The folly of retreat

Looking around the globe today, old frameworks governing relations among states seem to be breaking down. The world appears to be unraveling.

It is against this backdrop that celebrated journalist and former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Bret Stephens’s America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder appears very timely.

In the Middle East, borders that delineate states are being challenged, blurred or redrawn. States like Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, created arbitrarily by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, are disintegrating into regions that fall under the influence of ethnic and sectarian groups – Islamic State, the Kurds, the Assad regime’s forces, various Shi’ite groups or the Nusra Front.

Meanwhile in Yemen, the Houthis – a Shi’ite group with ties to Iran – has overthrown the Western-backed Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, which could lead to civil war, partition or the rise of al-Qaida.

The possibility of a nuclear arms race in the region is looking increasingly probable.

Saudi Arabia has voiced concerns that it feels threatened by Iran’s push for nuclear weapons, and has more than hinted that it would obtain its own – most likely from Pakistan. Turkey, Egypt and other Sunni states in the region might follow suit. Israel has considered launching an attack on Tehran’s nuclear weapons plants in an attempt to set back the Iranians.

In Eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin’s revanchist designs on Ukraine and his de facto annexation of the Crimea have challenged the post-Cold War arrangements enforced by NATO and the EU. The Russian leader – whose popularity has soared in the past year, since he embarked on his violently expansionist mission to “repatriate” ethnic Russians living in Ukraine – might use the same logic to spread his influence to Baltic States like Estonia, Latvia and perhaps even Lithuania, which all have large Russian-speaking populations.

In Poland, semi-autonomous militias are gaining grassroots support, bracing for a possible Russian invasion.

In the Far East, China is increasingly asserting its control over the South China Sea, in the process bullying Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Woody Island (Yongxing in Chinese), a tiny speck of a place, has been transformed into a major center – at least nominally – facilitating Chinese claims to administer surrounding waters that make up an area larger than the Gulf of Mexico.

What all these troubling developments and others have in common, notes Stephens in his book, is that they can be linked to US foreign policy as it has been formulated and implemented by the Obama administration over the past six years.

According to Stephens, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for his Global View weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, the breakdown in international order, from the Middle East and Eastern Europe to the Far East, is the cumulative effect of a “light footprint” foreign policy implemented by US President Barack Obama and his staff. A vacuum has been created in many parts of the world by a US that is less and less willing to use force when necessary to enforce global order.

In Syria, red lines were allowed to be crossed; in Libya, Obama opted to “lead from behind”; in Iran, “engagement” has replaced a principled stand against Islamists.

And the same sort of argument is made by Stephens for US reactions to Russian and Chinese aggressions.

Stephens, however, is no idealist. He is critical of the neoconservative faith in the ability to fundamentally change people and societies, which was the justification for the US’s prolonged involvement in Iraq. Under the leadership of president George W. Bush, the US made the mistake of believing it would be possible not only to topple Saddam Hussein’s genocidal, kleptocratic regime, but to replace it with a Western-style democracy. Stephens continues to strongly support the decision to take down Saddam, while being highly critical of the US’s overambitious plans for a metamorphosis.

Herein lies the crux of Stephens’s argument: He has no illusions about the American ability to transform countries and societies. He does believe that order can be maintained internationally through limited but powerful American assertiveness. The US need not get bogged down in a prolonged occupation, as it did in Iraq. But the present backlash of criticism against the US’s failed mission in Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan, which has led to a resurgence of the sort of isolationism last seen in the period after the First World War – or perhaps after the Vietnam War – has gone too far.

The US needs to restore global order by forcefully intervening when red lines are crossed and sovereignty of states is compromised.

US interventionism – as opposed to isolationism – ultimately furthers American interests, not because America will always position itself on the side of the good guys against the bad guys, says Stephens.

Rather, the very maintenance of order is an American interest. In contrast, a breakdown of order inevitably is bad for the US, because it facilitates the rise of radical, aggressive, anti-democratic regimes – not unlike the spread of criminal elements in a city with lax law enforcement.

Stephens’s somewhat America-centric theory is a remarkably ambitious – and convincing – attempt to explain developments in a vast array of countries throughout the world with a single underlying thesis: America’s retreat invites anarchy. But does a decline in American assertiveness necessarily lead to disorder? Even if it does, does America always have available the sorts of short-term intervention scenarios that Stephens claims would succeed in keeping order? And don’t even limited intervention schemes carry with them unexpected consequences that could lead to more, not less, anarchy? Stephens’s book is a compelling and biting criticism of the Obama administration’s foreign policy decisions over the past six years. Obama believed – and perhaps still believes – that through the power of speeches like the one he gave in Cairo in 2009 at the beginning of his first term, and engagement with the Muslim world, it would be possible to restart relations that had been so badly managed by his predecessor Bush in the post-9/11 era. Obama wanted to change the narrative, to launch a new beginning that would revamp perceptions in the eyes of those on the receiving end of American power.

In one of the very first foreign policy speeches of his first campaign, delivered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington on August 1, 2007, Obama presented a compelling image.

As a senator, he said, he had seen the desperate faces of refugees and flood victims from the door of a helicopter. Here he paused and pursed his lips, either because he was thinking while he spoke or because he wished to convey the impression of active thought. “And it makes you stop and wonder,” he said. “When those faces look up at an American helicopter, do they feel hope, or do they feel hate?” Obama hoped to change perceptions of America – and in this sense he was an idealist. He believed in the power of words; he believed that if the US adopted a “light footprint” policy and chose to “lead from behind,” America would not be hated by the faces looking to American intervention.

Millions were inspired by Obama’s message – but ultimately, he failed. His failure is a testament to the futility of sincere gestures, and the power of religious fundamentalism.

Stephens offers a more modest, and therefore more realistic, proposal.

The breakdown in international order is the cumulative effect of a Barack Obama’s ‘light footprint’ foreign policy, writes Bret Stephens.