Forum: Toward a Liberal Realist Foreign Policy
A memo for the next president
by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
On January 20, you will inherit a legacy of trouble: Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, North Korea for starters. Failure to manage any one of them could mire your presidency and sap your political support—and threaten the country’s future. At the same time, you must not let these inherited problems define your foreign policy. You need to put them in a larger context and create your own vision of how Americans should deal with the world.
Some pundits believe that no matter who wins the 2008 election, he or she will be bound to follow the broad lines of President Bush’s strategy. Vice President Cheney has argued, “When we get all through 10 years from now, we’ll look back on this period of time and see that liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq really did represent a major, fundamental shift, obviously, in U.S. policy in terms of how we dealt with the emerging terrorist threat—and that we’ll have fundamentally changed circumstances in that part of the world.” President Bush himself has pointed out that Harry Truman suffered low ratings in the last year of his presidency because of the Korean War, but today is generally held in high regard, while South Korea is a democracy protected by American troops. Do not accept this over-simplification of history. By this stage of his presidency, Truman had built major cooperative institutions such as the Marshall Plan and NATO. In contrast, the unbridled unilateral style of the neoconservatives and assertive nationalists in the Bush administration produced a foreign policy that was like a car with a hair-trigger accelerator but no brakes. It was bound to go off the road.
The crisis of September 11, 2001, created an opportunity for George W. Bush to express a bold vision. But one should judge a vision by whether it balances ideals with capabilities: anyone can produce a wish list, but effective visions combine feasibility with the inspiration. Among past presidents, Franklin Roosevelt was good at this, but Woodrow Wilson was not. David Gergen, director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, has described the difference between the boldness of FDR and that of the current president: “FDR was also much more of a public educator than Bush, talking people carefully through the challenges and choices the nation faced, cultivating public opinion, building up a sturdy foundation of support before he acted. As he showed during the lead-up to World War II, he would never charge as far in front of his followers as Bush.” Bush’s temperament is less patient. As one journalist put it, “He likes to shake things up. That was the key to going into Iraq.”
The Context of Foreign Policy
A key skill you will need is “contextual intelligence.” Chapman professor of business administration Nitin Nohria and lecturer of business administration Anthony Mayo have defined contextual intelligence as the ability to understand an evolving environment and to capitalize on trends in changing markets. In foreign policy, contextual intelligence is the intuitive diagnostic skill that helps you align tactics with objectives to create smart strategies in varying situations. Of recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had impressive contextual intelligence, which starts with a good understanding of the current context of American foreign policy, both at home and abroad.
Unfortunately, many academics, pundits, and advisers have often been mistaken about America’s position in the world. Two decades ago, for example, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in decline, suffering from “imperial overstretch.” A decade later, with the end of the Cold War, the new conventional wisdom was that the world was a unipolar American hegemony. Some neoconservatives drew the conclusion that the United States could decide what it thought was right, and others would have no choice but to follow. Charles Krauthammer celebrated this view as “the new unilateralism,” and it heavily influenced the Bush administration even before the shock of the September 11 attacks produced a new “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war and coercive democratization.
This new U.S. unilateralism of the early twenty-first century was based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics. Power is the ability to get the outcomes one wants. Whether the resources one possesses will produce such outcomes depends upon the context. In the past, it was assumed that military power dominated most issues, but in today’s world, the contexts of power differ greatly for military, economic, and transnational issues.
A Liberal Realist Vision
The old distinction between realists and liberals needs to give way to a new synthesis that you might choose to call “liberal realism.” What should a liberal realist foreign policy comprise?
First, it would start with an understanding of the strength and limits of American power. We are the only superpower, but preponderance is not empire or hegemony. We can influence, but not control, other parts of the world. The context of world politics today is like a three-dimensional chess game. The top board of military power is unipolar; but on the middle board of economic relations, the world is multipolar. On the bottom board of transnational relations (such as climate change, illegal drugs, pandemics, and terrorism) power is chaotically distributed. Military power is only a small part of the solution in responding to these new threats. They require cooperation among governments and international institutions. Even on the top board (where the United States represents nearly half of world defense expenditures), our military is supreme in the global commons of air, sea, and space, but much more limited in its ability to control nationalistic populations in occupied areas.
Second, a liberal realist policy would stress the importance of developing an integrated grand strategy that combines hard military power with soft “attractive power” to create smart power of the sort that won the Cold War. In a war on terrorism, we need to use hard power against the hard-core terrorists, but we cannot hope to win unless we gain the hearts and minds of the moderates. If the misuse of hard power creates more new terrorists than we can kill or deter, we will lose. Right now, we have no integrated strategy for combining hard and soft power. Many official instruments of soft power—public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, even military-to-military contacts—are scattered throughout the government, with no overarching strategy or budget that even tries to integrate them with military power into a unified national-security strategy. We spend about 500 times more on the military than we do on broadcasting and exchanges. Is this the right proportion? How would we know? How would we make trade-offs? And how should the government relate to the nonofficial generators of soft power—everything from Hollywood to Harvard to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—that emanate from our civil society?
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