The Cred
Robert Kagan's most recent column in the Post was indeed a sight to behold. Over the past fourteen months, Republican rhetoric regarding foreign policy has been a grand and glorious thing. High flown language is often used to explain the "new" American mission in the world. Kagan reaches new heights here in his post-inaugural euphoria.
His piece tracks a narrative revolving around a revolution in Bush's thinking on foreign policy he believes occurred over the past half decade. It occurred in three phases, he believes. The first was the campaign attempt at a Realist retrenchment, claiming that our foreign policy should be narrowly defined by "national interest." The second was a return to the Reaganesque definition of the world in terms of Good and Evil in the wake of 9/11. Now the third seems to have come. Kagan writes,
Bush still asserts that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." But in his inaugural address he has taken a step beyond that. In this third phase he has grounded American foreign policy in universal principles, in the Declaration of Independence and what Lincoln called its "abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times." The goal of American foreign policy is now to spread democracy, for its own sake, for reasons that transcend specific threats. In short, Bush has unmoored his foreign policy from the war on terrorism.
Right.
Kagan, however, isn't the only one praising Bush recently. The Times offered grudging praise of the Administration's push to spread democracy throughout the world. It writes,
Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.
So can it be true? Is it time for Liberals to begin giving the Devil his due?
Not for my money. While, yes, it is important and encouraging that democracy may be spreading across the Middle East, if it is indeed to the result of the administration's ill-advised policies and is therefore attributable to them, there is then a tragic aspect to this bold movement. This is because the administration's policies are, first, disingenuous for they are conceived not of the benevolence the administration claims, but of simple economic self interest, and, second, dangerously ill-conceived, positioning America in an overstretched and untenable position in the world.
As for Kagan's take on Bush, my response would be that in the end, the only things that have changed about Bush's rhetoric and thinking over the past four years is that it has become more convoluted and delusional. And people like Kagan and his ideological guru Charles Kruathammer have shown nothing other than either their foolishness or their partisanship in their willingness to provide intellectual cover for him.
The Speech
With all the soaring Conservative rhetoric glorifying Democracy and the benevolence of American power to bestow it where it chooses over the past year, I thought it was worth going back to the speech that got it all started. I am referring, of course, Charles Krauthammer's infamous "Democratic Realism" speech--the speech that essentially laid down the paradigm, rhetoric, and rationale for all the conservative rhetoric that has gone after it.
Half of the speech is spent discussing and critiquing two schools of foreign policy, Isolationism and Realism, while laying some of the groundwork for his eventual point. A third section is concerned with Liberal Internationalism, its uselessness, and the multitudinous flaws he finds within it. Then, finally, he sets out to describe the newest school of foreign policy, created by George Bush--a convoluted and ultimately thinly disguised veil for what is little other than a justification for the worthless Iraq invasion and the application of American power and influence to shape the world as it sees fit.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more than four to one in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
I actually have little to argue with here. There is much truth in what he says here. The problem, as always with Kruathammer, is what he chooses to leave out. Are Liberals really only interested in fighting wars for the sake the justice? Is there nothing more to these sorts of interventions than simple morality?
In fact, there is more to it than that. At the root of all the the Democratic approach to foreign policy is the idea of "Branding"--of creating a positive aura around the mention of your name. One of the key tenets of 1990's thinking was that it was unrealistic to think that the current unipolar world would always exist, and that if the US could continue in the new post-Cold War era to be seen as a benefactor to the world--a provider of stability in an unstable world--than we stood a good chance of influencing the future shape of global affairs in a ways that were advantageous us.
And, of course, as we all know, in the wake of 9/11, George Bush had an opportunity to essentially seal the deal for America, and simply decided not to do so. 9/11 was the golden opportunity to set in motion an international system which could have eventually resulted in the world the Clinton architects envisioned. Instead, the Bush administration became obsessed with invading Iraq, and it is now unlikely we will ever have such a chance again. The sad truth is that most of those who opposed the war have only a partial idea of how much it has truly cost America. Krauthammer goes on to say:
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition--to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries. This American exceptionalism explains why non-Americans find this foreign policy so difficult to credit; why Blair has had more difficulty garnering support for it in his country; and why Europe, in particular, finds this kind of value-driven foreign policy hopelessly and irritatingly moralistic.
...Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy.
But where? The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.
Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts.
Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.
Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why? Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.
Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.
Establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq and ultimately their key neighbors would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan in the 1940s, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.
Yes, it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right. But how do they know in advance? Half a century ago, we heard the same confident warnings about the imperviousness to democracy of Confucian culture. That proved stunningly wrong. Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?
Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It's not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism. It's not one man; it is a condition. It will be nice to find that man and hang him, but that's the cops-and-robbers law-enforcement model of fighting terrorism that we tried for twenty years and that gave us 9/11. This is war, and in war arresting murderers is nice. But you win by taking territory--and leaving something behind.
Krauthammer is makes it all sound so easy. Once again, however, it is not enough to judge his work at face value. It is what he leaves out that is important.
Like when he overblows the problems the exist within our international institutions--as if our Government has never had a scandal--and refuses to mention the worth that they have to world, and even more importantly, their potential. Or his utter silliness when it comes to implanting Democracy in Iraq. Does he really not realize that a functional democracy requires about eight different ingredients including a strong middle class, a transparent government, a free press, a healthy economy, etc.?
Reading all of this, you have an odd feeling. You begin to wonder if you've missed something. Can he really be serious about this? Is he kidding? No. In fact, he is not. He is very serious.
Fellow neo-Conservative Francis Fukuyama had much the same response to the speech. He writes that Krauthammer's speech was "strangely disconnected from reality." "Reading Krauthammer, one gets the impression that the Iraq War - the archetypical application of American unipolarity - had been an unqualified success, with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based fully vindicated." "There is not the slightest nod" in Krauthammer's exposition "towards the new empirical facts" that have come to light over the course of the occupation.
According to Fukuyama, Kruathammer's logic is "utterly unrealistic in its overestimation of U.S. power and our ability to control events around the world." "Of all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neoconservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the United States could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy," he wrote, "and to go on from there to democratize the broader Middle East."
What is even more odd, in Fukuyama's mind, is what had happened to the neo-conservatives he once knew in the 90's. Strange because it was "precisely because these same neoconservatives had spent much of the past generation warning...about the dangers of ambitious social engineering, and how social planners could never control behavior or deal with unanticipated consequences." If America couldn't eliminate poverty at home or improve its own education system, he asked, "how does it expect to bring democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot?"
The Point
Like all the recent Republican rhetoric over the past year, the implied idealism is a false pretense. There has been much made over the past few years about how revolutionary this policy push for democracy is. In truth, it is nothing of the sort. It has been the policy of the United States for years to create democracies in the countries it occupies and to support democracy whatever it begins to thrive. But what is interesting is how little real interest the administration had in this sort of thing until it became clear there where no WMD in Iraq.
The only truly revolutionary thing about the Bush administration is its willingness to believe in the limitlessness of American power and right to do as it chooses in the world and to shape it as it sees fit. This sort of thinking started for the President right after 9/11. It is the only revolution that has occurred in his thinking: the belief that it is imperative that he control everything. Kagan's fallacy is that he confounds Bush's revolutionary thinking with his non-revolutionary politic cover rhetoric. But the sad truth is that neo-Conservative delusions like Kagan's and Krauthammer's has become so prominent, that there is little doubt that even the President himself has bought into this lie.
And this, then, is what is so wrong with the praise offered by the Times. In giving credit to the president for creating these supposed revolutionary policies--policies we have engaged in for years--the Times plays into and supports Kagan's fallacy and, therefore, the misdirect perpetrated by the administration. And in doing this, it in turn provides yet more political cover for the what is the Administration's true interest, which is engaging in a kind of "Puppet Master" foreign policy unprecedented in American history.
And so there is an almost comic effect every time Bush concerning Middle Eastern Democracy and the US's benevolence toward it. The truth is that our intents are nothing of the kind. We are there for oil. And this simple fact paints every word he speaks with hypocrisy in the eyes of the people he is trying to free. Liberals must not allow themselves to be outmanuvered by the Administration. In the end, their high flown language is nothing more than rhetorical flourish. They could care less about spreading freedom to the unfree. In the end, they just want control, and this is how they think they will do it.
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