Angry Planet - America’s Foreign Policy is Broken, Here’s How it Got That Way

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

America is at war all over the planet and the American public doesn’t seem to care. Since the end of the Cold War, Americans have largely checked out of foreign policy concerns. Today on War College, American foreign policy analyst Stephen M. Walt walks us through how we got here, and how to fix it.Walt’s new book is The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. You know, you need a real estate license to sell real estate, but not to practice foreign policy. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jay. Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is busy today.

In the year of our Lord 2018, America's at war all over the planet with no sign of stopping. One of our closest allies allegedly killed an outspoken journalist before dismembering him with a bone saw, and the commander-in-chief is questioning NATO, pulling out of the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, and destroying old trade agreements. How the hell did we get here and how the hell do we get out? Here to help us answer that question is Stephen M. Walt. Walt is the Robert and Renea Belfor Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, a contributor at foreign policy, and the author of the new book, The Hell of Good Intentions, American's Foreign Policy Elite, and the decline of U.S. primacy. Sir, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure

to be talking with you. So, Walt, how the hell did we get here? What is going on? What's the big picture? Well, the inspiration for the book was to try and answer to that very question, that why was the extraordinary optimism with which we greeted the end of the Cold War and looked ahead from the early 1990s, disappointed in so many ways? If you just compare where we were in 1993, 94, and where we are today, it's really quite striking. Back then, 25 years ago, we had reasonably good relations with Russia and China. Democracy was spreading around the world. We had capped North Korea's nuclear program. Iran had no enrichment capacity. Globalization is spreading. The Oslo process gave the prospect for peace in the Middle East. And the American military

seemed kind of unstoppable. And therefore, people thought, you know, we'd reached the end of history. And everyone was basically going to become like us in a happy, globalized world. Well, look at the world today, 2018. Democracy is in retreat around the world. Our relationship. with China and Russia are worse than at any time since the Cold War, and they are collaborating more closely. North Korea, Pakistan, and India have all tested nuclear weapons. Iran is essentially a latent nuclear power, could get nuclear weapons if it wanted to. The two-state solution in the Middle East is effectively dead, and the Middle East itself is in turmoil. I would argue the United States is not solely responsible for all of those trends, but our fingerprints are over.

a lot of them, and a lot of them that has to do with errors that we have made, sins of both omission and commission, and the book tries to explain what those errors were, why they occurred, and how to fix them. Did we squander the peace after the Cold War, do you think? Do we squander our kind of leadership position?

In some respects, yes. I mean, certainly, we squandered trillions of dollars fighting foolish wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I think we also squandered the possibility for a much more positive relationship with Russia by doing a variety of things, the most notable one being expanding NATO in an open-ended fashion eastward into Russia's sphere of influence. And we may not have thought that was threatening to Russia. We may not have intended it as threatening to Russia, but that's clearly how they saw it. And we did some other

things along the way that further fueled Russian concerns and where Russia was able to eventually take steps to thwart us, despite the fact that it's much weaker than we are. So, yes, some of the positive things we could have achieved, we missed, we could have done a much better job of our mediation in the Oslo process, really. The Clinton administration, the Bush administration, and the Obama administration all put a lot of time and effort into trying to produce an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, but they handled it ineptly and got nowhere, really a humiliating diplomatic failure. So you add it all up. There are things we left undone some things which we ought to have done and we did some things

which we ought not to have done. And that's in part why we're where we at today. And it's partly why Donald Trump ended up our president. All right. One of the core concepts of your book is the idea of the foreign policy elite or the foreign policy blob. Can you define that for us? Well, I define the foreign policy elite as basically those Americans that work on a more or less constant basis on issues of international affairs. It's their principal job, their principal application, where they spend their time and effort. And it's a pretty large community here. We're talking about certainly people within the government who work on international affairs, whether it's state or defense or treasury or intelligence agencies. We're

talking about the world of think tanks in Washington, many of whom are actively involved in foreign affairs in different ways. I would add to that, of course, lobbying groups of various kinds, whether it's human rights or arms control or ethnic lobbies or pro-defense lobbies. And then, of course, there's the media, those parts of the media that work on international affairs. And finally, academics like me who write and teach about international affairs. Those are the people who do foreign policy in the United States, and I argue that there's a quite profound consensus within most of that community, not 100 percent, obviously, but for the last 25 years or so, most of the people and most of the institutions in that world have been strongly in favor of a very energetic, ambitious policy of trying to spread democracy, markets, and the American ideal around the world. I refer to as liberal hegemony. All right, but what is the blob?

Well, the blob was a term coined by Ben Rhodes, who was Barack Obama's National Security Advisor. And I think he meant it to refer to mostly the sort of penumbra of institutions in Washington, D.C., that do foreign policy outside of government. He's really talking about the sort of, you might call it. at loyal opposition or sometimes loyal supporters in places like Brookings or the American Enterprise Institute or other think tanks around there. I have a somewhat broader conception because I think people, again, at universities who work on international affairs, who train people who sometimes serve in government themselves,

are part of this blob as well. And it has a couple of interesting features, by the way. First of all, there's no real requirements to be part of the foreign population. elite in this country. You don't have to have a particular degree. You don't have to pass a bar exam or a medical board. You know, you need a real estate license to sell real estate, but not to practice foreign policy. You just have to be accepted by other members of the elite. You need to impress some people who are in positions of authority, who believe that you're smart and energetic and loyal, and you can be part of this community. It's also a genuine community where people know each other, and especially as you get higher up in the ranks, everybody knows everybody else.

What that means is success depends very much on your reputation. Be part of a network, to be respected within that network, to have people think well of you, think your sound, have good judgment, you understand what our interests are, etc. And unfortunately, what that means is there's a very powerful incentive for consensus. Staying within the lines. don't question any of the fundamental principles of American foreign policy, and in particular, don't question whether the United States has to be intervening in politics virtually all over the world. The American global leadership is essential to our security and prosperity, and it can't ever be questioned in any way.

If you stay within those lines, you can do pretty well. If you start painting outside those lines, your reputation will suffer, and your professional prospects will go down. Okay, so you make it sound like an echo chamber. There's a lot of echo chamber in it. And in fact, one of the things I do in the book is I compare three different elite task forces. One, the Princeton Project in National Security in 2006, something called the Project for United and Strong America in 2013, and then a Center for New American Security Report called Extending American Power in 2016. These are all bipartisan efforts. They're are all produced by bold-faced names in the foreign policy elite.

The conditions under which they're written are very different, before and after the financial crisis, before and after Iraq goes south, before and after ISIS emerges. And yet if you read these reports, they're virtually identical. They're almost interchangeable. It doesn't matter what the condition of the country is, the condition of the economy, the array of forces, arrayed for or against us. The answer is always the same. The United States has to be involved everywhere. We have to provide security for nearly everyone, and we have to constantly exercise global

leadership. And this is a very profound orthodoxy within most of the foreign policy. How did this thing form and how did that become the consensus? I mean, I was born in 1983. It certainly feels like that has always just kind of been the way it is. That's a great question. I mean, first of all, this is not some kind of shadowy conspiracy. It's not like a bunch of, you know, senior people get together in a secret site and work out what the line is going to be and then disseminate through private channels to everybody.

This is very much a sort of a large, amorphous group, loose associations in some respects hiding in plain sight. And I think it's largely a consequence of how the United States waged and won the Cold War, set of ideas and institutions that were developed there were to a large extent vindicated by that victory, but have never been rethought for the very different world that we're living in today and therefore continue to sort of shape what, you know, rising members of this group, this broad elite, know, is acceptable. You know, for example, if you want to be an ambitious, you know, foreign policy wonk, questioning NATO is probably not a good idea. You always want to say that you're in favor of democracy and human rights, and we should stand for them. You certainly don't want to

criticize Israel. You certainly don't want to say anything particularly nice about Iran or Russia or China these days. You don't, you want to be opposed to nuclear proliferation. You can't say you're in favor of that. But of course, you also can't say you're in favor of the United States giving up, or even substantially reducing its own nuclear arsenal. So there's a set of, I think, pretty well-understood principles. And you are not going to advance your career if you start questioning them in most cases. That is not to say there aren't real disagreements within the elite over certain issues. For example, should we get involved in Syria?

That was a real debate. Should we sign a nuclear deal with Iran? There was a real debate on that issue. So it's not a 100% group think. But on most of the big issues and on questions like, you know, should the United States continue to exercise global leadership, maintain military supremacy, maintain alliances in every corner of the world, there there is, I think, a surprising amount of agreement. All right, but do you think that that's gotten us into trouble?

Well, I think there's no question it has. again, just look at the track record between 1993 and today, where we go from being essentially on top of the world to feeling beleaguered. And this is not just the Iraq War, of course. As I said earlier, a number of other steps that we took along the way contributed to real problems for the country. So, as I said, expanding NATO eastward and making it clear that we were going to continue to do that, possibly eventually, including countries.

countries like Georgia and Ukraine, poisoned the relationship with Moscow and led, in many ways, to the Ukraine crisis. That's not to defend what Russia did there. My point is simply that we should not have been surprised that they took a step like that. I think it also has led us to get involved in the Middle East in ways that were unproductive. Again, not just the Iraq war. You could talk about Barack Obama's decision to authorize the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, And what that has led to, it hasn't led to a thriving democracy in Libya.

It's led to a failed state. So it's not just, you know, one mistake or another. It's rather the sense that the United States should try to run the world, should try to do this mostly on its own, and should gradually try to transform the rest of the world into copies of the United States, liberal democracies that resemble us in a variety of ways. Now, most of the time we want to do that peacefully. We're not trying to do that with military force, but in some cases, we've been willing to use force to do it as well. And again, the record of the past 25 years suggests this doesn't work out very well.

Okay, so how do we kind of pull, how do we get better ideas into the blob? And what do we do different here? Well, just a couple of points. First of all, what's very interesting is I think we are at something of a flexible or a plastic moment, when people are starting to think about new ideas. And some of the credit to that, I regret to say, goes with Donald Trump. Because Trump ran for office in 2016 going after both our foreign policy, which he called a complete and total disaster, but also taking dead aim at the foreign policy elite,

including the elite in his own party. And it's worth noting that Republicans in the foreign policy elite were absolutely apoplectic about the rise of Trump. wrote a series of open letters with, you know, over 100 people signing them, declaring Trump to be unfit for office. Well, he was a direct challenge to their intellectual hegemony, right? No question. And they, I think they genuinely saw his ideas as dangerous, but they also didn't like the fact that he didn't take them very seriously either. My point is that one of the reasons we're having conversations like this now is that the windows got opened up a little bit.

by the Trump candidacy. And in some ways, and I want to be very carefully, in some ways he has challenged these orthodoxies in his policies. I actually believe the blob has been winning more often than it is losing in battling against Trump. But he has certainly brought a very different style and a very different attitude to the conduct of foreign policy. And that's opened up some space for discussion here.

But I think what the Trump experience also shows. us is how hard it is to really change the fundamentals of American foreign policy, how much resistance you face from the entrenched elite, and that therefore you're not likely to get a great deal of change until the composition of that elite and the beliefs within it change to some degree. What about the American public? Because it feels like, you know, because I pay attention to this stuff quite closely, but it feels like almost everybody I know doesn't. And how you make Americans care about foreign policy again in the way that the blob does? Because it just doesn't seem like they do. That's a really important point that, you know, traditionally the United

States, the American public do not care very much about foreign policy. I think it rarely determines elections. Bill Clinton famously told one of his aides, you know, that Americans are basically isolationist, which is another way of saying they don't really care that much about about the outside world. And that's one of the reasons that the foreign policy elite has been able to run a very ambitious foreign policy that surveys show the American people don't really support. There's a large gap between what the foreign policy elite believes the United States should be doing in the world and what the American public thinks.

The American public does not favor isolationism. They don't want us to disengage from the world, and they're correct in that regard. but there's much less support for the kind of ambitious efforts to intervene and shape world politics all over the world among the body politic. And so the elite has to work pretty hard to convince Americans not necessarily to actively support this, but at least to go along. And they do that, of course, by inflating threats, pretending the world is more dangerous than it really is, by sort of overstating the benefits of this expansive foreign policy. and very importantly by concealing the costs. For example, if we're going to fight wars in various places, we'll borrow the money to do it. We won't raise taxes.

We'll put the burden of those wars not on today's population, but on future generations. And that's a way of minimizing public opposition. Relying on the all-volunteer force is critical too, right? If college-age students could get drafted and sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan or Nigeria or wherever, there would be much less support for this kind of thing. All of that is a way of exploiting the fact that the public is mostly indifferent and only gets really exercised about foreign policy when something really horrible happens, which fortunately does not happen very often.

Right. I'm thinking, you know, American troops dying in North Africa, the recent dismemberment of the journalist in Turkey, these kinds of things like big newspegs team to make people stand up and pay attention. Is there any way to get them to do to pay attention without these terrible stories? I certainly don't know of one. I mean, I think of myself as being in that business in the sense that I write books. I teach students and I, you know, write for foreign policy magazine. But I don't think that there's an easy, quick solution to sort of enhance global,

concerns and global awareness on the part of the American people. It's really part of, I think, a long overdue process of civic education we need in the United States, not just in terms of foreign policy, but also in terms our politics and society more generally. Nonetheless, I do think the American people actually have pretty good instincts, right? That they do have a pretty good intuitive sense of what matters when things are really important, and therefore they're willing to support the United States being engaged abroad when they think our vital interests really are at stake. There was strong support for going into Afghanistan to go after al-Qaeda, to go after Osama bin Laden. You couldn't let someone attack the United States, as he did

on September 11th and get off Scott Free. There's much less support for these open ended commitments to try and transform other societies, partly because Americans realize that it really doesn't matter very much to them how, say, Afghanistan or Syria is governed, but also because when we have tried to do these things, they haven't worked out very well, and the American people can sort of realize that, you know, this really isn't something we should be trying to use a lot of American blood or treasure to accomplish because we don't know how to do it. Neither does anybody else. Why, this is a weird tangent, I think, but I want to ask it.

Why did Japan work and every other time has not worked? Well, you could also point to the example of Germany. No, it's great success stories, which are always invoked when people want to go off on one of these, you know, projects of social engineering, is to point out that, well, we were able to reform Japan and Germany after the second. World War, we can do the same thing elsewhere. And these situations are completely different for several reasons. First of all, both Japan and Germany were reasonably economically advanced societies. They were modern industrial powers. They had a sizable middle class, very high literacy rates, etc. All of these things that are preconditions of successful democracy. And both countries had

significant experience with democracy beforehand, more so in the case of Germany. than in Japan, but they had certainly the rudiments of democracy and they knew about these institutions as well. So it wasn't like we were trying to create a political system that was completely different than what had gone before. Third, both countries were really worried by the Soviet threat in the late 1940s and 1950s. They wanted to reform and they wanted to cooperate with the United States because they were worried about an external danger, the Soviet Union.

And that made it a much different prospect. And then finally, the American presence in these countries, the actual American military presence in both these countries in this period was quite substantial. We had a lot of troops there and we left them there for a long period of time because we thought it was important for Cold War reasons. None of those things apply in places like Afghanistan or Iraq where the population was deeply divided along religious, ethnic, or sectarian lines. where levels of literacy were much lower, where the levels of economic development were substantially lower,

where they didn't necessarily see us as the solution to a security problem that they faced, where we didn't speak the languages, where we didn't know anything about the cultures or the history, and therefore wouldn't know how to operate within these societies in an effective way. And finally, there was neither the same size of the American presence relative to population or the understanding that this was so important. We really had to pour a lot of resources into it. You'll just remember when the Bush administration went into Iraq, their idea was they were going to go in, knock off Saddam, set things up and get out very quickly. It wasn't going to cost much, wasn't going to need a lot of American tutelage. And when you think about it, this was really delusional.

the idea that we could go there and quickly create a functioning democracy in a half a dozen years or so. No serious person should ever have thought that would be possible. And unfortunately, a lot of serious people did. Okay, so how do we, what's the worst thing that we could do right now? Like, how do we not fix this problem? I don't spend an enormous amount of my time thinking about what's the worst possible. thing we could do. But I do think we are actually starting to do a few, repeat some of the mistakes we have made in the past. One of the mistakes of the past 25 years, not all the time,

but in many cases, was a tendency to over-relie on military power under-utilized diplomacy and basically adopt what I called in the book, take it or leave it diplomacy, where we would issue a set of demands, and if other countries did not comply with our demands, we would just start ratcheting up the pressure and wait for them to say, uncle. In other words, we stopped seeing diplomacy as the peaceful resolution of differences in which each side gets some of what it wants and both sides end up better off as a result, and it became sort of exercises in issuing ultimatums and just waiting for the other side to capitulate. And this never worked very well, because when you ask everybody to give up all of their interests,

to give you all of the things you want, they just dig their heels in and they refuse. The only way, for example, we were able to get to a nuclear deal with Iran was when we stopped insisting that they abandoned their entire nuclear capacity, and we agreed to let them keep some of it, albeit under restrictions that made it, impossible for them to get a bomb quickly. We in short had to compromise some to get a deal that they would accept and that we could live with as well. And I think we're starting to repeat that in the Trump administration, that their approach both to Iran but also to a number of other states is a very uncompromising one where we just issue demands and then try to find ways

to put pressure on people. So I think that's, you know, I don't know if that's the biggest mistake we could make. But that's certainly a case of repeating mistakes we have made in the past. All right. Let's say you wake up tomorrow. Your phone rings. It's the White House. They say, you know, we need you as Secretary of State. You've got to be the replacement. What is your foreign policy agenda? What are the three things that you want to make sure that you're tackling right now? Well, very importantly, if I'm Secretary of State, and I think your listeners can all be relieved that that's not likely to happen. But very important, part of my job would be to rebuild the State Department itself, which has fallen on hard times.

It was, I think, in need of significant reform before Trump became president. But Rex Tillerson, his initial appointee, I didn't mismanaged that process quite badly. Morale in the building plummeted. We lost a lot of senior diplomats. And I think that a serious effort to rebuild the state Department and to reemphasize diplomacy would be a critical part of any Secretary of State's agenda. In terms of actual substance, I would argue for a broad rethinking of sort of America's overall grand strategy. And the one I lay out in the book, some of us have called offshore balancing, involves sort of recognizing what the most important challenges facing the United States are and devoting more attention to them. In traditional security,

terms, it means basically using American power to prevent any other country from becoming a peer competitor to the United States and dominating its neighborhood, its region of the world, the same way that the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. If a country like that were to control all of Europe or all of Asia and not have any enemies nearby, then that country would be free to project power around the world the same way the United States does, it could even project power into the Western Hemisphere, form alliances with countries here, maybe have military bases in the Western Hemisphere. And this would be a situation that the United States really has not faced in over a century. So one of the core principles of

our foreign policies prevent that from happening. If you look at the world today, the only country that might be able to do that someday is China. So I would focus much more effort on building up and strengthening our various alliance networks in Asia, possibly recruiting some more allies within there, so that China focuses most of its attention closer to home, can't project power in other places, including the Western Hemisphere, as easily. So Asia would get the primary focus of my foreign policy. By contrast, the United States can draw down its commitment to Europe and let the European countries stand on their own two feet and take care of their own security. Europe is a more populous, wealthier, even spends more money on defense than Russia does, I should add by a

substantial margin, doesn't spend it very well. And over time, and by time I mean a decade or so, the United States should gradually be turning European security back over to Europe. And then finally, we should be getting out of the Middle East militarily. We would have diplomatic relations there. We might still have security commitments there. But we should go back to the policy we followed up until the first Gulf War, which was to keep the American military out of the Middle East and only

send it there when it was absolutely necessary, as it was when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Consistent with this sort of balance of power policy, we should also be having normal relations with everybody in the Middle East, including Iran, as opposed to special relationships with some countries in the Middle East and no relations with others. I think what's happened and for the last several weeks with Saudi Arabia just illustrates why that's important. None of our current allies in the Middle East deserve unconditional American backing. And none of our adversaries in the Middle East are countries we shouldn't be talking to to let them know what we think, what we want, and to listen to what they have to say as well.

Doing that, by the way, would give us the greatest amount of leverage because you want all countries in the Middle East competing for our support and competing for our favor instead of taking American backing for granted. As a little coda to that, I do, you know, RE, the power, the idea of another country power projecting. I do want to point out that China now does have a military base in Djibouti in Africa. And all of the, all of my friends that are war reporters that have been in Africa over the past decade or so, always tell me that they always see. A lot of Chinese infrastructure being built. Always there kind of building, helping, supporting in the background.

So I think that's an interesting point that you bring up and one that's important. Stephen and Walt, thank you so much for joining us. The book is The Hell of Good Intentions, America's Foreign Policy Elite, and the decline of U.S. primacy. Thank you so much for being on War College. It was my pleasure. Thanks a lot. That's it.

Thank you for War College. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. Follow us on Twitter at war underscore college or find us on Facebook on Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe. And if you're feeling frisky, leave us a rating and a comment on iTunes. Next week we'll have two episodes. One is a discussion of radical political violence in the 70s and how it's markedly different from what we're seeing today. The other is a bonus episode I recorded where I ran my mouth off about nuclear pop culture on Jake Hanrahan's popular front.

We will see you next week.