Just a super-quickie on the issue about morality and 'doing the right thing' because that's a whole other very involved conversation. I'd just say on that point that there's a big difference between advocating that America's actions should be consistent with its moral principles and values versus conducting foreign policy discourse in "ethical"terms.
This is at the basis of the ships passing in the night labelled praktke and Katherine, setting to one side the bruises left over from last year's primary season.
Katherine doesn't seem to grasp how the "ethical" frame all too easily turns into a critique of past US action not only as "unwise, misguided, not in keeping with America's moral leadership, not true to the interests of the US or the international system, etc." but "wrong."
Now the biggest problem with being perceived as saying that the US is "wrong" is that, in the ears and viscera of a great many Americans, "wrong" equals "bad." They reject out of hand any suggestion that America could be "bad," and they are highly suspicious of anyone who could accuse America of being bad. So in one easy step, we're right back to having Dems who use the ethical frame easily painted as part of the old anti-Vietnam crowd and "blame America firsters."
The second problem with an "ethical" frame is that it easily becomes an excuse for inaction, because in fact a great many things we do as the world's biggest power have lots of ancillary consequences. We're presented with conundrums. There are not clear answers. We have to make the best judgments we can, and weigh the costs and benefits the best we can. In politics, "ethics" may not be the refuge of the scoundrel (although I'm convinced moral clarity is), but it's often the refuge of the person who wants inaction and/or obfuscation. And so both the general public and scholars of foreign policy and international relations find an ethical frame troubling at best.
If don't interpret praktike or Simon (or for that matter Gaddis) as arguing with you about "doing the right thing." IN fact, I think they'd probably say that long-term, doing the right thing and global leadership kind of go hand in hand, and the big problems arise when they're out of sync.
But they would argue that an "ethical" foreign policy discourse is not going to be a framework that will resonate with both Americans and the rest of the world. And our problem right now -- for the US, the world and the Democrats -- is finding a vocabulary and fraemwork fo thinking that's reasonably well-aligned across all three groups.
OK, on to the Balkans and the Europeans.
Generally, the problem with saying we should rely on the Europeans when a problem is in our broad national interests is the Albright problem -- the US is the "indispensable nation." I'll set Kosovo to one side, since that's a particularly messy one to sort out, and if ever there were a time for "a plague on all your houses," Kosovo seems to qualify.
But the decade plus involvement in Bosnia etc in part reached the point where we had to push intervention because we left it to the Europeans to stew in their own juices. Baker, and Eagleberger when he replaced Baker, had become so tired of hearing the sniping from the Europeans about Western European defense initiatives and NATO, they said fine, it's your problem, go right ahead. Call us when you need us, we'll be at the other end of the phone over here on our side of the pond. And surprise surprise, we finally had to take the lead.
So it's all well and good to say the Europeans should get their act together when it's in their neighborhood even though it's in our broad strategic interests what happens. I think we need more realism about what they will and won't be likely to do and how we can play a constructive role.
I'd also like to point to Robert Kagan's recent piece in the NYT (early Dec) on "the embraceable EU." He says "look, lots of the friction comes on the collective security and use of whose military for what." Instead of pressuring the EU to ramp up their military capacity, why don't we stop trying to shoe-horn Nato into out-of-area stuff and have the EU focus on what they're good at. And that is expanding the EU's sphere of political-economic-cultural nfluence into the iffy areas where we and the Europeans both have a strong interest in stability and, in Barnett terms, connectivity. It's kind of along the division of labor Barnett suggests at least implicitly -- the EU should leave the military capacity to the US and focus on strengthening the non-connectivity bits.
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OK, on to the Balkans and the Europeans. Generally, the problem with saying we should rely on the Europeans when a problem is in our broad national interests is the Albright problem -- the US is the "indispensable nation." I'll set Kosovo to one side, since that's a particularly messy one to sort out, and if ever there were a time for "a plague on all your houses," Kosovo seems to qualify. But the decade plus involvement in Bosnia etc in part reached the point where we had to push intervention because we left it to the Europeans to stew in their own juices. Baker, and Eagleberger when he replaced Baker, had become so tired of hearing the sniping from the Europeans about Western European defense initiatives and NATO, they said fine, it's your problem, go right ahead. Call us when you need us, we'll be at the other end of the phone over here on our side of the pond. And surprise surprise, we finally had to take the lead. So it's all well and good to say the Europeans should get their act together when it's in their neighborhood even though it's in our broad strategic interests what happens. I think we need more realism about what they will and won't be likely to do and how we can play a constructive role. I'd also like to point to Robert Kagan's recent piece in the NYT (early Dec) on "the embraceable EU." He says "look, lots of the friction comes on the collective security and use of whose military for what." Instead of pressuring the EU to ramp up their military capacity, why don't we stop trying to shoe-horn Nato into out-of-area stuff and have the EU focus on what they're good at. And that is expanding the EU's sphere of political-economic-cultural nfluence into the iffy areas where we and the Europeans both have a strong interest in stability and, in Barnett terms, connectivity. It's kind of along the division of labor Barnett suggests at least implicitly -- the EU should leave the military capacity to the US and focus on strengthening the non-connectivity bits.