The Case for Restraint

Comments and Responses

by Francis Fukuyama


I find myself agreeing with Barry Posen’s outline for a strategy of “restraint” much more than I expected. We are at an important juncture in the history of American foreign policy, at the denouement of a disastrous war that has undermined American prestige and poisoned our relations with much of the world. There are many efforts to define a “not-Bush” foreign policy, but Posen is right that both Democrats and Republicans are stuck in frameworks left over from the Cold War, and that the present situation begs for a more radical rethinking of many of the premises on which U.S. foreign policy has been based. While I agree with much of the logic of his analysis, however, his specific suggestions for how to implement “restraint” in policy are very unrealistic and need to be reformulated if they are to carry weight in the policy debate.

The central driver of American policy since September 11, 2001 is an overestimation of the threat posed both by al-Qaeda, and by rogue state proliferators like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. These two kinds of threats were, incidentally, quite distinct, but were deliberately amalgamated in the Bush Administration’s effort to sell the Iraq war. Posen hits it exactly right in saying that while both of them pose serious problems, they do not pose the kind of apocalyptic challenges to our way of life that earlier totalitarian threats did. We answered the post-September 11 question—“Why do they hate us?”—too readily with the response that they “hate us for what we are”, or they “hate freedom.” In fact, a great deal of anti-Americanism in the Middle East is generated by the way we have inserted ourselves into that region, and it will die down if we assume a lower profile.

The four factors Posen cites as changing the nature of the environment we face—unipolarity, identity politics, the diffusion of power and globalization—all make, as he argues, the present world rather different from that of the 1914–89 period. And he is indubitably right about the underlying point, that America is not nearly as powerful as it thinks it is, and therefore is unlikely to succeed in its ambitious plans to transform global politics through a hyper-activist policy.

I would emphasize, perhaps, a somewhat different set of factors than the military ones Posen cites. One of the things that makes the arc from North Africa through the Middle East and on into Central Asia so difficult to deal with is not just identity politics and the diffusion of military power, but state weakness in places like Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. State weakness means that conventional military power, which was the coin of the realm in 20th-century power politics, is much less usable. We cannot coerce these states into doing things they are incapable of doing, like cracking down on armed militias, sealing borders or chasing terrorists in a way that would be possible with strong states. What we need is stronger and more capable governments, but for now we have few tools or usable concepts for how to get them. So even if the United States had significantly larger military forces, it would still be unable to use them effectively to achieve the political goals it sets for itself.

Globalization also works differently than Posen suggests. As Josef Joffe noted in Überpower (2006), the countries that have most successfully integrated into the global economy (for example, China and India) are among the least anti-American countries in the world. It is those that get left behind by globalization, or those that can’t cope with globalization’s substantial political challenges, that feel the most resentful. It is above all the lack of reciprocity in levels of influence between the United States and much of the rest of the world that creates a high level of structural anti-Americanism, a fact we need to get used to, for it’s not going away anytime soon.

Two of Posen’s specific suggestions for how to implement “restraint” seem to me particularly unrealistic. Ending all aid to Israel over a ten-year period is a political non-starter. Whether one could justify this in theory is irrelevant; it simply isn’t going to happen, and particularly will not happen if not put in the context of some conditionality that links aid to progress in the peace process.

The second problematic analysis concerns Japan. It is the nationalist Right in Japan that argues that the United States is an unreliable ally. Reducing our commitment to them will not force them to come to terms with historical issues; it will drive them to acquire nuclear weapons and adopt a much more confrontational posture with regard to Korea and China.

“Restraint” in current circumstances can also be interpreted very differently from the Posen approach. Restraint may mean no big destabilizing shifts in American behavior. The United States has undermined political order in an important part of the world over the past few years because it was overly activist in a clumsy and incompetent way. While we can afford to pull back in Iraq and other places, we risk destabilizing the world if we move too quickly to reduce our core international commitments. It might be fine to think in terms of ten-year adjustment periods, but not to announce them in advance.

Source: The American Interest Online

http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=332&MId=16