One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

Ok, the election is done with, I'm already tired of debating how the Democrats should be reaching out to disaffected red staters — though for what it's worth, I think elrod in the Tacitus diaries has a pretty good premise for that, together with Mark Schmitt (see his entry after that too). Best of luck to the party as it rights itself and all that but any hopes that I might personally make some contribution to bridging the red state-blue state divide is pretty well wiped out by the fact that I'm still an elitist godless secular-humanist liberal even when I'm back home in Indiana, so I don't help much with the emerging consensus that we need to do some work on our collective brand image. But that's all beside the point! The point is I want to blog about something else right now, that ended up getting shelved until after the election like so much else.

I took Praktike's recommendation from a week or so ago and watched Frontline's piece on Rumsfeld's War. It really was a fascinating program to watch, and a complex one too since a lot of different threads seem to be at work: the title is somewhat deceptive because there are actually quite a few conflicts surrounding the Secretary of Defense presented within the program, any single one of which could probably merit a whole program of its own.   more »

One of the things I find fascinating, and maybe to an extent under-appreciated, is the extent to which the implementation of American foreign policy has become militarized; that is, when it comes to administering, informing, and representing American policies overseas, the Department of Defense has found itself in a greater and greater role over the course of the past century in general, and I would say the post-Cold War era in particular. The marginalization of the State Department from the policy-making and implementation process was particularly vividly apparent in the run-up to the Iraq conflict, but it's something that's been going on for a long time now, to the extent where the best solution for American engagement in a region -- say, Africa -- requires appealing to the power of the proconsuls first.

One of the themes of my course on the American Military Experience has been the evolving role of the US military, from a small regular force primarily intended to operate at the core of a larger citizen's militia during the immediate post-Revolutionary period to the pacification and exploitation of the West to the gradual movement towards professionalization of the services and a reliance on a trained regular standing army, something anathema in the founding days of the republic, in the post-Civil War era. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked a major turning point in resolving what purpose the Army would be used for in the future, with deployments of military governors and counterinsurgency forces to Cuba and the Phillipines and the inculcation of a set of lessons for occupation duty that I believe are still studied today -- the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual being one example. Though civil administration followed, it was the Army that was tasked with reconstructing Cuban and Phillipine society and administering the American protectorates -- just as it had been forced to do in the occupied South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Tomorrow's lesson will be on these nation-building efforts in the Phillipines specifically, and I hope to have more specific insights to offer after the lecture. Professor Bacevich has actually written a book on one of the major figures of the Phillipine occupation, Maj Gen. Frank McCoy, and his hybrid role as a military leader and a political envoy and administrator, which I read two years ago and will have to look up again to refresh myself on, because it too covered the question of the proconsul's role in some great detail as I recall it. On the one hand, I can appreciate the unity-of-command type logic behind relying upon a central politco-military authority to implement US foreign policy in the farflung corners of the globe (after all, as Clausewitz said, they are essentially two responses on the same spectrum), but if it's truly going to be US policy to ultimately rely upon its military to run the show, it seems as though it will still require a serious shift in their defining missions, geared as they are now to war-fighting above all else.

Because that's the thing -- as much as we rely on the military to implement a whole range of foreign policy for us, they don't really seem to want to be doing it. When the entire US Marine Corps, often the first responders to a crisis overseas, maintains only two teams of civil affairs units (as I learned in reading this interesting report of one such unit's daily struggles), or when I read about Tommy Franks' and others' bizarre insistence that tactical military success against the Hussein regime somehow constitutes a "victory" totally separate from the failings of Phase IV post-combat operations (more on this in Prof. Bacevich's review of Franks' recent book here, it makes me think we have yet to seriously come to grips with the requirements of concerted nation-building, which seems to be a recurring need in the implementation of our foreign policy. If I remember correctly plans to do away with the Army's small peace-keeping school were in fact put on hold, but if the military isn't willing to whole-heartedly embrace the state-building mission (and I can see why they would be reluctant to, given their conception of their role as warriors first and foremost), maybe we need to think seriously about developing a really strong foreign civil service corps for these sorts of duties that can work directly alongside them in complement to the military mission. Out of all the categories we have here on the blog, I think the broad issues of "Nation-building" are the one topic of pre-eminent, overarching importance for the future of US foreign policy (in the sense that it seems to me to be, in whatever degree, the ultimate answer to "what is the solution" after we've finished establishing "what is the problem"), and it's something I'm not at all sure I know enough about, on either a practical or theoretical level. When you think about it, it covers such a diverse array of issues that it could really be almost a major unto itself, let alone an important subset of international relations; I don't think there are really any comprehensive courses taught here at BU in "Occuptation theory" or "Comparative State-building Missions" but if there were, I'd sure like to take one.