Hanging on the wall of Dennis Ross' office at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a map of Jerusalem, a gift from President Clinton for distinguished diplomatic service. Indeed, as a policy planner at the State Department during the first Bush administration and a chief envoy in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for Clinton, Dennis Ross is no stranger to the complex world of American foreign relations. On a recent July morning, he sat down with me to discuss his new book, Statecraft, And How to Restore America's Standing in the World.
What is statecraft exactly? It sounds Machiavellian.
Statecraft is the capacity to marry your objectives and your means. If you could orchestrate and integrate the use of all your diplomatic, military, economic, and intelligence information tools effectively, it still wouldn't mean much if your objectives didn't make any sense.
You write that bipartisan foreign policy is often, if not always, a chimera. Post-9/11 unity, for example, was short-lived. So what value is there to having an ideology dominate your foreign policy?
First, it gives a very strong sense of purpose. It sometimes creates a kind of passion and intensity of effort. Now, that has to be tempered by not becoming such a zealot that you lose your perspective and you're not prepared to listen to other points of view that might direct you in a more favorable way. Administrations that are governed by groupthink inevitably make profound mistakes.
You've talked about the bureaucratic dysfunction of this administration. Can you elaborate on that?
In the case of Bush, you've had an administration at war with itself. On Iran, through the first term of the Bush administration, the division between the regime changers and engagers was so great, [the administration as a whole] had no policy. On Iraq, you had groupthink that got us into the war, and precluded the understanding of what were likely problems, like an insurgency and a vacuum, both of which were foreseeable.
Wasn't this battle also over statecraft? In the first Bush term, neo-conservative hawks saw "soft power," like sway with international institutions, as irrelevant. What value do you think international or multilateral institutions have?
First, let's look at it through the lens of Iraq. We didn't need the UN to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But we needed them for afterward. If we understood that we were going to face an insurgency, the best thing was to make sure that the insurgency didn't acquire legitimacy. If we became a symbol of occupation, it would. So you needed the UN to setup an international administrator.
The neo-con argument was that the UN limits American sovereignty, but you seem to be saying that a good relationship with the UN could further U.S. objectives.
Yes, it's ironic, isn't it? Those who are most resistant don't fully appreciate how international institutions can be an adjunct. How does Iran describe the Security Council? As a tool of the United States or the British. Well, the rest of the world doesn't see it that way. In a sense, it's true that international institutions almost by definition limit the scope of sovereignty, but the reality is that the very meaning of sovereignty today is transformed. We join international conventions, even though it limits our sovereignty, because in the end it serves our interests.
What is "smart" power? Why is it the best response to a globalized era where violence irrupts as much from states as from non-state actors?
First, I borrow the term "smart power" from [Harvard University professor] Joseph Nye. You use power for a reason. It's not an end in itself; it's a means. So whether it's hard or soft, the blend of "smart" is by definition supposed to signal that you use it intelligently for the purpose of affecting the behavior of others.
Second, we live in a world where many of the traditional threats that we used to face are changing. Now that doesn't mean that deterrence has no meaning in a world where you have non-state actors. It's true, those non-state actors are governed by a philosophy that says, "Kill me and you reward me." Yet it's interesting that most of the leaders of those non-state actors are not so quick to become martyrs themselves. There are still punishments that matter. If you can find ways to discredit them, that's a terrible punishment.
How has the semantic line between liberal and conservative foreign policy been blurred?
When you look historically at the country, the liberals were the ones who were transformationalists on the world stage. Conservatives were the ones who were the realists, who said, "it's only narrow power interests that matter." Humanitarianism, they argued, is squishy. Values, for conservatives, were not part of foreign policy.
So, we've had a reversal. Neo-conservatives became those who were transformationalists. My criticism of them is not that transformation is wrong as an objective, but that the tool of hard military power is one which is rarely likely to be successful. The neo-liberal says, you know what, we understand that power is still a requirement in the world. We believe that how regimes treat their people is a matter of concern from the outside, internationally. We can't be indifferent when we see Darfur. Humanitarian interventions matter because they are a reflection of the kind of world we want. Only, neo-liberals are more aware of the limits of hard power and more aware of the need to use international institutions to legitimize what we're doing.
Hasn't the legitimacy of neo-liberal interventionism taken a hit, in so far as there were neo-liberals who supported going to war in Iraq? What do you think of someone like [Brandeis University professor] Kanan Makiya, who still supports the war on humanitarian grounds alone?
Well, not all neo-liberals believed going into Iraq was a good thing. Joe Nye is a neo-liberal, at least in my definition of it. So is Francis Fukuyama. When they looked at the calculus, they said, this doesn't make sense. There were people like me who were supportive of it, but with conditions, none of which were met. I should have evaluated more carefully who was in this administration and how they did business. The Kanan Makiya's of the world are people that I have enormous admiration and respect for. I think if you could identify anybody who feels tortured about what's happened in Iraq, it's Kanan Makiya, who wanted this for all the right reasons, but also didn't realize how much Iraq had changed. He might also say, though, that the way we went about this had to be dramatically different.
Bush claims to be an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. You pin him more as a Wilsonian. Why?
Because I think Roosevelt was a hands-on president. His mediation efforts [settling the Manchurian conflict] were in person. Can you imagine President Bush doing something like that? Also, what was Roosevelt's fundamental motto?
"Speak softly and carry a big stick."
This administration too often speaks loudly and carries a small stick. The administration's position on certain countries like Syria is to be tough rhetorically and to be soft practically. I do not see Bush as a Roosevelt disciple then, but rather as someone attracted to the transformational posture of someone like Wilson.
You question the conventional wisdom that Bush is a shoot-from-the-hip unilateralist. If he's not a unilateralist, what is he?
Well, he's certainly not someone who wants others to constrain what we do as a matter of principle. But the fact is, or what I've suggested is, that when the administration has been multilateral, it just hasn't been very effective. What I'm really trying to suggest is that the unilateral vs. multilateral measure is not the right measure. Multilateralism isn't an end in itself. It's a means. This is in part why I felt inspired to write the book. So much in the debate was simply misplaced.
