Foreign Policy--Coming From A Strange Brew

Historically US foreign policy is not a creature of rational calculation. It is not the result of clear, cold assessments of what course of action will best achieve national interests. It is not the result of realistic, proactive considerations of what kind of world order would best suit American needs and interests.

Nope. While we might like to think that our foreign policy and the mechanisms employed to implement it are and have been the consequence of intelligent analysis of problems and opportunities facing our commonweal, nothing could be further from reality.

Rather than being the result of flinty-eyed geopoliticians coolly looking at the globe and determining what, where, and how our national and strategic interests might be advanced, US foreign policy comes out of a messy, intellectually unsound, flawed mixture of national interests, national values and national enthusiasms as understood at the moment by politicians and others of the politically articulate elite. That the process often results in partial success at best and more often failure approaching or surpassing the level of debacle is not at all surprising.

The surprise comes when a policy actually works.

It's not misleading to see foreign policy as being a stew. There are three basic ingredients used. National interest. National values. National enthusiasms. These ingredients are mixed, blended and their proportions argued over by a myriad of cooks--politicians, academics, journalists, lobbying groups, corporations. Not making the preparation any easier is the existence of different cookbooks, each reflecting different ideologies.

The three ingredients are unspecified. It's like saying the stew has meat, spices, and veggies but not refining the list to a specific kind of meat, flavor of spice, or sort of vegetable. Each cookbook and most of the cooks differ on whether beef or pork, salt or pepper, carrots or lima beans should be thrown in the pot.

Worse, some cooks (not unlike the Reagan Administration school lunch program) will say that ketchup is a vegetable while others maintain it is a spice. Other cooks will insist that meatless recipes are best. And yet others will argue over the point at which a broth ceases to be a flavoring and becomes either a meat or a veggie.

Like the coach sez, "Ya gotta start with the fundamentals."

There is nothing more fundamental than a national interest. If nothing else it should be easy to agree on the most basic of national interests. The rock of all foreign policy is national survival. To expand slightly: The primal function of foreign policy is to protect and preserve the territorial integrity of the country as well as the integrity of its political, social and economic structures.

This back-to-the-most-basic-of-basics approach to foreign policy would work well if there could be agreement on just what it means. Construed quite narrowly, it implies that the most effective root of foreign policy would be one which produces an utterly impregnable, Fortress America with little if any need for intercourse with the rest of the world.

The isolationists of the Thirties stood almost at this extreme.

At other times the understanding of American survival demanded that the focus be on expansion of US territory or, later, expansion of unimpeded access to resources and markets abroad.

The reason for this wide variance in interpretation of even the most essential of national interests is simply that interest per se cannot be considered without the context of national values and even the transient winds of national enthusiasms.

Take a look at "free trade."

Is free trade (A) a national interest critical to the structural integrity of the American economy; (B) a national value honored in rhetoric but often violated in policy; (C) a national enthusiasm whipped up from time to time to serve purposes far divorced from national interest; (D) all of the foregoing at different times?

If you answered (D) you have a sounder grasp of the history of American policy both foreign and domestic than most.

Arguably, free trade has been a key feature in the list of American national interests. But, it has also served as a fetish to be waved by those pursuing expansive goals quite unrelated to the assurance of US economic stability and even inimical to other, even more core national interests.

In the alternative, the American national interest presumably contained in free trade can be ignored when its pursuit would be either inconvenient or conflict with other items in the foreign policy maker's agenda.

"Wait one, Geek! You're losing me."

OK. Walk through these bits of US history with the Geek.

Nearly two centuries ago the then small, weak, and barely born American Republic espoused freedom of maritime commerce as essential to its prosperity and internal stability. There is no doubt but that it was that as the US was a maritime power in the making and depended upon unfettered foreign trade for its survival.

When faced by a threat to open maritime commerce by the (Muslim) pirates of North Africa, the US responded by fighting a lengthy, expensive, and ultimately barely successful war against the seaborne thugs of the Barbary Coast and their political masters. The US government and politically articulate elite rejected the option of bribery even though various Europeans had taken that course successfully.

More recently the Reagan Administration responded to the Libyan claim that the Gulf of Siddra was Libyan territorial water and not, as the US looked at the map, international waters, with a show of force which escalated into a bombing raid on several Libyan targets. Arguably, this was an overly robust response to a minimal threat taken too quickly. However, in the context of the time, the response was taken not only from a generous interpretation of free trade and open seas but also from a national enthusiasm which, to put it mildly, was profoundly anti-Libyan.

Most recently the pirates of Puntand have made themselves a considerable nuisance to free maritime trade. The nuisance level was escalated significantly when the Somali brigands seized a very large crude carrier. This action had an immediate effect on world oil prices reversing at least temporarily their downward trajectory. Considering that four percent of the world's oil travels through the Gulf of Aden and an even larger percentage goes through the waters where the VLCC was hijacked, the impact on oil prices may become more significant and have a longer duration.

Even though the criminal actions directly and materially affect the structural integrity of the American economy, the actions of the US navy have been limited to "monitoring" the situation and providing hortatory advice to ship owners and operators. Free trade, at least as regards the maritime carriage of oil, does not seem to be a matter of national interest at the moment for the current administration.

This result may well be the inevitable outcome of a national enthusiasm of the present day. There is a deep and pervasive enthusiasm running against the current administration and its demonstrated proclivity for shooting first and talking later. Any use of force against pirates, no matter how justified and in the genuine national interest such might be, would be a needless distraction to the current administration in its closing days.

National interest, except in the immediate aftermath of an attack upon the US, is never undiluted by both national values and enthusiasms.

Other examples of the interaction between interest, values, and enthusiasms are easily seen in the history of the US.

Harry Truman, a most perceptive student of his country's history, took great pains not to arouse American enthusiasm during the Korean War. He and his administration generally correctly saw the war as being one of a limited nature in support of a policy--the policy of containment--that was intended to show the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China that when the US drew a line in the sand, that line could not be crossed with impunity.

The crusading enthusiasm of the American public was not aroused. This kept the war limited despite the urgings of General MacArthur and others to widen it, to use nuclear weapons, to invade the Chinese mainland. It also meant the war was profoundly unpopular and assured that Korea and its war were shoved to the furthest recesses of the American memory.

Truman was right. He waged a war of national interest. His conduct of the war did not invoke spurious appeals to American values such as democracy. It carefully caged the beast of public enthusiasm. It was successful even if completely lacking in glory.

Richard Nixon was not so coolly focused when he took over the running of our war in Vietnam. Under all the rhetoric of "credibility" and "peace with honor" ( to say nothing of the lives snuffed out in pursuit of these oratorical gems), Nixon was quite willing to leave Vietnam with one proviso.

That proviso?

As Nixon said to a (stunned) interlocutor in 1970, if the South Vietnamese elected a Communist government that wanted the US out so it could unify with the North, he, Nixon, would order the pullout without delay. True that was an extremely unlikely possibility given the nature of what passed for elections in South Vietnam, but Nixon's comment speaks loudly as to the power of an American national value.

In terms of national interest, it might be argued that democracies are desirable, more desirable than dictatorships. But, the active promotion of democracy, particularly by diplomatic means more robust than propaganda (OK, the Geek should have used the politically correct euphemism, "public diplomacy") is far more a product of national values than one of true national interest.

(If you have any doubts about the linkage between democracy and good-for-America, take a look at Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or Paraguay. Like the old saying about drugs had it, "Not all highs are good highs,)

The US has gone to war because of the conflation of national interest and national value. The Spanish-American War is a good example of this. Another, even better one is to be found in Woodrow Wilson's completely unnecessary and ultimately counterproductive decision to enter World War I.

National values and national enthusiasms combined with an overly generous interpretation of national interest to propel the US into World War I. An overly generous interpretation of the requirements of the doctrine of containment coupled with a transient dose of enthusiasm opened the gates to defeat in Vietnam.

And, in the past few years we have seen another lesson, the best lesson yet in the reality that critical foreign policy decisions are made, not from rational understanding of primal national interest, but the dictates of national values as seen through the prism of ideology.

The single greatest challenge in foreign policy today is that of correctly parsing between the small number of genuine national interests and the plethora of possible applications of national values or national enthusiasms. National interest, to be effectively preserved, protected, and advanced, must be narrowly construed and rigidly divorced from the values espoused by the politically articulate elite. More important even than that is the necessity of decoupling interest from enthusiasm.

Difficult? Yes.

Impossible? No. Harry Truman showed that.