"Diplomacy and Empire"

Earlier today, I was privileged to stumble upon a recent speech given by the former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman to the group Diplomats and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR). Titled "Diplomacy and Empire," Freeman delivers more, with eloquence and style, on what has happened to the United States since 1989 than I have ever read before. What a speech it must have been in person!


Some may have heard of Freeman's recent appointment by President Obama to the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC is part of the U.S. Intelligence Community and serves to provide the best guess as to current and future issues to senior policy makers in our government. Often, the NIC only ends up in the news when they deliver National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) - and only then when those NIEs turn out to be quite controversial. As it turns out, Freeman's history of even-handedness - based on U.S. national security interests first - in a region dominated by Israel has raised the hackles of the pro-Israel community. Despite the concerned howls and ludicrous protests, the choice of Freeman is inspired - and inspiring - and you can get a sense of why from his own words.

I highlight this speech because what Freeman says matches so closely to what I think about the innate strength and inner wealth the U.S. has had, possesses today and must use to guide our shared future. In case you have not already clicked through to Freeman's speech, here are some highlights:

On our current "unhappiness"

Since 9/11 Americans have chosen to stake our domestic tranquility and the preservation of our liberties on our ability – under our commander-in-chief – to rule the world by force of arms rather than to lead, as we had in the past, by the force of our example or our arguments. And we appear to have decided that it is necessary to destroy our constitutional practices and civil liberties in order to save them. This is a trade-off we had resolutely refused to make during our far more perilous half-century confrontation with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union.

On the failure of Grand Strategy (or any strategy) since 2001 (or even 1989):

With the numbers of our enemies mounting, it is fortunate that our military power remains without match. The United States' armed forces are the most competent and lethal in history. And so they are likely to remain for decades to come. Our humbling on the battlegrounds of the Middle East does not reflect military inadequacy; it is rather the result of the absence of strategy and its political handmaiden – diplomacy. We are learning the hard way that old allies will not aid us and new allies will not stick with us if we ignore their interests, deride their advice, impugn their motives, and denigrate their capabilities. Friends will not walk with us into either danger or opportunity if we injure their interests and brush aside their objections to our doing so. Those with whom we have professed friendship in the past cannot sustain their receptivity to our counsel if we demand that they adopt secular norms of the European Enlightenment that we no longer exemplify, while loudly disparaging their religious beliefs and traditions. Diplomacy-free foreign policy does not work any better than strategy-free warfare.

And the futility of our current war:

When war is not the extension of policy but the entrenchment of policy failure by other means, it easily degenerates into mindless belligerence and death without meaning.

On what has been the result:

As distaste has succeeded esteem for us in the international community, we have become ever more isolated. Our ability to rally others behind our causes has withered. We have responded by abandoning the effort to lead. We are now known internationally more for our recalcitrance than our vision. We have sought to exempt ourselves from the jurisdiction of international law. We have suspended our efforts to lead the world to further liberalization of trade and investment through the Doha Round. We no longer participate in the UN body charged with the global promotion of human rights. We decline to discuss global climate change, nuclear disarmament, or the avoidance of arms races in outer space. If we have proposals for a world more congenial to the values we espouse, we no longer articulate them. The world is a much less promising place for our silence and absence.

The increasing restriction of American intercourse with foreigners encourages the outsourcing not just of jobs but of innovation in science and technology, research and development, engineering and design services, and industrial production. Xenophobic policies and practices have begun to erode the long-standing American scientific and technological superiority they were intended to protect. Like economic protectionism, intellectual protectionism, it turns out, weakens, not strengthens one, and makes one less rather than more competitive in the global marketplace.

And who has "won":

The contrast with the situation here underscores the extent to which al-Qaïda has achieved its central objectives. It has unhinged America and alienated us from the world. We are apparently willing to sacrifice everything, including the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, to achieve absolute security from risks that others rightly consider nasty but manageable. Quite aside from the fact that absolute security is absolutely impossible, this is not who we were. It is not who most of us want to be.

Freeman offers his thoughts on what next steps the United States must take to climb out of the hole in which we find ourselves.

First, an America driven by dread and delusion into the construction of a garrison state, ruled by a presidency claiming inherent powers rather than by our constitution and our laws, is an America that can be counted upon to respect neither the freedoms of its own people nor those of others. The key to the defense of both the United States and the freedom that defines us as a great nation is to retain our rights and cultivate our liberties, not to yield them to our government, and to honor and defend, not to invade, the sovereignty of other nations and individuals. Second, it is time to recognize that freedom spreads by example and a helping hand to those who seek it. It cannot be imposed on others by coercive means, no matter how much shock and awe these elicit. Neither can it be installed by diatribe and denunciation nor proclaimed from the false security of fortified buildings. We must come home to our traditions, restore the openness of our society, and resume our role as "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all ... [but] the champion and vindicator only of our own." Third, credibility is not enhanced by persistence in counterproductive policies, no matter how much one has already invested in them. The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction. Doing more of the same does not make bad strategy sound or snatch successful outcomes from wars of attrition. All it does is convince onlookers that one is so stubbornly foolish that one is not afraid to die. Admitting that mistakes have been made and taking remedial action generally does more for credibility than soldiering blindly on. The United States needs big course corrections on quite a range of foreign and domestic policies at present. Fourth, we must recover the habit of listening and curb our propensity to harangue. We might, in fact, consider a war on arrogance to complement our war on terror.

There's no doubt that many will think Freeman insufficiently supportinve of pre-Israel policies and way to sympathetic to the thoughts, feelings and interests of the other several hundred million Arab and Persian peoples who live in the Middle East. I, however, believe that our nation is well served by this appointment and applaud the Obama Administration for its courage in making it.

(Original h/t to Moon Over Alabama's host, b)

(Image from Nieman Watch website)