Thursday, May 04, 2006

Security trap

At TPMCafe, John Ikenberry does a nice job of looking at the errors of the Bush administration in the grand geopolitical scheme of things (via 3 Quarks Daily). I know I go on and on about this same set of problems of legitimacy, sovereignty, and the overlooked dimensions of globalization. Ikenberry does a nice clear job here of summarizing some of the crucial points.

Bush foreign policy is failing – but it is important to come to grips with why it is failing. To be sure, it is failing because Bush stumbled into an epic disaster in Iraq. But the problems are not just about policy incompetence, ideological blindness, or high risk policy choices gone bad. I would argue that Bush foreign policy is failing – in the large sense – because it is inconsistent with the realities of a transforming international system that shapes and limits the way the United States can effectively exercise power and – more importantly -- assert its authority.

Because of this, the Bush administration has run into trouble, or as I would put it, it has gotten America caught in a “security trap.” It is a security trap in the sense that as the Bush administration tries to solve the nation’s security problems by exercising its power or using force, it tends to produce resistance and backlash that leaves the country more isolated, bereft of authority, and, ultimately, insecure.

The problem is that when liberals take over the reins of foreign policy, they too will fall into this trap unless they understand the problem and devise a grand strategy that works with rather than against these evolving global realities...

Two other shifts in the global system reinforce this “problem” of American power. The end of the Cold War has eliminated a common threat that tied the United States to a global array of allies. The end of this Cold War threat has meant that the U.S. does not need these allies in the same way as in the past but it also means that other states do not need the U.S. as much as in the past. As a result, American power is less clearly tied to a common purpose (Cold War: containment of communism. Today: not sure). This makes American power less intrinsically legitimate and desirable in the eyes of states and peoples around the world.

The other long term shift is the rise of democratic community. The world is increasingly filled with democracies – and together these democracies form a sort of democratic community. This fact of democratic community has paradoxical effects on American foreign policy. On the one hand, it gives the United States the ready access to partners and the ability to pursue complex forms of cooperation. American power itself is seen – because the U.S. is a democracy – as more benign and accessible to other democracies. The United State, in turn, is surrounded by affluent, capable, and friendly states. On the other hand, these democratic states are not likely to respond to domination or coercion by the United States. Indeed, they will expect the United States to operate within rules and institutions of the democratic community....

I truly dislike the standard categories for thinking through the new and changing forms of global politics. The Iraq War, for instance, is analyzed mostly through the traditional lens of realism or neo-realism or as viewed as the product of a brand of Wilsonian liberal internationalism. Despite views to the contrary (see this post of mine, and then this exchange at Lawyers, Guns, and Money in the comments), I think neither lens provides a clear picture, whether descriptively or normatively.

A realist analysis - based as it is in the analysis of relations between states - misses far too much of the dynamics between NGOs, civil society movements, the evolving nature of international legitimacy, and popular will and its effectiveness or lack thereof. Iraq is a liberal internationalist adventure only if one assumes the neocons' "democratization" claim. Given that democratization was an afterthought justification (to WMDs, alleged aggression, terrorism sponsorhip, etc., etc.) for the war, the liberal internationalist explanation serves as an ex post facto justification rather than a genuine normative argument about this administration's foreign policy.

Further, as Ikenberry points out, and I've repeated ad nauseam, the legitimacy of unilateral power is only partly based in economic and military might. The US, during the Cold War, provided the better of two opposing normative claims about society. The choice was fairly easy given the empirical evidence of "success" in fulfilling those normative claims on both sides. Despite Cold War abuses by the US, they never rose to the extremes of Stalin's purges, pogroms, mass forced migrations, and other crimes.

The US had in its favor a stronger claim to legitimacy in that a democratic and relatively free society offered a better vision of the future than one that was growing increasingly oppressive and regressive.

The state, I suggest, is now shaped on three sides – by economic globalization (and its transnational financial actors), by domestic polities and representatives, and by other transnational entities that often place demands on states to take up the democratic deficits in domestic politics. The state as a central facilitator of economic globalization and of command economies is undergoing its own challenges of democratic legitimacy. The US, as the central power player, is subject to the most scrutiny and the loudest demands to live up to the ideals that gained it international legitimacy in the first place. But now these ideals are developed in new directions and by new and evolving entities while current US foreign policy remains trapped in the intellectual patterns of the Cold War, including its notion of the nature of power. This anachronistic logic risks dooming the US to a continuing loss of legitimacy in the international sphere.

Iraq poignantly represents this logic: the fundamental contradiction and trap of having used might for the wrong reasons, changing the reasons to fit whatever signs of success arise; a growing loss of control over those signs or situations; and the inability to exit the fiasco "succesfully," in any sense of the word. Withdrawal may be the best practical option for the US, but it entails moral failure on top of moral failure. In the context of Ikenberry's essay, it also admits of a deeper failure to uphold a modicum of international legitimacy, as well as a failure to hold onto a respectable use of power, and possibly means a weakening of that very power inherited through the end of the Cold War.

Globally, I still subscribe to the view that we are operating on new political and ethical territory. Global civil society organizations use the communication and information technologies of economic globalization in order to challenge and reform the limits and legitimacy of state and global institutional power. This is accomplished not only through shaming and other techniques, but also through serving to inform moral and political obligations and commitments of domestic polities that apply pressure on state power from “below.” This creates a feedback loop of publics: not only in the (Deweyan) sense of publics created as a response to perceived sets of indirect consequences to actions, but also of the global flow of information transforming domestic concerns and pressures, and thus the nature of democratic states.

Global civil society has little direct effect on states except through publicizing transgressions of the emerging and perhaps necessarily vague sense of a global ethic. Where it does have the most effect is in the loop through which global civil publics themselves are formed out of perceived effects of actions and the seeking of solutions. Rather than this entailing a new fixed form of liberalism in which certain values, beliefs, and commitments are instilled within a polity and filter up and down to the state level, the process is experimental in fits and starts. Civil society, of course, takes on some characteristics of states when its players become powerful actors. These actors are nonetheless always dependent on the public interests that give rise to and support them, unlike stronger states. To the extent that civil society actors represent themselves as saviors, they inadvertently imply that the public they purportedly represent is not democratic.

At this point, however, we are subject to feeble claims by the administration and its supporters that "the media" doesn't accurately report its message or alleged successes. Continuing reliance on demonizing "the media" in addition to all political opponents and criticism is the deathknell of the weak, which is perhaps an even more dangerous situation than we've yet seen from this administration.

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