Time for the wacko birds

The budget crunch on defense and foreign policy has me thinking: While Congress is off on its merry pursuit of Passover or Easter and the White House is preoccupied with bringing peace (again!) to the Middle East, this is a good time to think about how we really ought to engage the world.

Not the phony baloney about the "indispensable nation," attributed to Madeleine Albright and believed by too many in Washington. There are plenty of folks ready to dispense with us, especially after the travesties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not the "declining power," which is only the shadow side of aggressive, neoconservative interventionism. It’s all about our power, you see. With it, we "shape" the international environment (or just write the rules ourselves when we are being really outrageous). Without it, global security is done for and anarchy will break out — terrorists on all fronts, nuclear weapons on every corner.

How about some plain old common sense? The United States is just another country — a big one, with big interests and big capabilities, but still just one in a world crowded with countries and problems that need to be solved. We cannot write all the rules; we can influence some of them. We cannot shape neighborhoods whose traumas and dilemmas are up close and personal to them (see Israel-Palestine, or China-Japan). Too often in the last 10 years we have tried to write the rules, only to create new adversaries or stir up old ones.

I am not making a plea for withdrawal, but for modesty — modesty in ambition and expectations. It’s a good moment for modesty. Everyone’s resources are stretched; internal dilemmas (some with external instigators — see Russian money and Cypriot banks for a nice synergy) are barking at every national and regional door.

John McCain called people who see wisdom in modesty "wacko birds" the other day, and Stephen Kinzer picked it up in his Guardian column today.

Well, count me a wacko bird, who wants neither to intervene with the Marines or special operations forces, nor to withdraw, but rather to remain engaged.

I will add my own twist to the wacko-bird manifesto. As we define more modest engagements, we need to demilitarize our foreign policy machinery so that we don’t define every issue as solvable with military force. The Pentagon and the uniformed military should not define the framework for our global engagement; they should proudly and competently support our statecraft.

We should be sending advisors to governments seeking to create effective, efficient, and accountable governance, not sending "security" trainers to beef up other countries’ militaries and internal police forces before local civilian officials know how to handle them.

We should have a diplomatic and foreign assistance capability that can prevent and resolve conflict and advise on governance, not one that backs away from this kind of engagement and restricts itself to representing the United States and reporting on events. And we should use this capacity modestly, for the task is large and we cannot "shape" it either alone or in our image.

A changed perspective on how we engage the rest of the world is a big part of the answer to the endless thrashing about of the past 20 years. Liberal international interventionists have had their day, and paid the price. Conservative regime changers have shamed themselves adequately (though to read the reviews on Iraq 10 years later, there seems be a shortage of shame. Doug Feith? Really?)

Time for the wacko birds. Sign me up.