This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Europe
Trump’s foreign policy was clumsy, poorly coordinated, and too frequently guided by Trump’s ignorance, sense of personal grievance and avarice. However, some of the guiding principles of Trump’s foreign policy, notably the notion that the US should be less engaged with the rest of the world, resonated with large proportions of the American people and, if articulated by a less toxic politician, can do so across party lines.
Yet, the West rarely recognizes that Russia, like countries in the West, has its own interests. To Westerners, Russia’s actions are part of a storied narrative: It consistently acts in outrageous ways to thwart not Western interests, but also moral and political good in Ukraine. There’s a big problem with that view: By recasting a struggle between two political forces and interests as one simply between right and wrong, the West makes it more difficult to understand and combat Russian influence. If the U.S. and Europe want to change Russia’s behavior, they must toss those antiquated, Cold War notions, and accept that modern tensions are substantially based on economic and political interests, not just on latent Russian anger, or its alleged inferiority complex. That means accepting, for example, that scolding Russian leaders for breaking Western rules and expectations won’t provoke changes in Moscow. More dramatically, it may require the U.S. to recognize the limits of its ability to influence outcomes in Ukraine or other countries where Russia also has interests at stake.
While Romney is not the first Republican to use anti-European rhetoric in this manner, he is also no longer just a Republican politician. He is one of the two people most likely to be president of the U.S. in 53 weeks. Coming from a potential president, these kinds of jibes against Europe should be seen differently. Romney may legitimately believe that European style social democracy is bad for the U.S., or as is more likely, believe that caricaturing European policies is much easier than explaining his party’s policies of anti-poor class warfare of the last generation. Nonetheless, it is very dangerous for an American president to not have a full understanding of the value of the U.S. relationship with many European countries, or to jeopardize that relationship through over-heated campaign slogans.
Although the situation is Libya in 2011 is quite different than that in Iraq in 2003, the way Bush went to war in Iraq still partially framed the decision and options facing the Obama administration in recent weeks. The decision to establish a no fly zone over parts of Libya may or may not have been the right thing to do, but the process for arriving at this decision is different. This time, for example, the administration secured support from key European allies in a collaborative way. Although much of the heavy military lifting will be done by the U.S., the perception that this is truly an allied effort is extremely important.
Believing that multi-culturalism has failed in your society, even if you are the chancellor, is not a policy prescription, it is a complaint. It may be a widespread complaint, but it is little more than that. Multi-culturalism is not an “approach” to use Merkel’s word, nor is it some kind of experiment created by well-meaning liberals, it is simply part of the reality of today’s Europe, and much of the world. The tone of Merkel’s complaint may have overshadowed that at least one part of her observation, that Germany has not handled this new reality well, is probably true.
It is difficult to open a newspaper or peruse the internet without reading about America’s declining power around the globe. These stories which never really go away but seem to have increased in the last few years almost invariably focus on America’s reduced economic power as well as the rise of other powerful countries or blocks, most prominently China, but also India, Russia, Brazil and even Europe.
Perhaps a similar dynamic will evolve globally as well. People around the world who saw Obama’s election as evidence of the real promise of America and as a reason to hope that Bush’s America was an aberration may begin to question these assumptions too. This is partially natural as American foreign policy has always been characterized by more continuity than change between administrations. U.S. interests almost never change substantially when a new president comes to office. People anywhere in the world who expected the Obama administration to abandon long standing alliances, tone down U.S. efforts to combat Jihadist terror or to seek to change the U.S. role in international relations were inevitably going to be disappointed.
Georgia, naturally, sharply disagreed with this view on the very reasonable grounds that as an independent country, they had the right to chart their own foreign policy and that they wanted to become closer to the U.S. and Europe. For Georgia accepting Russia’s sphere of privileged interest would have meant giving Moscow veto power over Georgian foreign policy. The notion of spheres of privileged interests for Russia was also clearly rejected by western powers who shared Georgia’s view, not only with regards to Georgia, but with regards to all countries. Critics of U.S. foreign policy have, not without reason, pointed out that the U.S. rejection of the spheres of privileged interests does not stop the U.S. from believing it has its own spheres of privileged interests, but that has not prevented the U.S. from strongly disagreeing with Russia on this.
The cooling of relations between Belarus and Russia is good news for the west, but it has not changed the nature of the authoritarian regime in Belarus. This raises something of a dilemma for the US and Europe who are now caught between wanting to continue to encourage the nascent rift between Belarus and Russia while also encouraging political liberalization in the former country. Of course, pushing too hard for this liberalization, which the Lukashenka regime has consistently resisted, will very possibly also push Belarus back to Russia, while backing away from supporting and calling for freedom in Belarus will encourage the dictators in Minsk to simply continue their domestic policies.
Passage of the health care bill is obviously of primary import inside the U.S., but it will also have an impact on U.S. foreign policy. The stakes in the health care debate were extremely high and clearly out of proportion for a bill that was somodest and moderate in nature. Nonetheless, Obama all but wagered his presidency on passage of the bill. Had the bill failed, which seemed very likely in January, Obama’s presidency would have been reeling. He would have been viewed as ineffective, even a failure, before his first term was halfway over. The bill, of course, passed, reinvigorating and strengthening the president.
All of these events certainly had significant impacts on the world, or on part of the world, but focusing too much on how events like September 11th changed the world only tells one side of the story. This is exacerbated by a media and punditry that focuses often overstate the impact of political events. The other side of the story, that even world changing events are usually as much about continuity as change, does not get as much attention, but is also important. Ignoring this continuity, or focusing on the changes to a degree that precludes and understanding of the continuity is a mistake.
When this decade, which is now only a few days old ends, we will almost certainly be confronting foreign policy challenges that are hard to foresee right now. In January of 2000 few would have foreseen that a terrorist attack on the U.S. would so radically reorient and drive our foreign policy for most of the decade or that we would spend most of the decade embroiled in a seemingly endless war in Iraq. However, it is likely that some of the foreign policy issues confronting the U.S. now will not go away and will remain confounding problems throughout the decade. Some issues such as the problem of combating terrorism or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain, but may take very different forms over the course of the decade. These five are likely to remain substantially unchanged over the next ten years.
Blame for the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference to lead to a stronger agreement has, in many quarters, been assigned to China. A recent piece in The Guardian sums up this view very clearly. While it may not be entirely fair to blame this failure solely on China, and affluent countries including the U.S. and many in Europe are not, in the bigger picture, without blame for the climate change crisis, China clearly bears some of the responsibility for the relative failure in Copenhagen.
This is one of the reasons why Obama’s views on Afghanistan are so puzzling. Adding troops in Afghanistan to pursue a mission that looks more difficult every day is the perfect recipe for overextending the U.S. and accelerating our declining power and influence, at a time when we cannot afford it. It is a policy that simply does not recognize how the world, and the ability of the U.S. to change the world, has changed. The threat of terrorism is real, but a policy of keeping the U.S. safe from terrorism and expanding the war and rebuilding in Afghanistan are not at all the same thing.
Today, anti-Americanism in Europe has receded a great deal. Anti-Americanism, as President Obama’s advisor David Axelrod pointed out, “isn’t cool anymore.” This is very fortunate for the U.S. because if it was still cool, the tide of anti-Americanism in Europe today would very likely make that of 2003-2005 look like a Fourth of July picnic. During those years, anti-Americanism was spurred by U.S. foreign policy which, as bad as it might have been, had very little effect on the day-to-day lives of most Europeans. Today, the continent is in the throes of a major economic recession which many would like to blame on the U.S. The implosion of the overheated U.S. economy with its seemingly infinite market for a broad range of consumer goods has dragged down huge segments of global trade while the subprime mortgage problems have created a ripple effect which has devastated the world’s finances. This should be the language of the new anti-Americanism, but so far, it has yet to materialize.
The story is not, for many reasons, quite as simple as this. The G20 Summit is occurring in the midst of a global economic crisis of historic proportions, one which raises important, although far from identical, problems for all of the countries participating in the summit. Due to the impact of the downturn in the US and the effect on the rest of the world of the American bubble bursting, Obama is forced into a very strange position, one that is part rock star and part Dr. Doom. The American president whose personal story and style exudes optimism will be, to a substantial extent, playing the role of pessimist, or realist, at the summit, as he must not seek to minimize the seriousness of the economic problems we all face.