Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of “The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution.”
While the media has focused on the Republican presidential primaries, offstage the greatest revolution in American foreign policy in a generation has occurred, with little discussion or debate surrounding its announcement last week by President Obama.
The relative lack of controversy marks a contrast with the last great transformation of American foreign policy, which took place at the end of the Cold War. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear that the Soviet-American conflict that had structured U.S. foreign policy since the late 1940s was coming to an end. For several years there was a vigorous debate in the mainstream media as well as expert circles about what should replace the Cold War strategy of containment of communism as the basis of American grand strategy.
Isolationism was championed by some like the conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan. Another alternative, championed by scholars like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, was “realism” — a policy of selective engagement of the world that emphasized the national interest and minimized attempts by the U.S. and other outsiders to remake foreign societies. Yet a third alternative was liberal internationalism, a strategy founded on an attempt to realize Woodrow Wilson’s dreams of collective security based on international institutions like the United Nations and NATO. The fourth alternative has been described as “hegemony” or “empire” — a policy of indefinite American global military domination. This view was backed most vigorously by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol’s the Weekly Standard....
The great debate about American strategy came to an abrupt end with the Gulf War in early 1991. The ease with which America’s armed forces defeated the regime of Saddam Hussein, who was left in power and contained in part of his territory, convinced America’s foreign policy establishment that the benefits of America’s global hegemony as the “sole remaining superpower” were great while the costs were extremely low. The new bipartisan consensus was consolidated during the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, when triumphant “humanitarian hawks” insisted that anyone who opposed U.S./Nato intervention in the Balkan wars was an immoral appeaser of Nazi-like evil....
In announcing the new orientation of American security strategy last week, the president emphasized that the U.S. will maintain its position as the leading military power in the world; no president, in this generation, could do otherwise. What is striking, however, is the speed with which the Obama administration has not only wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but repudiated the post-1989 consensus.
According to the new vision of American defense, the U.S. will reorient itself from fighting wars of nation-building and counterinsurgency in the Muslim world to focusing on balancing the power of rising states in East Asia (read China). This reflects the classic logic of realpolitik, not neoconservative hegemonism or neoliberal Wilsonianism. The shift in emphasis from quasi-colonial nation-building, which requires many American boots on the ground, to strategies that rely more on local allies, special forces and the (morally and legally problematic, it should be said) use of drones represents another break with the strategy of the Bush/Cheney years....
