Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 8)
Chapter 8 is titled “The World Beyond Our Borders”.
This chapter is fascinating simply as a presentation of how liberals look at foreign policy. It’s not often that you see it all in one place. The chapter starts with a brief summary of American history.
An interesting lesson learned about the liberal perspective - our alliances won the Cold War. Not our military strength or our economic prowess. This is so perverse I don’t even know what to say. Our alliances were necessary but not sufficient components of our victory. If they were as important as Obama thinks they are, why didn’t the Cold War end the day NATO was formed?
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I have to give Obama some credit here.
...at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that US multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West – in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.
If he’s telling the truth, that’s a surprisingly mature view coming from someone on the left. On the other hand, I’m skeptical that this is the outright truth and that it hasn’t been sanitized a bit.
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As expected, a good chunk of this chapter is dedicated to Iraq. The book was written in 2006, so some of the material in here is outdated and mostly irrelevant, other than to note that his stance is and always has been that our presence in Iraq is illegitimate, and that we should leave no matter what. His consistency to a fault is interesting, especially now that we know he wouldn’t even in hindsight have supported an effective policy (the surge) if he knew it was going to be effective. He’s not one to let practicality get in the way of ideology, apparently.
Then he goes on to talk about foreign policy in more general terms. There are the typical cliched criticisms - “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?” - followed by the statement that we have no coherent foreign policy, and we need one. It seems to me that for someone to reach the conclusion that we have no coherent foreign policy, one must engage in a fair bit of willful blindness. Regardless, Obama first states that he has no “grand strategy in my hip pocket”, but of course, he has some suggestions.
First, we must recognize that isolationism is the wrong approach. Excellent start.
Second, we must recognize that the world has changed – that the major threats to our security come not from “great powers”, but from states on the margins of the civilized world. We need to maintain our ability to “play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff”, and yet, our military is too large and should be cut. He doesn’t say by how much. In addition, we need to reconfigure the military to be less “fancy hardware” and more troops. In my mind, more fancy hardware means less dead American troops. While I can nitpick here, particularly on the military cuts, I generally agree with the philosophy of his statements.
Third, “the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against attack,” up to and including a preemptive strike against an imminent threat. Merely stating this is virtually meaningless though, as conservatives and liberals are typically going to have widely varying concepts of what an imminent threat is, what constitutes an attack on our nation, as well as what constitutes an appropriate response.
Fourth, any international use of force beyond self-defense should be a multilateral action, with “hard diplomatic work ... obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions.” Then, paradoxically, he states that the UN Security Council should not have a veto over our actions. So in essence – he’s willing to buck the veto of Russia or China, but only if the rest of the world gets on board. Given the limp-wristed response of Europe to pretty much everything lately, requiring their consent for action is de facto deciding to voluntarily tie our own hands. Which, to much of Obama’s base, is exactly the idea.
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I have to give him a lot of credit for this, though the devil is in the details:
I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy.
Absolutely true. He states that he recognizes that the American system has flaws, but he also recognizes that local movements like Hugo Chavez’s socialism or Sharia theocracy are not the way to alleviate people’s suffering. That’s a stunningly mature observation, and I didn’t expect it of him.
However, he also says that democracy cannot be delivered by the barrel of a gun, and that the only way to true reform is via a home-grown movement. This is rather naive, given the obvious counterexamples of Germany, Japan, and dare I say it – Iraq.
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Oh, the irony:
I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history…
Surely not, or his candidacy would not have gotten this far in the first place.
