Get Realist
How conservative foreign policy has been borne out.

By Ramesh Ponnuru. From the December 31, 2001, issue of National Review
December 19, 2001 8:20 a.m.

t 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.