[Salon] Hawks Still Don't Understand the Limits of American Power

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

Hawks Still Don't Understand the Limits of American Power

One might wonder what it is that the U.S. could or should have done to prevent these events, but Mead will not give you any answers.

Daniel Larison

Jan 11

Walter Russell Mead wants you to know that Things Are Happening in The World and Biden has not somehow magically stopped them from happening:

Last week Russian troops fanned out across Kazakhstan; the Myanmar junta sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi to four more years in prison; and China transferred a senior official from Xinjiang to lead the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Hong Kong. Two things are clear. First, America’s geopolitical adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration. Second, the administration’s attempts to make a priority of human rights and democracy have so far failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.

One might wonder what it is that the U.S. could or should have done to prevent these events, but Mead will not give you any answers. He cherry picks a series of events from different countries, imagines that they form a pattern, and then concludes, as he concludes almost every week, that it proves that “adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration.” Mead does not attempt to explain what the administration might have done differently to “impress” them, nor does he consider whether the events he mentions are in America’s power to change or even influence. He simply lists things and inevitably lays blame for them at Biden’s door because he has “failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.”

Reading Mead columns is like opening a time capsule from the mid-2000s. The references may be more recent, but the mindset of the writer remains mired in the hubris of the Bush era. It used to be that almost every hawkish pundit and analyst viewed the world in this simplistic, ridiculous way, but there are still some, including Mead, that interpret every undesirable or neutral event as a “failure” of American leadership and/or a setback for the cause of democracy. According to this view, the agency and interests of other states are at best secondary considerations when trying to explain why anything happens in the world. If an adversary does something we don’t like, it is because they are insufficiently in awe of the president’s resolve. The possibility that some things are beyond America’s reach or that things happen for reasons unrelated to how American power is perceived continues to elude people with this worldview.

Consider Mead’s first three examples. Presumably these are the examples Mead finds most compelling because he leads off his argument with them. First, Russia has sent troops into Kazakhstan (at the request of the Kazakh government) in response to the recent unrest and violence that broke out across the country in the last week. What does this have to do with what Putin thinks of Biden or his foreign policy? As far as I can tell, nothing at all. Russia has moved to shore up Tokayev in what appears to be at least partly an intra-elite battle for control inside Kazakhstan. Maybe Putin is “impressed” by Biden, and maybe he isn’t, but the decision to send troops into Kazakhstan has nothing to do with Biden or the United States. Strike one.

What about the Tatmadaw’s new sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi? This would appear to be a purely internal move related to their consolidation of power. Are we supposed to believe that the junta in Naypyidaw would have refrained from adding to her sentence if Biden had done something differently? If so, what is that something? Once again, Mead will not so much as hint at what that might be. Strike two. Finally, the Chinese government appoints an official that had served in Xinjiang to govern Hong Kong. I can see how this is bad news for people in Hong Kong, but I cannot for the life of me see how the U.S. government under any president could have influenced Beijing’s personnel decisions inside their own country for the better. Strike three. Mead saw some things in the headlines and tried to shoehorn them into a “Biden is failing” narrative. He should have chosen his examples more wisely.

Biden’s foreign policy in the first year has been quite poor in my estimation, but Mead’s complaints don’t get anywhere close to identifying the real problems. He spends the rest of his column whining that Biden is not being accommodating enough of authoritarian governments in Southeast Asia…just moments after he was whining about how he “failed” to “impress” the junta in Myanmar!

Biden’s democracy summit makes for an easy target, but even here Mead can’t really land any serious blows:

Last month’s virtual Summit for Democracy had an odd guest list. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan were invited; seven of the 10 members of Asean were not. At a time when America needs to tighten relations with Asean countries, the U.S. held a summit that excluded not only Myanmar but also Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The pointlessness of the summit presumably reduced the sting of exclusion. But especially as domestic protectionism hamstrings serious American trade diplomacy, the U.S. needs to find ways to attract Asean leaders, not drive them into China’s waiting embrace.

By Mead’s own admission, the summit was pointless, but he is very unhappy that various authoritarian governments in Southeast Asia were not asked to participate. He says that the summit had an “odd guest list,” but the guest list was, if anything, too accommodating and cynical. There were illiberal and semi-authoritarian democratic governments represented at the summit that probably shouldn’t have been. The problem wasn’t that Laos and Cambodia weren’t invited, but that the Philippines and India were. If you want to fault the administration’s democracy summit for anything, it was for not taking their supposed principles seriously enough. The truth is that the “administration’s attempts to make a priority of human rights and democracy” have been pretty halting and uneven, and in some parts of the world there have been no attempts at all.

The Biden administration made some questionable calls about which governments to invite, but at least there was a baseline that the country had to have a democratically elected government. Most of ASEAN was left out because most countries in ASEAN aren’t democracies by any stretch of the imagination. The guest list seems “odd” only if you assume that the entire exercise was window dressing for anti-China coalition-building, but then that just underscores how many ugly authoritarian governments the U.S. would have to indulge to build that coalition.

It’s true that the Biden administration’s handling of relations with Southeast Asian countries has been lacking, but it’s not because they have been too idealistic and principled. The chief problem is that the U.S. seems to treat the region as a means to an anti-China end without taking the concerns and interests of the countries in the region seriously. A good way to “attract” ASEAN leaders is to stop viewing them and their countries as pawns on a chessboard, but as far as Mead is concerned this is the only reason to take an interest in them.

It is remarkable that many hawks still don’t understand the limits of American power even after all of the failures of U.S. “leadership” that we have seen over the last twenty years.