America’s strategic blindness

MADRID – The recriminations over US spying activities, triggered by the revelations of the former American intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden, have now reached fever pitch. Questions abound – about what President Barack Obama knew and when, about the legitimacy of eavesdropping on friendly foreign leaders’ conversations, about the future of transatlantic relations, and even about the meaning of the term “ally.”But the current firestorm, like other recent diplomatic crises for the United States, reflects a more fundamental problem: the lack of strategic vision in American foreign policy.Until the US is able to establish an overarching, purpose-oriented framework through which it relates to the world, a reactive approach is inevitable, with high-intensity incidents such as we have seen this month continuing to be the norm. For more than 40 years, the Cold War policy of containment of Soviet influence provided America its strategic framework. Though US tactics were debated and shifted from administration to administration, the overarching approach remained consistent, because it was broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. Of course, an overarching national-security strategy provided no guarantee against problems or even major disasters in countries like Vietnam and Nicaragua. Nonetheless, in hindsight, containment infused an order and organization on US foreign policy that is absent today.After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the necessity that had been driving containment disappeared. The US, inebriated by victory, saw in the triumph over the Soviet bloc another sign of its exceptionalism, and found itself taken in by the mirage that its Cold War success was itself a strategy.What followed was a decade of scattershot foreign policy marked by notable cases of inaction, together with individual initiatives taken largely without reference to a broader doctrine. Unchallenged in the world’s unipolar moment, the US had the luxury of not knowing its strategic goals.Shocked by the attacks of September 11, the US forced a new framework onto its still-unquestioned belief in the inexorable movement of history toward freedom. Unfortunately, what emerged was a deeply flawed approach, not least because in declaring a “war on terror,” America positioned itself against a tactic, not an entity or an ideology.Under Obama, the US has begun to depart from this approach. The problem is that it remains a departure without any meaningful destination. As in the 1990’s, the US has no organizing imperative, and the result is the same: a combination of inactivity and incoherent initiatives. And, at a time of domestic political polarization, the lack of a global strategy denies a potential rallying point around which Democrats and Republicans can unite.Two decades ago, geopolitical conditions limited blowback from America’s foreign-policy vacuum. Today, the US remains the world’s essential power, but it is no longer the exclusive power. It cannot solve problems that directly affect it by acting on its own, though its leadership remains indispensable.That is all the more true given that the nature of such problems has also changed. America, like the rest of us, is vulnerable to climate change, pandemics, and terrorism – challenges that require coordinated global solutions. For the US, however, the utility of multilateralism is purely situational. Above all, multilateralism is never preferable to a “good” bilateral solution – a view that has reinforced behavior that undermines, rather than strengthens, the capacity for effective international action.Indeed, always ready to negotiate treaties but rarely prepared to sign – and even less likely to ratify – them, the US remains absent from such key global agreements as the Kyoto Protocol, the Mine Ban Treaty, and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Its inspired creativity and support in building formal institutions like the United Nations and World Bank has given way to a predilection for weak, informal, and ad hoc groupings, such as the various G-somethings and “coalitions of the willing.”Establishing effective multilateralism requires an emphasis on rules and institutions that facilitate coordination. The recent decision by the US to sign the Arms Trade Treaty could be a good start – if only Congress could marshal the bipartisan support needed to ratify it.But scattered moves in the right direction will not suffice. What is really needed is a change in vision and mentality – a shift from viewing multilateralism as a tactic to embracing it as a strategic imperative.The current spying scandal is the product of a rudderless US foreign policy focused on narrowly drawn tactical objectives that exist outside the conceptual funnel of a comprehensive vision. The result in this case has been damage to the transatlantic relationship, with some in Europe even calling for a halt to the talks on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).Suspending the trade talks would be folly, not just in terms of the regional impact, but also because the TTIP should be an exercise in rule-making that echoes globally. The current diplomatic crisis, too, is an opportunity to ensure that transatlantic discussions about privacy and surveillance reverberate in a multilateral setting; seizing it would represent a small but significant contribution to the strategic vision that has been sorely lacking for the last quarter-century.Ana Palacio, a former Spanish foreign minister and former Senior Vice President of the World Bank, is a member of the Spanish Council of State.