At 8:30 this morning U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will give  "a major address on the role of economics in our foreign policy."  This speech is the culmination of a series of Clinton speeches and papers over the past few months, including her July remarks in Hong Kong, her essay on America's Pacific Century in the pages of FP, and her remarks on global leadership earlier this week. 

Laura Rozen has been all over this initiative, and she previews the speech: 

A key precept in Clinton's effort is addressing a kind of cultural lag in the sprawling Washington bureaucracy. Lead policy makers may recognize the pivotal role that economics plays in global diplomacy--but in many ways, the diplomatic bureaucracy needs to catch up. Clinton's planned speech will be in large part a call to her own agency's ambassadors, diplomatic staff and analysts to shift their thinking.

And as Clinton lays out that vision in more detail, she will stress two main bulwarks. First, she will highlight the need to advance relations with the wider world as part of the effort to revive the American domestic economic order. And second, she will stress that State Department diplomats and foreign policy thinkers need to work harder to understand how market forces are driving first-order national security challenges in hot spots such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

Now, as I noted last week, my full disclosure here is that I've seen multiple draft versions of this speech and might have made a modest suggestion or two (because you, dear readers, know how gentle I am with the red pen).  Last week, I was pretty pessimistic about the effect of this kind of initiative: 

I fear that the State Department is fighting through hurricane-level winds on this front to make a difference. First, the trade deals just sent to Congress are the last ones we're going to see for a while. Doha is dead, the Trans-Pacific Partnership still hasn't materialized, and all of the momentum on trade policy is to move towards futile gestures closure. The dynamic, growing economy is not looking so dynamic, and those deep capital markets are getting extremely jittery.

And this week?  Oddly, I find myself more on the "glass half full" side, for a few reasons.  First, Congress finally cleared the decks on the three outstanding trade deals, so that looks a bit less embarrassing.  Second, there does appear to be genuine enthusiasm inside the administration for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a recognition that this would be a neat-o deliverable for the upcoming APEC summit in Honolulu.  Third, my own conversation with State Department officials suggest that they've got a decent read on which geographic regions should be the focus of which initiatives.  Fourth , dwindling resources doesn't mean no resources -- the U.S. still has some formidable foreign economic policy arrows in its quiver. 

The most important reason I'm more optimistic, however, is that the Secretary will be doing two things with this speech that speeches can actually accomplish.  A speech can act as a form of reassurance to other countries that the United States gets it -- economics is a vital component of foreign policy, and Washington is ready to play. 

A speech can also signal to the foreign policy bureaucracy that there's a shift in priorities, and they had better get on the train if they want to get promoted make a difference.  If foreign service officers see that a familiarity with economics is a key for advancement, then the United States will develop a diplomatic corps that doesn't run away screaming in terror seem distracted if the words "exchange rates" or "geographic indicators" are uttered. 

Watch the speech yourself -- it will be webcast at 8:30 AM -- and let me know what you think in the comments. 

As I noted previously, compared to his GOP rivals, Mitt Romney has some actual foreign policy thinking going on.  On the other hand, as Dan Trombly points out, doing better than Herman Cain or Rick Perry is a really low bar.  So, looked at objectively, what's my assessment of Romney's foreign policy white paper? 

I could go through it line by line, but James Joyner already did that for The Atlantic.  As it turns out, I'm reaching a course called The Art and Science of Statecraft that will require students to write a grand strategy document.  Sooo.... if Mitt Romney was one of my students, how would I grade him?  See below:

********************************************************************************** 

Mitt,

You and your study team have clearly put a lot of work into "An American Century."  It's cogently written and organized.  Your basic statement of purpose -- "advance an international system that is congenial to the institutions of open markets, representative government, and respect for human rights (p. 7)" -- fits perfectly within the mainstream of American foreign policy thinking. You've done an excellent job of demonstrating an awareness of the complexity of threats that face the United States in the 21st century.  I liked it on p. 6 when you noted that:

In the highly dynamic realm of national security and foreign policy there are seldom easy answers. Discrete circumstances in disparate regions of the world demand different kinds of approaches. There is no silver bullet for the problem of securing the United States and protecting our interests around the world.

You've also demonstrated an appropriate awareness that American power rests on more than a strong military.  When you note that a Romney administration would "apply the full spectrum of hard and soft power to influence events before they erupt into conflict (p. 8)," I caught myself nodding along.  

Some of the details are intriguing as well.  I need to look more into these "Reagan economic zones" that you mention a lot, but applying them to Latin America and the Pacific Rim make a great deal of strategic and economic sense.  I'm not fully persuaded that your notion of creating regional envoys to organize all "soft power resources" is all that different from the foreign policy czars or special envoys of administrations past, but this kind of argument fits well with your management background. 

That said, there are some logical flaws and major gaps in this draft that will have to be corrected if you want to earn a better grade.  The first problem is the style.  I recognize that you've written this as a campaign document, so you're never going to completely eliminate the unadulterated horsheshit allegations about the current president going on an apology tour.  Maybe you could do it a bit more subtly in the future, however? 

Secondly, there's a lack of historical awareness in some parts of the document.  For example, on page 7 the paper says:

[A] Romney foreign policy will proceed with clarity and resolve. The United States will  clearly enunciate its interests and values. Our friends and allies will not have doubts about where we  stand and what we will do to safeguard our interests and theirs; neither will our rivals, competitors, and adversaries.

Now, reading this, I kept thinking back to the Bush administration and its repeated assetions that that there would be no hypocrisy in foreign affairs.  Much like Bush, reality turned out to be trickier.  I suspect you know this, from the other excerpts noted earlier.  So get rid of this fluff:  I'm sure statements like this play well in a management consulting boardroom, but it's not going to cut it in the real world. 

Similarly, for someone who says that, the Obama administration is "undermining one’s allies (p. 3)" in contrast to you, who will "reassure our allies (p. 13)", you don't actually talk about America's treaty allies much at all.  True, you do talk about expanding America's alliance system to include India and Indonesia.  Mexico gets some face time.  Israel gets a lot of face time.  On the other hand, NATO is not mentioned once in this entire document.  Neither is the European Union.  Japan and South Korea get perfunctory treamtment at best.  Turkey is a major treaty ally but you treat it like a pariah state.  For someone who's claiming that the U.S. will reassure its major allies, you didn't seem to give them much attention at all.  This is a really important problem, because Japan and Europe have been crucial allies in a lot of major American initiatives -- and they're getting weaker.  Even in discussing new possible allies, I'm kind of gobsmacked that Brazil is never mentioned. 

Another big problem is that your approach to China is so shot full of contradictions that I don't know where to begin.  Do you seriously believe what you wrote on p. 3: 

The easiest way... to become embroiled in a clash with China over Taiwan, or because of China’s ambitions in the South or East China Seas, will be to leave Beijing in doubt about the depth of our commitment to longstanding allies in the region.

Really?  See, I'd say the easiest way to get embroiled in a clash with China is to write Taiwan a blank check on their defense needs.  The second easiest would be to publicly bluster on about Taiwan to a Chinese leadership that feels increasingly insecure and will be tempted to stoke the fires of Chinese nationalism by creating another Quemoy and Matsu crisis. 

Furthermore, you talk explicitly about supplying Taiwan with "adequate aircraft and other military platforms (p. 18)" in supposed contrast to the Obama administration.  You also talk about strengthening relationships with other countries that neighbor China in an effort to preserve American dominance.  Now, this might be a bit provocative, but I get the rationale.  Here's the thing, though -- you can't simultaneously do this and assert that you will "work to persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament (p. 29)."  Really?  How exactly are you gonna persuade them on this point?   Do you really think that arming Taiwan to the teeth and blasting its human rights record will do the trick? 

If the section on China is contradictory, then your discussion of Pakistan is worse.  You state on p. 31-32:

It is in the interests of all three nations to see that Afghanistan and the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border region are rid of the Taliban and other insurgent groups.... Pakistan should understand that any connection between insurgent forces and Pakistan’s security and intelligence forces must be severed. The United States enjoys significant leverage over both of these nations. We should not be shy about using it. 

There are at least two assertions in the quoted section that are highly dubious -- I'll let you find them on your own.   

One final point, should you choose to revise this draft strategy -- you need to prioritize the threats you discuss in the paper.  You list a whole bunch of them -- rising authoritarian states, transnational violence, failing states, and rogue states.  If you have to prioritize, which threats merit greater attention?  This should actually be pretty easy, since you absurdly overhype the threats posed by some of these countries (Venezuela, Cuba and Russia in particular). 

I look forward to reviewing your later work. 

Grade:  B

I thought I'd said my peace piece about Occupy Wall Street earlier this week -- interesting, but in all likelihood not going to amount to much unless it resonated culturally with broad swaths of American society.

I think it's safe to say that these protests don't resonate with OTB's Doug Mataconis.  So this would seem to be a data point to support my argument.  In his rant against the We Are the 99% crowd, however, Mataconis says something that triggered my history alarm:

The first thought I had when I looked through the Tumblr account is that these people can’t be doing all that bad if they’ve got access to the internet and a computer with a webcam necessary to create the posting that they put up at Tumblr. In any event, though, what strikes me more than anything else is that alot of these people are frustrated 20-somethings who have gotten out of college and found that the road to the good life isn’t quite as smooth as they thought it would be. Of course, things are more difficult today than they were ten years ago but that doesn’t mean they were easy back then. Establishing yourself in life is always a challenge, especially if you run up tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt without really thinking about how you’re going to pay it off.

What comes across to me the most, though, is a sense of entitlement from some people and they idea that the situation they’re in clearly can’t be their fault so it must be the blame of someone else. There’s an attitude about the protests that there is something morally wrong about the fact that not everyone is suffering equally in the current economy as well. So when they look up and see that some people have managed to succeed during these rough economic times, that sense of entitlement becomes intermingled with a sense of envy and the belief that the only way these other people could have succeeded is by cheating....

There’s something pretty immature about blaming other people for your situation in life.

Now this strikes me as a bit harsh in judgment, but that's neither here nor there.  What I can't help wondering, however, is whether Mataconis has also described the necessary conditions for a movement like Occupy Wall Street to sustain itself.  Young people with a lot of time on their hands and prior entitlements possess both the will and the assets necessary to sit in for a looooooooooooong time. 

There's something else:  Mataconis' description of entitled young people used to peace and prosperity and demanding more of it sounds like... like... the people that decided to protest the Vietnam War after they began to realize that they might get drafted once they graduated college.   

If the job prospects for twentysomethings are that bleak, then it really doesn't matter whether the protestors are responsible for their student loans or not.  If they feel like the system has screwed them over, then they'll take to the streets and stay there.  And in a society where the overwhelming majority of people haven't seen their wages or net wealth trending in the positive direction, I can't say they they'll necessarily trigger that much resentment. 

Developing....

I was fortunate enough to give a talk at my alma mater over the weekend and chat informally with some of the political science undergraduates over some food from an Indian restaurant that didn't exist when I was in school and I can't believe how much greater their range of ethnic food choices are than when I was in school and their life is great and college life was much tougher back in my day while we broke bread. Inevitably, the question of Occupy Wall Street came up and whether it would go anywhere.

Now, in many ways, this phenomenon has many of the features of networked movements that have been at the center of The Slaughter-Drezner Debates (although in this case Slaughter seems a bit more disdainful of the movement's potential). If you read here or here or here, you'll see all the advantages of a networked structure outlined in painstaking detail. This ragtag group of rebels has managed to get coverage on The Daily Show, generate associated online movements like the "We Are the 99%" Tumblr, generate headlines through mass arrests over the weekend, and inspire similar movements in other cities.

So … what did I say to these impressionable young adults?

I said two things. First, I said the moment was ripe for this kind of movement. You have an ample supply of network technologies to start a movement, and rising economic inequality to create the necessary social purpose for such a movement. Indeed, the surprising thing about Occupy Wall Street isn't that it's happening -- it's that it took three years for it to happen.

The other thing I said was that for this group to generate more than a thousand people or so out in the streets, however, their message has to resonate culturally with people who would otherwise not want to go out onto the streets. And here's where I start to be a bit more skeptical. I'm not sure the latest manifesto is really cogent enough -- beyond a rejection of corporations as we know them -- to generate much sympathy with broad swaths of the American people. And, as I've said before, unless you attract people who vote, this kind of thing will generate news coverage and not much else.

Could they attract a larger crowd? After reading Time's Nate Rawlings, I'm skeptical:

While "Occupy Wall Street" has become more organized, its demands haven't coalesced into a coherent message. The only thing its various constituent groups appear to have in common is a deep-seated anger at inequality in this country. For them Wall Street symbolizes that unfairness, but the groups have other concerns as well. Many want to redistribute wealth; others want to enlarge government social programs. Some are protesting against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Daniel Levine, a journalism student from upstate New York, said he was taking a stand against the controversial method of natural gas extraction known as hydrofracking in his hometown – but also noted that the practice can bring jobs to economically disadvantaged regions.

Just as it lacks a single message, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement has been defined by the absence of a clear leader. Participants say that is by design, and point to the committees that have sprung up to tend to the daily needs of those camped in Zuccotti Park. It isn't clear that they want a single leader, and many think the movement is better of[f] without one. “It's kind of cool how it's growing organically,” one said. “People just need to give it time and it'll come together.”

Maybe, over time, that will happen. There's a political paradox, however, that Occupy Wall Street faces. Without clear and coherent demands, there will be little to inspire ordinary citizens to take to the streets. Articulating clear and coherent demands, however, will destroy the very gestalt that the people currently on the streets seem to like some much.

Still, unions have started to come out in support of this movement. The U.S. economy is in a bad way, and the festering eurocrisis could make it really bad. So maybe external conditions will eliminate this paradox for the protesters.

So that's what I think. What do you think?

Over at The Atlantic, Max Fisher argues that the age of American client states is coming to an end:

The fall of easily controlled dictators across the region (the U.S. has already given up on its man in Yemen) comes at the same time as U.S.-allied democracies and autocracies alike seem increasingly willing to buck Washington's wishes. Last week alone, the U.S. clashed with some of its most important client states. Maybe that's because of America's habit of picking the most troubled states in the most troubled regions as clients (where they're perceived as the most needed), maybe it's because democratic movements are pressuring client states to follow popular domestic will rather than foreign guidance, and maybe it's because the idea of clientalism was doomed from the start....

Whatever the reasons, U.S. client states have been causing Washington more headaches than normal this year, and particularly over the past week. Here are ten of the most closely held U.S. clients, measured in part by foreign assistance (scheduled for fiscal year 2012) and by number of U.S. troops stationed there (according to Department of Defense statistics). Each is labeled with the reason for their strategic importance and with a rough gauge of how much trouble it's been causing the U.S., rated on a scale from "Zero Problems" to "Migraines in Washington." The most extreme cases are labeled "Client Relationship at Risk." Looking over the list of troubled client relationships, it's easy to wonder if the entire Cold War-inspired enterprise could be nearing its end. Maybe Egypt, just as it helped end the centuries of European imperialism in 1956, could make 2011 the year that began the end of clientalism.

Fisher makes an interesting point, but if you look at his list, there's a pretty obvious pattern: the client states causing actual headaches in Washington are in the Greater Middle East. Fisher's examples from Latin America and the Pacific Rim -- Colombia, South Korea and Taiwan -- are relationships that are actually deepening rather than fraying. These also happen to be the most democratic countries on Fisher's list.

The deeper question is whether the trouble with clients is a uniquely American problem, a uniquely Middle East problem, or a more general phenomenon of client-patron relationships. This is really the bailiwick of Dan Nexon, and I expect he'll weigh in on this question soon. Based on China's difficulties with North Korea and the Middle East, I'm inclined to think it's a general phenomenon, however.

Fareed Zakaria thinks that the Libya intervention signals "a new era in U.S. foreign policy": 

The United States decided that it was only going to intervene in Libya if it could establish several conditions:

1)    A local group that was willing to fight and die for change; in other words, "indigenous capacity".

2)    Locally recognized legitimacy in the form of the Arab League's request for intervention.

3)    International legitimacy in the form of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.

4)    Genuine burden sharing with the British and French spelling out precisely how many sorties they would be willing to man and precisely what level of commitment they would be willing to provide.…

The new model does two things:

First, it ensures that there's genuinely a local alliance committed to the same goals as the external coalition.  This way, there is more legitimacy on the ground. And if there is anything Afghanistan and Iraq have taught us, it is that local legitimacy is key.

Second, this model ensures that there is genuine burden sharing so that the United States is not left owning the country as has happened so often in the past.…

In the future, we will again have to follow this limited model of intervention.

This sounds great, except that the set of criteria that Zakaria lists is so stringent that I seriously doubt that they will be satisfied again in my lifetime. Russia and China regretted the U.N. support the minute after it passed, and the president of the Arab League had buyer's remorse almost immediately after NATO started bombing. Even if the Libya operation looks like a success from here on out, there's no way that list of criteria will be satisfied. Ever. 

Now, for those readers worried about the creeping militarization of American foreign policy, this might sound like a great idea, as it creates a ridiculously high barrier for military intervention. And, indeed, so long as these criteria are only used to satisfy humanitarian military interventions, it sounds good. Except that most military interventions aren't strictly humanitarian. The moment core national interests kick in, these criteria get downgraded from prerequisites to luxuries. 

So Zakaria is wildly inflating the importance of the sui generis nature of the Libya intervention. But that's OK; he's a pundit, not an actual policymaker. There's no way anyone working in the White House, say, would make such a simplistic, facile -- hey, what's in this Josh Rogin FP interview with Ben Rhodes? 

This week's toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya shows that the Obama administration's multilateral and light-footprint approach to regime change is more effective than the troop-heavy occupation-style approach used by the George W. Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, a top White House official told Foreign Policy today in a wide-ranging interview.

"The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis of legitimacy for this but also will provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for communications, in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with FP. "While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition."…

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Rhodes said that the United States is not going to be able to replicate the exact same approach to intervention in other countries, but identified the two core principles of relying on indigenous forces and burden sharing as "characteristics of how the president approaches foreign policy and military intervention."

Excuse me for a second; I have to go do this. 

Look, ceteris paribus, burden-sharing and local support are obviously nifty things to have. I guarantee you, however, that the time will come when an urgent foreign-policy priority will require some kind of military statecraft, and these criteria will not be met. The Obama administration should know this, since its greatest success in military statecraft to date did not satisfy either of these criteria. 

There is always a danger, after a perceived policy success, to declare it as a template for all future policies in that arena. Pundits make this mistake all the time. Policymakers should know better. 

As I type this, most of Tripoli is now in the hands of Transitional National Council forces and supporters, two of Muammar Khaddafi's sons are in custody, and the backbone of Khaddafi's military has been broken. TNC forces do not control all of Libya, but they control an ever-increasing amount of it, including all of its oil infrastructuire. The whereabouts of Gaddafi, Khaddafy, and Qaddafi are still unknown, however.

So, six months after a spontaneous protest movement morphed into armed resistance and NATO got involved.... what does this all mean? With events on the ground still evolving, let me suggest the following list of tentative winners and losers from this operation:

WINNERS

1) The people of Libya. I think it's safe to say that an overwhelming majority of Libyans are pretty pleased that they're no longer living under the thumb of the Qaddafi family. Juan Cole has a pretty triumphalist post up about how this is playing out. He's a bit overoptimistic in places, but this point rings true -- appearances to the contrary, this was not a civil war:

It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing their city quarters taking on trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a civil war. Only in a few small pockets of territory, such as Sirte and its environs, did pro-Qaddafi civilians oppose the revolutionaries, but it would be wrong to magnify a handful of skirmishes of that sort into a civil war. Qaddafi’s support was too limited, too thin, and too centered in the professional military, to allow us to speak of a civil war.

Brian Whitaker makes similar points in The Guardian. This fact does not necessarily mean that an armed insurgency won't persist, but even if it does, it would lack domestic political legitimacy.

2) NATO. Quick, was the 1999 Kosovo operation a NATO success or a failure? During the operation, it seemed like a failure, as a) everyone thought it was taking too long; and b) the operation expost the operational gaps between the U.S. and European forces. After Kosovo ended, however, it seemed like a victory... because it was.

This operation parallels the rhythms of the Kosovo intervention, but in many ways represents a bigger victory. The UK and France shouldered a greater share of the burden, there were no casualties in the alliance, and this operation directly led to regime change (whereas Kosovo had only an indirect effect on Serbia). As Blake Hounshell has observed, at the cost of $1 billion, Western involvement was totally worth it.

3) Air power advocates. Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers' New York Times account of the march into Tripoli suggests the ways in which NATO air power played a critical role in aiding TNC forces on the ground. Stepping back, one has to conclude that NATO's air power was a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for Libya to play out the way it did. Despite some neoconservative calls for even heavier intervention, however, Western boots on the ground were not necessary.

4) Tunisia and Egypt. If TNC forces are able to consolidate their hold on Libya and restore some semblance of law and order, that means the return of more than 680,000 Libyan refugees. This would be good not just for Libya proper, but for the countries housing most of these refugees -- namely, Egypt and Tunisia. These countries are attempt their own transition into more representative regimes. Eliminating the socioeconomic pressure of displaced Libyans is an unalloyed good thing for the political development of Libya's neighbors.

5) President Obama.  To quote Eli Lake: "President Birth Certificate has done what Reagan and W could not: end Gadhafi's reign and kill bin Laden." It's worth noting that oth operations took more than six months to play out. While he won't necessarily be this blunt about it, Obama can now credibly argue that patience + determinaion = badass military statecraft.

LOSERS

1) Other authoritarian despots, particularly in Africa.  I don't want to overstate this -- I'm skeptical that the scenes from Tripoli will lead to spontaneous uprisings in Damascus and elsewhere. Still, this is the kind of event that will always make other despots nervous.

In the case of African authoritarians or quasi-authoritarians, the fall of Khaddafi also leads to the permanent end of a pipeline of cash from Libya to his friends in Africa.

2) U.S. cable news networks. Useless. Totally f$%*ing useless. Seriously, until FOX news started airing live footage from its SkyNews partner, I got vastly more information from my Twitter feed than any of the cable news nets. That's when they were even covering events in Tripoli -- I think it took MSNBC something like five hours to realize there was something worth covering. Yesterday's performance was just embarrassing.

3) Realists. The United States should never have intervened!! It's a civil war!!! Libya is an example of the militarization of American foreign policy!! The U.S. will be drawn into an expensive quagmire that is not a core national interest!! Air power alone will never work!! Many, many other realist cliches!!

Oops.

Readers are warmly welomed to provide realist rationalizations for why they are still right/will be proven right in the future in the comments.

4) KT McFarland. There has been a lot of stupid American punditry on Libya, but I think McFarland's FoxNews.com essay from last Friday takes the cake as the Dumbest Thing I've Read on Libya in the past month.  Thankfully, it's also completely obsolete.

5) President Obama.  [Wait, how is he a winner and a loser?!--ed.] On the one hand, Obama certainly wins by insulating himself against foreign policy criticism. On the other hand, foreign policy victories in the bank are quickly forgotten -- just look at the way in which bin Laden's death translated into a transitory blip for Obama's popularity.

In 2012, the only issue any voter cares about is the economy. A successful operation in Libya will mean less news coverage about Libya and even more coverage of the economy … which is not exactly Obama's strong suit at the moment.

The "this week" portion of the blog post title suggests tentativeness of these assessments (see also Peter Feaver and Steve Walt on this point). Nevertheless... am I missing anything?

[WARNING:  THE FOLLOWING IS AN OPTIMISTIC GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY POST]

Note:  in my last blog post, I might have sounded juuuuust a wee bit pessimistic about the state of the global political economy.  That was my intent, but it wasn't necessarily how I actually felt.  My aim was to assemble as negative a brief as possible about the state of the global political economy.  The aim of this post is to argue that, despite all the recent bad news, the fundamentals of the global political economy are surprisingly sound.  I'm not actually as optimistic as the rest of this post suggests, either -- but I do lean more in this direction.  The fact that I'm blogging this from a zombie-proof vacation redoubt should in no way affect your evaluation of the following few paragraphs.  

So, when we last left off this debate, things were looking grim.  My concern in the last post was that the persistence of hard times would cause governments to take actions that would lead to a collapse of the open global economy, a spike in general riots and disturbances, and eerie echoes of the Great Depression.  Let's assume that the global economy persists in sputtering for a while, because that's what happens after major financial shocks.    Why won't these other bad things happen?  Why isn't it 1931? 

Let's start with the obvious -- it's not gonna be 1931 because there's some passing familiarity with how 1931 played out.  The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has devoted much of his academic career to studying the Great Depression.  I'm gonna go out on a limb therefore and assert that if the world plunges into a another severe downturn, it's not gonna be because central bank heads replay the same set of mistakes. 

The legacy of the Great Depression has also affected public attitudes and institutions that provide much stronger cement for the current system.  In terms of publuc attitudes, compare the results of this mid-2007 poll with this mid-2010 poll about which economic system is best.  I'll just reproduce the key charts below: 

The headline of the 2010 results is that there's eroding U.S. support for the global economy,  but a few other things stand out.  U.S. support has declined, but it's declined from a very high level.  In contrast, support for free markets has increased in other major powers, such as Germany and China.  On the whole, despite the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, public attitudes have not changed all that much.  While there might be populist demands to "do something," that something is not a return to autarky or anything so drastc. 

Another big difference is that multilateral economic institutions are much more robust now than they were in 1931.  On trade matters, even if the Doha round is dead, the rest of the World Trade Organization's corpus of trade-liberalizing measures are still working quite well.  Even beyond the WTO, the complaint about trade is not the deficit of free-trade agreements but the surfeit of them.  The IMF's resources have been strengthened as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.  The Basle Committee on Banking Supervision has already promulgated a plan to strengthen capital requirements for banks.  True, it's a slow, weak-assed plan, but it would be an improvement over the status quo. 

As for the G-20, I've been pretty skeptical about that group's abilities to collectively address serious macroeconomic problems.  That is setting the bar rather high, however.  One could argue that the G-20's most useful function is reassurance.  Even if there are disagreements, communication can prevent them from growing into anything worse. 

Finally, a note about the possibility of riots and other general social unrest.  The working paper cited in my previous post noted the links between austerity measures and increases in disturbances.  However, that paper contains the following important paragraph on page 19: 

[I]n countries with better institutions, the responsiveness of unrest to budget cuts is generally lower. Where constraints on the executive are minimal, the coefficient on expenditure changes is strongly negative -- more spending buys a lot of social peace. In countries with Polity-2 scores above zero, the coefficient is about half in size, and less significant. As we limit the sample to ever more democratic countries, the size of the coefficient declines. For full democracies with a complete range of civil rights, the coefficient is still negative, but no longer significant.

This is good news!!  The world has a hell of a lot more democratic governments now than it did in 1931.  What happened in London, in other words, might prove to be the exception more than the rule. 

So yes, the recent economic news might seem grim.  Unless political institutions and public attitudes buckle, however, we're unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the 1930's.  And, based on the data we've got, that's not going to happen. 

American politicians are super-mad at Standard & Poor's for downgrading U.S. debt even after the debtopocalypse was averted earlier this week.  These same politicians seem torn between pointing out that S&P  sucks at math and blaming the other political party for the S&P screw-up. 

I really don't care about that as much as the debate over whether S&P got its political analysis  right.  Here's the key paragraphs of the actual Standard & Poor statement: 

[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011....

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Felix Salmon, thinks that this analysis is spot on:   

[T]he US does not deserve a triple-A rating, and the reason has nothing whatsoever to do with its debt ratios. America’s ability to pay is neither here nor there: the problem is its willingness to pay. And there’s a serious constituency of powerful people in Congress who are perfectly willing and even eager to drive the US into default. The Tea Party is fully cognizant that it has been given a bazooka, and it’s just itching to pull the trigger. There’s no good reason to believe that won’t happen at some point.

David Weigel concludes that the S&P political analysis is fair:

This is not crazy.This what Republicans imply about the supercommittee -- they will not accept plans that increase taxes, and despite the fact that they've agreed to let the Bush tax cuts lapse on January 1, 2013, they are making noises about not accepting a return of the rates. The best possible scenario, if we assume that stance, is what I wrote about today -- tax reform plans that start in the supercommittee and win over a committed Congress.

Kevin Drum, however, thinks that S&P's political analysis is way off: 

S&P shouldn't be in the business of commenting on a country's political spats unless they've been going on so long that they're likely to have a real, concrete impact on the safety of a country's bonds. And that hasn't happened yet. There's no serious macroeconomic reason to think Americacan't service its debt and there's no serious political reason to think the Tea Party has anything close to the power to provoke a political meltdown in which wewon'tpay our debt....

[S&P]should care only about the safety of U.S. bonds, and for the moment anyway, there's no legitimate reason to think either that we can't pay or that we won't pay. The bond market, which has all the same information as S&P, continues to believe that U.S. debt is the safest in the world, and in this case the market is right. S&P should stop playing dumb political games and stick to its core business.

I side, mostly, with Drum.  It's totally fair for S&P to factor politics into their assessment of sovereign debt.  Indeed, a key trend in sovereign debt analysis over the past five years has been the recognition that political fundamentals can matter as much as economics.  That said, if ratings agencies are going to do this, then their political expectations can't just be retrospective -- they need to do some actual forecasting.  Instead, they looked at recent weeks and extrapolated into the future. 

There are three factors that should give S&P pause before assuming that political dysfunction could lead to no increae in tax revenue.  First, as Drum points out, despite all the displays of ideological inflexibility, in the end the debt ceiling vote secured a strong majority of the GOP House caucus.  Some Tea Party members were willing to risk a crisis, but not actually go and perpetuate one.  It was not a Great Moment in Democracy, but in the end a deal was done.  You can't dock for intransigence without noting the outcome. 

Second, unlike the debt ceiling, deadlock in late 2012 means that the Bush tax cuts expire.  Either a lame-duck Obama or a newly-re-elected Obama will be able to make that fiscal decision (no way any faction in Congress musters the 2/3 vote necessary to override).  As Jonathan Chait has repeatedly observed, that dynamic is the opposite of the debt ceiling episode, in which case paralysis led to bad fiscal outcomes.  If S&P thinks partisan gridlock will persist on Capitol Hill, then the conclusion to draw is that taxes will go up. 

Third -- and this is pretty important -- S&P has failed to observe the political aftereffects of the debt deal.  As I argued previously: 

[T]he thing about democracy is that it has multiple ways to constrain political stupidity and ideological overreach. The first line of defense is that politicians will have an electoral incentive to act in non-crazy ways in order to get re-elected. The second line of defense is that politicians or parties who violate the non-crazy rule fail to get re-elected. So, in some ways, the true test of the American system's ability to stave off failure will be the 2012 election.

The first line line of defense has been breached, but the second line of defense looks increasingly robust.  Public opinion poll after public opinion poll in the wake of the debt deal show the same thing -- everyone in Washington is unpopular, but Congress is really unpopular and GOP members of Congress are ridiculously unpopular.  At a minimum, S&P needs to calculate how the current members of Congress will react to rising anti-incumbent sentiment.  If they did that analysis and concluded that nothing would be done, I'd understand their thinking more.  I didn't see anything like that kind of political analysis in their statement, however.   

In the end, I suspect Moody's and Fitch won't follow S&P's move, so this could be a giant nothingburger.  Still, if these guys are going to be doing political risk analysis, it might help to actually have some political scientists on the payroll.  Based on their statement, S&P is simply extrapolating from the op-ed page, and that's a lousy way to make a political forecast. 

Am I missing anything? 

I've whored mingled enough with the magazine world to understand that publishing "best/worst" lists are fun and engaging.  Some choices will be universally acknowledged, others will provoke controversy and debate, and so forth.  Lists are always going to engage the readers.  It's almost impossible to get them wrong. 

I bring this up because The Atlantic's list of the best and worst foreign policy presidents of the past century is really, really wrong. 

Democracy Arsenal's Michael Cohen cobbled together the list.  Here are his criteria: 

After reaching out to host of historians, foreign policy experts, academics and various think tankers here's one stab at answering a question which, in many respects, has no right answer. How you choose the best and worst foreign policy President depends in large measure on what values inform your vision of what a good foreign policy looks like. If you're a foreign policy idealist, Wilson would seem pretty good; a foreign policy realist; you might cast a vote for George H.W Bush or even Richard Nixon. If you prefer your presidents to talk tough, Harry Truman might be your man; if you prefer a more modest and less partisan figure, Dwight Eisenhower might float your boat.

As my list suggests, I tend to lean toward the more restrained, pragmatic realists who are suspicious about the use of force. Conversely, I'm more wary of not only the idealistic and ideologically driven presidents, but also those who use foreign policy, most destructively, as a tool of domestic politics.

OK, fair enough.  Here's his list: 

The Five Best Presidents:  1) FDR; 2) Dwight Eisenhower; 3) George H.W. Bush; 4) Ronald Reagan; 5) John F. Kennedy

The Five Worst Presidents:  1) LBJ; 2) Jimmy Carter; 3) Woodrow Wilson; 4) Harry Truman; 5) Richard Nixon. 

I'll let Tom Ricks rebut the JFK assessment on his own blog.  I'll let my readers make other objections -- and there are many ones to make -- with most of he list.  My problem is with the assessment of Harry Truman as, somehow, one of the five worst foreign policy presidents of the last century. 

Here's Cohen's explanation -- let's do this by paragraph, shall we? 

Harry Truman has in the nearly 50 years since he left the White House grown significantly in the estimation of both the public and many historians. To be sure, he deserves enormous credit for protecting and stabilizing Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. These are signal achievements but as historians from Robert Dallek and Walter Lafeber to Fredrik Logevall have suggested there is a pretty significant downside to Truman's presidency as well.

One must stop here or a second and admire Cohen's ability to glom most of Truman's foreign policy accomplishments into a single sentence.  That takes some doing.  One could have at least noted that in the span of five years Truman and his foreign  policy advisors created pragmatic institutions that not only withstood the Cold War but prospered even after it ended.  Nope, nothing on that point.  That takes some serious doing. 

OK, let's move onto Truman's alleged defects:  

First there was Korea. An impulsive response to a cross-border attack that re-shaped American foreign policy. It was the final nail in the coffin of the more modest containment strategy proposed by George Kennan and by default enshrined the notion that the US had a responsibility to contain Communism wherever it showed its fangs.  But while the decision to go to war can be considered a debatable one; the failure in rein in Douglas MacArthur's push to the Yalu River, which triggered a Chinese intervention is a disaster that can't be washed away (even by Truman's later decision to fire the general). Considering that more than 20 million North Koreans continue to live in terrible hardship today because of that decision only compounds the mistake (emphasis added).

Why yes, that's so true.  Had Truman not decided to respond in force in Korea, there wouldn't be 20 million North Koreans living in terrible hardship -- there would be at least 60 million Koreans living in terrible hardship. 

Seriously, this line of reasoning makes no sense to me.  I understand but strongly disagree with the logic that intervening in Korea was a mistake.  I understand and kinda agree with the contention that crossing the 38th parallel was exceedingly costly in terms of blood and treasure.  I simply can't understand, however, the argument that had the U.S. not made that push, North Korea would have evolved differently.  Would Kim-Il Sung have abandoned juche if MacArthur hadn't tried for the Yalu? 

Speaking of MacArthur, you can't acknowledge Truman's failure to rein him in without also acknowledging that by firing MacArthur, Truman cemented civilian control over the military just as the size of the U.S. military was reaching a new high. 

Onward!!

Beyond Korea, the Truman Doctrine and its declaration that it was the "policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures" laid the groundwork for the limitless definition of US national interests that unfolded over the next 60 years. As Kennan would later note, it was one thing to contain Communism in Europe (a goal on which Truman succeeded). It was quite another to broaden that goal to the rest of the world. There is, as a result, a straight line between Truman's foreign policy choices and the war in Vietnam.

Right, this is why Eisenhower felt compelled to intervene in Vietnam during Dien Bien Phu -- oh, wait, as Cohen points out in his Eisenhower write-up, he did the exact opposite of that.  I don't buy straight-line arguments that take two decades to play out.   

Then there was Truman's use of anti-Communist rhetoric for political advantage that turned what might have been a balance of power, geo-political clash into an ideological one. This, of course, also helped to politicize the Cold War in the United States and heightened the issue of anti-Communism. Indeed, few Presidents more flagrantly used foreign policy as a political punching bag as frequently as Truman.

I'd be more charitable towards this point if Cohen hadn't also said that Eisenhower "used Cold War fears to push for national highway system and more money for higher education, two smart national security investments."  When is using foreign policy fears at home good and when is it bad, exactly?  Based on Cohen's list, I can't tell. 

Finally, ask yourself a counter-factual: how would the Cold War have unfolded if FDR had lived out his fourth term, rather than having the inexperienced Truman become the leader of the Free World? It's not hard to imagine that the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, so deftly handled by FDR during WWII, would have been minimized and a less militarist and dangerous conflict might have emerged. At the very least, as Robert Dallek points out even if superpower, ideological conflict between the US and Soviet Union was inevitable, Truman never really sought to find an alternative (emphasis added).

Again, I'm not sure what to make of this.  First, Cohen acknowledged that FDR "sold out the Eastern Europe countries at Yalta."  Does he believe that FDR would have somehow been able to repulse Stalin in Iran, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere without a Cold War -- or do those countries not matter? 

Second, if the bipolar distribution of power made superpower conflict inevitable, why exactly should Truman be blamed for not dickering around with alternatives that would have crashed and burned?  According to this logic, Truman is one of the five worst foreign policy presidents of the last century because he failed to pursue unfeasible options.  I'm sorry, but clearly I don't get it. 

In his blog post explaining the list, Cohen acknowledges that: 

I'm probably far too generous to John F. Kennedy, who makes the best list, and far too harsh to Richard Nixon, who makes the worst list. This is a pretty fair critique and if I had my druthers I'd put both men somewhere in the middle, but the need for editorial symmetry was too strong!

Fair enough -- but I'm sorry, listing Harry Truman as one of the five-worst foreign policy presidents is absurd. 

Am, I missing anything? 

After last night's stunningly useless set of speeches, I'd put the odds of the U.S. not raising the debt ceiling by August 2nd at 1 in 2. Like many other observers, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to envision a deal that would get through the Senate while attracting a majority of House Republicans [You meant a majority of the House of Representatives, right?--ed. No, I meant a majority of House Republicans. I'm pretty sure that Boehner and the rest of the House GOP leadership will refuse to pass any debt ceiling plan that relies too much on House Democrats.]

So, it's gonna be a fun few weeks for those of us who study the global political economy. Let's start by thinking the unthinkable -- what will happen if there is a default?

I've expressed my feelings on the matter already, and I'm hardly the only one. That said, I've also hedged my bets been flummoxed by the lack of market reaction to the DC stalemate. The lack of market reaction to date has emboldened House GOP members to stand fast. Could they be right?

Tom Oatley, who pooh-poohed my fears of the debtpocalypse last week, makes an interesting point about the composition of U.S. debt-holders:

By these figures, about 63% of US government debt is owned by central banks (foreign and domestic) and/sovereign wealth funds. Most of these entities are American friends and allies. Another 4% is owned by US state and local governments. That leaves 33%--about $4.8 trillion--in private hands. Of this, the financial institutions with the most restrictive regulations regarding asset ownership (depository institutions) own only 2% of the total ($290 billion). Mutual Funds, who may or may not have to dump downgraded debt, hold another 9% ($1.35 trillion).

What's the point? The discussion about the impact of US default revolves around the market response to default. Useful to recognize that most of the US government debt is held by public-sector agents who are much less sensitive to balance sheet pressures and regulatory constraints. These public sector agents are also substantially more sensitive to "moral suasion" and direct appeal than private financial institutions. The structure of ownership of US debt might dampen the negative impact of any default that does occur.

This is pretty interesting. Oatley focuses on "moral suasion," but there's also a national-interest motive for many U.S. debtholders. Most of the official holders of U.S. debt have a strong incentive for a) the value of their holdings not to plummet; and b) the United States economy to continue to snap up other their exports. If China, for example, is buying up U.S. debt to sustain its own growth, then neither a technical default nor a ratings downgrade should deter China or other export engines from continuing to buy U.S. debt even if there's a spot of trouble.

So it appears that complex interdependence will force America's rivals to continue to hold U.S. debt even after the debtpocalypse!! The United States in the clear, right?

Not so fast. Here are five "known unknowns" I can think of that might complicate Oatley's analysis:

1) What if the creditors form a cartel? In my 2009 paper, this was the one scenario that gave me the heebie-jeebies, because it's the one scenario under which creditors can wring geopolitical gains from debtor states. Any kind of default can act as a focal point moment in which U.S. creditors decide it's time to apply a haircut to American power and influence.

I don't think this is going to happen, because the national interests of American debtholders remain divergent. That said, if U.S. allies interpret default as a signal of U.S. unreliability in times of crisis, then all bets are off.

2) What about the economic nationalism of China? China is the largest foreign debtholder, which gives it a certain agenda-setting power in moments of crisis. There are a lot of compelling reasons why China would decide to try to minimize the economic disruptions . On the other hand, there's a lot of resentment on Chinese Internet boards already about the Chinese purchases of U.S. debt. During a period in which the CCP is already concerned about domestic instability, one could envision a scenario whereby they try to mollify nationalists at home by acting out against the United States.

3) What would be the effect of a mild market reaction on the House of Representatives? The less the markets react, the less that the House GOP will feel a need to do anything. There will come a point, therefore, when official debtholders might need to signal to the House that, in IPE lingo, "s**t needs to get done." That signal would in and of itself roil markets, not to mention the effects the current uncertainty is already having on the real economy.

4) What is the fiscal shock from a default? There are two causal mechanisms through which a default could affect the global economy. The first is through panic and uncertainty roiling financial markets. The second, however, is from a dramatic fiscal contraction due to limited government spending. Given the lackluster state of the current recovery, it wouldn't take much to tip the United States back into recession.

5) What if there's another AAA bubble? FT Alphaville's Tracy Alloway provided another interesting chart earlier this month on the distribution of AAA securities:

As Alloway warns:

[W]atch what starts happening from 2008 and 2009.

The AAA bubble re-inflates and suddenly sovereign debt becomes the major force driving the world’s triple-A supply. The turmoil of 2008 shunted some investors from ABS into safer sovereign debt, it’s true. But you also had a plethora of incoming bank regulation to purposefully herd investors towards holding more government bonds, plus a glut of central bank liquidity facilities accepting government IOUs as collateral. Where ABS dissipated, sovereign debt stood in to fill the gap. And more.

It’s one reason why the sovereign crisis is well and truly painful.

It’s a global repricing of risk, again, but one that has the potential for a much largerpop, so to speak.

We know that a downgrade of U.S. Treasuries would likely lead to a downgrade of state and municipal bond ratings as well. We also know that the ripple effects from the collapse of asset-backed securities were much larger than anticipated before the 2008 crisis. This is why the possible knock-on effects of downgrade so many AAA asserts makes me itchy. Even if banks and other financial institutions have minimal exposure to U.S. Treasuries, I don't think it's possible for them to have minimal exposure to all U.S.-based AAA sovereign debt.

These are just the five known unknowns that I could think of in the past hour -- there are probably many, many more. Readers are strongly encouraged to add them in the comments.

Despite Fareed Zakaria's best efforts, it seems that foreign policy commentators can't stop offering advice on American grand strategy. 

Richard Haass provides the latest salvo in Time.  After arguing that no other great power can offer a serious revisionist challenge to the current system, concluding, "Today's great powers are not all that great."  With that set-up, he proposes a grand strategy of "Restoration": 

The U.S. would continue to carry out an active foreign policy—to create international arrangements to manage the challenges inherent in globalization, to invigorate alliances and partnerships, to deal with the threats posed by an aggressive North Korea, a nuclear-armed Iran and a failing Pakistan.

But under a doctrine of restoration, there would be fewer wars of choice—armed interventions when either the interests at stake are less than vital or when there are alternative policies that appear viable. Recent wars of choice include Vietnam, the second Iraq war and the current Libyan intervention. There would, however, continue to be wars of necessity, which involve vital interests when no alternatives to using military force exist. Modern wars of necessity include the first Iraq war and Afghanistan after 9/11....

Restoration is not just about acting more discriminating abroad; it is even more about doing the right things at home. The principal focus would be on restoring the fiscal foundations of American power. The current situation is unsustainable, leaving the U.S. vulnerable either to market forces that could impose higher interest rates and draconian spending cuts or to the pressures of one or more central banks motivated by economic or conceivably political concerns.

Reducing discretionary domestic spending would constitute one piece of any fiscal plan. But cuts need to be smart: domestic spending is desirable when it is an investment in the U.S.'s human and physical future and competitiveness. This includes targeted spending on public education, including at the community-college and university levels; modernizing transportation and energy infrastructures; and increasing energy efficiency while decreasing dependence on Middle East oil. Spending cuts should focus on entitlements and defense. Further deficit reductions can be achieved by reducing so-called tax expenditures such as health care plans and mortgage deductions. The goal should be to reduce the deficit by some $300 billion per year until the budget is balanced but for interest payments on the debt.

Adopting a doctrine of restoration for several years would help the U.S. shore up the economic foundations of its power.

Over at Democracy Arsenal, Jacob Stokes thinks restoration (or some variant of it) sounds peachy: 

[Hasss' argument is] derivative of what journalist Peter Beinart called a “solvency doctrine” back in 2009. He wrote, “No matter what grand visions Obama may harbor to remake the world, the central mission of his foreign policy--at least at first--will be to get it out of the red.” None of these plans or explanations is perfect, of course, but taken together, they seem to me good starting points for what a grand strategy for the U.S. should look like, namely a focus on tending to the sources of American power rather than on making more commitments that draw on it.

Color me skeptical.  It's not that I don't like the ideas behind Haass' argument -- they're sympatico with a welter of realpolitik-friendly strategies that have been promulgated at regular intervals. 

There are two currently insurmountable political problems with Haass' strategy, however.  The first is that it is ridiculously hard for the U.S. government to draw down military commitments -- particularly if the U.S. military doesn't want to do it.  It's worth remembering that Barack Obama entered office with a worldview that closely matched Haass' restoration idea -- and yet, in the end, he expanded U.S. operations in Afghanistan and attacked Libya to boot.  The U.S. military strongly supported the former, while Obama's foreign policy advisors jump-started the latter.  [So, you're saying that if a powerful executive-branch foreign-policy actor favors the use of military statecraft, it's gonna happen?--ed.  Um... yeah, I guess I am.]

The second is that a restoration strategy is really a focus on domestic policy.  And, as I noted in the pages of Foreign Affairs:

The most significant challenge to Obama's grand strategy is likely to emerge at home rather than abroad. Viable grand strategies need to rest on a wellspring of domestic support. The biggest problem with Obama's new grand strategy is its troublesome domestic politics....

By focusing on renewing the United States' domestic strength, the Obama administration has introduced more partisan politics into the equation. There is still some truth to the aphorism that politics stops at the water's edge. But if the administration argues that the key to U.S. foreign policy is the domestic economy, then it increases the likelihood of domestic discord. Based on the tenor of the debates about the rising levels of U.S. debt, the possibility that the president can hammer out a grand bargain over fiscal and tax policies is looking increasingly remote.

I wrote that a few months ago, and of course as the debtopocalypse approaches, I'm sure things will improve in our domestic political discour--- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA... I'm sorry, I couldn't finish that sentence, I was crying bitter tears laughing too hard. 

Restoration won't be happening anytime during this session of Congress... or perhaps ever.  The real problem in today's political climate is devising a grand strategy that is sustainable both domestically and internationally.  I'm reluctantly coming around to Peter Trubowitz and Charles Kupchan's conclusion that the bipartisan political foundations for a viable grand strategy are badly eroded. 

Fareed Zakaria's Washington Post column today opens as follows:

Every few months, commentators find a new grand strategy that animates Barack Obama. First he was the antiwar candidate, because his rise in the Democratic primaries had much to do with his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq war. But even some on the right, including Robert Kagan, pointed out that he was interventionist on other issues, such as Afghanistan. Some criticized his multilateralism, pointing to his offers of engagement to all comers, from Iran to Russia to China. More recently, watching his vigorous outreach to Asian countries threatened by China, the scholar Daniel Drezner concluded that the new grand strategy was one of “counterpunching.”

In fact, the search itself is misguided. The doctrinal approach to foreign policy doesn’t make much sense anymore. Every American foreign policy “doctrine” but one was formulated during the Cold War, for a bipolar world, when American policy toward one country — the Soviet Union — dominated all U.S. strategy and was the defining aspect of global affairs. (The Monroe Doctrine is the exception.) In today’s multipolar, multilayered world, there is no central hinge upon which all American foreign policy rests. Policymaking looks more varied, and inconsistent, as regions require approaches that don’t necessarily apply elsewhere (emphasis added).

A minor point and then a major point.  Minor point:  as I said before, there's a difference between a foreign policy "doctrine" and a grand strategy, and Zakaria is conflating the two here. 

The major point:  the whole "world is too complex and multilayered to fit into a grand strategy" sounds great -- except that it is precisely in this kind of uncertain environment when countries need to prioritize what's important and what's not.  Or, as I phrased it in Foreign Affairs: 

A grand strategy consists of a clear articulation of national interests married to a set of operational plans for advancing them. Sometimes, such strategies are set out in advance, with actions following in sequence. Other times, strategic narratives are offered as coherent explanations connecting past policies with future ones. Either way, a well-articulated grand strategy can offer an interpretative framework that tells everybody, including foreign policy officials themselves, how to understand the administration's behavior.

That's what a coherent grand strategy should provide.  Admittedly, it's much easier to do this when a single overarching threat exists -- but it's still necessary in a complex world. 

Zakaria seems to equate a grand strategy with rigidity, but that's hardly necessary.  Linking back to my previous post on whether Reagan was really a Reaganite, one could argue that Reagan's greatest strength was his ability to simultaneously articulate a toghness in his rhetoric but have a political gifts to make exceptions when necessary.  This is the only way a president who traded arms for hostages, negotiated with terrorists, refused to escalate a crisis with the Soviet Union, cut and ran after a terrorist attack, and came veeery close to negotiating a nuclear-free world with the Soviet Union could have the reputaion as a hawk.   

I agree with Zakaria that there are times when grand strategy is not necessary -- but this ain't one of them.  Or, to repeat what I said back in April: 

[I]f I were Obama's foreign policy team, I'd start thinking very hard about a speech that clearly prioritizes American interests and values.  Because unless the president defines his grand strategy, pundits will be more than happy to define it -- badly -- for him.

From James Traub's latest FP column:

I first need to amend something I wrote a few weeks ago. After thefirst Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, I concluded that the "neo-Reaganite" ethos in foreign policy -- uncompromising rhetoric, intervention in the name of "values," democracy promotion -- had no followers among the GOP candidates. I should have said that the candidates have calculated that Republican primary voters don't have much of an appetite for that language (nor do many Democrats). In fact, three of the more likely candidates for the nomination -- Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Pawlenty -- all offer some variant of conservative internationalism.

Traub's essay prompted a fair amount of angry pushback from RealClearWorld's Ben Domenech, who accused him of... hmm, let me check... elitist bias, membership in the secret council of elders that rules the world Council on Foreign Relations, and ignorance of the disparate foreign policy views of the GOP candidates. 

While contretemps like these are fun, I wonder if they're missing the point.  What I'm wondering is whether Traub's description of a Reaganite foreign policy -- "uncompromising rhetoric, intervention in the name of "values," democracy promotion" -- is at all accurate.  I mean, it described the neoconservatives or "Neo-Reaganites," but what about Reagan himself? 

Mehdi Hasan writes in the Guardian that Reagan was no Reaganite:

[Reagan] succeeded in avoiding a direct military confrontation. As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: "On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm's way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer."

In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Lest we forget, after America's first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to "cut and run". Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. "Perhaps we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle," Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: "The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position ... those 241 marines would be alive today."

These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons' blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.

The truth is that Reagan wasn't a Reaganite; he ended the cold war through negotiation and with far fewer military interventions than his successors have managed so far in the war on terror. His actions, rather than his occasionally bombastic words, reveal a president more interested in jaw-jaw than war-war.

This is the foreign policy variant of debates that fiscal policy wonks have about Reagan's record on taxes, in which it could simultaneously be claimed that:  a) Reagan enacted the largest marginal tax rate cuts  in history; and b) Reagan enacted the largest tax increase in history. 

The point is, there's an awful lot of expanse within Reagan's actual foreign policy record for a GOP candidate to camp in.  William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others who brand the term "Reaganite" to equal neoconservatism do a disservice to history. 

Here's my question, however.  It could still be argued that neoconservatism was the primary theme of Reagan's presidency, even if it doesn't match Traub's description of it.  So, dear readers, I'll put it to you:  what were the key themese of Reaganite foreign policy?