Everybody talks about multilateralism, but nobody does anything about it. That holds true for American presidents from John Kennedy to Barack Obama -- with the exception of George Bush the Younger, whose administration didn't pretend it wanted the counsel of lesser states. Today, the case for a cultivated set of diplomatic as well as military alliances is compelling. Cardinal features of the world environment point clearly in that direction: the nature of the problems (regional stability; global system maintenance); the growing self confidence and capacity of new actors (China, Brazil, India, Turkey); and the evident limits of America's capacities for enlightened leadership in every respect -- including intelligent strategy and skillful diplomacy.
Yet Washington shows no inclination to change its commanding ways, for understandable, if not persuasive, reasons. The United States was born with a sense of superiority as well as exceptionalism. Many Americans feel that the country was born in a state of "original virtue." Our belief in that virtue underpins a deeply ingrained conviction that we are destined to be the trail guide to a global Promised Land...
The nation's manifest might over the past seventy years has confirmed it, as has the deference of allies. The Cold War success sealed it. A culture of domination and subordination suffuses our dealings with them. Modes of interaction conform to that culture. As a practical matter, American officials find it unnatural to address others as equals, even selectively on problems in their neighborhood that affect their interests more acutely than they affect ours. We instinctively take command and are unbending when we make up our mind, which usually is a strictly internal process (e.g. the Afghan 'surge").
To date, the painful failures of unilateralism have not dented our insular mentality. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine, international monetary reform, the Missile Shield -- they share the same methods of American policy-making and execution. Cumulatively, these serial errors have cost us greatly.
How can this change? That would demand both an inescapably agonizing reappraisal of who we are and what we can accomplish, and pressure from allies, e.g. Turkey and Brazil on the Iranian nuclear issue. The latter will grow -- albeit slowly, especially among our truest on most psychological dependent allies in Europe. The United States' disposition to undertake the former is invisible. I refer not only to the arrogance of the Obama people. I refer as well to the discourse within the foreign affairs community more broadly. Frankly, it is replete with "they shoulds" and "they musts" -- whether the "they" is France, Pakistan, Germany, Brazil, the Iraqis, Russia or whomever. A New York Times editorial used the former expression four times and the latter expression eight times in one editorial directed at Vladimir Putin during the Southern Ossetia affair. That broke the informal record of three and seven used in an editorial lecturing General Musharraf. One surmises that the same language is used at the upper echelons of the Obama administration, as evident in every insider account of high-level Washington deliberations. Stanley McChrystal may have been cruder in his remarks about allied
countries, but the attitude is predominant.
The language is unimportant; the mindset that it conveys is. Obama is well-spoken and polite; but "they" remain "they." All his rhetoric about alliance dialogue and multilateralism has had no tangible meaning. That will continue to be the case unless and until he wakes up to the concrete costs to American interests registering now, and the enormous opportunity costs from failure to see what future world stability requires.