Worldmaking (94 page)

Near the end of a series of interviews, which became the basis of a fascinating profile in
The New Yorker
, David Remnick asked Obama if he was “haunted” by his decision not to intervene in Syria. “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war,” replied Obama. “It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq.” Another Iraq-style military intervention, of course, is a fantastical prospect to Obama and, indeed, to the public he serves. But Obama provided Remnick with a description of his policymaking method:

I have strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every person. I do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity, and I think I'm pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I'm taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and that America makes; understanding that there are going to be limits to the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there's going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy occasionally, but that if I am doing my very best and basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most Americans, that at the end of the day things will be better rather than worse.
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These words, extolling recognition of complexity and comprehension of the limits of what is achievable, could have been spoken by George Kennan. In contrast to Vali Nasr, Obama appears to believe that “exuberance” has caused some of the United States' most damaging foreign-policy missteps, that it is a trait best left to motivational speakers and sports announcers. Sobriety is much more in keeping with Obama's style. In thirty years or so, historians will be better placed to determine who is correct. But the past fifteen years suggest that Nasr's “exuberant American desire to lead” may well have destabilized the world more than it has steadied it. It is little wonder that the United States has a diminished capacity and inclination for worldmaking.

During a supposedly off-the-record discussion with reporters in the summer of 2014, Obama observed that his core strategic doctrine could be summarized simply as “Don't do stupid shit.” During an on-the-record interview with
The Atlantic
, Hillary Clinton disagreed: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle.”
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Yet when the interviewer invited Clinton to spell out her own organizing principle, she answered, “peace, progress, and prosperity,” alliterative boilerplate that any American politician since the inception of the republic could have uttered. Clinton understands the problems with neat organizing principles all too well. As she wrote in her 2014 memoir,
Hard Choices
, “Although some may have yearned for an Obama Doctrine—a grand unified theory that would provide a simple and elegant road map for foreign policy in this new era, like ‘containment' did during the Cold War—there was nothing simple or elegant about the problems we faced.”
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This was true when Clinton became secretary of state and it remains so today.

President Obama delivered an important speech at West Point in 2014 that set out a typically equivocal vision:

It is absolutely true that in the 21st century American isolationism is not an option. We don't have a choice to ignore what happens beyond our borders … But to say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution. Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences—without building international support and legitimacy for our action; without leveling with the American people about the sacrifices required.
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The usual suspects assailed the speech as weak and unprincipled—“One can only marvel at the smallness of it all,” wrote Charles Krauthammer.
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Of course, no one seriously believes that every crisis has a military solution, and in this sense the president was disingenuous in setting up “a somber parade of straw men,” as Krauthammer wittily phrased it. But Obama's observation that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences” contains wisdom.

 

CONCLUSION

One of Woodrow Wilson's inspirations was Richard Cobden, the influential nineteenth-century British advocate of free trade and economic interdependence, whose “eloquence” and “genius,” Wilson believed, made him a man of truly “exalted character.”
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Henry Kissinger's political hero was of course Prince Metternich, whose enduring fascination was with power and how to wield it. When Wilson's and Kissinger's lodestars met for dinner in Vienna in the summer of 1847, it quickly became clear that their differences on statecraft were unbridgeable. Cobden noted how troubled he was by the reactivity and pessimism of Metternich's worldview: his belief that peace was best realized though applying weight to the lighter side of a scale; his disbelief in the ability of powerful nations to make systemic changes to the world system:

[Metternich] is probably the last of those State physicians who, looking only to the symptoms of a nation, content themselves with superficial remedies from day to day, and never attempt to probe beneath the surface to discover the source of the evils which afflict the social system. The order of statesmen will pass away with him, because too much light has been shed upon the laboratory of Governments, to allow them to impose upon mankind with the old formulas.
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In Cobden's words lies a tension that is central to this book. Should the United States look to cure diseases in the international system through rendering nations democratic or liberal-capitalist, remedying the “source of the evils which afflict the social system”? Or should Washington seek to ensure that the threat of infection presented by hostile regimes, alliance systems, or ideologies does not spread, through defensive “remedies” such as George Kennan's containment. Should diplomacy be practiced as a science, unveiling new discoveries to effect enduring change, or as an art, responding creatively and intuitively to a world without pattern?

One can imagine Woodrow Wilson, Paul Nitze, and Paul Wolfowitz lobbing Cobden's charge of “superficial remedies” at Alfred Thayer Mahan, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama—and indeed we have encountered such clashes in this book. A curative ambition was present in Wilson's view that the United States must move beyond Mahan's realism to devise and lead a new collaborative world system in the aftermath of the First World War, or in Wolfowitz's view that America must unfurl the Wilsonian banner in catalyzing the democratization of an entire region, the Middle East, to make the nation more secure in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. When Paul Nitze helped establish the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in 1943, he surveyed the literature on international affairs and was disheartened to discover that “most of it was historical … [the books and articles would] have no theoretical background at all.” This absence of scientific ambition suggested to Nitze that few took the subject seriously: “I complained to various people … why has United States academia been so deficient in addressing themselves from an experienced and theoretical view as to the practice of foreign policy?”
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Nitze believed that a foreign-policy education dominated by the teaching of history encouraged amateurism rather than professionalism.

Cobden, Wilson, Nitze, and Wolfowitz were all susceptible to scientism, which in this context is the belief that the core elements of scientific method—theory testing, the detection of patterns, and the unveiling of new discoveries—can be emulated to discern objective truth and make fundamental changes to the structure of world affairs. The appeal of scientism is not difficult to comprehend. It holds out a promise of certainty—permitting a nation to understand and tame the world's volatility—that is highly seductive. It is an optimistic creed that resonates with America's self-image as exceptional and eminently capable of “making” the world it leads. Denying America's ability to cure the world's “evils” is thus viewed as defeatist and un-American—amoral, European, declinist, Metternichian—all charges that have been leveled at Mahan, Kennan, Kissinger, and of course Obama.

This grouping of artists (or pessimists, as their critics would have it), comprising Mahan, Lippmann, Kennan, Kissinger, and Obama, conversely, believe that “evil” is a permanent fixture in our morals and habits, and that the application of “superficial remedies” is often the best that any foreign policymaker can do. As Barack Obama had observed during his 2007 interview with David Brooks (a response that was later used to blurb a reissue of Reinhold Niebuhr's
The Irony of American History
, “I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”
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Or as Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote in 1897, “Let us worship peace, indeed, as the goal at which humanity must hope to arrive, but let us not fancy that peace is to be had as a boy wrenches an unripe fruit from a tree.”
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As the Mahan scholar Jon Tetsuro Sumida observes, “The formulation of theory, or the construction of a philosophically complete system of explanation, was either secondary or hostile to the accomplishment of Mahan's primary task.” Mahan believed that skilled diplomatists must possess an artistic temperament that facilitates creative responses to the world's essential unpredictability.
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*   *   *

In many ways, the contrasting visions offered by Mahan and Wilson represented the first great American foreign-policy debate. Significant clashes on matters of international relations had occurred many times before—such as that between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over whether the fledgling republic should support the French Revolution—but Mahan and Wilson lived during the era in which the United States surpassed Great Britain to become the world's most powerful nation.
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This ensured that the ideas that prevailed would have global consequences.

Mahan believed that some problems were beyond America's ability to resolve and that interventions designed to effect change in other nations could end badly. This caution shaped Mahan's opposition to annexing the Philippines in 1898 and his unease at the American war against the Filipino insurgency that followed. In mid-1910, he observed that he had been a “personal witness of the extreme repugnance” with which America had seized the archipelago, and a year later he compared the hypothetical loss of the Philippines to “the loss of a little finger, perhaps a single joint of it. The Philippines to us are less a property than a charge.”
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Mahan focused ruthlessly on the policies that would serve the national interest and was unfazed by reputational damage wreaked by tactical retreat. The rest of the world's preferences and opinions were of scant concern to the United States, so long as its commercial interests were unaffected, its borders secure, its navy dominant, and its principal ally, Great Britain, free and unthreatened. Mahan focused on the big picture, which necessarily required an understanding of history. Those who lacked this detailed historical knowledge roused his ire:

During my whole time on the [Naval Planning] Board, historical parallels to our positions were continually occurring to me. How many men in the Navy, do you suppose, know naval history, or think of naval operations in that way; or how many, if they read this, would fail to vote me an egotistic, superannuated ass!… The Navy—in my opinion—wants to stop grubbing in machine shops and to get up somewhere where it can take a bird's eye view of military truths, and see them in their relations and proportions.
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Woodrow Wilson disagreed with Mahan on the best means to discern such truth. The outbreak of the First World War had shown that enduring peace was not maintainable through balance-of-power politics. Wilson argued that a world in which disputes were arbitrated by a League of Nations had to be attempted instead. In time, Wilson believed that America had to make other nations more like America. A world of democratic, liberal-capitalist uniformity offered the best prospect of an enduring “scientific peace.”

Charles Beard rejected a key assumption—that America's economic fate rested on the expansion of an export-led economy—that informed Mahan's and Wilson's worldviews. During the 1930s, as the Nye Committee pinned blame on bankers and industrialists for maneuvering the nation into the First World War, Beard argued that it was the taut economic threads that connected the United States to the world that ran the greatest risk of tearing the nation apart. His theory of “American continentalism” was designed to free the nation from those binds and leave it unencumbered. Beard hoped that FDR might be sympathetic to his “continentalist” blueprint—“the old possibility of a distinct national life and character” as “a living and vital force”—even if the hostility of his secretary of state, Cordell Hull (also known as the “Tennessee Cobden”), was all but guaranteed.
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