Consider this exchange between Fox News’ Major Garrett and President Obama last week in Russia:
GARRETT: “In your speech this morning, you said the Cold War reached its conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years. Mr. President, are the Russian sensitivities so fragile that you can’t say the Cold War was won, the West won it, and it was led by a combination of Democratic and Republican American presidents?”
President Obama: “Well, listen, the — I think that you just cut out Lech Walesa and the Poles. You just cut out Havel and the Czechs. There were a whole bunch of people throughout Eastern Europe who showed enormous courage. And I think that it is very important in this part of the world to acknowledge the degree to which people struggled for their own freedom. I’m very proud of the traditions of Democratic and Republican presidents to lift the Iron Curtain. But, you know, we don’t have to diminish other people in order to recognize our role in that history” (my emphasis).
Mr. Garrett’s question reflects the counterproductive worldview characterized by insecurity and American narcissism that has been embraced by Obama’s critics. The president’s answer, on the other hand, exemplifies a uniquely American confidence that we can guide the “arc of history” in favor of our national interests if only we apply a restrained and pragmatic touch to events as they unfold.
Garrett wants to craft an image of Obama as soft on our adversaries – too politically correct to speak the truth about the US’s role in history and by extension, too gun-shy to exert our influence on current events. (Never mind that Media Matters caught Garrett’s friend Sean Hannity selectively cropping video footage of this exchange to omit Obama’s mention of the Poles, the Czechs, and U.S. presidents).
The president points out some of the historical realities that Garrett chooses to ignore, but chooses not to lead Garrett by the hand to the broader point, which is: What foreign policy objective is served by withholding credit from the millions of eastern Europeans who daringly – and peacefully – took down communist regimes? Regardless of whether the Russian “sensitivities” are “fragile,” it has not occurred to Garrett that the president’s priority is to cultivate a constructive relationship with one of the largest, most powerful countries in the world. And that the president’s carefully-chosen tone might be a more productive way to advance our national interests than making needless jabs at Russia’s sensitivities.
Did the West win the Cold War, in part due to the policies of US presidents (particularly Reagan’s arms build-up that hastened the inevitable economic collapse of the USSR?) Of course. But to dismiss the sacrifices of the people of the eastern bloc, not to mention the political courage and historical foresight of Mikhail Gorbachev, the roles of Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, countless dissidents and demonstrators, etc., is to willingly adopt a bizarrely myopic understanding of history. For what? To inflate the sense of American narcissism felt by Fox News viewers? One can practically hear the devotees of Sean Hannity chanting “We’re number one!!” in the back of Garrett’s head.
As we’ve covered in this blog, this president has resisted the knee-jerk, neo-con impulses to interfere in Iran and appreciates (as any experienced community organizer does) that the forces of freedom, democracy, are social change ultimately must come from the people within a society. To be sure, these events can be influenced by active American policy under certain circumstances, but only when our credibility and legitimacy are intact – and when our strategy reflects the realities of the situation. In the case of the recent unrest in Iran, the realities of Iranian history and its political landscape required the U.S. to resist an overt declaration of solidarity with the reformers. And ironically, the ham-handed nature of our meddling in Middle Eastern affairs under the Bush Administration has made it more difficult to nudge events in our direction even if we tried.
Sadly, it used to be the GOP that was known for projecting confidence on issues of foreign policy and took a tough, but ultimately pragmatic and restrained approach to policy. This restraint was indicative of a broader conservative philosophy characterized by a healthy level of skepticism about our ability to actively build democracies from scratch and create nations in our image.
Fred Kaplan offers George H.W. Bush as a prime example of this hard-headed – and effective – restraint in the face of considerable domestic pressure to intervene in pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. He cites Bush’s memoirs, A World Transformed co-authored with his national security advisor Brent Scowcroft:
Bush recalled that he felt it important to “step carefully in Poland and Hungary and … avoid aggravating the Soviets, whose military presence still loomed there.” If the U.S. had taken overt action to encourage democracy, he explained, “I understood that the pressure on Gorbachev from hard-liners to intervene would grow…there could be more Tiananmens.”
In other words, he recognized that Ronald Reagan’s aggressive policies had set history in Eastern Europe in motion, and that it was now his own task to slow it down – to allow liberal change to settle in with minimal bloodshed.
The ability to put pragmatism over ideology and defy our worst clumsy but well-intentioned instincts will be critical in Afghanistan as the United States, its NATO allies, and the Afghan government collectively find a way forward. In their article titled “Flipping the Taliban” in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Fotini Christia and Michael Semple describe a key piece of our strategy in Afghanistan as a “political surge,” or a “committed effort to persuade large groups of Taliban fighters to put down their arms and give up the fight.” Part of the basis for this approach lies in a unique and long-established aspect of “the Afghan way of war” in which the desire to simply be on the winning side is a primary motivator of Afghan fighters, prompting them to continuously “realign” or change sides in mid-conflict. But more fundamentally, Christia and Semple write that our willing to adopt a reconciliation strategy comes in part from what we learned from our failures and successes Iraq: “no occupying power can hope to quash an insurgency by killing and capturing its way to victory. It must make friends, especially among its enemies” (my emphasis).
Needless to say, a concerted effort to negotiate or reconcile with insurgents or Taliban fighters sounds distasteful, and will be easy for critics to mischaracterize in order to score political points. Similarly, last week’s news that the U.S. might be open to talks with the Taliban will likely generate some misinformed commentary from the cable news outlets and the blogosphere. These issues represent an early test of how Obama’s foreign policy approach will be put in practice and how the public will receive it.
We saw how dumbing down foreign policy translated into domestic political success during the (W., not H.W.) Bush years. But we also saw during those years how tough talk and inflammatory rhetoric revealed our worste insecurities and poorly served our national interests.
I took to writing this post after seeing Michelle Obama dressed in a long black veil in the Catholic tradition during a visit with Pope Benedict and hearing the president publicly refer to the Pope as the “Holy Father” during the week leading up to the visit. While the foreign policy implications were small and it stirred no domestic controversy, many commentators cited these things and noted that American Catholics appreciate these gestures. A more controversial gesture – Obama’s “bow” to the Saudi King – did stir the headlines, but this too struck me as a simple gesture of respect.
Hopefully, people begin to see these minor things as well Obama’s broader international strategies for what they are: a projection of supreme confidence in himself and the country he leads. And in the long run, they reflect a foreign policy posture that will best serve our national security interests.
-MN
