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~ “ Terror often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking.” ~ Stephen King, 1981
~ “ The State is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (that is, considered to be legitimate) violence.” ~ Max Weber, 1919
~ “ This is not a battle between the United States and terrorism, but between the free and democratic world and terrorism.” ~ Tony Blair, Sept. 11, 2001
~ “America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. We must use what has been called “smart power”, the full range of tools at our disposal.” ~ Hillary Clinton, 2009
~ “ I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.” ~ Robert Gates, 2007.
~ “The Pentagon is the best-trained and best-resourced arm of the American government, but there are limits to what military power can achieve on its own. Promoting democracy, human rights, and development of civil society are not best handled with the barrel of a gun.” ~ Joseph Nye, 2011
“We must fight the battles that need to be fought, not those that terrorists prefer from us — large-scale deployments that drain our strength and may ultimately feed extremism. So even as we actively and aggressively pursue terrorist networks, through more targeted efforts and by building the capacity of our foreign partners, America must move off a permanent war footing. “
~ Pres. Obama, 2014
Listening this week to President Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address, like you perhaps, I was impressed how much and how little has changed in America’s approach to the world. To be sure, Pres. Obama made the case for using all tools of international relations not just military power. However, the lion’s share of his attention still focused upon the U.S. military role abroad. This lopsided approach is amply reflected still in Federal Government spending. For over a decade, since 9/11, America has spent over twenty times more on its military than all other forms of international relations combined. And still in 2014, over ten times more. In short, America has pursued and is still pursuing a predominantly militarized foreign policy.
Overwhelmingly, this approach is driven by counter terrorism and counter-insurgency. Most notably in long-lasting costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – now thankfully soon to be behind us. As Jane Harman – former U.S. Congresswoman and former Democratic ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, and now Director of the Wilson Center Washington think-tank – said is Davos last week, America puts priority on “going after the bad guys.” While the overall levels of conflict in the world have declined since the end of the Cold War, the term “terrorist” is now used indiscriminately to describe groups posing a true threat to the global system and many others pursuing purely national political agendas. This creates the misleading impression that, even today, after over a decade of militarized foreign policy, “global terrorism” is mushrooming into a yet bigger threat to world stability. In recent months, concerns about extremist attacks in places ranging from Mali to Nairobi to Sochi, to Syria seemingly have overshadowed Pres. Obama’s promised “pivot to Asia”.
Key Questions : By still looking at the world predominantly through the prism of the threat of terrorism, is America risking ironically reducing its influence in the world? How much of a real systemic threat does global terrorism actually pose to America and the world today? What other more important challenges is America failing to address by this approach? Is some form of “smart power” needed to better balance America’s approach to the world enabling it to grow its influence?
Counter-Terrorism is Imbalanced Foreign Policy : As the name implies, counter-terrorism is inherently a reactive approach. It aims only at countering perceived military threats once they have emerged. Yet, much instability in the world today is linked to poverty and weak governance in failing states. These conditions have taken long to arise and become acute. So, merely sending in the troops after a true terrorist supported insurgency has broken out – as when French troops went to Mali with U.S. drone support last year – may well be too late and inappropriate, fundamentally misreading the root causes. As Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage recognized in the 2007 Smart Power Commission, a militarized foreign policy risks emphasizing America as “exporting fear”, rather than optimism and opportunity. It thus undermines U.S. values and traditions of assisting other nations to develop and grow as a win-win for us as well as for them.
Yet, the U.S.A. has continuously underfunded greatly almost all of its non-military foreign policy tools : After all, the Benghazi consulate tragedy was in good measure due to Congressional under-funding of U.S. diplomatic mission security. And United States “soft power” in terms of developmental assistance to poor nations lags far behind – at only 0.2 per cent of our national income (GDP) – compared to three to five times more by other advanced nations. Much more is spent on countering terrorism, for instance through the National Security Agency (NSA)’s massive global computerized collection of email and telephone records. This is aimed at hunting down terrorists on a sort of “needle in a haystack” basis. But it has offended and upset relations with many U.S. allies in Europe and Latin America and their leaders.
How Important is Global Terrorism – Are All “Terrorists” Alike? – Despite almost daily references to terrorists that pepper our press and news media, the actual number of real terrorist movements with global scope are few. Essentially, it is only Al Qaeda and its regional offshoots. And even Al Qaeda has been badly depleted in leadership by successful efforts to weaken and destroy its capacity. On the other hand, as the Center for Systemic Peace (George Mason University) and the United Nations Peacekeeping Agency data show, overall levels of inter-state violence and conflict are generally three to five times lower than during the Cold War. Only in a small number of regions and nations has the level of violence remained high or increased. Terrorism – far from being global – is very much a localized phenomenon by and large. Conflict in the post-Cold War world is concentrated in poor societies. By contrast, potentially far more devastating conflict between major world powers is at a one hundred year low.
Far more widespread are national and regional insurgency movements. These are often aimed at achieving narrowly focused localized political goals. Such as political freedom from oppression for opposition or specific sectarian groups (eg., the Kurds). Such groups often end up resorting to violence as a response to state repression in undemocratic societies. In some cases, such as Mali recently, the root causes of the so-called “terrorist” insurgency go back long before Al Qaeda’s involvement. Mali has long been a divided society – split between the black African Christian and animist arable farming south, and the predominantly Arab/Berber, Muslim nomadic, cattle-herding north. With spreading desertification and loss of farm land across the Sahara, conflicts have simmered with growing economic and environmental pressures. They have also been spurred for decades by the rise of radical Wahhabi Islam promoted by Saudi clerics. In this case, Al Qaeda did not create the ‘terrorist” threat so much as they exploited an existing local conflict in a weak, impoverished society.
So, too often we seem to have now a knee-jerk reaction to all violent insurgency in the world – immediately calling it “terrorism” and seeing in it the hand of some global terrorist movement. In reality, most such situations are highly localized and not part of any global movement. We need to understand them better for what they are, and try to address underlying challenges sooner. This through some combination of development assistance, focusing on democracy building, education, poverty reduction, economic development, and expanding trade and business links.
While occasional isolated violent attacks may tragically occur from time to time, ironically, despite the heightened level of security we have all come to live with since 9/11, worldwide, conflict in and between prosperous, developed and growing societies is at an all time low.
New Global Challenges Require New Solutions : Nevertheless, it is not localized insurgencies – occasionally exploited by outside terrorists – in poor states but ultimately relationships and rivalries between the major powers and power global blocs that will determine our world’s future stability and prosperity. As the world’s sole super power, the United States has a vital interest in maintaining the openness and stability of the globalized economic and trading system. Today all major world powers – including Europe, China, India, Brazil, Nigeria and others – are all fully committed partners in that system. Yet commercial and political rivalries are rising inside it. And widening gaps between rich and poor are emerging not only in America but in other major nations – including China, and India as well as many European countries. In the complex, globally diverse, inter-connected but more regionalized post-Cold War world of today, America needs a foreign policy that effectively manages relationships in different regions and with the world’s major powers. Yet we heard nothing of these in this week’s State of the Union address.
Conclusions To maintain and expand its influence in the world, America is long overdue to refocus its foreign policy. Addressing global poverty, maintaining a stable and inclusive global economic and trading system, managing key trans-national issues on which humanity’s future could well depend – notably climate change, depletion of global natural resources (such as fish stocks, water supplies) and ensuring upholding of global rule of law and human rights will surely all be key challenges.
As Hillary Clinton said in 2009 (see quote above), America cannot do this alone, nor can the world : they must do it together. America needs therefore urgently now to cast off its militarized, counter-terrorism-based foreign policy and replace it with one that fully deploys all the United States’ many talents and capabilities, and sources of power. In the long run, this will benefit both the USA, its citizens and businesses, as well as the world.
I, for one, hope that our nation’s political leaders will take up this challenge!