The End of the American Consensus

We weren't told how to behave that day after 9-11, we just knew. It was right; it was the opposite of what we feel today . . . Are you ready to be the person you were that day after 9-11, on 9-12?

-Glenn Beck, 3/13/09

Wherefore 9/11 nostalgia?

What kind of nostalgia does the memory of 9-12-01 provoke? Why would it be appealing?

The memory of unity, of confronting the world as a coherent American people is clearly part of such romanticism.

The current economic recession, the fear of terrorism, and intensified political partisanship (through the Bush and, now, the Obama years) heighten the appeal of a reassuring unity.


Whence our discord?

But the events themselves (terror attack, economic recession) do not explain all of our unease. Nor does partisanship explain all of our discord.

Rather, 9/11 and the financial meltdown forced us to recognize American vulnerability in new ways and to make decisions that undermined the ideological consensus, predicated on the integrity of nation-states and of markets, that constituted the bulwark of American political life from, at least, World War II until recent years.

Let’s look at the security and economic challenges of recent years to understand how they have punctured this American consensus.


The security challenge: 9/11 demonstrated the limitations of the nation-state system: We learned that the apparently mundane political goings-on in other nation-states are of vital security interest to us even when possess no large conventional army. In other words, we have to pay attention to foreign societies, not just foreign militaries. The Bush Administration’s argument for the Iraq war, love it or hate it, proposed a response to this facet of the security challenge. At the same time, the preemptive Iraq War directly undermined Americans’ faith in the stability and relevance of the international laws undergirding the nation-state system.

The economic challenge: The TARP bailout demonstrated the limitations of our corporate sector as well as our new economic vulnerability: Ultimately, the stabilization of that sector demanded the ‘public insurance’ of our tax dollars. Also, our debt and our trade imbalance demonstrated that the economic goings-on in other nation-states are of vital interest to us. Our large international debt limited our options to respond to the financial crisis and may have contributed (read more here here and here) to it in a number of ways.

In short, events have overwhelmed the ideology that underpinned American political thinking from the end of World War II until recent years: We now have less faith in the international system of nation-states as well as less faith in free market, corporate capitalism.

This ideological disorientation causes the malaise that Glenn Beck now exploits.

Clear and Principled

Obama to Al-Arabiya:

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.

I have to say that I am excited and hopeful about Obama's pending visit to, and speech in, a Muslim capital.

The Nation-State and Global Integration

A few questions about strains on the power and efficacy of the nation-state:

(a) Does the global financial crisis call for international management of, say, currency exchange rates?

(b) Do globalization and the near-global triumph of capitalism undermine the greatest incentive (namely, international competition, respectively, among capitalist powers and between capitalist and non-capitalist powers) for leading capitalists to attend to the well-being of those who are not succeeding?

(c) Do global warming and other environmental strains demand an internationally-coordinated response that cannot entirely be managed by one nation-state?

My answer to all of these questions is 'yes' and points to the growing importance of international cooperation to solve many of our most pressing problems. I am not arguing that states are not strong. Neither am I am arguing necessarily for inter-governmental cooperation to solve these problems (although, such will sometimes be vital). Rather, I am arguing that a global perspective is becoming of greater importance. In due time, I believe that such a perspective will become the dominant paradigm, superseding the nation-state paradigm.

It is no coincidence that this pattern of integration presents itself as we find ourselves in a world in which everyone can be lifted out of poverty and in which universal education can be imagined. These goals can be achieved because (a) the global economy is sufficiently integrated to distribute basic goods, services, and skills to those in need of them, (b) globalization and the near-triumph of capitalism have led to a global economy in which human capital is of ever-greater economic value, and (c) environmental challenges force us to focus on how we can develop wealth without solely relying on materials. The best answers to this question are the development of technology and of human capital.

Emerging Independent Judiciary in Iraq

Briefly:

Here’s a story you don’t see very often. Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

Read more.

Impressed by Obama

Obama's strategy thus far, on three major issues, can be characterized as "focus, continue, and engage." The broad outlines are perfectly elegant.

Specifically:

+focus on the economy: little explanation is needed here. Obama has managed to include many major advisors in his administration: Geithner at Treasury, Summers at the National Economic Council, Goolsbee and Volcker on a special recovery taskforce.

+continue with the late second-term Bush approach to foreign policy: The caution here is reassuring to me and seems that it will be generally endured by those further to the left on such issues.

+engage on health care: Obama has chosen to extend internet democracy first to the discussion about health care. This is wise because (a) he can thus engage activists, and perhaps even temper their expectations as they are forced to wrestle with real world issues, even while he postpones immmediate action and (b) he may actually be able to glean a few good ideas as discussants will be able to sift the 'wheat from the chaff' through a participant-run ratings system.

Very impressed.

Obama and Russia

I agree.

Obama enters office signaling that he will continue the policies of President Bush's late second term in Iraq and Afghanistan, and key architects of those policies, starting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, will likely keep their jobs. That would leave Russia as the unexpected laboratory for Obama to shape his own foreign policy.

Read more.

Kagan on Europe: A Spicy Interview

Here are excerpts from a spicy interview with Robert Kagan in Der Spiegel. I particularly enjoyed the incisiveness of his critiques of European political blindnesses.

First:

Kagan: Correct. And, in that respect, ever since the surge, the additional troops we sent, there have been great successes…

SPIEGEL: …which are undeniable, though not necessarily sustainable. And this results primarily from the fact that the US government is paying bribes to tens of thousands of Sunni fighters to turn their backs on al-Qaida and no longer attack US troops.

Kagan: The money is really not the main issue. The issue is the entire new US military strategy, which establishes security and dramatically improves the lives of people. The New York Times recently reported that the overwhelming majority of al-Qaida terrorists have abandoned Iraq as a safe haven and that they are joining their fellow insurgents in Afghanistan.

SPIEGEL: The terrorists are undoubtedly concentrated in Afghanistan and in the border region with Pakistan, and some are certainly going to those places from Iraq. But this is not an entirely new development. The war against terrorism should have been waged in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, as Obama has said.

Kagan: You cannot acknowledge our successes in Iraq because Europeans can never admit that Bush is doing something right.

And:

SPIEGEL: An overwhelming majority of Europeans want to see Barack Obama become president…

Kagan: Yes, of the United States, although they would never elect someone like that in their own countries. But I understand the Europeans. I too believe that Obama would be an exciting choice, given America’s history. But also a risky one. He has no foreign policy experience compared with McCain, who has been to Europe dozens of times and is intimately familiar with world problems.

GEOPOLITICS, FINANCE, AND EDUCATION

In the upcoming weeks, world leaders will meet to begin to consider a new financial architecture for the world.

If they fail to found a cooperative framework, the threat of protectionism, economic decline, and the associated political challenges (which would not be small, and could be frightening) will be our biggest challenges.

If they succeed (as I suspect that they will), we will have taken a noticeable step to a more integrated world in which conflict between large nations becomes somewhat less likely. Challenges would still remain in that regard, to be sure, not least the endurance of petrodictatorships. Still, new issues will, after such a success, begin to come to the fore. I believe that one of the boldest dividing lines in a more stable (I take small group terrorism into account here.), integrated world will be the divide between the information technologically-able and the informational technologically-challenged. The would increase the importance of education, relative to international relations, as a defining issue for geopolitical stability.

What do you think?

"Are America’s Elites Post-American?" and Other Implied Questions of a Rambling Monologue

I admit that I'm throwing these thoughts at you, dear reader. Much can be more tightly defined and/or more broadly spun out. I'd love your feedback: What message do you discern from these expatiations?

The confrontation of non-democratic powers reinforces our belief that we need to dynamic, flexible, and largely unconstrained by governmental regulation. The self-interested reason that elites sometimes support social programs is that they believe in the strengthening of the nation-state, in this context.

The intermingling of elites, however, has undermined the sense that the future of elites is tied to the common person. At the same time, the common American supports the status quo because of a belief in the need to confront regimes that are less free, and potentially aggressive.

Peaceful accommodation among elites may eventually lead to the perception that aggressive confrontation is not strongly needed and the common person may decide that it is worthwhile to secure health and educational benefits for himself.

Trade agreements are one step in the direction of events such as these unfolding. More significant, however, would be (1) the democratization of China and (2a) the democratization of important parts of the Middle East or (2b) a dramatic decrease in our reliance on oil (NB: 2a and 2b do not both need to happen for the belief in a stable, wealthy world to take root much more firmly.). Such an occurrence (which would likely take decades to solidify itself) would convince common folks that the need to band behind their elite leadership is not so strong as it had earlier seemed.

Obama is an interesting phenomenon because he senses the potential for such a secure, wealthy world order to emerge. He simultaneously seems to support the passions of common folks to secure their part of an international system that does not fully consider them. This is a common liberal stance in American today. Obama is so successful because he presents it with so little acrimony. The image is understandably appealing.

The shortcoming is that, so long as challenges to the democratic world order are not taken seriously, the risks remain of (1) an ebb in the tide of democratic expansion and/or (2) a crisis in the relationship between Obama and American middle in the event of future challenges to that order.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT AMERICAN POWER

Please consider reading this if you are queasy about American power in the world (Friedman today on Zimbabwe).

FOREIGN AID AND FOREIGN POLICY

+ Sam Ruteikara argues that American attitudes about sex, in so far as they influence foreign aid policy, have undermined the Ugandan effort to fight AIDS. This is not the traditional critique (that pro-abstinence policymakers undermine condom distribution, sex education, etc.). Rather, Ruteikara argues that an American bias towards accepting casual sex has undermined Uganda's efforts to discourage the same.

+Gregory Scoblete suggests that we consider Obama and McCain's foreign policy in terms of their particularist and universalist tendencies, respectively. More specifically, how generalizable do they each believe American values to be? These positions do not easily correlate with the hawk vs. dove paradigm.

Peace in Iraq

David Brooks broadens our understanding of this topic in today's New York Times. Here are the first several paragraphs:

The U.S. brought no shortage of misconceptions into Iraq, but surely the longest lasting has been what you might call: Founding Fatherism. This is the belief that peace will come to the country when the nation’s political elites gather at a convention hall and make a series of grand compromises involving power-sharing and a new constitution.

The Bush administration has been pushing the Iraqis to make this sort of grand compromise for years — to little effect. The Democrats happily declare that there has been no political progress in Iraq because this grand compromise is the only kind of political progress they can conceive of.

As Philip Carl Salzman argues in “Culture and Conflict in the Middle East” (brilliantly reviewed by Stanley Kurtz in The Weekly Standard), many Middle Eastern societies are tribal. The most salient structure is the local lineage group. National leaders do not make giant sacrifices on behalf of the nation because their higher loyalty is to the sect or clan. Order is achieved not by the top-down imposition of abstract law. Instead, order is achieved through fluid balance of power agreements between local groups.

In a society like this, political progress takes different forms. It’s not top down. It’s bottom up. And this is exactly the sort of progress we are seeing in Iraq. While the Green Zone politicians have taken advantage of the surge by trying to entrench their own power, things are happening at the grass-roots.

THE AUSTRALIAN PM

I hadn't been expecting to write about Australia. Still, I found this description of the new Prime Minister's foreign policy to be interesting. He seems to me to be on the right track for the decades ahead.

An excerpt:

It would be easy to ridicule [Prime Minister Rudd's foreign policy] ambition and it would be wrong. The European portion of Rudd's world tour takes him deep into the second leg of his now famous foreign policy tripod. The American part of the journey represented the first leg of the tripod: the US alliance.
Here Rudd made profoundly important commitments to the US alliance as central to Australian foreign policy, to a view of the US as "overwhelmingly a force for good" in the world, and displayed a warmth to Republican and Democratic leaders alike, which underlined the bipartisan quality of the alliance in both the US and Australia.

Now, in Europe, he displays the second leg of his policy tripod, his commitment to multilateralism and the institutions of global governance.

Next week, in China, we'll get the third leg: deep engagement with Asia.

OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY

Here is the best article about Obama's foreign policy vision that I've read yet.


This quotation sums up the analysis:

Obama's foreign policy brain trust . . . envision[s] a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

I have two comments about the quotation:

1) I like the idea of "dignity promotion": I appreciate and support the desire to address "conditions" that "prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root." I agree that we have thought too litle about this in recent years and I would appreciate it if we come to see Obama 'put his money where his mouth is' and explicitly make the kinds of arguments that Kerrey, et. al, are somewhat more cautious in making, but which many Democrats apparently believe. I agree that the Democrats will not be come credible about foreign policy by being "lite Republicans."

2) I am not comfortable with the apparent dismissal of the idea of "democracy promotion." The US is not simply a charitable organization. It has fundamental interests at stake that are tied to the promotion of democracy. Is it possible that the focus on 'dignity' rather than 'democracy' implies a focus on basic needs and a relative neglect of the political and civil forms that stabilize free and prosperous societies?

As Aristotle writes in Politics (IV.4:1291a19ff):

If the mind is to be reckoned as a more essentially a part of a living being than the body, parts of a similar order must equally be reckoned as more essentially as parts of the city than those which serve its basic needs. By this we mean the military part, the part concerned in the legal organization of justice, and (we may also add) the part engaged in deliberation, which is a function that needs the gift of political understanding.

The Logic (?) of the US Creed, Democratic Ideals, and Foreign Policy

I was inspired to put this together after reading a report a CNN article about the Rand Corp. review of US policy in Iraq (commissioned by the US Department of Defense). I supported the war in Iraq but feel that the strategy of our struggle against terrorism is unproductively skewed towards military tactics.

I've put together a series of interlinked statements that help to explain why I supported the war and how I think our efforts have gone awry. The arguments are political and social, as well as military [Quotes are taken from CNN quotations from the Rand Corp. report (My apologies for not looking them up myself :)].

Here goes:

(1) Every society depends, for cohesion, on a common sense of mission.
(2) The US creed “that all men are created equal” is one of the central elements to this nation’s sense of mission.
(3) This creed ultimately requires us to respect all people around the world both in terms of (a) the value of the lives and (b) their desire for self-government (Again, these requirement relate back to item #1 and are therefore pragmatic, as much as idealistic requirements.)
(4) The paradox of international politics flows from the fact that there exist authoritarian regimes and movements that can undermine societies that adhere to the ideal of “human equality”; it is not always apparent how to stop these regimes without the use of force. The use of force against these regimes contradicts item #3, the requirement that we respect the dignity of every human life (Namely, when civilians are killed in Afghanistan by US forces, our own faith in our national creed is affected.)
(5) In order to both (a) uphold our international commitments and (b) maintain our national faith in our creed, we must never allow violence to be the dominant aspect of our foreign policy.
(6) Over-reliance on violence also erodes our international relationships and exhausts our forces (which are ultimately supported by the morale and treasure of the nation entire).
(7) The attempt to implant democracy in the Middle East is an important element of the effort to spread democracy around the world. This importance is related to (a) the terrorism that has flowed from that region and (b) yes, the importance of oil to the stability of the geopolitical system.
(8) A recent report from the Rand Corp., commissioned by the US Department of Defense, highlights some ways in which we are over-relying on hard power, as opposed to soft power, in our struggle against terrorism. The report focuses on ways in which the US military is overstretching itself and ways in which we are overlooking the possibility of international cooperation to further our goals (see #6).
(9) The report also emphasizes that "Foreign forces cannot substitute for effective local governments, and they can even weaken their legitimacy," However, "when it comes to building these and other civil capabilities abroad, the United States is alarmingly weak." Therefore, "the federal government will need a dramatic increase in civilian capabilities [and] new organizational arrangements . . ." Such an effort would both (a) support the US military (see items #6 and 8) and would (b) help to spread the creed of the US around the world. Such an effort would also help to resolve the paradox contained in item #4, as it would allow us to promote democracy abroad with less reliance on the use of force.