Well, you won’t, Dan. Just because I’m painfully slow and stumbling off the mark, and not much better down the stretch, you thought you could slip a few fast ones by me, but nuh-uh. I’m onto your game, and you’ll pay the price.
The first of Dan’s “curve balls” (to vary the metaphor) came a month ago in a post titled “The erosion of U.S. network power”, which is scarcely more than a rewrite of an earlier piece of Dan’s that provoked my ire, “The Blob abides: When a term obfuscates more than it enlightens”, leading to one of my more regrettably unhinged outbursts, “I should grow the hell up, Daniel Drezner? I think maybe YOU should grow the hell up!”. In both pieces, Dan takes exception to articles by people making fun of “the Blob”, in whose pulsatin’ purulence Dan takes a curiously proprietary interest.
Dan begins with Emma Ashford’s “Build a Better Blob”, originally appearing in Foreign Policy, a generalized complaint about the still prevalent conviction that the world must be led, and only America can lead it, an assumption that defines “acceptable” views on foreign policy as those bounded by Hillary Clinton on the left to Dick Cheney on the right. As Emma, a relatively uncloseted “realist”, rather like myself, points out, anyone who suggests that we should pursue less than Hillaryan levels of involvement/invasion is likely to be branded as “isolationist” and, most likely, an admirer/supporter of both Charles Lindbergh and Donald Trump.1
Well, you can read Dan’s critique for yourself, but I would paraphrase it as that, basically, Emma should either shut the hell up or grow the hell up, or perhaps both, because the Blob is goddamn fine just the goddamn way it is right now.
Unsurprisingly, Dan has a similar reaction to the second of the two Blob doubters he holds up for scornful inspection, Jeremy Shapiro, for his piece, “The Future of U.S. Global Leadership”, basically a review of Mira Rapp-Hooper’s Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances, a book title so resounding one thinks it ought to come complete with a brass fanfare—trumpets, surely, and perhaps even a tuba or two. Though Dan doesn’t say so, Jeremy is a bit of turncoat in the Blobosphere, having worked in the State Department and currently research director of European Council on Foreign Relations and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where Dan himself has had occasion to hang his hat. Jeremy’s establishment links probably explain the occasional Blobby gush that erupts in his review of Mira’s Shields, viz, “Her deep erudition, crisp prose style, and innate brilliance shine through on most every page”—which sounds suspiciously like a free Blobby blurb.
Despite these gifts, Jeremy feels that Shields is basically same-old, same-old, despite all the deep erudition, yada, yada, yada. We’ll replace Trump’s stupidity with all the stuff that we did before Trump that worked so well—worked so well that the Republican Party, and about 45% of the American electorate, have sold their soul to a moral idiot. I believe it is a serious indictment of the U.S. foreign policy establishment/military intellectual complex that the boundaries of “acceptable” thought on foreign affairs are so narrow that virtually the only major political figures with the nerve to speak the truth about the 2003 invasion of Iraq—that we were deliberately lied into an entirely unnecessary war—and then only 10 to 15 years after the fact—are outliers like Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and, yes, Donald Trump. Schapiro describes this establishment as follows:
[A] self-replicating class of powerful institutions and people whose education, outlook, and financial interests all told them that America’s continued global leadership and its associated alliance structure was necessary for both global stability and U.S. security.
This class never constituted a cabal, trying to distort U.S. policy for their advantage. To the contrary, in my experience both inside and outside of government, they are patriots who genuinely believe in the virtues of America’s global role. Nonetheless, over time, interests tend to form identities—you tend to believe something if your next meal (or your next job) depends on it.2 The U.S. foreign policy elites very identity tied them to the continuation of a policy that supported their interests as a class: an activist foreign policy of U.S. global leadership. Dissenters were essentially apostates, banned from the church of government or even condemned to the hell of academia.
This intellectual hegemony seems to have constrained Rapp-Hooper and focused her attention on how to reform alliances so that they can support U.S. leadership rather than questioning the overall approach. Rapp-Hooper astutely notes the dilemma: “the United States will not be able simply to return to its role as a global alliance leader. Instead, persistent domestic economic and political factors, as well as complex global power shifts, will impose constraints on U.S. alliance leadership.” But for her project, the question is “how the United States attempts to recover leadership and on what terms,” not whether it should make the attempt.
Dan will have none of this dangerous nonsense, of course. “Cards on the table,” he huffs,
I appreciate the efforts by Ashford, Shapiro et al to articulate a distinct foreign policy vision for the United States. But I find arguments about the undue burden of U.S. leadership to be sterile. The claims that the U.S. network of alliances endangers the United States or risks wider great power conflicts are unconvincing. The claim of public fatigue with liberal internationalism is flat-out false.
This is a nice example of “putting the bunny in the hat”, as the lawyers like to say. Foreign policy skeptics, or “realists”, like myself, not to mention the more formally accredited folks at the Cato Institute and the newly formed Quincy Institute are not saying that the post-Cold War foreign policy pursued by successive U.S. administrations, beginning with the first Bush administration and largely continuing today, has imposed an “undue burden” on the U.S. We, or at least I, are saying that it has been an utter disaster, destabilizing the world and wasting trillions of dollars and costing hundreds of thousands of lives, most of them citizens of countries other than our own, which is perhaps why Dan doesn’t find the body count so depressing. Such arguments are not “sterile”. They’re true, even though Dan shrinks from even discussing such “hoary foreign policy chestnuts” as “NATO expansion, Iraq, Libya and Syria.”3 No fair mentioning our failures!
Dan does more bunny stuffing in his sentence “[t]he claims that the U.S. network of alliances endangers the United States or risks wider great power conflicts are unconvincing,” linking, as “proof”, to an article that appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of International Security by Michael Beckley, formerly at Harvard and now at the American Enterprise Institute,4 “The Myth of Entangling Alliances: Reassessing the Security Risks of U.S. Defense Pacts”. On the basis of his research, Mike concludes that the “myth of entangling alliances is, well, a myth:
The finding that U.S. entanglement is rare has important implications for international relations scholarship and U.S. foreign policy. For scholars, it casts doubt on classic theories of imperial overstretch in which great powers exhaust their resources by accumulating allies that free ride on their protection and embroil them in military quagmires. The U.S. experience instead suggests that great powers can dictate the terms of their security commitments and that allies often help their great power protectors avoid strategic overextension.
Okay, this one big fat bunny. No one, that I know of, has argued that our foreign policy woes come from “entangling alliances.”5 The misbegotten invasions of Iraq and Libya, and the reasonably begun but disastrously protracted invasion of Afghanistan, were not the result of “entangling alliances” but rather our own deeply unwise policy choices, ultimately reflecting an American desire to exert direct military and political control over the entire Middle East, largely in accordance with our “informal” yet seemingly inescapable commitments to Israel and Saudi Arabia,6 which, though not formally “alliances”, we seem to find almost as binding as the cloak, or mantle, of Deianeira (which burned poor old Hercules alive).
The expansion of NATO after the Cold War was a disaster, not because the U.S. was dragged into a war we did not want to fight, because obviously we weren’t, but because the continuing obsession among the foreign policy elite to expand “freedom” in Eastern Europe, which, though a commendable ideal, had the effect of encouraging political revolts in what was left of the Russian empire, convincing Vladimir Putin and others that the U.S. wanted to bring Mother Russia to her knees. The shell game that the U.S. played with the UN to obtain its blessing for our subsequent assault on Libya, saying that we only wanted to “prevent genocide” when it was our clear intent, from the very beginning, to remove Gaddafi—“we came, we saw, he died”, snickered Hillary—convinced Putin that America’s appetite for power knew no bounds. And anyone who thinks that Clinton didn’t later dream of ousting Putin from power as she had ousted Kaddafi is kidding himself. If we hadn’t insisted on “freeing” Ukraine Putin would have had no reason to invade Crimea. But any thought of “spheres of influence” was anathema to the post-Cold War elite, the height of immorality. Because there was only one sphere of influence, and it belonged to the U.S., and that sphere was the entire world.
Mira Rapp-Hooper, in her book, Shields of the Republic, blasted by Blob-buster Schapiro and later endorsed in a separate write-up by Dan, is similarly adept at lapine prestidigitation:
Until the 2016 election, alliance skeptics received little pushback, despite the fact that the restraint narrative can be misleading. For example, in critiques theorists often conflate nonallies such as Saudi Arabia with formal treaty partners, incorrectly suggesting that these countries use the cover of U.S. security guarantees—which they do not enjoy—to behave recklessly. Restraint proponents also rarely consider the counterfactual: What would the last seventy years of U.S. foreign policy have looked like without alliances?
Well, we can dispose of the “seventy years” shuffle, which looks a lot more like a canard than a lapin, right off the bat. We “advocates of restraint” are not talking about the Cold War. We are talking about the post-Cold War! Since Mira, a senior fellow with both the Council of Foreign Relations and Yale Law School, was six when the Cold War ended, we can perhaps forgive a certain lack of perspective on her part, but the “nonallies” shuffle is another matter. We restraint guys aren’t solely—or even largely—bitching about “formal treaty partners”. We are bitching about the proliferation of aggressive interventions, with or without the benefit of allies, that, over and over again, have proved massively costly in both blood and treasure, and utterly counterproductive to the interests of the U.S. and other nations. Mere quibbling over definitions is not meaningful argument; and those who engage in it merely advertise their desire to discredit and deceive. Why should such “experts” be taken seriously? And why should they be considered “expert” in anything other than career advancement?
Getting back to Dan, who I fear may be starting to feel neglected, and who, you may remember was “proving” that alliances aren’t a bad thing (which is not quite the same as proving that they’re a good thing). Rather like Mira, Dan sighs about the good old days, when men were men, and the U.S. could right wrongs all over the world. Take the recent, bloody border clash between India and China, for example:
This is not a clash that involves U.S. allies. But I can remember a time in which the United States possessed enough diplomatic capital and network centrality to function as a mediator between the two nuclear-armed countries. As this border skirmish was heating up, Donald Trump offered to act as a mediator only to be rebuffed by India almost immediately.
First of all, it’s my impression that countries accept mediators when they want to be mediated—though why anyone would accept mediation from Donald Trump is another very good question. And, more to the point, I can remember a time, in 1989, when China murdered hundreds of its own citizens, a time when China’s economy was less than one tenth the size of ours—compared to the present, when the two are roughly comparable—and the U.S. said and did nothing. If we couldn’t affect China’s behavior on an issue the Chinese regarded as “their business” then—and we certainly couldn’t—how does Dan think we could do so today? And how well has our “diplomatic capital and network centrality” dealt with the much smaller nations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea in either the past or the present? Isn’t it true that the harder we’ve tried, the more disastrously we’ve failed? Isn’t it, Dan? Isn’t it?
The thing is, Dan himself has written extensively, and with monumental good sense, on our current and future relations with China, as I pointed out in a recent, glowing post, whose first paragraph I’ll reprint below:
Daniel Drezner, who seems to be my favorite straw man/straight man, and maybe even tin man, has a long post up at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, which is absolutely gold. As Dan points out, in a thoroughly researched and most convincing manner, the very many sins and crimes of the Chinese government doesn’t detract in the slightest from the fact that China isn’t going anywhere, that it constitutes all by itself over 20% of the world’s population, and that its economy, with all its faults and weaknesses, is absolutely vital to the world’s economy, which, shockingly enough, is absolutely vital to the U.S. economy. The United States needs a healthy, growing, expanding Chinese economy, even though China’s government will almost surely remain corrupt and oppressive for the foreseeable future.
This is as real as realism gets. So why does Dan get so gosh-darn cantankerous when any outsider dares to critique his beloved Blob? The answer, I think, is that Dan, like any classic establishmentarian, believes that all these matters should be handled from within. Yes, mistakes were made. Let’s learn from them. Let’s not make them again. But let’s not point fingers. Let’s not get personal. That’s not professional.
The same dialectic, so to speak, is at work, I think, in another recent piece, by my other favorite straw man/straight man/tin man, Fred Kaplan, “John Bolton’s Book Is a Scathing Indictment … of John Bolton”. Fred’s take on both Bolton and Trump, as a pair of loathsome though fortunately largely immiscible jerks, is 99.44% accurate, but his thumbnail on Johnnie Boy is a bit off point:
Bolton has long drifted on the outer edge of our right-wing foreign policy elite. Often tagged a neocon, he’s actually more a 19th-century imperialist, obsessed with imposing American power on the world, not so concerned about spreading democracy.
“Drifted on the outer edge”? Bolton had jobs in the Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump administrations. In Bush II, Fred says, “he served as U.N. ambassador [by recess appointment], even though he was hostile to the U.N. and opposed international law, on principle.” First of all, being UN ambassador is not exactly “outer edge”, and secondly he was put there by Bush precisely because “he was hostile to the U.N. and opposed international law, on principle.” Because the Bush administration was too!
Bolton’s views were 99.44% those of Dick Cheney, who was only vice president at the time, and the dominant voice in foreign policy in the “first” Bush II administration, losing out to Condi Rice only when it was clear that the whole Iraq thing wasn’t going to end well. The only difference between Bolton and Cheney is that after Iraq went south Cheney mostly shut up while Bolton didn’t, bellowing like a bull moose for the invasion of Iran throughout the Obama years, a cause dear—and that’s putting it mildly— to the hearts of neocons throughout the land, particularly at the American Enterprise Institute, where, until recently, Bolton was a “scholar”, or a “fellow”, or whatever it is that they like to call themselves. So why does Fred put John on the “outer edge”? Because he doesn’t want to admit that old “Bomb ‘em back to the Stone Age”, as I like to call him, is part of “the family”—“one of us”.
I remain perplexed by the way both Fred and Dan can be so acute in the particular—Dan’s profoundly “realist” take on China, for example, which I’m getting a little tired of praising, though you should still read it already, and Fred’s takedown of then SecDef James Mattis descent into nuclear nonsense—“Mattis Goes Nuclear”—yet cling so desperately to the notion of the sanctity of the Blob. I mean, when I was 10 I joined the Cub Scouts and swore my fealty to “the Law of the Pack”. But that was then. I mean, childish things, and all that.
The answer, I think, lies in both men’s devotion to the ideal of “leadership”, which is, after all, the talisman of Type A personalities as a whole. Leadership brings order out of chaos and separates the valedictorians from the also-rans. Since it defines their lives, it ought to define everything. Fred still repeats explicitly that the United States is the “indispensable nation”, to my acute distress, while Dan, a bit more cautious, it seems to me—prefers the quasi-fig leaf of the “liberal international order”, which he insists can only be maintained by—wait for it—U.S. leadership, and from which it follows, as night follows day, the eternal necessity of the eternal maintenance and indeed expansion of America’s system of alliances, which somehow underlie everything, even though they don’t, and even though the purpose for which they were constructed no longer exist.7 To question this is to question everything—which is why, of course (the night follows day thing), criticism must be “constructive”, that is to say, must come from within the family, from those, and only those, who share our pre-conceptions. Otherwise, well, chaos beckons.
It somehow doesn’t matter to Fred and Dan that we have no more business telling the Afghans what to do in their country than they would have telling us what to do in ours, and have had no more success there than they would have had here, that our ham-handed and often openly self-interested efforts to “maintain” the international liberal order have had the opposite effect. The mantle of leadership is our fate, and we must accept it!—though I for one would prefer to avoid the example of Hercules.
Perhaps the most damning self-indictment I have ever read came from an insider’s insider, Leslie Gelb, assistant secretary of state under President Carter and associated with any number of Blobbish think tanks, and indeed president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations itself, before dying last year. Writing in the summer 2009 issue of Democracy (with Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati) in an article titled “Mission Not Accomplished”, Gelb insisted that President Bush’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq was not, repeat NOT, the fault of think tankers like himself. No! It was the gosh-darn media!
Long after the Iraq War went south, [Gelb and Zelmati lecture] when its [the invasion’s] failures could no longer be minimized, the elite newspapers and weeklies finally got around to offering sound analyses and asking the Bush Administration tough questions. It took them long enough–not until after December 2003, by which time the war was underway and its damage irreversible.
Over and over again, Gelb and Zelmati insist, the media—both reporters and “commentators” alike—failed to ask the tough questions of Bush Administration officials, rarely sought out the views of dissenting experts, and even more rarely gave such views prominent coverage.
But where could such experts be found? Not, apparently, at the Council of Foreign Relations:
As for the shadow government–the think tanks and universities–it has overwhelmingly become party to, rather than an arbitrator of, major policy disputes, let alone an independent voice. Most senior fellows and professors now take up the cudgels for their causes, ideologies, and political parties, and many rotate in and out of government. Too many think tanks and universities reinforce this trend by recruiting along ideological lines.
Yet wouldn’t have been “news” if Leslie Gelb, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, a former assistant secretary of state, and a man most famous for being given the job, back in the Johnson Administration, of overseeing the study that became known as the Pentagon Papers, had spoken up, loudly, against the war? Samantha Power, at the beginning of her career, had the nerve to take a “nuanced” position against the invasion What was holding Leslie back?
Leslie was holding Leslie back. Leslie had already been blobbified.
I was a strong supporter of the Iraq War. I was sure Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons because he had used them against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. He had also attacked Iran and Kuwait. And I believed that he either had or was close to achieving nuclear weapons capability, and I favored getting rid of him before that day. I would have waited for more help from our friends and allies, as President George H.W. Bush did in the first Gulf war. And I would have limited the attack to the southern Shiite portion of Iraq, while we held onto the already protected Kurdish region in the North. This would have cut Hussein off from his oil supplies and, I believe, led to his ouster by the Iraqi military.
But for all the ands, ifs, buts, and maybes, the fact was I didn’t look hard enough at the country, its history and culture, the WMD facts, and above all, whether the Administration had thought through what to do with Iraq after defeating Hussein’s army. What’s more, I knew at the time that I wasn’t taking a hard enough look at these matters. To remedy this, I started two Council on Foreign Relations task forces on our policy toward Iraq, just before and after the outbreak of war.
Well, too damn little and too damn late. Most of all, Gelb should have asked himself, not how the media got it wrong, but how he got it wrong. Reporters and pundits have as much power as their sources will give them. Reporters who make their sources mad are no longer reporters. “Shadow government” folk have much more freedom than reporters do. Instead of blaming and investigating them, Gelb should have blamed and investigated himself. He should have considered the long build-up to the war, that really began with shut-down of Gulf I. He should have examined the entire fallacy of “danger” of “weapons of mass destruction”, which are not weapons of mass destruction, a calculated myth that he swallowed whole. He should have noticed that right-wing conservatives were inventing the notion of Saddam Hussein as an all-purpose bogyman both to beat the Democrats and promote their own return to power and, ultimately, justify what would be nothing less than a U.S. invasion/occupation of the Middle East, to ensure “stable” oil prices and Israeli security. He should have asked himself why a nation of more than 300 million felt “compelled” to attack a nation of less than 30 million, a nation that had done us no harm and that posed not the slightest threat to us. He might have noticed that we were attacking Iraq not because she was so dangerous but because she was so weak, a helpless nation that we could beat on without mercy or fear of retribution, that we were attacking as a celebration of our power and amorality. He should have thought about these things.
To repeat language I quoted earlier from Jeremy Schapiro, “The U.S. foreign policy elites very identity tied them to the continuation of a policy that supported their interests as a class: an activist foreign policy of U.S. global leadership. Dissenters were essentially apostates, banned from the church of government or even condemned to the hell of academia.” Yet it’s hard to imagine that a man as well positioned as Leslie Gelb would have suffered anything more than the loss of a few invitations. But they would have included, one suspects, a few of the very best invitations. And, when you’ve reached the top, that makes all the difference.
Architectural Afterwords
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the top think tanks in DC, occupies its own building on Rhode Island Avenue near Scott Circle, where Rhode Island intersects with Massachusetts Avenue. According to Wikipedia, the building cost $100 million. A few blocks away, at the intersection of Massachusetts and 18th Street, the American Enterprise Institute occupies an “historic”, century-old, five-story structure that AEI renovated and expanded. If that cost $100 million, I wouldn’t be surprised. The first—okay, the second—post by Dan that I ever made fun of, “Why I’m not freaking out too much about the foreign funding of American think tanks”, responds to a New York Times article, “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks” by offering this “defense”: “Before we cry havoc and let slip the dogs of hypocrisy charges, it’s worth considering that think tanks have to get their funding from somewhere.” And, anyway, “At various points in my career I was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a nonresident transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and am currently a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The point is, think tanks have been very, very good to me.” Damn straight, they have. A man’s gotta eat, after all, and that poached salmon ain’t gonna poach itself.
1. For example, Ashford notes that when the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments asked six think tanks for recommendations for future U.S. defense spending, only one suggesting spending less than the Pentagon itself—scarcely a disinterested party—wanted to spend. For whatever reason, she doesn’t mention that the one outlier was her own Cato Institute.
2. Schapiro notes that Rapp-Hooper’s book sounds at times like a job application, for the best of reasons.
3. Dan forgets all about Afghanistan, where Americans are still fighting and dying, and killing.
4. What goes around comes around, eh?
5. The whole notion of “entangling alliances” being dangers really goes back to revisionist/exculpatory theories about World War I, which allowed countries to explain away their participation in what, up until that point, had been the greatest disaster in European history. In fact, none of the major combatants was “entangled”. The Germans and Austrians planned the war together. Though they hoped to limit it to Serbia, they agreed ahead of time that the war’s expansion to include all of Europe would not stop them. France, Russia, and Great Britain all effectively recognized that the power of Germany had grown so great that, if they didn’t unite against her, they would lose all semblance of being great powers, which would surely guarantee the collapse of the existing governments in all three states, if nothing else. Despite the posturing at the start of the war, Britain did not enter the conflict because of the 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian independence, but because the British establishment knew that Britain could not maintain its empire in the face of a Europe dominated by Germany. After the war many British wanted to believe, and some still do, that they were tricked into fighting a war they didn’t need to fight. But this is wishful thinking. You can read a whole lot more of this stuff here. It’s “interesting” that Great Britain, though not formally allied with either France or Russia, entered the war almost immediately, while Italy, which was formally allied with Germany and Austria, did not. Almost as if countries consult their real interests on important issues rather than mere “scraps of paper”.
6. Schapiro, and many other “experts”, are naturally reluctant to admit how much of our foreign policy in the Middle East is driven by a desire to control the world price of oil and the domestic political need to placate the intense emotional commitment to Israel of many Jews and Christian evangelicals, and not by a love of “democracy”.
7. One of the very, very few times that Dan has praised Donald Trump is when, early in his administration, Trump “admitted” that his original “plan” to withdraw from Afghanistan was a bad idea—when, of course, it was one of his few good ones, and one on which, it seems, he is finally willing to act, if this latest “Russian blood money” scandal doesn’t blow the whole thing out of the water.