Daily Times

Multilateralism and selective engagement represent the two key United States foreign policy strategies. At least, this is the central premise of Perry Anderson’s book, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Anderson is a British historian, often identified as Western Marxist in leaning. Here, I hope to take a closer look at certain ideas discussed in the aforementioned work.

According to Anderson, the US largely views its imperial project through the Wilsonianlens; meaning that of liberal internationalism. Among the prominent thinkers from this camp are Michael Mandelbaum and John Ikenberry.

“For Mandelbaum, the story of the twentieth century was ‘a Whig history with a vengeance’: the triumph of the Wilsonian triad of peace, democracy and free markets.

These were the ideas that finished off the Soviet Union, bringing the Cold War to a victorious end as its rulers succumbed to their attractive force”. However, the full Wilsonian triad has yet to accomplish universally to “incorporate Russia and China fully into the liberal world order, as the earlier illiberal powers of Germany and Japan were made over from challengers into pillars of the system, after the war”.

Anderson says that Mandelbaum thought it was a mistake for the Bill Clinton White House to expand NATO eastwards, terming the move to the “a foolish provocation of Russia, jeopardising its integration into a consensual ecumene after the Cold War”.

The primary focus of Wilsonianism was always Europe (Central and Western), something that Anderson overlooks. Yet while this proved rather limited in scope — it didn’t stopthe US from viewing the world through the European prism, despite this in no way representing a microcosm of the latter

Clinton, however, could boast of the World Trade Organisation being established on his watch; as well as paving the way for Chinese membership. “Proud of his role under (US President Jimmy) Carter in negotiating diplomatic relations with Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow, (Zbigniew) Brzezinski — like (Henry) Kissinger, for the same reasons — has consistently warned against any policies that could be construed as building a coalition against China, which was inevitably going to become the dominant global  power. The best course would clearly be to co-opt a democratising and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation.”

Yet the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterbalancing force, for Anderson, offered the necessary latitude to see other factors challenge Washington.

“For with the extinction of the USSR, the US had become a unipolar power, tempted to act not by common rules it observed, but simply by relationships it established, leaving its traditional allies with less motive to defer to it just as new transnational fevers and forces — conspicuously terrorism — required a new set of responses”. Thus consequent expansion of the area of allies becomes difficult for Washington to manage.

For Anderson, two enduring traditions of American foreign policy have never stopped competing with each other. “In Kissinger’s version, the two legacies that matter are lines that descend respectively from Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson: the first, a realist resolve to maintain a balance of power in the world; the second, an idealist commitment to put an end to arbitrary powers everywhere.”

In other words, in the realm of foreign affairs there is constant oscillation between two opposing strains of American nationalism: “the economic and political realism of the tradition represented by the first Roosevelt, and the preceptorial and religious moralism consecrated by Wilson”. Interestingly, within the domain of realism itself, Washington is torn between two of its leading proponents: “Where Kissinger fancied himself as the heir to balance-of-power statesmen of the Old World, Brzezinski comes from the later, and quite distinct, line of geopolitics.”

The primary focus of Wilsonianism, however, was always Europe (Central and Western), especially the mutual disputes among the countries of that continent; something that Anderson overlooks. Thus we may say that Wilsonianism was rather limited in scope.

Though this didn’t stop the US from viewing the world through the European prism, despite it in no way representing a microcosm of the latter. This has left everyone in a state of flummox of sorts. Meaning that while some parts of the world have recognised Wilsonian ideals more slowly than anticipated — Washington appears not to have found a single leader equipped to introduce a new ideology to meet the needs of the new age.

For Anderson, the US approach to foreign affairs has long been problematic: “American policy towards the world . . . had always been primarily defensive. Its leitmotif was containment, traceable across successive declensions from the time of [US President Harry] Truman to that of Kissinger, in an arc of impressive restraint and clairvoyance.”Yet today, while this focus on containment is still very much there — nations such as China and Russia are proving resilient.

In terms of the relationship between the US and democracy, the British historian appears to lament the following: “American contributions to the maintenance of peace and the spread of free markets were generally acknowledged. But the importance of the United States in the diffusion of democracy was scarcely less.”

Yet, here, Anderson overlooks the fact that not all societies have a positive view of democracy as an ideology; with some fearing that, when combined with pluralism, the economic playing field will be rendered more uneven still. Thus democracy is still delinked from peace and the free-market in some parts.

Inevitably, Anderson turns his attention to the most recent US attempts at expanding democracy; which took place under the Clinton and George W Bush presidencies under the banner of humanitarian intervention and wars of pre-emption, such as Iraq. “In substance the foreign policy of the two [Clinton and Bush] had been much the same. Humanitarian intervention and preventive war were twins, not opposites.” This is because, as Anderson puts it, the “discourses of foreign policy since the time of Clinton return to a common set of themes confronting the nation: the disorders of the homeland, the menace of terrorism, the rise of powers in the East.” In other words, new problems beckon new solutions.

For the British historian, this lies in a return to multilateralism; which is “the magic word for Wilsonians, but after their fashion harder cases pay their respects to the same requirement — (Robert) Kagan calls for greater tact in handling Europeans, (Walter Russell) Mead for a ‘diplomacy of civilisations’ in dealing with Islam, (Robert) Art wants American hegemony to ‘look more benign’, (Francis) Fukuyama urges ‘at least a rhetorical concern for the poor and the excluded’”. Thus there have been calls for the US to “eschew military attempts at nation-building, and seek international cooperation for its endeavours wherever possible”.

And finally, Anderson hones in on a solution offered by Art who, in a break from Wilsonian tradition, proposes “selective engagement: a strategy that gives priority to America’s vital interests, but ‘holds out hope that the desirable interests can be partially realised’, striking a balance between trying to use force to do too much and to do too little”. This seems to be what President Donald Trump going for, given that his new South Asia vision envisages the US staying the course in Afghanistan, while courting both that country and India multilaterally, whilst engaging Pakistan selectively. Thus Anderson could well be on to something.

The writer can be reached at qaisarrashid@yahoo.com

Published in Daily Times, November 7^th 2017.