Foreign Policy in Americans' Interest
With the UN General Assembly closing this week, how do Americans make sense of international cooperation?
Thanks for your patience dear reader. These weeks in September, during Jewish high holidays, are busy and distract me from writing. We will be getting back to our regular mid-week missives shortly.
We talk about American foreign policy as advancing America’s interests, but what about Americans’ interests?
This is a thought that has been on my mind the past few days when I was in New York during the UN General Assembly. I don’t often write about foreign policy, but I do think about stories and grand narratives. This week, I felt the real lack of grand narrative in American involvement with multinational organizations and foreign policy generally. Do regular Americans have a way of understanding how our country and the people representing it make decisions about our engagement with other states?
Multinational Malaise
This past week was the UN General Assembly’s 78th session in New York City. It is a time when leaders and representatives from all over the world meet in this deliberative body to discuss cooperation towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), among other things. It’s a time when diplomats, policy makers, and journalists get really nerdy (and/or really drunk), while also reflective. Many often express a bit of malaise at the challenge of meeting seemingly impossible goals and saving the planet from existential threats when countries are warring with each other.
The UN theme for 2023 is: “Rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity: accelerating action on the 2030 agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals toward peace, prosperity, progress and sustainability for all.” Rebuilding trust indeed.
Yes, the UN and many multinational organizations through the decades have lost some of their relevance. Depending on the nation, the UN has mixed reviews when it comes to confidence in the institution. A key talking point in the Trump campaign and many nationalist movements around the world has critiqued this kind of “elitist” “globalism” of expert policy wonks that international cooperation represents — Trump’s 2019 UNGA speech said as much. This anti-globalist, anti-expert spirit has dominated press and folk narratives for years. Sometimes this spirit has significant consequences: Biden halted Trump’s choice for the US to leave the World Health Organization, for example.
Sometimes the SDGs seem outrageously impossible. I remember when they were “Millennium Development Goals.” The posts are always moving. Looking at the list, the first goal is “No poverty” and the second, “Zero hunger.” While these are noble goals, knowing the delta between goal and reality can feel painful… even naive.
The UN was created following the Great Wars that kicked off the 20th century, in an effort to prevent the kind of mass industrial destruction we witnessed. How can we make sense of the value of international cooperation? Do we take the UN and cooperation for granted?
A Grand Narrative of Foreign Policy
Something in my discussions this week that continually came up with more seasoned folks in government, diplomacy, journalism, policy, and advocacy — particularly the American ones — was “Who is this policy all for?”
There have been many a layman story to help the average American make sense of their nation’s purpose, how our state’s actions help the average American, and where our tax money goes. As the lore goes, in entering WW2, America had a purpose in being an outsider salvation force to curb mass destruction wrought by Axis powers, even goig so far as dropping atomic bombs in an effort to stop the massive amounts of industrial killing happening all over the world. During the Cold War, our raison d'être was preventing the spread of communism (and to an extent, nuclear war)—which would in turn help our own economic and security bottom line. Even the little piece of time between the Cold War and the War on Terror, Clinton had his reactionary “never again” rationality: we would involve ourselves in the Balkan Wars so as not to have another genocide like Rwanda. America was a moral force for good as “victors” of the Cold War. The War on Terror, following 9/11, was to “make the world safe for democracy” and fight the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who had attacked our country on our own turf. There was a sense that what we were doing was protecting ourselves from a violent and unpredictable enemy.
Even though these are simplified folk histories of foreign policy, they had massive appeal at the times in helping people understand the reasoning and frameworks behind our actions abroad. These stories also helped us understand how they would help Americans.
What do we have now?
After the incredibly bloody and long War on Terror, many Americans don’t buy the lofty ideas of “Making the World Safe for Democracy” with a military. Often, many people see these wars as proxy conflicts benefiting the interests of oil companies and defense contractors. They might have been in the interest of American companies, but Americans?
Absent these massive shocks (WW2, the Cold War, the War on Terror), what is the folk narrative around foreign policy today? This is where it isn’t so clear. Trump offered an “America First” foreign policy, not wanting to engage in new foreign wars or disengage from certain multinational organizations. In turn, the money saved from abstaining in international conflict could be used at home — at least that is how the story goes. Biden has taken us out of Afghanistan, but we find ourselves in a proxy war supporting Ukraine against Russia — protecting our allies in Europe from Russian aggression. But explaining it to Americans as in their interest also has some challenges — increased spending for Ukraine is not supported by most Americans, especially as the home front sees billions going to a country far away when the folk knowledge is that it could be spent here. Many Americans understand the need to support our allies, but to what extent?
An Authentic Folk Narrative of American Foreign policy
Is there a folk knowledge framework that can explain “The Point” of an America involved in an increasingly multi-polar world? By folk knowledge, I mean a general spirit and understanding among most people to explain our country’s actions.
I’m feeling the dearth of that folk framework myself. If I were to guess what a future direction may be, my inclination would be to say “Save the world from climate apocalypse.” But this is a highly dissonant and inaccurate description of what we are currently doing: we are some of the biggest contributors to polluting emissions along with other big states. Solving that problem is less about international collaboration than just taking national responsibility for our own creation and consumption. It also does not consider very real threats from very real enemies who have a different — albeit sometimes clearer and more terrifying —vision for world order.
Experts who have spent money on MPAs and MPP degrees plus 10-30 years of experience in diplomacy, policy, and government will offer wonkish reasons for releasing money to Iran in exchange for prisoners. They will tell you all the reasons we need to be supporting Ukraine. They are going after goals and mandates in a larger machinery of executing on “American interests.” But sometimes, this expertise and these goals don’t translate into a folk knowledge or a grand strategic explanation. This is what presidents and senators and public intellectuals are for. Yet increasingly, they too don’t have a clear answer that isn’t also just a reactionary regurgitation of a previous framework, designed for a different kind of world.
Many Progressives rebuff the idea of “nation” or “nationalism” as a kind of xenophobic concept, advocating for an America that confesses and pays for its sins abroad (but what does this mean for Americans at home?) MAGA Republicans take “America First” to an extreme place of isolationism — perhaps in the same way as they do on spending and taxes, a kind of folksy “don’t spend what you can’t afford” and “don’t involve yourself in fights that don’t directly involve you.” In a way, both visions of foreign policy rebuff a vision of American exceptionalism—which in some ways is another nail in the coffin of a supra-ordinate American identity that says, “We are different from the others.”
I don’t have the answers. But I think not just Americans but many people around the world yearn for big goals, as well as authentic and real explanations of how we can take the first step to how we get there.
If authenticity is the name of the game in a world with hyper-connectivity, is there a foreign policy narrative that can address why a certain policy framework is good for Americans that respects the old Mae West adage: “Don’t piss on my back and tell me its raining?”
Can we get real about our power and what we are actually capable of doing, and who it benefits?