Obama’s Hollow Doctrine
- 03.26.2008 - 9:15 AMSpencer Ackerman has a long piece in the American Prospect which purports to be a serious exposition of Barack Obama’s foreign policy and of his choice of foreign policy advisers. Obama is said to have big, transformative ideas: He “is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we’ve heard from a serious presidential contender in decades.”
I got excited reading this — the kind of expectant feeling one gets upon sitting down to read something that proposes to be new and interesting. Ackerman writes that he “spoke at length with Obama’s foreign-policy brain trust” in order to take the measure of the “new global strategy” that President Obama will implement.
So what does this new strategy entail? Well, it will be
a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root.
So our foreign policy will be guided by “dignity promotion.” Ackerman quotes Samantha Power to flesh out the idea:
Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.
Power continues, arguing that U.S. policy should be “about meeting people where they’re at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That’s the swamp that needs draining. If we’re to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we’re not [providing].”
This is ludicrous. Islamist ideology itself is in many ways a type of “dignity promotion,” insofar as it is concerned with the recovery of Islam’s world-historical grandeur and the obliteration of western power, which is viewed as a source of humiliation and tyranny. Unfortunately for Obama and his brain trust, Islamism inspires a form of political and cultural dignity that runs far deeper than any sentiments created through enlarged American budgets for food distribution.
How does Barack Obama propose to offer Muslims the sense of dignity that they clearly derive from their participation in resistance movements whose most basic ambition is the rejection of the West? Is this really the sweeping foreign policy that Obama offers — an attempt to smother ideological radicalism with western materialism? This isn’t transformative policy; it is a banal example of defining a problem away.
You can continue reading the piece in search of specifics, but you won’t find any. It ends with a clichéd flourish:
Why not demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why not pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why not abandon fear? What is it we have to fear, exactly?
“He goes back to Roosevelt,” Power says. “Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us.”
What does “liberal internationalism” mean in Ackerman’s imagination? What does “enlightened global leadership” entail? Does that mean we let Iran get the bomb, or not? Who knows. Now what was Ackerman saying at the beginning of his piece about hollow sloganeering?
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March 26th, 2008 at 9:46 AM
Actually, Noah, as much as I agree about the lack of specifics, the tone of your entry suggests disdain for dignity promotion that is unfounded. Much of Western Culture is about dignity promotion, starting with Man being created “in God’s Image.” Furthermore, if the draw of radical Islam is dignity promotion through jihad, then that suggests dignity promotion through some other method as a line of competition. I’m not saying Samantha Power for Secretary of State, but the idea shouldn’t be tossed aside.
March 26th, 2008 at 10:26 AM
How about “achieving dignity by organizing one’s society to be civilized”.
March 26th, 2008 at 10:37 AM
But Obama says nothing in the most beautiful, way, nu?
March 26th, 2008 at 11:07 AM
They just don’t get it. Al Qaeda is the symptom, not the problem.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:20 AM
“Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street.”
Didn’t we try to do that in Somalia?
March 26th, 2008 at 11:46 AM
“Dignity promotion” is simply the self-esteem movement in our schools on steroids.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:51 AM
Sure, and that NGO passing out food and promoting dignity will last until some fanatic decides to drive a car bomb into the middle of it.
The survivors will come home and the hand-wringers will say, “At least we tried. Next!”
March 26th, 2008 at 11:57 AM
I’ve got it, let’s give all of the people in the world medals and trophy’s and delcare them all winners. The Obama Doctrine is the Special Olympics.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:58 AM
Ho do you give dignity to Darfur refugees in a camp? Seminars by Tony Robbins? A new suit from Men’s Warehouse? Bible readings?
I cannot believe that these people think they are ready to run a country. The only way to give back the lost dignity would be to give them guns, armoured vehicles and the necessary air cover to allow them to go and take back their homes. I have nothing against that - if they want to fight the Janjaweed, I say arm them and train them up. But does Obambi really support starting a proxy war, especially one against one of China’s proxies, in the middle of an important oil extraction country, and one which will be opposed by the UN, the EU etc? I kind of doubt it - which is why the Darfurians are stuck where they are - they can’t get their dignity back without taking it back, and the global concensus seems to be that to facillitate that would be too disruptive - so let’s just buy them nicer tents instead.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:59 AM
The Obama policy proposals are especially hollow because their proponents do not seem to understand what dignity is. This is not too surprising considering that the candidate himself does not have enough of a sense of dignity to walk away from the undignified anti-american vitriol his spiritual father is spouting. A candidate who wants to surrender in Iraq and kowtow to tyrants is not very well placed to defend national honor and dignity.
The suffering in Darfur might provoke compassion, sympathy, even guilt… but it does not affront one’s sense of dignity. And giving charity, which is what these policy proposals resemble more than anything else, relieves a sense of guilt, but only does the minimum to restore the dignity of those who are suffering. In fact, restoring dignity would be a wonderful thing for the disadvantaged of the earth. As everyone ought to know by now, the best way to do it is through free enterprise, sustained by free trade.
Radical Islam does provide an ersatz dignity for its adherents, but when people believe that they are asserting their honor by murdering their daughters their sense of dignity is surely hanging by a thread. The way to deal with that problem is to relieve them of their false sense of dignity, by allowing them to know what they look like in the eyes of the world, and by inflicting a humiliating defeat on them