The Iraq invasion of 2003 was intended to overthrow a gangster regime that had acquired weapons of mass destruction and replace it with a Western-oriented democracy. It was also meant to demonstrate American power, intimidate friend and foe alike, and lock in American hegemony. Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad and was later captured, tried, and clumsily executed on video, but no evidence of weapons of mass destruction or attempts to acquire them were ever found. The occupation provoked a violent and ongoing resistance to the Anglo-American military occupation that has been responsible for far more casualties than the invasion.1 The invasion made Iran and North Korea more threatened and committed to developing nuclear weapons. It produced a power vacuum that invited the rise of ISIS and its short-lived but brutal and bloody occupation of swaths of the Middle East. It left the region more unstable than before, with intensified ethnic and religious rivalries, problems of drought and food shortages, and many more refugees. It significantly reduced American influence and strengthened the hold of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Closer to home, successive American administrations have attempted to coerce or bribe Mexico to take action to interdict the flow of drugs into the US. Since the Nixon administration, Washington routinely negotiated agreements with Mexico and promptly violated them by carrying out unauthorized operations on its territory. These raids produced harsh and public reactions by Mexican officials who resented the US for infringing on their sovereignty. Mexican objections, reprisals, and refusal to cooperate in anti-drug efforts entrapped the US into progressively more restrictive agreements. The war against drugs in Mexico has not prevented the influx of cocaine and heroin into the US and has led to considerable spillover and cross-border violence. Most frightening of all, it has raised the prospect of a “failed state” along America’s southern border.2 President George Bush sought to break free of this cycle and put relations with Mexico on a more positive basis, but his efforts were torpedoed by a Republican Congress that refused to regularize the status of Mexican immigrants, and more importantly, of the many immigrants from failed states in Latin America who transit Mexico in search of safe havens in the US. In recent decades the drug and immigration problems have worsened considerably. Mexico has become increasingly unable to police its own territory, and the drug flow has increased. American policies made a bad problem worse.3
What do these stories have in common? In both situations the US pursued an illusory end with disastrous results. It defied political logic to think that in an era of nationalism a Muslim state deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines could successfully be governed by a foreign power or its puppet regime. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, US forces, once they intervened, could not leave without turning these countries over to their enemies and could not stay without becoming their targets. Build-ups, surges, and cross-tribal and ethnic alliances were to no avail and often played into the hands of increasingly extreme adversaries. Mexican policy was equally ill-considered. The drug problem is not caused by imports from Mexico but by domestic demand, most of it from middle-class white Americans. Presidents and the Congress are unwilling to face this politically unpleasant truth. It is politically easier to blame foreigners. But it makes no sense to treat Mexico and Columbia as second-class countries whose sovereignty can be abridged at will. Terrorism has increased and the drug problem has not eased. US influence in the Middle East and Central America has declined.
These are only two of many possible examples of disastrous American foreign policies. Similar stories could be told about other security issues, foreign aid, trade, immigration, and even scientific and cultural exchanges. Their root cause is a heavy-handed approach by American presidents, their advisors, and much of the national security establishment, who believe that power talks and other countries and peoples can be brought to heel at little or no cost. Many, moreover, mistakenly believe that it is America’s right and mission to assert leadership in this manner and that others welcome its so-called leadership.
The country needs a more realistic and sophisticated approach to the world that begins with the understanding that, for all its might, America is just another country, and one deeply resented by others when it abuses its political, economic, or military power. Americans must reconnect with their national interests and the ways in which they should be anchored in the values they hold most dear. Foreign and national security policy in turn should seek to instantiate, protect, and advance these values. American leaders must further recognize that persuasion is more effective than coercion, multilateralism more efficacious than unilateralism, and that power, when exercised, needs to be masked, not publicized and paraded. Self-restraint is rarely perceived as weakness, contrary to the conventional wisdom in the national security establishment. Even more paradoxically, given how Americans think about the world, sitting back from time to time and letting others take the lead can build respect and influence in the longer term.
Americans must wean themselves from their fixation and overreliance on power. They must learn to distinguish between power and influence as they are not the same thing by any means. The crude exercise of power in the form of bribes, threats, and political coercion has seriously alienated other governments and peoples and reduced American influence to a marked degree. It has led to a remarkable conundrum that the most powerful political unit the world has ever witnessed is increasingly unable to persuade others to do what it wants. This book explores this seeming paradox and what can be done about it.
Foreign policy ought to protect and advance American interests abroad. Just what are those interests and how should they be advanced and protected? Here there is no agreement, nor has there been since the early days of the Republic, when political leaders and citizens were deeply divided over how to treat revolutionary France. Those committed to encouraging democracy, like Thomas Jefferson, favored supporting France. Those concerned with the country’s material interests like Alexander Hamilton favored good relations with its British adversary.4 American history indicates that the national interest reflects the subjective values and interests of citizens. There is no objective way to determine it because it is fundamentally a political issue. People offer and defend definitions of the national interest consistent with their values and goals.
I will offer my own take on the national interest in this book, and do so by deriving it from values I think central to most Americans. I do not expect my depiction of the national interest to be acceptable to everyone. I accordingly lay out a method for making connections between values and interest that should prove equally useful to those emphasizing different values or a different ordering of them. My goal is not to lead readers by the nose, but encourage them sniff around by themselves, to think about their core values and the interests to which they give rise, and also how those interests are best defended and advanced. For the same reason, I rarely advocate specific foreign policies, although I do in the China chapter. They depend on our values and interests, but also our understanding of what builds and maintains influence. I have a lot to say about the latter question.
My starting point is the tragic understanding of life and politics. As formulated by the Greek playwrights and Thucydides, and later in the dramas of Shakespeare and Goethe, tragedy teaches us that the world is complex enough to defeat our understandings of it, conflict is inevitable because of competing values and interests, rigid commitments to beliefs and principles put them at risk, and attempts to dominate others are costly and likely to be counterproductive. It further suggests ways of thinking that have the potential to reconcile us to the vagaries of life, make us grateful for what we have, and happier about ourselves and our relationships. Adopting a tragic perspective on life may also have the potential of reducing the harm that comes one’s way, but it can never insure against it.
Tragedy speaks to the most fundamental questions of politics.5 It offers a compelling critique of power, showing why and how it does not readily translate into influence, but also how it might help advance goals when suitably masked, used in support of shared goals, and with the willing cooperation of others. It provides insights into the role of a great power that are counterintuitive to the beliefs of Americans fed on a steady diet of American might, particularism, and the need to act as the world’s policeman. Tragedy suggests that only rarely is there any agreement about national interest or how to advance it because people have differing beliefs, aspirations, and expectations. There is no way of adjudicating between clashing value systems. Rather, we must find ways of living with differences at home and abroad and the conflicts they generate while minimizing their negative consequences, and when possible, working around them to advance common goals.
Tragedy indicates that powerful people and states are their own worst enemies. Success goes to their heads. They seek further wealth and status, and in ways that threaten what they already have. This was true of Philip II’s Spain, the France of Louis XIV and Napoleon, and the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. The US gives evidence of the same pathology. True influence is based on shared identities that build common interests and make others willing to contribute to joint projects and possibly accept another state’s leadership in carrying them out. Bribing and coercing others to do as you want—even more evident in the current administration—is costly and works only as long as others fear or need you. When they no longer do, or when your power ebbs, they will turn on you with a vengeance. Tragedy teaches us that settling for less often results i...