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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Dumb and
dumber By John
Feffer
Nor was diplomacy ever actually on
the table with North Korea. The Obama team came in
with a less than half-hearted commitment to the
Six Party process - the negotiations to address
North Korea's nuclear program among the United
States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas,
which had stalled in the final months of Bush's
second term.
In the National Security
Council, Asia point man Jeffrey Bader axed a State
Department cable that would have reassured the
North Koreans that a US policy of engagement would
continue. "Strategic patience" became the
euphemism for doing nothing and letting hawkish
leaders in Tokyo and Seoul unravel the previous
years of engagement. After some predictably belligerent
rhetoric from Pyongyang,
followed by a failed missile launch and a second
nuclear test, Obama largely dispensed with
diplomacy altogether.
Clinton did indeed
move quickly to increase the size of the State
Department budget to hire more people and
implement more programs to beef up diplomacy. That
budget grew by more than 7% in 2009-10. But that
didn't bring the department of diplomacy up to
even US$50 billion. In fact, it is still plagued
by a serious shortage of diplomats and, as State
Department whistleblower Peter van Buren has
written, "The whole of the Foreign Service is
smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft
carrier."
Meanwhile, despite a persistent
recession, the Pentagon budget continued to rise
during the Obama years - a roughly 3% increase in
2010 to about $700 billion. (And Romney promises
to hike it even more drastically.)
Like
most Democratic politicians, Obama has been
acutely aware that hard power is a way of
establishing political invulnerability in the face
of Republican attacks. But the use of hard power
to gain political points at home is a risky
affair. It is the nature of this "dumb power" to
make the United States into a bigger target,
alienate allies, and jeopardize authentic efforts
at multilateralism.
A kinder, gentler
empire Despite its rhetorical flexibility,
"smart power" has several inherent flaws. First,
it focuses on the means of exercising power
without questioning the ends toward which power is
deployed. The State Department and the Pentagon
will tussle over which agency can more effectively
win the hearts and minds of Afghans. But neither
agency is willing to rethink the US presence in
the country or acknowledge how few hearts and
minds have been won.
As with Afghanistan,
so with the rest of the world. For all his talk of
power "with" rather than "over", Joseph Nye has
largely been concerned with different methods by
which the United States can maintain dominion.
"Smart power" is not about the inherent value of
diplomacy, the virtues of collective
decision-making, or the imperatives of peace,
justice, or environmental sustainability. Rather
it is a way of calculating how best to get others
to do what the US wants them to do, with the
threat of a drone strike or a Special Forces
incursion always present in the background.
The Pentagon, at least, has been clear
about this point. In 2007, then-secretary of
defense Robert Gates argued for "strengthening our
capacity to use soft power and for better
integrating it with hard power". The Pentagon has
long realized that a toolbox with only a single
hammer in it handicaps the handyman, but it still
persists in seeing a world full of nails.
At a more practical level, "smart power"
encounters problems because in this "integration",
the Pentagon always turns out to be the primary
partner. As a result, the work of diplomats,
dispensers of humanitarian aid, and all the other
"do-gooders" who attempt to distinguish their work
from soldiers' is compromised. After decades of
trying to convince their overseas partners that
they are not simply civilian adjuncts to the
Pentagon, the staff of the State Department have
now jumped into bed with the military. They might
as well put big bull's-eyes on their backs, and
there's nothing smart about that.
"Smart
power" also provides a lifeline for a military
that might face significant cuts if the US
Congress' sequestration plan goes through. The
North Atlantic Treaty Organization has already
shown the way. Its embrace of "smart defense" is a
direct response to military cutbacks by European
governments. The Pentagon is deeply worried that
budget-cutters will follow the European example,
so it is doing what corporations everywhere
attempt during a crisis. It is trying to rebrand
its services.
Always in search of a
mission, the Pentagon now has its fingers in just
about every pie in the bakery. The Marine Corps is
doing drug interdiction in Guatemala. Special
Operations forces are constructing cyclone
shelters in Bangladesh. The US Navy provided
post-disaster relief in Japan after the Fukushima
nuclear meltdown, while the US Army did the same
in Haiti. In 2011, the Africa Command budgeted
$150 million for development and health care.
The Pentagon, in other words, has turned
itself into an all-purpose agency, even attempting
"reconstruction" along with State and various
crony corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is
preparing for the impact of climate change,
pouring research and development dollars into
alternative energy, and running operations in
cyberspace. The Pentagon has been smart about its
power by spreading it everywhere.
Dumb
vs dumber As president, Obama has shown no
hesitation to use force. But his use of military
power has not proved any "smarter" than that of
his predecessor. Iran and North Korea pushed ahead
with their nuclear programs when diplomatic
alternatives were not forthcoming. Nuclear power
Pakistan is closer to outright anarchy than four
years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, and an arms race
is heating up in East Asia, fueled in part by the
efforts of the United States and its allies to box
in China with more air and sea power.
In
one way, however, Obama has been Mr Softy. He has
shown no backbone whatsoever in confronting the
bullies already in America's corner. He has done
little to push back against Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and his occupation policies. He
hasn't confronted Saudi Arabia, the most
autocratic of US allies. In fact, he has leveraged
the power of both countries - toward Iran, Syria,
Bahrain. A key component of "smart power" is
outsourcing the messy stuff to others.
Make no mistake: Romney is worse. A Mitt
Romney-Paul Ryan administration would be a step
backward to the policies of the early Bush years.
President Romney would increase military spending,
restart a cold war with Russia, possibly undertake
a hot war against Iran, deep-six as many
multilateral agreements as he could, and generally
resurrect the Ugly American policies of the recent
past.
But President Romney wouldn't
fundamentally alter US foreign policy. After all,
President Obama has largely preserved the
post-September 11 fundamentals laid down by George
W Bush, which in turn drew heavily on a
unilateralist and militarist recipe that top chefs
from Bill Clinton on back merely tweaked.
Obama has mentioned, sotto voce,
that Mr Softy might resurface if the incumbent is
re-elected. Off-mike, as he mentioned in an aside
to then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev at a
meeting in Seoul last spring, he has promised to
show more "flexibility" in his second term. This
might translate into more arms agreements with
Russia, more diplomatic overtures like the effort
with Myanmar, and more spending of political
capital to address global warming,
non-proliferation, global poverty, and health
pandemics.
But don't count on it. The
smart money is not with Obama's smart power. Mr
Softy has largely been an electoral ploy. If he's
re-elected, Obama will undoubtedly continue to act
as Mr Stick. Brace yourself for four more years of
dumb power - or, if he loses, even dumber power.
John Feffer is an Open
Society Fellow for 2012-13 focusing on Eastern
Europe. He is the author of Crusade 2.0: The
West's Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights
Books). His writings can be found on his
websitejohnfeffer.com.
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