Still Waiting For The President’s `Humble’ Foreign Policy

"The world's only superpower now looks vulnerable," says Gustav Ranis, Professor of International Economics and director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University. The US is at a stage where it has no "clear exit strategy" from the foreign policy muddle it has gotten into by taking a unilateral stand on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Al-Qaeda. Ranis says that although it might appear on the surface that unilateralism has worked, this is obviously untrue since Afghanistan is still not secure, Iraq is on the brink of a civil war, and the UN is increasingly looked to as the only way out of the crisis. And in the US, the public has lost whatever confidence it might have had in US foreign policy in 2001. "The American public is increasingly likely to turn its back on future foreign involvements," says Ranis. With the presidential elections drawing near, the heavy price of a unilateral war, a global anti-terrorism drive, and expensive nation-building, becomes more apparent. The US, Ranis says, has to “rediscover the path between unilateral imperialism and unilateral isolationism that we once trod so successfully after World War II.” – YaleGlobal