America has power, but…
Last time I looked, America was still the greatest power on Earth. The country boasts vast armies equipped with sophisticated weaponry deployed all over the Middle East and beyond. Its capacity to change regimes and bring down bad guys, including some of the world's greatest evildoers -- Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Muammar al-Qaddafi (dispatched albeit by committee) -- is indisputable. America even has a superstar secretary of state who traverses the globe preaching a well-received global humanism.
Yet with all its power, why isn't America more admired and respected? Exactly what's going on here?
I offer four possible explanations:
1. America never ruled the world.
Part of the problem is that the country is in love with a vision of U.S. power that has always been something of an illusion. From 1945 through the 1980s, the United States clearly had more successes in the Middle East than it has experienced over the past couple of decades. I'd call them moments -- during the early 1970s in Arab-Israeli peacemaking and during the late 1980s and early 1990s in war-making.
Why do I say "moments"? The thing is, America was never really a consistently effective hegemon. It was a tall task to win hearts and minds, conduct breakthrough diplomacy, project military power, and create some kind of impermeable pro-American zone of influence in a region where folks didn't like U.S. policies all that much. From Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, from the Bandung summit to the failed Baghdad Pact, the region consistently rejected U.S. schemes, dreams, and visions. America did pretty well in holding the Russians at bay, keeping the oil flowing, and maintaining close ties with the region's royals and the Israelis. But those same successes -- staunch anti-communism, support for Israel, and an obvious preference for the oil producers -- generated opposition among Arab nationalists who resented Western intrusion.
Even the victories America won came at a time when protecting U.S. interests was far easier than it is now. To expect the U.S. government to walk on water and perform miracles -- even in a part of the world known for that sort of thing -- is absurd. You could invite Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus back down to Earth to help out with the Iranian nuclear issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and they'd be struggling too.
2. Bridges too far.
When pundits and commentators decry the absence of an American strategy for this region, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Strategy isn't something a bunch of smart folks hermetically sealed in the Situation Room at the White House or State Department map out in a memo to the president. It's a dynamic process that usually depends on factors beyond U.S. control, on Lady Luck, and on some opportunity that those same smart folks can exploit if they have the will and the skill. The key to successful strategy is more often found in exploiting opportunities, not creating them. See: Henry Kissinger and the 1973 October War, President Ronald Reagan and the collapsing Soviet Union, and President George H.W. Bush and the Gulf War.
In fact, America gets into trouble when it adheres blindly to a strategy but hasn't read reality right or has failed to analyze the relationship between U.S. goals and the means at the country's disposal to achieve them. Things get even more out of hand when the country thinks big and imagines it can save the world or re-create the world in America's image with some overarching plan to "support freedom," "make peace," or "build nations."
President George W. Bush had big ideas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you want to pretend that what the United States has achieved in these countries is still worth the price it paid, and is still paying?
It's not that America necessarily needs to think small, but there are a few basic rules of the road that must be observed before embarking on foreign adventures. The country needs to (a) think before it acts, and when possible act with others, (b) try to calculate whether it has the means and the will to stay the course in any policy undertaken, and (c) ensure that the small tribes that inhabit these lands -- and on whom U.S. success sadly depends -- have a sense of ownership and obligation too. To take the most prominent example: If you want a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, they need to want it more than you do.
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