The Lessons of Tragedy by Hal Brands;Charles Edel;

Author:Hal Brands;Charles Edel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300238242
Publisher: Yale University Press

IV

It is hard to blame them, because many of their leaders and elites have been stoking precisely that ambivalence. In recent years, prominent intellectuals have argued that the remarkable degree of peace and stability the world has enjoyed since World War II has been a product of revolutionary moral advances on the part of humanity, or of breakthroughs in international law, rather than the result of tireless geopolitical management by the United States and its allies.61 Within academia, the study of international relations is heavily influenced by scholars who argue that Washington can have the geopolitical equivalent of a free lunch—that terminating alliances, reducing America’s overseas military footprint, and dramatically retrenching can make the United States more prosperous, secure, and influential.62 And while it is easy to dismiss the influence of ideas expressed by intellectuals, similar notions have pervaded the worldviews of the past two presidents.

To be sure, Barack Obama was never as hell-bent on retreat as some critics claimed. He escalated one war in Afghanistan and launched another in Libya. He further expanded NATO and modernized U.S. alliances in the Asia-Pacific. He used punishing economic sanctions as well as other pressures in addressing Iran’s nuclear program, and waged an aggressive campaign against terrorist groups that directly threatened the United States. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” he once remarked.63 Yet Obama also reflected America’s conflicted feelings about international leadership, because he always displayed a certain personal diffidence regarding that role, and he often espoused the very ideas that were undermining America’s tragic sensibility.

Hard as it is to remember now, Obama’s team came into power speaking the language of great-power convergence and global transformation. “Most nations worry about the same global threats,” secretary of state Hillary Clinton declared in 2009. By “inducing greater cooperation … and reducing competition,” Washington could turn an emerging “multi-polar world” into a “multi-partner world.”64 Likewise, Obama’s 2010 National Security Strategy made virtually no mention of great-power rivalry. Instead, it focused—as the administration’s early policies toward Russia and China did—on “galvanizing the collective action that can serve common interests” on transnational problems from counterterrorism to climate change and working toward the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.65 When confronted, in 2012, with the idea that Russia might be more interested in undermining than sustaining the international order, Obama responded dismissively: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”66

In the event, of course, Obama’s tenure did see sharply revisionist behavior by Moscow and Beijing. Yet even at the close of his presidency, there remained an obvious reluctance to acknowledge that traditional patterns of geopolitics had returned. The White House reportedly discouraged the Pentagon from using the phrase “great-power competition” to describe an undeniably competitive relationship with Beijing; Obama continued to claim that the danger was a weak China that could not contribute to solving shared challenges, not a strong China that might seek to dominate the Asia-Pacific.

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