the imperial pretensions of the last fifteen years.  It will be leadership that is collaborative in nature, in which America sets the agenda, but doesn’t necessarily determine the policy or the resources that are put in pursuit of it.  It will take time to establish, and may well be forged in response to crisis.  But fail to recognise that the new American leadership will rest on authority rather than coercion and the realities of American decline may override the utility of American leadership.  A new kind of American century then, or none at all.  Obama is making the right choice.

What now for America’s AfPak Strategy?

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As the Taliban make new inroads into Pakistan, America is left trying to rebuild one failed states as another state fails next door. But Pakistan has a democratically elected government, and a population whose anti-Americanism grows stronger with every drone attack along the frontier.

Whilst Hilary Clinton may rail against the Pakistan government ‘abdicating’ to the Taliban, the basic political fact is that the government’s survival depends on not being seen to be an Amreican pawn. Despite the billions of dollars of US aid, the government has never been in a position to dictate to many of the western provinces, where feudal landowners had been dominant until the Taliban produced the force – often backed by local communities – to challenge the system.

What realistically can America and its European allies do? Long-term, Obama’s inclusive appracah to international relations may – may – difuse the more popular anti-Americanism that allows Talibanisation-by-invitation. But in the shorter term the United States has to focuse on holding what the Afghan and Pakistan governments have and strenthening the role of government in those regions, in particular by facilitating development and infrastructure.

The idea should be to isolate the Taliban, to draw back to a secure border on either side, implement a no-fly zone and then undermine the Taliban by making the grass greener on the other side. This is emporer Hadrian meets West Berlin, and in some ways it sounds like a negative strategy, and is it certainly not a quick fix. But it may well be the only option left that doesn’t run the very real risk of the collapse of the democratic government in Pakistan and its replacement with an Taliban state, in charge of nuclear weapons, next-door to India. And that really is too terrible to contemplate.

Nuclear Disarmament – An Idea Whose Time Has (Finally) Come?

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Some interesting thoughts from Henry Kissinger in the Washington Post today.  He sees the potential collapse of any homogenous world order if the great powers, currently acting like a global Concert of Europe, fail to ensure that neither North Korea nor Iran gain nuclear weapons capability in the next few (and as he points out, it is literally a few) years.

First, to take issue with the Concert of Europe analogy.  Yes, the Concert acted cooperatively to solve challenges to the existing balance.  But they did not have an agenda-setter, or indeed an agenda: the sole point was the prevention of a European war.  Today, the United States seeks to lead – and in most cases, the other members of the Concert – the EU, Russia, China, Japan – either lobby for leadership or seek to prevent it, depending on the area.  And the areas are multiple – climate change, economic crisis, statebuilding, counter-terrorism, and of course, weapons proliferation.

There is, frankly, little that even a united concert of great powers can do to prevent states such as N Korea and Iran going nuclear, if that is really their goal.  The technology is available, as are the materials.  It’s not an easy process, it takes time and money, but where there’s a will there’s definitely a way.  The task then, is to find the way to extinguish the will.

We have a successful case in Libya.  But here Gaddaffi simply had to be convinced that his regime was not being actively threatened by the West, and a few sweeteners to the deal thrown in.  North Korea and Iran are very different.  Whilst in the latter case it may be possible (though far harder than the Libyan case) to pursue a grand bargain, the strategic situation on the Korean peninsula cannot be up for discussion, and Kim Jung-Il is unlikely to ever be convinced that his regime is not threatened so long as American troops guard the demilitarised zone.

So what options are left?  There is one that has been gaining ground in Washington and Brussels over the last eighteen months – disarmament.  The US and Russia are proceeding with nuclear reduction talks, and though this can only be a good thing, both Cold War superpowers could make massive reductions in their arsenals and still be able to send each other – and everyone else – the way of the dinosaurs.

Russia and the US talking disarmament is a start.  But if the Kissinger’s concert is to convince startups like Iran and N Korea to abandon their nuclear programs then the United States needs to lead a universal process, which means adding Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel to the list.

American leadership is essential to get such a process off-the-ground, but given the likely fragmentation of world-order that Kissinger envisages it may well be directly in America’s – and the other powers – interests to do so.   Iran and North Korea won’t be the last, so the need is to avert the time where we’ll be worrying more about fallout than fragmentation.

The Sources of an Obama Doctrine

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Three pieces I’ve read this week caught my attention: the first on Barack Obama’s response to being asked to describe the ‘Obama Doctrine’ in foreign policy; the second on the rise of progressivism in American domestic politics and the third about the ‘insane’ reaction of the American right to all things Obama.

What struck me here is that whilst the Obama doctrine may differ from the Bush Doctrine in the admission that other countries have interests and potentially worthwhile things to say, that hardly makes it progressive, let alone liberal (and judging by the polling cited in Halpin and Teixeira’s American Prospect article the American public are somewhat confused by the relation of those two terms).  Which makes one wonder, why is the American right so enraged by it?

At very first impressions, the Obama Doctrine has three elements.  First, a revival of American leadership based on American values; second, offering a sense of input into that leadership wherever possible; and third, recognising that American leadership depends upon others’ acquiesence, and that means understanding that other states have legitimate interests.  This represents a repudiation of American doctrine from 2001-2005, which could be summed up as ‘our values are universal and we are the domiant superpower, so we can do what we like and everyone else will fall in line (and if they don’t what do we care)’.

But how significant is this change in tone?  The American right have reacted to it as a sign of Obama’s weakness, reflecting the nationalism that Anatol Lieven analyses in America, Right or Wrong.  It’s weak to engage Cuba and Venezuela, it’s weak to involve China in planning for economic recovery, it’s weak to use international institutions.  And all of this weakness isdangerous because it threatens America’s ability to act in its own interests, and a lack of international freedom of action will soon translate into a loss of individual political liberty at home.

Yet Obama has already wielded unilateral military power in an operation against Somali pirates, something that could easily have resulted, as one commentator noted, in those same right-wingers throwing the Book of Handy Jimmy Carter Epithets at him.  The change in tone that to date is the most salient feature of Obama’s foreign policy reflects a combination of political detente with a measure of American decline, and attempt to use the former to arrest the latter.  It recognises that the sources of challenges to American power are asymmetric, and it is the way in which that power is exercised that determines whether it is met with acquiesence or resistance.  In doing so, Obama hopes to reassert American hegemony through a public good model rather than an imperial model.

Whether the United States can continue to play the role of hegemon, however, depends on more than the willingness of others to accept America as the provider of global public goods.  It also depends on America’s ability to provide them, and on the American public’s willingness to pay for them.  Given the ‘tea bag’ tax protests last week, whether that willingness will remain in bad economic times is unclear.  But what is clear is that the right can’t have it both ways – leadership, whether by means of assertive nationalism or interest-based corporatism, costs.

IDEAS Special Report: The World Crisis

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A quick plug for asr001 report I edited, available as a pdf here

“Comment peut-on réguler le capitalisme”
Howard Davies
Director, London School of Economics

Global Financial Governance: Principles for Reform
David Held
Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, LSE
Kevin Young
LSE Fellow in Global Politics

The Implications of Globalised Finance
Danny Quah
Professor of Economics, London School of Economics

IDEAS Strategic Update: Afghanistan

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A quick plug for a report I edited, available as a pdf here

su001

Afghanistan: Now You See Me?

NATO Strategy – Building the Comprehensive Approach
Jamie Shea
Director of Policy Planning, NATO

The Pygmy who turned into a Giant: The Afghan Taliban in 2009
Antonio Giustozzi
Research Fellow, Crisis States Research Centre

Opium in Afghanistan: a reality check
Fabrice Pothier
Director, Carnegie Europe

Afghanistan – The Regional Dimension
Amalendu Misra
Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University