n his
first year in office, U.S. president Barack Obama was asked about his
belief in the concept of "American exceptionalism." The president's
response was a sharp break from the concept as understood by his
predecessor in the Oval Office, George W. Bush, and many Americans. The
more generally accepted concept was summarized by writer James Kirchik
as the notion "that our history as the world's oldest democracy, our
immigrant founding and our devotion to liberty endow the United States
with a unique, providential role in world affairs."
The concept, in other
words, supports an outlook on America's role in world affairs that
includes our active involvement in these matters, and argues that
America has had a positive involvement in world affairs.
Obama's response as the
leader of his country, a country that for decades was the
self-proclaimed leader of the free world, was unusual to say the least:
"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits
believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek
exceptionalism."
Comparing the United
States role in the world to Britain's, a former great power, now one
with one-fifth the population of the United States, or to that of
Greece, a country with less than one-thirtieth the population of the
United States, and a collapsing economy to boot, suggested that for the
new president, neither America nor its history were all that special.
This is, after all, a
president who has been seemingly obsessed with "difference" and
inequality at home. So it was probably not that surprising that he
viewed America's recent outsized and costly role (both in men and
treasure) in military interventions overseas, as something to be scaled
back. Greece could not afford to send, and was not sending troops around
the world, so why should America? Why should America be the big dog?
Was our prominent role in world matters (as compared to the role of
other nations) fair?
The president
campaigned on a platform that emphasized multilateralism in activities
abroad, with a greater emphasis on diplomacy over the use of force. To a
large extent, war fatigue was something the president shared with many
Americans. The United States has suffered about 7,000 fatalities, and
several times that number of injured in the conflicts in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The Vietnam war, a very long conflict that also caused a long
post-conflict American war fatigue, had eight times the number of
Americans killed in combat, and left a similar less-than-satisfactory
state of affairs in the country where we had been engaged.
One great difference
between the Vietnam War and the more recent conflicts related to the
size of the American armed forces, and the greater shared sacrifices
that occurred in the earlier conflict. In a nation of 180 million, 3.5
million served in the military during the Vietnam period, and a large
number of those who served had been drafted rather than volunteering for
duty. Now the United States has an all-volunteer military, with about
1.4 million members in a nation of well over 310 million people. The
share of the American population in the armed forces has dropped from 2%
to less than 0.5%, a greater than ¾ decline. Many fewer American
families are "military families" with a real personal stake in what
happens to their sons and daughters overseas, and the division between
military families and the rest of America has widened.
Obama's shift from a
presidency concentrating on foreign affairs, including wars abroad, to
one that focuses the president and the government on domestic matters,
is therefore a popular course, though there are obvious wide splits
within the nation on the critical domestic issues that should be the
focus of government, and on the appropriate domestic policies to pursue.
The past few years have
witnessed many American policy statements on troubling matters abroad,
but much less of an active role in resolving them. The Syrian civil war,
which has continued for several years and has produced well over a
100,000 deaths, seems to have barely bothered the critics of America's
invasion of Iraq (which of course at the time included then Illinois
State Senator and later U.S. Senator Barack Obama) and produced similar
large casualty figures in the civil war that followed the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein's regime. While good policy options for ending the
conflict in Syria have not been obvious, the Obama White House seemed to
have set policy in part not to offend the Iranians (with whom it was
negotiating on a nuclear deal), and Russia, both of which had important
stakes in preserving the Bashar Assad government. The human rights choir
in the United States, which seems to care so deeply about what happens
to innocent refugees in the Sudan, seemed not to value as much the lives
of murdered Syrian civilians. Maybe if Mia Farrow and Nicholas Kristof
had ventured off to Syria, the Left would have cared more.
There might have been a
time during the Syrian conflict when a more active American role might
have enabled a non-al-Qaida dominated Sunni resistance to have emerged
to fight the Assad regime. But that does not appear to be an option
today, and the killing continues. In Libya, the United States was happy
to "lead from behind" in the overthrow of the Gadhafi regime, supporting
a limited military intervention by our allies, in order to respond to
identical crimes that have occurred in Syria on a much larger scale.
Clearly, even with a policy of avoiding direct U.S. military
involvement, consistency has been a hard thing to find with this
administration in responding to overseas hot spots or human rights
catastrophes.
One area where the
administration has been steadier has been in its public pronouncements
and more recently in its stepped-up efforts to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there is zero evidence to date that
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can move the parties to a deal within
the designated or any time frame. While the American negotiators always
talk of windows of opportunity about to close without a deal this very
moment (suggesting the atmospherics are better now than at other times),
it is hard to see why that is the case. The Palestinians seem as
uninterested in resolving the conflict as they always have been. They
have demanded maximalist concessions from Israel (a complete transfer of
sovereignty in Jerusalem's Old City), never relaxed any of their
demands (a right of return for between 5 and 8 million descendants of
refugees), and never promised to agree to an end of the conflict if a
satisfactory agreement could be negotiated to create a Palestinian
state.
The Palestinians are
rejectionist for several reasons: They never pay a price for saying no
to American negotiators or those from other countries, they have no
interest in actually having to run a state (given the Hamas/Fatah split
and the chaos, corruption and failed governance and economies in both
Hamas- and PA-dominated areas), and they have never reconciled to the
permanence of a Jewish majority State of Israel. It is always easier to
blame Israeli stubbornness about settlements as the reason why talks
collapse, and that is likely to be the case again.
The passion with which
Kerry has undertaken his peace negotiations is matched only by his zeal
for alarming people at home and abroad of the catastrophe that he warns
will soon be upon us due to global warming caused by rising carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere. While in Indonesia this week, a
developing country with a gross domestic product less than $3,500 per
capita, Kerry argued that global warming should be the No. 1. concern of
this nation of over 200 million people. As the evidence of the extent
of global warming becomes increasingly scant, the voices warning of its
dangers have become more strident.
Many have tried to make
some sense and find a common thread in the new internationalism of the
Obama administration. If you review the evidence, you get this -- fight
no more wars abroad, reduce the size and cost of the military, expand
the welfare state, fight global warming (renamed as climate change since
it goes down easier and can be applied to all changes up or down in the
number of storms, or temperatures), pressure Israel for a peace deal
with the Palestinians (since solving that problem is so essential and
ripe for resolution, and Israeli intransigence explains why a deal has
never been reached to date), allow the Iranians to talk their way out of
sanctions with promises they don't really commit to on scaling back
their nuclear program, work more closely with international bodies and
groups of nations on particular problems, and never unilaterally advance
specifically national (American) objectives. This laundry list well
describes the foreign policy objectives of the major European nations
and the European Union itself over the past decades.
If you want to manage a nation in decline, Barack Obama has chosen a good model.
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