By Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
The US diplomacy has turned into a fallback status that encourages limited, short-term, reactionary and responsive engagements. No great projects exist on the forefront. No grand ideas and strategic agenda has been published by officials. No revolutionary international solutions to global problems are in active play.
The present American foreign policy and infrastructure is utterly incapable of successfully resolving the deep rooted political setbacks around the world. Take the following foreign policy topics, for example:
Terrorism
Arab Spring
Syrian Civil War
North Korean Nuclear Weapons and Human Rights
Iraq (past, present and future)
Afghanistan (present and future)
China and Japan (present and future)
Russia-EU-Ukraine (present and future)
America’s counterterrorism policy and diplomacy went from light ‘em up because we can to negotiating peace with the Taliban because we must.
The US policy on Syria went through periods of wait-and-see, after North Africa’s so called Arab Spring and pro-democracy movements as well as supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and “moderate” rebels. At its height, US Syrian policy went into a gunboat diplomacy moment over chemical weapons used by the regime [and later by some opposition groups as well]. Terrorism is rampant on both sides.
Ironically, as far as diplomacy is concerned, Syria and Iran, which remain grim, have seen very small, first steps taken in a diplomatic direction. Syria was an American accident. Iran engagement followed through greater Russian mediation.
The rest on the list is a combination of failures of strategy and failures of American political projection capability. It is unfortunately far easier for an American that distrusts diplomacy to being with, to not feel obligated to blame the process itself, rather than its own incompetence at using such a powerful tool to accomplish national and transformative will. But even “accidental diplomacy” can get results, and so if stupid diplomacy can accomplish more progress than “normal” routine diplomacy, perhaps there is much more power here than the US is willing to accept or embrace. This is not a particular administration’s failure but the collective failure to adequately use diplomacy and statecraft.
Iraq and Afghanistan need little discussion. Iraq is in a state of subversive political partition by Saudi Arabia, extremists and Iran. Our great friends, the Saudis have crushed all democracy and human rights attempts in their borders; despise American principles, work against them, train jihadists against our interests and are increasingly internally unstable. Our friends, the Israelis, continue building walls in their own state, demolishing Palestinian homes and resettling them with Jewish families. They do not embrace our two-state policy on Israel-Palestine and they reject our diplomatic efforts, take our military aid and threaten to get us involved in a military conflicts throughout the region; particularly, Iran.
In short, Washington has too many strong foreign lobbies: Israel, Japan, and Saudi Arabia to name a few. They are getting much more than they are delivering to us in the relationship. A more realistic selection and reevaluation of strategic partnerships and alliances is needed that is based on American principles and values. The US should also continue rebuilding EU and bilateral relations as a core element and enlarge the Anglo-alliance to extend to Nordic and Germanic states, for example, growing the inner-circle.
Afghanistan, in a word, is a [diplomatic] nightmare.
The military redeployment from Europe to Asia has seen an increased Russian and Chinese aggression over the last year, rather than its opposite. Neither of these executive decisions were thought out beyond the very present recommendations. A military power vacuum in Eastern Europe is a direct result of a reduced US military presence. The trigger was Western political maneuvering in Kiev, which has seen an increase in Russia’s military footprint, not the ousting of Russia from Ukraine.
What happens in Europe if our forces are moved? If we dabble with politics of Ukraine? The reply at the time was: nothing, Russia is not a threat. They would never send troops westward. They were a non-issue that are now at the forefront again after over a decade of building cooperation. No apparent political contingency planning.
The increase in forces in the Pacific and the backing of allies with arms has seen irrational bold moves and the provocation of war with China. Japan’s foolish nationalization of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands was and also clearly seen by the Chinese leadership as a tacitly endorsed territory grab with Washington’s consent. The behavior in rhetoric and jingoism in an increasingly unstable Japan is reaching new highs. An increasingly unstable China is using the political conflict further as a victim of Japanese aggression before its people. Propaganda, sure. But they are now surrounded by islands and the US. This action should make them more aggressive, less predictable and less cooperative in all other diplomacy in the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, the use of diplomacy requires that a state look through the eyes of it’s enemy, while foreign policy execution does not require an understanding of the enemy or the largest consequences of its actions- which are always political outcomes of somekind.
What happens when we sponsor the deployment of more naval ships and arms toward the Asian Pacific? The US foreign policy response: nothing worse can happen. We can contain and pacify Chinese national and economic ambitions and aggression through our allies and increased presence. What happens after that short period of time? That question was not asked. No radical diplomatic solutions have been actively pursued that are agreeable or monumental to any improvements to the crisis that we observe as deteriorating. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good idea but as big as it is, it is not enough.
The American policy of North Korean neglect has spawned an ever increasing belligerent and nuclear regime in Pyongyang. The US rationale: we can cool off tensions by ignoring North Korea, containing and isolating them. This seems to be Washington’s approach to everything- contain and isolate. Methods, good diplomacy does not make. Strategic thinking, flexibility and grand vision is required.
North Korea views the present cold shoulder as a lack of respect, a rekindling of the war, a closing-in on their territory through an increased military presence in the region and in the South; and the international isolation as an attempt by the West to cut off supplies and surround them for the final kill. IF the final kill is not an objective, it sure appears that way. The regime continues to lashing out because they are incapable of thinking along our liberal terms. Their basis for action is much more primitive and antiquated realism and they are literally starving to death and blaming the USA and their partners for their own misery. Where is diplomacy in all of this nonsense?
What guides Washington’s thinking is a traditionalist and misguided approach diplomacy in a changing 21st century world with a decreasing American advantage. America lacks the ability to open the world to modern diplomacy. The world is getting smarter, more powerful and less liberal. The adversaries are craftier, more cunning and more conniving than the US. The US is getting less powerful, less capable and more religiously principled but still expecting the world to be more democratic and liberal of its own accord- as if it were God’s Truth marching before them in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. No longer having the presence to build, entice or coerce adversaries, it must rely on successful old methods as a course of nervous habit in fallback.
The old liberal institutions like the UN are melting away. They are stalled or bypassed altogether by rival member states. Yet Washington is also a part of this problem and not a UN or UN alternative political solution. Cooperation among states, far from a concept of global governance, is absent amidst provocations from various players, likened to what realist international relations scholars call anarchy. Anarchic states do not exist absent a central authority but a central influencing power. In the absence of an entity able to create harmony and cooperation, the state lacks any and all polity.
At present, Americans are out of touch with the greater world body and they remain floating away even further. They fail to learn and study the world of states around them, so they fail to engineer that world. They are unable to perceive the political world correctly, holding fast to the lenses of neo-liberalism and economic globalization—or the embrace of concepts they understand—business.
Washington cannot see through the eyes of its perceived adversaries and competitors. And that is its biggest problem.
If Washington combined, not realism, but reality with liberalism, it could shape the international political system according to a more Western semblance. It has, to a large extent, done this in establishing an economic global order through the Cold War partnerships. This was a brilliant move that attempted to encourage rivalry and channel it through trade. But nothing followed this phase according to plan and no alternatives were sufficient. After a lack of strategic political thinking and policies, the US remains paddling in reverse. Economic instabilities are only part of this problem in a foundation resting on ever-changing digital currencies and commerce.
A reactionary approach that runs back to a mercantilist globalism is a faulty anachronism. Repairing the old broken machine is the opposite of progress and realistic critical need.
A more secure foundation will rest on an evolving liberalism with a political framework and emphasis. This means: greater people-to-people cultural, educational and political contact. It means looking at the big picture; using digital and virtual 21st century institutions and engines; big data international policy simulations, strategic diplomacy and an increasing role of AI in foreign policy. It requires the flow of information, migration, governmental transparency, debate and deliberation, compromise and radical solutions that are based on reality and projected from solid liberal visionaries.
If the State Department is incapable of diplomacy, in the above manner, then it should be refitted for this larger role as a revolutionary and evolving foreign affairs ministry. I would suggest Washington considers a department-wide and thematic akin to the US Department of Defense’s Revolution in Military Affairs. Call this the Revolution in Foreign Affairs and let it grow with equal ambitions.
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