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Rebalancing American foreign policy.

Article Excerpt
The United States faces unprecedented foreign policy and national security challenges. (1) Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global war on terrorism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the increasing assertiveness of Russia, the growth of Chinese military power, global climate change, not to mention the spread of poverty, infectious diseases, and ethnic and religious strife around the world: the challenges aren't limited; the resources to meet them are. The high operational tempo of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has stretched the military to the breaking point. The ongoing financial crisis and economic recession will severely limit the ability of the federal government to sustain or increase expenditures for defense and foreign aid.

The Obama administration has a unique opportunity to reorient American foreign policy and lay out a new national security strategy that more effectively strikes a balance between the ends we seek and the means we possess. Such a strategy would recognize that the United States faces considerable constraints in the realm of foreign policy. Some of these are self- inflicted: the war in Iraq, for example, proved to be a costly undertaking that has severely burdened the U.S. military. Other constraints stem from developments outside of Washington's control. The rise of new regional powers and the erosion of the liberal consensus will increasingly limit the exercise of American power. Given these developments, Washington must not only scale back American ambitions, but also demonstrate prudence with the nation's limited resources.

In his classic book on the subject, Liddell Hart defined strategy as "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." (2) While armchair generals often focus on the application of force, identifying and prioritizing the "ends of policy" are of equal, if not greater, importance. For without a clear sense of the ends, foreign policy will not only be incoherent, but often ineffective. Moreover, without realistic prioritization, foreign policy will attempt everything while, often, accomplishing nothing.

Elected on a foreign policy platform that preached modesty, the Bush administration came to define the goals of the United States in broad and lofty terms. In its 2006 National Security Strategy, for example, the White House boldly argued that the "ultimate goal" of U.S. policy would be to "end tyranny in our world" by creating "a world of democratic, well-governed states that can meet the needs of their citizens and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system." (3) Among the specific tasks listed as essential to realizing this vision were strengthening alliances to defeat global terrorism, working with others to defuse regional conflicts, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, encouraging the development of democratic societies, and promoting free trade and open markets.

In the abstract, each of these goals is laudable, and to its credit, the Bush administration did make selective progress toward realizing its vision. But as a guide to practical planning, there are serious limitations with this vision of America's place in the world. To begin with, there is little sense of which of these goals should be prioritized. The lack of a clear hierarchy of objectives is particularly problematic given that many of these abstract policy objectives are in tension with one another. For example, efforts to strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan were frequently at odds with attempts to champion human dignity or promote democracy. Similarly, encouraging countries to open their economies to global trade and investment may pay dividends in the long term, but in the short term these policies often have the effect of exacerbating inequality and generating domestic strife. The strategy also lacks clarity on how achieving the goals it outlines will directly protect the United States. The spread of democracy may encourage the emergence of friendly regimes, but it is also possible that militant groups will use the ballot box to achieve power, as was the case with Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Working to defuse regional conflicts might promote peace and stability in some cases, but it could also embroil the United States in distant conflicts of little direct interest.

The so-called "global war on terrorism" epitomizes the drawbacks of casting the core goals of American foreign policy in such abstract and contradictory terms. Various Bush-era planning documents describe the United States as engaged in a conflict in which "the enemy is terrorism" and "building and maintaining a united global front against terrorism" is an important component of victory. (4) These statements are not particularly useful as guides for public policy. According to the State Department, some forty-two groups around the globe employ terrorism as a strategy to accomplish their specific aims. (5) To lump these groups together is to define the threat in a way that is overly broad: it conflates Islamic extremists in Algeria with Marxist rebels in Colombia, Shiite fundamentalists in Lebanon with Sunni radicals in Pakistan. To claim that we can or should fight terrorism in all of these locations, or that these conflicts comprise some coherent war in which a single strategy will prove effective, is unhelpful.

Trying to undermine particular terrorist groups can be an appropriate foreign...

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