March 19th,
2007:
The following are notes
for a speech I gave last Friday at McGill's Center for Developing
Area Studies. It focuses
on the major points of Canadian foreign policy issues towards
Somalia:
(i)
The
obvious issues of nation-building and the need for a permanent
peace-making police force without which there can obviously be no
democratic stability and
prosperity.
(ii)
The
need for academics to focus on the issues of From Clans and Tribes
to Markets and the transformative institutions required to do
this.
(iii)
The necessity of confronting
the issues of democratic self-determination for
Somaliland and recognition of incubators of
democratic process in the international
community.
(iv)
The
importance for a (very) long term focus on Northeast African
economic integration, to share prosperity that comes from many
source, including the discovery of oil in the Ogaden (the
Somali-speaking region of Ethiopia).
January 7, 2007: U.S.
foreign policy after Baker-Hamilton :
U.S.
foreign policy and Canadian responses to it will enter a new stage
post-Iraq. The
tremendous mistakes of
U.S.
decision-makers vis-à-vis
Iraq
were not based on their bad intentions as so many would like to
argue. They were
based on a tragic mix of obsolete assumptions (Cheney and Rumsfeld
formed their views in the 1970s) about the post-Cold War arena and
U.S.
lack of self-awareness about its rule as the sole superpower. Fueled by a narrow
view of
U.S.
"exceptionalism",
U.S.
foreign policy ignored the virtues of
America and
emphasized its weaknesses.
The
U.S.
spirit makes Bill Gates a role model and a hero in
Hanoi or
Africa, and made Gorbachev seek the
managerial excellence of McDonald's as he tried to overhaul the
Soviet Union. This spirit was
replaced by the same blundering
U.S.
foreign policy which had made mistake after mistake in trying to
manage South African democratization in the 1980s, Iranian
democratization in the 1950s and the Middle
East forever. Instead of
relying on the things that the U.S. does well (marketing, economic
growth-oriented economic strategies, the celebration and promotion
of entrepreneurship),
the United States responded to the post 9/11 world with the
things its does badly:
a reliance on technology for things that technology is
ill-suited to solve, a reliance on military strategies for
complicated political situations, an ahistorical "New World"
approach to human relations which made U.S. democrats look, at best,
naïve.
Throughout the post-1945 world defined by the process of
decolonization when viewed from places other than
Washington, the
United States has developed a track record
for backing the wrong horses. Samantha Power's
superb recounting of the story of
U.S.
foreign policy toward genocide lists a series of inconsistencies and
self-defined contradictions by American decision-makers. The
U.S.
supported either weak local leaders in
Cambodia
in the 1970s or the discredited warlords of
Mogadishu in the 2000s
with catastrophic consequences. In
Iraq,
it backed Hussein before it didn't back Hussein and looks
hypocritical, and even more damaging, incoherent around the
world.
The
U.S.
consistently misses the paradox of "American-backed" regimes. If groups with a
democratic backing are seen to be pro-U.S., they lose nationalist
legitimacy. In
Vietnam,
nationalist anti-American
regimes with strong domestic support are inevitably drawn into a
Citicorp-Microsoft world because stable regimes aspire to global
standards of living. But
U.S.
foreign-policy makers keep on missing this point. The
America
which works and is admired is an
America
of commerce and enterprise. The
America
which consistently fails is one which believes it has an
"exceptional" democracy and a unique role as the world's only
superpower.
(The replacement of the notion of
U.S. self-interest with the idea that the
U.S. has a special role to "create" democracy is
at the core of the tragedies of the Bush Administration. In most of the world,
Finnish or Icelandic democratic practices have as much claim to
"exceptionalism" as American habits. We can debate in legal
theory classes forever whether a politicized judiciary is
"democratic" as the Americans believe. But in a world
where the effectiveness of the delivery of social welfare and the
notion that a democratic state does not condone capital punishment,
the U.S. argument for a special role, superior to Finns or Germans,
is difficult to sustain.)
When it is pointed out to American decision-makers that their
involvement transforms a situation, that being pro-American
discredits actors in Persia or Somalia or Iraq, they view this all
too often as a statement of European anti-Americanism. However, if one looks
at the French, German and many Canadian views on the Iraq war in
2002-3, the warnings and predictions made by many who were not
anti-American and certainly not anti-democratic have proven to be
correct.
A staggeringly unpopular regime in
Tehran has been
strengthened by being seen to "stand up to
America". A terrible situation
in
Somalia
has been made worse by the failure of the
U.S.
to support the democratically-oriented Baidoa government, or more
effectively, to let the Swedes and Europeans do it.
The United States often succeeds when soft
power in used. It
is better at making 20something Filipinos or Bengalis excited about
Microsoft than it is about making the preconditions for democracy
work in Baghdad or
Mogadishu.
U.S.
foreign policy has now been reduced to being a casual observer of
scenes around the world, missing the big story of
Somalia,
while hundreds of billions are spent on
Iraq. Let us ask the
counterfactual: if the
U.S.
and Dubai had spent 10%
of the expenditures on the
Iraq
war on building a Somali ports facility and infrastructure for the
economic development of northeast Africa,
would the
U.S.
be more or less secure from the rise of Middle Eastern
fundamentalisms?
Then let us ask the academic question, why was this argument
not possible within the current
U.S.
decision-making model, a model, which incidentally still wants to
discuss issues like an anti-ballistic missile system for continental
defense. To use
the overused expression, paradigms shift and when one is caught on
the wrong side of a paradigm shift, one ends up looking as complete
a failure as Cheney and Rumsfeld now do.
The mistake of the Democrats and the European opposition to
the
Iraq
war is to see the individual practitioners of the Bush
Administration as evil or flawed instead of seeing them as trapped
within an obsolete paradigm. The successes of
Sierra Leone and Kosovo had convinced the
world community that rule of law could be established, genocidal
regimes or warlords could be contained and that the nightmares of
Srebrenica and Kigali
need not be repeated. Liberal interventionism became
fashionable as a political short-cut without really being understood
in the overall context of post-Cold War international politics. In both cases,
U.S. involvement had been either non-existent, or minimal. A new framework for a
post-Cold War world had been etched in draft form.
Iraq
permanently changed this calculation, making interventions in
Burma
or Dar Fur even more difficult than they would otherwise
be.
In nation-building exercises, Canadian and other non-American
democrats have to understand the rules of nation-building. A Turkmen dissident,
Yovshan Annagurban, is
quoted in the New York Times as saying: "He (Niyazov) corrupted
everything and everyone around him. People at the top as well as
ordinary people do not trust anyone and everyone".
Nation-building starts with the invention of trust. If one likes the
expression building social capital or civil society, then this is a
necessary condition of the rule of law. One must be prepared
to delay gratification (invest/save) and trust others
(delegate/collaborate) or there can be no democracy. There has to be peace
(the restoration of order in Sierra
Leone or
Liberia)
before there can be markets. The tremendous
challenge of nation-building becomes the philosophical exercise of
building trust, decision by decision, event by
event.
What applies to
Turkmenistan
applies to
Iraq. The
United States (and its friends) has now a
crossroad.
The strategies which have the least chance of not working
(given where we now start from) are the ones which allow oases of
trust to build.
The first responsibility
of the democratic world is to protect pockets of democracy. Therefore, the first
foundation for a new Middle east is to
protect the democratic Kurdish revolution. To do that,
U.S.
troops will have to be committed indefinitely to the Kurdish area
where they will reassure understandably nervous (and democratic)
Turks about the sanctity of their borders. From a Korea-type presence,
the
U.S.
will, at minimum physical risk to the courageous and disciplined
U.S.
military, whose sacrifices have to be acknowledged by all of the
U.S.
friends and allied, significantly increase the chances for stability
in the Middle East. Market-oriented and
democratic Kurds will establish a prototype of an Islamic
democracy.
The second task is to
create a financial vehicle for the management of
Iraq's
oil wealth. The
Clinton-Ensign proposal
for an Oil Trust Fund, similar to those that have been proposed for
the Gulf of
Guinea oil revenues,
provides the chance for an economic partnership between the
market-oriented elites of Shia and Sunni Iraq and the Kurdish
zone. Turning oil
revenues into pensions and productive long term investment
instruments is a critical need for the entire global economy from
Central Asia to
Angola
,
from
Madagascar
to
Brunei
.
It is essential that this be one of the positive consequences of the
Iraqi misadventures.
The third step is to
remove the
U.S.
presence as rapidly as possible from the zones of conflict,
following the new rule of post-Cold War national building, insulate
and incubate democracies. If Shia
cities in the south can build and manage sewage and power systems,
they have taken the first step toward democracy. The Americans and the
British can no longer be blamed for things that go wrong.
The fourth step is the
security issue for the remaining, predominantly Sunni Arab parts of
Iraq. This is
obviously the most complicated of issues, but one where boldness of
vision is required.
If Sunni states (Palestine,
Jordan,
Saudi Arabia) want to have a role in
policing this area, then so much the better. This is, of
course, the de facto partition of
Iraq
along the lines that Peter
Galbraith and others have advocated. If partition is
a democratic choice, then it should be encouraged and it will
provide a framework for the development of democratic cultures
(societies of trust and effective management) that cannot exist in a
fragmented and conflict-ridden society. This
is a difficult step and one which creates many complexities as the
continued role of the Saudi state should cause more concern to the
next generation of foreign policy makers than the
Iraq
state. For
decades, decision-makers have made the calculation that a flagrantly
undemocratic Saudi state was a price worth paying for some kind of
regional security.
That calculation needs eventually to be revisited in the new
paradigm before another complicated set of military decisions has to
be made in the future. (For the goal of
building democracies in the Islamic Middle East, it should have been
addressed first. That
is water under the bridge, but another word for water under the
bridge is a lesson learned). In the short term,
however, Saudi commitment to policing Sunni Iraq might be a
necessary byproduct of a removal of
U.S.
forces.
The
United
States is brilliant at many things,
but struggles with the complexities of dealing with
post-decolonization nationalism. Its unwillingness to focus on
the role the Americans had in the construction of the Saudi state
and its role in administrating all of Islam's holiest sites is a
form of naiveté which is more than simply ignoring the elephant in
the living room.
Its inability to see that its involvement weakens democratic
nationalist forces (in
Persia
,
in
Somalia
and elsewhere) because of its less-than-stellar (however
understandable) track record in "promoting democracy" during the
Cold War are all features of the old paradigm.
Friends of the
U.S.
can hope that the next U.S. President will be able to bring to the
international table an instant credibility in multilateralism. The next U.S.
President must have a perspective on the world which is formed not
from inside the worldview of American "exceptionalism" or
military-based foreign policies. The next U.S.
President must be prepared to frame a world view which is based on
effective incubation and insulation of democratic individuals and
groups around the world.
It will be a 20-year project to create a political culture of
trust in
Turkmenistan. It took that
long in
Korea
and
Japan,
for the record.
Barack Obama, because of his heritage and life experience may
be best positioned to provide this leadership. His challenge is to
turn his brilliance and charisma into a coherent foreign policy view
that others in the United States and around the world can
work with. If not him, then one of the
other Presidential contenders will have to grow into this role in
the arena of the Presidential campaign. From this
a new approach to
U.S.
foreign policy must emerge.
It starts with understanding
the limits of U.S. power, in criticizing not the intentions of the
people who wanted to make Basra as safe as Monrovia, or Kabul as
free as Sarajevo , but
in their assumptions which trapped them in the wrong policy
frameworks.
It will be easier for Obama, or whoever the
U.S.
electorate chooses in 2008 if the Bush Administration achieves a
limited success in
Iraq: a democratic Kurdish area, a
Shia state moving towards governability, and an international
presence in providing police and security for Sunni Arab Iraq. This wasn't the
right route to get here, but if the lessons are learned about the
new world in which we are all learning to act, the sacrifices of
U.S.
families will not have been in vain.
The role for
Canada
(and other non-imperial democratic states) is to understand our role
in building cultures of trust and incubating democratic cultures
wherever people choose to make them happen. Canadian foreign policy
cannot evolve in a vacuum.
To be a good friend to the
United
States and a strategically-relevant
smaller county, Canadians need to specialize on our competitive
advantages, like nation-building skills. Canadian foreign
policy, like all foreign policies, needs to be predicated on our
interests, but we have to be prepared to assist the
U.S. in developing a new role for
itself in the world, which makes it more secure and more
popular.
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