ZenPundit
Sunday, October 10, 2004
 
OUR MYOPIC FOREIGN POLICY ELITE

"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance."
- Senator John F. Kerry


Senator John Kerry did not actually inspire this post but I thank him for his timely epitomizing of it.

Of course if Mr. Kerry meant that such a goal is to be achieved through the destruction of al Qaida and the regimes and networks that support Islamist terror, then he has articulated a noble goal - one in fact I can fully support. The problem is it’s highly unlikely that is what he meant. In all probability, Senator Kerry was voicing the derision of our foreign policy elite, who are mostly unanimous against the policies pursued by President Bush, for the mundane and reasonable concerns of the common herd on matters of the war currently being directed at them by Islamist fanatics. Terrorism and dead Americans from flyover country are, you see, to our transatlantic seminar set, merely the cost of doing business as a superpower. Nothing to get excited about really. This war business of Mr. Bush is an old-fashioned inconvenience and an ideological incantation conjured by Likudnik neocons to distract the blue collar simpletons who shop at Wal-Mart and watch NASCAR from really important issues like prescription drug programs and reviving Kyoto.

Our bipartisan, transnational, foreign policy elite leveled much criticism at Mr. Bush on his handling of the WOT and Iraq. Some of the criticism was justified and indeed mirrored that expressed by field intelligence officers, retired generals and even conservative activists. On the other hand, I think it would be both fair and timely to take a look at how our would-be " wise men " have spent their time before 9/11. It's less than impressive. In fact it's a whole lot less substantive or relevant than the strategy the Bush administration has put forward.

I dug out some old issues of the elite's flagship publication, Foreign Affairs to see what they were talking about prior to September 11. The key articles for that journal which went to press prior to al Qaida's grand attack are a good snapshot of what our elite considered to be truly important:

THE WORLD BANK MISSION CREEP - Jessica Einhorn

GETTING DEBT RELIEF RIGHT - M. A. Thomas

PROVIDING UNIVERSAL EDUCATION - Gene Sperling

THE FUTURE AMERICAN PACIFIER - John Mearshimer

Islamism, much less terrorism as a strategic threat did not exactly top the agenda of our best and our brightest, even after a decade where the WTC, our embassises, Khobar Towers and the USS Cole were blown up by Islamist zealots en route to greeting Allah. Of the lot, Professor Mearshimer receives due credit for thinking in strategic policy terms instead of trivialities, social policy or fine-tuning existing institutions. That's the sort of article FA should be publishing, except Professor Mearshimer, who went on to become a fierce critic of the Bush Doctrine of Preemption, was originally confident of a Bush-led American retreat from world affairs and a menacing rise of China. Not exactly on target.

Over at The National Interest, the more conservative, realpolitik, journal that serves as the foreign policy elite's minority report, we see in the summer 2001 issue that their primary focus was not potential strategic problems but the vexing difficulties of American primacy:

AMERICA AT THE APEX - Henry Kissinger

THE BALKANS: HOW TO GET OUT - Richard Betts

WILSON'S BELATED TRIUMPH - Michael Mandelbaum

WHO'S AFRAID OF MR. BIG ? - Josef Joffre

DIFFERENT DRUMMER, SAME DRUM - Andrew Bacevich

Dr. Kissinger ironically bemoaned " That generation has not yet raised leaders capable of evoking a commitment to a consistent and long-range foreign policy". Of course we did and have since 9/11 - the Bush policy is simply one the elites do not like because Preemption tackles a problem they do not wish to face - as Senator Kerry illustrated with his confession of annoyance to the NYT . Mr. Joffre did have a nice analysis of anti-American " strategic balancing" by our European " friends" and - again the irony is rich-
" Saudi freelance bombardier bin Laden ". I must credit The National Interest for swinging into action with their special issue on the War on Terror in the aftermath of September 11, it is in my view, still a must read issue ( which includes an article by L. Paul Bremer who eventually became the CPA chief) but looking at the above advice I must say that our elite seem to be angry at Bush in part to cover the stinging memory of their own blindness. Living in a glass house of detachment from reality they rain a storm of stones at Mr. Bush from the CIA, the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie and hope no one will notice.

Their record speaks of intellectual self-absorbtion andat least a decade of tasks deferred. Tasks that Senator Kerry wishes to defer further by pretending we are not at war by not reacting - as we did not react throughout two preceding decades - to Islamist terror. Living in a post-Kantian wonderland of unreality is no longer possible but it is now quite apparent that Mr. Kerry will need another 9/11 or two before he draws the same conclusions, if indeed he ever will.

If anyone wonders why, after a million lost opportunities in postwar Iraq, I still can support President Bush and his beleaguered band of neocons, this is it.
 
Comments:
Zen Buddhism called. It wants its name back.
 
I'm not so sure.

Zen Buddhist monks were quite ferocious, even moreso than Samurai, until they were tamed by the Tokugawa shogunate. The Tibetans were similarly fearsome until the Yellow sect ( the current structure with the Dalai Lama) gained ascendancy.

In any event I'm far more Zen than Buddhist.
 
While it is fairly clear that the traditional foreign policy elite here in America were oblivious to the threat of radical Islam, so too were the neocons. Most of them, like the foreign policy establishment, were Cold Warriors who were 'out of a job' after fall of the USSR. Even after getting back into power, they were almost myopic in their focus on China and missile defense. The key difference, in my opinion, is that the neocons had a ready to go ideology to counter the threat, whereas a 'fowards leaning' posture was contrary to everything that the foreign policy establishment stood for during the Cold War. They essentially constructed a world order that they believe Bush is today destroying. When the neocons psuhed for a more agressive stance in US-Soviet realtions in the 80's there was much of the same backlash. The foreign policy elite saw their decades of work being undermined. I think you are seeing the many of same sentiments today.
 
While it is fairly clear that the traditional foreign policy elite here in America were oblivious to the threat of radical Islam, so too were the neocons. Most of them, like the foreign policy establishment, were Cold Warriors who were 'out of a job' after fall of the USSR. Even after getting back into power, they were almost myopic in their focus on China and missile defense. The key difference, in my opinion, is that the neocons had a ready to go ideology to counter the threat, whereas a 'fowards leaning' posture was contrary to everything that the foreign policy establishment stood for during the Cold War. They essentially constructed a world order that they believe Bush is today destroying. When the neocons psuhed for a more agressive stance in US-Soviet realtions in the 80's there was much of the same backlash. The foreign policy elite saw their decades of work being undermined. I think you are seeing the many of same sentiments today.
 
Hello Andrew,

Very incisive and amusing commentary. I have a friend (of sorts) who worked for Nixon and then later on Reagan's NSC, active on Afghanistan and Middle-East issues, who would strongly second your remarks on the Neocons, many of whom he knows personally ( he detests Perle, loves Wolfowitz).

Our Elite are incorrect in any event. Bush has not torn down their structure, he has just recognized that is anachronistic and has been for years and acted accordingly. Instead of congratulating ourselves for being " the indispensible nation" we ought have spent the last ten years building a consensus on new rules to fit a changed world.
 
Our Elite are incorrect in any event. Bush has not torn down their structure, he has just recognized that is anachronistic and has been for years and acted accordingly. Instead of congratulating ourselves for being " the indispensible nation" we ought have spent the last ten years building a consensus on new rules to fit a changed world.

I agree. This is the price we pay for not grabbing hold of the opportunity we were presented with after the Cold War. Instead of shaping the international system like we did after WWII, we had offered no real policy, only ad hoc responses to the latest international crisis. Now we see ourselves paying the price to make up for this lost opportunity. You call it new rules, I call it stability and development, either way I think we are talking abou the same thing. We face substantial threats from state actors as well as the so-called "super-empowered individuals" because we turned our back on the undeveloped parts of the world. Think about how stupid the term "peace dividend" sounds now. We could have been a decade into the process of developming the 3rd world. While Bush 41 and Clinton did some good things in setting the table (realtions with the Soviets, IMF and NAFTA) they missed out on the big picture. Bush has done well in this regard, he finally got the ball rolling but I would like to see his methods take on a new tone. At least there is hope for that. Kerry seems like he does not have strategic view of the world, thus you hear comments like the one you posted. Terrorism is not a police problem, it is endemic of the larger systemic/structural problems that we face.
 
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