Between Kennan and Ikenberry: the critical pragmatism of Obama’s grand strategy
Paper prepared for presentation at the International Studies Association 56th Annual Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 18-21, 2015; Panel TB68 American Grand Strategy and the Obama Presidency
Kari Möttölä
Network for European Studies, FI-00014 University of Helsinki [email protected]
Abstract
Referring to the inconclusive search by the political class, punditry and academia for one concept or catchphrase informing Barack Obama’s foreign policy, the paper argues that it is the combination of transformation and ambiguity in the international milieu and within the presidency as an agency explaining why no straightforward answer is found among the established schools of thought in American grand strategy.
To decrypt Obama, and to address the theory-policy connection, the paper draws from the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings applied by, respectively, George F. Kennan and G. John Ikenberry for postulating the trajectory of the United States in an historical turn of the world order. In their strategic guidelines for foreign policy, both address the constitutive ambiguity of the US hegemonic situation, whether on the rise or under stress.
Kennan’s classical realism combines an opaque set of values with the geopolitical prudence of prioritization of national interests. Ikenberry’s constitutional liberalism suggests a compelling form of leadership by the systemic penetration of adapted global governance. In the pursuance of critical pragmatism, Obama’s hybrid grand strategy struggles with the reconciliation of Kennan’s realist conception of morality in politics and Ikenberry’s liberal purpose of power in ordering.
Viewing grand strategy as the policy and art of creating power, the paper concludes by tracing Kennan’s and Ikenberry’s approaches in the predicament of Obama’s leadership of the US foreign policy amidst the uncertainty between a cyclical and evolutionary change in international order.
1 INTRODUCTION
On the congruence of theory and policy
Depending on points of view, the grand strategy of the Barack Obama administration underlying the foreign policy of the United States has been an enduring enigma, difficult to put in a box representing a particular doctrinal school of thought or a practical tradition drawn from history or experience.
While Obama’s narrative and action seem to defer eclectically to realism and liberalism, applying praxeology in policy analysis offers too elusive a solution to tracing consistency in the course of action - without being an easier guide than an abstract theory.
At the same time, for politicians, pundits and academics alike, placing the Obama foreign policy on a dimension illustrating such dichotomies as those between conservatism and idealism, activism and passivism or restraint and engagement has been a frustrating exercise and one apt to draw a controversy.
Consequently, searching the congruence between theory and policy is deemed here as a demanding and rewarding approach to the analysis of the Obama grand strategy. While the definition of grand strategy defies consensus, in general terms it denotes a relation between means and key goals of policy in shaping international order.
In its use of power, the leadership profile of the United States has been oscillating between degrees of engagement in, and withdrawal from, international relations. Making the Obama case extraordinary is that the administration has been forced to weather the normative and geopolitical storm of a transformative era in world politics. Following the milestones marking the post-war and post-cold war periods of international order, the US has been involved in shaping and fixing the fundaments of a purportedly ‘post-post-cold war’ global order without a widely adopted title.
While remaining in aggregate terms the most powerful country in the world, the United States has to make policy choices whereby it is not only influencing the shape of the global order but also accommodating – if not submitting - to changes therein; being not only a subject but increasingly also an object of international politics. How the US is navigating a changing milieu is the measure of its power but also of the wisdom and quality of its tactics and strategy.
In search of the profile and substance of the Obama grand strategy, the paper draws from two thinkers who combine and integrate policy with theory and theory with policy: George F. Kennan and G. John Ikenberry, taken here not as political or elite actors but proponents of conceptual models of grand strategy in their thinking and writing on the foreign policy of the United States.
Why Kennan and Ikenberry?
Kennan and Ikenberry are not brought forth to tell the whole truth about the Obama grand strategy but nor are they chosen accidentally either. They figure prominently in both the policy-oriented and academically-flavoured public discourse of recent and ongoing on the US scene - not only
2 of the time of their service (Kennan on the post-war era of creation) or of the time periods focused in their writing (Ikenberry on the post-cold war era).
Both of their intellectual works concern the post-war period including its origins, the post-cold war turn and the current situation. Both are relevant for analyzing the juxtaposition of change with recurrence and continuity in strategic paths.
While Kennan is depicted as the architect of a key fundament of the post-war US grand strategy of containment, his version of the doctrine has been enacted by himself and commentators in assessing the choices taken by the US at the end of the cold war and in the subsequent era. To complete the narrative cycle, Kennan’s name has been called up during the present predicament regarding Russian behaviour, in particular, but also as a generic model of realist thought useful in driving the US and Western policy under wider change in great-power relations.
While Ikenberry extends his concept of liberal internationalism as the US grand strategy to the formative post-war years, he contends that its core has been applied throughout the post-cold war era and could be operational in an adjusted form in facing the future of deep global change as well. Consequently, Ikenberry has been in the eye of the storm in the ongoing public and scholarly debate over the way Obama has been pursuing the liberal strategy widely seen as the default US doctrine with criticism directed from both sides: a foreign policy mired in excessive caution or in need for fundamental change in favour of retrenchment.
While Kennan and Ikenberry represent, respectively, realism and liberalism as theories of policy, they also demonstrate the width and ambivalence of both paradigmatic constructs.
Kennan’s classical and moral realism, rejecting the structural and offensive versions of the theory, was opposed to the offensive and militaristic features of containment as applied in the cold war, including post-cold war strategic mistakes debated today. Placed in the geopolitical context, his actor-level approach includes cultural and ideational as well as societal explanations of state behaviour, viewing the national interest in the light of continuity.
Ikenberry’s institutional and normative liberalism stresses the staying power of the “American” international order even in geopolitical shifts. A specific challenge in Ikenberry’s theoretical narrative relates to the management of the relative decline of US power as a material and strategic contention in global transition, which calls for alternative models of international order.
The research task of the paper, while offering a narrative of US post-war foreign policies as the starting point, is to come up with a mix of Kennan’s and Ikenberry’s theories of strategic policy in explaining, understanding and predicting the Obama grand strategy. Consequently, concepts and practices to be analyzed in the interaction of theory and policy include grand strategy, power and order.
I POLICY TO THEORY
1. Measuring Obama in the historical trajectory of US grand strategy
The crisis of liberalism as grand theory and strategy
An analysis of the way grand theories as products of scholarship may influence and shape policy provides a useful set of tools for the study of grand strategy as an intellectual exercise. It is particularly intriguing to observe and ascertain change in grand strategy in the light of paradigm shifts or ‘great debates’ in scholarship.
3 A prominent case of deep shifts in theory and policy taking place in parallel and in the same direction has been the liberal peace theory as observed and applied in its heyday of the 1980/90s in the transatlantic community. In the same manner, a parallel reverse trend can be observed in the self-doubt concerning the sustainability of liberal internationalism as its policy implementation due to political and economic downturns and failures affecting the position of the West in the 2000s and the 2010s. Although events have confirmed the realist view that institutions depend on structures of power and interests, liberalism based on the achievements of the last twenty years of dominance and embedded in international order continues to have a future role in taming realist power.
While the spread of democracy, the growth of economic interdependence and the strengthening of multilateral institutions have not proved to be such forces of stability, prosperity and ideational homogeneity as expected, industrial modernity as the dominant mode of production with its consequences for international trade and transnational business has sustained as the dominant mode of liberal power. From its creation two centuries ago, liberalism has driven global change and challenged the realist theory on cycles of power shift and hegemonic war as a natural way for order change. (Gleditsch, 2008; Keohane, 2012; Buzan, 2014)
The record of policy and scholarly debates and discourses reveal that the Obama foreign policy is a moving and variegated object. Obama has been taken and dismissed as a follower of liberalism and realism, as a pragmatist and an ideologue, or an internationalist and a home-builder. Whether Obama will end up as a transactional or transformational leader with regard to changing the terms of the discourse or the line of action of the US foreign policy remains an open question.
The dominant discussion point has been to mark its place between engagement, restraint and caution. Intensifying in time, the critique has been skewed towards commentary on what has been seen as an overly or misguided retrenchment if not weakness under such rubrics as “America self- contained” (The American Interest, 2014), “America’s World-Weariness Dilemma” (Alcaro, 2014), “Obama’s Avoidance Doctrine” (Zakheim, 2014), “America the Shrunken” (Bruni, 2014) or more generally “U.S. Foreign Policy: In Troubling Disarray” (Haass, 2014).
What follows in the structure of the paper is the introduction of a recent narrative of the national security policy or grand strategy of the United States in the post-war perspective and the placing of the Obama administration in the historical chain of such strategic patterns; the background and involvement of the names of Kennan and Ikenberry, respectively, as strategists and theoreticians in the present discourse on the US foreign policy; and, in the concluding section, how, in the light of the relevance of Kennan and Ikenberry, the Obama administration can be seen in pursuing its policy in the conceptual framework of grand strategy understood as the art of creating and using power for order change.
National Security Strategy
Required by law from each administration since 1987, the National Security Strategy (NSS) has proved to be a relatively accurate prescriptive document of policy intentions. (Quinn, 2015)
The NSS of the first Obama administration can be characterized as a recipe for adjusting and renovating US leadership for the long haul in global change. In recognition of relative decline in the US power position, the strategy suggests the strengthening of alliances with more effective burden- sharing and offers cooperation with rising powers and a dialogue with adversaries as well as committing the US for improved multilateral cooperation in addressing global problems. (NSS, 2010)
By recalibrating the tactics of counterterrorism, preparing withdrawals from wars, signaling a more cautious and selective policy in military intervention, without excluding unilateral use of force, the document creates room for increased emphasis on the economic and social improvements on the home front as means for security enhancing.
4 While the implementation of a NSS by necessity is guided by realities on the ground, a strategic guidance document ostensibly for the defence policy two years later informed a major corrective of the grand strategy in two respects: the pivot or rebalancing to Asia to address rising Chinese regional ambitions and an updated hierarchy of the missions of the armed forces, including, in the last place, a more modest and limited profile for crisis management operations. (Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership, 2012; Möttölä, 2013a)
A further factor is the functioning of the national security team and bureaucracy, where a line of senior cabinet members and advisers, in the first administration, did not seem to reflect the initial transformational aspiration of the president, while, on the other hand, the Obama White House is said to have concentrated power in the National Security Council more than any predecessor. (Korb, 2015; Mann, 2012; Rothkopf, 2014) Another constraining factor in grand strategy making is constituted by the entrenched orientations of the established think tanks and other policy-planning institutions in the US elite and business networks. (Van Appeldoorn and de Graaff, 2014)
The NSS of the second Obama administration has a confident tone asserting that the United States is in a more enhanced position than five years earlier for pursuing a strong and sustainable American leadership to advance national interests, universal values and a rules-based international order (“not whether America will lead but how”). Highlighting the invigorated economy together with the unrivaled military might underlying US power, the NSS of 2015 presents a multidimensional strategy on addressing global issues such as non-proliferation, climate change, cyber security, infectious disease and rising regions as well as responding to developments in great-power relations such as Russian transgression, China’s rise and partnership with India. (NSS, 2015)
What president Obama calls a “smart” national strategy dwells with being principled and selective in the use of force, where unilateral may be the necessity of choice but acting with allies and partners sharing the burden is preferable. Forging collective action is a main purpose of US power.
The narrative of grand strategy from Truman to Obama
In the analytical narratives of two recent studies the foreign policy of the United States is going through a cyclical and recurring evolution as seen through the prism of selected criteria of grand strategy. (Sestanovich, 2014; Brands, 2014)
Grand strategy as policy
For Sestanovich, instead of an embodiment of strategic continuity, the US foreign policy has been a variable alternating between the strategies of “maximalism” and “retrenchment” in a cyclical relation to each other. The recalibration of the foreign policy has been the rule with few exceptions, as the administrations have tended to conclude that strategic reassessment was necessary due to a fundamental change in the world situation or policy failures of their predecessors. As a result of the quest for a new direction of foreign policy, such cycles and recurring patterns can be timed at, and identified with, particular presidents and their administrations.
Typical developments sparking strategic revisions have been a regional or global crisis calling for a maximalist response to restore US structural power and political leadership; or an overreach or excessive engagement bringing in a decision to retrench commitments in order to stabilize the international and domestic situation; whereupon a new maximalist regime appears again with an expanding policy to correct insufficiencies in the response and to restore US prestige and leadership; to be followed by revelations that the maximalist goals are out of reach; thus leading to a new cycle of retrenchment.
The cyclical model is driven in a critical fashion by failures in domestic consensus on foreign policy lines of action. Although framed by the concept of containment, which in fact concealed several different strategies, the US foreign policy has been a divisive issue throughout the period.
5 Sestanovich presents waves of maximalism and retrenchment between or overlapping administrations. Allowing for actual or anticipated changes also during the terms of individual administrations caused by wars or other ruptures, or for the domestic or economic pressures or path dependency taking events against the political will of leaders.
Inevitably, there is a hybrid character within some if not all strategies including cases such as pursuing a maximalist strategy on the cheap or retrenchment with a maximalist doctrinal aspiration; appearing to be different for the sake of demonstrating a political distance from the predecessor; or to increase influence by a policy of retrenchment.
Encapsulating the presidencies and administrations in two strategic schools of thought, where “more” implies a version of maximalism and “less” means adjustment to a policy of retrenchment in the generation and employment of US power:
- the “more” school (generally practicing the maximalist strategy): Truman, Kennedy, Johnson (post-1965), Reagan, Bush 43 (post-911);
- the “less” school (overseeing retrenchment or curtailment of US power): Eisenhower, Johnson (pre-Vietnam), Nixon, Ford, Carter, Obama.
- the hybrid cases: Bush 41 (change during the term from “more” to “less”), Clinton (change from “less” to “more”).
In terms of lessons learnt from history relevant for the case of Obama, and summarizing strategic and social-psychological explanatory factors drawn from policy analysis, political fortunes and trajectories of presidencies express certain regularities and specificities. (Sestanovic 2014, 325- 336)
As strategy, retrenchment is more complex than a mere cleanup job forced upon the practitioner. Nor is retrenchment the same thing as decline, rather, it can be a way of avoiding or managing decline, not embracing or accelerating it. Retrenchment can launch a direction in foreign policy based on strategic reconceptualization for the long haul, although politically its practitioners rarely win a second term while falling victim to a more or less extremist backlash.
As strategy, maximalism has been the essential ingredient of success as well as of failure for the US foreign policy. Maximalists have rarely been able to extricate themselves from wars or other bold adventures, paying a high political price for failures. On the other hand, at times the US has been able to keep peace by being confrontational when challenged by other powers or by rejecting normative or structural compromises in world politics.
In more than a few cases maximalism has involved taking a rigid stance where no vital national interest was at stake, drawing contemporary and subsequent political and analytical critique. Arguably, the political risk-taking in those cases (such as Vietnam), while determined by the need to protect or strengthen the legitimacy of US primacy or leadership, shaped the course of international relations in the long term differently from what might have happened had the US chosen a more accommodating strategy.
Grand strategy as art
For Brands, the focus is on the art of having the skill and capability required to pursue and implement a chosen grand strategy and on the lessons to be learnt from the record of US post-war administrations (Obama is not included in his book as a case) for designing an ideal way of practicing grand strategy.
For Brands, grand strategy is the highest form of statecraft, the intellectual architecture of principles and priorities that gives form and structure to foreign policy, including a link between short-term actions and medium- and long-term goals. With the quality of the intellectual structure
6 emphasized, grand strategy becomes an exercise in logics, coherence and consistency. In terms of political success, the key aspect of strategy is the sustainability of the priorities set among the means and ends while negotiating an evolving and complex international order. (Brands, 2014, 1-7)
Because grand strategy is as much a process as a structure, it calls for balancing between resources and interests, portioning power in day-to-day demands of diplomacy and international politics, and correcting the course after mistakes and failures at the tactical level. The skills have to be adjusted and used in the framework and pressures of domestic political cycles. (Brands, 2014, 8-16)
There are different conditions for success in performing grand strategy. Some administrations, living “a golden age” of making a strategic and lasting difference, have had the chance and skill to convert insights into policies with tangible and comprehensive outcomes. Even in such cases, while containment, as the core of the Truman grand strategy, was innovative and put US power to essential long-term purposes, it also involved adaptation and improvisation as external circumstances changed and reflected at times a disorderly and iterative process. (Brands, 2014, 56-58)
By exploiting a historic improvement of the US geopolitical fortunes, and based on far-reaching and shrewd ideas, Reagan’s grand strategy utilized all elements of national power to redress the temporary weakness in the US position and was able to adjust its outlook by reaching fruitful outcomes in great-power relations with a right mix of policies.
Others have developed conceptual thinking which has subsequently brought benefits for US strategic interests. The Nixon-Kissinger effort to exploit what was a relative decline of American power by providing a new geopolitical order at a lower price for the US was undermined in the short term as a model of politics, which flouted the institutions and traditions of the American political system.
In the case of Bush 43, the grand strategy overreached in aspiring transformative triumphs based on overly optimistic reliance on the influence of military power. With the negative externalities of the mismanagement of the Iraq War as the main reason, the Bush 43 grand strategy has been judged as a failure both in implementation and in its flawed and overambitious content.
The historical cases and records indicate and prove that grand strategy as an exercise in combining vision and rationality with power is beset by tensions between the quest for coherence and the reality of complexity; the need for foresight and the fact of uncertainty; the steadiness of purpose and the agility for adjustment. Altogether, there are limits in grand strategy making that call for keeping expectations moderate despite the high aspirations as defined by Brands. (Brands, 2014, 190-194)
Based on case studies focused on the Truman, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 43 administrations, Brands comes up with a number of suggestions and recommendations for the issue of grand strategy.
The first argument is that there is no good alternative to grand strategy irrespective of skepticism expressed by some practitioners of the possibility of the task itself, warning examples of (bad) strategies going wrong, or “strategic nihilism” of deliberately avoiding grand strategy. Consequently, Brands recommends that new presidents start with setting principles and make the prompt completion of the National Security Strategy a top priority.
At the same time, grand strategy should be seen as a process with a space for flexibility and recalibration, supported by sufficient investment in planning. Finally, the administrations need to embrace the democratic messiness of foreign policy making despite the inclination of many leading strategists to lament the pernicious effects of congressional politics and other elements of the domestic scene.
7 Prospects of Obama’s grand strategy
What follows is how the Obama administration would be fitted and ranked in the analytical schemes of Sestanovich and Brands.
Why and how has Barack Obama (so far) pursued a grand strategy of retrenchment and what can he do in the second administration? (Sestanovich 2014, 302-324; Sestanovich, 2014a)
Aside from a change of direction being a historical necessity as such, retrenchment was a practical necessity for domestic political reasons of nation-building at home and after an overextension of military resource in Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Secondly, the promise of engagement and negotiation with foreign partners and adversaries and nuclear disarmament was deemed necessary for restoring a positive global image for the US.
Downsizing the US military footprint by the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and by introducing a high threshold for future military-civilian interventions as well as by cutting the defence budget has been pursued in a prudent manner but not without raising controversies domestically and questions internationally. Albeit that the narrower (but not blunt) military profile was not meant to express a lesser but a repaired grand strategy, the Obama administration has been pressured to dismiss doubts and accusations that it has embraced the idea or fact of American decline, which would still predict a maximalist successor.
To prove that retrenchment is the way to avoid decline, Obama needs to show diplomatic success despite or in congruence with military downsizing, which historically has tended not to succeed in the longer run, as an activist foreign policy is hard to sustain on a shrinking material base (cf. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford).
In Obama’s case, the diplomatic test of his retrenchment strategy is pending and incomplete in the Middle East, Iran, East Asia, nuclear disarmament and other critical issue-areas. In addition to external turns, a complicating factor is the lesson of history that retrenchment strengthens Congress’s role in foreign policy. To sustain the functionality and popularity of a retrenchment strategy, the Obama administration will need to show results for foreign as well as domestic interlocutors and audiences. In the Sestanovich account, Obama would be the first US president to find the path back to greater activism after having begun a retrenchment and met subsequent challenges.
How successful will Obama be in the art of pursuing a grand strategy? (Brands, 2014a)
According to Brands, the Obama administration does have a grand strategy with strategic principles revolving around the idea of maintaining US global leadership at a lower cost and in ways that reflect shift in the geopolitics of power. The first idea behind the strategy is to preserve and extend the post-cold war order beneficial to continued US leadership; the second is to correct the strategic and military overstretch and exert power and leadership in smarter, cheaper and more prudent ways; the third is to reorient the US strategic attention to reflect changing geopolitics and geo-economics, particularly the rise of Asia.
The implementation of the Obama strategy is problematic or uncertain for a number of reasons. The strategy lacks rhetorical appeal to the general and international publics; fiscal austerity may jeopardize the necessary level of US power; increased tension on the European scene may complicate the pivot to Asia, which is also predicated on uncertain progress in the Middle East; any sense of “underreach” perceived by allies and adversaries as weakness rather than prudence may be as dangerous to global order as overreach and create a need for strategic reassurance and reimposition.
In conclusion, the hybrid character of the Obama grand strategy, which seems to correspond to the realities at home and abroad, is at the same time its potential weakness in implementation. In Sestanovich’s narrative, Obama may be in the middle of transition within a predictable and
8 demanding domestic circumstance. Likewise, in Brands’s narrative, Obama has the chance of learning lessons from developments abroad for recalibrating grand strategy as a process. At the same time, the jury is still out, as Obama is launching his last two years as president with initiatives for an expansive and expensive policy in the domestic front and commands the executive capability for foreign policy initiatives. (Gärtner, 2014)
II THEORY TO POLICY
2. ‘What Would Kennan Say to Obama?’ (Costigliola, 2014a) - The US foreign policy adrift in ‘a disordered world’ (Haass, 2014a)
Kennan and classical realism
George Kennan was present at the formation of International Relations as a discipline with a theory and an institutionalized community of its own. While being a period when realism surged into a dominant and sustained position in the disciplinary history, it was also a time when theorists located the moral dilemmas of politics at the centre of the IR field, forwarding classical realism as a new idealism in the immediate post-war/early cold-war era replacing the failed idealism of the interwar period. (Guilhot, 2011)
The resurgence of classical realism in the academic discourse of the era of the 2000s provides a moral platform for criticizing the ideational and operational excesses of the universalizing strategies of neoconservatism and neoliberalism as crusading forms of the US foreign policy in the post-cold war years. Within the field of realism, classical realism may offer itself as an alternative to both the Hamiltonian conservative internationalism and the Jacksonian liberal nationalism (in the categories presented by Mead, 2001) but it could also become a synthesis befitting to the management of a declining empire. (Guilhot, 2014, 5-7)
Being invited to (but unable to attend; he sent a paper) the conference organized by the Rockefeller Foundation in May 1954 for discussing the possibility, nature and limits of theory for international relations, Kennan was attached to and identified with a group of leading academic and political intellectuals of the time. (Guilhot, 2011)
For Kennan realism is a rule of thumb and not a full-fledged theory of international relations, no “- ism”. The realist talk and project is based on the elite morality (Kennan, 1994) to be secluded as much as possible from the deceptive influence of the democratic populace and also as much as possible from the interference of congressional politics. Paradoxically, in its rejection of the liberal conceptions of legalism, moralism and historical confidence, the type of pessimistic morality included in Kennan’s realism was not destined to fit for the long line of American political reality.
In the context of the theoretical discourse, Kennan warns that because of its emerging power position, the United States is presenting its national interests as if they were universal moral principles for all nations. The challenge of realist theory is to avoid a normative approach to international relations which imposes national morality on to the international scene, and national principles into the contractual principles of international relations. (Guilhot, 2011, 247)
As asserted by Niebuhr, when presented too unqualifiedly, self-righteous and pretentious claims, including the talk of unlimited wars, constitute perils in the modern period, thus supporting Kennan’s thesis that regard for the national interest can be more wise, being more moderate, than modern moralism in democratic policies. (Guilhot, 2011, 271)
In a scheme of main strategies available for the US, Kennan drew (in 1949): (1) a world domination; (2) rigorous isolationism; (3) limited power politics of means and ends; (4) the mercantile and
9 liberal concept; (5) the multilateral legalism. He saw the US having followed 2 and 4 but pushing towards 5, while he found himself for the limited approach 3. (Stephanson, 2011, 167-168)
Kennan and the grand strategy of containment
In Kennan’s misfortune, it became evident that realism as policy was unrealistic politically. Kennan’s strict, narrowly constructed approach to containment defined in terms of national interests as an intelligent reaction to Roosevelt’s “unrealistic” or illusionary neo-Wilsonian liberalism, and as initially led by Truman and Marshall, was replaced by the ideological excess of a confrontational and militarized cold-war policy, making Kennan himself into a perpetual critic of many key decisions of the US foreign policy for his remaining fifty years. (Gaddis, 2011; Stephanson, 2011; Thompson, 2009)
In the crosscurrents of theory and policy, Kennan became squeezed by criticism of aspects of the US policy he had not designed, if not completely disowned, while not credited for those projects he did articulate and saw as central tenets of future US policy. The dialectical juxtaposition of universalism and particularity as underlying concepts of policy and bargaining as a driver and vehicle for the implementation of containment is the key to understanding Kennan’s predicament as a planner and a critic of policy. (Stephanson, 2011, 164-166; Gaddis, 2011, 270-275)
In Walter Lippmann’s critique of Kennan’s X-article in Foreign Affairs (July 1947) - a precursor to the concept of “the cold war” introduced in the title of the book comprising the 14 columns Lippmann wrote on the topic -, the inevitable or at least apparent universalism of the containment policy as reflected in the “monstrosity” of the Truman Doctrine was castigated as passive in its undifferentiated nature and global structure, while the particularity of the Marshall Plan was extolled as smart and effective policy. As for Kennan, he had seen the economically focused Marshall Plan, where his influence was critical, supplanting the political-militarily focused Truman doctrine in the containment strategy.
While Kennan is credited for offering with containment as a grand strategy a third way out of the post-war predicament between a new war and another round of failing appeasement and, consequently, paving the way for the liberal international order (Gaddis, 2011, 693-694), the crucial question from the beginning was how to practice containment, with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as the two prototypes of different paths.
Moreover, containment was painted by Lippmann as a defensive policy for offering the use of counterforce to initiatives by the Soviet adversary without leaving room for diplomatic bargaining, which could actually solve the problems and threats at hand. Here again, the criticism hit a wrong target, as Kennan regarded successful containment not an end in itself but as a prerequisite for the ultimate process of negotiation. (Costigliola, 2011, 4)
What haunted Kennan in the conceptualization and operationalization of his ideas was Lippmann’s reference to the nature of the Soviet/Russian threat, presumably Kennan’s strong point. While Kennan painted the Soviet motivations as a complex of an aggressive and expansionist ideology using a defensive nationalism with the sense of insecurity at the bottom, he saw the threat as a totality which would in the end be transformed from inside. For Lippmann, Kennan was too obsessed with Moscow’s universalist claims and had lost sight of the particularity of various Soviet interests, noting that great-power interests could be comprehensible and variable. One of Kennan’s insights was that while Stalin painted the two antagonistic world centres on the way towards confrontation, there was no fixed timetable in his message, indicating that the Soviet Union would be wary of risks and could retreat when needed.
In fact, Kennan followed his own thesis – inserted consistently in the context of the nuclear arms race – according to which the Americans should see their security resting on the intentions rather than capabilities of other nations and not drift into preoccupation with what the Russians could conceivably do. (Kennan, 2014, 226)
10 Kennan’s strategic thinking, guarding against excessive strategic involvement and tactical timidity, believed in the possibility of eventual understanding between the Russian and American peoples. A central element in Kennan’s political thinking was intuitive yet often incisive and empathic descriptions of the inner worlds of the Russian people and their impact on the regime. (Costigliola, 2011, 8)
In the decades of the subsequent confrontation with the policy he helped to birth, Kennan found little understanding for his proposals for a changed relationship with the Soviet Union, whereby he made an effort to correct the particularity deficit referred to by Lippmann. Having in mind that like the Long Telegram (Kennan, 1967, 547-559), the X-article was devoted to the analysis of the Soviet problem instead of curing or solving it, Kennan could not be accused for an absence of bargaining in his initiatives.
In particular, Kennan made two remarkable initiatives, based on the general concept of disengagement, for solving the German problem as a separate and practical agreement with the Soviet Union, in order to potentially unravel the militarized and confrontational structure of the cold war and prevent the freezing of the division of Germany and Europe: while still in the State Department (Plan A in 1948), where the initiative failed (Kennan, 1967, 423-426; 442-448; Gaddis, 2011, 329-334), and outside the government in the Reith Lectures (while at Oxford in 1957) (Kennan, 1972, 229-266; Gaddis, 2011, 520-534), which created a spectacular international controversy. In both cases Kennan advocated the view that diplomacy is possible even in the framework of extreme polarization, something which few realists or cold warriors believed (cf. Kissinger, 2011).
Kennan’s theory as legacy
Kennan’s trajectory as policy planner, scholar and public intellectual has provided the basis for his role in bridging the gap between theory and policy during and after the cold war in various occasions, when he had a high profile or when his name was enacted as a symbol of particular solution or critique.
Although Kennan has been praised – by strategists who were not sympathetic to his idealistic deviation from realism in his initiatives to change its implementation – as providing the conceptual foundation for the grand strategy the US would follow for four decades (Gaddis, 2011, 249), or having come as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history (Kissinger, 2011), he himself denied the paternity of the policy of containment as pursued by the US and its subsequent relevance. Even as for the end of the cold war, Kennan did not see it as a success but a failure for having taken so long and for its high costs as well as for leading to an unconditional surrender of a great-power adversary.
In his works and appearances, Kennan never produced a full-fledged critique of the cold war as a US project in strategy and foreign policy or of its universalist feature. He directed his comments on particular issues or policies as not following his conception of realism in foreign policy or of the workings of the world order. In this perspective, Kennan has carried his reputation as the one who got Russia right or who revealed and castigated US shortcomings and errors in conducting foreign policy. In fact, for Kennan, realism as a concept was too general; it should not be seen as a body of knowledge or a single approach but a way of being toward the world, a skill in adequating means and ends, a call for prudence and limits. (Stephanson, 2011, 171-172)
Similarly, in a comment on the saying that Kennan’s strategy of containment won the cold war, it has been noted that what proved enduring was not the strategy but the temperament, the habits of mind that he counseled for the American leadership to display in the face of the Soviet threat in the cold war: neither overestimate Soviet belligerence nor underestimate the US capabilities. Kennan’s emotional affinity for the Russian people served the doctrine from ideological dogmatism, tempered the hatred of the regime and prevented the doctrine from locking American policy into a war
11 between civilizations. This enabled Kennan to bring American self-righteousness and moralism under the control of a strategically patient temperament. (Ignatieff, 2014, 19)
For Kennan, international political life is organic, not mechanical, with change as its essence. For Kennan, geopolitics is a social phenomenon. The only effective systems for regulating international politics over the long term are those sufficiently subtle and pliable to adjust themselves to the constant change in the interests and power of the various actors involved. An international organization cannot take the place of a well-conceived and realistic foreign policy. The conception of international law, while worth US support, cannot (yet) replace power as the vital force for the world. (Kennan, 2014, 170-171)
Relevance of Kennan for the age of Obama
While putting final touches on the process of winding down America’s longest wars, Barack Obama noted to an interviewer, “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now”, specifying that what the United States needs isn’t a new grand strategy but, rather, the right strategic partners. When an aide, in further strategic philosophizing, offered that in historical currents one cannot necessarily determine the final destination but it may be more important to figure out the right direction, Obama commented that he believes in both a great-man and a great-movement theory of history. (Remnick, 2014)
Remnick summarizes Obama’s pattern of actions in various conflicts as not realism or idealism but something closer to policy particularism, not as a one-size-fits-all recourse to action. Obama has been seen to resist the idealism of a previous generation of liberal interventionists, but his realism, if it is that, diverges also from the traditional realism of Kissinger or Scowcroft, as his policy comes from the idea that change is organic and modernization or regime change comes to countries in its own way.
In an earlier profile, Obama confesses that his policy is a return to the traditional realistic policy of Bush 41, Kennedy and in some ways Reagan. Stepping away from idealism, he has been called a consequentialist who is interested in what works. His leadership with a humble profile may accept a stealth and modest role in ‘leading from behind’. (Lizza, 2011)
The borders against liberal internationalism are defined by domestic and external pressures but also, in a significant way, by Obama’s idiosyncrasies rooted in the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism. Driven by such behavioural guidelines as flexibility, experimentation as a way of testing truths, and historicism, Obama’s philosophy of pragmatism serves as an approach to solve issues and face challenges flowing from his recognition of the contingency of US power. (Kloppenberg, 2011)
Psychological characterizations encapsulate the several dimensions which have made the grand strategy of the Obama administration an enigma or a hard nut for political allies and opponents as well as pundits and academics alike. At the same time, it is indicative that similarities with Kennan, whose life work arguably helped to lead the US and the West to victory in the cold war and who was out of synch and sympathy with the political models and styles of the post-cold war foreign policy, have been brought forth in the discourse of choices made and ahead in the US grand strategy under Obama.
Carrying on from the legacy of his two post-cold war predecessors, whose eras are best identified with the unipolarity of the 1990’s and the unilateralism of the 2000’s, identified with an indispensable power delivering public goods as well as challenging others to take sides in global confrontation, Obama had started his foreign and security policies with promising engagement in multilateralism and offering partnership with allies and stretching a hand to opponents alike with the purpose of leaving strategic space for domestic reconstruction.
As a consequence of the turbulence of globalization, political and economic power shifts and frustrations in policy initiatives, the outcomes of Obama’s policies had become increasingly
12 debatable and controversial in the deeply changing international order, despite political and analytical testimonies stressing the continued and sustained position of the United States as an activist and liberal leader in world affairs.
Why and in what respects was George Kennan presented as a relevant thinker or strategist for Obama’s predicaments in responding to ‘a disordered world’ (Haass, 2014a)?
A leading expert on Kennan, Frank Costigliola raises several aspects of Kennan’s strategic thinking which Obama would need, quite a few of them identifiable in the president’s own foreign policy trajectory or profile. A pattern of limiting military intervention and stressing hard-headed diplomacy, while setting strategic priorities to major power centres (in the case of containment on Western Europe and Japan) and not wasting resources in marginal areas. Perhaps most intriguingly, along with Reinhold Niebuhr, known as Obama’s favourite philosopher, Kennan warned the Americans of outsized ambitions and self-righteousness; spreading democracy by using military force would never had been approved by the Founding Fathers. (Costigliola, 2014a)
Likewise, although 1989 left Kennan with a moral question, what to do when your idea is misinterpreted but then leads to what you had hoped for; his two big ideas remain relevant: containment and realism. When being a sceptic about the US competence in foreign affairs, it is best to limit engagement. Obama’s policy resembles Kennan’s views in the withdrawal from Afghanistan but also in using covert actions such as targeted killings; the rhetoric of ridding the world of nuclear weapons; and eschewing grand expressions and expressing humility in leadership. (Thompson, 2012)
As the “man who got Russia right”, Kennan appears a stalwart and prescient guide in the debate over the Ukraine crisis and its antecedents. He saw historical contradictions that undermined the foundation of the Soviet regime; it would rise as a force greater than any other power in Europe but the cultural factors would prove the communist state’s undoing. Today the Russian people know how to wait, just as the Soviet Union was a transitory phenomenon. In Washington there is a tradition to get Russia wrong, but Kennan’s legacy reminds how to get it right. (Glasser, 2013)
Kennan has been recalled as a fierce opponent of NATO’s enlargement. In 1998 he warned that it would be a beginning of a new cold war, as Russia will gradually react adversely. In terms of security, there was no reason, as nobody was threatening anybody. NATO has neither the resources nor the intention to protect the acceding allies in a serious way, Russia is not attacking Western Europe, while the conflict was with Soviet communism. Russian democracy is as advanced as much as in those countries. The decision showed little understanding of Russian history; there will be a bad reaction from Russia and then NATO expanders will say ‘we told you so’. (Friedman, 2014)
Drawn from Kennan’s historically and culturally based understanding of Russia’s psyche, instead of adding to trauma or humiliation, flaring up feelings of nationalism and insecurity, and reactions adverse to the US interests inside Russia, the right strategy would be to provide respect and reassurance (Khrushcheva, 2014), letting the Russian political regime to mellow or self-destruct.
Dating back to the Stalinist era, lessons attached to Kennan’s legacy have become part of the debate on dealing with Putin’s narrative arguing for the annexation of Crimea. As, following Kennan, Russia can be equated with the Soviet Union with a different ideology but similar behavioural patterns, the form of containment designed by Kennan understood as linking counterforce with soft power and a willingness to compromise is offered as relevant in 2014 as it was in 1947. (Motyl, 2014)
In a face-saving exit from the Ukraine crisis, the West would welcome Russia as a partner in solving regional conflicts and offer agreement on limits on NATO enlargement in return for quid pro quos by Russia in retracting its behaviour over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In particular, a great- power deal over excluding, freezing or conditioning Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership has
13 been forwarded by geopolitically-minded experts on Russia. (Betts, 2014; Brzezinski, 2014; Kissinger, 2014; Matlock, 2014; Mearsheimer, 2014)
For Kennan, Russia’s national assertiveness arises not from communism but from a sense of insecurity. To Kennan’s biographer Gaddis, he would not have been surprised by Putin, as his advice to Strobe Talbott in 2000 was: patience is needed, to avoid a military collision with Russia, to play a patient long game. Kennan’s insight remains to contain menaces until they collapse internally, not overextend and to make sure Putin’s seeds of self-destruction are more deeply rooted than any weakness in the West. (McManus, 2014; Brooks, 2014)
The publication of Kennan’s diaries (Kennan, 2014) has raised a discussion on his inner character and its impact on his political philosophy. The diaries reflect Kennan’s sense of lonely regret, a fear that he had never been valued at his true worth; when employed and appreciated by his superiors, his diaries fall silent; the instant he felt neglected, self-flagellation returns. (Ignatieff, 2014, 18)
For Kennan, the national security state created by the cold war was inimical to true American republican traditions, and he was always sceptical of America’s intentions. The inner Kennan turns out as a compulsive grouser, downbeat, an unapologetic reactionary with misgivings towards democracy. Depression as one of the keys to understanding the diaries invites the notion of ‘depressive realism’ as his doctrine. But Kennan was able to step outside of himself and envision alternate realities; his diagnosis of Stalinism, scepticism and independence of thought, the proclivity to ask big questions and the gift for transforming his insights into powerful prose remain a legacy. (Caryl, 2014)
Kennan was seen as a strategist and – being dovish on most foreign policy issues – a liberal in the domestic discourse on security issues; in his political philosophy, instincts and insights were deeply conservative but in a way that did not fit into left-right categories. The sense of realism pervades Kennan’s observations; he drew on understanding of history, continuity, and culture on Russia, China, the UN, Poland. What Kennan could not comprehend was modernity, which for him meant danger and disaster. (Zakaria, 2014)
3. ‘Barack Obama Is Not a Realist’ (Saunders, 2014) - Ikenberry and the struggle over policy theories in an era of ‘compounding complexity’ (Smith and Stokes, 2014)
Ikenberry’s liberalism as a default model
Justifiably, for the sake of analysis, as well as in view of political expectations, the default position was that the Obama administration would follow a foreign policy based on the concept of liberal internationalism. Accordingly, the question at hand has been the sustainability and adaptability of such a liberalism-driven grand strategy under an exceptional external and internal stress.
A leading theoretician and proponent of a liberal international order driven by American (hegemonic) leadership, John Ikenberry has been inextricably attached to policy-oriented think tank and academic debates on how the US grand strategy has unfolded under the Obama administration and how it should be directed in view of historical, political or analytical lessons learnt and alternative doctrines promoted.
The role and accuracy of Ikenberry’s liberal internationalism is tested below in two reviews of the theory-policy discourse; first, as an analytical exercise of placing Obama amidst schools of thought expressing American traditions in grand theories; and secondly, in an account of the recent scholarly debate on the US strategic course.
Ikenberry’s intellectual construct is a statement of theory and policy on the durability, albeit in a modified shape, of a US-led liberal international order, which is an open and loosely rule-based system of relations among states and international institutions. Although the system is hierarchical,
14 and in its original form based on the undisputed American hegemonic position, the leading state operates within the common rules and institutions in the contours of relative liberal dominance which promotes its values and interests. (Ikenberry, 2011)
While the leadership position of the United States has been strong enough to justify the expression “the American world order” for most of the post-war period, the international order has been generated and shaped by two centuries of liberal ascendancy driven successively by the Empire- building Britain and the global power of the United States.
In the discussion on liberal world order as theory, the American institutional-structural and rationalist-strategic approach is challenged by the European historical-sociological and critical- normative approach. The European theory sees a historical trajectory of contradictions and inconsistencies as compared with the ideal process of progress attached to liberalism. The American school presents liberalism as a coherent system of ideas which tends to follow a linear and progressive vision of history. For the American view, the critical task is to adapt the US power as an ordering principle into a new, possibly post-hegemonic leadership position. For the European view, the liberal order is challenged not only by global power shifts but also by the tendency of liberalism to renegotiate its own principles. (Dunne and Flockhart, eds., 2013; Dunne et. al., 2013a; Möttölä, 2014)
For an American liberal theorist, Ikenberry is more apt to recognize the impact of global change on the US hegemony as theory and policy and willing to chart alternative avenues forward for the liberal international order. As the most likely outcome, and the one Ikenberry sees Obama pursuing, a renegotiated American-led order would be conducive to the necessary response to the systemic crisis of governance caused by globalization and to the need for sharing authority with the rising powers. (Ikenberry, 2009/2013)
There is a shift from the strong path dependency of an earlier Ikenberry model of a concert of liberal democracies asserting its power globally according to universally applicable regime criteria. On the other hand, there is a Marshal Plan-type idea for a new stage in liberal internationalism driven by a broader community of democracies shaping the normative order. At the same time, Ikenberry’s theory has been criticized for the lack of recognition and politicization of the systemic and global crisis. (Ikenberry and Slaughter, 2006; Deudney and Ikenberry, 2012; Levine and Barder, 2014)
While the borderline to the alternative option of post-hegemonic liberal international order may be subtle, it would shift authority to multilateral institutions in the classical wilsonian sense and reduce the control exercised by the US together with other great powers to the extent not seen workable. Instead, in Ikenberry’s chosen alternative the US would retain a leading (whether called post- hegemonic or post-American remains a matter of contention) position while negotiating new bargains and regimes with the global and regional actors in relevant power positions. To his European critics, however, Ikenberry’s institutionalist logic of change does not recognize sufficiently the significance of the gap between the articulated core values of liberalism and their practice in the real world. (Flockhart, 2013; Rae and Reus-Smit, 2013)
Liberal internationalism challenged
Obama’s relationship with liberal internationalism is seen in a diverse and complex manner when his strategy is placed in the framework of schools of thought as developed and designed from the four historical-ideational traditions in American foreign policy by Mead (Mead, 2001) and named as Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian grand strategies. In a two-by-two table one dimension denotes political identity as conservatism or liberalism and the other dimension indicates external orientation as internationalism and nationalism. (Möttölä, 2011; Möttölä, 2013; see Table 1)
In the framework of the four strategic traditions, Obama emerges as an adapted liberal internationalist but his Wilsonian outlook has been curtailed by selective multilateralism and
15 restraint in politically-driven interventions as well as the heightened place of national interests caused by the emerging overall threat picture.
At the same time, Obama’s liberalism has been susceptible to adjustments driven by influences first of all from Hamiltonian conservative internationalism, which brings up the prudence of traditional realism with its emphasis on great-power relations; from Jeffersonian conservative nationalism, reflecting the idea of foreign policy starting at home and the need for diverting resources for infrastructural reforms; and from Jacksonian liberal nationalism, copied in some unilateral military actions in counterterrorism albeit without the neoconservative doctrinal assertiveness in democracy promotion.
In the framework of the scholarly debate underway on variations and degrees of “retrenchment” and “deep engagement” as models of security strategy, the author (Möttölä, 2013) has tracked and placed key approaches to change in three categories of reassessing, modifying or dismissing liberal internationalism as grand strategy for the future.
Liberalism is an inherent aspect in American foreign policy thought in Wilsonian and Jacksonian democracy promotion, while in liberal internationalism it is based on the authority and power of norms and institutions in sustaining and driving change. It is the long history of military interventions, often aiming at regime change, which has raised the most serious controversy and divide in the American scholarly community.
Although the balance of opinions is different in the think tank and policy expert world, where by and large an activist foreign policy is adopted and the relative decline is seen not inevitable but conditional (Flockhart, 2014; Jones, 2014; Wright, 2015), proponents of liberal internationalism, Ikenberry and his partners, claim that most academic scholars writing about the grand strategy of the United States argue for retrenchment. Consequently, the critics discard deep engagement which for the preservers has been the US grand strategy of the post-war era. (Brooks et. al., 2012/2013, 7-10; also Brooks et. al., 2013)
The question of measuring and verifying relative power informs the main arguments for retrenchment. Focusing on the consequences of the decline of US power and the consequent end of unipolarity, the proponents of a limited strategy note that the United States is unable to discharge the large tasks (provision of public goods) required, thus making the open liberal order based on the US hegemony unsustainable. (Layne, 2012) On the side of the economic capability, the grand strategy for undertaking global responsibilities has become fiscally impossible or impractical to carry on. (Mandelbaum, 2010)
From the military-security angle, and in the debate on the implementation and practicability of the strategic lines of action followed by the US, the juxtaposition of liberal and realist theories of international politics as the bases for foreign policy becomes dominant. In particular, for realist critics, the policy for building and using military force as driven by opportunities instead of threats has been perilously expansive and should be replaced by a less ambitious prioritized agenda focused on real threats. (Betts, 2012; Betts, 2014)
For Posen, more broadly, the post-war grand strategy of “Liberal Hegemony” identified with Ikenberry is costly, wasteful and counterproductive as well as self-defeating. It is not necessary for the US interests and can be replaced by a grand strategy of restraint. In terms of theory, the flaw lies in the expansive concept of security applied by the liberals for a plethora of foreign policy goals, whereas grand strategy should be focused on and limited to the basics of security understood in a narrow definition as sovereignty, safety, and territorial integrity to be preserved by the consequent and appropriate power position as a means and an end. Other objectives in foreign policy may fall under grand strategy but they should not be held as given. (Posen, 2014)
Irrespective of the continuity of the US grand strategy extending to the post-war era, for Posen, the end of the cold war provided a moment of choice among four alternative lines. The combination of cooperative security and primacy was adopted as the prevailing liberal consensus, whereas the
16 alternative realist strategy of restrain would combine with selective engagement and isolationism. (Posen, 2014, 6-7)
The grand strategy of restraint advocates a set of more limited means and goals focused on geopolitical interests vital to security including nuclear weapons and the four regions of Europe/Eurasia, East Asia, the Middle East and South Asia as well as the requisite military strategy directed at commanding the global commons. Instead of remaining excessively and intensively engaged around the globe, the US should protect its interests at a lower cost by reforming policies in the vital areas and reducing its profile in identity politics. Although the strategy of liberal hegemony has worked poorly, it is based on a broad political infrastructure. Short of a deep voluntary political change or a rupturing crisis, it can only transform incrementally towards a more restraint policy. (Posen, 2014, 164-175)
The notion of ‘the return of geopolitics’ is another key angle in the liberal-realist debate. For the theory and policy in the liberal international framework, the end of the cold war and the rise of new powers have not changed the logic behind the post-war project. For the proponents of the rise of geopolitics, a core group of revisionist and illiberal powers (China, Russia, and Iran) are engaged in overturning the geopolitical settlement as a challenge to the US leadership. While the liberal powers continue to believe in enlarging a liberal win-win order, the revisionist powers are playing classical geopolitics in Eurasia and creating spheres of influence and activating security dilemmas. As a consequence, the United States as the power which has created and maintained the international order cannot let the grip loose of its responsibilities. (Allison, 2014; Kagan, 2012; Kagan, 2014; Kaplan, 2014; Mead, 2014)
To see geopolitics back as a dominant factor is for Ikenberry a misreading of power realities, as China and Russia are at most part-time spoilers and incapable, and even not seeing in their interest, to act as full-scale revisionist powers. As a result of the ongoing spread of liberal democracy, the United States with its allies and partners stand at the top of the geopolitical system. (Ikenberry, 2014a)
Another challenge concerns the socialization of hegemonic power and the interconnection between material power and ideas in international order. Despite the long trajectory and continued impetus of liberal ascendancy, which does not make likely a rivalling global doctrine, rising powers may create their own ideational spheres of influence. To the extent material power distribution determines the distribution of ideational power, the international order is turning into a normatively – and not only institutionally - diverse order. (Buzan, 2010; Ikenberry and Kupchan, 2006; Kupchan, 2012; Kupchan, 2014)
As for implications for theory, being either self-proclaimed realists or basing their assessment in realist scholarship, advocates of retreat maintain that realism speaks for retrenchment and the post-cold war US policy is an anomaly explained by domestic politics or liberal ideology. Ikenberry and his partners claim that realism does not necessarily yield in favour of retrenchment, and other theories help to explain the US grand strategy. The US post-cold war strategy is what a rational, self-interested, and leading power would do. (Brooks et. al., 2012/2013, 50-51; Wohlforth, 2012)
In their counterarguments on the issue of policy practice, the respondents of liberal internationalism turn down the core claim that the grand strategy of deep engagement, is not in the US national interest due to rising costs that dwarf its benefits. The proponents maintain that for six decades the US has sought to advance its interests in security, prosperity and domestic liberty by pursuing three overlapping core objectives: (1) to reduce near- and long-term threats to US national security by managing the external environment; (2) promoting a liberal economic order to expand the global economy and domestic prosperity; and (3) creating, sustaining and revising the global institutional order, including security commitments, to advance international cooperation and collective action in terms favourable to US interests.
17 The dividing line to retrenchment is whether the three core objectives are necessary for the US values and interests and whether the associated security commitments – hit the hardest by critics - are necessary. On other aspects of foreign policy such as democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention or human rights, advocates do not have uniform opinions; they are not constant or defining elements of the grand strategy and commitments have varied. Nor does leadership by deep engagement imply an aggressive use of military force, which remains an instrument of choice in each case. (Brooks et. al., 2012/2013, 13-14)
The inherently policy-relevant discourse by and large perceives a muddling-through mode for the US foreign policy with a wide agenda. The scholarly discourse has progressed further in disclosing differences of theoretical approaches and generating alternatives to the current grand strategy.
At the same time, liberal internationalism can be seen to encompass a uniting theme or a yardstick among protagonists of different schools of thought drawn from the American historical, constitutional and political legacy in world politics.
Regarding liberal internationalism and Obama’s policy
The mutual fertilization with the other principal traditions, as witnessed in the formation of the Obama grand strategy, displays the complexity and suppleness of the concept of liberal internationalism taken onto the practical level of policy making. A standard for pure liberalism is not easy to establish, as even those who view the current US policy as liberal internationalism call for modifications and changes to ensure its sustainability, while purist forms of realism are not necessarily more successful in the American polity.
In an effort to compile a synthesis of the scholarly debates, the voices heard on the sustainability of liberal internationalism as a US grand strategy are grouped according to the nature of change they advocate: bending, recasting or replacing liberal internationalism. For a comparative analysis, the substantive contents of the profiles are drawn by indicating, in the order of priority, the urgency or significance they place on the key components of grand strategy formation: order; large ends; and means. (See Table 2)
Bending is an ends-driven strategy with the focus on enlarging and strengthening the liberal ascendancy in the international order. Recasting is an order-driven strategy, which calls for structural and institutional changes by burden sharing in global governance. Replacing is a means- driven strategy necessitating a thorough overhaul in the means and resources invested and used for promoting selective US interests and values, ultimately downgrading liberal objectives.
For protagonists of bending, global change and power shift are manageable by a modified US leadership of global governance, supported by the continued investment in resources and capabilities. For protagonists of recasting, a moderate recalibration of the usage of resources is called for in maintaining a stable environment by reforming international institutions and regimes in recognition of power shift. For protagonists of replacement, some inevitable reduction of liberal features in the global order is tolerable, as a consequence of adapting the US policy with a narrower but prioritized agenda to a less governable global environment.
Barack Obama seems to have pursued in his first administration a crossover grand strategy of bending (cf. Indyk et.al., 2012) and recasting liberal internationalism, blending a committed deep engagement with tactical aspects of retrenchment under a prudent leadership. The agility of his profile, driven by ideational and structural factors, helps to ensure the sustainability of liberal internationalism as defined broadly enough.
18 Political Conservatism Liberalism identity Doubt in and Trust in and External restraint toward strive toward orientation international change international change
Internationalism (1) Conservative (2) Liberal internationalism internationalism
Regular participation in Hamiltonian Wilsonian international affairs (1); Great power Multilateralism including commitment to centricity Institutionalism multilateral order (2) Carrot = stick Carrot > stick Interests > values Interests < values
Nationalism (3) Conservative (4) Liberal nationalism nationalism Restraint in international participation (3); or Jeffersonian Jacksonian targeted influence Isolationism Unilateralism without permanent Neosovereigntism Neoconservatism commitments (4) Carrot ≠ stick Carrot < stick Interests < values Interests = values
Table 1. Schools of thought in external grand strategy for the United States: historical- ideational identification (as in Mead, 2001); mix of structural and institutional approaches to influencing the external milieu; relation between persuasion and coercion as means of power; prioritizing between external security interests and American/universal values in the promotion of US goals.
19 III GRAND STRATEGY TO ORDER CHANGE
4. What does grand strategy do with policy and order?
Grand theory and grand strategy: a two-way street
The question of policy relevance of International Relations scholarship can be approached from several angles. In his classical treatise, George identifies three types of policy-relevant knowledge produced by research in the areas of International Relations theory and Foreign Policy analysis. (George, 1993)
Abstract conceptual models of strategy are directly relevant for the topic of the paper at hand. While not grand strategies as such, models provide a framework for understanding an effective strategy by identifying the critical components to be concretized by policy choices and the general logic for employing the strategy in adversarial challenges. Conceptual models are useful as deductive theories even though they may not help in predicting outcomes.
Generic knowledge, particularly topical today in foresight analysis, contains empirical laws, causal patterns and conditional generalizations of developments drawn from empirical systemic or case studies on the strategic environment.
Actor-specific behavioural models, particularly in demand in analyses of great powers such as Russia and China as competitors and adversaries of the US, or of the dynamics of regions of perpetual conflict, are useful when generalized rationality needs to be replaced by psychological, cultural or sociological attributes as the basis for understanding behaviour in international relations.
20 In a systematic study of the policy relevance of grand theory, Eriksson finds that case- and actor- specific studies as bridge-building efforts rely on middle-range theories, while grand theories,, which make generalizing or universal claims of validity, are considered of little value for the purpose of problem-solving in the policy world. (Eriksson, 2014)
A common way of verifying policy relevance of scholarship is to view the sender-receiver relationship in shaping the policy agenda in the simplified ‘speaking truth to power’ mode, where research outcomes are communicated to, or scholarly advice is requested by, planners and decision-makers.
Instead of focusing on the instrumental or one-way influences, it would be more productive to perceive the discourse overcoming the gap between theory and policy as a platform where practitioners, consciously or unconsciously, use ideas and patterns produced by scholars as guides or instigate them as building-blocks for their policies. It is in the perspective of such an epistemic community embracing academic scholarship, think tank advocacy and governance as practice and leadership where the greatest impact and policy relevance of grand theories and concepts may be found.
As the main functions of scholarship, Eriksson identifies, in parallel with the George categories, three types of usage of grand theories in the making of policy. Instrumentally, such grand theories as variations of realism and liberalism may be mainstreamed or applied directly to policy. Conceptually, ideas and concepts help policy-makers to understand the external environment and encapsulate their own thinking and policy philosophy. Symbolically, ideas may be used for legitimating, critiquing or redefining policy decisions and commitments as well as raising public support. (Eriksson, 2014, 100-102)
Defining grand strategy
However defined, grand strategy calls for ideational skills in analysis and policy. Formation of grand strategy has to generate an image of the world as it is and a perception how it should be. A prescriptive function is on a weak ground without a predictive aspect, which brings in strategic foresight as an increasingly vital element in grand strategy bracing global change. (Missiroli, 2013; Burrows, 2014)
In orienting towards the future, grand strategy is preoccupied with significant and valuable ends to be achieved and secured by policy pursued within the international order and directed at shaping its trajectory. Intent does not make objectives happen without the acquisition and usage of adequate resources and capabilities. Succinctly, grand strategy has been defined as the calculated relationship between means and large ends over the long turn. (Howorth, 2010, 463)
Similarly, grand strategy is the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means. Kennan’s idea of containment was effective and historical because it was charted at the time with great authority and within a grand strategic framework. (Gaddis, 2011, 693-694)
Another question is whether grand strategy is about the practice and skill to do things rather than focused on the substance of steps taken and ends defined. In practicing grand strategy a key task is to find and maintain a balance between ends and means; and from another angle the challenge is to juxtapose the attention to an end-state with the process of taking intermediate steps in time.
In fact, for Freedman strategy evolves through a series of steps reached, and it is best understood as moving to the next stage rather than as a definitive and permanent conclusion of a process. Accordingly, strategy has to be fluid and flexible, governed by the immediate or intermediate points and not the end point. In that perspective, strategy is the art of creating power with the purpose of getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. Strategy becomes occupied with persistence in reaching marginal advantages.
21 Accordingly, Freedman does not use the concept grand strategy but strategy as a multipurpose concept under three headings: strategies of force, strategy from below and strategy from above, albeit his treatise seems to fit best in the traditional perspective of military strategy. (Freedman, 2014, x-xii; Kennedy, 2014)
A further distinction to be drawn has to do with the proclivity of analysts to associate grand strategy with doctrines and national security strategies as prescriptive policy documents. Grand strategy, with its generality necessary for universal validity, is seen to be evolving and developing at a higher level of abstraction than security doctrines which present a course of action by identifying problems and responses. While grand strategy may express a philosophical albeit politically-driven thought process, a doctrine indicates a planning and commitment for action.
Historically and ideationally, military strategy is viewed as the harbinger or core of the development of the concept of grand strategy. While its meaning has changed over time, strategy has evolved as a concept denoting the link between policy (and statecraft) at the highest level and the use of military force as the ultimate tool. As a broadening concept, after the Second World War, grand strategy has become akin to a comprehensive state policy on foreign and military affairs. Even with the background in military security, as an art of creating and using power in the international system, grand strategy (total strategy, major strategy) has come to embrace the pursuit of political ends, primarily in international relations, not only with military tools, but also with diplomatic, economic or cultural instruments of state power. (Heuser, 2010, 8-9, 26-28)
Nevertheless, for realist strategists, the military retains a special and unique position in security threats and responses, a consistent condition for the US as the leading military power. Military power can be put to both limited and expansive use. In Posen’s definition, a grand strategy is a nation-state’s theory about how to produce security for itself. Grand strategy focuses on military threats, because they are the most dangerous, and on military responses or remedies, because these are the most costly. Such a geostrategic focus is justified when security is defined traditionally to encompass the preservation of power position as the necessary means to preserve sovereignty, safety, and territorial integrity of the state and society in a Westphalian order. (Posen, 2014, 1)
Manifestations of power
As power is ubiquitous in all social relations, it is consequential that the discourse on power in international relations, including state power, has taken a new turn reflecting the diversifying international order as an object of study. To understand or explain the relationship between power and policy outcome has become a complex task calling for reassessing the phenomenon of power itself as well as redefining and, ultimately, expanding the concept or theory of power in realist, liberal and constructivist traits. (Finnemore and Goldstein, 2013)
For the purpose of identifying the sources and effects of US power, the taxonomy of Barnett and Duval serves to test or reveal the comprehensive character of power in various manifestations. At the same time, the evolution of thinking around power points to the difficulty in establishing a parsimonious or grand theory of power. (Barnett and Duval, 2005; Krasner, 2013)
Compulsory power, which works in the direct interaction between actors, allows a stronger state to exercise control over the existence or behaviour of a weaker one and drive regime change by the use of material power. The use of military force by occupation or a crisis management intervention is an example of compulsory power.
Institutional power, which is also exercised in the diffuse interaction of actors, works through institutions that reflect the preferences of more powerful actors and primarily aims at changing or monitoring policies of the other. The impact of international financial and trade institutions and norms on acceding members is an example of institutional power.
22 Structural power works through mutual social relations, which may enable or constrain the constitution of identities, roles and preferences as well as capabilities of actors. Although structural power does not involve identifiable actors, it would be normal that more powerful actors would be able to directly target the profile of the other. The spread and evolution of a particular international order such as the Westphalian state system is an example of structural power.
Productive power, which involves the constitution of identities and capabilities through diffuse social relations, works through indirect and networked relations. Actors are embedded in discourses where they adopt certain kinds of behaviour as acceptable or appropriate. Productive power is the more effective the more deeply and widely states are embedded in a global discourse where certain states pursue leadership.
As opposed to bargaining as a model of goal-oriented relationships, various forms of power call for significant differences in underlying material and ideational capabilities between actors and states in social relations: to commit resources, establish and support institutions, or transform the international environment are actions of strategic and systemic significance.
5. Grand strategy in action: theories and policies of order change
Grand strategy driving an order change: Kennan vs Ikenberry
Grand strategy is about the art of addressing milieu change through the manipulation of power in its various dimensions and hierarchies and shaping global governance and rule, in support of norms, ideas and interests promoted by the actor. When asserting that power can be turned into order not only by hegemonic or hierarchical competition but also by organizing and shaping interrelationships among states and international institutions, the discourse about grand strategy verifies that international order is not purely anarchical but can be governed by voluntaristic and determined policy of major powers and other actors.
Unipolarity measures the distance of the order from other structures such as multipolarity and non- polarity or from polycentric and decentred orders. Unipolarity is past in most analyses of the Obama grand strategy, but it does not mean that an American-led or hegemonic order would be out of the conceptual toolkit even if they are contested with or replaced by post-American or post- hegemonic orders in the discussion on managing decline and the spectre of retrenchment. (Buzan, 2011; Ikenberry e.t al., eds., 2011)
The United States is an order-shaping actor driven and sustained by its superior multi-dimensional power in aggregate and diverse terms and its proclivity for leadership in international relations since the Second World War in liberal internationalism and even longer in liberal ascendancy.
There are different approaches to identifying or benchmarking turning points or transformative periods in the development of international order, with the ends of major wars being seen as ruptures which not only record power shifts but launch normative and institutional changes as well. (Buzan, 2014; Holsti, 2004; Ikenberry, 2001)
Arguably the end of the cold war has been another milestone, however contested. For a longer period of time, the discussion has moved to the topic of a post-post-cold war order, which has been arriving without a major war as a catalyst. To the extent the Obama administration is facing a turning point in international order, and consequently, in demand for a foreign policy strategy to address and impact order change, the theories of Kennan and Ikenberry serve different purposes as drawn from the empirical and conceptual reviews and analyses presented above in the paper. (See Table 3)
- As for the historical pattern or ‘laws’ of US security strategies, the Obama administration is occupying a turn to “retrenchment” but in a hybrid mode in two respects. First, in a complex
23 manner of generating and employing power, the instances of military power projection, the shift of strategic rebalancing and the strategy of domestic reconstruction and international economic expansion help to reject the conception of decline. Secondly, there are potential initiatives on the agenda, which could bring about a turn from “less” to “more” during the term of the administration and prepare the ground for a “maximalist” successor.
- Being a contemporary, Ikenberry does not see the US involved in retrenchment if that would call for cutting off or radically reducing security commitments or institutional engagements and thus changing the open and rule-based structure of international order, while recalibrating authority structures is advisable for the purpose of embedding new powers as partners in its management. For Kennan, a uniform order based on international law and common norms is a distant thought in place of a system, which is run by states pursuing national interests in a moderate fashion in the geopolitical environment.
- In terms of the policy relevance of their scholarship, the Ikenberry theory, being primarily a systems-level guide, will have to prove and sustain the fundamental continuity of international order with institutional modification, with its effects on actors’ policies , whereas Kennan’s agency-level theory would call for particular and prioritized policy choices, which have transformative consequences for parts of the international order.
- While Ikenberry’s theory would lend itself for instrumental use in policy as a source of generic knowledge for liberal mainstreaming, Kennan’s theory offers a lessons-learnt-driven conceptual model of international politics thus serving a conceptual function for foreign policy. In terms of actor-specific behavioural models, Kennan’s advice is to discern the ideational and moral drivers of the politics of partners and adversaries, whereas Ikenberry would draw clues from the embedding of the country in the normative and institutional structure of international order.
- In the theory-to-policy discourse, Ikenberry’s theory would typically be put to symbolic use for legitimating and Kennan’s theses for critiquing policies, while both are relevant for redefining strategies in a transforming order.
- In their conceptions of grand strategy, Ikenberry points to large and long-term ends, whereas Kennan’s attention lies at the problem at hand. In this context, there may be a related dichotomy between the universalism of Ikenberry’s model for the dynamics of international order and the inherent particularity of Kennan’s approach to strategic choices. Neither theoreticians value the role of military power as a critical tool for generic use.
- To the effect that grand strategy is a process for creating power to handle future, potentially more demanding contingencies, the ubiquitous nature and extent of the US power makes the task somewhat contradictory. While Ikenberry views the American leadership instrumental and organic to international order, Kennan is in essence skeptical about the skill and morality of US leadership despite its power position. While for Ikenberry consistency is paramount to success, for Kennan strategic mistakes are part of the normal and results of false advice.
- While for Kennan power is a social and psychological as well as moral issue of agency, Ikenberry trusts the pervasive impact of international institutions and norms on the functioning of international order. In the Barnett-Duval framework, Kennan would recognize the role of compulsory power but trust the workings of structural power as well, whereas institutional power provides the fundament of Ikenberry’s strategy together with an optimistic perspective towards the organic role of productive power.
24 Patterns of order change
In the concluding section an analytical framework is drawn for placing Obama’s grand strategy making in the framework of order change, with traces of Kennan’s and Ikenberry’s theories informing underlying explanatory factors.
Cyclical and evolutionary theories represent efforts to describe, discern and explain paths to change in international order. While power transition theory, which has been in use as a messenger of ruptures in order caused by shifts in relative power among the leading actors well before the current discussion on the case of Obama’s America, may apply to both of them, cyclical and evolutionary theories reflect different ways and degrees of the influence of power. (Ikenberry, ed., 2014; Ikenberry, 2014a; Wohlforth, 2011)
The cyclical theory relies more on power, in particular military and aggregate power, as the basis for choices of great powers, including war and grand bargains. A cyclical change of order is arbitrary in nature and reflects the anarchical side of the international system. While there is a causal link between power shift and order change – they need to correspond to each other in the long term – international order is not mechanically built on the balance of power but rather it may be driven by a structured asymmetry of power emerging into the hierarchical structure.
In addition to power diffusion as a driver to cyclical change, hegemonic and other great powers may introduce cultural and political norms, values and ideas as motivating factors in transforming global order or a particular regional order under their influence. The cyclical change may result in a diverse international order instead of a uniform overlay of power of global order.
The evolutionary theory takes into consideration the role of power but as a complementary factor for individual and collective action in international relations. An evolutionary change is understood more profoundly as a historical-sociological process such as that of modernization driven and enlarged by industrial capitalism underpinned by liberal ascendancy or the US-led liberal internationalist order in the post-war era.
While the core of the systemic evolution is taking place at the level of societies and states, it is linked to securing a corresponding change of global governance sufficient for the requisite progress sought in international order. In such developments, authority is a necessary form of power needed to ensure compliance with normative and institutional commitments, and legitimacy is a vital position for leadership in providing public goods and overcoming collective action problems within a hierarchical system.
Conclusion: ‘Kennan’ and ‘Ikenberry’ theories alternating and mixing as roots in Obama’s grand strategy
To what extent is Barack Obama’s grand strategy informed by Kennan’s and Ikenberry’s approaches? Intuitively, Kennan’s theory would work for a cyclical change and Ikenberry’s theory would be suitable for an evolutionary change of international order.
It is indicative of the hybrid or fluid nature of Obama’s grand strategy for the United States as constituted by his actions and narratives that at some point or circumstance practically any ‘Kennanian’ or ‘Ikenberryan’ element could be credibly observed or introduced in his policies. The most intriguing outcome of the schematic connection of Obama’s profile to the scholarship of the theoreticians-cum-strategists of two different ages as indicated in Table 3 is the specific character and emphasis of Kennan’s classical realism and Ikenberry’s constitutional liberalism in the framework of the respective two theoretical schools.
What can be concluded as Kennan’s realist conception of the morality of power is constituted in his urge for moderation in the use of power for the promotion of the national interest in relations with other countries, especially great powers. As his view of the international order is focused on analyzing and illuminating individual countries and their decision-makers in the psychological-
25 sociological-cultural context, Kennan imposes high moral criteria on the statecraft of politics as the use of power. Kennan’s application of realism is particularly revealing, as he was an operational force in strategic-policy making at a deep juncture in world politics when the United States was on the rise to a unique category of superpower and yielded exceptional leverage over order formation and change. His realist counselor would not be surprised or at a loss when faced with a cyclical change of the world order.
As Obama’s main immediate security concerns have been rogue and otherwise threatening countries and non-state movements in an increasingly disordered world, he needs actor-specific intelligence and foresight on adversaries to inform relevant US strategic responses, which have tended to become of a long duration. In fact, with the cloud of perceived decline hanging in the air, the pattern of security-policy making in the US administration – pressured by domestic challenges - has become increasingly of an intermediate or immediate character, while global issues as well as the rise of illiberal great-power competitors would call for updating strategic visions of the longest perspective.
To the extent that the pattern of the Obama strategic policy making is indicative of the external environment becoming increasingly arbitrary and approaching a cyclical change of international order, liberal internationalism has to carry the burden of proof of its sustainability as a driver of the global shape of international order. Consequently, Ikenberry’s liberal conception of the purpose of power is constituted by a consistent and robust US leadership amidst the turbulence of world politics both at the agency- and systems-levels of ordering developments.
To uphold the open and rule-based character of international order, the United States has to keep up contributing to the strength of the authority and legitimacy of established international institutions and potentially novel regimes. Although cultural and civilizational divides and confrontations abound in discourses and events on the world scene, the US has to leverage the ideational dimension of its power position as well.
In the last instance, in the liberal narrative, the United States has the capability to underpin the ideational and structural basis of liberal international order, as there are no really equal rivals to establish an alternative source of power to leverage generic influence across institutions and regimes for security and economic governance. Consequently, pending an adapted US leadership, the change of international order underway could remain managed and evolutionary.
While it would be an arbitrary exercise to place Kennan in today’s situation, he would most likely be disposed to the strategic choice of restraint in the US role; however, he would be suggesting incremental and active responses to the challenges posed by great powers, turning the strategy towards a hybrid model. Likewise, Ikenberry’s thinking predicts and prescribes the turn of the United States towards a hybrid security strategy in modifying the character and position of US leadership. Irrespective of whether seen from the social geopolitical perspective of Kennan’s classical realism or from the angle of the institutionally-driven doctrine of liberal internationalism promoted by Ikenberry, the US grand strategy has arrived at a fluid stage of development with emerging hybrid contents.
26 ORDER CHANGE ‘KENNAN’ ‘IKENBERRY’
Theory of policy in Classical realism Constitutional liberalism international relations
Relevance and use of Agency-level Systems-level scholarship for policy Conceptual model Generic knowledge making Actor-specific behaviour Actor-targeted influence Conceptual use Instrumental use
Focus of grand strategy Immediate stage Large ends Particularity Universalism
Art of creating power National interest Leadership Moderation Consistency
Determinants of power Psychological-social Ideational Morality Structural
Manifestations of power Compulsory Institutional Structural Productive
Nature of order change Arbitrary Managed Cyclical Evolutionary
Driver and trajectory of Social geopolitics Liberal internationalism US grand strategy Retrenchment to hybrid Engagement to hybrid
Table 3. US grand strategy addressing change of international order; elements and drivers drawn schematically from Kennan’s and Ikenberry’s theories; as reflected in the inclination of the narratives and choices of the Obama administration (italics).
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