In the crude violence of the contemporary international scene—with Russia running rampant in Ukraine and rattling its saber toward the Baltic states, with Muslims and Christians facing slaughter by ISIS in the Levant, and with thousands of African migrants boarding overloaded scows to cross the Mediterranean in a perilous search for work—it may seem harsh to hold an American President to a moral standard of foreign policy any higher than “realism.”
But the moral aspirations of the American republic—even as framed by the current incumbent of the White House—permit a review of our foreign policy performance that is a bit more critical.
By that measure, the current report card is not inspiring. Preoccupied by issues of criminal justice, civil rights, and medical care at home, and flummoxed abroad, we seem to have forgotten the broader ideals of internationalism that animated the founders. John Quincy Adams warned the new republic against venturing abroad seeking monsters to slay—but that was at a time when monsters were more easily thwarted and avoided, and when sailing ships from Europe took thirty days to arrive in North America. It was a time, as Adams’ near contemporary, President James Monroe opined, when the New World could be declared as a hemisphere peculiarly unavailable to autocratic powers. In a world now circled by air in 48 hours, with an international commerce that brings tens of thousands of container ships to American seaports, problems have no protective distance. There is no cordon sanitaire to protect the American homeland from chaos elsewhere.
Nor does a thin-lipped “‘realism’ about American foreign policy warrant any different posture about moral catastrophe abroad. Lest we forget, human rights were at the center of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, invoking Nature’s God as well as English common law traditions. The new American Constitution could not be ratified in 1788 until an enumerated Bill of Rights was promised. In the foreign policy of a country founded on those principles, the cruelty and radical disregard for human rights evidenced in the conduct of governments in so many regions may deserve a remedy more robust than a mere literary acknowledgement in annual reports from the State Department or Freedom House.
Yet we often pull our punches, supposing that reticence will serve as aptly as speech or action. One example tainted the beginning of this Administration, when the White House failed to support the pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran, and did not venture beyond soft-spoken remonstrance at the wanton shooting of an innocent young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan during the 2009 protests against the mullahs near Tehran’s Azadi Square. Our interest in curbing Iran’s nuclear program by negotiation also has muffled the human rights complaints that should be aimed at Tehran for its execution of dissidents of every stripe, including Christians, still hung high from the gantry arms of construction cranes. So, too, in China, our quarrels with the regime’s violent persecution of political dissidents and Christians—as well as the arbitrary use of detention and hard labor to eliminate rivals of the commercial elite—were raised only in a measured and demure voice during Mr. Obama’s first visit to the capital city of Beijing. Perhaps subtlety is the most effective syntax within an Asian culture. But it also may be a subtle way of signaling the relative priority of commerce or comity over freedom.
Even for a President inclined to prioritize domestic American problems, the global strategy of other great powers demands our attention. The 19th-century ground rules of President James Monroe for hemispheric autonomy no longer set the standard, as seen in China’s conspicuous entry into Latin America with significant investments in Argentina’s economy. Sino-Argentinian joint ventures in nuclear power and hydropower, mining, space technology, and financing may recast the loyalties of a key Latin state, advanced as well by Beijing’s support of the Argentinian demand for the “return” of the Falklands. The political assassination of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman in January 2015, immediately upon his return to Buenos Aires to testify against President Christina Fernandez, also shows that a certain strain of fascism—strengthened by Argentina’s asylum for émigré European fascists after World War II—has never left the country. As steward of the world’s largest economy and Commander-in-Chief of the globe’s largest fighting force, an American President has a responsibility to police the global commons, and certainly to stabilize his own hemisphere. He might worry at these developments.
So, too, China’s grand entrée into Africa—wooing governments, sending minions to build low-cost infrastructure, buying up land for factory farming and mining for industrial production—is something that a White House should watch, if only to understand the dynamic of having 53 African votes in the U.N. General Assembly as a potential counterweight to U.S. preferences, as well as the increased potential for China to become a double-coasted Atlantic power. Added to the “string of pearls” that China has built in the Indian Ocean—by subsidizing the construction of modern ports in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—an American President has to anticipate that China will project a far more agile (and potentially troublesome) global naval presence.
To be sure, the shriveling of the American press has helped along White House abdication from these “details” of foreign policy—and this holds true for both political parties. American universities that purport to teach international relations have often abandoned area studies about real countries and regions, in favor of the simpler game of “international relations theory” – taking a familiar problem and analyzing it in light of vaunted (but tautological) schools of realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and liberalism. One wag has chided that the rather mechanical manipulations preached by each of these analytic “schools” is perfect for American students, because one doesn’t need to have traveled anywhere or learned any languages or know any history in order to move the pieces around.
But the lack of attention to the chess pieces that affect international strategy and limit American influence is broader than that. There are, quite simply, no American newspapers covering the politics of Africa – for that, one must go to Jeune Afrique or Reuters, or the occasional story in the Economist. Detailed reporting on most of Asia is left aside as well by financially strapped newspapers, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition, and the Financial Times. Our understanding of the politics of Latin America is cramped. What still sells newspapers, even after Hearst, is the simplicity and glare of violence, rather than the politics and plight of the 192 other members of the United Nations.
What, then, is most urgently missing from our foreign policy? Perhaps first and foremost is our reluctance to call out what has gone wrong in the misuse of Islam by a new generation of European and Middle Eastern youth. The White House condemns what it numbly calls “violent extremism”—without any attempt to rebut and isolate the newly revived ideology of Islamic jihad that excites some young men and women in Europe and the Middle East and Asia. The recent White House conference on “violent extremism” was akin to a party game in which one has to guess the word that no one can say. It was not focused on Hindu violence in India or the Janjaweed’s attacks on Sudanese rebels stemming from rivalries between herders and farmers. Its impetus was the urgent problem of jihadist Islamic thought. But no one was permitted to frame and challenge the doctrines of radical Islam that have mobilized hundreds, if not thousands, of young jihadists. The only evident suggestion was to try to build economic opportunity for young men and women, and hope that ideology would cure itself.
This unwillingness to name the problem will neutralize the cure, for the ethical constraints on violence within Islam must be framed within the religion itself. As it happens, the most sophisticated account of the Islamic law of war—when force can be used and when peace is required and what tactics are allowable—was sketched by an Iraqi-American scholar named Majid Khadduri, who taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In Khadduri’s account, the permissible uses of violence in Islamic law have everything to do with whether Islam itself is in peril, and how that is to be judged. The exegesis of the point is complicated, and requires literacy in classical Arabic and Koranic studies. But proving to contemporary Muslim youth that classic Islam—as well as the modern law of war—strictly forbids the use of violence against innocents and demands tolerance for other religious faiths, will be key to turning around a generation. The evasive phrase of “violent extremism” doesn’t begin to frame the intellectual and social challenge needed for success in this venture. There appears to be no real successor to Khadduri in the American academy, and the best sources I have found are some astonishingly erudite military officers who taught themselves Arabic and read in the Hadith and other sources to understand their adversaries.
This key question is not something in which the White House has chosen to invest—unwisely relying upon a purely economic (dare we call it “suburban”) cure for jihadism, and conflating all forms of what it chooses to call “violent extremism.” The moral fault of feckless violence may be the same, but its causes may different. One should take the ideology of an adversary as a matter to be understood.
More than forty years ago, Yale sociologist Scott Boorman brilliantly analyzed Mao’s military strategy in the Chinese civil war in light of the rules of Wei-Chi, or the game of “go.” There may be a lesson that has escaped this White House—of seeking to understand an adversary by his own terms.
In addition, we must understand that a renewed strategic game of resources and alliance is now afoot in all quarters of the globe. Despite the naming exercise of Amerigo Vespucci, the United States of America has no normative claim to hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, and we should not be surprised when our global rivals and adversaries, including some particularly nasty actors, attempt to strike their own deals with governments in the Western Hemisphere. Neither the French, nor Belgians, nor British should be surprised at the same mix-and-match in Africa and Asia.
There was a time when things seemed more settled for America. The Monroe Doctrine held sway, by dint of the evident superiority of republican forms of government and the power imbalance between the United States and its competitors, with a tip of the hat to the robustness of gunboat diplomacy. But even in that earlier era, France’s ambitious Napoleon III attempted to win a foothold in Mexico, taking advantage of the distractions of the American Civil War (and dreaming of his own pan-oceanic canal). And during the Fidelista years of the 20th century, Venezuela and Bolivia came under the sway of Chavismo, with a froth that lingers even now. Thus, it is necessary to remember that in the realpolitik of the global marketplace, strategic location, natural resources, and nondemocratic forms of government will continue to attract self-interested actors looking for sport. Thus, there is no safe return to an earlier form of pan-isolationism, for strategic players will contest even the most established alliances.