The Need to Rebuild Our Foreign Policy

George W. Bush's defenders too easily forget that the president inherited a functioning foreign policy that was developed and used by the last eleven presidents with varying degrees of success and emphasis. There's no question that at any point in the last sixty years, our foreign policy could have been better. And there's no question mistakes have been made by both Democratic and Republican Presidents. But, when a president radically changes our foreign policy, he's obligated to have something better.

Early on, Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that as the most economically powerful country in the world, we have responsibilities (if, as an example, other countries turn to us for help, we have to decide when to be involved and when not to). As we acquired a powerful military, it hasn't always been clear what our responsibilities are and how much we should act in our own interest and on what time scale we should act in our own interest. One thing we learned early on is that military action is costly, even for a superpower. And once nuclear war became possible, we had to be careful how we proceeded. There have been foreign policy experiments in the last sixty years, some successful, some not. Eisenhower, for example, understood the costs of war and tried to use the C.I.A. as a kind of old-fashioned shortcut for such foreign policy goals as regime change; more often than not, Eisenhower's policy had long-term consequences that we're still dealing with. There are reasons why most presidents, most of the time, have emphasized diplomacy and multilateral efforts to deal with difficult issues. And there are reasons why we listen to intelligence analysts and experts

If a president is going to take our foreign policy in a radical direction, he better have some very good reasons to give up a functioning foreign policy and at the very least have some results to show for his radical change after six years. After almost six years of Bush's failures, we need more than 'gut feelings' and perpetual foreign policy speeches that say the same things over and over.

Earlier this week, Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory had an excellent post on what passes for a foreign policy among right wing Republicans:

One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration's foreign policy -- arguably its most disastrous hallmark -- is the literal elimination of diplomacy as a foreign policy instrument for dealing with hostile nations. They actually believe, and overtly argue, that diplomacy and negotiations are worthless when it comes to many countries which are acting against American interests.

(snip)

...Instapundit himself adds that "diplomats tend to overvalue dialogue," and he then cites to an interview Diane Sawyer conducted yesterday with Donald Gregg, the Ambassador to South Korea under Bush 41, in which Gregg argued that it was a mistake for the Bush administration to refuse North Korea's repeated requests for direct negotiations. In response, Reynolds says that the Gregg interview "made me very grateful that he no longer has a hand in formulating U.S. policy." ...

(snip)

Where a country like North Korea is engaged in conduct that we would like to stop, we have three options:

(1) wage war against them;

(2) engage in diplomacy and attempt to reach a negotiated solution; or

(3) do nothing.

If we remove option (2) from the list -- as Bush followers want to do in almost every case and as the administration repeatedly does -- it means that only options (1) and (3) remain. And where option (1) is not viable -- as is the case with the U.S. vis-a-vis North Korea (mostly because we already chose option (1) with two other countries and are threatening to do so with a third) -- then the only option left is (3) -- do nothing. That is exactly what we have done while North Korea became a nuclear-armed power, and we did nothing because we operated from [the] premise that diplomacy and negotiations are essentially worthless, which left us with no other options.

The list Greenwald gives us is simplified but still accurately describes Bush's foreign policy. Here's another take by TPM Reader DK of Talking Points Memo:

I have no doubt that there are genuine hardliners within the Administration who urged covert and overt military action against North Korea early in the President's first term, and certainly in response to the breakdown of the Agreed Framework. Every Republican Administration is going to have its share of Curtis LeMays.

But those true hardliners have not prevailed in the internal Administration struggle over whether the U.S. should lead with the carrot or with the stick. What has emerged as U.S. "policy" is inertia. No carrot. No stick. No nothing, unless cheap rhetoric about what is "unacceptable" counts for something.

(snip)

The sad truth is that we have virtually no good options for putting the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle, and I am quite convinced that our military options at the moment range from bad to worse (and that the current Administration would be unable to competently execute any military option).

But in the same way that it is a mistake to conclude that the Clinton Administration offer of a carrot was a failure, it is a mistake to conclude that the stick has failed, too. Both may be needed in the future.

All that we can say with any certainty is that paralysis has failed to achieve our objective of a non-nuclear Korean peninsula. And paralysis, if I may say, is unacceptable.

The only quibble I have with DK is the slight confusion between 'hardliners' and the use of the 'stick': most hardliners don't think through the consequences of their actions: hence, the fiasco in Iraq. Effective diplomacy with countries like North Korea requires the use of the carrot and the mutual knowledge of the stick, whether economic or military; I don't like that diplomacy too often requires the real potential of the military option but that has remained somewhat unavoidable since the fall of the Soviet Union. Those who understand how to do foreign policy manage to keep the exercise of the military option to a minimum and effectively get results by way of serious face-to-face negotiations.

It was a serious strategic mistake for Bush to go to war in Iraq without finishing the job in Afghanistan; he would have had far more foreign policy leverage the past four years if our military had not been tied down by the Iraq adventure. It's too bad our president, since bungling Iraq and increasingly Afghanistan, prefers to sit on his hands except when waving them while making fatuous speeches. Whether it's inertia, paralysis or incompetence in the White House, we have a problem.