Should stability be the be-all and end-all of the US foreign policy? Based on how our pursuit of stability has tended to betray our core values on behalf of dictators, extremists, and businesses, this analyst suggests, no.
The problem is, seeking stability is easy. Everything else is messy, and requires actual thinking, consideration, and compromise.
Surely there is a middle way between supporting every failing state (usually a state that deserves to fail) and hunkering down in a bunker in Kansas while genocide prevails. The greatest immediate difficulty is that any such “middle way” would, in fact, be a number–perhaps a great number–of different ways. The classical age of diplomacy, from Metternich through Bismarck to Kissinger, is finished. In truth, a one-size-fits-all diplomatic framework never really worked, but during the Cold War we expended tremendous efforts to make it function, or at least to pretend it was working. Today, in a world that is systemically, developmentally, economically, and culturally differentiated and differentiating–despite the surface effects of globalization–our diplomacy cannot rely on easy-to-use constructs or unifying ideology (a great triumph of the 20th century was the destruction of the historical aberration of ideology in the West; today’s European “socialists” owe more to trial-and-error than to Marx, LaSalle, or Liebknecht, and all but the most bigoted Americans are political pragmatists in the clinch).
Our strategic approach must be situational, though shaped in each separate case by our national interests and informed by our core values. Of course, we must recognize the limits of the possible, but our greatest problem as a global power seems to be understanding what is impossible abroad, whether the impossibility is creating enduring ethnic harmony in the Balkans through armed patrols, willing a Somali state into existence through the presence of a few thousand under-supported troops, or trying to control terrorists with blustering threats and the occasional cruise-missile spanking.
Interesting reading.