Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Spencer Ackerman’s article on the “Obama Doctrine” is quite good at exploring what actually makes Obama different and gets at why I think Obama is a much better candidate than Clinton on the one area where the President has the most power to implement policy. But, and this may be the only time ever, I have to agree with Michael Goldfarb that Obama’s idea of “dignity promotion” and using development to drain the swamp for terrorism is a little shallow and misguided:

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

I’m all for promoting “dignity” and economic development. I want more foreign aid, smarter spending on health care initiatives in the developing world and have us not deploy democracy promotion solely aginst regimes I don’t like. But the idea that addressing the issues of poverty and disease have much to do with terrorism is, sadly, just substituting the Bush Doctrine for the Obama Doctrine. Let me explain.

The connection between poverty – like, dire, one dollar a day, lethal poverty – and terrorism does not exist. Most anti-American terrorists come from middle class, professional, educated backgrounds. Hell, they are disproportionally engineers. Goldfarb is right to point out that if poverty was the root cause of terrorism, we’d see more terrorists from Burkino Faso and Congo. But no, we see them from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world. The idea that Africa is the next breeding ground for terrorism and anti Americanism, while a well intentioned way to get us to pay attention to a place where millions die of poverty and preventable diseases, is misguided. All the operational problems that plague terrorists groups today – funding, logistics, evading detection, law enforcement at the borders – would be well magnified for any hypothetical African terrorists. But even as I’m writing this, I’m still a little shocked that I have to disprove that there are really any substantial national security threats emanating from Africa. Unless Obama sees China’s resource competition as anything worth orienting our foreign policy around, then I do not really know what Scott Gration is getting at when he says:

“Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I’m concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years.”

Sure, this will be a big problem for Africa, and since I’m a cosmopolitan utilitarian, I think the US should do something smart to help out, but to say that we ought to shift our foreign policy to deal with this challenge doesn’t make much sense. All the factors that brewed in the Middle East to create the threat of terrorism – history of imperialism, support for dictatorial regimes, frustrated opportunities for educated people, lots of money sloshing around, Salafi extremism – just aren’t present in Africa. To date, most of our military interventions there have just been failed attempts at extending the War on Terror to the Horn, just look at our boondoggle in Somalia.

But I’m not surprised that a team who wants to “end the mindset that brought us to war” is endorsing this type of development-cum-anti terrorism strategy. Because what I really think is that Obama ought to do is end the war on terror as some grand ideological/foreign policy project and pay attention to other pressing foreign policy issues – nonproliferation or public health in Africa. But we can’t do that in America, and much of our foreign policy apparatus is based around there being grand unifying themes for a presidency.

So when Obama wants to address these really substantial foreign policy issues, like disease and poverty in Africa, he can’t just say “we have to move because millions of people are dying,” instead, he has to say “these millions of poor people dying because they are poor is a threat to us.” It may well be true that the only way to mobilize around these types of issues is to “securitize” them and frame them in the context of a security/foreign policy, but there are worries that this could lead our military, diplomatic and foreign policy pros to not focus on issues in which they have real expertise, like nonproliferation, while at the same time confusing what should be humanitarianism with implementing the foreign policy goals of the US.

If Obama really wanted a paradigm shift in how we view foreign policy, he wouldn’t replace the Bush Doctrine with the Obama Doctrine, but instead question why we need to have such overarching foreign policy visions or doctrines in the first place. Good old liberal internationalism supplemented with an appreciation for counterinsurgency and humanitarianism would do just fine, thank you very much.

PS – This does not represent the entirety of my thought on the Obama foreign policy or this article. More is surely forthcoming as the election plays out.