The Secret to America’s Foreign-Policy Success (and Failure)1

Is there a reason why U.S. policies worked with Cuba and Iran, but didn’t in Iraq or with Russia? Yes. And, as it turns out, it’s not that complicated.

BY STEPHEN M. WALT | JULY 27, 2015 | @STEPHENWALT

If you have been watching hopes for a benevolent “new world order” crash and burn

over the past two decades, you might have concluded that the United States isn’t very

good at foreign policy.

Just consider where the United States was when the Cold War ended, and consider

where it is today. In 1993, the Soviet Union was gone, and the United States faced no

serious geopolitical rivals. (Can you say “unipolar moment”?) Saddam Hussein still

ruled Iraq, but his military power was in tatters and his programs for weapons of mass

destruction (WMD) were being dismantled. The Oslo Accords made Middle East peace

seem tantalizingly close; al Qaeda was not yet a major force; and Iran possessed

exactly zeronuclear centrifuges. A “third wave” of democratic expansion was

underway, and sophisticated observers from Thomas Friedman to Francis Fukuyama

thought humankind had no choice but to embrace market-based democracy, individual

freedom, the rule of law, and other familiar liberal values.

We’ve seen a parade of bipartisan foreign-policy debacles ever since, including the

folly of “dual containment,” the emergence of al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, the

catastrophic war in Iraq, and years of incompetent U.S. stewardship of the Israeli-

Palestinian peace process. Russia and the United States are now at odds over

Ukraine, and Moscow keeps moving closer to an increasingly powerful and assertive

China. The Arab world is in turmoil, and Libya, Syria, and Yemen are convulsed by

civil wars for which the United States is at least partly responsible. A new extremist

1 Walt Stephen “The Secret to America’s Foreign-Policy Success (and Failure)”, disponible en: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/27/the-secret-to-americas-foreign-policy-success-and-failure-iran-syria-obama/. Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

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movement — the Islamic State — has filled the power vacuum created by the failed

U.S. occupation of Iraq. Victory seems less and less likely after 14 years of war in

Afghanistan; confidence in democratic institutions has declined at home and abroad;

and authoritarian regimes turned out to be surprisingly resilient in some pretty

important places.

In short, if you’re looking for foreign-policy failures, you’d don’t have to squint very

hard.

Yet no country as powerful and as engaged as the United States fails at everything,

and the past two-plus decades also contain a number of obvious “success stories.” The

United States did managed to broker a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, and it

took the lead in ending the Bosnian War. The innovative Nunn-Lugar program helped

keep loose nukes from leaving the former Soviet Union, and the Proliferation Security

Initiative of President George W. Bush’s administration created an effective coalition

to halt the spread of sensitive WMD technologies. Washington managed the 1994

Mexican peso crisis skillfully and played a central role in creating NAFTA and the

World Trade Organization. The PEPFAR program helped slow the growth of AIDS in

Africa, and the United States also conducted effective humanitarian relief efforts in

Indonesia, Haiti, and Pakistan, among others. I’d even argue that Washington has

handled relations with Beijing reasonably well, despite the friction that is inevitable

when new great powers emerge. There are also plenty of other bad things that might

have happened but didn’t, and U.S. leaders deserve at least some of the credit

whenever dangerous dogs don’t bark.

But wait, there’s more! After a disappointing first term dealing with the messes

inherited from his predecessor, U.S. President Barack Obama regained his foreign-

policy mojo and now stands on the brink of a respectable foreign-policy legacy. Some

readers may recall my doubts about Obama’s ability to accomplish much in his second

term, but we’ve now signed a solid nuclear agreement with Iran, a reopened embassy

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in Havana marks the end of a bankrupt Cuba policy, and Obama may even get big

trade deals with Asia and Europe across the finish line as well. The administration has

also made progress assembling a multinational coalition to isolate and contain the

Islamic State — and without having to send a big, new U.S. expeditionary force back

into the Iraqi quagmire. Assuming the Republican-controlled Congress doesn’t screw

these things up in the next few months, this record ain’t half-bad.

In short, America’s recent track record contains both failures and successes (though

the former have been more numerous and more consequential), and that mixed record

provides an opportunity for reflection. If we compare the two categories, what does it

reveal, and what lessons should we draw?

Let’s start with the failures. What do most of them have in common?

First, a lot of recent U.S. missteps arose from an unwarranted faith in various liberal

theories of international relations and a related reluctance to acknowledge the

enduring importance of realism. To be specific, both liberal interventionists and

neoconservatives believed that spreading democracy and markets as far as possible

would produce peace and prosperity, keep dangerous autocrats off balance, and

eventually consign most if not all dictatorships to the dustbin of history. So the United

States decided to accelerate the process, beginning with open-ended NATO expansion

and using a variety of tools — including military force — to conduct regime change in

a number of other places.

The results, to put it mildly, have been disappointing. Not only did the United States

mostly fail to create stable democracies outside Europe, but this ambitious project

inevitably provoked a harsh backlash from states that saw it as a direct threat to their

own interests and stability. The taproot of Russia’s obstreperous behavior in Ukraine

was its fear that the United States was gradually trying to pull Ukraine into the

Western orbit, as well as the related fear that the United States’ long-term goal was

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regime change in Moscow itself. Maybe these fears are utterly misplaced, but it

doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Russian leaders might be a teensy bit sensitive

about the political and security arrangements on their borders. Unfortunately,

European and American elites believed their own rhetoric about the benevolent

effects of liberal expansion and ignored the lessons of realism; they failed to anticipate

that Moscow might see things differently and move aggressively to thwart Western

aims.

A related source of failure was a tendency to exaggerate U.S. power, especially the

effectiveness of military power. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and several other

places, U.S. leaders failed to realize that there were limits to what U.S. power could

accomplish and that military force is a crude instrument that inevitably produces

unintended consequences. Defeating third-rate armies and toppling foreign leaders

was easy, but conventional military superiority did not enable Washington to govern

foreign societies wisely or defeat stubborn local insurgencies.

Nor did U.S. leaders realize that it’s a lot easier to get into trouble than it is to get out

of it. President Bill Clinton told us that U.S. troops would be in Bosnia for 12 months;

they ended up staying for years. Bush and his advisors thought Afghanistan and Iraq

would be cakewalks and that U.S. forces would go in fast and get out quickly; instead,

the United States ended up in costly quagmires with little hope of victory. Targeted

operations with drones and special operations forces have reduced the U.S. footprint

in places like Yemen, but these tools don’t produce swift victories either and may even

make the terrorism problem worse.

Moreover, this same sense of American omnipotence led U.S. leaders to believe that

they had the leverage to force opponents into meeting America’s demands, thereby

obviating the need for any real give-and-take. For years, U.S. officials insisted that

Iran had to give up its entire enrichment capability, piously declared “Assad must go,”

and demanded that Russia give back Crimea and return to the status quo ante in

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Ukraine. These are all nice things to wish for, but none were realistic, and insisting on

them foreclosed more fruitful diplomatic possibilities. To be sure, Washington could

sometimes browbeat very weak states like Serbia, but neither Bashar al-Assad,

Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Mahmoud Abbas, nor the Islamic

Republic of Iran ever caved into all of America’s demands. Diplomacy is the art of

compromise, and overconfidence in American power led Washington to forget that

fact on more than one occasion. And, of course, it doesn’t help that any hint of

compromise invites harsh denunciations from the other party and the rabble-rousing

jingoists at Fox News.

Third, U.S. foreign-policy initiatives were especially prone to fail when they involved

large-scale social engineering in other countries, especially when these states were

far away, vastly different from the United States, and riven by serious internal

divisions. These failures should not surprise, as pastefforts at “nation-building” usually

failed to produce stable democracies, especially when the countries involved were

poor and divided along ethnic, national, or sectarian lines. It took several centuries for

stable democracies to establish themselves in Europe and North America, and that

process was a contentious and violent one. U.S. officials were simply deluded to think

they could invade other countries, topple corrupt dictatorships, write a constitution,

and quickly set up functioning democracies. A lot of smart people in Washington

succumbed to this fantasy more than once, and I suspect it isn’t dead even now.

What about the successes?

In nearly all of these successful cases, the United States recognized the limits to U.S.

leverage and adjusted its original goals in order to win international support and

eventually reach mutually beneficial agreements. An obvious case in point is the

recent nuclear deal between the P5+1 countries and Iran. As long as the United

States insisted that Iran give up its entire program and refused to talk to Tehran

directly, it made no headway whatsoever, and the Islamic Republic just kept building

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more and more capacity and enriching more and more uranium. Once the United

States came to its senses and began to negotiate in earnest, however, it was able to

assemble a more effective international coalition and eventually reach a deal that will

prevent Iran from moving closer to a bomb for at least a decade. It didn’t hurt that

Iran’s citizens elected a more reasonable government, of course, but it took flexibility

on America’s part to take advantage of that opportunity.

Success also involved a willingness to work with authoritarian regimes whose values

and governing principles differed from America’s, instead of imposing a lot of onerous

preconditions before getting down to serious talks. The United States didn’t demand

that states become democracies before joining the Proliferation Security Initiative or

receiving Nunn-Lugar funds, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently being

finalized includes friendly democracies such as Australia and also one-party regimes

such as Vietnam (and the sultanate of Brunei, too). I like democracy as much as

anyone, but making it a precondition for deal-making is bad diplomacy and bad for

business too.

Last but not least, these achievements all involved situations in which the participants

had ample incentive to reach solutions that would leave them all better off. Iran has

good reasons to want to get out of the “penalty box” that it has been in for the past

20-plus years, and the P5+1 countries (and other nearby states) will be better off with

Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon blocked. Similarly, reopening relations with Cuba will

yield tangible economic benefits for Cuba’s struggling economy, but will also do more

to accelerate an end to dictatorship there than the failed policies of the past 50 years.

Trade deals with Asia and Europe will also have positive economic and strategic

effects, even though U.S. negotiators are hardly going to get everything they might

have wanted.

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The bottom line: When U.S. foreign-policy officials have pursued realistic goals in a

flexible and nonjudgmental way, they have mostly succeeded. When they have tried to

do the impossible, have relied too heavily on military force and overt coercion, and

have expected other states to ignore their own interests and just do as they’re told,

these U.S. officials have mostly failed.

As the 2016 presidential race heats up, ask yourself which general approach the

different candidates intend to follow once elected. It ought to be pretty easy to tell,

and thus easy to predict which ones are destined to fail once in office.

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