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a time when a popular Republican president is waging a successful
war, liberals are having to take their consolations where they can.
Some liberals are telling themselves that the renewed esteem for
the Pentagon will carry over to support for national health care.
Others, bolder, are calling the war a vindication for liberal foreign
policy as well as for liberal domestic policy. Al Hunt wrote, "Today's
basic policy formulations — state-building, a strong reliance
on the United Nations, and multilateralism — all were articulated
during the 2000 campaign by the Democratic candidate." George
Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, says that President
Bush has succeeded "in part because he has simply discarded
almost everything he said on foreign policy prior to September 11."
It is tempting
to respond to this line of argument by asking why, if Clinton-Gore-style
liberal internationalism is so great, eight years of it did nothing
to prevent the September 11 attacks. Since it is not difficult to
see how that approach to foreign affairs contributed to American
vulnerability, the temptation should not be resisted. Indeed, the
war so far has been a vindication of Bush's foreign-policy inclinations
as against those of his critics, both liberal and neoconservative.
Consider the
hallmarks of modern liberal internationalism: the delusion that
the military and geopolitical issues that had occupied statesmen
in previous eras could now give way to questions of international
environmental policy, the promotion of commerce, and "soft
power"; the conviction that any conflicts between peoples are
more apparent than real, and amenable to solution through better
communication and the building of trust (are there any peoples who
understand each other better than Northern Ireland's Catholics and
Protestants, or know each other's ambitions better than the Palestinians
and Israelis?); the obsession with multilateralism and the dream
of "global governance"; the fondness for humanitarian
interventions related loosely, if at all, to national interests;
the exaltation of international treaties in which dictators make
paper promises to improve their behavior; the exquisitely calibrated
use of military force to "send a message" rather than
to defeat enemies.
In the post-9/11
context, all of this seems as chimerical as the Kellogg-Briand pact
to outlaw war did after the invasion of Poland. Bill Clinton's endless
proffering of apologies for America's sins, real and imagined, looks
even worse.
Is the above
a caricature of Clintonian foreign policy? Not to judge from the
former president's own November speech on the terrorist attacks.
Clinton was widely criticized for dwelling on the historical misdeeds
of the ancestors of white Christians. Less widely remarked is that
his proposed course of action for America mainly emphasized rhetoric,
cultural exchange, and confidence-building measures. Even now, he
appears incapable of imagining a problem that he can't talk his
way out of.
Sen. Mitchell's
claim, however, is based on caricature. Bush did not have
to abandon the "unilateralism" the liberals decry because
he never took it up in the first place. To eschew allies would be
silly as well as dangerous, and no foreign-policy thinker has recommended
the idea. Bush's major foreign-policy speech during the presidential
campaign, at the Reagan Library in November 1999, repeatedly mentioned
the importance of "strengthening the alliances that sustain
our influence in Europe and East Asia and the Middle East."
He even noted that "international organizations can serve the
cause of peace."
It is a characteristic
(and annoying) conceit of liberal internationalism that no other
type of internationalism exists. Thus liberals have a hard time
grasping that a conservative internationalist such as Bush can value
alliances and organizations — but as instruments, not ends
in themselves. To consult with allies is not to run a focus group.
In the present crisis, America has led and asked others to follow;
it has not waited for an international consensus to form before
taking action. (Does anyone imagine we would be close to victory
in Afghanistan, or even have begun to fight, had we waited for a
U.N. go-ahead?) Moreover, Americans, with the Northern Alliance,
have done almost all the fighting.
Among our useful
allies, not one has been moved by any wispy notion of international
community. Britain and Australia are with us because of a cultural
affinity that underlies an ideological one. Our local allies are
motivated by a combination of fear of our wrath, fear of our enemies'
success, greed for our money, and a craven desire to back the winner.
The president has not needed to give an inch on the global-warming
accord, the International Criminal Court, or missile defense to
win their support.
Our willingness
to work with unsavory allies is, indeed, another rebuke to liberal
idealism in foreign policy. To be sure, the Clinton administration
had nasty allies, as all administrations must. But we largely preferred
to turn a blind eye to their faults, pretending for example that
the Kosovo Liberation Army was not a band of drug-running thugs.
Nobody has any illusions about the Northern Alliance or the Pakistani
military regime — or about the necessity of using them.
By bringing
us back to our bedrock interest in survival, the war has seen a
general return to realism. Even Bush, who has been prone to surrounding
himself with realist advisers, has become more realist during the
war. In his Reagan Library speech, he said that "we cannot
excuse Russian brutality" in Chechnya. It turns out that we
can ignore it.
Liberal relativism,
equivocation, and guilt have been early casualties of the war. But
liberals are not the only foreign-policy thinkers who have engaged
in a flight from realism and, sometimes, from reality. "Idealism"
comes in neoconservative as well as liberal flavors. The debate
between realists and idealists in foreign policy always has a somewhat
artificial quality because both camps concede so much to the other.
Idealists know that America cannot pursue its values without regard
to its interests and capabilities. Realists understand that the
spread of freedom serves our interests — as President Bush
proclaimed in that same speech. It is no wonder, then, that both
labels have a tendency to become less descriptions of schools of
thought than idle boasts.
The war has
also scrambled the arguments between these schools. At one moment
in the short course of the war so far, the anti-realist neoconservatives
who are usually friendly to the idea of "nation-building"
were warning the administration not to engage in it in Afghanistan,
while the realist conservatives who generally disdain the idea were
suggesting it for Iraq. This moment of confusion exposed a theoretical
weakness in both positions. Realists have sometimes discounted the
importance of the internal structure of regimes — treating
Soviet foreign-policy behavior as a function of traditional Russian
nationalism, for example, rather than of the inherently aggressive
character of totalitarianism. But this is a failure of realism to
be sufficiently realistic. Dismantling totalitarianism in Iraq and
replacing it with the institutions of freedom is a condition of
peace, and a realism that recognizes this fact is an improved realism.
The neoconservatives,
for their part, were merely making the commonsense point that the
war in Afghanistan would have to be won before it made sense to
form a new government there. They may very well revert to form by
favoring a continued American presence to run a postwar Afghanistan;
in the past they have joined with hawkish liberals to support "peacekeeping."
If so, the administration is unlikely to satisfy them. It seems
currently inclined to leave Afghanistan to our allies. This policy
would be in keeping with the president's distinction between warmaking
and peacekeeping, and with conservative realist John Hillen's comment
that "superpowers don't do windows."
That policy
may also be necessary if the administration is to turn against Iraq,
a goal of both the realists and the neoconservatives. But to say
this is to say that there is a limit to how much American power
can accomplish, at least at any one time. For several years, some
neoconservatives have talked as though the overthrow of the Chinese
regime could be the focus of American foreign policy. The war should
end this fantasy, even for those who (like me) detest the Chinese
regime, consider its interests largely opposed to ours, and would
welcome its replacement by a liberal democracy. Much of the art
of statecraft is discrimination, which is why neoconservative idealism
is more common among writers than the people who actually make foreign
policy.
The neoconservatives
have tended to regard prudence as a virtue of the weak, just as
liberals have faulted it for want of imagination. But the war also
reminds us that prudence, though much mocked and uninspiring, is
not to be confused with timidity and is in fact the cardinal virtue
in foreign policy. As the late realist John P. Roche remarked, the
world is not made of Play-Doh.
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