Conventional wisdom says that foreign policy does not determine the winner in US Presidential elections. Particularly not when domestic economic anxieties are high — and that kind of anxiety has probably never been higher in several generations.
Still — could it be different this time? Should it be? Remember, when we get to the ‘other side’ of the acute phase of the crisis, the US will be facing a world with foreign policy challenges that go way beyond insolvent banks.
Both candidates have spoken in the debates and in their stump speeches as if foreign policy issues matter a great deal in this campaign. Each argues for a significant change in the nature of America’s presence in the world. Of course McCain and Obama have distinctly different visions of the right direction for that change, and equally different theories of foreign policy leadership. But we fear that neither will state openly just how hard it will be for their leadership propositions to attract followers among the other nations that make up world politics.
It is good campaign rhetoric to talk about ‘going back to the way America used to be’ in world affairs, regardless of whether your good memories are of Ronald Reagan or FDR. But in much of the rest of the world, this all sounds like self-indulgent nostalgia. The ‘Post- World War II era’ that American foreign policy analysts lionize as a ‘model’ for benign hegemony was 60 years ago — at least two generations before the majority of the world’s population was born. It’s simply not relevant to their life experience — and no amount of lofty rhetoric is going to make it so.
America has a habit of proclaiming big ‘world order’ concepts and assuming that others will buy in intellectually and go along politically. For those keeping track, we are now about to move on to the “new new new new world order.” The first President Bush’s new world order was about global problem-solving through the multilateral United Nations — but then came Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. President Clinton’s world order rebranded Pax Americana as ‘globalization,’ with transnational trade, interdependence, and democratization uniting nations through markets — but then came 9/11. The current President Bush’s world order, the Global War on Terror, is visibly coming apart in the Middle East, South Asia, and of course in Guantanamo Bay.
There was a time when the first question a foreign leader asked him or herself upon waking in the morning was, “What is the United States going to do today?” But for the major emerging powers in world politics today — Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Brazil—that time is largely gone. They are now at least as focused on building their strength and connections with each other as they are on building good relations with the U.S.
Make no mistake: To believe that anyone but Americans wants America to go back in time and restore its position as self-proclaimed benign hegemon strains credulity. It’s particularly grating when American foreign policy thinkers use the phrase primus inter pares (first among equals) to describe their ambition for a restored American leadership. To the rest of the world, this concept does not sound friendly, multilateral, or magnanimous; it does not fix the Bush administration’s legacy. Others do not want to live in an Orwellian world where all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
A legitimate and sustainable world order that people would want to join requires new arrangements for global problem-solving on equal terms with the relevant stakeholders. These arrangements cannot be built on yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s institutions. They can’t imagine away the real differences of power and priorities that now divide the globe.
Both candidates want to claim the mantle of a realist, but to be a realist means first and foremost to accept the world as it is, particularly these three core realities:
First, countries do not want to be managed by a faceless force called globalization; they want to manage it instead. This was deeply true before the urgent banking and credit crises of the last few weeks. Witness the failure of the WTO’s Doha trade round and India’s and other nations’ preference for bilateral and regional preferential trade agreements instead of universal but unbalanced free trade. Capital mobility and convertible currencies are decisions that governments make when they see the benefits, not facts of nature. American lectures on the virtues of economic liberalism won’t change that.
Second, state capitalism is a serious and competitive alternative system. Ask a member of the emerging Chinese middle class what he or she thinks brought about their revolution in upward living standards over the last twenty years. Ask an executive of Gazprom or PetroBras if they believe that oil and gas assets ought to be owned by private companies, or that national oil companies cannot be managed efficiently. Ask the money managers of sovereign wealth funds in the UAE if the ‘sovereign’ part of ‘sovereign wealth’ is a burden or a boom to smart investment strategies. The US is in any case less distinctive on this score than Americans like to believe, particularly after events of the last month that are de facto nationalization of some of the major institutions that backstop the US housing market.
Third, stability and predictable governance are for much of the world’s population more important goals than democracy. The rich and healthy have the luxury of arguing endlessly about the comparative merits of different kinds of decision making processes; the poor and sick want first and foremost to see some results. The popularity of Vladimir Putin is not some kind of false consciousness but a real reflection of tangible recovery from an economic collapse like nothing Americans, even those who lived through the Great Depression, have ever experienced. Hamas won elections in Gaza because it beat out Fatah in the provision of social services to people in desperate need. If America wants truly to promote democracy as a form of governance, we need to demonstrate precisely how a democratic process leads to better human outcomes, not just the spectacle of voting booths and ballots.
The world is entering a period of real and profound experimentation with concepts for order, global and otherwise. Whatever label foreign policy advisers choose for themselves as the election and then the transition proceeds, the candidates now and the President-elect in a few weeks should judge new ideas by their ability to compete on equal terms with those coming from other parts of the world in these rough and tumble experimental settings. We can’t and shouldn’t try to shut the experiments down (others won’t stand for that) or to pretend that they are the quixotic ventures of people less capable and insightful than ourselves (they are not).
Most important, we shouldn’t indulge in the fantasy that the rest of the world will in 2009 simply sign on to a new American world order concept, whether it comes from Obama or McCain. It just won’t happen that way, even if our new President asks for their support in very friendly and perhaps even apologetic terms.
Written by Steven Weber and Parag Khanna.
