‘The most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique in decades’
That’s how The American Prospect magazine refers to The Obama Doctrine, which is based on a very good concept that, unfortunately, doesn’t follow through.
The article opens with this:
When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn’t incremental at all. “I don’t want to just end the war,” he said, “but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.”
Sounds enlightened. Noble. Sweeping. What does he mean, though? Yes, the writer says,
to understand what Obama is proposing, it’s important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place?
To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama’s foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.
The “politics of fear” is political sloganeering itself, which begs the question of why these advisers consider “democracy promotion” to be a hollow agenda. Is it correct and well-researched intelligence or insight that reveals that anti-Americanism is bred in conditions of misery? Conditions that ‘prevent liberty and justice’, conditions America is responsible for causing?
The central core of this foreign policy vision is “dignity promotion”. Sounds excellent, the concept upon which a global program for peace and justice could, finally, be built and sustained. But what does it mean, in terms of a foreign policy program for a future president?
His brain trust doesn’t exactly say. “Freedom from fear and freedom from want”, one offers. “The destruction of al-Qaeda” by targeted hits in Parkistan, is a start, to eliminate some of the fear. We are, one adviser suggests, competing with extremism, so we can’t fill stomachs and reduce misery until we get rid of “the baddies”.
This is why, Obama’s advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda.
Couple of things…
One, the Economist political blog wonders where this worldview is going, which is a good question.
Most of the studies of terrorist motivations I have seen find little to support the thesis that material want per se is a “root cause” of terrorism. More typically, the terrorist is an educated male with a middle-class background, as the 9/11 hijackers were.
And for another thing…
it is not so much absolute deprivation that is a precursor to violence as the resentment that comes from the belief that one has less than one is due—and the search for the villain who is keeping one from it.
Now what if the “less” refers to domination?
Early on in “Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism,” author George Weigel explains the complexities of understanding the violence here and abroad, which requires more than a plan for targeted hits on terrorist hideouts in the desert.
The kind of terrorism visited upon America on 9/11…was terrorism intended to “effect maximum destruction,” both material and psychological-terrorism that, as a mtter of principle, declined to discriminate between those who were “guilty” (in terms of specific political grievances) and those who were “innocent” in respect to those grievances. The notion that there are “no innocents”-that the enemy is “guilty” simply by reason of drawing breath-was itself something new and reflected a deliberate strategic choice: a strategy of open-ended mayhem based on the radical dehumanization of the “other.” [emphasis added]
That’s the strategy of the “war that burst upon us”. It was not bred out of misery and want. It sought to dehumanize us as “other” and destroy us. ‘We cannot not understand this,’ says Weigel.
Even more important, in terms of clarifying what we must face over the long haul, 9/11 forced us to see what we had hitherto refused to see: that we are now confronted by an existential enemy, that is, one for whom a greater share in the world’s wealth or power may be a subsidiary goal, but whose primary motivation is the overthrow of our very way of life-our civilization.
Yes, promotion of human dignity is primary in advancing the possibility of living together on the planet in peace. And it rests, as Weigel points out, on theological foundations.
At the moment…the important thing would seem to be to concentrate on working at such common borders as exist between us…
If, for example, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and agnostics (as well as Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of other religions) could agree that there are certain moral truths “built into” the world, built into us, and built into the dynamics of human striving-moral truths that we can know, by careful reflection, to be true-then we would have the first building blocks of a philosophical foundation on which to construct, together, free and just societies that respect religious conviction.
That’s the most sweeping foreign-policy critique in modern times.