America Afflicted Posted by Shawn Brimley

So Ilan wanted me to do another post on strategy after his piece last week. Given that we all serve at his pleasure… here is my attempt.

America is suffering from profound strategic afflictions. Even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, the necessary conversation over the future of American power has yet to begin. What passes for a debate over America's purpose and place in the world occurs in campaign speeches and surrogate rhetoric divorced from the language of real choices and hard tradeoffs. Progressives need to do more than simply respond to attacks, we need to make a positive case for a strategy that can restore and renew American power. We need a grand strategy to make our country not just a great power, but a grand power.

What often goes unaddressed even in progressive circles is the fact that America is suffering from two fundamental and potentially crippling afflictions: strategic myopia and strategic amnesia.

America is suffering from strategic myopia. While the preponderance of American power is devoted to operations in the deserts of Mesopotamia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the attentions of other rising and revanchist great powers are focused elsewhere. During the Cold War, America power rested on the ability, along with allies, to retain primacy in the global commons – those sea, air, space, (and now cyberspace) dimensions upon and within which globalization depends. We have taken stability in the commons for granted – emerging powers have not. Welcome to the era of the contested commons.

• A few weeks ago, Russia declared it would dramatically increase its naval operations in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans to demonstrate its expanding military might. As melting Arctic ice opens new year-round shipping routes, and as rising oil prices make resource exploitation more practical, Russia is making aggressive claims on the far north.
• On January 11, 2007 China destroyed one of its own aging weather satellites with a ground-launched missile, demonstrating its developing anti-satellite capabilities. A year later, on February 20, 2008, the U.S. military destroyed one of its ailing satellites. With the United States and several rising powers increasingly dependent on space in the pursuit their military and economic interests, 2008 may, in hindsight, come to mark a turning point in the debate over the militarization of space.
• The digital realm is also a likely venue for future conflict. Recent attacks on U.S. defense computers and even those of several U.S. members of Congress have been publically linked to China. The U.S. Defense Department recent created a new "Cyberspace" military command.
• Rising powers such as China, India, Russia, and South Korea continue to invest heavily in naval capabilities, portending a future with up to a dozen so-called "blue-water" navies on the high seas – those that can project power far from their home shores. In 2006 near Okinawa, an advanced Chinese submarine surfaced very close to the U.S. carrier Kitty Hawk before being detected. With 90 percent of global commerce traveling by sea, new naval powers will test America's ability to maintain stability on the sea – what Mahan in 1890 called "a great highway…a wide common."
• Also worrisome are broader systemic trends like climate change and increasing competition for resources such as energy, food, and water that will not only strain relations among great powers, but put pressure on weaker states that will struggle to sustain both sovereignty and stability.

These examples only scratch the surface of some of the significant strategic trends taking shape around the world. While conflict is not inevitable, the fact remains that America risks being surprised yet again by fundamental developments in the international system. Progressives cannot afford to be myopic as we consider what a grand strategy for a new Democratic administration might look like.

America is suffering from strategic amnesia. Democrats have been complicit in allowing the Bush administration to turn its back on the fundamental strategic legacy of the Cold War. In our post-Cold War triumphalism and our post-9/11 paranoia, we have forgotten that our power is not permanent, but rests on pillars built and sustained by the so-called "greatest generation." These pillars are eroding, putting American power in jeopardy.

American power and influence are derived principally by providing the key global public goods that overlap with U.S. vital interests: stability in key regions; a vibrant global economy; and fair access to the global commons. Joseph Nye has recently argued that considering the relationship of American power to global public goods helps to unveil "an important strategic principle that could help America reconcile its national interests with a broader global perspective and assert effective leadership." Viewing grand strategy through this prism helps to widen the strategic aperture and reveal just how important the responsible exercise of American power is to the global system.

Far from a radical strategic departure, focusing U.S. power on leading the effort to sustain these basic features of the global system is well within America's strategic tradition. In many ways such an effort has dominated U.S. foreign policy for decades but has been obscured in recent years by a foreign policy dominated by the "war on terror" and, more recently, the President's so-called "freedom agenda." Both efforts are important, but necessarily subsidiary to the fundamental need to reinforce and sustain the global system. Recall that America's Cold War defense and national security policy was predicated on exactly these priorities. The United States used all the elements of its power to contain what George Kennan called "Russian expansive tendencies," but it also helped construct and then sustain an international system whose pillars continue to support today's world. Little since the end of the Cold War – including the 9/11 attacks – is cause to forget or ignore this powerful strategic legacy. As James Steinberg recently argued: "Far from justifying a radical change in policy, the evolution of the international system since the collapse of the Soviet Union actually reinforced the validity of the liberal internationalist approach." Containment was only one side of the Cold War coin – we have allowed ourselves to forget about sustainment, the more important strategic legacy from that twilight struggle.

These two core ideas – that myopia has blinded us to the emerging contest over the global commons, and that amnesia has led us to forget the powerful strategic legacy of sustainment – set up a powerful challenge to us all. How does America reset and renew its place in the world if we can neither see where we're going nor remember where we've been?

But these ideas, properly utilized, can also form a conceptual backdrop from which progressives ought to be able to construct a new vision that pivots off what we know works in order to chart a positive direction for America. This is our challenge.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

I detect the discredited Truman Project sneaking its way into the Big Tent.

[Dan Kervick]

Progressives need to do more than simply respond to attacks, we need to make a positive case for a strategy that can restore and renew American power. We need a grand strategy to make our country not just a great power, but a grand power.

Boy, I hate this kind of talk.

When are you neoliberals ever going to figure out that you can't turn "progressives" into imperialists and assertive nationalists, no matter how frequently you exhort them to change. If you want a foreign policy based on the pursuit of some form of "national greatness", or now "national grandness", you are going to have to make common cause with a lot of conservatives, and leave progressives out of it. I think progressives would just like their country to be a good country, not a great or grand one.

When's the last time you read an article in The Nation or The Progressive about the need for the United States to build its naval power, address its crumbling dominance in southeast Asia or compete more effectively for control of the global commons? How many sessions at ther World Social Forum are devoted to the compelling need for America to solidify its pre-eminence and aspire to be the chief provider of public global goods?

Your impulse, as it appears to be for just about everyone in the elite foreign policy class, those who have all gone to the same narrow circle of schools, apprenticed with the same insular circle of leaders and adopted the same narrow and invidious ideologies, is for the United States to sustain, solidify and extend its power over others, with debates only over whether it does this by "soft" means or "muscular" means. But the instincts of progressives are both democratic and internationalist; and the inherently exceptionalistic, aristocratic and chauvinistic attitudes of conventional strategists of the center and right are antithetical to progressive values.

Your reflections and prescriptions are no different from those of aristocrats of old, anxious as ever about the declining power of the nobility, and eager to restore and justify that nobility's exalted place in the social order by realizing the notion that they are essential providers of social goods, especially the good of protection. But in the modern age, which is lacking a broad popular belief in a divinely ordained social order, most people simply find it humiliating to have their goods provided by a class of nobles. It doesn't matter how good America gets at providing global goods, to the extent that these goods are seen as provided by America in an America-centered order, that order will be resisted globally.

Among "great" powers in the world, the United States is currently the most revanchist of all, desperately trying to reconstruct or restore post WWII and Cold War power relations that now belong to the past, and entertaining itself constantly with exceptionalist and patriotic fantasies about their country. You and the other Democracy Arsenal writers are virtual apostles of revanchism. But the Cold War Western order was one in which the peoples of a number of advanced states, out of the necessity born of their temporary postwar weakness and the perception of a powerful common enemy, accepted a subordinate status under US primacy, and out of the same necessity sometimes accepted the forced subordination of weaker states by the United States, as regrettable moves in the global struggle against the Soviet Union. The very day the wall came down in Germany, that order began to crumble. It is not coming back.

The neoconservatives, at least, recognized that in order to preserve American primacy, they needed to create a frightening and powerful common external enemy. You liberals seem to think you can just get everyone to kneel to America's manifest excellence.

And by the way, how often in the past did Americans have a vibrant debate about their "place in the world." Those debates always take place among a small percentage of the chattering classes. They might actually have an effect on events, to the extent they have an impact on the behavior of key national leaders. But for the most part, the US has always just found its place in the world simply by responding to events as they occur in real time.

[Don Bacon]

In other words, you people need to get out more. Get out of your ivory towers and talk to some regular folks about "America Afflicted" and they'll say, yeah, by corrupt politicians overwhelmed with their own importance, which leaves Americans afflicted with war and poor social services. Or go to a foreign country and spend some time, as I often do, and learn that Americans, to friendly foreigners, are primarily afflicted with an overblown sense of their own importance as well as laziness and loudness.

On a lighter note, I heard a good joke in Croatia last month. What do you call someone who speaks three languages? --Tri-lingual. Two languages? --Bilingual. One language? --American.

[Zathras]

It occurs to me that use of the term "progressive" here provides a lesson in how the search for better marketing can get out of hand.

The orginal Progressive, after all, was Theodore Roosevelt, who as President asserted American power without apology and was largely responsible for the creation of the modern American Navy, and along with a variety of social reforms took as his signature issue after leaving the White House the need for American military preparedness. God knows what he would have thought of the people who today style themselves as "progressive" because they think it sounds more appealing than "liberal" or "leftist." He probably wouldn't have thought very much of them, or vice versa; their ideas just don't have that much in common.

One fundamental difference that bears on the subject of this post is that Roosevelt had a deep and abiding interest in international affairs, and most Americans who might call themselves "progressives" today just don't. There are exceptions, of course, even excluding those Americans who use discussions of foreign affairs primarily as a vehicle for expressing their personal alienation from this country. But within the Democratic Party it is hard to find a reliable constituency of any size for anything resembling a "grand strategy." Indeed, the one large, organized Democratic constituency that does have a policy agenda touching on foreign affairs is as invested in the interests of a foreign country -- Israel -- as it is in America's own.

If who will support a "grand strategy" is a question without an answer at this point, so is who will design and implement it. Truman had good judgement and Dean Acheson, empowered to promote the best ideas and their advocates while discarding the others. Nixon had sophistication about international affairs and Henry Kissinger, empowered at all times to speak for the President to foreign governments (incidentally after having written about strategy for years). What does Barack Obama have?

I am a little suspicious of grand strategies, as a matter of general principle. It is too easy to assign the "strategy" label to after-the-fact justifications of actions undertaken for other reasons (the Bush administration has done this more than once) or to exercises in laundry-listism -- we must address the naval commons and cyberspace and climate change and the arts and cultural exchanges and human rights, and on and on. In any event, and Kissinger notwithstanding, I don't think you can get to a grand strategy today by starting out with one.

Particularly if your President is, as a President Obama would be, a complete greenhorn in the foreign and national security field, you need to start out with a very short list of general principles and a serious commitment to orderly process. Constructive responses to the multiple challenges and opportunities in today's world are most likely to emerge from a large number of officials with real authority in clearly defined policy areas, working under a White House and senior Cabinet able to impose discipline and force decisions. The opposite approach, in which all decision making is concentrated in the White House and agencies are emasculated with respect to major policy issues, better reflects the needs of an election campaign organization than it does of the federal government.

This is the main thing. There are other steps the next administration will need to take as well, in particular addressing the badly weakened condition of the State Department relative to the Pentagon in foreign affairs. The point, though, is that strategy is just words on a page as long as it deals only with what government ought to do. Whoever heads up the next administration will need to devote its greatest efforts to making the government able to do what it ought to do.

[Antdevamp]

I think if we want to resume our former strategic position, it will take some fast and specific action, most notably against our more subtle war profiteers, the Oil Companies.

Definition Three of War Profiteering: Commodity

War usually leads to a shortage in the supply of commodities, which results in higher prices and higher revenues. For example, increased oil prices have enabled the oil companies to increase their profit in recent years, so oil companies are profiteering from war.

Solutions/Anti Profiteering Measures:

Making unreasonable profits from war is widely considered unethical and is deeply unpopular, so attempts to prohibit excessive war profiteering, such as the imposition of an excess profits tax, receive much political support in wartime. Defining 'excessive' accurately is difficult, however, and such legislation frequently allows some instances of profiteering to go unchecked while reducing the income of others' war-related business to loss-making levels.

---------------
Given the above contested Wikipedia definitions (which I'm sure the wrangling of will prove at least a decade in court to target Exxon and Speculators specifically) why don't we take it off their noses?

The Oil Companies have gotten fat, and their move out of the United States makes their intentions obvious. I honestly don't see why we don't nail them but good while the law, right and momentum is on our side. Might it cause a fluctuation in Oil Markets? Certainly. If we leeched off their 280% increase in sales since the start of the Iraq War, could we subsidy gas cost and rebuild the military with US excess profits tax alone? Sure. How much tax are we talking about? Well, 5 Billion dollars represents 12 hours of Exxon's daily profits.

I see no reason we could not pay for the entirety of the Iraq War and all associated costs, and even pay for some US Attorneys to nail Halliburton (KBH, whatever) to the wall for their overcharges, which would give us another half trillion dollars.

This would need to be done NOW, to prevent Obama's presidency from sucking air for two years trying to make up for all the excesses of the Bush Administrations (alleged) criminal collusion with war profiteering.

[Antdevamp]

I think if we want to resume our former strategic position, it will take some fast and specific action, most notably against our more subtle war profiteers, the Oil Companies.

Definition Three of War Profiteering: Commodity

War usually leads to a shortage in the supply of commodities, which results in higher prices and higher revenues. For example, increased oil prices have enabled the oil companies to increase their profit in recent years, so oil companies are profiteering from war.

Solutions/Anti Profiteering Measures:

Making unreasonable profits from war is widely considered unethical and is deeply unpopular, so attempts to prohibit excessive war profiteering, such as the imposition of an excess profits tax, receive much political support in wartime. Defining 'excessive' accurately is difficult, however, and such legislation frequently allows some instances of profiteering to go unchecked while reducing the income of others' war-related business to loss-making levels.

---------------
Given the above contested Wikipedia definitions (which I'm sure the wrangling of will prove at least a decade in court to target Exxon and Speculators specifically) why don't we take it off their noses?

The Oil Companies have gotten fat, and their move out of the United States makes their intentions obvious. I honestly don't see why we don't nail them but good while the law, right and momentum is on our side. Might it cause a fluctuation in Oil Markets? Certainly. If we leeched off their 280% increase in sales since the start of the Iraq War, could we subsidy gas cost and rebuild the military with US excess profits tax alone? Sure. How much tax are we talking about? Well, 5 Billion dollars represents 12 hours of Exxon's daily profits.

I see no reason we could not pay for the entirety of the Iraq War and all associated costs, and even pay for some US Attorneys to nail Halliburton (KBH, whatever) to the wall for their overcharges, which would give us another half trillion dollars.

This would need to be done NOW, to prevent Obama's presidency from sucking air for two years trying to make up for all the excesses of the Bush Administrations (alleged) criminal collusion with war profiteering.

[Duva]

I'm a sometime lurker on this blog. The original notion that we should seek to sustain the 60-year and counting international order is flawed. Does this mean that we should abandon UNSC reform and stick with the same P5? Large U.S. military presence in Europe? Economic and military overstretch, whether of communism or now of terrorism, Chinese influence, etc?

I think the U.S. needs to promote gradual shifts in this system, without overturning it, while striving to maintain order and U.S. security and prosperity, and continued advances in global prosperity and health. Incorporate China into the G8. Over time, strengthen a partnership with India, Australia, and southeast Asian powers (Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia). Support a permanent seat for Brazil and Japan in the UNSC. Encourage Russia, China, and other powers to contribute troops to UN operations. Demonstrate the value of an AFRICOM to African states don't just proclaim its goodness.

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What often goes unaddressed even in progressive circles is the fact that America is suffering from two fundamental and potentially crippling afflictions: strategic myopia and strategic amnesia.