Adrift on a Sea of Change

As the presidential campaign season heats up and the national conventions are in the offing, I want to continue for a while to focus on foreign affairs. I will add two more posts under the heading "Adrift on a Sea of Change" from my former blog, as I feel they offer a nice summary of what has transpired in U.S. foreign policy over the course of the past decade or so. Then I will begin to explore what comes next, in the hopes that someone is both thinking and listening.

From a certain perspective, U.S. foreign policy before and after the turn of the century presents the image of a vessel adrift on a sea of change. The geostrategic alignment of the international political system has shifted dramatically, in many ways to favor the United States. We have not weathered the success well, though, failing to adapt to our new status as the world’s only remaining superpower.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy was conceived and executed within the strategic framework of “containment,” or the strategy of containing the spread of Soviet (or “communist”) power and influence in the world. After the ideological and economic collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States never found a replacement for containment as an overarching strategic policy direction. Our strategic national interests, which had for so long been defined against the backdrop of the Soviet monolith, now seemed shifting and uncertain.

What is tragically missing from U.S. foreign policy – and has been since at least 1989 – is a new strategic orientation to the world. Under successive Republican and Democratic administrations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States has adopted a wide range of thematic tactical frameworks for foreign policy, sometimes employing multiple, conflicting frameworks simultaneously. Too often this orientation has put the United States on a reactive footing, forcing us to respond to events controlled by others. Rather than acting as the world’s policeman (a problematic role on its own merits), the United States has seemed more like its firefighter over the past 15 years.

As a result, our foreign policy record is riddled with numerous failures. More telling, though, are those successes that U.S. presidents have pointed to, such as the spread of democracy and the free market in the countries previously behind the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Kuwait, the end of open conflict in the Balkans, and the destruction of the al Qaeda infrastructure and removal from power of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In each of these cases, it can be argued that our success was only superficial, that we failed to see our policies through to their logical conclusions. In Eastern Europe, rapid economic and political progress in the early 1990s was followed by the onset of severe structural economic problems and a return to favor of former communist leaders. Political and economic reforms ground to a halt, most famously in Russia itself. In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was successful in pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but our failure to destroy the Iraqi military and removing Saddam Hussein from power set up a decade of difficulties that ultimately precipitated last year’s invasion of Iraq. In the Balkans, the widespread warfare and genocide has ended, but many war criminals remain free, little reconciliation has occurred and ethnic conflict still regularly flares up. In Afghanistan, war lords still control vast amounts of territory and Osama bin Laden managed to escape – and still remains free today.