Max Boot is Wrong, Democrats Shouldn’t Embrace Status Quo Foreign Policy
Max Boot, a columnist for The Washington Post, recently penned an article entitled, “The Democrats need a new foreign policy — one that doesn’t sound like Trumpism of the left.” In his opinion piece, Boot makes the case that progressive Democrats are embracing a foreign policy centered on isolationism and is remarkably similar to Trump’s foreign policy.
In his article, Boot attempts to make his case by cherry-picking quotes from progressive leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, while conflating issues within their arguments to make a false choice between all or nothing. For example, Boot says that Warren argued in favor of supporting our allies but also argues for troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. He writes, “It would be interesting to find out how she squares this exit strategy with her support for “human rights abroad,” since a U.S. exit would be a boon to horrific human rights violators such as the Islamic State and the Taliban. But Warren never confronts the obvious contradiction.”
The problem with the way in which Boot understands foreign policy is that he primarily, and sometimes solely, views foreign policy through a highly-securitized lens. It seems incomprehensible to Boot how we could have a foreign policy that supports our allies, combats terrorism and violent extremism, and yet does not require a massive military invasion or an endless series of kinetic operations.
Senator Warren understands this and succinctly made this case in the same article that Boot quotes. He asked how Warren squares an exit from Iraq and Afghanistan with promoting human rights abroad, and she literally answers him in the article. Perhaps he didn’t read the whole article, I don’t know. But here is what Warren said in, “A Foreign Policy for All Strengthening Democracy—at Home and Abroad”:
“To achieve all these goals, it will be essential to reprioritize diplomacy and reinvest in the State Department and the development agencies; foreign policy should not be run out of the Pentagon alone. The United States spends only about one percent of its federal budget on foreign aid…[D]iplomacy is not about charity; it is about advancing U.S. interests and preventing problems from morphing into costly wars. Similarly, alliances are not exclusively about principles; they are about safety in numbers. The world is a big, complicated place, and not even the strongest nation can solve everything on its own. As we face down antidemocratic forces around the world, we will need our allies on our side.”
It’s incredible, yet unsurprising to me, that Boot suggests that what Democrats should do is continue to put forward a foreign policy that centers on “American exceptionalism.” But, that’s just keeping on with business as usual and it is not what progressive Democrats want, and it is definitely not what the world needs. To address the issues of today, terrorism, violent extremism, mass atrocities, the global displacement crisis, and so on, we need to end the fantasy that America can fix all the problems by ourselves and that most problems can be solved with our military. We must adopt a prevention-focused foreign policy that aims at tackling the root causes and drivers of violence, insecurity, and fragility, and not just in the short-term as we do with so many “transition” or “stabilization” initiatives.
Our foreign policy should focus on principled diplomatic and development engagement that is unwilling to sell out our values for short-term interests, and that is willing to invest the time and money needed to bring about long-term change. When we make deals with and continue to prop up “bad regimes” it may serve a short-term interest, but it definitely not to our long-term benefit and often ends up with blowback down the road. Just think about the US strategy of arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. You can draw a line from those extremists we supported in the 80s to the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, 9/11, and the extremists we are fighting today in Afghanistan. Or look at the US’s decision to invade Iraq, disband the Iraqi military, and the creation of ISIS. Our interventions and policies from the past have come back to haunt us in the present and caused major instability across the region replete with horrific atrocities and gross human rights abuses.
We don’t need more of the same when it comes to our foreign policy. We need a new approach and some progressive Democrats are leading the charge in providing us with new thinking. It’s time we invest the necessary money and resources into our diplomatic and development arms of our foreign policy so that we can effectively support the change we want to see in the world.
We have a $700 billion defense budget. We spend over $100 billion more on defense than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan spend on their combined defense budgets. Compare that to the roughly $40 billion that we spend on our Departments of State and the US Agency for International Development. President Trump has made it clear that he wants to dramatically cut that number down. Only $40 billion, or less, to cover all of our diplomatic, development, humanitarian aid, and peacebuilding programs and you can see we have a major spending imbalance. Yet we are surprised when we aren’t successful at preventing atrocities, combatting violent extremism, and effectively dealing with global issues like the displacement crisis. Budgets reflect our values and for a long time now our priorities have been a bit misguided.
As we gear up for the 2020 Presidential elections, I am looking forward to seeing how the Democratic candidates articulate their foreign policy vision. Despite the fact that most voters do not care about foreign policy issues, I hope we see some new bold ideas. The Executive Branch is primarily a foreign policy position. The current administration’s foreign policy has been chaotic at best and dangerous at worst. We need an administration that will not only be able to repair some of the serious damage the Trump administration has caused to our foreign policy apparatus but also lead the United States in developing a prevention-focused foreign policy, one that eschews old ways of thinking and outdated policies like Max Boot is offering.
