“The Blob” isn’t a coherent concept, according to some blobsters. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? Print
This article first appeared in the Nonzero Newsletter and is republished with the authors’ permission.
The people claiming that there is some sort of unified theory of Blob-dom are not thinking clearly, said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. For one thing, he said, even within Brookings there is a wide range of opinion on Afghanistan. He supported the withdrawal, for instance—which would seem to make him a traitor to the Blob, even though he is, by any definition, in the Blob himself. —The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2021
The term “Blob” has arrived. Within the past two months this recent addition to our foreign policy vocabulary has appeared in the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, not one, not two, not three, but four times. In the first of those cases, I’m happy to say, I was the one uttering it. In the last of those cases, I’m also happy to say, it appeared in the headline; and, better yet, it appeared in the phrase “Beware the Blob”—which is something that those of us who embrace the term would definitely advise.
But what do we mean by the term? This has become a subject of contention. Some people we consider part of the Blob—such as Thomas Wright, quoted, above, in the last of those Times pieces—say it has no coherent meaning. Which is understandable: We’re using it as a pejorative, so the less sense it seems to make, the better for the people we’re applying it to.
But the truth is that “the Blob” is a useful term with a coherent meaning. At least, it’s as useful as many other common foreign policy labels, such as “liberal internationalists” and “neoconservatives.” Both of these labels encompass people who don’t agree on everything. In fact, it’s hard to find any belief that all people in either of those two categories share that isn’t shared by a fair number of people in the other category. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, this kind of fuzziness is characteristic of the labels we use to organize reality. There’s no distinctive property, he noted by way of example, that is shared by all the things we call “games.”
Yet we have a working understanding of what we mean by “games.” I think we can achieve the same for “Blob.”
And I think we must! I’m not kidding when I say I believe the Blob is a grave threat to America’s and the world’s future. (Which isn’t to say that blobsters are bad people; like most human beings, they mean well.) To come up with a working definition of “the Blob” is to sketch a vision of what American foreign policy shouldn’t be—and, by implication, to come up with at least some rough outlines of what it should be.
And, by the way, though the people who oppose the Blob—sometimes called the “restrainers” or the “restraint coalition” or the “Quincy coalition”—range from left to right, there is a fair amount of agreement among them about what’s wrong with the Blob. I don’t purport to speak for all restrainers, but I think what follows would get pretty broad buy-in from within the restraint coalition.
You know what’s harder to characterize than the Blob? God! Some theologians respond to that challenge with what’s called “negative theology.” They specify things God isn’t rather than things God is. Likewise, I’ll begin our search for a working definition of the Blob with some negative blobology. Here are three things the Blob isn’t.
1) The Blob is not, strictly speaking, the American foreign policy establishment. That was a hard sentence for me to write, because I myself have repeatedly given, as a shorthand definition of the Blob, “the American foreign policy establishment.” But I’ve noticed that if people take that as too literal a definition, without any elaboration, misunderstanding can ensue.
Consider the last of those four New York Times pieces. Its author, Sarah Lyall, interviewed various blobsters and gave them a chance to critique the term “Blob.” One of them—Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke—critiqued it by way of critiquing Ben Rhodes, the Obama national security aide and speechwriter who coined the term a few years ago.
Feaver said Rhodes was engaging in “faux populism, as in ‘Woe is me, I’m just a poor assistant to the president trying to speak truth to all these well-entrenched fat cats.’ That is nutty. No one could be more inside the system than the speechwriter for the president.” Feaver added: “Everybody has borrowed this exact same conceit. You’ll find Harvard professors complaining about the Blob.”
Now, it may be true that a White House national security aide and a Harvard international relations professor are in some sense inherently part of the establishment. But that doesn’t mean their views on foreign policy are the views that prevail within the establishment. There have been radical Ivy League professors who watched with dismay as the world failed to followed their guidance, and there have been maverick White House advisers whose preferred policies rarely carried the day. It’s the non-radical, non-maverick views—the Blob’s views—that tend overwhelmingly to prevail within the foreign policy establishment.
To put this distinction between Blob and foreign policy establishment another way:
Those of us in the anti-Blob movement hope that people who share our views will someday take over the foreign policy establishment. (Please don’t repeat this; we want to preserve the element of surprise.) Well, obviously, if that happens, we won’t be calling the foreign policy establishment the Blob! We’ll call it something more flattering, like the Font of Human Wisdom or the Pantheon.
My point is just that the Blob is not, strictly speaking, the institutions that undergird the American foreign policy establishment (the think tanks, public policy schools, media outlets, government bodies), and it’s not, strictly speaking, all the inhabitants of those institutions. The Blob is a large and dominant subset of the people who inhabit those institutions—a subset whose members, while sometimes disagreeing, share certain proclivities that shape America’s foreign policy.
Which proclivities? We’ll come to that. Meanwhile:
2) The Blob is not something that stands in contrast to Obama’s foreign policy. Since Rhodes, perhaps Obama’s closest foreign policy confidant, is the one who coined the term, there is a natural tendency to think it connotes an un-Obama foreign policy. Feaver, in that New York Times piece, says “Ben Rhodes had a very precise definition [of the Blob], and his definition was ‘people who disagree with me,’ or ‘people who disagree with me and Obama.’”
That may or may not be what Rhodes originally had in mind, but it certainly won’t do as a definition of “Blob” as the term is now used. Pretty much everyone in the restraint coalition lauds some of Obama’s achievements (the Iran nuclear deal, engagement with Cuba) but also believes that the Obama foreign policy was by and large very blobbish.
And it was blobbish in instructively diverse ways. There’s a tendency to think of blobsters as people who have favored full-on ground wars—the Iraq war was supported by almost all of them—but it’s important to understand that there are lots of other kinds of interventions that are characteristically blobbish. And Obama’s tenure includes a number of them. Here are four: