Back in the day, there was a time when American diplomacy did big and important things.
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No more, it seems. The world's gotten complicated, America is a good deal weaker, and the U.S. administration is handicapping itself with a dysfunctional bureaucratic setup that makes it harder to focus and find its footing.
Effective American diplomacy may well be going the way of the dodo, and the sad fact is there may be little Barack Obama can do about it.
Lamenting the absence of great men years before his own shining moment, Winston Churchill wrote that in England, once upon a time, "there were wonderful giants of old." There's always a danger in idealizing what once was or seemed to be in order to make a point about the present. Still, looking back over the last 60 years, you really do have to wonder whether America's best diplomacy and foreign policy are behind it.
America never ran the world (an illusion the left, right, and much of the third and fourth worlds believe; but there were moments (1945-1950, the early 1970s, 1988-1991) when the United States marshaled its military, political, and economic power toward impressive ends.
There were, or course, disasters and plenty of dysfunction during these years, including the Vietnam War and out-of-control CIA operations. But there were also brilliant achievements: the Marshall Plan, NATO, effective Arab-Israeli diplomacy, détente with the Russians, opening to China, a competent American role in the acceleration and management of the end of the Cold War, and the first Gulf War.
For most of the last 16 years, however -- under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- America has been in a diplomatic dry patch. In the face of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, wars of choice, and nasty regional conflicts, conventional diplomacy has either not been tried or not been very successful. The image of the shuttling secretary of state pre-empting crises or exploiting them to broker agreements, doggedly pursuing Middle East peace, achieving dramatic breakthroughs with spectacular secret diplomacy seems a world away.
The Obama administration wants to do this kind of stuff. And it has done pretty well in managing the big relationships with Russia and Europe, though it has had its share of problems with China. But frankly, these are the easy ones. It's not from the big that the president's problems come; it's from the small.
In garden spots like Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the problems are four parts military, five parts nation-building, and maybe one part diplomacy. And America is unlikely to prevail in any meaningful sense of the word where corrupt, extractive regimes are unable to control their own territory and cut deals with anti-American elements and place their security and political concerns first.
Even in areas where diplomacy might seem to work on paper -- Kashmir, Arab-Israeli peacemaking -- the United States is hampered by conflicts driven by deep ethnic and religious hostility and by internal politics in which its own allies (Israel, Pakistan, and India) can't be of much help. And in one of the cruelest ironies of all, the U.S. president who has gone further to engage Iran than any of his predecessors is watching any hope for diplomacy being ground up by a regime under siege in Tehran.
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