Rhetorical critique of 'Smart Power' and Obama-era foreign policy rhetoric

we consider what not to do. The first approach proposes something known appealingly enough as “Smart Power.”5” The concept was summarized most sharply by President Obama in 2014, when he said American policy ought best be guided by this tight precept: “Don’t do stupid stuff.5®” And while it is hard to disagree with this sort of charming, solipsistic formulation — there’s not a long list of politicians supporting a strategy of “Do stupid things”? - “Smart Power” is no more a foreign policy vision than “Good Weather’ is a strategy for farming. It suggests in some way there is no need for a strategy at all. Faced with a problem, just make a smart decision. “I don't really even need George Kennan right now,” Obama remarked at one point during his presidency, dismissing the need for a strategist of real stature - and, by implication, the need for any strategy at all.5° Such a stance reflects an instinct that the great strategic question of our day — the future — has pretty well been worked out. In such a view of history, all we need to do is not screw this up too much. The root of this idea is an absence of a long view of history and a discomfort I think about the application of cold power. There’s a misplaced confidence at work here, an assurance that American-style power, our model of politics and economics, is the best, final and only answer to the question of how the nations of the world might be best organized. Americans need, in this telling of history, only patience. The world will catch on. And | suppose that if you grew up in the United States after World War Two, such a vision of the world certainly would be consistent with your own experience. The problem is that sucha comfortable posture is at odds with nearly any book of history you might pick up, from The Peloponnesian Wars to Churchill's The Hinge of Fate, all of which will remind you in the most violent terms that liberty and freedom demand struggle and defense; that epochal changes come whether we want them or not. Also that nations that look invincible can find themselves nearly unwound in an historical instant. Great Britain mastered the globe in 1937; three years later she was gasping for air; three decades later she was an afterthought. “Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it,” Pericles told his Athenian audience nearly 2500 years ago in as they mourned a full year of war-dead sons and fathers -— and no peace yet in sight. Or, Churchill, famously: “Never, never, never, never give up.”6! We should be embarrassed to hold “Don’t do stupid things” against these mottos. Admiral Hyman Rickover’s famous advice as he surveyed the nuclear navy he’d built in the last century has it about right at every level: “To find meaning in life one must 57 The first approach: Joseph S. Nye, Jr, “Get Smart”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009 58 The concept was summarized: Jeffrey Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS” Atlantic Monthly, Aug 2014 59 “IT don’t really even need”: David Remnick, “Going the Distance: On and off the Road with Barack Obama”, The New Yorker, January 27, 2014 60 “Freedom is the sure possession:” 61 Or Chuchill: 48 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018280