{"id":64532,"date":"2015-10-05T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=64532"},"modified":"2015-10-01T18:28:33","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T17:28:33","slug":"why-doesnt-the-foreign-policy-establishment-take-world-peace-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/10\/why-doesnt-the-foreign-policy-establishment-take-world-peace-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Doesn\u2019t the Foreign Policy Establishment Take World Peace Seriously?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to what should be a fundamental goal of foreign policy \u2014 world peace \u2014 the elites aren’t even trying.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"elites<\/a><\/p>\n

25 Sep 2015 – <\/em>It\u2019s the fall of 1993. I\u2019m sitting in my Foreign Policy 101 class at Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School of Government. The faculty \u2014 a former State Department official \u2014 goes through a list of US \u201cnational interests.\u201d The usual suspects are all there: preventing nuclear proliferation, strengthening democracy in Eastern Europe, and so on.<\/p>\n

I raise my hand to argue that protecting the Brazilian rainforest is also a vital U.S. national interest. The faculty\u2019s reaction? \u201cEr, so, if Brazilians keep chopping down their forest, should we bomb them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Welcome to the establishment\u2019s mindset!<\/p>\n

The U.S. foreign policy establishment \u2014 that is, professionals who trained in international affairs and make careers in government, think tanks, and higher education, with revolving doors among the three \u2014 plays an outsized role in U.S. foreign policy. But they fail to deliver the multilateral approach that the American public wants. They\u2019re stuck in old schools of thought and groupthink.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, they lack ambition, as the UN\u2019s September 25-27 Sustainability Summit reveals. What\u2019s missing is some vision of world peace.<\/p>\n

Exceptionalists<\/strong><\/p>\n

Using opinion polls<\/a> from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) stretching from 1974 to 2004, Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton have convincingly identified a disconnect<\/a> between the general public and the establishment.<\/p>\n

On some issues, these views differ consistently over the long term \u2014 and the public fails to get its way. The disconnect has more to do with interests than with knowledge or values. So, for example, the establishment is more likely to put troops in harm\u2019s way, less likely to protect jobs from globalization, and more likely to use the public purse to buy influence over dubious allies like Egypt or Pakistan.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the public, not the establishment, who pays the price of such policies.<\/p>\n

A particularly important disconnect concerns multilateralism. The CCGA polls show strong, consistent, and bipartisan support of the American public for multilateralism, on par with majorities observed in other countries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The surveys show a strong majority (78 percent in 2014) in favor of maintaining or increasing U.S. commitments to NATO and a preference for exercising \u201cshared leadership\u201d over \u201cdominant leadership\u201d (63 percent vs. 28 percent in 2015). A majority of Americans agree to work through the UN even when that means that America doesn\u2019t get its first choice (59 percent in 2014). Additionally, strong majorities support acceding to the International Criminal Court Statutes (70 percent in 2012), a treaty to curb carbon emission (71 percent in 2014), the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (84 percent in 2012), the Law of the Sea (83 percent in 2014), and the Arms Trade Treaty (68 percent in 2014).<\/p>\n

According to these polls and Page and Bouton\u2019s analysis, elites don\u2019t deliver on these priorities, in part because of the establishment\u2019s misperception of the public\u2019s preferences and in part because of the checks and balances of the U.S. political system, which allow a minority to block policy (such as the super-majority necessary for the Senate to ratify treaties).<\/p>\n

Diverging interests are again relevant here: The establishment has a vested interest in hoarding power in U.S. institutions rather than sharing it with international institutions.<\/p>\n

Old School<\/strong><\/p>\n

The end of the Cold War and advent of globalization have not significantly altered the analytical frameworks of the international affairs discipline (though an important exception is the \u201cgovernance without government\u201d paradigm<\/a>, which is more relevant to the economic side of foreign affairs).<\/p>\n

The worldviews of the foreign policy establishment continue to be dominated by realism and liberal internationalism<\/a>. Neoconservatism<\/a> had a chance and failed during the George W. Bush administration. Three other worldviews \u2014 isolationism, libertarianism, and pacifism<\/a> \u2014 remain outside the establishment mainstream. Elites consider these views to be outcasts, and they have thus far failed at the ballot box (although isolationism and libertarianism have recently gained some traction within the Republican Party).<\/p>\n

Despite its division into these camps, the foreign policy establishment is susceptible to groupthink. Take Iran, for instance. Although the debate over the nuclear deal is heated, it revolves around technicalities such as verification protocol or the feasibility of air strikes. Very few people in the establishment challenge the threat to use force if Iran reneges on the deal. No one questions whether Iran should be considered an enemy<\/a> in the first place.<\/p>\n

For international affairs graduates, challenging such consensus views puts access to senior government jobs at risk. An academic at a prominent university whom I interviewed in preparation for this essay quickly grasped where I was heading and confided that \u201cit is impossible to make a career in this field with an alternative view; it is not by chance that alternative views come from people educated in other disciplines, like linguistics for Noam Chomsky or law for Richard Falk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lacking Vision<\/strong><\/p>\n

Such groupthink explains in part the inability of the discipline to articulate a transformative vision. The U.S. National Security Strategy<\/a> is good up to a point but not transformative; it is incremental and even status quo-oriented.<\/p>\n

The UN Security Council, G7, G20, and other multilateral forums do reactive crisis management. A grand bargain among big powers to end war is nowhere in the works.<\/p>\n

Even think tanks and academia fail to produce blueprints for world peace. I am not aware of any credible plan to achieve comprehensive and sustainable international peace within a generation, nor of any forum to produce such plan. Indeed, asking for one comes across as naive. In all the polls of CCGA and other organizations, two fundamental questions are conspicuously absent: Do you believe that world peace is achievable? And should it be a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an economist engaged in a career in international development. Ending world poverty used to sound like a utopian goal but not anymore. In 2000, the United Nations set a goal to halve extreme poverty in the world by 2015. That goal was met in 2011. We \u2014 the United Nations, the World Bank, national governments, and a whole industry of non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, and consultants \u2014 have been discussing a new goal to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. The UN Sustainability Summit is expected to endorse it. We mean it, and we\u2019ll do it.<\/p>\n

But world peace? The foreign policy establishment isn\u2019t even trying, because they don\u2019t believe in it \u2014 and they don\u2019t believe in it because they\u2019re not even trying.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Didier Jacobs is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fpif.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The faculty goes through a list of US \u201cnational interests.\u201d The usual suspects are all there: preventing nuclear proliferation, strengthening democracy, and so on. I raise my hand to argue that protecting the Brazilian rainforest is also a vital U.S. national interest. The faculty\u2019s reaction? \u201cEr, so, if Brazilians keep chopping down their forest, should we bomb them?\u201d Welcome to the establishment\u2019s mindset!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}