The U.S. Turns Its Back On the World

With the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Barack Obama wants to end “the decade of war.” Those who welcome that may soon be in for a lesson.

So that was that. Barack Obama not only announced America’s full withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014 as he was expected to do; he also provided a reason for his decision. This marks the official end of an expansive epoch in U.S. foreign policy, a “decade of war,” as Obama called it in his speech to the nation. A decade in which America ran the danger of becoming overextended in its attempt to confront “every evil that can be found abroad.” He added, “America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”

With this speech, the neoconservative era has finally ended. Those who welcome that news may soon find themselves in for a lesson: American expansionism is far less dangerous than the hangover of isolationism that regularly follows such euphoric times.

As far as the withdrawal goes, it’s all too fast for the military and too slow for the war-weary public. Quibbling about this is pointless because the timetable is being dictated by something more serious than Afghanistan’s fate: namely, the fate of the president.

By the time November 2012 is here, Obama will have withdrawn enough troops to show his supporters how serious his intentions are — but not so many that Afghanistan collapses.

Whoever eventually follows him will have to deal with that.

“We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place,” the president said. What he meant was that the attempt to democratize the country was being abandoned. It would be sufficient if al-Qaida were denied a safe haven there, which the U.S. would accomplish using unmanned drones and Special Forces, as it currently does in Pakistan.

Getting Untangled from the Project to Export Democracy

Obama can more easily untangle America from George W. Bush’s project to export democracy than any of the potential challengers he will face in 2012, some of whom are preaching isolationism.

Jon Huntsman, whom many consider to be the most promising Republican candidate, wants to cut military budgets in order to strengthen America’s economic ability to compete with Asia — meaning China. And the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted last Friday against America’s involvement in the Libya campaign.

While that non-binding vote had only symbolic significance, it nonetheless marks a change in opinion among Republicans.

The Republican shift means conservatives are returning to their roots. Contrary to the prejudices of European liberals, the “Imperial Presidency” — as historian and adviser to the Kennedy brothers Arthur M. Schlesinger called the period from Woodrow Wilson through Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman down to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — was a project of the Democrats.

Since Woodrow Wilson set out to make the world safe for democracy, the Democrats have stood for international politics, while the Republicans tend toward a more skeptical realpolitik. The wars started by Democrats Truman, Kennedy and Johnson in Korea and Indo-China were ended by Republicans Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon.

Republican Ronald Reagan, excoriated here in Germany as a warmonger, waged only one war: the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. His successor, George H.W. Bush, may have liberated Kuwait but opted to leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq to take over responsibility for rebuilding that nation.

His son campaigned for the presidency under the motto of a more “humble” foreign policy, promising to reduce the size of America’s military and not to misuse it for nation building.

With the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden caused an about-face in U.S. policy, giving the neoconservatives a chance to make the concept of security through democratization the official policy of the George W. Bush administration.

Many Republicans accused the neocons — and rightly so — of pursuing policies that were not conservative but rather a continuation of those advanced by Woodrow Wilson. Some even saw the program advocated by the neocons, among whom there were several ex-Trotskyites, as being a resurrection of Trotsky’s concept of “permanent revolution,” theoretically based on Francis Fukuyama’s historical teleology that, like Hegel and Marx, proclaimed a determined “end,” i.e. a goal.

The only difference was that Fukuyama, unlike Hegel and his Prussian state officials or Marx and socialism, saw that “end” as the final global triumph of democracy and capitalism.

At any rate, the “unipolar moment”* has remained nothing more than just a moment, and the neocons were unsuccessful in creating the “New American Century” as they had envisioned it, because the United States doesn’t like being a global policeman, and the U.S. is far from being able to pursue a long-term imperialist strategy.

As President Obama said in his Afghanistan speech in clear reference to the neocons, “We stand not for empire but for self-determination.”

Of course, these great words mask the fact that America’s new humility is driven mainly by current economic conditions. “It’s the economy stupid!” According to all leading indicators — growth, employment, debt and trade deficits — the United States has been left behind not only by China but also by Europe, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

America’s public debt and its budget deficit are at a 60-year high. While Europe thinks it has a headache over the possibility of a bankrupt Greece, the U.S. Treasury Department announced last week that Congress will reach the constitutionally mandated debt limit by Aug. 2, at which time it must either raise the debt ceiling or the country will be unable to service its debt.

The European Union, described by its president, José Manuel Barroso, as a “democratic empire,” is faced with problems from Belarus to civil wars in Syria and Libya — all made more complicated by the Arab Spring. It cannot simply run away from them and has to face the fact that the United States will no longer automatically take over leadership in matters of Western importance. It has already demonstrated it can do so with its mission in Libya.

Obama discovered the concept of “leading from behind” for his Libya policy, but there hasn’t been much in the way of European leadership.

America turning its back on the world poses the risk that undemocratic powers might try to fill the vacuum. Europe is being challenged as never before. The fact that Germany torpedoed the European Union’s often-touted common foreign and security policies doesn’t bode very well.

*Translator’s Note: The unipolar movement is a concept that holds that there is only one global superpower, that being the United States of America.