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.