The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own. The only way to deal with them is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy. And it isn't likely to work in today's world.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Stagnant
Fareed Zakaria's column about objections to the mild changes of course Barack Obama has made to American foreign policy was an effective reminder about how fundamentally conservative (as in resistant to change) the nation's foreign policy establishment truly is. I know this is a point that liberal bloggers have been making for years, but it's something that can't be repeated enough. I cede the floor to Zakaria:
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2 comments:
I tend to disagree on the overall quality of the piece--that concluding paragraph was rather sweeping, given the limited evidence Zakaria assembles in the preceding paragraphs. I do think that the foreign policy establishment (of which Zakaria is a leading member) is rather conservative in the sense you suggest, but the consensus around which they are clustered is nowhere near as Manichean as the characterization makes them out to be.
Hi John,
That's a fair point about the final paragraph, it was a little too much to be based on just a couple of columns/comments by Les Gelb and Charles Krauthammer. Perhaps Zakaria undersells the amount disagreement that exists among foreign policy gurus, but I think that he's right in how entrenched a certain view of America in its dealings with the rest of the world really is. As practiced, American foreign policy under Democrats and Republicans is usually predicated on the idea that maintaining our hyperpower status is the foremost goal, as if that in and of itself makes things always better for Americans (to say nothing of the rest of the world). I think a lot of your criticism boils down to the format; this is a tough topic to cover in one column with any nuance, and I’d love to see him devote about five or ten times as many words to it. Maybe he did in his latest book, which I’ve not had the chance to read.
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