Bret Stephens is the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize winning foreign affairs columnist. He is also author of a new book, "America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming World Disorder":, detailing the Obama administration’s foreign policy blunders. Recently I spoke with Stephens about his book, how this White House has caused trouble for America abroad, and if there’s hope on the horizon.
Lee Smith: Is retreat a choice?
Bret Stephens: Yes—at least this retreat is. Barack Obama came to office determined to scale down America's global commitments for the sake of what he likes to call "nation building at home." He is the president who, King Canute-like, commanded the tide of war to recede and declared that al Qaeda was on a path to defeat. Obama has fulfilled the promise of George McGovern's 1972 run for president: Come Home, America.
None of this was forced on Obama, in the way that an enfeebled Britain had no choice but to relinquish her Empire in the late 1940s or France was forced to get out of Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s and 60s. There was no strategic or even political requirement to get out of Iraq once we had succeeded in pacifying the country. There was no need to abandon our commitment to build an anti-ballistic missile site in Poland for the sake of the Russian reset—much less to do so without warning on the 70th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact. There was no pressing diplomatic need for John Kerry to announce to the Organization of American States that the Obama administration had renounced the Monroe Doctrine.
All this was done because the president's ideal foreign policy is to have less foreign policy. Like most progressives, Obama believes that, as with our carbon footprint, so too with our geopolitical footprint: It's too big. It harms the planet. It makes things worse. It creates misunderstandings. It's a waste of money. It gets in the way of collective action.
So retreat was the choice Obama made. And now we are living with the consequences of that retreat: Power vacuums, created by the U.S., being filled by our adversaries. A perception across the world of a Washington that is timid, feckless and disengaged. Fear among our allies that our security guarantees aren't good and that they had better start thinking of Plan B. This is a world of emboldened rogues and nervous freelancers. It explains the palpable sense of a new world disorder, a world where America has just checked out.
LS: Is this particular retreat, Obama’s, reversible?
BS: It is for now, though it becomes more difficult as time goes on.
I titled my book America in Retreat, but I devote an entire chapter to explaining that America is not in decline. Decline is something that happens to defeated nations, or exhausted nations, or nations in the grip of overwhelming demographic, cultural or social forces that not even the most talented statesmen can reverse. Could Winston Churchill have prevented Britain's postwar slide if he had been re-elected in 1945? I doubt it.
The U.S. today is nothing like the Britain of 1945, which had spent a quarter of its national wealth on winning the war and lost nearly 400,000 lives. Great nations are not felled by small wars like Iraq or mediocre economic recoveries like our current one. American innovation continues to set the pace for the rest of the world: Just look at social media, or the apps industry, or the fracking revolution that is restoring our status as the world’s leading energy producer. Our competitors are all hobbled by their own profound structural problems. China is only formidable if you credit its bogus economic statistics and ignore its burgeoning structural liabilities.
All this means that the U.S. has the capacity to reverse its retreat. The real question is whether we can elect leaders who understand the consequences of retreat and are prepared to persuade Americans that the U.S. must lead.
**LS: Many around the world, and even here at home, like the president himself, seem to believe that U.S. action around the world does on balance more harm than good. What credibility does the US have to serve as the world’s police force?**
BS: As global hegemons go, the United States has been a superb steward of world order. Unlike Pax Romana or even Pax Britannica, the Pax Americana was achieved by consent, not coercion. American troops are stationed in South Korea, Japan, Germany, Spain, the U.K., Bahrain, and so on by invitation, not because we shoved those forces down their throats. When an Afghan Loya Jirga was asked last year to approve a status-of-forces agreement with the United States, they voted unanimously in favor of it. So much for all the clichés about the “ugly Americans.”
The harder case to make is here at home. Americans have lived for so long with the silent benefits of Pax Americana—a world without major wars; a world in which English is the language of diplomacy, trade, tourism, and technology; a world of seamless communication and transaction; a world in which our values, when not the norm, are often the aspiration— that we tend to notice only its costs.
I’ve been getting this very question a lot in my radio interviews for the book. I ask listeners: “How many of you have a Samsung phone in your pocket?” Samsung could not exist without Pax Americana; without the efforts we made over six decades to transform South Korea from an authoritarian backwater into a thriving modern democracy.
**LS: What was Obama’s biggest foreign policy mistake and can it be fixed? What was Bush’s and can that be fixed?**
BS: Let me start with the second question first: Bush’s biggest foreign policy mistake was the substitution of Bush Doctrine 1.0—we will not allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to get hold of the world’s most dangerous weapons—with Bush Doctrine 2.0—a.k.a., the Freedom Agenda. The first version is a foreign policy focused squarely and pragmatically on keeping our nightmares at bay. The second is a foreign policy that’s about making dreams come true: ending tyranny in the world, fostering Arab liberal democracy, and so on. You knew the Bush administration had lost the plot in his second term when it advocated Palestinian elections that brought Hamas to power in 2006, tacitly opposed Israel’s strike on the Syrian reactor in 2007, and negotiated another empty nuclear agreement with North Korea in 2008.
As for Obama’s biggest foreign policy mistake, how about a Top 10 list? Here is mine:
10) Failing to support Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, the best chance we had in a generation to destroy a toxic regime.
9) The half-hearted Afghan surge aimed to “degrade” but not destroy the Taliban, which raised the human cost of the war by cheapening the strategic goal.
8) The failure to negotiate a status of forces agreement with Iraq to maintain a residual U.S. troop presence.
7) Six years of mishandled relations with Israel, culminating in Kerry’s disastrous efforts to negotiate a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
6) The quasi-embrace of Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, followed by the quasi-rejection of Abdel Fattah El-Sissi’s government.
5) The New START nuclear treaty with Moscow, approved by the Senate after the State Department failed to disclose suspicions that Russia was violating the 1987 INF Treaty.
4) The failure to punish Russia and support Ukraine after the seizure of Crimea, which encouraged the Kremlin to expand the war to eastern Ukraine and perhaps beyond.
3) Declaring victory over al Qaeda, which lulled Americans into a false sense of complacency about the rising jihadist tide.
2) The interim agreement in Iran, that has given Tehran the diplomatic cover it needs to continue work on those aspects of its nuclear program that have not been completed, particularly with respect to weaponization.
1) Walking away from the chemical red line in Syria, a foreign policy fiasco the consequences of which will stay with us for years.
LS: Can you see any Iran deal you would support and what would it look like?
I can’t. Iran will never agree to the only deal I would be able to support, which would be a complete and verifiable dismantlement of all nuclear capabilities along the lines of the terms imposed on Libya in 2003/04.
**LS: What will be the biggest foreign policy issue by the 2016 elections and who, among the presumptive candidates, is most qualified to address it? Who among them is least qualified to address it?**
BS: I assume Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. Her worldview is mainly opportunistic. The main thing to be said in its favor is that it’s not as reflexively ideological as Barack Obama’s worldview. I guess she would probably be a less detached and incompetent executive.
As for the Republican party, I don’t see Rand Paul winning the nomination, at least this time around. The real question, though, is whether he will be able to make isolationism respectable again in the Republican party. The GOP will need standard bearers who can make a powerful case for America’s global leadership and, when necessary, intervention, while also being able to acknowledge that the job of being a world’s policeman cannot devolve into trying to repair crippled societies.