Word: foreigners
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Barack Obama starts with a bad hand. The Bush Administration didn't just preside over the creation of a financial bubble; it helped build a foreign policy bubble as well. After 9/11, it acted as if America's power were virtually unlimited: our resources were infinite; our military was unstoppable; our ideology was sweeping the world. Bush and Dick Cheney were like homeowners who took on more and more debt, certain that they could cover it because the value of their home would forever rise. They toppled regimes in two countries with little history of competent, representative government. They defined...
...Walter Lippmann famously wrote that "foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." By that standard, U.S. foreign policy is in Chapter 9. No matter what grand visions Obama may harbor to remake the world, the central mission of his foreign policy--at least at first--will be to get it out of the red. Call it the solvency doctrine...
...most attractive way to balance America's commitments and its power, of course, would be to increase the latter--to do the foreign policy equivalent of growing revenues rather than slashing jobs. But the harsh reality is that in the short term, Obama won't be able to dramatically boost U.S. power. He can enlarge the armed forces, as he has pledged to do, but even if he increases the number of troops and repairs the tanks, the top military brass will still be far more reluctant to use them. So will the public, which wants out of Iraq...
...liquidate, of course, is the war in Iraq. But how can the U.S. draw down its troop levels without letting Iraq spiral out of control? The answer, at least in part, is to end another conflict: America's proxy war with Iran. Since Iran is the other big foreign power with influence in Baghdad, the U.S. needs its help to prevent Iraq from sliding back into anarchy as we withdraw. A better relationship with Iran might also make it easier to achieve calm--if not peace--between Israel and its two nonstate foes Hizballah and Hamas, since Tehran arms...
...best precedent for all this is what the U.S. did in the wake of Vietnam. By the early 1970s, the containment of global communism had become a foreign policy bubble of its own. The U.S. had committed itself to stopping virtually any leftist movement from taking power anywhere in the world. But in Vietnam, this ideological determination was exacting a toll in money and blood that the American public was no longer willing...