BY
In 1967, Britain
unexpectedly announced the end of what, for decades, had been a genuinely
global foreign policy. In response to the depreciation of the pound sterling,
expensive decolonization campaigns, and the evolving attitudes of the baby
boomer generation, Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labor government abruptly
announced that his government would change course, prioritizing welfare over
warfare.
That would include withdrawal from all bases “East of
Suez.” In response, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk complained that he “could
not believe that free aspirin and false teeth were more important than
Britain’s role in the world.” But the danger of such a patrician attitude to
foreign policy — one that views domestic considerations as illegitimate — is
that, over time, foreign policy can become seriously disconnected from the
priorities of the electorate.
If the New
Hampshire primary — where populist candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie
Sanders resoundingly thrashed their establishment rivals — gave us anything to
go by, the United States could be approaching a similar moment. Populist
candidates threaten the two pillars that have dominated establishment views on
U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War: liberal economics and
liberal interventionism.
Take the
liberal economic commitment to open markets, represented in the 2016 presidential
race by support for the Trans Pacific-Partnership (TPP) trade deal.
Rapid globalization since the end of the Cold War has generally benefited
skilled workers in Western countries in the middle and upper class, those who
can sell their services to the world and enjoy cheap and varied goods.
But for many
lower-middle class Americans, globalization is perceived not as a warm summer
breeze, but as a biting winter wind. Their once-stable manufacturing jobs have
been sent overseas, immigrants compete with them for low-paying jobs at home,
and incomes have
stagnated. Shockingly, blue-collar white men are the only group in America
whose life expectancy has actually declined since 1999, due mainly to
suicide and substance abuse. Yes, globalization brings blue-collar Americans
cheap goods too, but that makes no difference to social mobility: it’s
unsurprising that the link between individual freedom and economic
liberalization pushed by establishment candidates rings hollow to all too many
American ears.
With
remarkable effect, Trump and Sanders have channeled this visceral and inchoate
anger in their rejection of the TPP. More recently, Sen. Ted Cruz hasjumped on the
anti-TPP bandwagon, although he has equivocated on exactly what his position is
— perhaps not surprising, given his vexed claim to be running as an
anti-establishment candidate, his Princeton and Harvard Law School pedigree and
marriage to a Goldman Sachs banker notwithstanding..
By announcing their opposition to the TPP, the
populists have sent Hillary Clinton running for cover, despite her role in
sculpting the deal as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term.
Gov. John Kasich is for the TPP, saying he is “pretty much for open” trade. But
he too has equivocated,
saying that “American workers have been shafted” and that he “want[s] to make
sure that the workers in this country are protected.”
The only candidates to have thrown their full weight
behind TPP are Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio. But their reasons for so doing
are based primarily on the U.S. role in Asia and the treaty’s advantages for
corporate America, which do not speak to the concerns of blue-collar workers.
Rubio, for example, published an April 2015
op-ed in support of the TPP. “It will advance economic liberty and unleash
free-market forces in the world’s most dynamic region,” he wrote, adding that
it would strengthen U.S. alliances in the western Pacific. There is a certain
courage in advancing this position, given how unpopular it is across the
American rust belt. But this only confirms the fragility of the domestic
political foundation for free trade and open markets.
However, liberal internationalist economic policies
may still find a thin majority of support after the November election, given
their benefits to much of the middle- and higher-earning tranches of the
American electorate. Moreover, there is a good argument that you can’t reverse
globalization anyway, since the information revolution is here to stay and
protectionist policies won’t do much to insulate blue-collar workers from a
rapidly changing information economy. The real priority is to fix education so
that more people have the skills to benefit from a globalized economy.
While free-market foreign policies are more likely to
taper off than to collapse outright, the other pillar of post-Cold War U.S.
foreign policy — liberal interventionism — is on the verge of policy oblivion.
The
failures of Iraq and Libya have been a stick that Trump, Cruz, and Sanders have
used unrelentingly to beat Hillary Clinton. With nothing
to parry them with, she’s simply had to take these blows, and the bruises are
increasingly starting to show in the polls. In her lastdebate with Sanders,
Clinton argued that a vote
against invading Iraq in 2002 — which Sanders cast and Clinton did not — is not
a plan to defeat the Islamic State now. She’s right, but this argument suffers
from the fatal defect that the Islamic State would not exist in its current
form were it not for these interventions.
As for Bush, his dithering inability to take a
coherent position on the invasion of Iraq speaks for itself. We’ll see in
November if Trump was right to claim iconoclastically,
given the context of the last Republican debate, that: “The [Iraq] war was a
horrible thing. If we’re not going to admit that, you’re going to have yet
another election where the Democrats are going to win.”
The force of the populists’ argument on this point
isn’t hard to grasp. As should be rather obvious from the label, regime change
can create ungoverned space, into which transnational, networked terrorist
groups will flow, especially when there’s no replacement plan, as the
experiences of Iraq and Libya showed us. The Kurds aside, this is the problem
with arguing for regime change in Syria. The West has no alternative to the
Assad regime even if the man himself goes, so regime change would very likely
create a political vacuum filled by a cocktail of radical Islamic terrorists.
The United States would ultimately be forced to accept that reality, or to
redeploy American forces to pacify the region — both outcomes for which the
U.S. electorate has zero enthusiasm. This geopolitical reality has left Clinton
with no choice but to more or less avoid the issue of regime change, and
instead focus only on the narrow question of the Islamic State, and on
humanitarian precautions such as no-fly zones that won’t change the direction
of the conflict.
The only candidate fully on board with regime change
in Syria appears to be Rubio, who has clashed vigorously with Trump and Cruz on the issue.
While Rubio claims, not unreasonably, that Assad encourages the likes of the
Islamic State, he also has no explanation whatsoever for how regime change
would prevent a Libya-like jihadi-fest.
Beyond Syria, the broader idea of spreading democracy
and human rights seems to be grinding to a halt. Apart from some vague
statements of “concern,”
none of the candidates has seriously challenged Egyptian President Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi’s ruthless political repression in Egypt, or the widespread allegations of ethnic
cleansing by the Iraqi government’s Shiite militias against the Sunni
population.
Of course, the implicit narrative now is that the
Islamic State, not democracy, is the priority. But this masks a more
fundamental reality flowing from the 4,500 U.S. dead and $2 trillion-debt
burden for an Iraq War that handed Baghdad to Tehran on a platter. Whatever the
Iraq War was supposed to be in the world of counterfactuals — if the weapons of
mass destruction had been there, if the Iraqi Army had not been disbanded, if
Bush had extended the status of forces agreement to keep troops
in Iraq beyond 2011, if Obama had not withdrawn troops in 2011, and so on — the
war that actually took place was, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest U.S.
strategic disaster since Vietnam. With that plain reality in mind, Rubio’s
zealous enthusiasm for regime change seems wildly out of touch with the U.S.
electorate.
Unless he wins in November, the immediate future of
U.S. foreign policy will likely be a return to a proven Cold War model that
privileges stability and strong alliances over disruptive and unaffordable
ambitions to spread democracy by force.
Ultimately, only economic superpowers or dictatorships
can drive foreign policy independently of domestic considerations — and Britain
was neither in 1967. America is an economic superpower, but also a democracy,
which explains both why foreign policy can be pushed beyond domestic
considerations for long periods of time, but also why it can all too suddenly
come crashing down.
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