Has it really been four months since I made fun of Dan Drezner? Well, it is, and, again, I’m saying that Dan just isn’t pessimistic enough.
The last time around, in October of 2020, I snickered at Dan for snickering at Donald Trump’s “shambolic campaign” for reelection, Dan endorsing Ross Douthat’s picture of Trump as a tedious old blowhard who was all blow and no go, a smugly elegant trope that unfortunately underestimated The Donald’s inner malignancy by approximately a thousand-fold. (I was only off by ten-fold.)
Dan’s most recent column, “The U.S. need for foreign policy narratives”, might be described as a narrative in search of a narrative, as Dan runs through a number of recent books and articles to come up with some. An alternative title might be “What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking”, because it seemed to me that Dan could have given us a little less chin and colleague-stroking and a few more actual recommendations.
Particularly depressing, to me, at least, is the general impression of cluelessness I get when reading the contributions of Dan’s collection of experts,1 even the best of them, Daniel Nexon’s Against Great Power Competition. Nexon, a professor at Georgetown, wisely warns against competition for competition’s sake, but also says things like “The United States must adapt to a world in which China and Russia are growing stronger, both militarily and economically.”
But Russia isn’t growing stronger, “both militarily and economically”. Back in the Cold War days, the USSR had the second largest economy in the world. Today it’s eleventh. Eleventh! Behind Canada! Its 2019 defense budget was $65 billion, compared with a US defense budget of $720 billion. Italy, France, the UK, and Germany all have economies larger than Russia’s, while the defense budgets of France, the UK, and Germany (2019 again) total $145 billion! Shouldn’t even professors sometimes look at, you know, facts! And then, you know, think! And make recommendations based on those facts, instead of coming up with soporific apothegms like “Cooperation will often advance U.S. security and prosperity more effectively than competition,” which, while true, scarcely negates its opposite, “Competition will often advance U.S. security and prosperity more effectively than cooperation”? Isn’t there more to life than, you know, covering your ass?
Next up is Foreign Policy for Pragmatists: How Biden Can Learn From History in Real Time, by Gideon Rose, outgoing editor of Foreign Affairs, doubly depressing because of the combination of Rose’s exalted position and the uselessness of his essay. The title certainly sounds promising, and Rose shows off his historical chops by framing the foreign policy world in terms of Hobbesians (aka “realists” or “pessimists”) versus Lockeans (aka “liberals” or “optimists”).2 Both the optimist and the pessimist “maps” are flawed, Rose says, but not to worry:
simplistic road maps are not very helpful in dealing with today’s complex international landscape, and both convinced optimists and convinced pessimists seem fated to produce crude and incomplete surveys. But that is not an argument for throwing the maps away. It is an argument for figuring out how to use two bad maps simultaneously.
Foreign policy, after all, is not cartography. It’s orienteering—racing madly through dangerous, unknown territory. And theorists aren’t mapmakers, they’re coaches: their job is to help players race better. Maps provide crucial information, but the players have to use them out in the field, trying to move as fast as possible relative to others without getting hurt. Offered two bad maps, smart players wouldn’t pick one or toss both. They’d take both along and put them to use. Policymakers should do the same, carrying both realist and liberal maps of the world with them as they go, filtering and combining them as possible.
But this is ridiculous, mere argument from metaphor, assuming that users somehow have access to a “good map”, one that is always right, and thus can infallibly identify which (or neither?) of the two maps should be relied upon. If you’re in DC and you want to go to Chicago, and you have two contradictory maps showing you how to get there, how do you choose between them? Unless you have a third map that you somehow “know” is correct, you can’t. Rose wants to believe that there is a natural yin and yang to U.S. foreign policy, so that we always correct our mistakes—a process, apparently, not available to other nations, though he never asks himself why.
Dan, though he can grow quite, well, “pessimistic”, wants to believe this is true, though he cautions that three things have to happen: 1) The Republican Party has to grow up; 2) the American foreign policy establishment has to stay sharp, “swatting away bad narratives with compelling logic and offering more counter-narratives in their stead”; and 3) the Biden administration has to have one of those meta maps that tell you which regular map to use.
As for the first, well, that train left the station in 2016, and it’s still picking up speed. In fact, if poor old Liz Cheney hasn’t been decapitated, or at least defenestrated, by the time you read this, I’ll be surprised.
As for the second, well, Dan is defending his own, leaving me less than impressed. “I have faith in my fellow international relations scholars — they have become much better at policy engagement than is commonly believed.” Really, Dan? Really? The record of America’s foreign policy establishment since the end of the Cold War is awful, wasting a full decade obsessed with the Great Satan Saddam Hussein, who was never a threat to the U.S., only to be blindsided by 9/11, which virtually no one saw coming, despite multiple terrorist attacks against the U.S. by Osama Bin Ladin. Since the 9/11 attacks we have engaged in one disastrous essay in regime change after another, each achieving the same catastrophic results, throttled back slightly under Donald Trump, who thankfully shrank from overt violence but piled one brutal sanction after another on hapless regimes in Venezuela and Iran in his foul determination to prove himself a total bad ass.
Throughout this horror show, now stretching over thirty years, the foreign policy establishment has, by and large, refused to acknowledge its mistakes—because “fingerpointing” is “unprofessional”. Our disastrous invasions of Iraq and Libya are politely acknowledged as “disasters” and then quickly passed over. One doesn’t like to dwell on unpleasantness, after all. The “gang” leaves it to outsiders like Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders—and Donald Trump!—to tell the truth about Iraq, that the Bush Administration deliberately lied us into an entirely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war—one that had, incidentally, absolutely nothing to do with “weapons of mass destruction”? I howled about all this, quite extensively, last July, so if you want more, go here, ’cause my tonsils (I still have ’em) are feeling the strain.
Fareed Zakaria has a painfully accurate column up at the Washington Post, America is becoming more imperial than many empires were. That’s a mistake., which I hope Dan has read:
The United States’ diplomatic outposts used to be handsome buildings in the center of cities where people could meet and events were held. I recall going to watch classic Hollywood movies sponsored by the U.S. Information Service at the stunning seaside consulate in Mumbai. But that architectural jewel has been sold off, as have others. U.S. diplomats now often work in fortress-like buildings, behind concrete blast walls, with multiple layers of security, rarely encountering the people of the country they are in. If you want to know why, after 20 years and trillions of dollars, the United States is not well understood or loved in Iraq or Afghanistan, visit the U.S. embassies in their capitals.
Our embassies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other countries, are monuments to the failure of U.S. interventionism around the world. Our crusading has made us hated. Instead of constantly harping on our “good intentions”—which were, in fact, always selfish—Dan and his colleagues should look at the fruits of our labors—massive destruction and immense human suffering, callously and relentlessly inflicted, very largely out of bureaucratic inertia, the fatal unwillingness to admit that we didn’t know what we were doing, that we were wrong.
As for Dan’s number three, well, I’ve got my fingers crossed too.
Pessimistic Afterwords
Pessimistic Dan links to an article of his from 2019, bluntly titled This Time Is Different: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover. Reading this article, one can hardly blame Dan for trying to look on the bright side. Here’s a glimpse of the dark side:
After Trump, a new president will no doubt try to restore sanity to U.S. foreign policy. Surely, he or she will reverse the travel ban, halt the hostile rhetoric toward long-standing allies, and end the attacks on the world trading system. These patches will miss the deeper problem, however. Political polarization has eroded the notion that presidents need to govern from the center. Trump has eviscerated that idea. The odds are decent that a left-wing populist will replace the current president, and then an archconservative will replace that president. The weak constraints on the executive branch will only make things worse. Congress has evinced little interest in playing a constructive role when it comes to foreign policy. The public is still checked out on world politics. The combination of worn-down guardrails and presidents emerging from the ends of the political spectrum may well whipsaw U.S. foreign policy between “America first” and a new Second International. The very concept of a consistent, durable grand strategy will not be sustainable.
Well, we didn’t get the “left-wing populist”. So far, so good!
Special Armored Afterwords: The geopolitics of the M48-A2C
I spent the spring of 1968 in Ft. Knox, Ky., where I was introduced to the U.S. Army’s aging main battle tank, the 52-ton M48-A2C. “The M48-A2C is found in only three places in the world,” our CO told us, “West Germany, South Korea, and Ft. Knox, Ky., and God help you if you end up in any of them.”
Every lifer I met in Ft. Knox had pulled multiple tours in both Germany and Korea, and as a result I came to think of the USSR as a bottle with two stoppers. Now the bottle is gone, but the stoppers remain.
There is no reason for this. As I’ve said, western Europe is more than match for Russia. In fact, Germany alone is, and the Germans know the Russians far better than we do. I understand that people like Anne Applebaum and Max Boot and others feel that democracy can only be maintained in central and eastern Europe through U.S. pressure, that the “little countries” should not have to choose between Germany and Russia as “protector”. Well, it isn’t the best of choices, but central Europe is simply not “vital” to the U.S. Since it isn’t vital, we will never make anything more than ineffectual gestures to shape events there, extending wars rather than resolving them. We should let the Europeans take care of Russia.
And similarly in Korea. Anne Applebaum has again championed our role there, determined to maintain a “full court press” around the world for “freedom” regardless of how disastrously this policy has failed over the past thirty years, and regardless of the fact that South Korea is a far more powerful nation than North Korea, which despite all its bluster has never invaded anyone, unlike, you know, us.3 However ugly life in North Korea is, and it’s very ugly, it’s more than arguable that all the major parties concerned prefer it that the division remain. China has no desire whatsoever to see a united Korea on its doorstep. Koreans have very negative feelings about Japan, which would also be unhappy to have a united Korea to deal with, as would the Russians. And the South Koreans themselves, many of them, are quite leery about having to take in their uncouth cousins. Look at West and East Germany! How’s that going?
But even the most liberal neocons don’t want to look at things this way. Don’t you care about freedom? Yes, I do, but I also care about political stability, both at home and abroad, and your policies have brought neither. It was the combination of Iraq and Libya that put Donald Trump in the White House. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton have a lot to answer for.
1. I only read the articles, skipping Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power, by Manjari Chatterjee Miller, which is likely worth reading, but Dan only cites it to get his “narrative quest” going, rather than anything substantial.
2. But what happened to "Jacksonian" versus "Wilsonian"? Or was that last year's meme?
3. Nuclear weapons are not the game changer everyone insists they are. Nuclear weapons ensure that the U.S. won't launch a full-scale assault on North Korea, which we weren't going to do anyway.
