Brookings on foreign aid.  The idea that foreign aid--which is literally less than one percent of the US's budget--is a vast expense, full of fraud and waste, is ludicrous. We could probably quadruple foreign aid and make the world a whole lot easier for us to manage. The US defense budget could lose a couple bombers and do a great deal more good that way. Think that's not true? What if the US had invested a hundred million dollars per year in Afghanistan from 1992 to 2001. That would have been a billion dollars. How much have we spent in Afghanistan since 2001? Approximately one trillion dollars--a thousand billion. Across all the wars we've been engaged in since 2001, estimates at the end of 2018 were almost six trillion dollars. This is sheer money--not counting the lives lost and lives damaged over that period.

Why is this important? Because if we don't care about the world order, it will get worse. In fact it's in the process of getting worse now, as you read this. Consider this piece, which tracks evidence for a growing structural shift away from coordination and cooperation and negotiation, and towards great power politics, even in economic terms. As the author puts it:

We are moving from a globalized world economy to a fortress economy in which individual countries, or groupings like the E.U., see international interdependence as a risk rather than as an opportunity, and build new walls to defend their national economic systems. Some actors, such as the E.U., are doing this for primarily defensive reasons, and others for offensive purposes. Trump’s statement is a blunt and crude expression of a general economic transformation that we are only beginning to understand.

Some people think the US should accelerate the retrenchment. Today brings an op-ed by a young historian arguing for a progressive “come home, America” strategy. The crucial paragraph in the piece is this:

Hawks will retort that lowering America’s military profile will plunge the world into a hostile power’s arms. They are projecting, assuming that one rival will covet and attain the kind of armed domination that has served America poorly. Russia, with an economy the size of Italy’s, cannot rule Europe, whatever it desires. China bears watching but has so far focused its military on denying access to its coasts and mainland. It is a long way from undertaking a costly bid for primacy in East Asia, let alone the world.

A couple things. First, it’s not about “lowering America’s military profile”. There’s a lot of space to “lower America’s military profile” before you do what this piece proposes, which is to withdraw American military power from much of the world, leaving only “small forces to protect commercial sea lanes.” (That’s a direct, if crazy, quote. I mean, what happens to NATO? Korea? US bases on Okinawa?) This is a great example of deceptive phrasing. Second, it is not only “hawks” who worry about what such a massive withdrawal would mean. Unless you consider a figure like Obama a “hawk,” which would extend the category a pretty far extent. Secondly, Russia doesn’t have to seek to “rule Europe.” All it needs to do is re-bully the Baltics, Finlandize Poland, and keep snipping away at the Ukraine. The “near abroad” is part of Russia’s self-understood realm of control, as they have made eminently clear. And China—all he can say is it “bears watching.” I don’t think this is a serious assessment of real threats in the world. But it is something certain fragments of the American left believe, and a little bit of the right, too.

This will possibly be a topic in coming months in the US Democratic party primary. While there is no chance of a rational debate on the Republican side, the Democrats may well have an at least semi-intelligible discussion of what to do with US global power, especially given the new global context of retrenchment and the return of great power politics.

In response to this sort of thing, Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution has some interesting thoughts on the “progressive” wing of the Democratic party and their foreign policy challenges:

democracy versus autocracy is not a radical departure from traditional Democratic foreign policy. Both Sanders and Warren essentially accept the diagnosis of more hawkish Democrats that the United States is locked in a geopolitical struggle with authoritarian regimes, but they depart significantly on the prescription—they would both slash the defense budget and switch the topic away from geopolitical rivalries and toward inequality, economic policy, and democracy. This sets up a fundamental contradiction: Sanders and Warren will be forced to choose between waging the struggle against autocrats and cutting the defense budget and deemphasizing military power.

It's important to note that similar discussions were had in the Obama-Clinton struggle in 2008, and Obama nonetheless regressed to the mean, as it were, once he took office. (Things look different from behind the Resolute Desk, I guess.)

This is bad news for US foreign policy in general, and bad news for our allies as well. Robert Kagan this morning has an interesting, if somewhat tortured, piece in the Washington Post about how Israel has profited from the “liberal world order,” and how it is now actively seeking to attack it, for short-term gains.

The stupidity and short-sightedness of the Netanyahu government is astonishing to me, as there was a time when I imagined Israeli political leaders, because of the vulnerability of their nation, were more alert to dangers than many others. But it’s not so. And the meddling of Netanyahu in US domestic politics is breathtaking. This is going to damage US-Israeli relations deeply, and I fear permanently. (The Saudis will face this as well, especially since the fracking revolution has liberated the US, perhaps permanently, from dependence on hydrocarbons from the Arabian peninsula. Seriously, no one has yet realized what the Permian Basin means for US foreign policy in the middle east; if the Iranians were to realize the full implications of that, a lot could change quickly in the middle east, and to the detriment of Israel and Saudi Arabia.)

But the Israelis are just an example of many nations who may soon come to see the truth of Michael Mandelbaum’s prescient prediction from 2005, in his book The Case for Goliath.  Speaking of the liberal world order and noting the way the United States, on his view, shouldered a large share of the public burden for corporations’ private gain and for other states’ benefit as well, Mandelbaum concluded that book with the following stark claim: “About other countries’ approach to the American role as the world’s government, however, three things can be safely predicted: They will not pay for it, they will continue to criticize it, and they will miss it when it is gone.”

To put all this in quite personal terms: My parents’ generation was composed, mostly, of people who came of age in or soon after World War Two. (I was a late baby.) Most of my uncles served in the war. My father served in the Korean War. Blood from my family has watered the soil in Europe, Africa, and Asia. I had a step-grandfather who was in OCS for World War One, though he never went to Europe. I grew up around people injured by history, some of them grievously. Most of those people were marked by what they did, what was done to them, what they suffered. (It is no accident that Homer’s Odysseus has that name; the prototypical war veteran trying to return home, even once he had returned home, in Homeric Greek his name means “man of pain” or “man of suffering”, and it is ambivalent between giving and receiving pain, as if maybe the acts of giving and receiving pain were themselves a bit ambivalent.)

Behind the generations of my parents and grandparents was the generation of people who came of age before World War One and who served in that war in positions, say, of middle-management status (in the US, I think of figures like Major Eisenhower, Colonel Marshall, Major Truman, Assistant Secretary of the Navy FDR). In the inter-war years, as they grew into their maturity, they saw people forget or ignore the lessons of the recent past, and they saw the world plunge into another cataclysmic war a generation later. At the end of that war, they worked assiduously to ensure that no third such war would happen. They worked imperfectly. But it was enough. And we’ve now had three, almost four generations of relative peace—a stretch beginning to approach the age between Waterloo and 1914. It would be nice if we could find ways of keeping our historical memory alive, and active, enough to sustain a deep and abiding sense of wishing to avoid major war.  But in every era of history that we know of to this point--and in much fiction as well--some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

We’ve come some distance from the beginning of this blog post on US foreign aid. But the point is to see that that foreign aid may be the most effective long-term tool of active foreign policy the US has. And that an active US foreign policy, shoring up the “liberal world order,” is not a bad idea.