Daniel Larison picks up on the Hachigian piece from the weekend:
What Kagan omits in his complaint is that the last two administrations blithely assumed that they were not elevating America over the rest of the world (they were providing â??leadershipâ?!), and they also assumed that they were pursuing policies that served the interests of all. Antiterrorism, nuclear proliferation and democracy promotion have been the triad of issues that Clinton, Bush and Obama all agree on in principle, and all of them take for granted that the first two are global threats that require coordinated international responses. Where Obama differs from them, or where Clinton and Obama differ from Bush, is in the execution. Moreover, all of them believe, or claim to believe, that American â??leadershipâ? is necessary to address every global issue of importance, which means that they understand the exercise of U.S. primacy as something that benefits the entire world.The belief in Pax Americana was very real to Obamaâ??s predecessors, as it is real for him, and this belief easily reconciles the perpetuation of U.S. primacy (or hegemony) with a conviction that nations have shared interests and should be engaged in cooperative action. Pax Americana is supposed to make competition between states, especially security competition, unnecessary and redundant.
As Larison alludes to at the end of his post, the goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve American primacy. For me, at least, the problem with the primacy debate is not really what it seeks, but how it proposes to achieve it.
What we have seen since the unrivaled emergence of the United States as the world's preeminent power is a (quite natural) effort to entrench that status - with conservatives seeing an ever-widening military footprint and an absurdly long set of "vital interests" to defend as key to preserving American superiority; and progressives advocating a "lite" version of this military expansionism coupled with a more aggressive effort to knit together the world in a series of legalistic norms and institutions - to "lock in" an American led (or heavily influenced) global institutionalism.
Both efforts, I think, are doomed to failure, although the conservative vision promises a much faster and potentially more painful denouement than its liberal counterpart. The trouble for the progressive strategy is not only that it hinges on China accepting the role they have laid out for it, but that states' interests are too widely divergent to ultimately be subsumed under anything but the most meaningless and toothless international laws.
There is, however, a third way - a strategy that promises to extend America's strength relative to the rest of the world, while avoiding the pitfalls that the prevailing orthodoxies are leading to. That is a strategy of off-shore balancing. It has many advocates in the academic and realist policy realm, and there is no single formula for how it's accomplished, although the basic outline would pull the U.S. out of its role as the front line defender for other states and instead hold out U.S. power as a "last resort" if any state threatens a regional power balance in a manner that would harm American interests.
Off shore balancing retains the conservative ideal of hording a preponderance of military power with the liberal internationalist ideal of working, wherever possible, through multilateral institutions without elevating either as the sine qua non of American policy. It is, fundamentally, a conservative approach that argues for husbanding resources instead of squandering them in the pursuit of Utopian schemes. Perhaps that's why it's so unpopular...
