It's easy to reminisce about the supposed grandeur of America's good-old days. Before China was rising, before Russia was roaring, and before Brazil was fit to be a BRIC, the United States canvassed the globe with its impressive, blockbuster diplomacy. By comparison, today's state visits are frustrating, compromises come slowly, and international summits produce little. It leaves any casual observer wondering: What happened?
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Such is the lamenting nostalgia of Aaron David Miller in his recent FP article, "The End of Diplomacy?" The author hearkens back to a time when diplomacy achieved big things. He fears that the image of a "shuttling secretary of state ... achieving dramatic breakthroughs with spectacular secret diplomacy seems a world away."
Miller might be right in one sense; U.S. diplomatic ambitions have shrunken since the days of the Warsaw Pact and NATO. But that shift is no accidental decline. Today's world is more subtle; the challenges are more numerous and complex than those of the past. So while the Cold War world necessitated broad diplomatic strokes, today's negotiators must paint in detail. In short, the world changed, and Washington did too.
According to Miller, U.S. foreign policy from 1945 to 1991 was a mix of disasters, such as the Vietnam War, and brilliant achievements, including the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. The past 16 years by comparison were a supposed "diplomatic dry patch" in which the United States achieved little, succeeded even less, and failed to find victory in a host of places from Somalia to Pakistan, Afghanistan to Iraq.
Miller's dismissal of the past 16 years, however, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. He overlooks the U.S. leadership that led to monumental peace treaties in Northern Ireland (the Belfast Agreement) and Bosnia (the Dayton Accords). He neglects to mention the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the expansion of NATO, or even the coaxing of Libya away from nuclear weapons. None of these are of the same magnitude as, say, the Marshall Plan, true. But Washington didn't get weak; it just got smart.
Big diplomacy made sense in the early years of the Cold War, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson; director of the State Department's policy planning office, Paul Nitze; and Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan made containing the Soviet Union priority number one. Creating NATO and undertaking the Marshall Plan were large-scale, straightforward initiatives that matched the United States' large-scale, straightforward containment strategy.
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