Daniel Drezner wrote a rather interesting blog for The Washington Post this week calling for a new Long Telegram.
From where does the United States need a new Long Telegram?
This requires a place where the U.S. foreign policy community is ripe for a rethink — a place that is both important and where the status quo thinking seems radically insufficient. I don’t think Russia or China qualifies here. The rethink of the reset has already occurred toward Moscow, and U.S. policy toward China is in pretty good shape
no matter how many times Donald Trump says China. The Iran deal is too fresh for a rethink to be possible. North Korea is vexing, but as the United States has no diplomats in Pyongyang, unfortunately, that telegram won’t happen.
No, if there’s a place I want to see a Long Telegram from, it’s Saudi Arabia. Last week in the Atlantic, Sarah Chayes and (my Fletcher School colleague) Alex DeWaal offered up quite the warning about the protector of Mecca and Medina:
While I think Drezner’s general instincts about the value of a Long Telegram from Saudi Arabia are correct and I agree with his criticisms of Chayes and Dewaal’s article, I also believe that, in limiting the call for a Long Telegram to one country, Drezner is neglecting to fully interface with the context of the original document and what that context means for the production of an effective reboot.
The Long Telegram was the child of a nascent bi-polar international environment emerging from the Second World War. Its timing and content worked because the Long Telegram accurately reflected the looming national security threat of that time (the Soviet Union) and it also attempted to clarify how that threat might unfold by looking to how the USSR’s national neuroses may manifest themselves in its foreign policy. This gave the United States a certain understanding of how the USSR thought about itself and its international environment which, in turn, helped drive American strategy in dealing with the Soviet Union.
Today’s threat environment does not have any one, prominent prospective enemy. The United States is faced with a number of emergent national security threats, whose potential to disrupt American interests fluctuates depending on one’s interlocutor or the zeitgeist of a particular week’s news cycle.
Overall, there appears to be a general feeling that the United States is entering a new period of multipolarity, and that the chaos that has ensued is the product of the growing pains of American strategic adjustment. So, it may be very much time for a new Long Telegram, or a series of Long Telegrams that can help rationalize how the domestic heuristics of other countries’ foreign policies are manifesting themselves at the system level in opposition to American objectives. In addition, those documents should also provide an outline of a broad national strategy for navigating the international challenges that will emerge from these perspectives, just as Kennan’s original document did.
Contrary to Drezner, emerging multipolarity calls for Long Telegrams on China, Russia, and Iran, in addition to Saudi Arabia. While there may be a great deal of scholarship and State Department analysis on the domestic situations of these countries, the United States should be looking for common dominators that could help orient a widely applicable, general strategic position. It is difficult to claim that the United States has such a good handle on these countries’ individual domestic systems and how exactly mechanisms at the unit level drive their actions on the international stage that it should not be looking to check its assumptions.
US failures in this regard are illustrated by the fact that Americans are often unwilling to widely acknowledge the place of the United States in fueling the posturing of nations like China, Russia, and Iran that so threatens our long term interests. It is also illustrated by the fact that we have recently seen the US put in the place of having to make the tough decisions about how to proceed in places like Syria, Ukraine, and the South China Sea, which would seem to be a symptom of having been outplayed by an opponent that has a better understanding of our decision trees and incentives. Instead of driving actions, we are in the difficult place of having the terms of interaction dictated to us. Maybe other countries have a better understanding of what motivates our actions in the international system than we have of theirs.
Currently, the scramble to meet problems as they materialize and the willingness of Russia and China to increase the intensity of their challenges to US interests and power point to an inefficient system of resource allocation and potential power (military, economic, cultural, and diplomatic), a general lack of resources to fuel effective individualized responses across the system, or both. What a series of Long Telegrams could provide would be the impetus for a creative grand strategy aimed at understanding the interconnected systemic issues that are emerging from these potential national security threats. Connections between the unit level analyses could provide the perspective from which the United States may begin to more confidently grapple with issues as they arise.
InterSec&G 