On Obama's Foreign Policy, the Establishment Debates Itself, and Nobody Wins

Question: What do a billionaire publisher, a Bush administration official, a former democratic presidential candidate, and France’s most prominent living philosopher have in common? Answer: way too much.

“Obama’s Foreign Policy Spells America’s Decline” was the motion in a televised, Oxford-style debate held this Tuesday at New York University, the latest in an annual series commissioned by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, brainchild of conservative philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz. The program pitted U.S. News & World Report editor Mortimer Zuckerman and former Bush administration official Dan Senor against 2004 Democratic presidential contender Wesley Clark and world-renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. You can probably guess which team argued which position.

The pugnacious and relatively youthful Senor, a nonconservative wunderkind and one-time spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, kicked off the event. He argued, in standard neocon fashion, that Obama has abandoned the core principles that have animated U.S. foreign policy on a bipartisan basis since Truman: bold projection of American power; unstinting commitment to U.S. allies in the face of regional tyrannies; and material and moral support for democratic dissidents around the world.

While Senor (naturally) supported Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his steadfastness in Iraq, he decried the President’s decision to scrap the missile defense program in Eastern Europe, a move that alienated traditional U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic. He castigated Obama for his silence during the Iranian uprising last summer, blaming the President’s aloofness for the regime's violent crackdown, and noted the fruitlessness of Obama’s efforts to convince Security Council members China and Russia to support his policy of globally isolating Iran. The Iranian nuclear program, he said, is closer to producing a bomb than ever before.

Next for the pro-motion side was Mort Zuckerman, the Bloomberg-like billionaire whose politics straddle that uncomfortable line between traditional Jewish liberalism and pro-Israel bellicosity. Zuckerman more or less echoed Senor’s diagnosis, but with fewer substantive points and greater abstraction.

“In the Middle East,” he said, invoking a common imperial metaphor, “There are two chessboards. There’s the one on the table, that everybody can see, and there’s the one below the table. And you have to know how to play the game. I do not believe that Barack Obama knows how to play the game.” The Iranians, he opined, “can only be handled with a clenched fist” — by which he meant a military strike — whereas Obama offers them a friendly handshake. (Ironically, it was mentioned that Zuckerman supported Obama during the 2008 election. He must have missed the whole platform of engagement on which Obama campaigned.)

For the con side, Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, went first.  His tactic was to underscore the atrocious legacy of the Bush administration and praise Obama for doing his best to minimize the fallout. He rebutted criticism of Obama's missile defense policy, arguing (I’d presume credibly, given his background) that missile defense can now be conducted from naval submarines, rendering stationary ABM installations unnecessary. Clark congratulated Obama for "doubling down" in Afghanistan — a tough decision, he said (in fact, it was the politically expedient choice for a Democrat seen as weak on security) — and for maintaining smart pressure on Iran, rather than merely expressing impotent rage, a la Bush.

Then came Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose cartoonish French accent, popped collar and exposed chest hair only added to the charisma of his presentation. As would befit a philosopher, Lévy took the position that it is the great masses of people, not individual policymakers, who are the movers of history. And in speaking directly to the Muslim world, as he did in his path-breaking Cairo speech, Obama has generated respect and sympathy for the United States in the eyes of the only political actor that counts: world public opinion.

But Lévy, a self-proclaimed "militant of human rights" and critic of what he considers neofascist ideologies, including "Islamofascism" (a term that for so many reasons is distasteful and problematic), also issued a glowing endorsement of Obama’s Afghanistan policy, praising the counter-insurgency strategy he witnessed during a recent visit to that country. He lauded the caution and responsibility Obama displayed by not encouraging the Iranian Green Movement at a time when the U.S. was unprepared to back them militarily — something he did not seem to intrinsically oppose. And he seemed to condone Obama's deployment of the unmanned Predator drones that have killed so many civilians in Pakistan.

And so the limits of our public discourse were exposed, for all to see: at a debate whose raison d'etre was, according to Intelligence Squared, "To encourage recognition that the opposing side has intellectually respectable views," the real "opposition" — the anti-war left — was entirely sidelined. Instead, the debate maintained and normalized an imperial consensus, with even the token European "leftist" representing the relatively bellicose school of humanitarian interventionists that author Paul Berman praised in his worthwhile book, Power and the Idealists. Where was the voice of the many U.S. activists and writers — even some politicians — who have been urging the American public to rethink the Afghanistan war, and come to a pragmatic accommodation with the Iranian nuclear program? Where were the Noam Chomskys and the Katrina vanden Heuvels?

Perhaps more surprising, however, was the absence of a discussion of Israel, its policies toward the Palestinians, and the Obama administration's ongoing dispute with Prime Minister Netanyahu over settlement expansion. This lacuna was particularly pronounced given that three of the four debaters are Jewish and have known Zionist leanings (Senor currently has a hot-selling book that extols the genius of Israeli industry). There, again, we can see the discursive limitations of even this supposedly thought-provoking forum: there was no advocate for a stronger diplomatic posture toward Israeli occupation policy. Instead, the pro-Zionist beltway consensus was passed off as thrilling "critical" discourse.

As it turned out, the "pro-Obama" side “won” the debate. But the question remains as to who really "wins" from public events like these (the debate will air on Bloomberg TV the week of May 17-23). I'd suggest an answer: certainly not the marketplace of ideas, and certainly not the American people.

Photo credit: The White House