In the post-Machiavellian World, Economics, Not War, Rule

Posted by: Steve LeVine on April 06

The outlines of the Obama administration’s foreign policy are becoming plain. And they are as audacious as his domestic policies.

Among the interconnected aims so far are: Engineer fully normalized relations with Syria and a strategic partnership with Russia, paving the way to a rapprochement with Iran, and shaking up the power equation in the Middle East.

You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes, but wait. We’ve discussed previously how the financial crisis potentially changes the chessboard in numerous ways. But there’s also something qualitatively different in the administration’s approach from its predecessors’ — how far it appears willing to go.

Among ideas under consideration, last Friday the Financial Times’s Daniel Dombey reported that Washington could allow Iran to enrich uranium as long as it’s under strict observation; and it’s been clear that the administration is willing to delay or even cancel the George W. Bush-era plan to station missile defense positions in Poland and the Czech Republic, as long as Russia offers up something equivalent in exchange (according to a report by the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock, the Czechs may pull out of the plan unilaterally in any case). In terms of Syria, read Seymour Hersh’s exhaustive account of American diplomacy and what it could bring in last week’s New Yorker.

Interestingly, helpful offers are coming from elsewhere to ease this process. Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, for instance, is offering to host a "nuclear bank" of fissile material that nations such as Iran could tap in order to feed nuclear reactors without having to develop their own enriched uranium, report the Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman and Marc Champion. According to the WSJ story, President Obama is seriously considering the offer, which seems reasonable: Kazakhstan is a stable country, and the offer is part of its continuing efforts to get back in the West's good graces after its years of pummeling on political rights grounds. Over at Registan, Josh Foust rightly says the jury is out on whether the bank will actually be created. Yet the fact that it's even getting such consideration demonstrates the administration's will to wedge into a thaw with Iran.

Against this backdrop, Leslie Gelb, the uber-analyst who formerly ran the Council on Foreign Relations, weighs in with a new book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy. The book, which has been reviewed well elsewhere, is written as a letter to Obama.

Gelb's narrative explicitly jumps off from Machiavelli's The Prince, arguing that for much of five centuries, a national leader's main power has ultimately rested on fear of what he might and could do militarily. Yet Gelb is at heart a pragmatist. Gelb -- last week, I attended a talk by him before a small group of think-tank types and reporters over at the Council's Washington office -- has no time for ideologues or idealists who "ensnare our leaders into thinking about what they 'must' do, rather than about what they can do." He skillfully weaves the current tapestry of global events into the history of what brought us here.

Yet what I found most interesting in the book was Gelb's steady description of how power in the world has changed fundamentally since Machiavelli wrote his job application to Lorenzo de' Medici. Today, economics, and not warmaking, are at the center of power, a point that we discussed last week with Paul Kennedy.

Over at The National Interest, Daniel Drezner writes that this is a problem with the book. Drezner says Gelb fails to handle the economics portion well. I disagree. While Gelb is obviously more comfortable with the politics, the message on economics is clear and, more important, spot on.

I have my own problems with the book, primarily that Gelb seems not to consider that a nation's power can stem not only from its basic military or economic strength, but also from its capacity to muck up the works. In the talk, Gelb called Iran "a third-rate power," verging on fourth-rate, suggesting that it thus shouldn't be looked at as a central player in the Middle East or elsewhere. But what about Iran-supported Hezbollah and Hamas, and their threat to Israel and stability in Lebanon? Iran does occupy a pivotal place, specifically because of its nuisance value.

Conversely, both Iran and Russia -- another nation that delights in confounding U.S. initiatives abroad -- showed in the wake of 9/11 that they are willing and able to work within the construct of international consensus. Both nations played crucial roles in the U.S. dislodging of the Taliban in October 2002.

Russia's Vladimir Putin intuitively grasps the shift in global affairs. That's demonstrated in his energy policy, which despite the financial crisis continues to work to shift Russian power into Europe through the construction of natural gas pipelines and the purchase of energy infrastructure.

But, as Gelb suggests, the U.S. still seems locked into Machiavelli's world:

The linking of trade, investments, and resources to foreign policy and military affairs has been second nature to most nations for centuries. But this has not been the case in America, where principle and politics unite to 'protect' economics and business from government intrusion (except where needed), where the departments of State and Treasury still avoid collaborating on policy, and where intellectual apartheid separates economics and politics departments at universities.

Power Rules gets the new rules right.