Worldmaking (96 page)

Of all the individuals this book has surveyed, Barack Obama is the most intuitive and averse to ideology. The insight that the incumbent president drew from the Second Iraq War is similar to that which Oliver Wendell Holmes drew from the Civil War: “certitude leads to violence.” According to Louis Menand, in his erudite history of the emergence of pragmatism, the harrowing conflict led Holmes to “lose his belief in beliefs,” a phrase that could be attributed to the defiantly unideological Obama, who pointedly decried the proposed invasion of Iraq as an “ideological” war. As Menand writes, “Pragmatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs … Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey wished to bring ideas and principles and beliefs down to a human level because they wished to avoid the violence they saw hidden in abstractions.”
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Obama is identifiably pragmatic in responding to challenges on a case-by-case basis, shunning universal principles and doctrines.

After Barack Obama's election victory in 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote an op-ed in
The Washington Post
titled “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy for His Second Term?” To help Obama locate his big idea, Slaughter observed, “First terms are about justifying your place in office. Second terms are about justifying your place in history,” and helpfully pointed out that there were lots of places for Obama to seek inspiration in achieving this second goal (such as her employer, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton): “In Washington, the period between an election and an inauguration is a fertile time for big, ambitious ideas, reports, and essays. Foreign policy wonks are partial to laying out ‘grand strategies': sweeping statements of the means through which the United States should achieve its goals in the world.”
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That Obama has not yet identified his doctrine was clearly a source of concern and frustration to Slaughter. But one suspects that the president does not view the quest as particularly useful or important. His observation to David Remnick in 2013 that “I don't really even need George Kennan right now” was an affront to scholars and analysts vested in the formulation of “big, ambitious ideas.”
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But Obama's approach exhibits a modesty and suppleness well suited to an age in which the dangers of “ideological” wars have become painfully apparent.

*   *   *

The ideas surveyed in this book have transcended their historical moment, some more obviously than others. There is useful instruction to be drawn—both positive and negative—from all the actual and aspirant worldmakers discussed herein. And as we move toward the presidential election of 2016, the legacies of Mahan, Wilson, Beard, Kennan, Kissinger, Wolfowitz, and others will fall into view during foreign-policy debates, with or without attribution. The identity of the next president will help answer a question that is currently impossible to answer: Will Obama's pragmatic method represent a short-lived aberration—akin to the Kissinger era—or does it mark the beginning of something more lasting?

The power capabilities and economic requirements of dominant nations at any given moment condition the strategies devised. Mahan counseled naval expansion to facilitate swifter economic growth at a time when the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed, and restless eyes turned elsewhere for opportunity. At no other time, perhaps, than following a cataclysmic global war in which seventeen million people died could Wilson have proposed dismantling balance-of-power politics and elevating a League of Nations to take its place. Beard's continental Americanism was framed before a backdrop of acute economic distress and growing evidence that Wilson's idealistic justification for America's entry into the First World War was not all it seemed. Kennan's Long Telegram was shaped by frustration and anger that Washington seemed incapable of finessing Stalin's true nature; Nitze's NSC-68 by the notion that the Cold War was a zero-sum game in which Soviet adventurism had to be resisted everywhere. Kissinger believed he was cleaning up the almighty mess created by such blunt and obtuse thinking; Wolfowitz believed that America would shed what made it special if it followed Kissinger's path to great power normalcy. Barack Obama's foreign policy has been defined by an aversion to Wolfowitzian scientism and certainty, but also by recognition that finite resources have to be redirected from neo-Wilsonian interventionism to the more pressing requirement of renewing the United States itself.

History teaches that anything is possible, of course, and that historians are best advised to suppress any nagging inclination to prophesize. Following America's withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 was a period of introspection as the nation became conflict averse. In October 1983, for example, an Islamist suicide bomber detonated a truck bomb in the lobby of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 servicemen—a tragedy and willful provocation. Yet President Reagan—commonly feted as the toughest of Cold Warriors—responded by withdrawing all U.S. forces from the region. Indeed, Reagan dispatched troops overseas only once during his presidency: during the 1984 invasion of tiny Grenada, Operation Urgent Fury, which did not bring the catharsis promised by its code name. The president was pleased to support anticommunist proxies wherever they fought, of course, and his anti-Soviet rhetoric was strident. Yet one can draw a significant line of continuity from Eisenhower to Reagan to Obama. All were reluctant to send U.S. troops overseas, and all felt the targeting of America's enemies was best achieved by deploying other dark arts: CIA covert action, the funding of anticommunist insurgents, and the expansion of lethal drone strikes.

In the 1970s, the United States seemed to be a nation in decline, chastened and humiliated by an insurgency ten thousand miles away and losing economic ground to Japan and Western Europe. Yet who would have predicted that America's withdrawal from the debacle in Vietnam would be followed by a disastrous war of choice in Iraq a generation later? Humility exited the stage in the interim, which could well happen again. It seems inconceivable at this juncture that the United States might again launch a war as misconceived as those in Vietnam and Iraq. But makers of foreign policy often forget the nation's traumas or reconceive them as foiled victories; if only different tactics had been tried, the outcome might have been different. Optimism is one of America's principal virtues, and it is a source of considerable strength. But the trait can cause significant damage when applied to foreign policy in a manner that is untroubled by historical memory.

There are clearly problems with narrowly conceiving of foreign policy as either an art or a science. And I do not believe that intuition and creativity, the traits of the artist, are the only diplomatic virtues, that presidents must simply react and that proactivity is an impossible dream. The sequence of foreign-policy innovations that the United States spearheaded from 1945 to 1949—the creation of the United Nations, the establishment of a rules- and institution-based financial system at Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, NATO—were a collective masterstroke. But they were also a series of strategies, plural, advocated by various individuals at different times with different motivations and goals. The process of their devising was organic and they did not follow a master plan. Led by the efforts of memoirists and historians, a sequence of discrete, single-shot initiatives spanning a presidency is often reconceived as something larger and more deliberate. But this omniscient narrator is not always discernable in the archival record.

While not a Rosetta stone, I believe that art and science is a binary worth considering. The uncertainty of history is the most significant obstacle to approaching foreign policy as a science. In his 2014 book,
World Order
, Henry Kissinger confessed that he was “brash” at Harvard to proclaim on the meaning of history, but “I now know that history's meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared.”
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Unless every nation is united behind a common goal—as Kennan implied in urging a Wilsonian solution to the dangers posed by climate change and nuclear proliferation—nothing in international affairs is possessed of stable properties. Many experiments conceived as stark departures from historical precedent have failed abysmally, and the bolder the experiment, as this book has witnessed, the greater the failure. Ultimately it is through studying history and aspiring toward objectivity—it is the trying that counts, for its achievement is impossible—that foreign policymakers can study dilemmas, contextualize threats, compare their magnitude to the resources available, weigh humanitarian and reputational imperatives, and offer appropriately calibrated responses. It is perhaps the best that any nation can do.

 

NOTES

Abbreviations

Introduction