America Needs a Quagmire-Proof Foreign Policy

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Global Governance, Americas

The next U.S. president can't afford to drain resources indefinitely.

Some of those who have had the chance to read my contribution to the March/April 2016 issue of the National Interest have taken me up on the implied challenge at the end of the article. If I believe that U.S. foreign policy across both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations displays a serious “imbalance between resources and requirements” that has been produced by an unwillingness on the part of the American national security community “to contemplate hard choices and entertain unpleasant tradeoffs,” is there any viable “new approach” that might succeed? We’ve already tried things like “smart power,” which, while an appealing tagline, has not succeeded in providing a template for policy. Is there something that the next administration could use to better guide U.S. foreign policy choices, a workable paradigm for American foreign policy that answers moral considerations and that provides a rationale for American intervention and engagement in the world, yet can provide a template for avoiding perceived disasters like the Iraq War, the crises in Libya and Syria and the possibility of unintended conflicts with rising powers?

Both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, in turn, proved unable to bridge the gap between their rhetoric and pledged commitment to defend values and the actual policies they were prepared to execute on the global stage. Moreover, neither president’s national security teams seemed willing to grapple with the implications of the assessment Amitai Etzioni provided: “that the world is a harsh place and that it is difficult to change, and hence we should carefully select where we employ the scarce resources we actually command.” Perhaps they feared that a public embrace of a strategy of greater selectivity would undermine U.S. claims to leadership of the global community of nations—but a steady stream of ambitious failures over the last sixteen years cannot be said to have enhanced the U.S. position.