Finally, a strategy we can support

Robert Fox, Matthew Paris, Simon Jenkins, the Heresiarch - four writers in various states of despair about the prospects for our mission in Afghanistan. Simon Jenkins and Robert Fox are long time sceptics. Matthew Paris and the Heresiarch - along with a growing majority of the public, it seems - are more recent converts. This is worrying, because it suggests that those of us in favour of continued engagement in Afghanistan are losing the argument. Much of the new mood is bound up with the recent spike in casualties, but alongside it is a vein of criticism that addresses fundamental issues of strategy. If this is not dealt with, those numbers could very well harden.

The argument is that our effort there lacks strategic focus. This is odd because of all the criticisms one can make of this mission - and there are many - it seems to me that this is the one with least force. Only some years ago, at the outset of the mission, was it fair to say that our effort there suffered for the want of a coherent strategy. It has not really been true for some time, and so the right time to make the argument was then, not now. That we are beginning to question the logic and coherence of the overarching concept at the very moment the elements needed for a focused strategic effort are finally put in place is just one of the many ironies that swirl around this debate .


To see why this is true all we need to do is revisit the history. Although the basic template for state building operations was, by the time of the invasion in 2001/2, fully developed, it was never fully integrated into America’s strategic doctrine because of a desire on the part of the new administration to avoid what they saw as the ‘excesses’ of Clinton-style liberal internationalism. George W. Bush was especially critical of what he called the ‘open-ended deployments and unclear military missions’ of the Clinton era, and promised to be much more careful about sending US forces abroad. Crucially, he called for clear criteria surrounding the use of force, based upon ‘vital national interest’ rather than humanitarian objectives. And so although the UN, NATO/ISAF, and other assorted aid agencies signed up to what they thought was a nation building program, they very quickly found that the focus of the Americans had moved on. The effort in Afghanistan was denied the resources it needed either to stabilise the government in Kabul, or defeat the Taliban.

This left those on the ground in Afghanistan desperately grasping for arguments to justify their continued presence and keen to jump on any sign of success to build support for a faltering mission. That is why, at various times, and with varying degrees of conviction, very different arguments have been put forward to justify our presence there, from the growing numbers of girls now in school, to the amount of poppy crop destroyed. All of this history is well known, and yet, if the current crop of arguments are anything to go by, it appears to have been all but forgotten. The basic truth about the mission in Afghanistan is that a plan was in place from the start. What was missing was not a focused strategic concept, but rather the resources to implement it. The politicians cannot make this argument, of course, because it calls into question their competence to run the war. This is why the publication of the new CSIS report by Anthony Cordesman is so timely, because it reminds us of this basic truth.

What was that concept? The immediate goal is, and has always been, to defeat what we now call the insurgency, or at the very least to confine it to the border region. The medium term goal is for the aid and development effort to build up the capacity of the state. Once the Afghan state crosses the threshold into self-sustaining growth and development the drawdown of Western forces will begin. All of this is in line with established doctrine and all of it quite clear. Quite why people are having trouble grasping it, I do not know. It is a classic state building exercise, and to suggest, as each of these writers does, that this is somehow merely the justification de la semaine, is unfair. Though you can argue that instead of being mutually reinforcing, different aspects of our approach have appeared at times to undermine each other, these are largely disagreements at the tactical level. At the level of strategy, the broad outlines of our approach were in place from the start and they have remained the same throughout.

Where the mission has changed, it has been in response to changed circumstances. But again, this is fully in line with established doctrine and so it is wrong to dismiss the new, enlarged strategic concept as somehow evidence of ‘mission creep’. Upon arriving in theatre, we were not fully clear about the nature of the threat. We were unsure. We groped around somewhat for exactly the right approach and the strategic concept was a little flabby. But this is to be expected. In the list of far away places of which we know little, Afghanistan was at the very top. Invasion was not a contingency we had planned for and there was no strategic concept for operations there. One had to be cobbled together, quickly, in the early autumn of 2001. But, as we have built up our intelligence, and fully assessed the nature of the threat, so our strategic thinking has evolved. The concept has been reworked, stripped of any excess and we are now operating according to a much more rigorous and focused doctrine. There is less talk about turning Afghanistan into a model democracy and more about building up basic institutions and infrastructure.

This new thinking has been accompanied by an intense diplomatic effort to convince the Pakistanis of the need to play their part. And it looks like that effort is beginning to pay off. On top of this, in a speech at NATO Headquarters in Brussels today, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced a ‘civilian surge’ to back up the recent reinforcements of troops. And so the key thing now that we have finally arrived at fully developed strategic concept, now that efforts are being made to commit the necessary level of resources – both civilian and military - is to give the new concept time to work. That means acknowledging that we are embarked upon capacity building and development work of a sort that takes years. It means abandoning the simplified and simplifying narratives of the past. It means resisting the clamour from elements in the press and parliament for withdrawal. It means knuckling down for the long haul. It means acknowledging that this is a generational commitment. If we can achieve all of those things, there is still very real hope for this mission.

*UPDATE: Read this morning's DfID press release outlining details of the new £255m package of development support for Afghanistan here

The Devil is in the Detail

After a decade of foreign policy activism, the first task for the incoming Tory government is to design a diplomacy that acknowledges limits. At the same time it must continue to advance British interests. This is a difficult balance to strike and, with falling budgets, one that will require a finely calibrated sense of the difference between interests that are vital and those that are merely peripheral. Our current strategic posture is unsustainable. This much everyone agrees upon. And so the most pressing need is for clear strategic judgements about where to put Britain’s diminished resources to achieve maximum advantage. When formulating these judgements, the trick is to avoid compromising morally by falling back on a cynical realpolitik, while at the same time avoiding the kind of moral absolutes that lead to strategic overstretch - to retain an expansive definition of Britain’s interests while at the same time acknowledging the very real limits and pressure upon future British capabilities.

In a wide-ranging speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) yesterday, Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague just about pulled it off. At the centre of the speech was a reaffirmation of the ‘three circles’ concept, the guiding principle that underpins all post-war British thinking on foreign policy; namely that Britain maximises its influence by being at the centre of three great global networks - the European Union, The Commonwealth, and the Anglosphere. And so there was as much continuity as difference in the speech, but this much was to be expected. No British government is going to jettison these core alliances. What difference there was appeared in the underreported section on leadership by example, or soft power, and in the renewed emphasis given to the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, it is in these two respects that the speech left most to be desired. On the Commonwealth, although the speech recognised the strategic dimension of the argument, in the Q&A the Shadow Foreign Secretary was less than convincing.

When pressed by Bronwen Maddox he continued to frame the argument in moral terms, seemed unsure about the real strategic value of our aid and development effort and failed to articulate a convincing national security argument for our engagement there, reciting instead some rather tired CCHQ talking points about our commitment to the UN Millennium Development Goals. Similarly on the idea of leadership by example, or what we now more commonly refer to as ‘soft’ power. After setting up the argument for a fully strategic concept of soft power by emphasising the national security aspects of good governance and conflict resolution initiatives, he rounded off the section with the very same appeals to our "conscience" and "common humanity".

It is this confusion, this failure to fully separate out and develop the national security dimension of the argument, that we are seeing reflected in the rather tentative proposals around institutional reform. This is why I have argued on this blog for a more radical restructuring of the Whitehall machinery. As they stand, the proposals for a new National Security Council do not fully meet the need for an integrated aid, development and security strategy. It is as though the Tories still have not quite grasped the full significance of aid and development for the new diplomacy. Though all the elements are there, and they are making all the right noises, one is left feeling that they have not quite joined up the dots, that their argument is still missing the one element that will transform it into a focused strategic concept.

For me, that element is a clear vision of the structures needed to support the new diplomacy. Of all the threats identified in the speech, in the recent IPPR report and elsewhere, the biggest threat to Britain comes from failed and failing states. On this everyone is agreed. Talk to anyone in the foreign policy community and they will offer you the same broad analysis: our top priority must be to maintain and, where possible, strengthen the integrity of states. Whether it is Africa or the Middle East, the Balkans or the tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, aid and development - in particular capacity building, civic infrastructure and good governance programmes - are crucial to this effort and need to be much more fully integrated into our strategic concept. The current bifurcated structure, originally designed to deliver New Labour’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy, with DfID and the FCO operating according to two quite separate and distinct concepts, has proved a singular failure in this regard which is why I will continue to press the argument for a more unified structure with clear lines of accountability. Whether anyone is listening or not, only time will tell.

You can read the full text of the speech here
You can watch the speech here
You can watch the question and answer session here

A Diplomacy for the Next Decade

Aid and development have been something of a feature of the foreign policy debate this month. First, in an underreported move, DfID launched its new UKAID logo on 6 July. Combined with other initiatives, the rebrand is intended give more strategic focus to Britain's aid policy. Next, U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), a move designed to integrate the aid and development functions more fully into the nation's diplomacy. Just two days later, David Cameron launched One World Conservatism, a 64-page International Development green paper outlining the Conservative approach to the very same issues and then, to complete the picture, on 14 July the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Kurdistan region of Iraq published its report on the challenges facing British policy there.

All this has left foreign policy commentators somewhat breathless, so if you are wondering why posting has been light, this is why. The flurry of activity around issues of aid and development has left me struggling to catch up. Having finally read the Conservative’s green paper, my first thought is that it is something of a mixed bag. For the past decade, Western diplomacy has been operating according to a flawed strategic doctrine. This much is a given. While this document goes someway towards repairing it, at the same time it too is deeply flawed. It is long on rhetoric, and short on detail. And where there is detail, it does not make either for great reading or coherent strategy.

Of course, as green paper this is only the beginnings of the new diplomacy, but it does address issues of vital strategic concern and so it is important that, between now and the first white paper, key arguments are strengthened, core concepts refined and flaws in some of the underlying thinking ironed out. With those caveats it mind, as a basis for consultation it is to be welcomed, and so what disappointed me most was the reaction from the Tory grass roots. Early reaction was mixed. As the debate developed, however, attitudes appeared to harden, an impression later reinforced by a PoliticsHome poll showing that, of Conservative-minded voters, a full 81% disagree with Cameron on the issue of DfID funding. And make no mistake, this was not disagreement on some minor point of detail. This was vigorous, visceral, ideologically-driven disagreement on a major point of principle. It is as though we have learned nothing from the failed diplomacy of the last 10 years.

At a time when the future of the mission in Afghanistan is in question, for the Tory grass roots to urge a cut in DfID spending is absurd. More than that, it is the height of irresponsibility. Incredibly, while we have spent £2.66bn on defence, DfID spending in Afghanistan totals a pathetically small £166m, and yet at no point in the debate did there seem to be any acknowledgement that the quickest way to defeat in Afghanistan is to reduce the aid and development budget still further. Similarly, the future success of Iraq policy depends wholly on the extent to which trade and investment flows can be increased. This, in turn, hinges upon continued assistance from UKAID in the areas of good governance, capacity building and infrastructure development. These are two concrete examples of how issues around aid and development affect strategy and yet still the clamour from the Tory grass roots is for reductions.

The problem is partly one of framing. Much of the debate around issues of aid and development is given a mawkish, sentimental gloss that obscures the wider strategic and security dimension. And so we need to reframe the debate. We need to move away from the idea of aid as ‘charity'. There need to be strict conditionalities attached and enforced, full transparency, and mechanisms of real accountability right across the aid and development portfolio. Also, and more importantly, there needs to be a clear strategic focus. Much as the Americans are seeking to do with their new QDDR initiative, we need to place strategic and security concerns at the centre of development policy. We need to ensure that, wherever possible, morality and strategy reinforce each other, instead of working on separate tracks.

On the headline question of the DfID budget, however, Cameron is right. He is right for the same reason the new Obama administration is right. We can no longer design a diplomacy around military force. Anyone who thinks the West is going to put another army into the field any time soon has not been paying attention. The whole trend in today’s diplomacy is towards a more subtle blend of elements. The aim being to bring both hard and soft elements of power into the mix. Once you concede that, the focus shifts immediately to other instrumentalities, first among them aid and development. And so the new American administration is busy designing a new diplomacy around these vital functions. With this policy announcement, Tory thinking is aligning itself with this new diplomacy. Underlying it all, of course, is the recognition that, even more than the American, the British war fighting capability has been seriously degraded by more than a decade of foreign policy activism. For the foreseeable future, war fighting is likely to be off the agenda. And so if we want to retain any foreign policy clout, it is going to have to be in the aid and development fields. The alternative is to have no foreign policy at all. And so those who are serious about foreign policy should support this announcement.

That said, the Americans are still way ahead of us on this issue. The biggest failure of Western diplomacy over the last decade was in the area of development policy, this largely a result of the now widely recognised disconnect between diplomacy and development. The American response has been to design a new institutional architecture, with the head of USAID now reporting directly to the Assistant Secretary of State. The Conservative response is much more tentative, the green paper committing them to the much more modest idea of enhancing the Stabilisation Unit so that it can “break through departmental rivalries and jealousies”, and it is in this respect that the document really falls down. The problem is that it leaves the main features of the existing structure in place. The whole, sorry story of the last decade of Western policy is a direct legacy of the institutional changes of the late 1990s. In the United States, the strategic debate was marred by the growth of two separate bureaucracies and two separate appropriations processes. Here in the UK, policy has been similarly afflicted.

The idea of separating out the aid and development functions into DfID was that this would strengthen the voice of the aid and development functions by placing their arguments at the centre of the debate – at the ‘top table’ as it were – well, that conception has proved an utter failure. Whatever way one looks at it, the changes of the 1990s have been found wanting. Throughout the Iraq misadventure, DfID simply failed to make its voice heard. As a stand-alone concept it is in many ways an absurd creature. Lacking strategic focus, it attacks problems at the margins, leaving the core issues of poor governance and underdeveloped civic infrastructure untouched. But of course, this kind of peripheral work, this idea of working on the fringe, is built into the concept from the outset. Once you separate out the functions in this way, by definition aid and development policy do not figure in the strategic mix. Aid and development are relegated to the margins, considered only as an afterthought, an addendum, and you arrive at the absurd situation where DfID spent less in Afghanistan in 2007-8 than it did in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Tanzania.

This is possible only once development and diplomacy become decoupled in this way, and so, between now and any future white paper, I would like to see much more thought given to the institutional aspect of the problem. We are told on page 58 that the enhanced Stabilisation Unit will report directly to the new National Security Council, but in the absence of any detailed policy discussion of this aspect of the proposal, we are unclear about exactly how, and will therefore have to reserve judgement.* My fear is that we are building strategic confusion into the concept from the start. As things stand, the proposal is for what looks like a kind of halfway house, a sort of semi-autonomous structure, without any real strategic focus or bite. It all seems to me like a recipe for strategic and operational muddle. I would like to see our response echo the American model, with a more streamlined structure and clear lines of accountability. This means undoing the reforms of the late 1990s and collapsing the whole thing into one structure by bringing DfID back under the control of the FCO.

Ultimately, the way to resolve issues around framing, but also the more serious issues around policy and strategy, is to rid ourselves of the kind of compartmentalised thinking that gave us this bifurcated institutional architecture with development and diplomacy operating on completely separate tracks. For all the good work that it does, and it does do good work, on all the big questions DfID has proved the most monstrous and murderous extravagance; a failure of conception, management and implementation. And it needs to be rectified. The Tories go some way towards this in their new green paper, but not nearly far enough. It may be that the proposed National Security Council answers these concerns. We shall have to wait and see. I certainly hope so.

*UPDATE: Mark Phillips, Chief of Staff to the Shadow Security Minister, has confirmed that the Tories expect to publish their green paper on national security at the beginning of September.

Smart Power: the key to Obama's grand strategy

Interesting figures out this week from worldpublicopinion.org indicating just how far Obama still has to go to repair the damage wrought by the previous administration. FiveThirtyEight.com and PBS do a similar job chewing over the numbers, each drawing out the headline figures showing that, though Obama’s personal popularity is way ahead of that of George W. Bush, America’s numbers are still flat-lining.

So, what to make of them. On one level, these figures do not really tell us anything new. What they do is underscore what we already know; contra the claims of the previous administration that “they hate us for our freedom”, the real driver of anti-Americanism is dissatisfaction with American policy, not any deeper ideological or philosophical antipathy. On the extremes, of course, there is very real ideological hostility, but the great mass of people across the world retain a deep sense of affection and admiration both for the American system of government, and for its broader ideals.

The well known Pew Global Attitudes survey, mapping opinion across 54 countries from 2000 to 2008 pointed to much the same set of conclusions. Its key finding, for those that were minded to hear it, was that it was opposition to key elements of George W. Bush’s foreign policy that sent U.S. favourables plummeting, not any implacable opposition to freedom or to the American idea. This was true even of America’s closest allies. Deep levels of dissatisfaction with American policy in Britain, France and Germany did not turn them into enemies overnight. Like much of the rest of the world, Germany, Britain and France remain supportive of American leadership, they simply want a different kind of American leadership. What they want is a less abrasive diplomacy, a more restrained strategic posture, and above all a demilitarised policy.

The background to these disagreements is familiar enough. Throughout the Cold War, the various elements of the policy mix worked in something of a tandem; economic, development, aid and security policy were for the most part mutually supportive elements in a coordinated strategy. Then, somewhere near the end of the Clinton presidency, around the time talk of America’s ‘unipolar’ moment begins to surface and the intellectual groundwork for the Bush presidency is being laid, policy becomes overly militarised. Elements in the mix become dangerously unbalanced. Far too much emphasis is placed on the military aspects of power, the humanitarian and development aspects of policy are derided as ‘social work’, George W. Bush famously claims that “we don’t do nation building”, and a foreign policy consensus spanning forty years and ten administrations is cast aside in favour of a much more muscular and assertive strategy.

In response, around the time of the Iraq war, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs under President Clinton, begins to develop the concept of soft power. Soft power refers to all the non-military aspects of power. On one level, Nye’s distinction is unhelpful. By separating out the international development and aid functions and bundling them together under the umbrella term ‘soft’ power, he invites exactly the kind of sneering, dismissive response one would expect from foreign policy hawks pumped up on American military supremacy. But the concept is sound. The key is not to focus on one element or aspect to the exclusion of the other, but rather to find the right blend of elements, the right policy mix. Smart power is the ability to combine all the different elements of your power - both hard and soft - in support of your strategic objectives. It is a conception of power, and of strategy, that aims to bring all the various elements of American power to bear. Its aim is to add a strategic dimension to the aid and development functions so that they more fully cohere with national security objectives.

Starting out from the central principle of Amercian foreign policy, namely the commitment to the Kantian peace and democracy as a constituent element of it, the broad strategic objective is to move from closed systems to more open ones, to move the developing world towards better governance; to transition out of pre-modern forms of governance towards stable democracies, or at the very least systems that are in some sense representative, recognise basic human rights, and allow for peaceful transitions of power. This for the simple reason that open systems rationalise behaviour, making for more responsible actors on the international stage. Governments that act responsibly at home, act responsibly abroad. The idea that the military is the only instrument capable of nudging these societies along the path towards better governance is, of course, absurd. And yet for eight long years under the failed presidency of George W. Bush, policy focused on this aspect of power to the almost total exclusion of every other facet of our capability.

Thankfully, we are now moving away from that kind of lopsided reliance upon and exaggerated faith in, hard power. The downside of the new approach is that we are no longer talking about the headline-catching stuff. And so support for the strategy will be that much harder to maintain. For a commentariat used to instant results, this will come as a shock. There are no quick fixes, no magic bullets; repairing America’s battered image is no mere cosmetic exercise. This is not foreign policy as usual. This is not foreign policy as the neoconservatives conceive it. It is not foreign policy as show business. It is not Hollywood movie, nor is it bedtime story. There are no simplified or simplifying narratives. This is foreign policy for grown ups, it is the hard slog of diplomacy, containment, international development and aid work; the unfashionable stuff, the messy stuff that doesn’t fit into easily into the news cycle. The only stories this strategy generates are the kind that send news editors on the foreign desks to sleep. It doesn’t sell newspapers and no big money defence contracts hinge on it so there is no support in the media or parliament for it. But it is vital work. It is the nuts and bolts of diplomacy and it is a crucial element in our national security policy. That is why it was so encouraging to hear news this week that Secretary Clinton is to launch a new development initiative.

We will have to await the details of the announcement to more fully assess the likely impact, but slowly, surely, the Obama administration is edging towards a fully integrated aid, development and security policy. This is a welcome development, but also a return to an earlier, more rounded conception of power, and of strategy, that is sorely needed. It is the conception of power that won the Cold War. It is the conception of power and of strategy that has underwritten American security for the best part of sixty years and it is a conception that got lost in the heady triumphalism surrounding the unipolar moment and the devastating confusion and loss of 9/11. Slowly but surely the Obama administration is restoring a measure of balance to American grand strategy. My closing thought is simply this: while they are doing it they deserve not to be shouted down, sniped at and second-guessed, least of all by the architects of the failed Bush policy.

John Bolton gets it wrong, again

In this month’s Standpoint, during the course of a long, rambling article John Bolton takes Obama to task for “rejecting American exceptionalism” and ‘sounding like a European’. On one level, this is barely-concealed code for ‘weak’, ‘effeminate’ and 'ineffectual', intended to conjure up images of appeasement and indecision in the face of evil, but at a deeper, philosophical level Bolton is objecting to the grand tradition of American realism, wrongly believing that this places him squarely within the mainstream and Obama somehow at odds with it. Quite how someone with such a flimsy grasp on the history and philosophy of American foreign policy can have risen to such a position of influence is beyond me, although ‘influence’ is perhaps the wrong word. He is certainly indulged by editors of magazines such as Standpoint and his arguments do resonate with large numbers of Americans, but as serious foreign policy analysis his argument is not worth a row of beans.

Quite apart from the woeful lack of historical awareness and understanding at its core, at root, it rests on a set of crude dichotomies that simply fail to capture the full subtlety and range of thinking in the American realist tradition. Regular readers of this blog will know that I take a robustly realist line on these questions and so, as a way of pointing up some of the weaknesses in Bolton’s argument, I thought it might be useful just to map some of the main contours of American realism so as to distinguish it sharply from Bolton’s caricature.

If there is a core commitment in the realist tradition of American foreign policy, it is to the idea of the Kantian peace and to democracy as a constituent element of it. This is America's enduring orientation. It is her organising principle, her idée fixe. In truth, it is the cornerstone of all the great American foreign policy traditions, from the most messianic interventionism right the way through to isolationism. The central question thrown up by this core set of beliefs is whether America should be exemplar or crusader - whether it could best ensure its security by promoting its values abroad, that is, by seeking to remake the world in its image, or rather by serving as ’exemplar' - the city upon a hill. This is a question of means, rather than ends. On the core commitment to democracy, all Americans are agreed. The important point for our purposes is that the realist version of this doctrine, in sharp contrast to some of the more messianic formulations, is not predicated on the idea of America as a uniquely virtuous power and does not lapse into the narrow solipsism of the argument from exceptionalism, but rather on an analysis of the international system.

It is a theory of foreign policy behaviour, not a eulogy to the American character. For it, the benefits of democracy are to be measured in terms of its rationalising effect upon state behaviour. Crucially, America's position in the world is due not to providence, but rather to a combination of her capabilities and her geographical isolation. For realists, the singularity of the American experience is grounded in more objective factors and the American story more prosaic than the traditional argument from exceptionalism allows. This more sober analysis allows them to retain their commitment to the democracy agenda whilst avoiding what Henry Kissinger called the kind of ‘freewheeling’ interventionism that has historically led her to assume levels of risk wholly unwarranted by her national interests or by any rational long-term strategic objective. Substituting moral absolutes for strategic judgement, as John Bolton would have us do, is a fast lane to strategic overextension and moral and psychological exhaustion. The historical record is quite clear on this point, but American conservatism seems institutionally incapable of grasping it.

The problem is that we are no longer trained to think geostrategically. The great 20th century ideologies crowded out the kind of sober geopolitical analysis of the 19th century. The great European traditions of realpolitik and raison d’etat having given way to the passions and the furies of the 20th century, to the transformative diplomacies of Wilsonianism and revolutionary communism, we became used to thinking in terms of Manichean struggles between good and evil, accustomed to parsing strategy through the filter of one of the great ideological systems. The most urgent task for American foreign policy is to recover this earlier tradition, transcend the sterile debate about American exceptionalism, eschew the sort of moral, philosophical and religious categories at the centre of Bolton’s analysis in favour of geopolitical ones and view America not as sui generis, but rather as a great power like any other.  This is an analysis America’s earliest Presidents and foreign policy thinkers broadly shared. The early Presidents studiously avoided foreign entanglements, preferring to maintain a studied neutrality on the big foreign policy issues of the day and famously warning against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And so, far from Obama being the first “post-American president”, in truth he is returning to what is her oldest and most enduring tradition. Bolton, of course, does not want to hear this argument, because it underlines the case for a diplomacy that acknowledges limits. And Bolton is not a man to accept limits. But in this, he is the one that stands outside of the mainstream, not Obama.

Why Obama is still right on Iran

I argued last week that Obama’s cautious realism on the Iran issue had been ‘pitch perfect’, suggesting that what we needed above all else was a diplomacy that acknowledged limits. And yet still we find the Henry Jackson Society’s Scoop blog attacking Obama’s ‘weakness’, Melanie Phillips working herself up into regular paroxysms of anger over just about every move Obama makes, and Mark Steyn lampooning him as ‘By-stander in Chief’.  Quite apart from the fundamental lack of seriousness on display and the vicious, ad hominem nature of much of the attack, their fundamental mistake is confusing the weakness of our strategic position with the weakness of the man. While this is to be expected of foreign policy neophytes such as Phillips and partisan hacks like Steyn, this inability to think structurally, to look beyond personality to the objective aspect of the problem really is unworthy of the foreign policy sophisticates at the Henry Jackson Society.

That said, arguments of this kind are an enduring feature of the American foreign policy debate. The inability to come to terms with and acknowledge limits was always the weakness of the crusading element in the American foreign policy tradition. During the Cold War it evolved into a global commitment that reduced the flexibility of American diplomacy and imposed intolerable burdens on the American economy, risking strategic overextension and moral and psychological exhaustion. It mandated intervention and engagement in areas of limited strategic significance and led directly to the misadventures in Korea and Vietnam. Not satisifed, the desire to insert America at the centre of every crisis persisted beyond the Cold War and found its most recent expression in the debacle in Iraq.

At this point, one might have expected at the very least a period of reapprasial and reflection, a reassessment of their ideology and agenda, but, like the good ideologues they are, undeterred, they urge America on to even greater exertion and endeavour. I have likened it to a kind of solipsism, one to which a young republic is especially vulnerable, and one that must be overcome; suggesting that the one thing the neoconservatives are determined to do is to make this about America, to place America at the centre of the narrative; their growing impatience with Western inaction a rage against the idea of American impotence, and that the one thing they cannot abide is an America on the periphery. While there is truth in this analysis, it runs much deeper. Fundamentally, it is rooted in a core set of moral and philosophical axioms that are rooted deep in the American experience and bound up with her earliest conception of herself. It is backed up by a voluminous literature, supported by a sophisticated theoretical edifice and powered by passionate advocacy.

The problem is that it is grounded in an idea of the singularity not just of the American experience, but also of the American character. When inverted it leads to obsessive, coruscating periods of introspection, to an auto-critique which lends America’s foreign policy debate a unique and destabilising volatility. Failures and reverses in American foreign policy are not understood in terms of the limits of American power, but routinely ascribed to flaws in the American character. This led both to the searing agonies of the Vietnam era debate and to the ongoing controversy surrounding the Bush presidency, and it is now resurfacing around the issue of Obama's Iran policy. The task for a mature American foreign policy is to purge the debate of this sort of moralism, eschew moral, philosophical and religious categories in favour of geopolitical ones and view America not as sui generis, but rather as a great power like any other. This means acknowledging limits. It means dropping our obsession with quick fixes and instant solutions, abandoning this conception of foreign policy as something for the Twitter generation - fully of nice, tidy, easily-digestible, bite-sized chunks - in favour of the hard slog of diplomacy, alliance building, deterrence and containment.

The problem with foreign policy as the neoconservatives conceive it is that there is no room for anything messy, no space for untidy, real-world narratives, nothing that can not be shoehorned into their simple formulas. It is time to get past this adolescent fixation with simple narratives, time to end foreign policy as Hollywood movie. It is time for foreign policy for grown ups. It is time for complicated, nuanced, uneven, and yes - sometimes unedifying - diplomacy. It is time for a dose of realism. That is what Obama was elected for, and it is what he is delivering.