Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
that Braudel would have liked, taking people away from the obsessions of the moment to-
ward a grander and longer-term perspective. The event was sponsored by the Center for
a New American Security, where I am a senior fellow. The circumstance was a panel dis-
cussion on what were the next steps that needed to be taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
with a special emphasis on the fine-tuning of counterinsurgency. Panelists proceeded to en-
gage the inside baseball of “Af-Pak,” as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region has come
to be addressed by the Washington cognoscenti. Then another panelist, Boston University
professor Andrew Bacevich, made an impolite observation, which I—sitting in the front
row—will paraphrase:
A historian looking at this panel from the viewpoint of the distant future might conclude,
Bacevich surmised, that while the United States was deeply focused on Afghanistan and
other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state failure was developing right on
America's southern border, with far more profound implications for the near and distant
future of America, its society, and American power than anything occurring half a world
away. What have we achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the
1980s? Bacevich asked. Why not fix Mexico instead? How we might have prospered had
we put all that money, expertise, and innovation that went into Iraq and Afghanistan into
Mexico.
Therein, sheathed in a simple question, lies the most elemental critique of American for-
eign policy since the end of the Cold War: a critique that, as we shall see, goes far bey-
ond Mexico, encompasses Eurasia, and yet is rooted in North American geography. I start
with Bacevich only because his frustration is stark and his bona fides particularly impress-
ive—and poignant: a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, his son was killed in Iraq.
But whereas Bacevich in his topics can be a polemicist with overwhelming disregard for
East Coast elites and all manner of entanglements in which they embroil America over-
seas, there are others whose views substantially dovetail with his. Their analysis, along
with Bacevich's, is above all rooted in a conscious attempt to get beyond
l'histoire évén-
mentielle
to the longer term. When I think about what truly worries all of these analysts,
Braudel's
longue durée
comes to mind.
Bacevich along with Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Paul Pillar, Mark Helprin, Ted
Galen Carpenter, and the late Samuel Huntington are not, in every case, the most well-
known voices in foreign policy analysis, and putting them in the same category is itself a
bit of a stretch. Yet in a composite sense they have questioned the fundamental direction
of American foreign policy for the longer term. Walt is a professor at Harvard and
Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, but with all the prestige which those appoint-
ments carry, their topic
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
, published in 2007, came
in for very rough treatment because of its allegation that Israel's supporters in America
were essentially the culprits behind the Iraq War, a war which everyone in this group of
analysts was dead-set against; or against how it was fought. Helprin, a novelist and former
