Suicide in foreign policy

The unraveling foreign policy of the current administration could have been scripted, chapter-by-chapter, from James Burnham's Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964; rpt. Regnery Publishing, 1985).

David P. Goldman, in "The Morality of Self-Interest" (First Things, May, 2010), writes:

The value of Augustinian realism might be more easily seen in its absence. In the tenure of two administrations, our foreign policy has passed from adolescence -- the Wilsonian fancy that America could remake the world in its own image -- to senile renunciation of world leadership, without ever having passed through maturity. Instead of the uncertain meticulous work of containing failed states, nurturing prospective allies, and deterring prospective enemies, Washington has swung from a utopian effort to fix the world, to a baffling pretense that the world somehow will fix itself if only America leaves it alone. The result is a self-inflicted wound to America's world standing -- to the anguish of our allies and the undisguised contempt of our adversaries.

... President Obama's doctrine is the self-liquidation of American influence -- an uprecedented and, on reflection, astonishing position for an American leader.

American foreign policy baffles the rest of the world. Look, for example, at the damage to America's world position during March and April of this year. First came the Obama administration's staged quarrel with Israel over a routine zoning decision for homes in northeastern Jerusalem, which is a neighborhood where Arabs had never lived and an area which every proposal for the division of Jerusalem has assigned to the Israeli side. Over thirty years, American administrations have avoided making an issue of Israel's claim to an undivided Jerusalem; Obama broke with that precedent in a staged crisis. The White House threatened Israel with an imposed solution, something no previous administration had undertaken, and threatened to demand that Israel abandon nuclear weapons.

Then came the United States' cosmetic nuclear-arms reduction agreement with Russia, after canceling the Bush administration's promise to base antimissiel systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. On receiving this diplomatic reward, Russia staged a coup in Kyrgyzstan that erased the American-sponsored "Tulip Revolution" of 2005 and left the air resupply of American forces in Afghanistan subject to Russian good will. There were valid objections to the Bush proposal, but Obama removed it without exacting anything in return from Russia, and he did so in a way that undercut the position of American allies.

And then, in a third blunder, the president indicated that he might not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, when he told a television interviewer, "The history of the Iranian regime, like the North Koreans regime, is that, you know, you apply international pressure on these countries, sometimes they choose to change behavior, sometimes they don't." To the extent that America's desultory efforts to impose sanctions on Iran had credibility, Obama lost it the moment he began to speak.

There is a great deal more in this article worth reading on the concept of Augustinian realism, and how this differs from other versions of "realism" in foreign policy. What is inevitably highlighted is something like the attitude of liberalism Burnham must have had in mind -- a confident self-congratulatory smugness that if all right-thinking (liberal) administrations would simply implement policies in keeping with the religious ideals secular Western Enlightenment (and, what is the same, really, Postmodern) values, then everyone will start being nice to us and to everyone else in the New World Order. (Another cold one with them chips, Lutheran?)