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U.S. Foreign Policy - Realist or Isolationist?
(Atlantic) Josef Joffe - Jeffrey Goldberg discussed "The Obama Doctrine" recently in The Atlantic. Normally, starring world powers are pushed off center-stage by more muscular players. Yet Obama's America has been slinking off without duress. It made sense back at the beginning of the Obama era, in 2009, to go for retrenchment instead of overreach. The U.S. was stuck in two endless wars while battling financial catastrophe. In Goldberg's words, Obama believes that the "the price of direct U.S. action would be higher than the price of inaction." But realism is more complicated. A realist knows that distant threats, if ignored, can turn into direct ones. A realist also knows that the international system, like nature, abhors a vacuum. So ambitious rivals will interpret inaction as invitation. No. 1 cannot go on vacation if it wants to keep the top-floor corner office - that is the moral of this tale. Who has comparable weight to America today? Russia, Iran, and China. Reaching out to them reflects a misreading of reality, for they are not cohorts, but hard-core rivals who have been emboldened by America's retraction. Street cred in the global arena depends on a reputation for violence that will render force unnecessary. The writer is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution.