20 March 2020, NIICE Commentary 3370
Prof Inderjeet Parmar & Dr. Atul Bhardwaj
There is more to contemporary America than Trumpism although the President has bludgeoned away at many political and foreign policy norms. A major ideological-power-shift is currently underway in American politics and within in its foreign policy establishment. The nerve-centre of capitalism is witnessing a historically-unprecedented “socialist surge” amid signs that the expeditionary spirit is beginning to wane in the Mecca of militarism.
Relatedly, the March-April 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the US foreign policy establishment, asks the big question at the heart of the legitimacy crisis of US power: with a picture of a soot-blowing US navy warship, it asks, “Come Home, America?”
America is “feeling down these days” and “questioning the global role it once embraced”, the quarterly review of the Council on Foreign Relations confesses. It confronts the more existential questions of the United States’ power and place in the world. It’s a cathartic issue urging America to introspect, lower its ambitions, “cut losses, and see failure as a portent to be heeded”. The underlying sentiment: the US empire is crumbling, is financially and morally unsustainable, and needs saving from complete collapse. The debate centres around whether America needs to prune its global commitments or to purge its desire for “endless wars”.
Thomas Wright in his article, “The Folly of Retrenchment: Why America Can’t Withdraw from the World”, demands continuation of American primacy in global affairs. Wright, a Fellow at the Brookings Institute, pitches for America to handle foreign policy conundrums by reinvigorating “the shared community of free societies” that the Trump administration has systematically undermined by promoting America First right-wing authoritarianism, undermining international order.
In sharp contrast, Stephen Wertheim, in his article “The Price of Primacy: Why America Shouldn’t Dominate the World”, welcomes the prospect of an end to US primacy. He suggests that it is smart to step back and explore a different possibility. Overcoming the fears of being branded as a revisionist and an appeaser, Wertheim suggests that America rein in its militaristic mindsets, demilitarise its foreign policy, and pursue diplomacy as its norm. The author rues the fact that America has frittered away the wonderful opportunity it had at the end of the Cold War to shape the world into a more peaceful place, when Russia was still grappling with the disintegration of the Soviet empire and China was still a regional minnow.
Wertheim is a leading light of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, funded by the ‘liberal’ George Soros and ‘libertarian’ Charles Koch foundations, transcending Left and Right in American politics. Quincy intends to challenge the core of American strategy that remains moored to ‘endless wars’. But it is hardly pacifist: it preaches ‘strategic restraint’ and ‘offshore balancing’: in brief, parking America’s military and naval might close to the shores of East Asia, Western Europe, and the Gulf. Ready, able and willing to intervene according to defence of US vital interests, rather than regime change or democracy promotion.
The other articles in the magazine argue for America to accept the loss of hegemony by either accepting ‘spheres of influence’ or by simply reducing America’s external burden through better governance. America with its 800 overseas military bases, spends over USD700 billion annually on its armed forces, as much as the next 8-10 states combined (most of them US allies). If one-fourth of the US military budget was spent on building global infrastructure, anti-Americanism would soon vanish and the challenge posed by Chinese global expansion would look tiny.
Foreign Affairs is of significance because it is the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), America’s “imperial brain trust”, on the verge of celebrating its 100-year love affair with US global domination. It is composed of a small power elite that has supplied almost half of all major foreign policy and national security appointees to all presidents regardless of party.
The very fact that CFR is willing to open its pages to debating America’s global role indicates a realization that “the Weary Titan staggering under the too vast orb of its fate”. The military extravagance has brought America to such a pass that the federal budget deficit is likely to cross USD1 trillion in fiscal 2020.
The emerging world order does not grant America the space it once commanded. It will have to play a smaller or at least different role in global affairs. Like the British empire, which appeased America with territorial concessions at the start of the twentieth century, Washington too needs to give up some of its prized possessions to win friends to help it stay afloat in troubled times.
