Leading the Free World

Writing in the LA Times, Andrew Bacevich keys in on America's strategic deficit:

The point is that unless we get the fundamentals right -- and we haven't since the Cold War ended -- the United States may yet share the fate suffered by Churchill's Britain, reduced from engine to caboose in the course of his own political career. Those are the consequences of strategic drift.

Obama has appointed czars for a host of issues, his administration today employing more czars than have occupied the Kremlin throughout its history. Yet there is no czar for strategy. This most crucial portfolio remains unassigned.

One issue that gets overlooked in the criticism of America's post Cold War drift is the sheer weight of America's commitments. These commitments, and the expectations they produce both at home and abroad, have successfully bound three post Cold War administrations and look to be binding a fourth. They inherit a grand strategy by default. Looking at the Obama administration, one gets the sense that even if they wanted more sweeping change, they're still bound by the approaches of their predecessor.

Moreover, there is little appetite to fundamentally rethink the concept of American global leadership that has characterized our foreign policy during the Cold War, and post Cold War periods.

The problem for each post Cold War administration is that they have insisted that threats to U.S. interests are also threats to world peace - but much of the world doesn't agree. With hindsight we view the Cold War as a period when the "free world" subsumed their petty differences and got behind America as it worked to confront and contain communism. But in truth their were deep disagreements among allies across a range of issues and those differences have only grown as the global menace of Soviet communism receded.

From Iran to North Korea, other major players (China, India and Russia) are content to do business with them or otherwise spurn our calls for tough measures - not because they're grossly irresponsible or malevolent, but because they simply don't face the same threat from these nations that the U.S. does.

The conflation of America's interests with the world's serves a useful purpose in that it makes our efforts appear selfless which, in theory at least, would motivate other nations to help us out. (It's also undoubtedly true that if the U.S. successfully convinced Iran to give up a nuclear bomb, the world, not just the U.S., would benefit.) But in the real world there seems to be a disconnect between the measures we're looking to enact and the measures our international partners will bear.