Dialogues from the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival - The New Pragmatism
US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice explains the Obama administration’s foreign policy to James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic.
James Bennet: I don’t know how to describe [President Obama’s] approach to foreign policy. Is it idealistic? Is it realist? … Summarize the philosophy.
Susan Rice: Well, I’m not going to give you a label. … My view of the way the administration approaches foreign policy—and policy in general—is that it is pragmatic, non-ideological, and principled. And I think that applies across the board in foreign policy and indeed in domestic policy. “Pragmatic” meaning that we take a sober look at circumstances as we see them, as we find them, and ask ourselves what tools are at our disposal to advance our interests in the context of those realities. And we don’t unilaterally disarm ourselves of any of those tools. As a matter of ideology, we look at a situation, we assess it, and we see how we can best approach it—in our interests.
But here’s where this alleged dichotomy between interests and values is proved false. There’s nothing that causes us to view our interests and values as diametrically opposed. We have an interest in promoting democracy—that’s consistent with our values. We have an interest in trying to move as many countries as we can to cooperate with us effectively to deal with the nature of the challenges that we face. But, in order for countries to want to work with us, and to have the capacity to work with us effectively, what do they need? They need to be peaceful. They need to share our aims and objectives—and ideally our values. They need to have the means to do so. And helping to build the will and capacity of countries to partner with us in our interests means that we need to be concerned in part about the types of things that they’re concerned about. But these are not “either/or.” Multilateralism isn’t a wooly end in itself: It’s a means among others—and not the only one—to accomplish our objectives in the nature of the world in which we live.