Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Peter Robinson at the Corner wonders why there hasn’t been any equivalent of the “Long Telegram” to frame our post 9/11 grand strategy:

Yet here we are today, more than six years after 9/11. Does anyone believe a new “Long Telegram” has yet been written? And accepted throughout the senior levels of the government? Norman Podhoretz’s own book represents a darned close approach to the “Long Telegram,” providing an intellectual framework for the current struggle that’s rigorous, compelling, and accessible. But something tells me it’s not being passed approvingly around the State Department.

What gives? Why were able to respond to the Soviets so quickly? (The “Long Telegram,” incidentally, is only one of several documents that could be cited here. Churchill gave his “iron curtain” speech on March 5, 1946, and Truman announced what we now call the “Truman Doctrine” on March 12, 1947—both within months of the beginning of the Cold War, both demonstrating that the West already understood what it was up against.) And why are we still fumbling for a strategy—for a basic intellectual framework—now?

If by grand strategy, Peter Robinson means unilateral militarism that attempts to halt proliferation by force, dismantle and marginalize international institutions and legitimize preemptive warfare, then no, there really isn’t a coherent grand strategy out there. Except maybe for David Frum and Richard Pearle’s An End to Evil. But what about the enemy Robinson wants to fight? Of course, Robinson looks to Podhoretz here, and by “enemy” or “adversary” he must mean the conflation of disparate militant Islamic groups who share neither common goals, ideologies and are oftentimes opposed to each other, or more likely, have little to do with eachother.

The problem for Robinson and the gang at NRO is that there have been quite a few books and articles outlining a Grand Strategy along the lines of the Long Telegram. The difference between now and 1947 is that 50 years ago, we had one nation-state adversary, who’s goals, motivations and behavior were either well known or could be predicted and analyzed. As far as the 21st century goes, we don’t know who our adversary is. Is it this amorphous collection of Islamic terrorists or is it failed states, is it “loose nukes, SARS, AIDS, climate change, China? It’s not easy to think up one coherent document or strategy to take into account all of those threats. Despite that difficulty, there have been attempts at writing a new Long Telegram. Proposed grand strategies that Robinson has chosen to ignore are Bob Wright’s Progressive Realism, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman’s Ethical Realism, Francis Fukuyama’s Realistic Wilsonianism, Michael Mandelbaum’s Case for Goliath and the Big Kahuna of them all, John Ikenberry and Anne Marie-Slaughter’s Forging a World of Liberty Under Law. The reason Robinson doesn’t recognize these rigorous attempts to figure out a post 9/11, post Bush foreign policy vision as worthy of Kennan is because Robinson hasn’t accepted that Bush’s foreign policy and neoconservatism have been a failure that has made the world less stable, more dangerous and America less powerful and influential. So, if Robinson says there’s no great document that will lead the way for his brand of disasterous foreign policy, then we’re clearly much better off.

PS – Dan Drezner dissected four attempts at drafting a grand strategy in WaPo late last year.