American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony

"Having described the international system and the world of foreign policy in which states have to operate, the next thing to understand is the particular actor that is the United States. What is it that makes this actor’s behaviour distinctive? The best book I know on that topic is by one of my PhD advisers at Harvard, Samuel Huntington, now unfortunately deceased. The essence of Huntington’s point is that the United States is a peculiar beast. It is an ideological polity. It is based on a creed; it is based on an idea, and it feels obliged to live up to that. But it is also a state like another state. A state with interests, a state living in the real world of international relations. For Huntington, that fundamental tension – between the idealism inherent in the American creed, and its ordinary nature as a state like other states – creates the dynamic of American policy. It oscillates between ordinary behaviour and idealistic behaviour; it feels the pull to act like everybody else and the pull to act like the City on the Hill, an exemplar to the world. You see it in terms of democracy promotion generally, and you can see it right now in the Middle East. Here you have a situation in which, in some respects, the allies of the United States in the Arab world have been thuggish autocracies. They are brutal regimes whose only real virtue is in providing some degree of stability in the region, which allows the oil resources to flow out. The United States has been happy to make compromises and deal with those regimes because, by and large, they provided the basic necessities that the United States required from the region. But when those regimes found themselves under attack from democratic protesters, every heart in America welled up with support for the protesters. We want to be on the side of the good guys, we want to be on the side of the youth in the streets protesting for democracy and human rights. We’re appalled to be on the side of nasty regimes shooting protesters. So this tension, between what we would like to be, and what we feel we need to be to operate in the world as it is, is a defining feature of American policy that recurs consistently throughout American history – both in domestic policy and in foreign policy. Not really, no. He points out that French foreign policy, and the institutions of France, existed before France was a democracy. French foreign policy – like many other European countries’ – essentially has a logic, a raison d’état that is alien to Americans. They may act in very cynical ways at times, but the American state came into being at the very same time as the American ideology, the American creedal belief and passion. The idea of America preceded the state. There’s always been this belief in America that the institutions of the state should live up to the ideals of the American political experiment. We see the compromises we make with our ideals as unfortunate or temporary, compromises we would prefer to shed. “The American state came into being at the very same time as the American ideology.” As a result, for America, the friendly tyrant – when you have a local thug who is serving your interests in the short term, but whom you find unsavoury and difficult – is a real problem. It really does pose an incredibly difficult dilemma, especially if that thug comes under attack from some kind of democratic revolution. We just don’t know what to do. So in the case of [the former Egyptian president, Hosni] Mubarak, after his decades of service as a loyal client in the Middle East, serving American interests, we kicked him to the kerb – almost with a “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!” The Saudis are furious with us for that. Even as we’re backing the Saudis, they’re thinking, “Wait, if you’re backing us, why did you get rid of Mubarak? Are you going to get rid of us too?” The short answer is we need the Saudis. We felt we needed Mubarak when he was the only alternative, but when it was no longer possible for him to stay without the use of brutal force, we jumped to the next horse very quickly. That’s the concluding line of the book, and the best line ever written about US foreign policy. You said before that everybody is upset with American foreign policy. Part of the reason, I would argue, is because they expect something good and serious from it, because they hear Americans talk about their ideals, they hear Americans say all these nice things about themselves. And they say, “Your practice doesn’t live up to your talk!” And they assume we’re not pure hypocrites, they actually get mad at us for not living up to our word. Americans do too. It all depends what you compare things to. If you compare the United States to small powers with no real obligations for providing security and public goods in the world, we look like a mean-spirited, self-interested, old-fashioned major state. But if you compare us to previous hegemons we look like positive angels! We have provided security, a generally free economic system, and a generally positive push towards political freedom in the world over a long period of time. Previous world hegemons didn’t do that. So it all depends what your comparison base is. American foreign policy also encourages that tension because it, itself, is confused as to what the proper gauge for its success should be."