I recently had an article in the print edition of Reason on Justin Hart’s Empire of Idea, a book about America’s efforts to influence world opinion. Peter Suderman interview me for a profile to run beside the article…but of course, I was over verbose, so most of my responses got cut. Peter, though, has kindly gave me permission to run the whole thing here instead.
Peter Suderman: What makes America so susceptible to foreign policy blunders?
NB: I think America’s tendency to stumble into foreign policy quagmires probably has a lot to do with the fact that we’re just everywhere. We’ve got a finger in every pie (and/or a foot on every neck, if you want to be more confrontational about it.) I think there’s just a
very strong ideological commitment to leading the world/solving all the world’s problems, which is partially expressed through spending tons and tons and tons of money on weapons — and once you’ve got all those weapons, there’s a huge incentive to use them, which reinforces the ideology, and you buy more weapons, and on and on and on.PS: Do you think there’s a disconnect between U.S. policy/government elites and less-well-connected citizens when it comes to foreign policy? Or are they basically in sync?
NB: There are obviously a lot of Americans, of all walks of life, who enjoy the image of the United States as a superpower, and who identify with the US projection of power. On the other hand, there’s also a substantial number of folks who want us to be doing less. Obama won the Democratic primary basically as the less-imperialism candidate. But then, of course, in office, he’s projected force as enthusiastically, if thank God less incompetently, than his predecessor. So…I’d say that elites are more unified in their support for imperial adventures. Those adventures draw at least occasional substantial opposition from the public, but that opposition seems difficult to translate into elite action (except in cases of transparent policy failure, like Iraq).
PS: You’ve written an awful lot about pop-culture. Does pop-culture contribute in important ways to how America sees itself in the world? Are there particularly relevant, insightful pop culture portrayals of America’s foreign policy outlook?
NB: I think pop culture both reflects and can contribute to how America sees itself, or what America does. I guess the most obvious recent example of that is 24, which became a touchstone for pro-torture arguments.
I think Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic Watchmen is an extremely insightful look at America’s foreign policy. It was written in the 80s, obviously, but it’s still really relevant, I think. It’s about the allure of power and of saving others, about the utilitarian calculus of sacrifice that goes along with it, and about the way that that utilitarian calculus ultimately founders on the fact that no power is ever enough power, and that, however many bombs you have, the future really isn’t under your control. Ozymadnias’ piles and piles of dead bodies are meant to be a sacrifice on the altar of the new future — but the book strongly suggests that they are, really, just piles and piles of dead bodies. The fact that it’s the liberal one-worlder who turns out to be the mass murderer while the right-wing fascist nutball is repulsed by the violence is a nice reminder that imperialism can be centrist as well as extremist .
PS: What do you think America could have done to avoid being linked with
European colonialism? Or was that linkage inevitable?NB: America has long had an isolationist strain; it seems at least possible that that could have had more of an influence than it did. Counterfactuals are hard to figure, though.
Reason ran a photo of me with the article as well…but looking at it again, I don’t think I can bear to reprint it. It’s just hard to avoid looking willfully smug in author photos, I guess. So if you want to see my shame, you’ll just have to pick up that issue of Reason.
I don’t know if the question is that we’re more susceptible to more blunders than other historical powers. Are there any that haven’t made the same type of errors that we have? It just comes with the terrority of having absolutely no one to answer to. Isolationism never had a chance.
Yeah, that’s a fair enough point.
“Fascism and Bolshevism — Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler — did not result from American isolationism. They were the results of European stupidity and bloody-minded idiot-interventionism.”
“All four presidents on Mt. Rushmore were protectionists.”
— Patrick J. Buchanan
I like a lot of things about Buchanan. I wish you could get the isolationism without the nativism, though.
Pretty short interview…hard to believe they had to cut it down.
It was just a little profile sidebar thing; I think the cut off was 100 words.
It’s a common fallacy to regard America’s foreign policy as blunder-prone. It’s actually a very shrewdly run business, on the whole.
Mahendra, I don’t think that’s actually true. Or…if it is run like a business, that’s only because businesses are really in general not very efficiently run.
I would say ruthless pragmatism and shocking incompetence tend to exist side by side in our foreign policy.
Noah B: “I like a lot of things about Buchanan. I wish you could get the isolationism without the nativism, though.”
How do they not go hand in hand?
That’s the million dollar question.
There isn’t any necessary logical reason why being anti-intervention would have to entail racism. And sometimes it doesn’t; the Vietnam war protests were anti-intervention, but weren’t ideologically racist, for example.
In a lot of cases, though, as with Buchanan, anti-intervention seems to get linked with hatred of immigrants, mistrust of outsiders, etc.
I read an article — maybe by Kissinger — that argued that contrary to popular opinion, the United States had achieved its big post-WWII foreign policy goals in the Middle East. The two I remember were preventing Soviet domination and maintaining access to critical resources. That stated me thinking that the U.S. often achieves its major foreign policy goals, but it seems like every solution creates two new problems. We’re not knowledgeable enough about the world around us to foresee unintended consequences. Most other countries aren’t either, but most other countries aren’t as activist as we are, so there’s much less negative effect.
Kissinger has a pretty enormous stake in claiming that American policy has been successful, I think.
That’s certainly true, and he (or whomever the author was, if I’m remembering wrong) had the advantage of picking the goals after the fact. “I meant to do that.” Still, we encouraged jihadism in Afghanistan in the eighties. We used Pakistani intelligence to execute that policy, and they did so to a far greater degree than we would have, favoring extremists over more moderate mujaheddin. The result was defeated Soviets and the beginning of the unraveling of the Soviet Union, with minimal risk to the United States. It was our wildest dream come true, but it was only the first row of dominoes to fall.
Somebody needs to scan that author photo from the magazine…
“It’s actually a very shrewdly run business, on the whole.”
I’m not sure if that comment is meant to be taken seriously. I’d say the citizens of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Fallujah would take issue with your comment.
But how could you justify an isolationist policy in WWII without a total denial of common human cause with groups outside your own? It’s all very well to say “liberal interventionism was the cause of that conflict,” but setting aside the dubious reasoning of that position, it’s irrelevant once that human catastrophe is in progress as to the moral position of an observer with power to affect the outcome. We didn’t act with perfect justice or clean hands in WWII, but the smugness of perfect isolationism gives me the willies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Pat_Buchanan#Accusations_of_Anti-semitism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_buchanan#Accusations_of_anti-semitism_and_Holocaust_diminution
World War II is a really hard case for non-interventionists. The Civil War too.
I do think the world in general would be a better place if we could stop trying to solve everyone’s problems with violence — and certainly if we were more willing to focus on the horrors that result from war and not so entirely focused on the horrors that result from no war.
Violence is the foundation of our civilization, historically and ongoing. There are ways to resist any conflict without violence. Not that I have an ideal scenario for WW2 or the Civil War, but they were the result of violence, not just cases where violence overcame evil.
I was thinking about what Mahendra said, and maybe the rest of us aren’t being entirely fair. I could write one of my typically long comments listing real achievements of American foreign policy. We tend to focus on the negative and forget that it’s a difficult, ambiguous business — that people with contrary objectives are actively working against those who are trying to devise and implement said policy. To add difficulty, the United States is a famously non-unitary actor (as Empire of Ideas illustrates, according to Noah’s review), so elements of the government and the populace are working against other elements. Of course, the multifarious nature gives us more arms to work with, too.
By the way, when I say, “I could write one of my typically long comments,” I don’t mean it as a threat.
It’s funny because it’s true.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I like a lot of things about Buchanan. I wish you could get the isolationism without the nativism, though.
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…And his concern that outsourcing American jobs was shafting our workers was likewise admirable. (The GOP leadership told him to lay off that issue…)
(But, being more concerned with the welfare of American workers over Third World sweatshop laborers could get him attacked as “racist”…)
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…World War II is a really hard case for non-interventionists…
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And for pacifists, too. After being the world’s most famous spokesperson for pacifism, advising young males in all countries to resist the draft, Albert Einstein changed his mind when the world was faced with the Nazi threat.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
It’s [ http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/6822931_700b.jpg ] funny because it’s true.
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Hah! That’s great…
The above is comedy, but this isn’t.
“We tend to focus on the negative and forget that it’s a difficult, ambiguous business — that people with contrary objectives are actively working against those who are trying to devise and implement said policy. ”
I don’t know about that. There seems to be many unified policy makers these days. So how many Iranians do you think are going to starve in the coming years?