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.