Third Time a Charm?
In his reluctance to brandish America’s world leadership credentials at every turn, President Obama is tapping into an interesting if frustrating strain of American history—and it just might help America learn the wisdom of great power prudence and humility.
By OWEN HARRIES, TOM SWITZER
A Washington
adage holds that someone commits a “gaffe” when he inadvertently tells the
truth. This seemed to be what a U.S. policymaker did two decades ago when he
mused about the limits to U.S. power in the post-Cold War era. On May 25, 1993,
just four months into the Clinton Administration, a certain senior government
official—the new Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and a former
president of the Council on Foreign Relations—spoke freely to about fifty
journalists on condition that they refer to him only as a “senior State
Department official.” Gaffe or no gaffe, Peter Tarnoff’s frank remarks at the
Overseas Writers Club luncheon set off serious political turbulence in the
foreign policy establishment.
Tarnoff’s
message was that, with the Cold War over, America should no longer be counted
on to take the lead in regional disputes unless a direct threat to its national
interest inhered in the circumstances. To avoid over-reaching, he warned, U.S.
policymakers should define the country’s interests with clarity and without a
residue of excessive sentiment, concentrating its resources on matters vital to
its own well-being. That meant Washington would “define the extent of its
commitment and make a commitment commensurate with those realities. This may on
occasion fall short of what some Americans would like and others would hope
for”, he recognized. The U.S. government would, if necessary, act unilaterally
where its own strategic and economic interests were directly threatened, but it
would otherwise pursue a foreign policy at the same time less interventionist
and more multilateral.
President
Clinton’s deferral to European demands on the Bosnian crisis, Tarnoff added,
marked a new era in which Washington would not automatically lead in
international crises. “We simply don’t have the leverage, we don’t have the
influence, we don’t have the inclination to use military force, and we
certainly don’t have the money to bring to bear the kind of pressure that will produce
positive results anytime soon.”
At first glance,
there was nothing new here. As far back as the Nixon Doctrine, U.S. officials
had spoken of more voluble burden-sharing, of asking allies to do more on their
own behalf, and of a variable-speed American foreign policy activism that could
be fine-tuned to circumstances. And then, within a year of the Soviet Union’s
collapse, Bill Clinton won a presidential election in part because he promised
to “focus like a laser” on domestic issues. Neither during Nixon’s tenure nor
in 1993 did anyone use the phrase “to lead from behind”, but this new locution
is consonant with the basic thinking of those earlier formulations. In some ways,
“leading from behind” is the third coming of a seasoned and generally sensible
idea.In some ways, “leading from behind” is the third
coming of a seasoned and generally sensible idea.
Nor was Tarnoff
saying anything outside the implicit consensus of presumed foreign policy “wise
men” at the time. Many dedicated Cold Warriors and leading foreign affairs
experts, Republicans and Democrats alike, had been arguing for the previous
three years that, having just won a great victory, it was time for America to
embrace a more restricted view of the nation’s interests and commitments. “With
a return to ‘normal’ times”, Jeane Kirkpatrick argued in The National
Interest in 1990, “we can again become a normal nation—and take care
of pressing problems of education, family, industry and technology. . . . It is
time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an .
. . open American republic.”Nathan Glazer proposed that it was “time to
withdraw to something closer to the modest role that the Founding Fathers
intended.” William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs at the
time, wrote, “What is definitely required is a psychological turn inwards.” And
according even to Henry Kissinger, the definition of the U.S. national interest
in the emerging era of multipolarity would be different from the two-power
world of the Cold War—“more discriminating in its purpose, less cataclysmic in
its strategy and, above all, more regional in its design.”
Notwithstanding
all this, and no doubt to his own surprise and chagrin, Tarnoff’s remarks
started a firestorm of fear and indignation almost the moment reports of his
background briefing hit the press. As one Australian newspaper correspondent
observed at the time, “the reaction to his words could scarcely have been more
dramatic if he had stripped naked and break-danced around the room.”1
Talking heads
denounced not just Tarnoff but the new President for whom he spoke as
“isolationist” and “declinist”; some beheld a “creeping Jimmy Carterism” with
an Arkansas accent. Foreign embassies went into overdrive as diplomats relayed
the news back home. The White House quickly attempted to distance itself from
what its press secretary dismissed as “Brand X.” The Secretary of State, Warren
Christopher, stayed up all night making personal phone calls to journalists and
appearing on late-night television to reassure the world that America’s global
leadership role was undiminished. In a hastily rewritten speech, Christopher
pointedly used some variant of the word “lead” 23 times. Meanwhile, rumors
swirled that the official (only later identified as Tarnoff) was about to lose
his job. Yet for all his allegedly neo-isolationist sins, the hapless official
remained employed. No apology or explanation was forthcoming.
Read more at:
No comments:
Post a Comment