Understanding America's Global Role in the Age of Trump
JANUARY 3, 2017 | 08:07 GMT
The
New Year, of course, is a time when many reflect on the past and look
toward the future. The past provides potential lessons and cautions for
those who would seek to find tomorrow's solutions in yesterday's
actions. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger wrote: "The study of history offers no manual of
instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by
analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable
situations. But each generation must determine for itself which
circumstances are in fact comparable."
While
Kissinger is explicit on the importance of studying and applying
history to policy, he is as insistent that history not be misapplied,
that the assessment of the past not lead to false conclusions for the
present or the future. Today, the concept of "Peace Through Strength"
popularized by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is emerging as a
mantra of the incoming Trump administration, its advisers and
supporters. The risk of raising iconic personalities and policies from
American history is that lessons may inadvertently be misapplied. The
concepts may be sound, but the interpretation and application in a
different context may lead to wildly different results.
Peace Through Strength
"Peace
Through Strength" was a cornerstone of the Reagan administration, an
assertion that an economically and militarily strong United States was
necessary to ensure peace and stability internationally by demonstrating
the futility of challenging U.S. power. But times have changed, the
world system is far different than it was during the Cold War, threats
have evolved, and the mythos of Reagan has perhaps superseded the
reality of history. It is worth considering what Peace Through Strength
meant in the past, what it may mean in the present, and perhaps most
important, just how one measures American strength in the modern era.
It
is hard to reconcile some current policy proposals — rolling back free
trade, increasing tariffs, pulling back on the U.S. global role and
leaving allies to their own defense — with the underpinnings of the
Reagan-esque Peace Through Strength, which encouraged free trade, an
activist foreign policy and the strong support of distant allies. But it
is also a very different moment in history.
Reagan
came to office at a time of double-digit interest rates and chaotic oil
markets, in a binary world of the U.S.-led West versus Soviet East, and
on the heels of a major U.S. intelligence reassessment of the Soviet
nuclear and conventional threat. The structure of the U.S. economy was
still based on manufacturing with a strong export component, and the
coming computer revolution was just beginning. Reagan even noted in his
1983 State of the Union address that "To many of us now, computers,
silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other
innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the
workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T
rattled down Main Street, U.S.A.," a comment that seems rather quaint
given today's technology-driven lives.
In
the Soviet Union, Reagan had a single major foreign threat to contend
with, and he coupled his push for missile defense systems (to negate the
advantage in Soviet missiles) with calls for reductions in nuclear
arms. Peace Through Strength was intended to deter conventional and
nuclear attacks against the United States and its allies by the Soviet
Union and its allies.
In
his March 1983 Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,
Reagan explained Peace Through Strength as the application of a policy
of deterrence. "Since the dawn of the atomic age, we've sought to reduce
the risk of war by maintaining a strong deterrent and by seeking
genuine arms control. 'Deterrence' means simply this: making sure any
adversary who thinks about attacking the United States, or our allies,
or our vital interests, concludes that the risks to him outweigh any
potential gains. Once he understands that, he won't attack. We maintain
the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression."
Two
months earlier, in his State of the Union Address, Reagan had
highlighted the dual economic and military components of a policy of
Peace through Strength. "Our strategy for peace with freedom must also
be based on strength—economic strength and military strength. A strong
American economy is essential to the well-being and security of our
friends and allies. The restoration of a strong, healthy American
economy has been and remains one of the central pillars of our foreign
policy." The dual concepts of a strong domestic American economy and a
strong defense capability were tied together into a single strategy with
a global focus.
The incoming U.S. administration has
picked up on these two themes and revived the Peace Through Strength
concept. The focus is on rebuilding the American economy through manufacturing,
infrastructure development and tax reform, and on strengthening
American defense in part through an expansion of nuclear capacity. But
the conditions are different now. Manufacturing and exports are no
longer as important to the U.S. economy, technology has created entire
new sectors of economic activity, and trade patterns have expanded into
massive networks spanning continents. Interest rates in double digits
when Reagan took office are barely rising above record lows today, and
oil prices remain hovering near lows, while U.S. domestic production is
on the rise. Technology has advanced the tools of warfare and disruption
into the cyber realm, reducing the speed and confidence of identifying
the perpetrator and altering the perception of risk and reward for state
powers as well as non-state actors.
And,
of course, there is no Soviet Union. Rather than a single superpower
adversary, the United States faces the emergence of several regional
powers, none exactly an opponent, but each seeking to assert its own
interests in the face of the single remaining global hegemon. The threat
is seen less as a battle between nuclear-armed superpowers than as a
struggle against non-state actors with a very different risk-reward
calculus. It is not clear, for example, that a strong nuclear force will
deter terrorist attacks by non-state actors and their sympathizers.
Even the large-scale U.S. military response in Afghanistan after the
9/11 attacks did not stop the later emergence of the Islamic State or
its promotion of militant attacks against American allies, interests and
homeland.
Reagan's
Peace Through Strength was more than simply about making America great:
Reagan asserted America was already great but just faced some problems.
His policy was about making America strong internally and externally so
it could carry out its broader global mission of spreading democracy.
Underlying Reagan's policies was the recognition that American
exceptionalism derived not only from its being powerful, but from its
responsibility to spread the American system to other countries. In the
super hero trope, great responsibility came with great power.
Beacon vs. Missionary
Exceptionalism
has long been a conceptual underpinning of American foreign and
domestic policy. America's founding myths perpetuate the idea that this
is a unique country, one that has refined a system of government and
personal freedoms that are not merely the result of local conditions,
but universal in application. The debate among American leadership, as
Kissinger highlighted, has long centered on whether to be the light on
the hill, semi-isolated but a shining beacon for others to emulate, or
to be the active crusading missionary, taking a direct role in bringing
American principles and systems to the world.
Reagan
was no isolationist; he did not seek retrenchment or withdrawal from
the global role of the United States. Instead, he promoted
internationalism, free trade, active financial and defense support of
allies, and a hands-on approach to world affairs. The Reagan
administration sought through strength a greater capacity to fulfill
what he saw as the U.S. role as the leader of the West, the bringer of
democracy, and the guiding light to the world.
It
is this broader mission that appears, at least on the surface, to be
lacking in the incoming administration's expression of Peace Through
Strength. America is exceptional, but exceptional and alone, responsible
for itself but not others. The goal is to make America great, but it is
unclear to what end. In part this may be the wide swing reaction to the
perception that the current Obama administration often appeared to
focus on the interests, concerns, or verbal preferences of others over
those of the United States. In times of transition the pendulum often
swings wide before it moves a back a little toward the center. Reagan's
policies were a far cry from those of his predecessor, and Barack Obama
shaped himself as the antithesis of what was derided as the cowboy-esque
tendencies of the George W. Bush administration. In each case, though,
the realities of the global system ultimately tempered at least some of
the rhetorical and ideological differences, or at least their
application.'
Perhaps the biggest challenge currently is simply understanding just
how to measure American power in the modern world. During the Cold War,
the intelligence community produced so-called "net assessments" and
National Intelligence Estimates for
the president and the administration to measure the net balance between
different aspects of American and Soviet power and those of their
alliance structures. These included economic, social, political and, of
course, military comparisons, though the latter frequently defaulted to
bean-counter comparisons of the numbers of systems rather than providing
a holistic look at their overall effectiveness. The dissolution of the
Soviet Union and the Communist bloc gave rise to a clear preponderance
of U.S. economic, cultural, political and militarily power.
But
that massive gap is narrowing, not necessarily due to a decline in
overall U.S. strength, but rather to the rise of regional powers —
notably China and
the re-emergence of Russia, but also smaller regional groupings that
have been growing economically and militarily. Many worldwide argue that
the United States should no longer be the default global leader, that
other countries have the right to take their turn at broader
international leadership, and that U.S. ideals are not universal and so
should not be asserted as such. The diffusion of global power is also
creating a diffusion of global ideals. Global and domestic resistance to
perceived over-globalization is strong, and the ability of the United
States to assert its ideals and its right to lead the global system is
increasingly challenged from without and within.
In relative strength, the United States is losing ground, particularly by measures from the beginning of the post-Cold War period.
But that does not mean that any other single power will soon overtake
the United States. The United States remains the single largest economy
and the single most powerful military force in the world. The question
is perhaps not whether the United States has strength, but how it
intends to apply that strength, and whether the United States has vision
beyond itself.