Series: What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals (I)

by William R. Polk

Mr. Polk taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1961 when he was appointed a member of the Policy Planning Council of the US State Department. In 1965 he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Subsequently, he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his books are The United States and the Arab World, The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century, Neighbors and Strangers: the Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs and the just-published Understanding Iraq. Other of his writings can be accessed on www.williampolk.com.

Editor's Note: This is the first in a six-part series by Mr. Polk exploring the full range of American foreign policy issues. As he points out, "the comprehensiveness is crucial because merely dickering with aspects of the American approach to the world won't work; what we need is a coherent policy." Click here to read the other articles in this series.

Æsop was one of the first commentators who sought to guide rulers toward the understanding that real power did not always arise from force and violence. Living in a time known as “The Age of the Tyrants,” when rulers regarded anyone who questioned their dominance as a subversive, Æsop reproved them indirectly with a fable. The Sun and The Wind , he said, were disputing over which was the more powerful. To settle their argument, they agreed on a contest -- which could make a tiny human down on Earth take off his cloak. Going first, Wind hurled himself on the luckless fellow with hurricane force. But the harder the gale buffeted him, the more tightly did the man wrap himself in his cloak. When his “shock and awe” did not work, Wind finally gave up. Then came the turn of Sun. He did not frighten the man as Wind had done but beguiled him. Warmed by his rays, the man threw off his heavy cloak. From a necessary protector against Wind, he found that it had become an uncomfortable burden.

No more than in Æsop’s time are rulers today happy to receive admonitions, but now we assert our right as citizens to reprove them. Here I will put aside issues of law or morality to focus simply on effectiveness. I will argue that, in Æsop’s terms, creating an environment of mutual interest works better than threat. Some people will dismiss as naïve the notion that leadership can replace force in a world of great danger where evil is seen to be lurking in all the continents. In part, of course, they are right because this approach to the world is self-fulfilling. Treating others as evil and threatening them with destruction, as I showed in the previous essay, causes them to fear America’s power and threat. Buffeted or fearing to be buffeted by the modern military equivalent of Æsop’s Wind, at least some of them will wrap themselves more tightly in the “cloak” of nuclear power. Others will seek different but also dangerous means to protect themselves while they grudgingly and temporarily do as they are compelled or bribed to do. Æsop’s Sun was certainly not less powerful than Wind. Æsop was not arguing for weakness or passivity. Certainly not for isolationism. Rather he realized that Sun could use its immense power in ways that were effective because they did not terrify but created conditions in which Æsop’s man was led to see that his own best interest was to do what Sun wanted. Here I will outline the dimensions and attributes of a “warm leadership” that is more likely than threat and violence to create the peace and security for which we all yearn.

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The precondition for the formulation of a successful policy is the recognition that “Wind” has not worked. “Improving” on Wind, increasing the power, the reach and the level of military threat, that America can direct toward others will almost certainly be self-defeating. But, despite our national proclivity to shortcuts, there are no gimmicks or “quick fixes” for America‘s dilemma. Therefore, it is time for a general reassessment of where we are today and of the direction in which we are heading.

As I have argued in the previous essay, despite America’s vast resources and immense power, America is not safer today than a decade or even a generation ago.. We are losing the war in Iraq,1 are certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan,2 have embarked upon a campaign against terrorism that is not working,3 all at enormous cost to ourselves and future generations.4 More of the same, respected business and government statesmen believe, will bankrupt us. But that is what we are told we must do. Indeed, we are told that we must do so in ways that terrify even America’s few remaining allies. The latest official statement of American policy indicates that we are not heeding these warnings but are heading in the opposite direction.

The 2005 “National Defense Strategy of the United States of America”5 makes the United States appear to be a rogue state. It asserts that America will do anything it deems to be in its interest anywhere and anytime it chooses regardless of the interests of others and even in violation of its treaty obligations. In this document, the Bush administration has adopted the role of the lone “gun slinger,” a figure who may stand tall in American mythology, and so caters to the John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movie image so popular among us, but whom even the real, rather than the silver screen, communities in the Wild West refused to tolerate. The world community is likely to do on a larger scale just what the real communities of the Wild West did: seek to curb or break our frightening power. In extreme cases, states like North Korea will seek the ultimate protection, nuclear weapons; national non-states cannot – yet -- compete on the nuclear level but they can and will use the weapon of the weak, terrorism. Or, to put it in terms of the Westerns, shoot us in the back.

Ideally, America would seek to recapture the universal respect, indeed the love and admiration, from which it derived its influence, its real power, for so long. To those who question whether respect, a belief in American legitimacy and benign leadership, constitutes real power, consider the contrast between a city where the government is respected as legitimate and one where it is not: Dallas can live in reasonable security with a small police force while Baghdad cannot be controlled by a whole army. Historical example after example provides ample proof that even overwhelming force does not produce the level of security that comes when societies believe they are being treated with an acceptable degree of fairness and attention to their well-being.

It is not only ”ideally” that America must seek to recapture respect for its role in world affairs. It is essential. Without the sense that a state or a government is legitimate in the exercise of its power, it is seen as tyranny. That is the downward trend on which we are embarked. Every recent public opinion poll taken -- even among traditional friends and allies -- indicates that the reservoir of goodwill which for long gave America its unique strength is now well drained.6 Refilling that reservoir with what President Eisenhower, drawing on Thomas Jefferson, called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” will be a long-term process.

1 In the last year, the number of daily attacks by insurgents have roughly doubled; US casualties have doubled; over 50 American-appointed Iraqi senior officials have been murdered; Iraqi police casualties are up a third; oil production is down; and from their belief that Iraqis would greet American soldiers with flowers in hand, senior American officials are now admitting that the war may be un-winnable and will likely last for a decade or more. A senior US general presciently said over a year ago that we are “already on the road to defeat.” (Thomas Ricks in The Washington Post, May 9, 2004.)

2 Reports based on US government intelligence indicate that there is a resurgence of the feared and widely hated Taliban and that the writ of Afghan government we sponsor hardly runs outside the capital, Kabul. The social situation is dire: after three years of American occupation, Afghanistan ranks 173 rd of 178 countries in the UN Human Development index. (Carlotta Gall, International Herald Tribune, February 23, 2005.)

3 As I write, an obviously well-orchestrated and large-scale campaign of terrorist bombings has wracked London. cUsama bin Ladin, who may or may not have been involved, has not been caught. Even if he were caught, his capture would probably not diminish the capacity of any of the now-several groups we lump into al-Qa cida. Moreover, as the CIA has acknowledged, the Iraq war is proving an excellent training ground for a new generation of terrorists. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin on the British policy in Colonial America, we did not find a war of terrorism in Iraq but we created one.

4 As reported in the Harper’s Magazine Forum of June 2005, “A respected credit agency recently noted that by 2026, baring a change in our fiscal policy, US Treasury bills – once the world’s de facto gold standard – will be classified as junk bonds.”

5 www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/dod/nds-usa_mar2005.htm

6 A poll of public opinion in 21 countries of some 22,000 people conducted by the B.B.C. indicated that 58% expected the Bush administration to have a negative impact on peace and security and that, for the first time, “dislike of Mr. Bush is translating into dislike of Americans in general.” (The Guardian, January 20, 2005).