Getting past a Binary Perspective
It is hard to get past looking at relationships in a binary way (for me anyway), once you introduce more then 2 sides to a an already complex relationship, it changes the way in which the first two participants inter-act with each other, it creates new outputs which must then be evaluated and accounted for. In the sense of a binary evaluation, Clausewitz had said war was a duel on a larger scale – I don’t think he meant that it was limited to two participants, but was trying to articulate the role chance and perhaps will play, however his analogy artificially lends itself to a binary image vs. say the final scenes of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", or something that while simple of enough to visualize is perhaps more representative of regional and global politics.
Once you go down the road of complex interaction involving not only the personalities/actors/interests within Iraq (or any state with diversity) who look toward their own interests and often have broad domestic ties, but who also often have regional and/or global ties, it becomes difficult to isolate the binary elements such as your wants and those of the person who you interacting with; or the root causes of conditions or problems that you are dealing with. Both parties represent additional interests - not just a two-way commercial transaction, but loyalty to various equities that have interest(s). The value of those equities weigh in on how the relationship develops.
If you elevate the observation from domestic to include regional and/or international relationships, and consider how a binary approach to an outcome denies the natural (and growing) interactions that have gone on as a result of broader human activities and interests (could be Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere). To account for natural and existing human interests, our own political objectives/ends must be broad enough to allow accommodating the new outputs produced by over time from the interaction that comes from multiple actors with multiple ends in mind.
The implementation of the ways to achieve our objective(s)/end(s) must account for that as these actors interact each will have some concept of an end in mind, and how that relationship affects other ends that define them or something that in some proximate way threatens them (back to Thucydides “fear, honor and interests). Leaders, Planners and Policy Makers must account for this while retaining enough focus to come out on the short term back end to satisfy (or articulate why the pursuit of the end is justified) the domestic audience’s concerns about our foreign policy decisions to our in order to mitigate political risk. They must also retain enough long term flexibility to maintain the relationships that serve our long term interests. This means they must retain consciousness that our actions don’t create new problems and unintended political or cultural conditions that cause harm to our allies; create new opportunities for our enemies. Further, that those actions could create domestic conditions in either camp that produce political instability and a loss of control that was neither anticipated nor desired.
The analogy of a game of cards has also been used. It may lend itself to more players with different interests, but even that analogy is constrained in today’s environment. Given the pace of globalization and the impact of information technologies, the card game analogy may need to be updated to be thought of more as a game of cards played online in which some players use pseudonyms and some don’t, in which each of the players has a different appraisal for the stakes of the game, and the willingness of the other players to remain engaged, and in which many of not all of the players engaged to varying degrees in other online games simultaneously, not all of which resemble the card game being played, have the same players, in which the rules seem to change, or in which some of the same players are engaged, but are acting under a new pseudonym, or through a proxy.
I thought it might be useful to consider what we think the various interests are with regard to one another. Even if you limit it to a regional perspective, and from a U.S. perspective, the statecraft required to identify and pursue objectives that at times seem to contradict one another are identifiable. Consider the role Turkey plays in dealings with Iraq, and that Iraq plays in dealing with Turkey? Consider Iran, the Arab ME, the continued access to natural resources in the ME not only from a U.S. perspective but from perspective of how a change in that access would affect other regional and international players, or in which political and economic stability are maintained by the state’s revenue from selling hydro-carbons?
These are just some of the challenges I think must be considered in a comprehensive FP that looks forward and would acknowledge that there is some degree of steady state engagement that must be sustained. It could be on different levels, with different tools (or different allocations of like tools), but there are few (if any) big problems that are going to solved definitively in a 2, 4 or even 8 year span. Many of these are more akin to conditions then problems, and as such require continued maintenance – the level and type of which changes over time along with the interests and interactions that give rise to them. It has probably always been that way, but we’ve either chosen to, or been able to play down the requirement because our own fears, honor and interests allowed us to or because geography and opportunity just did not make the consequences of doing otherwise as likely or as meaningful.
Best, Rob
Originally Posted by slapout9
- even the used ones come up at $40. At my current pay grade I'll have to stick to the online articles
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