Geopolitics

What Would Nixon Do on U.S.-Cuba Relations?

Patrick Doherty — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:18:00 -0400

We hope you can join us for this event next week:

Thirty-seven years after Nixon went to China, the next President of the United States has another chance to split a non-threatening communist state away from an aggressive socialist power. Then, like now, there is an opportunity to really change the perception of the United States in the world and shift the conversation.

This event is co-hosted by the New America Foundation and The Nixon Center.

To register for this event, click here.

Start: 07/28/2008 - 12:30pm
End: 07/28/2008 - 2:00pm

New America Foundation
1630 Connecticut Ave, NW 7th Floor
Washington, 20009

Featured speakers

Dimitri K. Simes
President, The Nixon Center
Former Foreign Policy Advisor to Richard Nixon

Flynt Leverett
Senior Fellow, Director, Geopolitics of Energy Initiative, New America Foundation
Former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs, National Security Council

Julia E. Sweig
Rockefeller Senior Fellow & Director Latin America Studies
Council on Foreign Relations

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.)
Former Chief of Staff, Department of State
Pamela C. Harriman Professor, College of William & Mary

Moderator

Steve Clemons
Director New America Foundation/American Strategy Program
Publisher, www.TheWashingtonNote.com

T. Boone Pickens: Right Track, Wrong Package

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:41:00 -0400

There is an old truism that goes, "where you stand depends on where you sit." This was the case for former Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin and his policy of "Rubinomics" that elevated a few short- and medium-term macro indicators (e.g. annual budget deficit, Fed Funds Rate, S&P 500, etc.) above long-term economic health.

Similarly, his successor, current Treasury Secretary and also former Goldman Sachs chief, Hank Paulson. In Paulson's case, stability of the macroeconomic status quo is the highest priority and thoughts of longer-term, broad-based domestic prosperity are given short shrift.

If you're a banker in Wall Street these policies make complete sense. If you're the next President of the United States, however, that kind of narrow thinking is insufficient.

That is a long introduction to my critique of T. Boone Pickens' new energy plan. In today's Wall Street Journal, the renowned oil executive offered up his plan to, as he puts it, "escape the grip of foreign oil." While Pickens' proposals rightly establish the scale of the problem -- "Now our country faces what I believe is the most serious situation since World War II" -- the package of solutions is clearly designed by an Energy executive, and is not ready for consideration by the next president.

I believe the next president needs to build a new grand strategy for the country rooted in, among other things, a shift towards a sustainable energy sector. Yet T. Boone Pickens' proposal looks more like another federal spending program that on its own will cost the taxpayer too much money and deliver inadequate results.

Rather, a new grand strategy has to be powered by a new economic engine. The last one was conceived after World War II and designed to deal with a vastly different set of grand strategic circumstances (Communist expansion, two superpowers, pent-up demand for housing, pent-up demand for everything from war-torn Europe and Japan, cheap energy, the baby boom, plenty of environmental cushion etc.). Attempting to prop up the energy sector of our obsolete, uncompetitive economy is just too little, too late. Today we face a vastly different set of grand strategic challenges (multi-polar international order, insecure and expensive energy, trade imbalances, fiscal dysfunction, climate change and other forms of ecosystem depletion, increasing inequality, demographic aging, breakdown of community, etc.)--and we need a new solution.

In other words, our economic engine needs to be replaced and its replacement needs to do our strategic heavy lifting. Contrast that with a new federal program spending money on a transitional energy infrastructure. A new economic engine would use legislation and executive orders to align prices in the marketplace to our strategic requirements. Some essential infrastructure would be funded, but it would be more on the order of the high-efficiency electrical transmission lines, metropolitan and intercity transportation infrastructure, and grid infrastructure than on wind turbines and nuclear plants. Spending relative to economic impact would be minimal.

But Picken's proposal picks a very particular energy mix, as he states here:

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. ... We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel.

To force this solution on the market would require a huge amount of additional market distortion in the form of subsidies and outright expenditures from a Treasury that already is far too in the red. The wind-gas-cars shift might be a good idea in some scenarios, but picking it as a winner for all 300 million U.S. consumers is better left to the markets.

I want an economic engine in which choosing renewable energy, smart growth, and sustainable consumer products means choosing the least expensive, most convenient options. Those three objectives will simultaneously secure our prosperty, our shores, and our environment. That's what the post-war economic engine did: the public investment in the national highway system, in combination with the GI Bill and private sector exploitation of Federal energy reserves, generated an incredible return on investment for the nation.

In other words, with signficant market-shaping and minimal direct expenditures we made suburbs cheaper than cities, let cars increase personal mobility, and gave centralized coal, oil, and natural gas-fired electricity a near monopoly on electricity generation. In fact, it created a massive new market called suburbia.

Large federal spending programs, like Pickens' and many other energy-only proposals circulating today, would put a straightjacket on the markets we need to be agile and innovative. They do not create markets but try to salvage an economy that is on its last legs and dangerously insecure.

That, in fact, is my test for economic policy going forward, during the Presidential campaign and after: does a particular package of policies, in the aggregate, generate a new, prosperous, secure, and sustainable economic engine, or does it attempt patch and repair the 60 year old rusting, greasy hulk we're operating today?

Thanks, Mr. Pickens, for elevating the issue. But please don't be upset if we choose a different path to American sustainability and security.

ASP In the News | June 30 - July 2

Ian McAllister — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:11:00 -0400

MSN Money Central (07/3) quotes Doug Rediker on fears of declining American competitiveness.
Sydney Morning Herald (07/02) cites Steve Clemons on a neoconservative regrouping in Washington.
Miami Herald (07/01) quotes Steve Clemons on the reasons behind North Korea's terrorism delisting.
Emirates Business (07/01) cites Parag Khanna on the Second World's growing ability to shape world events.
The Australian (06/28) features Peter's Bergen's analysis of the growing divisions within Al Qaeda .

Liberals for 'Conservative' Grand Strategy?

Patrick Doherty — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:07:00 -0400

I've been reading with some fascination the conversation by my friends over at the National Security Network's blog, Democracy Arsenal. If I am reading their meaning correctly, three consecutive posts on U.S. grand strategy are arguing that the essence of progressive grand strategy is about the U.S. becoming a conservative power.

Starting with Ilan Goldenberg at NSN and followed by Shawn Brimley of CNAS and David Shorr of the Stanley Foundation, all three say this pretty clearly:

Goldenberg: "The goal of American foreign policy should be to sustain the international system that that has served the United States and mankind so well for the past 60 years."
Brimley: "Beyond the defense of the homeland, a grand strategy of sustainment would commit the United States to the pursuit of three vital global interests: stable balances of power in key regions, an open international economy, and continued access to the global commons. Such things are international public goods, and are thus shared goals that can constitute a foundation of an efficacious approach to a stable world order."
Shorr: "We are indeed reorienting America from being a revolutionary power toward being a status quo power, and properly so. The last several years have been nothing if not a reminder of the hazards and unintended consequences of major disruptions toward the status quo."

I find this emerging consensus very troubling. So does Shadi Hamid, another blogger at Democracy Arsenal:

So, yes, I was concerned by David’s conclusion that “we are indeed reorienting America from being a revolutionary power toward being a status quo power, and properly so.” If this is indeed true – and if this is really what progressives want – then I’m really, really confused and more than a bit worried. Of course, we shouldn’t be a revolutionary power – in the sense that that revolutions are usually disrupting and often violent – but if we aspire to reinstate the status quo, let us just recall that the status quo wasn’t all that great for a lot of people.

While Shadi looks at the flaws from the perspective of those on the receiving end of our grand strategy, I prefer to look at it as tragically sub-optimal for U.S. long term interests. If we only focus grand strategy on an analysis of states and threats with a short-term horizon, I think Ilan, Shawn and David are right. But to limit ourselves to that level of analysis misses the real driver of international politics in the 21st Century.

Take for example the strategic importance of energy. Few would argue that energy, in particular oil, is the single largest source of strategic instability in the world today. Three major wars have transpired in the Persian Gulf since Washington and the world realized the U.S. was dependent on global oil markets in the 1970s. Prices are spiking and destabilizing politics around the planet. Likewise with food and raw materials. Increasing demand from rising Asian economies combined with high continued consumption from the West is squeezing existing supply chains. A recent New America/Terror Free Tomorrow poll discovered that 86% of Pakistanis cannot purchase enough wheat.

A state and power analysis of these issues argues that as the economic power of Asia increases, their military power will also increase so to avoid a period of more militarized strategic competition, it is time to recognize Asia's new power by giving them more of a stake in the structures of the international order. But the UN has a really bad track record when it comes to resource conflicts of major world powers. It is pretty much useless when such major strategic interests are at stake.

A deeper analysis yields better options. What lies behind these two economic dynamics is on-going and inexorable process of economic inclusion. In the 1990s, we thought about development, and helped close to a billion people enter the global market economy. But now that we have 2 billion people consuming at middle incomes or better, we're crashing the system. The net impact of two decades of post-Cold War development now forces us to think in terms of inclusion. How do we make economic space for--how do we include--the 4.5 billion people wanting to enter the formal sector of the global economy but for whom we have no energy, raw materials, land, or transport?

In China this narrative is about urbanization. By 2030, China will move an additional 700 million people into its cities. This is the single largest and fastest rural-urban migration the world has ever seen. As the McKinsey Global Institute points out, Chinese urbanization will overwhelm global patterns of of energy production, resource consumption, land use and mobility. Behind China is a long line of one billion more aspiring capitalists in India and 2 billion others scattered around the rest of the world.

Attempting to mount a conservative grand strategy in a period that will have to be one of massive economic transition is foolish. No institutional framework can manage the populist pressures of large nations without enough of the basic economic inputs to fulfill their aspirations, much less their aspirations. We can also anticipate that widespread discontent in illiberal societies will emerge either as militant nationalism or militant extremism. Either outcome poses major threats to international peace and stability and quite likely, the U.S. directly.

What is on offer from the two candidates is still insufficient to stem this tide. Even if Senator Obama wins the White House and signs into law the energy policy on his campaign website, it still won't be enough innovation in enough time to deal with the urbanization of China. Here, emissions reduction by 2050 is not the test. Consumption is. Obama promises only 35% reduction by 2030. Using the CIA's Factbook's oil numbers, we'll give back 7.3 million barrels per day of oil but, without a major shift, China will increase consumption by 8.5 mbpd. In that kind of scenario--where the U.S. commits to a 30% reduction of oil consumption--OPEC might not actually invest in additional upstream capacity. By 2030, in addition to many of the non-Opec major fields drying up, we will likely see a net reduction in production capacity and prices will spike even higher.

The problem is not Obama's, but it could be. The problem is the mindset in Washington's. Few in Washington are willing to think like FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower, in terms of grand strategies that shape the U.S. economy to do the nation's strategic heavy lifting. As a result, we are still talking about how much mitigating climate change will "cost" the United States and we are still talking about foreign policy as only the stuff we do "over there."

This should be government 101. Grand strategy is the correlation the economic engine and the national security strategy to meet the challenges of the day. When our economy is becoming more of a strategic liability than a strategic asset, it is time for a new grand strategy. With all due respect to my colleagues at Democracy Arsenal, a grand strategy of "conservation" is more akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Sewall's Strategy of 'Conservation'

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:21:00 -0400

A shout out to my colleague Sherle Schwenninger who reminded me that Harvard's Sarah Sewall has a new national security strategy paper making the rounds.

Sewall was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance and is now director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. I met Sarah ten years ago when she was at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences up in Cambridge. I was a grad student doing research on conflict prevention and she was leading a program on the International Criminal Court. Sewall, of course, is in the inner circles of two important people right now. One is General David Petraeus, the other is Senator Barack Obama. It's an extremely important relationship that the intense partisanship of the last two years has threatened in a dangerous way. But I digress.

Sarah's paper was commissioned by the Center for a New American Security as part of its American Grand Strategy Solarium Project. I called CNAS out a few weeks ago for having a panel on grand strategy without offering any grand strategies. So I was really pleased to see that Sarah calls her strategy not grand, but of the more typical garden variety, an every-day national security strategy.

I hope to someday soon post the full e-mail exchange I had with G. John Ikenberry, another contributor to CNAS' Solarium project, but in it I define a grand strategy in the following two ways:

"...the tests I put on US grand strategy are these:

Does it identify the main challenge facing the United States in the coming/current era?

Does it identify a singular goal that responds to that main challenge?

Does it orchestrate all our national means to achieve that goal?

Can it engender durable political consensus for the term of the strategy?

Put another way, I define U.S. grand strategy as the correlation of our economic engine and our national security strategy to achieve our most important goal in the context of the current era.

While I made those comments to Ikenberry because I felt his strategy focusing on the nature of the international order amounted to less than a grand strategy, I find in Sarah Sewall's paper something closer to the opposite.

While very much focused, like Ikenberry, on stability in an international order dominated by states and their shifting capabilities and strategic interests, deep within is hiding a little grand strategy crying for attention:

The second component of strategic flexibility aims to create greater room for political maneuver and credibility for global leadership through new policy initiatives that reshape relations with key states, rebuild alliances, and create new partnerships with rising powers – with the aim of marginalizing new or aspiring nuclear states and hostile non-state actors that challenge the stability of the international system. These steps should ameliorate hostility toward the United States and increase U.S. leverage to launch new and far-reaching initiatives. In some cases these policies are an exponential expansion of current efforts. In other cases, they represent significant departures from current U.S. policy.

In line with this mission, the government should require greater U.S. energy conservation through fuel efficiency standards and energy taxes and significantly increase funding for alternative energy development. This must be a presidential challenge, akin to putting a man on the moon, and will entail a populist educational effort, such as the national anti-smoking campaign. Such progress will signal a change in American attitudes; enable the United States to lead collective approaches to controlling climate change; and move the nation closer toward greater energy independence, which would fundamentally reshape strategic perceptions and options. This is essentially a call for national sacrifice and service, requiring large dislocations in the short term for a potentially game-changing strategic payoff.

Game-changing strategic payoff indeed. Sewall recognizes the incredible strategic advantages to be had by reducing the profile of energy security within the U.S. strategic portfolio. Her analysis that this "would fundamentally reshape strategic perceptions and options," is spot on.

This is the essence of American grand strategy. This is what Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were all able to understand when they designed the last two grand strategies, for World War II and the Cold War. The problem is Washington's perception of itself. Washington just does not think of itself as capable of designing grand strategy.

That may be changing. Today, here at NAF we had an incredible presentation by Leo Hindery and Tom Gallagher on a more near-term issue dealing with energy, the price of oil. Along the way, Gallagher, the senior managing director of the International Strategy and Investment Group, asserted his belief that the United States is on the verge of the reversal of the small-government Reagan policies of the 1980s. The pendulum has swung out too far and Americans want more, and better government, not less.

But can Washington, the White House and the Congress, really come to an understanding of their role in the same fashion as did FDR, Harry, and Ike? Can they see the real strategic advantage described by Sewall?

All three mid-century presidents understood that the government creates markets through regulation and therefore has a responsibility to shape those markets so they do our strategic heavy lifting. In World War II, this went so far as complete industrial control. But Truman and Eisenhower demobilized the economy in such a way as to ensure the economic engine was still doing the heavy lifting. The G.I. Bill and Eisenhower's investment in the national highway infrastructure were key to unlocking the economic boom of suburbia and at the time were major interventions in the domestic economy. The Federal mortgage deduction and the loan guarantees of Fannie Mae, not to mention the Carter Doctrine of protecting our access to Persian Gulf energy supplies were all part of that same Cold War grand strategy.

So, I think Sewall's analysis is dead on. We do need to focus the President's attention on how economic transformation can provide strategic advantage. I would say, however, that the Apollo analogy is too small a scale. This is about a much more pervasive re-design of our markets and investment in new kinds of energy, transportation, and metropolitan infrastructure to send price signals across the country and the world such that our economy is not only giving us better policy options, but doing the strategic heavy lifting.

Climate Change Intelligence

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:29:00 -0400

My friend Siobahn Gorman over at the Wall Street Journal covered the new National Intelligence Assessment on Global Climate Change today. Here's the article.

In summarizing the NIA for Congress, Tom Fingar, the head of the National Intelligence Council who spoke here at New America a few weeks ago, said global climate change is a very real national security challenge. Here's his summary graf:

We judge global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years. Although the United States will be less affected and is better equipped than most nations to deal with climate change, and may even see a benefit owing to increases in agriculture productivity, infrastructure repair and replacement will be costly. We judge that the most significant impact for the United States will be indirect and result from climate-driven effects on many other countries and their potential to seriously affect US national security interests.

All in all, I think the statement by Fingar is solid first look at the issue by an Intelligence Community that is trying hard to get a handle on a powerful geopolitical force that requires untraditional collection and analysis.

Is there anything new here? Not really. The findings are relatively safe and avoid looking at non-linear climate change dynamics. For an organization that challenged the White House line on Iran and now is taking on climate change, simply getting a consensus assessment is a significant accomplishment.

Of course not looking at non-linear dynamics is a major oversight. The big threat out there is the potential for the shut down of the Gulf Stream, a scenario which a 2003, DoD-sponsored report considered a major strategic concern, even if the likelihood was lower than linear warming.

Jay Gullege, a climate scientist at the Pew Centers for Global Climate Change recently noted, a) non-linear shocks are precisely how climate changes (even if overall change is measured in mean global temperature) and b) the best scientific models have been consistently under-estimating the scale and pace of the change, year after year.

My final thought on the report is that the Assessment is still trapped in an analytical box left over from the Cold War. The NIC, as Tom Fingar said in his talk here at New America a few weeks ago, can only look at specific, well defined questions, like "what are the national security implications of climate change." That's because intelligence assessments and estimates fundamentally asks how a given issue will impact the status quo. That status quo is built up of existing interests, but those interests, like oil and gas supplies, are part of the strategic dysfunction out there.

I believe that climate change combined with the urbanization of China and the economic rise of India, however, demands a major change in the status quo; a major U.S. strategic adaptation, and a shift in our national interests. What Tom Fingar confirmed today is that the consideration of grand strategic alternatives will not emerge even from our most elite intelligence professionals. Grand strategy is an inherently political act, which, ironically, must seek to transcend politics if we have any hope to sustain strategic focus for more than four or eight years.

That's what gets me up in the morning.

Pivot Point? Not Yet.

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:46:00 -0400

As the Weekly Standard editor, Bill Kristol, just joked, today's Pivot Point conference hosted by the Center for a New American Security is the greatest gathering of strategic firepower since Richard Holbrooke dined alone.

Billed as a conversation about American grand strategy, the first panel, entitled, "A New U.S. Grand Strategy" amounted to not the presentation of a new grand strategy but, an admission that these panelists hold little hope for finding one. The message of this panel, from Harvard's Joe Nye to Bill Kristol and all the speakers in between is that the world is complex and that here is no obvious singular organizing principle like we had in the Cold War. Therefore, says CNAS President and Co-Founder Michele Flournoy, the best we can do is to set out an attractive vision of the world we seek and deal with the complexity in the world out there.

While I would have loved to have had this incredible collection of strategic thinkers lay out a new grand strategy for the United States, the first panel still managed to provide Washington and arguably, the nation, a real service in holding this panel in this conference. It is clear that CNAS CEO Kurt Campbell and Michele Flournoy are convinced that the United States needs a new grand strategy and one that is both durable and bi-partisan. So it was important that Flournoy called for the next president of the United States, whether John McCain or Barack Obama, to hold a new Solarium Exercise. At that point, the Pivot Point conference title shifted in meaning from the simplistic, the end of the Bush Administration national security strategy and towards a real pivot point for America's role in the world.

It's not that they are the first. Steve Clemons and my predecessors at the New America Foundation, back in 2005, held an event called, The New Solarium Project On U.S. Foreign Policy, held in the Senate and featuring national security luminaries like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. This has been a long time coming.

But I digress. To explain the significance of these calls for a new grand strategy, we need to know what Solarium refers to. The original Solarium Exercise, conducted by Dwight Eisenhower after he took office, was an effort to end the partisan and intra-partisan debate over the U.S. grand strategy for the Cold War. Truman's doctrine, Containment, was the existing grand strategy, but the Republican party held strong voices arguing for grand strategies of roll back and even isolationism. Eisenhower divided the strategy directorate of his NSC into three teams, each to argue one of three alternatives. After the three teams made their case in front of Eisenhower over a long weekend in the White House Solarium, Eisenhower gave everyone a lesson in strategy and then pronounced his support for a version of Containment that was more globally pervasive than George Kennan, the author of the original concept, ever envisaged.

So in calling for the next president to hold another Solarium, Flournoy is calling for a high-level, official debate about U.S. grand strategy in the next administration. This is essential, even if CNAS, by its own admission, has yet to come up with a grand strategy. And it is important because of one reason that William and Mary's Mitchell Reiss identified, which might have been the keenest insight in this entire conference: one of the primary obstacles to coming up with a new U.S. grand strategy is that there has been little to no demand for such for at least a decade, since Bill Clinton gave up looking for the big idea and started managing the crises all around him. With no demand, most think tanks in Washington, with a few notable exceptions like New America and CNAS, have focused on day-to-day crisis management and incrementalism.

Looking at the rest of the conference line-up, the remainder of the day will be about discussing some of the main elements of U.S. national security strategy. Iraq is up now, Iran is not far behind, Asia, global warming, and others in the very familiar litany of atomized, discrete challenges facing the nation. As such, the rest of the conference is really about CNAS getting out front and framing these issues for the next administration.

Ironically, that kind of follow-up deadens the call for a new grand strategy, so well done in the first panel. There is much work to do and I'm glad that a lot more folks, like us here at the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, are looking at generating real grand strategic options for the next administration.

The Next Fault Line: Asia v. The West?

Patrick Doherty — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:11:00 -0400

(Kishore Mahbubani speaks at New America Foundation reception on the "Rise of Asia and the Decline of the West. Pictured are Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt, Kishore Mahbubani, and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Director Steve Clemons. photo credit: Samuel Sherraden)

My boss Steve Clemons is hosting a fascinating debate on the future of the international order over at his blog, The Washington Note. The debate is between some of the day's leading geopolitical thinkers, including Kishore Mahbubani, G. John Ikenberry, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. With that kind of fire power, I hesitate to step into the fray, but since I've been asked, here are my two cents:

While I certainly respect all three scholars and find myself in agreement on many of their points, the current thread of the conversation and its focus on the shape of the international order is a bit to academic for my tastes. Though, as one of the commenters said, this has been a great graduate course on the future of the international order, for me, the international order is and will remain, a much more dependent variable.

What determines that order is the interplay of the grand strategies of the major powers. In World War II, that interplay destroyed a weak and unjust international order. In the Cold War, that interplay created two separate international systems, East and West, joined by the frail connective tissue of the United Nations. Certainly, the institutions of the West were powerful elements of international influence, but they were only truly global institutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the de facto U.S. grand strategy needed those institutions.

We needed them because the U.S. attempted to extend the rules-based international economic order that organized the Western alliance to the rest of the world. That project ultimately failed for two big reasons: first, the Western economic model could not be extended from the one billion or so in the formal sector of the global economy to the five billion outside it. After including one billion additional consumers to the global economy, we have run into real physical limits in terms of energy, natural resources, food, and pollution, which are reflected in both rising commodity prices and environmental crises.

The second reason the de facto U.S. grand strategy of the 1990s failed is that extending the Western economic order, specifically its model of export-to-the-U.S. model of economic development was the wrong basis for the new global economy over the long-run. Though the price of manufactured goods has dropped considerably, the subsequent trend called "off-shoring" of high-wage manufacturing has ballooned the current account deficit and has failed to generate the follow-on "knowledge economy" necessary to raise middle class incomes in line with popular expectations, contributing mightily to the crisis affecting the housing markets and baby boomer retirement.

Now the international order is in tatters because the U.S. has shifted from an progressive economics-based and attractive de facto strategy to a conservative, status-quo-preserving de facto strategy. The problem is, the status quo is not working except for a very select few and preserving it only breeds animosity and dysfunction.

September 11, 2001 gave the Bush administration the opportunity to shift the U.S. strategic blueprint far and fast--in the wrong direction. Underneath the shallow exterior wrapper of the Global War on Terror, the defining element of U.S. strategy has been the evolution of the U.S. from being a progressive force in international affairs into what Professor Kissenger would have called a "conservative power." That is, the U.S. is more interested in seeking to defend our ailing economic engine and preserve our power than to seek principled progress that would benefit the U.S. and the world in general. Recognizing the central strategic role of oil in the current order, the Bush administration has doubled-down on a regime change strategy in the Middle East.

I would argue that this "conservatism" is held by the great center of the foreign policy establishment, including Ikenberry and Slaughter as well was Dick Cheney and John Bolton. While there is significant disagreement between these two camps, that disagreement is merely arguing about how to implement a conservative strategy. One side wants to use international institutions and "soft power" to advance an inherently conservative agenda the other wants to destroy them and act unilaterally.

And that brings us back to Kishore Mahbubani's original provocation in Steve's original post. Mahbubani that is at once both more provocative and basic than the question of the future of the international order. That challenge is this:

There is a fundamental flaw in the West's strategic thinking. In all its analyses of global challenges, the West assumes that it is the source of the solutions to the world's key problems. In fact, however, the West is also a major source of these problems. Unless key Western policymakers learn to understand and deal with this reality, the world is headed for an even more troubled phase.

I think Kishore is absolutely right, but in his reponse to Ikenberry and Slaughter's comments, he does not go far enough. Mahbubani argues that though the Western-led post-1945 international order has been generally benign, the policies of Western nations within that order (especially the United States), such as our agricultural subsidies and our approaches to dealing with climate change, are making global matters worse.

Likewise for the West's penchant for double standards. Here, the former ambassador from Singapore to the U.N. cites Western some egregious double standards such as when we chastize China for acting on its oil interests in Darfur, Sudan while we deny our own oil interests, in say, Iraq. Oh, and then there is his contention that liberal internationalists like Ikenberry and Slaughter would be hard pressed to apply the U.N.'s responsibility to protect provisions to the Isaeli-Palestinian dispute.

All good points, but they are ultimately tangential. With all due respect, Mahbubani pulls his punch. By focusing on those aspects of U.S. policy that relate to how the United States acts overseas, they miss the larger strategic challenge facing the United States: how to transform an aging domestic economic engine that is a now a strategic and environmental liability into a strategic and environmental asset.

To become a progressive power once again, to be the solution rather than the problem, we have to understand that our grand strategy needs to be rooted in a prosperous, sustainable, and attractive domestic economic engine. This is not a new concept. First President Roosevelt then Presidents Truman and Eisenhower recognized that to preserve the American experiment required more than sending WWI-style expeditionary forces to Nazi-controlled Europe or a short-sighted strategy of military roll back of communism. Rather, both grand strategies had Washington harness the full power of the American economy to defeat our adversaries. In World War II, it was called the "Arsenal of Democracy" in the Cold War, it was called Containment.

In the Cold War especially, we saw a powerful and honest self-assessment: the U.S. would not be able to win a conventional or nuclear military confrontation with the Soviets so Containment was designed to push great power competition onto the field of economic and political systems. Ultimately, the Western, market-oriented model, replete with various versions of democracy, did its strategic heavy lifting and out lasted the Soviet economy and political combine.

Today we need a similarly honest self-assessment. At the core of it will be an admission that our economy is more of a strategic liability than an asset. This is what I believe Mahbubani is really getting at. The Cold War economic engine that for forty years powered a grand strategy of containment is now obsolete. Our addiction to oil is insecure and unsustainable. Our biggest export is debt, not goods or services, and some of that debt is poisoned. The foundation of domestic growth, suburban housing expansion, is dysfunctional, locking us into infrastructure that is not fulfilling the American Dream while it consumes too much land, energy, and natural resources.

The next President faces a tough challenge: to put the domestic economy on a strategically-coherent path, just like FDR, Truman and Ike did. If he or she can do that, our economy will immediately start changing global behavior for the better. Domestically, a decisive shift in terms of energy, land use, transportation and taxes would generate the domestic demand for another boom, just like in the post-war years. Abroad, putting the U.S. on a 25-year trajectory to get the U.S. off oil as a transportation fuel, for example, will dramatically shift our relations in the Persian Gulf, with Russia, and with China. Encouraging sustainable regional economies rather than unsustainable export economies will dramaticaly change the balance of trade.

We just have to think as big as the leaders sixty years ago did.

Sure, many of our specific foreign policies are either self-serving or lacking in principle. Sure, the shape of the international order is in a massive state of fluidity. These are not, however, the main strategic challenges facing the United States. It's time to focus.

Unless the United States learns from the Marshalls, Kennans and Nitzes of the past, and forges a new grand strategy rooted in a sustainable, prosperous, and poltically durable American economic engine, the survival of the post-war international order may be the least of our problems.

ASP in the News | May 19-21

Ian McAllister — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:47:00 -0400

The Santiago Times (05/22) quotes Parag Khanna on America's declining global power.
International Press Service (05/21) cites Daniel Levy's analysis of the Middle East peace process.
Yahoo News (05/19) quotes Steve Clemons on McCain's strategy to discredit Obama.
The Washington Post (05/18) features Parag Khanna discussing The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria.
Arab American News (05/16) quotes Daniel Levy on the need for Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories.

ASP in the News May 16-19

Faith Smith — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:55:00 -0400

CNN (5/16) cites Peter Bergen's expert opinion on Sen. McCain's terrorism policy.
Charlie Rose (5/15) conversed with Parag Khanna about the decline of US dominance over global affairs.