Why U.S. Foreign Policy Won’t Grow Up

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous observation, made in his 1846 poem Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing, that “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” applies with some force to the current circumstances surrounding the war in Ukraine.

In the past week, reports by Ukrainian media indicate that Russia has deployed 16 ships, including seven carriers equipped with 48 Kalibr cruise missiles, to the Black Sea. U.S. Army Col. (ret.) Douglas Macgregor, a former senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense who is now a contributing editor at The American Conservative, warns, “All the signs point to major offensive action by the Russians.” 

At the same time, the U.S. Defense Security and Cooperation Agency has approved a $7.2 billion sale of 32 Lockheed Martin F-35A fighter aircraft to Romania. This comes amid discussions between the Biden administration and the British government on whether to allow Ukraine to use long-range American ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory. In response, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin issued what the New York Times referred to as “an unusually specific warning,” saying that the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles would “mean that NATO countries—the United States and European countries—are at war with Russia” because of the need for Western technicians to operate the systems.

And yet the prospect of a direct war between Russia, the United States, and its European allies leaves many within Washington’s foreign policy establishment unmoved. The former State Department official and Catholic University professor Michael Kimmage took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week to claim that the war is going so well for Ukraine that “in no way does Kyiv need to sue for peace.” Likewise, an open letter to the administration issued by a group of 17 former ambassadors and generals urged Biden “to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-provided weapons to strike deep into Russia.” 

“After more than 900 days of war,” they wrote, “we can safely assert that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated threats are nothing less than an attempt to deter Ukraine’s partners from properly arming her. Easing the restrictions on Western weapons will not cause Moscow to escalate.”

While the 17 signatories did not disclose the source of the crystal ball in their possession, the letter does raise a question as to whether there are any alternative strategies available to the administration other than risking World War III on the basis of their assurances.

A recent installment of the Financial Times’ intermittently interesting series, Lunch with the FT, featured a conversation with the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq during which the topic of Trump and Ukraine was broached. 

“What if,” asked the FT’s Magdalena Miecznicka, “[Donald Trump] stops supporting Ukraine?”

“That’s good,” responded Houellebecq. 

“But,” pressed Miecznicka, “Ukrainians want to liberate their territory.”

“What do I care?” responded Houellebecq. “At the start of the war, I was surprised because I thought Ukraine was Russian. “

“People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe,” continued Houellebecq. “It doesn’t work and motivations are doubtful.” 

Houellebecq’s comments seem intentionally provocative, but whether he was conscious of it or not, they were a kind of crude echo of a key precept of Charles de Gaulle’s foreign policy—that of mesure. It is a precept that has been sorely missing from the American foreign policy playbook for some time.

As de Gaulle himself once wrote, the practice of statecraft depends on “avoiding abstractions, but holding on to realities, preferring the useful to the sublime, the opportune to the spectacular, seeking for each particular problem not the ideal solution but the practical one.” For de Gaulle, there was “no value in a policy that does not take account of realities.”

This way of thinking became the hallmark of de Gaulle’s successful, innovative foreign policy when he served as president of the Fifth Republic from 1959 to 1969. It was premised on the recognition of the national interests, not just of France, but of other countries as well. At the same time, de Gaulle deplored what he viewed as the overextension of the United States and the Soviet Union during what was then the height of the Cold War. As the distinguished scholar of Europe David Calleo has written,

De Gaulle’s own view of history taught him not only how pusillanimous leaders allowed their countries to drift into disaster, but how gifted leaders were often done in by overreaching themselves. The successful hero required a vision and audacity but also mesure.

What Calleo referred to as the “Gaullist combination of foresight, agility and balance” is nowhere on display in the Washington of 2024. Indeed, it would be fair to say that the formulation and practice of U.S. foreign policy has been defined by the near total absence of “foresight, agility and balance” in the two and a half decades since 9/11.

George W. Bush’s declaration that countries are either “with us or against us” in the so-called War on Terror was as concise a rejection of the concept of mesure as could be imagined—and in many ways Bush’s statement set the tone for what was to come. The administration of his successor, Barack Obama, issued such ex cathedra pronouncements as  “Gaddafi must go” and, later, “Assad must go.” For his part, Trump is a living, breathing repudiation of the very concept of mesure, while the current president, Joe Biden, has issued public calls for regime change in Moscow, all the while debasing his office (and his country) with unstinting support for an extermination campaign being waged against the Palestinian people.

In the hands of the current establishment, American foreign policy lacks discernment, maturity, and an ability to distinguish between core and peripheral national interests—which itself is a, perhaps the, mark of mesure. And until the policy community learns how to distinguish between these, we will remain stuck in this unvirtuous, dangerous cycle of threat inflation and, ultimately, endless conflict.