Cut Points In The Foreign Policy Domain: Obama’s Questionable Strategy

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In my diary earlier today on Ron Paul, I noted how he fell among the 0.2% of people totally opposed to federal social welfare policies--a remarkably far-right fringe position from which to launch a campaign that even seeks to appeal to progressives distressed with the Democrats’ inept and confused response to the Iraq War. While Ron Paul stands zero chance of being elected President, he is doing a bang-up job of expanding the rightwing extremist base of influence, which is what a hegemonic cultural warrior ought to be doing. Too bad he is on the other side.

Now I want to flip to the other side, and take a look at how a much better positioned progressive candidate--Barack Obama--has managed to do the exact opposite: take a majoritarian position and cut it to pieces. He, too, will probably not be President. But unlike Paul, he is doing virtually nothing to build influence for ideological base. In fact, he’s doing the exact opposite: his funciton is to divide and sometimes even demonize that base.

My points of reference here are how Obama himself has characterized the divisions in foreign policy as he sees them, and how he responds.

In a MyDD diary last December, The Two Obamas and Me, Part One, Chris contrasted the principle-driven Obama who first inspired tremendous netroots support with the compromise-driven Obama were seen since, who often seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start. Chris cited this example:

In town-hall meetings, when those who opposed the war get shrill, Obama makes a point of noting that while he, too, opposed the war, he’s "not one of those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil."

Chis followed up:

Did anyone with any power every say that? Did any leading Democrats ever say that? Did any progressive or liberal of any public stature ever say that? If they did, I’d love to see the quote.

More recently, on November 2nd, in a diary, Establishment Revolution?, Chris cited this passage from a Sunday’s New York Times magazine article:

In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a "new international economic order." But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party. "The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam," he said to me on the campaign plane, "which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework."

The cut points that Obama makes are, I will argue, fundamentally misguided and destructive. Even if the dividions were accurate, the only reason to focus on such divisions in the first place should be to heal them, not simply highlight them. Besides, Ron Paul’s example clearly shows that the most effective strategy is not even to talk about divisions. But I don’t want to simply be negative. I want to illuminate what the real cut points are, and why it makes so much more sense to focus on them realistically in forming our policy.
The Left/Liberal Divide On Foreign Policy

The first thing out of the box, I have to say that it’s absolutely true there’s long been a divide roughly between liberals on one side and leftists on the other over US foreign policy. This was most vividly illustrated by the Henry Wallace/Harry Truman split in the 1948 election, and was reinforced by the early days of the Vietnam War protest movement, which was lead by groups like SDS--of which Tom Hayden was the leading theoretician at its founding--which were outside the political establishment.

Yet, at the same time, that split is also just one way to slice the pie, and it has rarely captured what things look like to the careful eye. There has always been more dissent within the establishment than this dichotomous view gives credit for--which is why, for example, votes like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution have been shrouded in deception. If the truth were known, there would be nothing close to establishment unity.

So, we acknowledge that such a divide exists, but we insist that it captures only part of the picture, and is never fully reflective of how the attitudinal lines break down. It is much better at relating to how people see their institutional roles--which, ironically, now includes Barack Obama, who no longer acts anything like the outsider he was back in 2002.

The Deeper Divide: The Two Cold Wars

A much more substantive dististinction can be pointed to, which I discussed briefly in my diary last weekend, Where’s Obama? Questioning v Reinforcing [Foreign Policy] CW #3 (Political Duality of Rep v Dem 6c). There I devoted a short section to discussion of a remarkable paper by Efstathios T. Fakiolas, "Kennan’s Long Telegram and NSC-68: A Comparative Analysis," East European Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 4, January 1998, Here I want to look at that paper in a little more detail. The paper analyzes two key documents from the formative days of the Cold War. Kennan’s Long Telegram, which first formulated a comprehensive picture of the Soviet threat, and laid the foundations for the doctrine of containment, and NSC-68, the national security directive primarily authored by Paul Nitze, which formed the blueprint for how the US fought the Cold War throughout most of its duration.

As I wrote in that diary:

It’s my own observation, based on this analysis, that we fought Nitze’s Cold War, but we won Kennan’s. It was not, in the end, our military strength that defeated the Soviet Union, it was the appeal of our culture of openness and freedom. The history of Eastern European resistance movements, especially in Checkoslavakia and Poland, makes this abundantly clear. Through their influence on dissident culture, Frank Zappa and Lou Reed did more to win the Cold War than any division of tanks ever did-or even a wing of nuclear armed B-52 bombers.

This is why I think it’s such a far superior candidate to focus on for identifying a cut point in foreign policy-because it represents the real dividing line between rhetorical fantasy on the one side and historical reality on the other.

Fakiolas first specifies the framework for his analysis:

For the purposes of our analysis, we prefer classical or traditional realism to the structural realism. Our choice is due to the fact that the former is more prescriptive than the latter....
classical or traditional realism focuses on how the unique features of international anarchy that is, the systemic imperatives and impetus, along with the particular characteristics of individual states may lead them to specific behaviour. From this point of view, the classical or traditional realism is prescriptive in the sense that it suggests policies which are likely to help states deal successfully with the international anarchy to which are continually subject.

He then explains the main division within this framework that illuminates the subject matter at hand:

In turn, the classical or traditional realism encompasses disputes among its proponents. On running the risk of oversimplification, we can make two basic classifications: the billiard ball perspective and the tectonic plates model. The fundamentals of these postulates have best been framed by Stephen Krasner.(4) The principal argument of the billiard ball perspective is that the international system is composed solely of egoistic sovereign states interested in maximizing their relative power capabilities at the expense of others; world politics is a "zero-sum" game in which national security conceived of in military and territorial terms is the one and only states’ national objective. On the other hand, the main assertion of the tectonic plates model is that even though states are the most important protagonists in world politics, there exist many other non-state actors; the distribution of power determines the outcomes in many fields of international system to the extent that the interaction of states structures varying patterns of behavior; for the world is not "zero-sum," and the opportunity for mutual cooperation is most often present.
The paper’s thesis is that the analysis offered by Kennan’s Long Telegram reflected the tectonic plates model of the realist school, while that offered by Nitze’s NSC-68 represented the billiard ball perspective.

Fakiolas develops a brilliant analysis, which, unfortunately, I cannot do justice to here. But I can highlight a central thread: Kennan’s approach was basically nonmilitary:

He was convinced that it was within the capabilities of the US to solve the problem without direct confrontation, or a "general military conflict" for two basic reasons: first, the Soviet leaders, unlike Hitler, were "neither schematic nor adventurist," in the sense that they were extremely "sensitive to the logic of force" and, therefore, they could readily withdraw, when strong counter-force and sufficient resistance was blocked up at any point; second, the Soviet Union continued to lag economically far away behind the West.(10)
As a consequence, the interests of the US, Kennan went on in his argument, could best be served by building a healthy and vigorous American society, on the one hand, and by conceiving and "exporting" to other free nations its "positive and constructive" image of the world, on the other.(11)

In contrast, Fakiolas begins his analysis of NSC-68 thus:

NSC-68 was intended to elaborate the overriding objectives of the US national security policy. It began with an assessment of the physiology of the world crisis, adopting two basic assumptions in respect to the global distribution of power: first, following the defeat of Germany and Japan and the collapse of British and French Empires, the international system was bipolar with the US and the Soviet Union representing the two centers of power; secondly, the Soviet Union had fundamentally antithetical objectives compared to those of US and, driven by a "fanatic faith," sought to "impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." Behind this bipolarized reality stood the inherently irreconcilable struggle between the free and the slave society or, in other words, between "the idea of freedom under a government of laws, and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin." The Cold War was substantially a "real war in which the survival of the free world" was in serious danger.(32)

It’s not that Kennan had an objectively more benign view of the Soviet Union-in fact Fakiolas elsewhere notes that "he turned out to exaggerate the Soviet Union’s capabilities and overestimate the ability of Soviet leadership to infiltrate the West." Rather, he had a more realistic appraisal that recognized important, deeply-rooted differences between the threat of Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union. He saw them as dangerous-but not crazy.

The reverse may well be true of al Qaeda--though "crazy" here is clearly an operational term, which simply means that their reference frame is far removed from that of most other actors. In both cases, however, it remains true that a truly realistic appraisal demands that we understand both dimensions: how dangerous is an enemy to our basic survival? and how far removed are they from the realist framework that guides most other actors? Unless we accurately understand the answers to both these questions, we have no chance of formulating a realistic response. We may still prevail by dumb luck, but the excess cost-in lives as well as treasure-can be truly staggering.

The safest and sanest path by far in both cases--the Cold War and the struggle against terrorism--is to strengthen our existing institutions, and to take the challenges we face as challenges to our own record of living up to our ideals. They should spur us onward all the more vigorously to be all that we have aspired to be--and toward that end, we should be eager to examine our shortcomings, for that is the only way to correct them.

Conclusion

This, then, is the cut-point in foreign policy that Obama ought to be focusing on in order to both forge a realistic and workable foreign policy, and to unite both liberal/progressive Democrats and the country at large. Obama comes nowhere close to doing this, I would argue, precisely because he accepts the elite conventional wisdom, which is the source of the falsely-placed cut-points he embraces and articulates in both the passages I cited at the beginning of this diary.

In short, Ron Paul’s great advantage--even though he’s both reactionary and crazy as a loon--is that he is true to his outsider roots, even though his intellect is limited. (Not the same as saying he’s stupid. He’s clearly not.) Obama’s great weakness--despite a superior intellect--is that he is, at bottom, an establishment sort of guy, who only thinks "outside the box" in ways that are pre-defined inside the box.

It’s like the boy band version of teenage rebellion. Paul Anka instead of Bob Dylan. Peter Frampton in place of Bruce Springsteen.

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