Hey all! I'll be your substitute columnist for the day, and the next week and the week after that - get excited! I have a smattering of interests so our theme here is "things that Nick will rant about." Again, excitement.
Today, I'm talking about something that I've wanted to discuss for a while - whatever happened to American foreign policy? It doesn't seem that we have coherent goals anymore (full disclosure: I'm a big fan of grand strategy) and that, I believe, has caused a lot of problems. Like the fad of the moment, we invade countries willy-nilly with very little strategic value. Was the invasion of Somalia worth it? Iraq? Afghanistan? We tried to build up countries that looked very difficult to help - to what end?
In an article for Foreign Affairs titled "The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm," Michael J. Mazarr describes how our borderline obsession with rebuilding failed states has distracted U.S. foreign policy from our more significant goals. Mazarr points out that there have been many intellectual problems with the Failed State obsession. Blanket assumptions about the connections between terror and failed states, and the assumptions about the feasibility of intervention have allowed the "state building-obsession" to "distort the United States' sense of its central purpose and role in global politics."
I tend to agree. When people get all excited about making democracy happen at the tip of an M16 or obsessed with saving lives in a situation that looks untenable, I find myself skeptical. Part of having no grand strategy or strategic narrative means, as far as I see it, a lot of bad, misguided foreign policy decisions - a tendency which isn't helped at all by sensationalist media or rich donors who love the idea of spreading the democracy.
What's worse is that distortion of our purpose that Mazarr pointed out. I do agree, as many may point out, that human rights issues across borders are the problems of the future. The increasing popularity of Right (or Responsibility) to Protect (R2P) with the UN crowd since the 1990s underscores this belief that it has become a legitimate and worthy idea to intervene to protect people from their own governments.
I'm of the opinion, however, that that future hasn't happened yet. The reports of history's end have been greatly exaggerated, as it seems: just ask Vladimir Putin. State-level rivalries and regional stability remain the names of the game. And though at this point, dear reader, you're probably saying. "Well, no duh," I think it's still an important point to make. Because all those dumb interventions we were making? Into places with little to no strategic value where we've killed tons of people for little gain? We spent a lot of money doing that, and the country has little will to jump into anything else, just in time for the Russians to decide to flex their muscles and conquer old parts of the Soviet sphere (led by a guy who worked for the KGB toward the end of the Cold War - he definitely has scores to settle).
This is where the title of the column comes in. The '90s were the last years we had some idea of what our part to play was. Especially under former President George H. W. Bush in his New World Order, our role was to facilitate global stability and continue to end the vagaries of the old world ? like the Persian Gulf War. Because of long, brutal wars and ideological opposition, we've chosen to forgo that role. It makes me miss people who believed in the centrality of America's role. But I think I know some people in Kiev who just might.
Nicholas Golden is a sophomore majoring in international relations and is also the executive editor of the opinion section of the Tufts Daily. He can be reached at Nicholas.Golden@tufts.edu.
