Mr. Congeniality chooses to cede all foreign policy arguments to his rival. But you can't really blame him, the decision to take the Iraq War off the table, and make the election a referendum on economic issues worked brilliantly for John Kerry...
Why Obama continues to embrace discredited neo-conservative interpretations of political developments in places like Georgia and the Middle East is beyond me. He seems to accept the notion that the American electorate is so stupid that it has no tolerance for nuance on issues such as "Israel's right to defend it self against an Iranian nuclear holocaust," or the "threat of Russian aggression." (though in Obama's defense, there is a theory out there that argues that if you treat someone like they are stupid for long enough, they may indeed become stupid. As PT Barnum observed: "you'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." I don't suppose that we should let the fact that Mr. Barnum died in debt overshadow the simple elegance of his formula...)
Obama may get lucky and be able to ride bad economic headlines into the White House, but when it comes to the more fundamental problem of coming to terms with American Empire, apparently we are not the ones we have been waiting for. Apparently they will come along some time later. Perhaps they will be able to reframe foreign policy issues in more realistic, less militaristic and ideological terms than "we" are currently able to.
I wonder how they will manage to do that.
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4 comments:
I offer this response in the spirit of solidarity:
Unfortunately, the blindly pro-Israel and now "pro-Georgian" foreign policy position shared by Obama and McCain is reflective of the larger framework within which American Empire has operated since the end of WWII, and is by no means solely a "neocon" ideology. Of course, the now infamous neoconservatives (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, etc.) have played a major role in perpetuating US imperialism first through the anti-communist "cold war" framework," and now through a "war on terror" against "radical Islam (Islamofascism)." McCain, with his vast resume as a militant American nationalist, has had ties to the neocons for several decades stretching back to their ascension during the "Reagan Revolution" and the beginning of a new "special relationship" between Israel and the United States. McCain's top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, for instance, is a participant in the neocons' Project for a New American Century and Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, while also being a paid lobbyist to the president of...Georgia!
So the neocons, who rose to prominence in the 1980s through advocating the unilateral imposition of American power, teamed-up with partners on the far Right in Israel and allies in Washington to refocus the "Free World's" post-cold war attention on a "terrorist" enemy lurking in the Middle East. Having peaked after 9/11 and the fulfillment of longstanding plans to re-invade Iraq, this imperial structure built on an anti-terrorist foundation has weakened to the point of near collapse. Thus by working through a proxy regime in Georgia, what's left of Bush's "coalition of the willing" in Washington and Tel Aviv is prodding Russia into joining the fray (which could eventually include Moscow defending Iran against a US/Israeli attack) thereby reigniting/reconfiguring their "Long War" into a more familiar struggle among "Great Powers." McCain is 150% behind this plan that would heighten global tensions dramatically through a new articulation of Bush's zero-sum "you're either with us, or with the terrorists" formula.
For his part, Obama appears to be more of an internationalist who nonetheless seeks to protect and extend American global leadership. An Obama foreign policy in this manner has the promise of being similar to that of the Carter administration, as in fact Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski is now advising Obama. Of course, Carter was at the last minute denied a speaking role at this year's DNC probably because of his recently outspoken defense of Palestinian rights. For his part, Brzezinski has also earned opposition from neocons and others affiliated with the "Israel Lobby" (to the point of being labeled anti-Semitic) for his advocacy of a more "evenhanded" approach to the Middle East. The Obama campaign is clearly distancing itself in public from the Carter Middle East strategy, yet it is still unclear exactly how an Obama administration would or would not revise its stance on Israel/Palestine once in office.
Ironically, Eastern Europe and Russia are considered more within the purview of Brzezinski (who is of Polish descent); some in fact consider Obama to be aligned with a Brzezinski-led faction in the Democratic Party--also associated with billionaire Hungarian emigre financier George Soros--that would engage in a "realist" approach to projecting US power while shifting attention away from the Middle East and towards Eastern Europe/Russia. By this account, Obama's defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primary election was a victory for the Brzezinski/Soros faction in cahoots with Howard Dean's DNC, which is opposed to "neocon fellow-travelers" such as Evan Bayh affiliated with the Clintons' Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
To whatever extent Obama may be connected to such a "realist" anti-Clinton/anti-neocon axis within the Democratic Party, it would be fully resonant with his campaign's foreign policy proposals centered on shifting focus and resources away from Iraq towards "winning the war" in Afghanistan. In addition to the stated goal of "rooting out al Qaeda and the Taliban," this strategy has the obvious effect of placing Central Asia and Eastern Europe/Russia at the center of US geopolitical interest. This would certainly make sense as far as Brzezinski is concerned, given how he bragged in his book "The Grand Chessboard" that he personally helped bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan--what he calls the "Afghan Trap." Indeed, while it escalated dramatically under Reagan and his neocon advisers, CIA sponsorship of the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen began under Carter and Brzezinski. So beyond the rhetoric of fighting terrorism, Obama's focus on Afghanistan amounts to a 21st century version of the "Great Game" for control over the strategically vital borderlands between Europe and Asia.
His promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan is therefore the most troubling aspect of Obama's foreign policy, particularly since it legitimizes the concept of "war on terror" and accepts the narrative framed by his neocon/American nationalist rivals. By how fully it either embraces or rejects the notion of building a foreign policy platform around retaliating against bin Laden and other "terrorists" for 9/11, the next administration will determine whether or not the neocon-inspired "war on terror/long war" has any chance of congealing into an all-encompassing framework reminiscent of the Cold War. Sadly, Obama's position regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan cedes too much ground to the neocon, i.e. Bush/McCain agenda by proclaiming to end a "failed strategy" in Iraq only to pursue a similar strategy in Central Asia. The same may be said of Obama's current positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as recent fighting between Russia and Georgia.
Yet, there are important nuances and crucial differences between the McCain and Obama foreign policies. The militant nationalist Bush/McCain vision promises to reinvigorate the war on terror paradigm by folding the familiar Russian enemy into a new bellicose framework in which "radical Islamic terrorists" and allied states such as Syria and Iran pose the "transcendent threat" of our generation. The Obama-Brzezinski realist/internationalist vision, however, avoids such dubious rhetoric while proclaiming that terrorism is one of many challenges facing the international community including climate change, nuclear proliferation, genocide, hunger, and disease.
To be sure, Team Obama is not promising to dismantle the American Empire. But, they are pledging to engage in a more tempered use of military power in which multilateral decision-making is a means of balancing the perceived "national (material) interest" with imperatives of global stability. A stark contrast therefore arose during the September 26 presidential debate with respect to McCain and Obama's assessments of how the current economic crisis (and $700 billion bail-out plan) might affect their respective agendas. McCain, showing his true militant nature, proposed a government "spending freeze" for everything but the military and veterans' benefits. Obama, on the other hand, answered the question by stating which programs he would remain committed to funding: energy independence, infrastructure redevelopment, affordable education and health care. Thus while still affirming his commitment to a "troop surge" in Afghanistan, Obama did not repeat during the debate his previous statements about increasing overall military spending. Moreover, he appeared to leave a door to demilitarization open by not mentioning defense spending at all among his top priorities within the context of a severely constrained budget. In fact, he went one step further in this direction on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer (9/28) by suggesting that he might cut "foreign aid" in order to divert money towards a Wall Street recovery while not sacrificing the main tenets of his agenda.
What does all of this mean? Perhaps nothing. Maybe Obama is just another Democratic "wolf in sheep's clothing" who poses no dramatic departure from the miserably corrupt status-quo. Perhaps he should come out and declare that he wishes to end America's role as the preeminent military power by closing down its far-flung "empire of bases" (to use Chalmers Johnson's phrase). That Obama doesn't choose to take this stand could in theory make him ultimately no better than Bush or McCain.
Yet in light of economic circumstances, an internationalist Obama foreign policy would by nature provide breathing-room for the Left to enact serious pressure towards demilitarization. Team Obama has already produced ambitious goals in terms of creating a New Deal-type economic recovery based on renewable energy production. Such a "Green Revolution" has only become more viable and indeed more necessary now that the nation is in the midst of a financial meltdown threatening to rival (or even surpass) that which produced the Great Depression.
Ultimately when it comes to articulating and implementing a vision for how the world ought to be, "we are the ones we've been waiting for." Barack Obama is simply a politician and at best also the flawed figurehead of a political movement far larger than him or any individual. Unfolding economic collapse may now provide the opponents of imperialism with an opportunity to make the case that money should be spent on healing/rebuilding the nation rather than housing troops in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Germany, Djibouti, Diego Garcia, Colombia, Guantanamo Bay, etc. At this critical juncture in which a number of factors and forces are converging, our generation is faced with perhaps its best and last chance to hoist a leader up and carry him on our shoulders as we march progressively into the future. With a President Obama ensconced in the White House, we just may have an opportunity to write a new, positive page in American history. Under a McCain-Palin administration, we'll be singing "bomb, bomb, bomb," from Moscow to Tehran.
Drastic times are beginning to call for drastic measures; as America and the world appear to be at a 1930s-like crossroads, two candidates offer drastically different possibilities for the fate of the United States. Indeed, the Obama option is not perfect from the perspective of the Left. But how picky should we really be at a time like this?
As always, I love your optimism and enthusiasm, though i think you may be reading too much into Obama's internationalism and his connection to Brzezinski.
Brzezinski was perhaps the loudest critic of Obama's much touted plan to "surge" US forces in Afghanistan, describing his proposal as falling into the "Afghan trap" he set for the Soviets (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f031f936-56a0-11dd-8686-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1), but then Zbig was one of the loudest voices calling for a confrontation with Russia over Georgia- Zbig has an an acute case of what Roger Morris calls "the Baltic Syndrome" -- east Europeans driven by ethnic and national hatreds of Russia that render them incapable of any truly realistic fp analysis. But I think Zbig is neither here nor there. He says that he supports the campaign, but will not take any formal adviser role because he doesn't want to be forced to subordinate his analysis to the dictates of domestic lobbies (bywhich he means AIPAC). He would like to keep his ethnic and national hatreds pure, in this sense. And Obama for his part wants to have nothing to do with Zbig for fear of alienating his AIPAC base of support.
My sense is that there is no grand strategic thinking here, only election year posturing. The Dems have long believed that they demonstrate their fp and national security credentials by outflanking Republicans on the right in Afghanistan. They have not however, succeeded in explaining how escalating America's involvement in that country will make the situation any better, nor have they explained how exactly we are going to pay for said escalation (Fareed Zakaria had a great discussion with Rory Stewart on the subject a couple weeks ago:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0809/07/fzgps.01.html).
Afghanistan is indicative of the moral, political and intellectual bankruptcy of the Dems (AKA the "me too" party) as a whole. I understand why the Dems are so eager to appear the Me Too Party on fp issues (see forthcoming post) but I think this kind posturing lacks moral courage and is strategically stupid. For eg, I have no idea why on god's green earth Obama would choose to tell O'Rielly that the surge has succeeded "beyond our wildest dreams," instead of arguing (as Dreyfuss did on DN this morning) that it flew in the face of all expert opinion and has kept us in there spending $10b a month for two more years. He could also compliment the intelligence of the electorate by citing the wealth of expert analysis that attributes the decrease in violence in Iraq (though still incredibly high) to factors intrinsic to Iraqi society and politics- namely the Shi'ite victory over their Sunni rivals in an Iraqi civil war that successfully imposed ethnic and sectarian segregation on a formerly integrated society (isn't it amazing how dramatically violence dropped in Virgina from 1865 to 1866-- the funny thing about civil wars is that once one side wins, violence goes down...).
when it comes to fp, Obama has assured all those that matter that he will not produce any dramatic departures from received practice and wisdom.
Sure, he may be better than McCain, but that is really not saying much. Its a bit like saying JFK was better than Nixon in 1960. Sure, I guess so, but isn't this a rather dubious distinction? Isn't JFK the one that escalated US involvement in Vietnam? Would Nixon have done the same, or would he have continued his predecessor's policy of limiting US involvement? We can never know, but what we can know is that presidents can become prisoners of their own rhetoric-just as JFK was held hostage to the discourse of communist containment - so too is Obama (BHO) trapped in the discourse of the GWOT. I don't suppose that it will be easier to challenge its dominant symbols on Nov 5, than it will be on Nov 3.
My sense is that the Dems will continue to get railroaded on fp issues until they invent a new language for challenging the presuppositions of received wisdom, and we will continue to be saddled with the burdens of Empire (ie low levels of public investment, high levels of public debt, and an anti-intellectual, anti-dissent, quasi-fascist political culture).
As I said in the post, economic circumstances may sweep BHO into the WH, and may force him to reevaluate priorities once there. But even if it turns this way (as I sincerely hope it does), Obama will have contributed nothing to the more fundamental task of refashioning the symbols of American national identity, and articulating a new vision of America's place in history and the world. On the contrary he will have the dubious distinction of having been on the wrong side of that struggle.
One little addition: JFK was a prisoner of the discourse of communist containment that HE HELPED CONSTRUCT (most famously by challenging the republicans from the right for going soft against the Ruskies (the "missile gap." and allowing a detente to to take shape)).
Discursive deconstruction is not just for our friends in the lit dept-- "going with the flow" is best left to dead fish.
For the most part, I don't think we disagree about much other than how best to confront and/or negotiate the realities of the Democratic party's hegemony over the American Left. The Democrats of today are a Center-Left party just as the Republicans are fundamentally of the Center-Right. Both of course are rooted in the European liberal-humanistic tradition (à la John Locke), although the contemporary GOP offers a more "conservative" articulation of liberalism symbolized by the thinking of, say, Edmund Burke. Our "two-party system" thus presents a pair of dialectically antagonistic political opponents that are ultimately more similar than not in most philosophical respects. According to Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, this ideological cohesion, i.e. lack of Marxian "class struggle," is attributed to the absence of European-style feudalism in US history (antebellum Southern plantations being the closest thing). While Hartz's theory has significant holes, it does make a compelling case for the argument that a lack of mass peasant-to-proletariat conversion in America laid the foundation for what became a lack of class consciousness and, ultimately, the failure of socialism to take root on any significant scale. There being no actual Ancien Régime to rebel against--only an upper-echelon of citizens organized into a putatively benevolent political class--there has been no truly profound social antagonism along the lines of Paris in 1848 or Russia in 1917. Without an essentially feudal/aristocratic order that would beget its revolutionary overthrow, there has permeated the Horatio Alger mythology pointing a patriotic working-class upwards towards the always just out-of-reach "American Dream." Rather than contest the power of the ruling petit-bourgeoisie, people seek to join it.
Progressive liberals are thus often only marginally different (if not indistinguishable) from conservative liberals: Joe Lieberman, anyone? So with regard to either Obama on Afghanistan or JFK on Vietnam, one might generalize that the Democrats are ultimately good capitalist-imperialists just like their Republican colleagues. That said, we don't have the "luxury" (as they do in, say, Sweden or Spain of casting a meaningful vote for a functioning Communist, Socialist, Green, Labor or Social-Democratic, etc. alternative to the major liberal and conservative parties. We have no coalition governments with assemblies comprised of a myriad different factions representing constituencies across the political spectrum. Rather, we have two centrist parties that are in fact today heavily leveraged by corporate power. Furthermore, there is no cohesive anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist political force ready to materialize any time soon. This was all too evident during the recent Wall Street crisis and $700 billion Congressional bailout brouhaha: there is no Marxist-Leninist oriented discourse available to provide a "serious" (that is taken seriously) response to what can plausibly be characterized as the real-time demise of free-market ideology if not capitalism generally. The "critical Left" has been relegated to either stomaching whatever pathetic solution the Democratic leadership offers, or bitterly yet ineffectively denouncing it.
The same can be said for what remains of America's overseas military-economic empire and the ideology of "exceptionalism," i.e. "Manifest Destiny," upon which it is premised. As US global power over-extends itself in Iraq under the watch of a coalition led by the far Right, the moderate Democratic Left proposes only to scale-back and downsize, if not just refocus the nation's "foreign entanglements." While the Cold War provided justification for US interventionism as a means of promoting Lockean ideals throughout the world in response to the spread of communism, the liberal-conservative foreign policy Establishment now wrestles with how to craft a Global War on Terror (GWOT) into another long-term paradigm under which a new "American Century" can be sustained. And clearly, whether it be in the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires, or the fact of a swiftly "rising" China/ Euro-Asian power bloc that virtually owns whatever remains of the US economy, signs abound that the much anticipated "end of American empire" is upon us. Yet we shouldn't look to the Democrats to begin immediately calling for the dismantling of the military-industrial complex.
So what should we be doing?
Rather than simply bash the Democratic leadership's centrist foreign policy, the critical Left might focus its attention on how to articulate a substantial and coherent strategy that could challenge a potential Obama administration to move in a progressive direction just as Bill Clinton found that he could not govern effectively without sliding to the right so as to please Republicans in Congress. Recent conservative successes can no doubt be attributed to the strength of their coalition in these regards. If there is a new Democratic administration alongside an enhanced Democratic majority in the House and Senate come January 2009, there ought to also be an energized progressive coalition that includes members of Congress as well as movement activists associated with MoveOn, Code Pink, and any grassroots organization interested in solidifying a leftwing hegemony.
Hence, imagine if the Obama-Biden White House (having begun a de-escalation in Iraq) introduced a bill to fund the war in Afghanistan that was rejected by a bloc of antiwar Democrats in Congress who were able to win over some (libertarian) Republican support. The House of Representatives' initial rejection of the Bush-Paulson Wall Street bailout has illuminated a newly fractious political atmosphere seeming to produce a realignment, on one hand, towards economic populism--77 Democrats (many from the Black, Latino, and Progressive Caucuses) voted along with the majority of Republicans against the bill. How this realignment might translate into Congressional action in the realm of foreign policy is unclear, yet one could at least envision a scenario whereby progressives in the House work with allies in the Green Party and elsewhere (read: Dennis Kucinich, Lynn Woolsey, etc. team-up with Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney) to push for a massive shift of resources from foreign intervention towards health care, education, infrastructure, and renewable energy. Since a massive reduction in defense spending may be the only way to pay for the social programs that Obama has rhetorically committed himself to, progressives should contemplate how to effectively challenge the nascent GWOT consensus and make isolationism popular once again across the political spectrum. Such a reality could be foreseeable, even if not necessarily likely, with Obama and the Democrats in the White House.
So its ultimately not just a question of Obama being better than McCain, just as Kennedy was better than Nixon in 1960 or "Kang" better than "Kodos" in 1996. The question is whether or not progressives might form a coalition that could have actual influence in the direction of national affairs. Given all the dynamics of Obama's current function in American society, the political terrain would be infinitely more ripe for a major transition should he win and take office with Democrats in control amid a "new" Great Depression demanding another New Deal. At this moment, we should be working for the solidification of a Social Democratic bloc that can operate in a critical alliance (when possible) with the Obama-Biden administration to produce a progressive reformation of American society at the dawn of the "global century."
The stakes are too high for anything but a grand vision of how to work with what we are being given, and cooperate with whomever we can, in order to create the other world that we all know is possible. If we are to succeed in this albeit lofty goal, the critical Left must be willing to abandon a certain sense of ideological purity in the interest of creating the conditions that will be most conducive to radical reform and, perhaps, revolution. While the "change we need" certainly does not end with a new Democratic administration, any hope therein would surely never begin should John McCain become the 44th President of the United States.
Thus it boils down to three simple words: OBAMA, OR BUST!
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