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Posts Tagged ‘nation building’
August 11th, 2010 at 12:21 am
Jacksonians, Jeffersonians, and Wilsonians: Three Foreign Policy Views on the Right
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Over at the American Conservative, Associate Editor W. James Antle III (apparently they pay by the number of letters in the byline over at the AC) has an insightful piece up today about the shift in foreign policy thinking on the right.

Antle’s key insight is that, as the war in Afghanistan increasingly comes to be defined as a creature of the Obama Administration, many conservative foreign policy hawks are managing to stay aggressive on national defense while divorcing themselves from the nation-building pretensions of the Bush Administration (this author is among that group, which Antle — taking a page from Rich Lowry — calls the “to hell with them hawks”).

As Antle notes:

There have long been three main foreign-policy tendencies on the American Right: old-style conservatives who agree with Randolph Bourne that war is the health of the state and therefore favor less military intervention abroad; neoconservatives who want to preserve the United States’ global hegemony and engage in armed proselytizing for democracy; and defense-minded conservatives who believe the U.S. should strike forcefully at its enemies whenever it perceives itself, its interests, or its allies to be threatened.

Roughly speaking, these groups can be described as the Jeffersonians, the Wilsonians, and the Jacksonians. Among rank-and-file conservatives, the Jacksonians are by far the largest group. In the postwar era, the Jacksonians have tended to align with the Wilsonians. But there is no reason why that conjunction is inevitable.

For the record, Antle and the folks over the AC (the foreign policy followers of Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul) consider themselves Jeffersonians, a term that deserves some criticism (this is, after all, the man who aggressively promoted the French Revolution and went after the Barbary Pirates). But on the broader point, Antle is right. The grand nation-building associated with counterinsurgency theory is basically liberal domestic policy extrapolated abroad. And as George Will has perceptively noted, the very idea of “nation building” makes about as much sense as “orchid building”.

In an age of microwavable punditry, Antle has done a great job of thinking long and hard about the foreign policy divisions on the right. Anyone who cares about the future of the conservative movement and international relations would do well to read his piece in its entirety.

July 2nd, 2010 at 2:44 pm
The Surge to Nowhere
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Last week, I wrote that even as august a figure as David Petraeus may not be enough to save the American military endeavor in Afghanistan given that country’s poor suitability for a counterinsurgency strategy.

Writing in today’s D.C. Examiner, Byron York looks at what General Petraeus’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee reveals about the war’s shortcomings:

“For example, nearly seven million Afghan children are now in school as opposed to less than one million a decade ago under Taliban control,” Petraeus said. “Immunization rates for children have gone up substantially and are now in the 70 to 90 percent range nationwide. Cell phones are ubiquitous in a country that had virtually none during the Taliban days.”

It was an extraordinary moment. Americans overwhelmingly supported the invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. In eight and a half years of war there, 1,149 American servicemembers have died. And after all that sacrifice, the top American commander is measuring the war’s progress by school attendance, child immunization and cell phone use.

Petraeus is a military hero, deserving of every accolade that has been heaped upon him for the success of the surge in Iraq. But defining victory in Afghanistan as erecting a functional civil society overseen by a competent government is a “boil the ocean” strategy that may not be achievable in 18 years, let alone 18 months. And it’s relation to our legitimate national security interests in Central Asia is tangential at best.

Rather than letting the current strategy atrophy into withdrawal, it’s time for the administration to start developing an approach in Afghanistan that protects our legitimate security priorities without indulging in nation-building that has neither the domestic support nor the timeframe necessary to succeed.

January 8th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Nation Buildling Lessons from Liberia

There is a fascinating piece over at Foreign Policy from a former American paratrooper and human rights defender who was tasked to help remake Liberia’s decimated military. The almost humorously titled “I Built an African Army” provides a sober assessment of the big picture thinking needed to train, equip, and manage a developing country’s military. One of the most important insights was to inculcate ideas about social justice, and a soldier’s place in a democracy into recruits who identified themselves and others by tribe membership before citizenship.

And though the author doesn’t linger on it, early on he mentions that his mission on behalf of the U.S. State Department was contracted through DynCorp International, a private military company. Yes, liberals, there are plenty examples of private military contractors doing the kind of nuanced, real world nation building that all the money from the UN, WTO, and IMF couldn’t equal. It’s nice having a new round of ammunition.