The Things We Don't Talk About on Foreign Policy Posted by Shadi Hamid

It’s really quite amazing when you think about it how little foreign policy has figured into this Democratic primary. Yes, there is the standard talk about multilateralism, the importance of diplomacy, getting out of Iraq, and generally not launching random wars – in other words, lowest common-denominator liberal internationalism. But Democrats, as a collective, have failed to provide anything resembling a vision or narrative on foreign policy. It is one thing to have solid policy prescriptions (and we usually do), but the more important question is do we, as liberals, have a foreign policy orientation that is distinctly different in both means and ends from conservatives? 

Considering how messed up the Middle East is, there is a disconnect between the extent of our problems in the region, and the boldness needed to confront them. To be bold, though, you have to be willing to question the assumptions of our national security discourse. Here is a short list of things we aren't talking about that we need be talking about:

1. The war on terrorism (lowercase): What are the root causes of terrorism? How do terrorists come to be? Once we understand that, are there, then, actions that policymakers can take to address these causal factors?

Republicans would like us to believe that extremists/terrorists hate us for who we are, as if they stumbled upon the bill of rights one morning and went berserk. Of course, anyone with even the least bit of knowledge knows this is absolute rubbish. But there is a public perception that we’re at war with crazed lunatics and there’s nothing we can hope to do but destroy them through sheer military might. This results in a smugness where we underestimate our enemies and the force that their narrative holds with mass publics in the Arab world and beyond. The fact of the matter is that while the vast majority of Muslims deplore the methods of Bin Laden, they tend to agree with his basic narrative that America is out to weaken and divide the Middle East and destroy Islam. Now, we can be smug and self-righteous and think that these are irrational sentiments, but if large majorities believe them, then we should at least make the effort to understand how and why they came to hold these perceptions about America and American power.

2. The role of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy

Democracy is a dirty word. Democracy promotion is not particularly popular. The Bush administration – through its cynical, and ultimately insincere use of our country’s greatest weapon, our ideals – has tarnished “democracy” and made it synonymous with militarism and hypocrisy. This may very well prove to be one of the greatest and lasting tragedies of the Iraq war. It will take Democrats to change this (don't hold your breath).

Democracy promotion must be revived and reinvigorated. This is not just a luxury for those of us who still insist on our idealism. No, it is national security imperative of the highest order. The only way to defeat terrorism and religious extremism in the long run is to support democratic development in the Middle East. As long as millions of frustrated young Muslims lack peaceful, democratic means with which to express their grievances, they will be more likely to resort to violence. For all its faults, the Bush administration once appeared to realize this, that the Middle East would have to be transformed from what it currently is to what it still has the potential to become. Liberating Arabs from the destructive grip of their dictators who have sucked the life out of their people would need to be part of the equation and the U.S. would have to do its part.

Unfortunately, the Bushies chose to do this by force, when there were easier, less costly ways to begin this process, namely by using the leverage of economic aid to put pressure on autocrats to reform. No need to start invading countries with long histories of sectarian division.

3. Islamic thought and practice needs to reformed/ engaging with moderate Islamists

This is connected with 1 and 2. It’s more sensitive for non-Muslims to talk about this for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities. Still, it needs to be talked about, especially in light what's happening in Europe now. America, with its uniquely integrated and patriotic Muslim population, is in a good place to talk about how Islam is compatible with democratic pluralism.

In the Middle East, the U.S. has a role to play in encouraging moderates while marginalizing extremists. Before doing this, though, we have to first figure out who the moderates are. American policymakers are holding out hope for a secular third-force in the Middle East that is pro-American and thoroughly liberal. Here as elsewhere, we tend to view things through our distorted lens. There are facts on the ground. Secularism, at least for the time being, is dead in the Middle East. Instead of aligning ourselves with tiny Westernized, secularized elites who have little influence with their broader publics, let’s get smart about it and build bridges with those groups and organizations that command mass constituencies. Mainstream Islamist groups - such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan - have the potential to move in more moderate directions, and they have already committed themselves to many of the foundational components of democratic governance. This is something positive and instead of shunning them, we should find ways to encourage this process of reconciliation between Islamists and modern secular nation-state. This has happened in Turkey and it has the potential to happen throughout the Middle East.

Comments

[Zathras]

Regular DA readers will have seen the equation "Muslim=Arab=Middle East" so often here that they might start to ask whether this is one of the things we ought to start questioning about American foreign policy, or at least about some of the commentary on it.

But the initial question in this post had to do with the relatively small role foreign policy has played in the Democratic campaign so far. It actually is not hard to understand. One reason for it is that John McCain is basically right: other things being equal, if American casualties in Iraq are down, the American public's interest in the war will be down as well. And American casualties in Iraq have been down for the last several months. The war is not on the tube every night, and since only a tiny fraction of the public is directly connected to the men and women who have to fight it, other issues have become salient.

That's no more than common sense, really, and if the violence in Iraq spikes once again we should expect media coverage of the war, and public discontent with Iraq, to increase as well. But the phrase "other things being equal" was used above deliberately. Even without 100 American combat deaths a month, the war is still enormously expensive, burning through more money in a few weeks than all the domestic pork barrel spending McCain rails against in a full year. This gets mentioned on the campaign trail, and occasionally the other disadvantages of the administration's emphasis on Iraq does as well -- but they don't get much more than a mention, a couple of items in the usual stump speech laundry list. Why?

The most obvious explanation is that the remaining Democratic candidates are more interested in domestic policy. That's not an accident; most Democratic candidates for any kind of federal office are mostly interested in domestic policy. In low-turnout elections -- party primaries and mid-term Congressional elections -- candidates need to appeal to the organized groups best able to fund their campaigns and get voters to the polls. These organized interests all have policy agendas, and those agendas are almost entirely domestic. Actually, it's even worse than that, because the policy agendas of organized Democratic interest groups don't intersect with defense or intelligence policy either.

This has bred a generation (actually, one full generation and part of another) of Democratic politicians who would rather talk about almost anything other than foreign and national security policy. They don't know much about either, and to the extent they are primarily concerned with their next election campaign, they don't care. This helps explain why Democratic Congressional criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy was so ineffectual for so long.

A large amount of spin (by the Clinton and Obama campaigns) and an even larger amount of projection (by Democrats outside the Clinton and Obama campaigns) credits the remaining Democratic candidates with, respectively, great experience and great insight into foreign policy. It is all nonsense. Both Clinton and Obama are conventional Democratic politicians; they talk about health care and job retraining because they think it is important, and only talk about foreign and national security policy when they are told it is important. Both candidates know and have thought a lot about a number of domestic policy issues. They have memorized some things about foreign policy -- neither has even gone that far with respect to the defense budget -- but in the White House they'd both basically have to learn on the job, the same way the last two Presidents have had to.

There is, of course, one prominent exception to the rule that organized Democratic interest groups have domestic policy agendas. Everyone knows what it is. I leave to others the assessment of whether that exception is helpful to a prospective new President, or not.

[Dan Kervick]

3. Islamic thought and practice needs to reformed/engaging with moderate Islamists

The first part of this one is a non-starter for me. Not only does it raise worries about quixotic and half-baked American meddling in the inner cultural life of people the US only dimly understands, but it is entirely inconsistent with deeply rooted American political traditions related to the free exercise of religion. It should simply never be part of the foreign policy of the United States to "reform the thought and practice" of someone's religion - whether here in the US or abroad.

Muslims have been struggling over their thought and practice for 1400 years, and will probably continue to struggle over it for at least another 1400. That in itself is none of our business. Nor should we be trying to micromanage Middle East political developments, or worry excessively about the religious-ideological makeup of the groups or subgroups with which we align, or who is up and who is down. Our consistent message should be that it is up to the people of Muslim countries to work out their political institutions and forms of religious and cultural life among themselves. We will work with whomever is in power, so long as they do not seek to harm us or damage our interests.

[David Tomlin]

I am really starting to hate the word 'narrative'.

[Phillip]

What's really missing in the public debate about American foreign policy? I believe it's the absence of honesty, a reluctance to level with the American people regarding the direct consequences of our own behavior. On any given day, you can find articles castigating the Bush administration, the foreign policy elite, or liberal academics, but you won't find anyone willing to talk directly to the American people about their own responsibility, even culpability, in shaping our hypocritical foreign policy and irresponsible domestic policies.

What do I mean by a lack of honesty? First, no one has asked the American people to put themselves in the shoes of an average Saudi, Egyptian or Pakistani citizen. How hard would it be to imagine what their lives are like? There's an abundance of factual information available. The fact is, no American would tolerate even for one day the kind of repression we expect the citizens of our close "allies" in the Muslim world to suffer for the rest of their lives. Looking back at our own Revolution, we were willing to use military force to free ourselves from relatively trivial concerns like "taxation without representation"; yet we expect the citizens of Saudi Arabia and Egypt to suffer a form of tyranny and repression far worse than anything we experienced here in North America (except of course our former slaves). We ignore this problem because we want the oil to flow freely, at a low price, thank you very much. So, we supply the Saudis with the best military equipment and training their money can buy and look the other way as one of the most despicable dictatorships in the world continues to deny freedom to its people.

The results are predicable: As long as we continue to close our eyes when other people around the world are suffering, simply because it suites our economic interests, those people will continue to hate us. If you take a look at debates within the Islamic extremist community you'll see advocates for attacking the "far enemy" (the United States) won out over those who only wanted to attack their own despotic governments because Usama Bin Laden and others made a convincing argument that the best way to remove the despots was to eliminate their foreign support. They're probably right.

That's not to say the Saudis would be better off if the royal family was replaced by a gang of terrorists. An Islamic republic in Saudi Arabia would be a failure, unable to meet the needs and aspirations of its people, just as the Islamic Republic of Iran is a failure. But its not for us to decide what form of government another people should have. Supporting a dictatorship for the sake of stability is a short term solution at best. The longer the pot boils, the more likely the lid will blow off entirely. Perhaps we need to step aside and allow a Sunni Islamic revolution to succeed, in the short term, so it can fail in the long term. Take a look at the history of communism: That ideology only faded away when it failed to meet the needs of its people, as demonstrated by the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union. For our part, we could make Democracy a far more credible option in the Muslim world if we showed we really mean it, by eliminating all the hypocritical elements of our foreign policy. The most glaring examples are the use of torture and support for despotic regimes.

A reasonable argument could be made that we would no longer be the main enemy and main target of the Islamic extremists if we stopped standing between them and the despotic regimes they want to remove. We should ask ourselves a simple question: Do the Saudi Royal family or any of the other tyrants ruling the Muslim world really deserve our support? How did we allow ourselves to become the primary advocates and defenders of so many despicable regimes? Do short term stability and the preservation of the status quo really reflect our highest values and aspirations?

A lack of honesty is also apparent in our domestic policy debates. As long as so many Americans insist on living in enormous McMansions, while their gas guzzling SUVs to the newest strip mall, we will be dependent on foreign energy. The fact is, we all share responsibility for the decision (or absence of a decision) to allow our cities to grow in the way they have since the end of WWII. We didn't have to allow the developers to push enormous suburban developments further ad further out into the countryside. We didn't have to allow so many millions of Americans to live in vast suburbs where they have to climb in their car to do anything, to shop or dine or play or even to visit friends and relatives. We chose to allow this to happen, or at a minimum we didn't do anything to stop it. Now, we're living with the consequences of our decisions (or indecision).

We could have chosen to develop our cities in a different way, with clustered developments, public transportation, schools and shopping within walking distance. It's ironic that so many upscale Americans are returning to the cities or flocking to new developments that offer a sense of community. Placing individual "freedom", the freedom to drive as big a car as you want and to live in the biggest house you can't afford, above all other values, has serious consequences. The neglect of civic values that lead to more rational zoning and a reasonable degree of regulation also has consequences. Take a look at our financial markets, where an absence of regulation or oversight allowed greed and irresponsible behavior to create a crisis that threatens our entire economy.

Greed doesn't stop on Wall Street, of course. We all share responsibility. If you support the war in Iraq, but oppose higher taxes, you share responsibility for the debt our children and grandchildren will have to pay. If you want the value of your house to go up indefinitely, but don't want to pay too much for someone else's house when you move up, you share responsibility for the state of our real estate markets. If you buy more house than you can afford, but don't want to pay a higher mortgage when the rates go up, you're part of the problem. If you insist on driving a Cadillac Escalade but don't want to pay more for gas, you share responsibility for the higher prices driven by high demand. If you hate sitting in traffic for hours during your daily commute, but refuse to support better public transportation or saner zoning regulations, you're getting what you deserve.

I, for one, would like to find a leader who is willing to have an honest conversation with his fellow Americans about the consequences of our hypocritical foreign policy, not to mention our irresponsible domestic policies. Does the freedom to consume as much as we want whenever we want represent our highest values and aspirations? What kind of country do we want to be, any way? Do we have to accept things the way they are, or can we share the responsibilities and burdens of change?

So, I've taken a vow to stop blaming my government or the conservatives or the liberals for all of our problems. I'm part of the problem, and I need to take responsibility by changing they way I think and the way I live. I'm going to make an effort to understand the way the world looks, from the perspective of ordinary people suffering from the tyrannical regimes we support. And I'm going to try to live a more responsible life by only consuming what my family and I really need. Sure, the adjustment will be painful at times. After all, we Americans have allowed unnecessary and wasteful consumption to dominate our lives, but the choice seems clear to me. Either we choose to change, of our own free will, or change will be forced on us by all those external factors we can't control. The limited supply and high price of oil is just one of those factors.