It’s Not Just Generals Who Fight the Last War
by Christopher Badeaux
There’s really no rhyme or reason to the conflict between great powers. Sometimes it comes with no real warning: No one in January of 1913 could have reasonably imagined that a mere five years later Europe would be a war-torn mess, with the best and brightest of a generation rotting in graves across France and Germany, Russia at the mouth end of a civil war that would yield the world’s first Marxist regime, and America washing its hands of the whole, sordid mess. By contrast, for a decade, everyone from London to Moscow feared and expected the French Revolution to boil over across the Continent at some point, making the little Corsican’s run from 1799 onward all the more embarrassing to the armies he trounced.
American Presidents from 1948 to 1991 had one advantage that offset the fact that their country faced nuclear annihilation on a daily basis: Their country faced nuclear annihilation on a daily basis, and so identifying their most important foreign policy focus became and remained easy. They lived in a world where, for the most part, the conflicts of their age were relatively well-signaled by the time they took their respective oaths of office, and so they could more reasonably be held to their campaign promises about how they would handle those conflicts.
The demise of the Soviet Empire led to a decade that we in the West thought pretty relaxed, the genocides in the Balkans, Africa, and Asia being the things of campaign rhetoric and gladhanded self-absolution. The 2000 election’s main foreign policy themes revolved around the candidates’ abilities to pronounce foreign leaders’ names and whether we would commit troops to low-intensity, more-or-less permanent “nation-building” exercises abroad.
As everyone noted for about a year after the World Trade Center fell, and some suggest even now, the Nineties were a vacation from reality. The Clinton Administration swept into office determined to enjoy a peace dividend and to manage international crises in such a way as not to spend that peace dividend. The relentless criticism of the first Bush Administration’s approach to the Balkan wars and China turned out, in the end, to be well-intentioned rhetoric backed by boots on the ground only when the worst had passed.
Put differently, the graveyards of Srebenica and Kigali are testaments to a foreign policy determined to manage problems out of the headlines, rather than out of existence.
This is not merely to pick on the Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton’s approach to foreign policy was not merely well-understood by the time he faced re-election, it was endorsed by a plurality of the American electorate and, frankly, George W. Bush’s first eight months in office. As just one example, the Clinton Administration’s feckless response to high-level Chinese espionage and its clearly enunciated intention to supplant America as the regional hegemon was really no different than the Bush Administration’s approach to Han fascism.
Indeed, Bush deserves more scorn here, because China’s rise as a fairly open and obvious enemy was a recurring feature of the 1990s, all of the blather about low-intensity warfare on Europe’s back porch notwithstanding. From their expedited efforts at military reform, to the espionage at Los Alamos, to their increased posturing over Taiwan and the Senkakus, to the array of various-colored papers China released as part of its endless posturing, China made clear that it intended to assume hegemony over Asia and as much of the Pacific as possible, and that it viewed the United States as an enemy, not a “strategic partner.” Despite this, as one of the last major diplomatic acts of the period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Age of Terror, after the People’s Republic forced down an American plane over international waters, the Bush Administration kowtowed to Beijing, a tacit capitulation in the face of a clearly designed effort by Beijing to test the new administration’s resolve.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush Administration’s foreign policy changed significantly, in tone and substance. However, on everything from North Korea policy to trade to regional power conferences, the Bush Administration continued to treat what Michael Ledeen famously, and correctly, identified as the world’s only truly functional fascist state as a legitimate power of nations, and as a regional partner rather than an enemy.
And that’s just China. It doesn’t even touch on the resurgence of a Russia returned from anarchy and a less functional kleptocracy; or on the dissolution of the weak bonds of NATO in Western Europe; or on the final stages of complete nuclear proliferation; or on the growth of a Pacific-centered foreign policy by Australia and many of the nations of Southeast Asia, of which America is frequently treated as a peripheral part. For eight years, the world has become a more chaotic, more dangerous place, with fewer wars and genocides, and more wars and genocides in the offing, than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union.
For eight years, the world has been trying to teach the United States, and its new President, some vital lessons. President Obama shows no signs of learning them.
An observer who lapsed into a coma in early 1998 and awoke a few days ago could reasonably conclude, if given only the names and curriculum vitae of President Obama’s foreign policy team, that the world had been remarkably static since the end of the Clinton Administration. Such an observer would not be remotely surprised to find that American foreign policy was almost obsessively preoccupied with the Middle East, even beyond Israel and the question of strategic access to oil supplies. That observer would be surprised to find out that Israeli foreign policy has basically yielded on the question of Palestinian control over large parts of Gaza and the West Bank; that the free flow of oil to the West is not really in doubt; and that all of this focus is the result of a war in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, an unpopular war now basically won and winding down.
The origins of this manic focus — this unrelenting determination to fight yesterday’s foreign policy battles — lie in the eighteen-month rush to war with Iraq. In October of 2002, then-State Senator Barack Obama made a speech on which he would touch, again and again, during the portion of his Presidential campaign that masqueraded as a stint in the United States Senate. Speaking to a friendly, anti-Iraq War crowd, Obama touched on all of the classic anti-war themes of the modern age: Jewish neoconservatives, Karl Rove, oil, and the looming depression that was a booming economy. Snark aside, some variant on that speech, in substance and text, was probably offered by thousands if not millions of people at rallies, in Congress, at coffee houses, and in dorm rooms across the country. During his meteoric rise to the Presidency, that speech became an essential aspect of his political identity, allowing him to position himself on the Left flank of the Democratic Party (where a goldmine of campaign contributions was waiting) and in opposition to the more centrist Democrats who had been backing some sort of conflict with Saddam Hussein for half a decade or more.
Through the weird thaumaturgy of American politics of the last eight years, American politics — and the Democratic Party in particular — grew increasingly obsessed with a war with a casualty rate of staggeringly small proportions, that had been basically won by the time of the 2008 elections. This myopic focus will have eventful consequences in the years ahead.
Most of the countries with whom the United States enjoys extremely tense relations have a view of the world that is considerably more akin to Vatican foreign policy than American: Ordinarily, they think in terms of decades and centuries, where we think in terms of Presidential terms. China, Iran, and Russia, while sharing virtually no other foreign policy views or assumptions, all believe that they have been here before the rise of the West, they will be here after, and their first goal is to identify Western (especially American) weakness and exploit it. Worse for us, each of those countries is facing both an economic collapse — where material well-being was one of the only reasons not to overthrow the regime — and a demographic collapse, both of which leave them keen to find advantage and use it.
President Obama’s first public act of foreign policy was to apologize on behalf of the United States to the Muslim world (apparently for freeing millions of Muslims from tyranny in Iraq, helping seize Kosovo Field from the Serbs, and only repeating the phrase “religion of peace” to describe Islam 2.6 million times the last eight years). Even before taking office, his transition team was reaching out to the Middle East to try to return America to its footing there in the late 1990s. The essential stupidity of these acts is no less for being entirely consistent with both a Clinton-era style of problem management (”I feel your pain”) and the odd, modern Democratic fixation on the Middle East and correcting the policies of the Bush Administration. Obama is pretending that the Middle East is the most important thing going in the world right now, and that the rest of the world can be managed, Clinton style. This is a profound misallocation of political capital and diplomatic resources, and one for which there is no excuse.
Take China. Sino-American relations have been marked for the last two decades by a handful of ironclad assumptions by American foreign policy makers which are both items of faith and largely false. Among these: That China is a highly stable, growing, prosperous society, with no large-scale internal unrest, a booming economy, and a desire to take its place in the world as a friendly, if mercantilist, power. If ever these assumptions were true, they are in serious doubt now. China is a stewpot in serious danger of boiling over.
Most Americans have no idea that somewhere on the order of ten percent (according to official government figures, which in turn probably means closer to fifteen percent) of Chinese are migrant workers, moving from rural homes to work in factories and other blue collar jobs in the coastal cities. In other words, scores of millions of Chinese are basically rootless, and for the last fifteen years have put bread to mouth by moving between the booming areas of China and doing whatever jobs needed to be done. Those people have only not become wandering mobs because of the booming economy, which of course went ka-boom a few months ago.
The results are terrifying. According to official Chinese figures — which are usually only half to three-quarters as bad as the truth — twenty million of the country’s migrant workers “have returned home,” by which they mean, have fled the coastal areas and relocated in the rural areas that could not support them when they left. Given that the number is probably more like thirty million, to put this in perspective for Americans, imagine that the entire population of the Houston Metropolitan Area simply packed up and headed to Nebraska and resettled there. Now imagine that those people generally don’t have cars and instead have to rely on an unreliable train system; that they don’t have the money to buy all of the food and water they need on the way and once they get there; and that even if they did, the infrastructure and the resources to supply them simply don’t exist.
All of this, in the first six months of a global recession which shows no signs of ending soon. Against the backdrop of a rapidly slowing economy — official Chinese estimates put growth down to nine percent per annum, which probably means that China is at or near a recession — China’s internal stability and the cool decision making that come with it are in doubt. This comes well in advance of the demographic bomb awaiting China in less than ten years.
Chinese reaction has been predictable, as, sadly, has been the American response. China released its latest, posturing, military white paper on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, essentially announcing its intent to secure regional hegemony by the end of the next decade. In both what it announced (strategic goals and obstacles) and what it didn’t (specifics of military development and power projection capabilities), the PRC made clear that it intends to constantly expand its sphere of influence through Asia and beyond. In response, the Obama Administration had Hillary Clinton promise no change in the foreign policy of the last twenty years in prepared remarks for her Senate confirmation as Secretary of State.
That’s right: The world’s most populous nation, a nuclear power with dreams of regional hegemony and global preeminence, is extending its military and foreign policy goals and power projection capabilities while its population begins to enter that condition delicately known as “France, 1788,” and the leader of the free world spends his diplomatic capital putting down a crisis that, insofar as it existed, ended a year before he took office. In so doing, he essentially told China that it would have a free hand for the foreseeable future.
Nor is the world merely becoming more dangerous in Zhongguo. The Korean peninsula is marked by a dangerous uncertainty even greater than usual. Is Kim Jong-Il still alive? In power? If not, who is? Relations between the North and the South, so promising (if one finds promise in attempts to treat bloodthirsty Marxist dictatorships as members of the community of nations) just a year ago, have once again entered the dysfunctional stage. Recent phone calls notwithstanding, there is no indication that the Obama Administration plans to handle North Korea and its clearance-aisle approach to nuclear weapons any differently than did the prior two administrations, which is to say, it apparently hopes that this round of talks will turn a paranoid, insular, military dictatorship prone to spontaneous military violence into a well-adjusted nation-state.
But even with all that, who could forget Russia? Russia, with nuclear weapons that may or may not still work. Russia, with a resurgent dictatorship, that has been resurging for eight years. Russia, riding high on oil wealth and adventurous in the Caucuses until oil’s collapse, with the internal political unrest one would expect of an economy whose only real support has collapsed. Russia, expansionist and assertive because that’s the only way it sees out of its economic and demographic trap. Russia, which took the occasion of Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency to announce that America has a nice Poland, it would be a shame if anything happened to it. Russia, whose revanchism and adventurism are directly and knowingly enabled by Germany — the same Germany that gave Obama the best crowds a politician has experienced in Berlin in seventy years.
In the interest of brevity, I’m not even touching on the challenges waiting outside of Eurasia, including the collapse of Brazil’s export market, the effect of cheaper oil on Venezuela, the return of the Islamic Courts to Somalia, the bloodletting in Central Africa, Iran’s nearly complete possession of nuclear missiles … you get the idea. The world is actively becoming a more dangerous, more chaotic place, from forces set in motion decades ago to the recent economic collapse. In response, President Obama plans to use the same toolkit and approach that gave us the world in which we live.
He is fighting the last war, using the old weapons, and seems to believe he’s waging a future peace. Even in this time of hope and change, that’s a recipe for disasters new and old.
