Their foreign policy debate ... and ours

Joseph S. Nye, prominent foreign policy academic and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, writes in the Harvard Magazine that the United States should "become a smart power once again by investing in global public goods-- providing services and policies that people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of leadership by the largest county. That means support for international institutions, aligning our country with international development, promoting public health, ... maintaining an open international economy, and dealing seriously with climate change." Nye calls this agenda a "liberal realist foreign policy".

Except for the "open economy" part (for open, read free-trade capitalist), this sounds not so bad. But is such a policy on the foreseeable agenda?

For the past decade, the conventional wisdom has portrayed a struggle between two wings of the U.S. ruling circles -- a neoconservative wing and a realist wing. The neoconservatives want to exploit U.S. hegemony while it has it to expand our dominant influence, while the realists caution that overreaching will alienate potential supporters and leave the U.S. isolated.

Yesterday, the Boston Globe published a comparison illustrating that the McCain and Obama policies on Iraq and Afghanistan correspond to this lineup. According to the article, the two candidates differ on where to fight Al Qaeda. Obama wants to withdraw troops from Iraq partly in order to send them into Afghanistan, while McCain wants to stay the course in Iraq to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq. So what's the big difference?

The neocon/Bush/McCain strategy sees U.S. domination of the Middle East as critical. Having taken a stand by occupying a major Arab and oil-producing country, the U.S. must hold its position. The McCain remark about staying 100 years is not an inaccurate summary of this group's goal. Its aim is still to build a centralized Iraqi state (except for Kurdistan) -- one balanced between Sunni and Shi'a and therefore controllable by the U.S. In this view, the U.S. must also confront and contain Iran and hold the line in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as prepare to fight in other areas.

The realist agenda evidently embraced by Obama sees the Mideast as only one front of the struggle to sustain U.S. hegemony. In this view, the game is lost in Iraq, and the U.S. must draw down its forces, allowing the country to split up along sectarian lines. The Shi'a, who control the oil, are allied with Iran, so many realists favor reaching an accommodation with Tehran, acknowledging its increased influence.

The "heart" of the realist position then hopes to follow along the lines of the Nye proposal, in which America would use its strength more wisely and widely, combatting world problems, earning it goodwill, client states and markets. Many parts of the world are in motion, and U.S. world domination could qualitatively slip away if it does not engage the restive forces on multiple continents.

But the realists' "head" knows that the conflict in the Middle East is not over. No U.S. hegemonist policy could accept a nuclear-armed Iran, which would give it qualitative parity with nuclear-armed Israel, or the loss of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus the realists are thrown back from their lofty, "liberal" aims to what appears to be merely a tactical refinement of the Iraq 100-year-war plan: fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan instead of in Iraq.

Does the difference matter to the world's people? It matters in two ways. If the U.S. is forced to retreat from Iraq, it matters (much as McCain says it does) because it means the U.S. has had to back down, because it would give aid and comfort to those everywhere who want to resist U.S. domination of their own countries. This is true even if the war rages next in Afghanistan.

The other reason it matters is that the "international development ... public health ... climate change" agenda, while it will never be adequately realized by realists (be they liberal or otherwise), provides an opening to debate a genuinely democratic foreign policy agenda. As long as these objectives are acknowledged as legitimate, it breaks up the super-patriotic consensus that has a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy debate. It creates space for popular forces to enter the foreign policy discussion in a way they have not generally been able to do, to link up with forces in other countries, and to demonstrate the inability of the realist agenda to truly tackle the problems of the world's people. Popular forces must take care to preserve independence from the liberal realists so that they continue to advocate their program when the liberal agenda is jettisoned, as it unavoidably will.

For Obama to articulate a liberal realist agenda would be a step forward relative to the history of the Democratic Party. The more detailed the program, the better. Although as president, the imperatives of capitalism would make it impossible for a President Obama to carry most of it out, the political space it would open up would be significant.