Advancing a Free Society

“If you are no longer interested in having an empire, we’ll take it,” I said, speaking recently in Istanbul to a group of U.S. congressmen and women who expressed ample frustration and, in the case of Syria, a clear disinterest in the affairs of the Middle East.

I have been observing with some amusement on recent trips to the United States how diametrically opposed Turkish and American appetites about the Middle East have grown. Since the onset of the Iraq war, and more noticeably with the Obama administration, the American public has come to see our region as a “burden.” In Washington, the route to democracy in Egypt and Libya has dampened the initial excitement about the Arab Spring. Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, the main U.S. policy goal is “keep out of the headlines.” To American eyes, current Israeli and Palestinian leadership look too capricious to even bother with a peace process and everyone I meet in Washington talks about Syria as “a mess,” suggesting that the best course is to stay out.

Not in Turkey. In fact, throughout the history of the modern Turkish republic, the appetite to delve into the Arab affairs has never been greater. Turkish diplomats and leaders are shuttling back and forth among regional centers and Turkey is deeply embroiled in the politics of Syria and Iraq. Ankara has lifted visa restrictions for most Arab countries, and trade with the Middle East has skyrocketed to roughly a third of Turkish exports today. Turks are in the process of building bridges with Iraqi Kurdistan –once regarded as the archenemy – and the Islamist ruling AK Party in Ankara regards the resurgence of Islamist parties in the post-dictatorship Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya as nothing but a strategic gain for Turkey.

In fact, once destined to enter the European Union, Ankara has diverted much of its focus to the Middle East and is more interested in regional leadership than haranguing for the last seat in an unfriendly – and to Turks, sinking – Europe.

Turkish self-confidence is high these days – perhaps higher than ever in the history of the modern republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

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“Pax Americana” always struck me as a somewhat misleading description of the postwar dispensation that the United States brought to the world, for two reasons. The first is its implied equivalence with earlier empires. It seems to me that the special fascination, and special benefit to the world, of American internationalism is precisely that it is not imperial. The British were in India for two hundred years; but we are rattled by overseas entanglements that last two hundred months, and even two hundred days. The United States has been a global power, an intrusive global power, but it has not been an empire; which is to say, it has been a new kind of global power, its commercial interests notwithstanding. The taxonomy needs a new term. American activism abroad has often been owed more to ideas than to interests, which is why our foreign policy regularly frightens the “realists” among us, who would in fact prefer that we behave more like a corporation with an army.

The second flaw in the metaphor of “Pax Americana” is that the American dispensation has not always been characterized by pax. We must be clear about this. Often the peace has come after war, and often the war has been a just war, which established more decent political conditions for the peace. This does not mean that we are “the cops of the world”. We have never been anything remotely like that. We intervene fitfully, infrequently, and less than our principles and the welfare of oppressed people demand. But sometimes we do use military force for purposes of democratization and rescue, and this should be a source of American pride. Among the least noticed facts of our era is that almost all of these interventions of democratization and rescue have been undertaken for the sake of Muslims, in southern Europe and the Middle East and Central Asia. We have not been making war on Muslims, we have been making war for Muslims.

In the Obama years, however, we have been content – more precisely, he has been content – to let Muslims languish in dictatorial and even genocidal circumstances, even as he piously proclaims his friendship for Muslim peoples. Rescue has fallen, or been banished, from the inventory of American purposes abroad. “Never again” are now the phoniest words this President utters. The Syrian catastrophe, in which Assad has perpetrated atrocities that dwarf many times over anything that Qaddafi was preparing to perpetrate in Libya, has exposed the heartlessness of Obama’s foreign policy. His contribution to the American record in this new age of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity is a stronger American stomach, a thicker American skin. We must be, he believes, less easily moved. But of course the reasons for the United States to intervene on behalf of the Syrian opposition have very little to do with emotionalism. There are huge principles and huge interests at stake in the question of Syrian rescue. Heartlessness in this case is not only unsentimental, it is also unintelligent.

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The use of force as an instrument of foreign policy has been an important and salient issue in America’s grappling with its role as the world’s sole superpower for more than two decades now. Europe could not muster the resources required for putting an end to the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and was relieved by the arrival of the US cavalry, but Europeans and others were irritated by George W. Bush’s use of force against another bloody tyrant. And American opinion vacillated from one end of the spectrum to another as Washington had to deal with successive challenges and crises in Somalia, Darfur, North Korea, Iraq and Iran, to name just a few. Was America willing and ready to serve as the global policeman? What were the practical and moral constraints on the use of force? And was it not true that if you had credible deterrence the actual use of force could be avoided?

In this context, the Middle East worlds of the Arabs and of Islam have occupied a special place. These are unstable parts of the world. Their attitudes toward America are ambivalent at best. Societies that are still grappling with the challenges of modernity and the West view America as the epitome of their predicament. It is to use the Ayatollahs’ language, “the great Satan” and therefore the legitimate and prime target for terrorist and other attacks. But it is also the power they want to come to terms with. It was from these lands that the attack on America was launched in 2001 and further attacks are waged and plotted. It is there where Washington’s allies wonder whether the cavalry would be available yet again should they be attacked by domestic or external foes. And it is there where Iran is building a nuclear arsenal and a stockpile of ballistic missiles.

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That the tide of American might is retreating from its outposts is unmistakable.  The US military presence in Western Europe, a legacy of the Second World War, melted away after the collapse of the Soviet empire. In the Middle East, the hegemonic role of the US that emerged as a result of the decline of the old European colonial powers is also disappearing. The Obama regime chose to withdraw from Iraq, despite the sacrifice that American soldiers made to topple the Baathist dictatorship, through its refusal to negotiate an appropriate status agreement. Now it is running to the exits in Afghanistan before any modicum of stability has been achieved. In addition, Washington was conspicuous by its absence in ending the Gaddafi regime in Libya, and it remained willfully ignorant of the post-Gaddafi dangers, as seen in the tragic events in Benghazi.

Clearly, the US is not seeking exposure in the broad swath of geography stretching from Morocco to Central Asia. While America was prepared to mobilize against the Soviet enemy in the Cold War, it has little appetite for the messy business of failed states, Islamist radicalism, and terrorist campaigns. In addition, the declining dependence on Middle East oil simply reduces interest in the area altogether—surely a short-sighted calculation since so many of our allies, Europe and Japan, rely on the Saudi fields. Perhaps this retreat just reflects crude political motives: the Obama campaign wanted to point to the withdrawal in order to support its foreign policy narrative in the 2012 election. In that case, a future administration might reverse the decisions: yet this seems unlikely, not only due to budget constraints, but because strategic leadership once surrendered cannot easily be regained.

Can Europe step into the breach? Much speaks against this unlikely prospect. Europe has been investing at only very low levels in its military; it does not have the hardware to project power effectively.  Nor will its welfare state budgets allow it to do much better in the future. In addition, Germany maintains a profoundly pacifist predisposition that makes any overseas deployments highly controversial and politically costly. Finally, to make matters worse, the EU requires unanimity among its 27 members in matters of foreign policy: hardly a structure designed for bold decision-making.

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In his epic offering to the glory of Rome, Virgil set the Romans different from the “others:”  Those others “could plead their cases better,” he wrote, “chart with their rods the stars, draw from the block of marble features thick with life.”  The Roman arts differed, the Roman had to put his “stamp on the works and ways of peace/to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

The American president is not Augustus, our military is not the Roman Legions.  We can let Rome be as precedent, we can settle for more proximate history:  the burden and the power assumed by Pax Britannica, and the baton being passed, within the Anglo-Saxon family, as it were, to Pax Americana.  Nowadays, that “imperial” idea is in retreat, and the custodians of American power are reluctant to accept the burden that comes with maintaining and defending the international order.  Our colleague Charles Hill has written and brooded over this for years: he had been a public servant and a diplomat of a larger and more confident America.  If this is imperial sunset, Hill can chart as precious few others can the American trajectory in recent years.  The inspiration for this, our fifth Caravan expedition, comes from him.

The Caravan’s writers will be rolled out in the next two weeks.  A new essay will be posted every two days.  We start with Charlie Hill and Russell Berman.

– Fouad Ajami

(Photo Credit: The Oath of Horatii, 1784, by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), oil on canvas, 330×425 cm/ Getty Images)

“World order after Pax Americana?”  As Virgil would say, ‘Horresco referens:”  Telling it makes me shudder.

A few years ago the wise political columnist Bill Safire occasionally would interview Richard Nixon in Hell (there for having imposed wage and price controls). So let’s get the old master of strategy on the “hot line” and ask him about it.

RMN: “Sorry about the crackling noises on the line; I can hear you perfectly well.”

“Rome did not fall so much as it changed.  My current successor in the White House has announced his goal of fundamentally transforming America, and he is doing it brilliantly, with the ‘opposition’ party falling in line.

“World orders do not last forever; most come to an end through a declining vision of wide horizons, increasing focus on the self, and a disinclination for the difficult.  The ‘meaning of life’ itself changes as revealed in that full-page ad in the New York Times (we read it like Pravda down here) depicting the chief ambition of today’s young Americans is ‘to retire earlier than your father did.’ So the country has retirement on the brain and this will continue whether the next presidency is won by Elizabeth Warren or Rand Paul.

“As Pax Americana fades, each pillar of world order will weaken, causing its neighbor to slide as well; not a cascade, but a slow downward spiral of the entire international structure.

“World order requires diplomacy and power to be used in tandem; but following the Europeans, we want diplomacy to work on its own.  Our flawed approach has been exploited by one dictatorial regime after another to play games with our negotiators.  Iran’s nuclear weapons drive is a long-running example, and by now is unstoppable.  This will undermine the nonproliferation treaty, itself a pillar of world order.

“The Arab Spring, begun with youthful hope for a freer, better life, has been commandeered by the old military, Islamist, and political gangs.

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