ashthomas//blog: The National Interest Summer 2004

ashthomas//blog

Saturday, July 31, 2004

The National Interest Summer 2004

The latest issue of the National Interest is a treasure trove of fascinating foreign policy analysis. Niall Ferguson writes on "Recovering Our Nerve", in which he identifies seven mistakes that the United States has made with regard to Iraq:
  1. In planning for a war to topple Saddam, Secretary of Defense Rumfeld did a brilliant job. But in planning for the peace that would follow, he did a dreadful job. ...

  2. In arguing that Saddam Hussein definitely possessed weapons of mass destruction, Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Chief George Tenet and ultimately George W. Bush himself—to say nothing of Prime Minister Tony Blair—did us all a disservice. It would have been perfectly sufficient to have argued that, after all his obfuscations, it was impossible to be sure whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. …

  3. Diplomacy can proceed on more than one track, but the tracks need to run in the same direction. With respect to the role of the United Nations, the Bush Administration went down two completely opposing tracks. One (Cheney’s) was to regard the UN as irrelevant. The other (Powell’s) was to regard it as indispensable. One or other of the policies might have been successful. But a hybrid was bound to fail. …

  4. It was probably unwise to flout the Geneva Convention at Guantanamo Bay; it was certainly fatal to indicate to military prison warders that it could be flouted in Iraq as well. …

  5. It was a mistake to set a June 30 deadline for the handover of power to an Iraqi government. The moment that deadline was set, the incentives for ordinary Iraqis to collaborate with the CPA became much weaker. …

  6. It was a blunder not to let the Marines finish off the Ba’athi rump at Fallujah.

  7. It was madness to execute a volte face and call in the United Nations in the belief that it might help to legitimatise the handover of sovereignty.

He identifies the root of these problems as an example of "a failure to learn from history" as he notes that "among the most obvious lessons of the history of modern imperialism is the lesson that an empire cannot rule by coercion alone."

This is certainly the major source of difference between neoconservatives - there are those who might be more accurately called liberal imperialists, who wish to use the power gap that exists in the United States’ favour in order to redirect the course of many nations, especially those in the Middle East away from tyranny towards democracy, through a process of liberal imperialism. This entails a period of liberal authoritarianism in which a culture is convinced of the worth of Western values. Liberal democracy is the ultimate goal, but a period of imperial management is necessary, possibly lasting decades.

The other wing of neoconsersativism may be called militarist nationalism, which seeks to defend an often broad definition of national interest through the frequent use of military force. This is the dominant wing in the Bush administration, which focussed on the invasion of Iraq and not on details of the post-invasion occupation and reconstruction.

Although John Lewis Gaddis was critical of Ferguson’s Colossus, discussed earlier, from a reading of another essay in the National Interest, they share many of the same ideas. Harvey Sicherman, in “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone”, reviews Gaddis’s Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. Gaddis, in distinguishing three distinct periods of US foreign policy, argues for a form of neoconservatism that is less arrogant:

He asserts that, after the 1814 disaster, John Q. [Adams] developed what Gaddis terms a pre-emptive, unilateral and hegemonic foreign policy--although limited to the Western Hemisphere, given America's very modest military power. George W. [Bush] is pursuing a variation of Adams' biggest achievement, the Monroe Doctrine, on a global rather than hemispheric scale.

He continues on by discussing "Roosevelt's post-Pearl Harbor blending of Wilson and his cousin Theodore, he of soft speech and big stick fame", leading to this conclusion:

Gaddis wants Bush to exercise hegemony the Roosevelt way, clothed in the disguise of coalitions and international organizations, the (sound) theory being that leaders of inferior powers still like to be asked and consulted.

Sicherman’s review is worth reading in full as a discussion of the various directions that US foreign policy is being pulled. The other books that he discusses include Owen Harries’ Benign or Imperial?, Richard A. Clarke’s Against All Enemies, Walter Russell Mead’s Power, Terror, Peace, and War, and David Frum and Richard Perle’s An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism.

All the books, save Frum and Perle’s, recommend a variation of liberal imperialism that encourages proactive involvement in the world’s affairs with an emphasis on reconstruction and liberalisation, as well as coalition building.

It is this final point, on the question of unilateralism as the norm rather than a last resort, is discussed by Francis Fukuyama’s essay in the same issue of the National Interest.

Fukuyama’s “The Neoconservative Moment” argues for a softer form of neoconservatism. Much of the essay deals with making a case against the dominant strain of neoconservatism as personified by Charles Krauthammer. An example of militarist nationalism, Krauthammer and his colleagues were vocal in favour of the invasion, and over-confident as to how the post-war period would proceed. Fukuyama writes:

As the war in Iraq turns from triumphant liberation to grinding insurgency, other voices--either traditional realists like Brent Scowcroft, nationalist-isolationists like Patrick Buchanan, or liberal internationalists like John Kerry--will step forward as authoritative voices and will have far more influence in defining American post-Iraq War foreign policy. The poorly executed nation-building strategy in Iraq will poison the well for future such exercises, undercutting domestic political support for a generous and visionary internationalism, just as Vietnam did.

It did not have to be this way. One can start with premises identical to Krauthammer's, agree wholeheartedly with his critiques of the other three positions, and yet come up with a foreign policy that is very different from the one he lays out. I believe that his strategy simultaneously defines our interests in such a narrow way as to make the neoconservative position indistinguishable from realism, while at the same time managing to be utterly unrealistic in its overestimation of U.S. power and our ability to control events around the world. It is probably too late to reclaim the label "neoconservative" for any but the policies undertaken by the Bush Administration, but it is still worth trying to reformulate a fourth alternative that combines idealism and realism--but in a fashion that can be sustained over the long haul.

Many of the criticisms that Ferguson had about the handling of the Iraq War and what followed come back to the issue of legitimacy. It is this concern that Fukuyama also turns:

Legitimacy is a tricky concept. It is related to substantive principles of justice, but it is not the same thing as justice. That is, people believe that a set of institutions is legitimate because they believe they are just, but legitimacy is always relative to the people conferring legitimacy.

Legitimacy is important to us not simply because we want to feel good about ourselves, but because it is useful. Other people will follow the American lead if they believe that it is legitimate; if they do not, they will resist, complain, obstruct or actively oppose what we do. In this respect, it matters not what we believe to be legitimate, but rather what other people believe is legitimate. If the Indian government says that it will not participate in a peacekeeping force in Iraq unless it has a UN Security Council mandate to do so, it does not matter in the slightest that we believe the Security Council to be an illegitimate institution: the Indians simply will not help us out.

Krauthammer and others have dismissed the importance of legitimacy by associating it entirely with the United Nations--and then shooting at that very easy target.

Thus Fukuyama agrees with Ferguson and Gaddis, that the major problem with neoconservatism as it is being practiced by the Bush administration is that it is exercised with impunity rather than nuance and respect for the rest of the world community.

Fukuyama concludes with an explication of his preferred variant of neoconservatism, which, although he doubts whether "it will ever be seen as neoconservative", he thinks "there is no reason why it should not have this title":

The United States should understand the need to exercise power in pursuit of both its interests and values, but also to be more prudent and subtle in that exercise. The world's sole superpower needs to remember that its margin of power is viewed with great suspicion around the world and will set off countervailing reactions if that power is not exercised judiciously.

This means, in the first instance, doing the simple work of diplomacy and coalition-building that the Bush Administration seemed reluctant to undertake prior to the Iraq War and not gratuitously to insult the "common opinions of mankind." We do not need to embrace the UN or multilateralism for its own sake, because we somehow believe that such institutions are inherently more legitimate than nation-states. On the other hand, we need likeminded allies to accomplish both the realist and idealist portions of our agenda and should spend much more time and energy cultivating them.

The promotion of democracy through all of the available tools at our disposal should remain high on the agenda, particularly with regard to the Middle East. But the United States needs to be more realistic about its nation-building abilities, and cautious in taking on large social-engineering projects in parts of the world it does not understand very well. On the other hand, it is inevitable that we will get sucked into similar projects in the future (for example, after a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime), and we need to be much better prepared. This means establishing a permanent office with authority and resources appropriate for the job the next time around as part of a broader restructuring of the U.S. government's soft-power agencies.

To this list I would add a final element that for reasons of space I cannot elaborate here. The visionary founders of the postwar order were institution-builders, who created not just the much-maligned UN system, but the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Korea alliances, the GATT, the WTO, and a host of other international organizations. Institution-building is not something that has occupied the time of officials in the Bush Administration, but it should. If the United States does not like the fact that the UN is dominated by non-democratic regimes, then it should invest in an effort to build up other institutions, like NATO or the Community of Democracies founded during the Clinton Administration, that are based on norms and values we share. The Community of Democracies initiative, which the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine tried to strangle at its birth, was never taken seriously by the Republicans, for, I assume, "not invented here" reasons. But such a global alliance of democracies, led by newer ones in eastern Europe and Latin America, could play a legitimizing function around the world in a way that NATO cannot.

This position is very close to the position that I myself endorse. It is a neoconservatism that is less offensive to the rest of the world and is more likely to encourage allies. Someone, I think it was Michael Lind, recently observed that many neocons come from former colonies of the British Empire (India, Canada, Australia). There is much support world wide for a policy of aggressive democratisation and liberalisation through the use of force where necessary. A less unilateral stance by the United States would make the neocon position more attractive to other Western nations who would otherwise be intimidated by an assertive and intractable US.

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