The Long, Quiet Death of American Foreign Policy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, August 26, 2021

 

Asked for his opinion of Western civilization, Mohandas K. Gandhi wryly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” We could say the same about U.S. foreign policy.

 

We don’t really have one, but it would be interesting to try one out.

 

In the United States, foreign policy is entirely subordinate to day-to-day domestic politics, and it has been that way for some time. China and Russia, Turkey and Poland, the United Kingdom and Afghanistan — these are not subjects for U.S. foreign policy but props for side engagements in purely domestic political rivalries, many of them based around identity politics. Consider how large Hungary and its risible little caudillo loom in our current political imagination, for one example — or how few Americans could tell you who Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan is.

 

Critics of U.S. political practice complain that our democracy is insufficiently robust, their perverse parallel complaints being that there is too little engagement by the ignorant and apathetic (relatively low voter turnout) and too much engagement by the informed and interested (“big money” in politics). But the real problem is more often the opposite: Too much democracy, and too few institutions that can or will overrule the will of the people when appropriate.

 

For example, a century-long program of progressive reform has almost completely undermined the institutional power of political parties, empowering irresponsible demagogues (Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump) who once would have been excluded by the prudent action of men operating in those “smoked-filled rooms” we used to hear so much about. Changes in primary elections and party organization have been amplified by social and technological changes, notably the rise of social media and other forms of digital media that have supplanted older fundraising and communication networks, unleashing a particularly noxious strain of personality-driven mob politics.

 

This has been bad for U.S. politics across the board, and catastrophic for U.S. foreign policy, which today must be run through a gauntlet of domestic interest-group demands, often petty and parochial, making it nearly impossible to implement a productive and responsible strategy during the course of a single presidential administration, much less to maintain some kind of policy coherence and consistency across administrations. It is for this reason that U.S. presidents as different as Barack Obama and Donald Trump both, to take one example, failed to comprehend our relationship with China as much more than a question of the balance of trade and the payrolls at North Carolina tire factories. It is also for this reason that the ladies and gentlemen in Washington cannot make the intellectual link between the billions of dollars they spend on farm subsidies and the stampede of illegal immigrants at our southern border — and that even those who do understand the connection find themselves unable to do anything about it.

 

The mess in Afghanistan is best understood as the Biden administration’s being slightly more incompetent in executing Donald Trump’s Afghanistan policy than the Trump administration was, while the Trump administration was slightly more incompetent in managing Barack Obama’s promised withdrawal from Afghanistan than the Obama administration was. But all three presidents wanted out of Afghanistan for the same reason: Being in Afghanistan costs money (plus the lives of soldiers, almost always an afterthought), and that money could instead be spent on what Barack Obama called “nation-building at home” in his argument for abandoning Afghanistan. Donald Trump used very similar language when he argued for an immediate withdrawal, complaining that “we waste billions” training the Afghan army when we should “rebuild the U.S.A.” Joe Biden says that in the case of Afghanistan “nation-building . . . never made any sense to me,” and insists that the money the U.S. government has spent there should have been sufficient to prevent the Taliban’s revanche.

 

Though being in Afghanistan is expensive, costs fell sharply in recent years as the U.S. mission evolved. In 2018, we spent about $45 billion in the country. For context, the U.S. government will spend nearly that much money on Social Security alone between yesterday and Labor Day, but you have never heard Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden fret very much about those dollars going out the door.

 

And that is because they learned something from George H. W. Bush.

 

It was under the first President Bush that the United States last had a foreign policy worth the appellation. His response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was something of a master class in diplomacy and the intelligent application of military force. Not since World War II had U.S. capabilities enjoyed so much credibility or U.S. leadership such prestige. It was something to see. And his administration and much of its work was promptly undone by a two-bit nobody making vague noises about “hope and change” and promising to redirect our resources from dusty foreign pits to fixing potholes in Sheboygan and funding free false teeth in Possum Bluff — there is a Baghdad in Florida as well as the one in Iraq, and Florida has more votes in the Electoral College. George W. Bush must have seethed watching the glib and lightly experienced Obama running the same campaign against John McCain and, by proxy, his own administration, as Bill Clinton had run against his father, the foreign policy of which had been entirely sunk in the molasses of domestic political opportunism.

 

Various interest groups prefer to think of their own agendas as “beyond politics,” a term that has been thrown around from time to time in regard to foreign policy. In truth, there is no such thing as “beyond politics” in a democracy such as ours — we can no more take the politics out of foreign policy than we can take the tuna out of tuna salad. But there is a difference between having a political debate over competing visions and approaches to foreign policy and an engagement with the world that embraces no real national interest at all beyond those immediately connected to our quadrennial convulsion and the advantage-seeking associated with it.

 

Our national interests do not change with the drapes in the White House.

 

The dysfunction in our government is deep — the last time Congress could be bothered to carry out its regular appropriations process, Frank Sinatra was alive to see it, the Spice Girls were on the radio, and the face of sober Republican government was Rudy Giuliani. That same year, a previously obscure group called the Taliban declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, not that we Americans were paying much attention — what did any of that have to do with us?

 

It is remarkable that we still haven’t quite managed to answer that question. It is also dangerous.

 

Foreign policy? Maybe we should try one out.