Détente or Decline? The Obama administration engages the World
Nicholas Kitchen, London School of Economics
Draft, please do not cite without permission
[email protected]
Asked to describe the „Obama doctrine‟ in April, the President responded that whilst the US
remains powerful, it is only one nation, that other countries have good ideas too, that other
countries represent different cultures and histories, and have their own interests. The contrast
between the reactions of Madeleine Albright, who considered the United States the
„indispensible nation‟ that sees „further into the future‟; or George W. Bush, who proclaimed that
America is a „nation that serves goals larger than self‟, is a rejection of the exceptionalism that
has deep roots in the history of American foreign relations and which has held sway since the
end of the Cold War.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine such a limited definition of American grand strategy passing the
lips of any President since the early days of Franklin Roosevelt‟s administration, and the early
signs are is that this is more significant than a reactionary rhetorical rollback of the perceived
excesses of the Bush administration. In his first year, American foreign policy under Obama has
been restrained and inclusive, to the outrage of the American right, which howled weakness at
every international summit and every rapprochement to foreign leaders formerly considered
beyond the diplomatic pale. Such has been the impact of this approach that the President, mere
months after taking office and somewhat farcically in even many supporters‟ eyes, was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between peoples.”
This paper will address the sources of this shift in American policy, and ask to what extent it
represents a policy of détente with the rest of the world, particularly aimed at European
sensibilities that were so alienated over the last eight years. Alternatively, is it that a more
limited conception of American grand strategy is a necessary reaction to the new realities of the
international system, particularly as a result of the ongoing financial crisis, that mean America is
no longer the hyperpower whose writ runs universally? In doing so it draws upon the strategic
experience of Obama‟s immediate Democratic predecessor in the White House.
American Grand Strategy
Historically, grand strategy has referred to the military realm. Clausewitz distinguished strategy
from tactics, which “is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win
the war.” (Clausewitz, Howard, & Paret, 1976, pp. 127-132) As warfare developed grand
strategy came to integrate all of the resources of power needed to win – as diverse as national
resources; diplomacy; national morale and political culture – as well as the state of peace that
was desired following victory. (Kennedy, 1991, p. 4; Liddell Hart, 1991, p. 338) The Cold War
took strategy one step further: winning was not necessarily the goal so much as not losing;
containment – in its various guises – was a grand strategy that established the limited American
goal of preventing the expansion of Soviet communism and set out the military, economic and
political means to achieve them. (Gaddis, 2005)
The history of American grand strategy is the history of American ideas and American power.
As the United States‟ power grew during the latter part of the nineteenth and then the twentieth
centuries, so its outlook became more internationalist until the United States‟ structural power
was such that it commanded what was functionally an empire called the „Free World‟. Yet
whilst the general trend towards internationalism correlates with the growth of the United States‟
power, that process was characterised by successive bouts of adventurist imperialism and retreat
as US foreign policy struggled with the competing imperatives of the liberty that was so
foundational of American identity. Should the United States remain true to the universality of
the American creed and promote the truth of those „self-evident‟ values to „all men‟, or should
seek to maintain and protect the liberty of the United States itself by avoiding the entanglements
that engagement in world affairs entailed. For a time the Cold War resolved this distinctly
American paradox between American uniqueness and the universal nature of the values that
defined America itself, since the zero-sum nature of that conflict meant that the protection of
American liberty at home necessitated America‟s support for liberty abroad.
After forty years, Cold War competition had become a basic fact of American , not to mention
European life. The West emerged victorious in the sense that that the revolutions of 1989 bought
much of the world into alignment with America‟s basic liberal political identity, yet at the same
time the end of the conflict left vacant the purpose to which much of that identity had been
directed. The comforting knowledge of clear enmity and purpose was replaced by moral and
strategic ambiguity. As Paul Kennedy wrote in 1993, “the relief that the Soviet Union is no
longer an “enemy” is overshadowed by uncertainties about the United States‟ proper world role.”
(Kennedy, 1993, p. 293) Thus the “paradoxical impact” of the end of the Cold War was that it
simultaneously vindicated American strategy whilst forcing a rethinking of the basic
assumptions that had guided US foreign policy, compelling Americans confront core issues
concerning its national interests and its role in the world. (Asmus, 1993, p. ix)
Thus throughout the 1990s the American academy, think-tank community, politicians, officials
and the broader public debated the possibility of a reformulated isolationism, the merits of
multilateral cooperation and the requirements of American dominance. (Dueck, 2004; Kohout, et
al., 1995; Nacht, 1995; Posen & Ross, 1996-7) The debate was abruptly ended by the events of
9-11 and the Bush Administration‟s response to it, which created a rally-around-the-flag
phenomenon that seemed to render strategic questioning unpatriotic, at least until the Iraq war
turned problematic and the focus turned towards analysis of a newly assertive American empire.
The result was that the 1990s became an interregnum, an interlude between more clearly defined
eras, a period in which international relations was in a state of flux, lacking a focal point around
which to organise itself. (Cox, Booth, & Dunne, 1999) Once the „war on terror‟ and the Bush
Doctrine provided that focal point, the ideas and policies of the preceding decade were instantly
forgotten, automatically deemed irrelevant in this new world of religious fanaticism and terrorist
mass destruction. As John Dumbrell notes in his introduction to one of the few analytical
assessments of Clinton‟s foreign policy, the 1990s became “that most remote of historical
periods: the day before yesterday... the era from which political analysts, journalists and political
scientists have retired, and to which professional, document-orientated historians have yet to
direct their attention.” (Dumbrell, 2009)
However, there is much reason to look back beyond Obama‟s immediate predecessor when
considering the strategic options open to the current US administration and attempting to identify
a distinctive doctrine for this President. Both are Democrats, and both came to power with a
major domestic agenda, including that poisoned chalice of modern American politics, universal
healthcare provision. Most fundamentally, both owe (at least in part) their election to an
economic recession and will be judged first and foremost on their ability to reverse it.
Bill Clinton‟s Underrated Grand Strategy
The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton, a draft-dodger with no previous national political
experience, didn‟t have a foreign policy. Elected in response to a President who the public
regarded as too focused on foreign affairs at the expense of America‟s domestic prosperity,
Clinton skillfully played upon isolationist sentiment, as James Carville‟s pithy précis of the
Democratic candidate‟s agenda – “it‟s the economy, stupid” – became the slogan to define the
1992 campaign. (Alvarez & Nagler, 1995)
Yet the idea that Clinton either came to office without a foreign policy or failed to articulate a
grand strategy for the United States in the post-Cold War world is fallacious. Clinton generated
a very clear strategy for the United States in the 1995 National Security Strategy of Engagement
and Enlargement, which advocated preventative diplomacy, open markets, democracy promotion
and security cooperation to address a diverse range of threats. (Lake, 1993) This strategy based
the necessity of American engagement in the world on sustaining and expanding the community
of market democracies which bought it peaceful relationships. It further sought to address the
possibility of the disintegration of the Western alliance by expanding NATO and in so doing
redefining the purpose of US-European cooperation. Democratic enlargement was “the Clinton
Doctrine”, the result of the “Kennan sweepstakes” to define a new “compass word” for
American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. Presented with the opportunity to establish
the strategy by managing the transition of states of the former Soviet Union from communism to
market democracy, the President likened the strategy of enlargement to the domino-theory in
reverse; encouraging and supporting rather than preventing a succession of mutually reinforcing
societal changes that were in the interests of the United States. (Brinkley, 1997)
As with all grand strategies, not all of the Clinton doctrine was translated into successful foreign
policy. Clinton‟s assertive humanitarianism was unevenly applied and with mixed results. Nor
was the attempt to isolate „rogue‟ states from the „family‟ of nations successful in changing the
behaviour of problematic regimes. (Dumbrell, 2002) However, by linking America‟s domestic
prosperity to the extension of liberal market democracy, Clinton responded to isolationists‟
concerns with a grand strategy of internationalism. (Cox, 1995, pp. 22-23) This strategy
emphasized the peaceful nature of open markets and democracies and the inexorable logic of
integration, and saw Clinton embark on the most significant bout of multilateral institutionbuilding since the end of World War II. This emphasis on the institutional integration of a truly
global economy alongside American economic revival made Clinton the “globalization
president”, as US-led neo-liberalism coordinated efforts to pry open banking, stock, and bond
markets, a policy that became known as the Washington Consensus. Clinton‟s economics-led
grand strategy was thus an attempt to universalise American ideology, as one author put it, “to
„go global‟: in other words, to entrench the United States as the power that will control the major
economic and political outcomes across the globe in the twenty-first century.” (Gowan, 1999, p.
vii)
Clinton‟s success in revitalizing the US economy was startling, so much so that the decline
debate sparked by Paul Kennedy‟s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the late 1980s and
which focused on the rise of Japan as an economic competitor appeared absurd ten years later.
(Friedman & LeBard, 1991; Garten, 1992; Kennedy, 1988) The immediate post-Cold War
system had exhibited a striking imbalance – the economic order, whilst still structurally biased
towards the United States, had become tripolar (United States, Europe and Japan) yet the military
order was unipolar. As Noam Chomsky was hardly radical in noting (Kennedy might have said
much the same thing), military power that is not backed up by a comparable economic base has
its limits as a means of coercion and domination. (Chomsky, 1992, pp. 2-3) Yet between 1990
and 1998, the US economy grew by twenty-six percent, compared with Europe‟s seventeen
percent and Japan‟s seven percent. (Ikenberry, 2001, p. 191) The United States accounted for
around one quarter of world GDP throughout the 1990s and remained the most technologically
advanced major economy with expenditures on research and development nearly equalling the
rest of the G-7 combined. The long boom that came after 1992 even allowed the United States to
eradicate its near three-decades-old budget deficit. One assessment ranked Clinton as the most
successful President in economic terms Lyndon Johnson. (McCormick, 2000) By the end of the
decade the United States was an empire renewed, its dominion enlarged, its ideology
unchallenged, its economy once again dominant, its military lead unsurpassable, its institutions
revived. Remarkably, Clinton had managed to extend America‟s lead in every aspect of power
capabilities whilst avoiding significant balancing behaviour as other powerful states chose to
bandwagon on the back of the American system.
It was therefore Clinton‟s success as an empire-builder that laid the platform for the Bush
Doctrine, which drew on the arguments for American primacy that had animated some on the
right during the 1990s from the draft Defense Planning Guidance through to the Project for a
New American Century. Yet where Clinton had sought to build institutions in the image of the
United States, the Bush administration came to power determined to reduce the constraints on
American freedom of action that those institutions implied. While Clinton increasingly resorted
(in part due to the constraints of a hostile Congress) to exploiting unipolarity by acting
unilaterally, the mantra “with others when we can, but alone when we must” accurately summed
up the Clinton administration‟s „uni-multilateralism‟. Bush‟s selection of assertive American
nationalists and neoconservatives at the heart of his first administration meant unilateralism
would now be the United States‟ modus operandi.
Of course, the Bush administration‟s policies – in particular the war in Iraq and the rendition of
terrorist suspects to Guantanamo Bay, both of which reflected a profound scorn for international
law and norms – generated a great deal of anti-American sentiment and precipitated „soft
balancing‟ against the United States.(Kelley, 2005; Pape, 2005; Paul, 2005) This resentment was
particularly felt in Europe, for reasons ranging from the idealistic to the ignoble, and in the
Muslim world, which understandably felt itself the target of an administration for whom tactful
diplomacy was not a strong point. Yet it was not simply the Bush administration‟s shift away
from the Clinton doctrine that precipitated this backlash. Yes, the Bush administration‟s move
from a policy of multilateralism-first to straightforward unilateralism was significant and
damaging. It brought home the extent of America‟s dominance, unveiling the American unipolar
empire. But the ideas of democracy promotion, the conditionality of sovereignty and the
rapacious opening of markets for global capitalism, as well as the sheer might of American
economic and military power: these were Clinton‟s legacy, and were already generating
blowback from non-state actors and balancing moves from great powers.1
Barack Obama – Redefining American Leadership?
1
“World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second
half of the twentieth century – that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American
decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.” (Johnson, 2002, p. 238)
The world bequeathed to Barack Obama by his predecessors therefore contained within it more
fundamental challenges than simply the Bush administration‟s two wars, its torture of terrorist
suspects and the continued antagonism of rogue states. Even the most fundamental building
block of the Clinton doctrine – the consensus surrounding neoliberal globalization – was
discredited in the wake of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.2 For all
the United States‟ success following the Cold War, that new powers rise and that empires decline
is an inescapable fact of the history of international politics. The most fundamental challenge
Obama faced therefore, was to redefine America‟s grand strategy to accept that the unipolar
moment – if it had ever existed – was over, and to recast the terms of American engagement with
the world. If Clinton and Bush were the Presidents of the post-Cold War Era, Obama came to
power as the first President of the post-unipolar age, with a similar set of questions about the
fundamental nature of American grand strategy as Clinton had faced in 1993.
It is then perhaps a little strange that the wider debate about the nature of American grand
strategy has not resurfaced with the vigour that it did following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
(Thompson & Clemons, 2009) Yet within the administration a comprehensive redefinition of
American grand strategy has been taking place. The first step has been to repudiate the legacy of
his immediate predecessor, to press the „reset button‟ across the spectrum of American foreign
relations, to “signal to the world that he is the unBush.” (Freedland) The flurry of activity in
Obama‟s first hundred days began within minutes by suspending last-minute federal regulations
pushed through by the outgoing administration and the theme has continued throughout the
President‟s first year in office. The announcement that Guantanamo would be closed and the
repudiation of torture; the pledge to withdraw from Iraq; the handshake with Hugo Chavez; the
lifting of travel restrictions to Cuba; the invitations to Iran and Syria to participate in dialogue on
regional issues; the speech in Cairo directed at Muslim opinion; the hostility towards Israeli
settlements; chairing a meeting of the UN Security Council: all more symbolic than substantive,
but each designed to remake the image of the United States in the world, to buy time and
goodwill for the more difficult decisions to come.
The initial imperative of creating a sense of „change‟ has been evident in the rhetoric of Barack
Obama himself. Asked on a number of occasions to describe an „Obama doctrine‟, the President
has emphasized two themes. First has been a definite tilt towards multilateralism, that the United
States cannot hope to solve international problems alone and is prepared to listen to the ideas of
others. Alongside this has been a rejection of American exceptionalism, usually delivered in a
hedge to the universalisability of American values that emphasizes that different cultures may
apply liberal norms differently. (Obama, 2009) At the same time, the perception of detente is
2
The editors of Foreign Policy‟s summing up of the Clinton Years was prescient: “Bill Clinton might have helped
usher in the age of global interdependence, but it will be incumbent upon his successors to make globalization
sustainable.” ("Clinton's Foreign Policy," 2000, p. 28) President Obama himself has indicated that the Washington
consensus may have been too rigidly applied. (Obama, 2009)
magnified because the Bush administration‟s diplomatic way of doing things was to ride
roughshod over allies and enemies alike.
Yet underlying these significant shifts in style and tone there are indications that the Obama
administration conceives of the United States‟ role in the world in profoundly different terms to
its post-Cold War predecessors. Both Clinton and Bush were prepared to impose the will of the
United States where it could not generate a multilateral consensus. The sheer brute facts of
American power underpinned every diplomatic initiative: the applicability of American values
was not up for discussion except in instances where American power might be bolstered by
avoiding issues of human rights or democratic norms. Obama on the other hand appears to pay
lip-service to American idealism for a domestic audience, whilst seeking to conduct international
diplomacy on the basis that disparate issues need not be conflated for the purposes of moral
clarity. (Richard Cohen)
In the eyes of some, this is „smart power‟, an approach to international leadership that
emphasizes the needs of followers to translate elements of hard and soft power into legitimacy
and authority. (Nye, 2008) Whilst the analytical usefulness of the Nye‟s concept may be in
dispute, the idea that the United States is trying to be smarter, to use all of the tools of power and
diplomacy available to it, reflects the fact that what the United States has discovered since the
end of the Cold War is that unipolarity doesn‟t mean omnipotence. What power is and the ways
in which states are able to use it have changed greatly in the past twenty years. The great game
of the Cold War has given way to a flatter, more complex world where asymmetry and norms of
conduct make it more difficult for great powers to „put their power down‟. The United States‟
failure to understand the nature of power in the post-Cold War world brought first illusions of
American empire and now raise the sceptre of decline. (Cox & Kitchen, 2009) If we understand
smart power as reflecting a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of international
political power in the modern world, then Obama administration‟s incipient strategy doesn‟t so
much reflect the decline of American power as it does a recognition of the most efficient means
to utilize it.
We may admit that the capabilities-to-power equation is more complex than previously thought
and still conclude however that Obama‟s strategy represents the necessities of American decline,
a new realism forced upon the United States by the rise of strategic competitors and the failure of
the United States‟ economic model and political ideology. (Brooks; Roger Cohen; Dionne Jr) In
practical terms the administration‟s more realistic approach to diplomacy has been strikingly
visible in a number of areas beyond the rhetoric of reengaging with the world and resetting
relationships.
The drawn-out review of strategy on Afghanistan was notable both for its process and its
outcome. That the debate over Afghan policy was so thoroughly deliberative spoke of a
President prepared to accept political risk in order to hear all sides of the argument and consider
the evidence and before reaching a conclusion. That the result produced a newly limited
definition of the goals of that war, eschewing notions of statebuilding or democracy promotion in
favour of targeting al-Qaeda and establishing a form of government sufficient to prevent the
return of safe-havens. This more limited strategic concept, along with some intensive
diplomacy, seems to have been enough to persuade the United States‟ European allies to
recommit to the war effort.
Where the Bush administration appeared to select its diplomatic targets on the basis of
ideological prejudgements and historical reprisals, the Obama administration has attempted to
take a zero-based budgeting approach to the international environment, assessing issues on their
merits. The withdrawal from Iraq is in some ways seen as much as a means to facilitate a more
clear-headed reassessment of American strategic priorities than an end in itself. That the
administration is keen not to let recently-neglected issues fester was evident in the early activism
of vice-President Joe Biden in the Balkans in May. (Traub, 2009)
On Iran‟s nuclear programme, attempts to bring Russia and China on board in condemning
Tehran has been tempered by offers of engagement and moves towards multilateral
disarmament. Most fundamentally, in advance of his trip to Asia, Obama announced himself the
'Pacific President', and there was much evidence to suggest that the United States now saw Asia
as its key regional alliance, and in particular prioritizes the relationship with China, the nation
whose rise is flipside of American decline. As the US-China Economic and Security Review
Commission noted, the United States today is no longer the world's biggest creditor; it is the
world's biggest debtor, with China as the largest overseas holder of U.S. debt instruments: $2.27
trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest cache, most of which is in dollardenominated bonds. (U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission , 2009) Not that
this puts China in a position of dominance over the United States, far from it - American
consumers remain the guarantors of Chinese growth, and by extension, the domestic legitimacy
of the Chinese Communist Party. What it does mean is that the United States and China are
locked together in a symbiotic relationship that seems destined to define international relations
over the coming years, and Obama has been quick to understand that and to treat China as the
United States‟ „most-favoured nation‟ in diplomatic as well as economic terms: dropping
references to Chinese human rights abuses and seeking out President Hu Jintao first at every
major international summit. The preoccupation with China has left Europe somewhat on the
sidelines in the new Administration. With European and American values increasingly divergent
and their interests no longer locked together by a shared enemy, the United States and Europe
increasingly disagree about solutions – on the economic crisis, on the Israel-Palestinian question,
on Russia, even on Pakistan. Transatlantic agreement – let alone cooperation – can no longer be
taken for granted as the United States prioritizes its own national interest and finds Europe,
despite Lisbon, struggling to speak with one voice. (Kitchen, 2009)
Obama admires George H.W. Bush and his arch-realist foreign policy team which so adeptly
managed the turbulent last days of the Soviet Union, paving the ground for the revival of
American power derived through Clinton‟s ability to focus on the international routes to
domestic economic success. (Brooks) His vice-President, who is afforded a great deal of
influence – and the President‟s ear – in foreign policy-making, regards principles as dangerous
guides to action and prefers to judge policies on the basis of their potential success rather than
their moral purpose. Such role-models indicate that Obama stands in a tradition of American
pragmatism in foreign policy that, whilst not morally nihilistic, regards the possibility of
realisation as the most important aspect of any policy choice. (Traub, 2009)
Whether the United States‟ new realism reflects a perpetual decline in American power remains
to be seen. Charles Krauthammer argues that decline is a choice, and if that is the case it may be
that Obama‟s strategy is to use multilateral engagement to dilute potential competitors‟ sense of
threat whilst rebuilding the economic basis of American power. (Krauthammer, 2009) It may be
that Obama‟s realism is no more than a temporary détente, a policy to bring the United States
international breathing space in which to resurrect its own economic power and regain the moral
authority to set the international political agenda. As Clinton used multilateralism to deter
balancing whilst expanding and embedding American power, so Obama may use detente to defer
and avoid American decline. The decline debate, after all, is one that has resurfaced time and
again during the course of the American century, only to be debunked by successive bouts of
ever-increasing American dominance.
Rebuilding the health of the American economy – and with it, the American system of open-door
global capitalism – is undoubtedly Obama‟s top priority, and if he succeeds in that endeavour we
may see a return to more assertive American diplomacy. It would seem unlikely that this
administration would be the one to deliver the kind of assertive American leadership that
characterised its predecessors however. It recognises that the relationship between capabilities,
power and outcomes is not automatic; it values the tools of diplomacy and is less beholden to the
kind of „end of history‟ American exceptionalism that characterised the post-Cold War period.
For the moment, we might sum up the Obama doctrine with a mantra: that power and leadership
means little if you can‟t get others to follow.
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