Policymaking by Remote Control

The Obama administration has to learn that foreign policy by remote control won't work.

Drone proliferation is a valid concern.

U.S. use of armed drone strikes, principally to combat terrorism, has increased steadily in recent years. The defense and intelligence communities defend drones as effective antiterrorism tools. They are accepted by some U.S. allies, and even public opinion in some measures, for the same reason. However, concerns over the legality, and ultimately the ethics, of lethal U.S. drone strikes are very real. Scholars at the New America Foundation are among those attempting to codify the number of drone strikes and push the Obama administration to set clearer guidelines for their use.

In and article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs – “The Next Drone Wars: Preparing for Proliferation” – Sarah Kreps and Micah Zenko argue that armed drones are here to stay and urge the U.S. to lead the establishment of international standards governing their use. Short of that, the authors fear both steady growth in the number of armed drone operations and a lowering of the threshold for drone strikes. More countries will employ more armed drones for more reasons, to the detriment of global stability.

The need for global standards on drones is real, but there are more obstacles to it than the authors discuss. While Kreps and Zenko articulate the “hard power” consequences of growing drone use, there are “soft power” consequences for the way American foreign policy is perceived abroad. These consequences are no less real for being less quantifiable.

[See a collection of political cartoons on President Obama's drone policy.]

Kreps and Zenko argue for the U.S. to lead the establishment of international controls on drones, informed in part by past agreements governing ballistic missiles. Recent experience shows, however, that the biggest barriers to U.S. leadership on such an agreement may be internal, emerging from two branches of the U.S. government. First, that the Obama administration’s stance on drone use has hewed closely to that of the Bush administration demonstrates how the executive branch – Republican or Democratic – will fight to maintain flexibility in the use of force. Drones are merely the most recent example of that long-term strategic trend. Second, the U.S. Senate has been reluctant to engage in treaties or international agreements in many areas, from crucial nonmilitary topics like climate change to strategic ones like maritime law. To lead on drone standards, it is likely that the White House would not only have to surrender some of its own autonomy over their use, but expend political capital to convince Congress of the need for international controls.

America’s drone use has a “soft power” impact as well. Many diplomats have argued that U.S. embassies, responding to real security pressures, have been so heavily defended that they resemble not outposts of an allied country but fortresses in enemy territory. This tangible distancing is driven by safety concerns, but it has ramifications. It creates an atmosphere of foreign policy conducted at a remove. The use of remote-controlled armaments like drones furthers this trend. Paul Brinkley, a former senior Defense Department official who ran civilian economic development efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, in his recent memoir War Front to Store Front, discusses how the use of body armor created a similar phenomenon – those executing U.S. foreign policy keeping their distance when engaging abroad:

We were there to help the citizens of Baghdad. Our soldiers were combatants; they had every reason to wear armor. But as civilians, we were there to build trust, to engage. Instead, we looked like astronauts exiting our spacecraft, wrapped in layers of protective gear to walk among the aliens.

It’s an imperfect analogy. Armored drones are combat technology; they are not engaged in community development. Outwardly, however, they are the airborne and unmanned equivalent of Brinkley description of body armor: technology that allows the U.S. to pursue its foreign policy goals at a remove – to engage, to paraphrase Brinkley, but at a safe distance.

[See a collection of political cartoons on defense spending.]

Kreps and Zenko are rightfully concerned about drone proliferation. The White House and Senate may be the biggest obstacles to their goal of U.S. leadership toward international governance of their use. Ultimately, how the U.S. executes its foreign policy is as important as the policy itself. Kreps and Zenko point to the dangers of policy by remote control.