America at the Crossroads

This article begins a serial discussion about the crossroads America finds herself in today.  I plan to address both domestic politics and our future as a nation, and our international position and foreign policy.  The purpose behind these pieces is to organize thoughts and provoke discussion of the most basic challenges facing our country now.  It has been a long time since either conservatives or left-liberals have really looked at our most fundamental premises; we’ve been on intellectual autopilot for decades, and it’s time to bring our assumptions out for a thorough airing and examination.

The first piece is on how we are oriented to emerging challenges in foreign policy and national security.  None of the pieces will be comprehensive in or by itself; much will be left for later discussion.  Basic premises are so pervasive in any topic that at a certain point, it becomes necessary to break them out and treat them separately.  I have a long-planned piece coming about Russian and Chinese policies that will document the references in this article, but that will be down the road a little.

The next piece in this series will address domestic politics.  Fasten your seat belts, readers.

It’s such a cliché to speak of “being at a crossroads” that we probably hear this metaphor used more now in facetious writing and dialogue than for serious purposes.  But in considering America’s situation today, I find the metaphor both apt and serious.  Sometimes things are hackneyed because they do the job better than anything else, and the “crossroads” metaphor is one of those.  America does face real choices, differing paths that will transform our future, to a greater extent than I think we have since the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  The questions “Who are we?” and “Who will we be?” apply today to our policy dilemmas across the board, in both domestic and foreign policy.

We are less likely to discern this in the latter realm.  Our geographic situation and our history dispose us to think of things foreign as things distant.  We don’t think of them as issues for which we have an ongoing responsibility, or as ever-present realities that we approach at all times – not just in times of organized threat – from the standpoint of a particular national character.  This has not prevented us, over the years, from acting abroad in ways that imply just such factors, but we tend to see the course of events through an ideological lens, and ourselves as either defensive champions of liberal democracy, or as merely acting in self-defense on some occasions, and dangerously outside that charter on others.  (Many “paleoconservatives” subscribe to the latter view.)

As we stand at the crossroads, however, a principal challenge facing us in foreign policy is that competitors are arising who are not principally organized ideologically.  This doesn’t mean they lack ideology, but it does mean that their actions become more and more difficult to see as originating from opposition to ours.  They also, unlike Nazi Germany or the former Soviet Union, or Imperial Japan, avow no ideology-driven intentions to remake their regions or the world politically.  This – also – doesn’t mean they aren’t pursuing consequences that would entail such a transformation; but it does mean that they aren’t marching under a banner guaranteed to trigger our alarm bells.

The competitors I speak of are, of course, Russia and China.  The other BRIC nations, India and Brazil, have the potential to become competitors, and Brazil in particular is cultivating a profile of regional leadership as a counterweight, or even alternative, to US leadership in the Western hemisphere.  We tend to focus on particularly troublesome regional actors – Iran, Venezuela, North Korea – to the exclusion of recognizing the maneuvering of the others.  But their activities in a globe in flux are very real, and will have an impact on our options, alliances, security, and economy sooner than we think.

The choice we face is especially difficult for Americans because of the lack of a pitched ideological confrontation.  In the absence of explicitly ideological approaches, how do we justify, for example, opposing Russia’s initiative to supersede NATO, with an overarching regional alliance in which – in theory – no one nation has primacy?  If Russia and China buy up oil and gas concessions throughout Latin America, as they are doing today, do we have a political pretext for being concerned about that?  How about for taking action?  And if so, what action?  As China seeks to gain control of the whole South China Sea, for the purpose of controlling its natural resources against the claims of the other nations with coastlines there, what reasoning will we have to oppose that Chinese project effectively?  Will we respond by seizing a similar control of the seabed resources of the Caribbean and Central America?  Will we try to enforce abstract principles about international recognition of ownership on China or Russia, when actual force becomes necessary?  What will we do if our private companies, the ones that employ American workers and pay American taxes, find themselves squeezed out of markets by the state-owned corporations of others?

Since the end of WWI and the inception of the Soviet Union, America has predicated her foreign and security policies on the identification of threats, and in particular, on ideology-based threats.  It has been a long time since we proclaimed “interests” independently of perceiving threats.  Even Islamism, while its successes against us have largely come from non-state actors, is an ideology-based threat.  Recognizing that other nations could be acting against our interests without an ideological motive or an eschatological idea is a skill we have lost touch with.

It’s also one we have no experience with in the era of our global primacy.  The last time we were at leisure to reflect on our interests rather than respond to threats, Britain led a European consortium that ordered the world we acted in.  We were a buster of hegemonies, against England as much as against other hegemons (as when we proclaimed our “Open Door” policy on China, or forced the opening of Japan to trade).  Whether we would see our way clear to behaving in such a manner under current conditions is another question.

But we would be wrong to assume no similar question will face us in the coming decades.  In fact, it is one of the most likely of prospects, particularly given the current competition of Russia and China to gain exclusive control of as many natural resource deposits as possible.  The control of resources could give them leverage over our allies before we felt a direct impact ourselves, but that is not a development to be dismissed or taken lightly.  Our value as an ally will always be situational; in an ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union we were indispensable, but if alliance with us doesn’t guarantee open, market-based access to resources for Japan or Europe, its value for those nations will decline.

In the future before us, the use of force, persuasion, intimidation, and cash will be as necessary to preserving our own national security and freedom of action as it has ever been.  How we recognize and interpret the facts, and what we do about them, will be a function of who we are, as a people and a nation.  Our profile in the world is facing its greatest test, and there is no guarantee of what the outcome will be.  To assume that we will accept decline, accept faits accomplis in the economic realm by more commercially aggressive nations (and Russia and China are unquestionably acting, in the commercial realm, as nations), or accept seeing our allies peeled away or our alliances rendered inert and meaningless – this is all to assume that we will behave in a manner that would, historically, be bizarre.  Nations don’t generally behave that way.  American exceptionalism seems unlikely to prompt America to.

But what are the alternatives?  To discern that, it will matter very much who we think we are.  How close we draw the line of “justifiable defense” and “international principle” to our shores, or how far from them, will depend mainly on that quantity.  Russia under Putin is not going to give us the pretext for drawing it further forward, by explicit ideological confrontation.  If Putin can help it, no line will be drawn either by other nations in Russia’s “near abroad”; they will instead be maintained in an obedient state without pitched confrontations, or appeals to the outside world.

China will continue to seek footholds around the globe through well-positioned, state-placed commercial interests in the transportation, financial, and infrastructure sectors.  We could assume that this is a benign and relatively meaningless development, as in theory it could be; or we could perceive the leverage and opportunities it affords China, in the political and military realms, and note that the emergence of such opportunities in Central America, around the Strait of Malacca, and in the Red Sea should at least concern us.

Without primarily ideological prompts, how will we react to a world in which the exclusionary control of resources sought by Russia and China begins to infringe on our, and our allies’, freedom of action?  Answering this question will require a sorting-out process at least as rigorous as what faces us in our domestic politics.  History suggests we are at least as likely to end up taking steps toward imperialism, out of a perception of self-defense, as we are to give up and accept the hegemony of a rival.  It is a commonplace in historical analysis that Rome expanded into an empire through protecting her perceived interests against both outright attack and systematic, low-level predation.  The British conquered India in large part to protect trade routes through the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.  A global trading power is especially likely to encounter problems for which ideological prescriptions are less compelling than what power-based “realism” would recommend.

If Americans do not want to become reluctant imperialists, we will need to be prepared for the likelihood of imperial choices looking pragmatic and necessary, and the alternatives untethered and impermanent, in the world we inhabit today.  But we will also have to be prepared to recognize non-ideological competition for the real and consequential matter it is.  To the extent we fail to, disadvantage will creep up on us, and its impact will have political and material consequences for which our explanations are likely to be mistargeted or overreactive.

If any nation can break the bonds of historical pattern, it will be America, at least in this present age.  But maintaining both our security, our tradition of liberty, and our latitude for action, without trending toward the imperial use of power, will be a considerable challenge.  We are being challenged today without fully recognizing it, and that will have concrete implications for our national life sooner than we might imagine.  Much depends on whether we can revitalize traditional statecraft, including the a priori identification of national interests as opposed to “threats,” after the long holiday the twentieth century’s series of ideological explosions has given us from that prosaic practice.  If we can do that, the more difficult task will follow of informing our statecraft again with distinctively American principles and choices.

In a world of instantaneous communication and rapid travel, defaulting to the passive, defensive, and reactionary in those principles will not be good enough.  We will have to know where we want our positive principles to take us, and what methods we are prepared to use in their service.  The well-worn path of imperial reaction is actually the easy one; we will have to consciously choose a path that leads elsewhere – but doesn’t entail a loss of latitude, sovereignty, and liberty.