By Peter Feaver
The
horrible tragedy in Haiti is an opportunity to put the Obama administration's
mantra -- "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste"
-- to the test. Reasonable people can debate whether the administration
has wasted opportunities at home (the domestic economic crisis) or abroad (Iran
political crisis). But in Haiti they get a fresh chance to apply that
mantra.
Of course, the primary focus should be on getting aid as quickly as possible to
the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are suffering. The Obama administration's initial response has been adequate but hopefully is just a down-payment. More can and
should be done and, I expect, will be done.
But I also expect that there are more opportunities in this crisis than merely
rushing in humanitarian aid (as important as that is). While the
first-responders in the administration are straining every nerve to ramp up
their efforts, I hope the strategic planners in the administration (who do not
have operational responsibility for responding) are also busy thinking of ways
to have the response to the crisis address more fundamental concerns.
The Bush administration's response to the late 2004 tsunami is instructive in
this regard. Beyond meeting the initial humanitarian goals of helping
alleviate the suffering, the Bush administration was able to have the U.S.
response address three other goals:
(1) to reinforce a powerful counter-narrative to al Qaeda's propaganda that the
United States was at war with Muslims. Al Qaeda's charge was never true --
no country has done more to defend and assist Muslims in recent decades than
the United States -- but it resonated nonetheless. The irrefutable
evidence of the United States taking the lead in helping the tsunami victims,
many of whom were Muslim, and of doing more, faster than others were able to do
(and doing it with military assets) still stands as the single greatest success
in the ongoing war of ideas with what President Obama calls the network of
violence and hatred.
(2) to demonstrate the utility of action-based multilateralism rather than
deliberation-based multilateralism. Now that the label "coalitions of the
willing" has been replaced with a more politically correct label of
"minilateralism,"
the fashionable set of foreign policy pundits has finally embraced it.
But, of course, this is precisely the kind of multilateralism that the
Bush administration pursued all along, whether the issue was Iraq (the original
coalition of the willing), Iran (P5+1), North Korea (6 Party Talks), Middle
East Peace (the Quartet), WMD proliferation (Proliferation Security
Initiative), or tsunami relief. It must be said, however, that no Bush
effort at minilateralism worked as well as did the Regional Core Group, the ad
hoc coalition created to lead the tsunami response and especially to provide
the early bridge response before the older established agencies could get on
the scene to do what they did best. The Regional Core Group is the best
example of the action-oriented international cooperation the administration
sought, often unsuccessfully, to promulgate.
(3) to help the Indonesian government reestablish responsible governance over
regions, especially Aceh, that posed serious security problems before they were
devastated by the tsunami. This goal has not been fully met, but the
situation is better than what it had been and was an important opportunity that
would otherwise not have been available.
I do not know what the similar opportunities are in the Haitian crisis, but I
am confident that they exist. Haiti has been the victim of mismanagement
and malgovernance for decades, producing misery no less profound than the
dramatic pictures that we see today. Perhaps the earthquake has so broken
the government that a whole new structure, one that will more closely
approximate the goal of effective democracy -- human liberty, protected by
democratic institutions -- can be established. Whatever the opportunities
are, it should be the urgent priority of the strategic planners in the Obama administration
to identify them and to sketch out ways of meeting them in the weeks and months
to come.
Let us do everything we can to help Haiti, but let us not waste this serious
crisis to do more than just meet the immediate first-aid needs.
UPDATE: Already, President Obama has made a good down-payment on the mantra by asking his two immediate predecessors to lead the bipartisan fundraising efforts for Haitian relief. This takes a page from Bush’s playbook -- he similarly asked his two predecessors (Clinton and Bush 41) to lead the disaster relief fundraising. More importantly, it is an excellent use of the crisis to get past the Anything But Bush syndrome that has afflicted the Obama Team this first year. President Bush’s decision to tap President Clinton for tsunami relief paved the way for the more intensive outreach across the aisle on foreign policy matters that characterized Bush’s second term (compared to the first). Perhaps Obama’s action will likewise pave the way for more intensive outreach to Republicans in Obama’s second year.
Read More
(5)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE