CIAO DATE: 09/07
The National Interest
On Might, Ethics and Realism: An Exchange
Anatol Lieven and Will Marshall
Full Text
John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven, Ethical Realism, (Pantheon Press, 2006), 224 pp., $22.00.
Will Marshall, With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy For Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, (Rowman & Littlefied Publishers, Inc.), 256 pp., $19.95.
Dear Will,
I have been reading with great interest the volume on Democratic foreign policy that you edited for the Progressive Policy Institute, With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, and I find parts of it admirable. This is especially true of your co-authors’ arguments that the Democrats should look to the Truman era for inspiration; on the need for the United States to adopt a far more generous and far-sighted approach to foreign development aid, especially in the Muslim world; and on the absolute imperative of reducing America’s dependence on oil, both for security and environmental reasons.
These are all points that John Hulsman and I make in our own book Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World, which was published in September. We also identify strongly with Melissa Tryon’s argument for a reconciliation between Democrats and military culture.
However, I also have great reservations concerning both many of the details of the strategy that you advocate and its overall thrust. One central problem is that, in my view, you have confused a strategy designed to appeal to the U.S. electorate in the next elections with one designed to defend the vital interests of America in the world. Of course, as a Democratic Party activist you have no choice but to do this in public, but my fear is that you and many of your colleagues genuinely do not understand that many arguments that seem self-evident to Americans are likely to be rejected with scorn by other nations.
Secondly, in your concern that in the forthcoming election campaigns the Democrats should not appear “weak” and “unpatriotic”, you have failed to produce a strategy which in most areas provides a truly different alternative to the disastrous approach of the Bush Administration. Thus you and your colleagues write repeatedly of the need to make greater effort to enlist support from allies, but this is always support for American leadership, and for policies laid down by America.
Nowhere can I find a real willingness to make concessions to the views and interests of other states on concrete issues. The emphasis in your work is all on American power, yet two of the critical lessons of recent years is that the United States is not in fact nearly as strong as it seemed to be, and other countries are stronger. You concentrate on gaining support from European nations who can hardly help the United States at all in the Middle East but ignore the wishes and interests of Muslim states whose support is absolutely essential.
In this book, and in the work of the Progressive Policy Institute and the Truman Project, you and your colleagues extend your electoral strategy into the past. You explicitly seek to enlist the memories of Truman, Kennedy and other tough-minded but idealistic Democratic leaders in the service of your version of Democratic strategy today.
This is not of course wrong in itself, since Truman was indeed an inspiring figure, to whom John and I pay deep tribute in our book. The problem is that in producing what is in essence a mythological portrait of the past for contemporary political purposes, you have ignored critical elements of the historical record.
Thus Truman will undoubtedly be remembered by history chiefly for two achievements: As you say, he rallied Americans and America’s allies to resist the expansion of Soviet Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. What you do not, however, point out is that he also categorically and successfully resisted intense pressure for a preventive war against the Soviet Union and China, even when the United States enjoyed complete short-term strategic superiority, and yet the longer-term threat to the United States was vastly greater than anything existing today.
In Truman’s (possibly apocryphal) words, “the only thing you prevent by war is peace.” Eisenhower was able to continue this line, and was motivated not just by fear of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but also by a deep concern for how on earth the United States would be able to run a shattered and infuriated Russian society after victory. Clearly, if you include this aspect of Truman’s record, then the support of many liberal hawks for the Bush Administration’s doctrine of preventive war comes to seem much more questionable in terms of the Democratic tradition (or for that matter the Republican one).
This leads to the equally important question of who was proved right by history. Concerning the recent past, you evade the question of whether the United States was in fact correct to invade Iraq—not surprisingly, since, in Kenneth Pollack and others, your group contains some of the leading advocates of that invasion. Similarly, in your anxiety to identify with Kennedy and distance the Democratic Party from the anti-Vietnam left, you ignore the question of whether the United States was in fact right to fight in Vietnam. And by identifying opposition to that war only with the left, you ignore the opposition of a great pragmatic Democrat statesman, William Fulbright.
Finally, by identifying Truman’s (and Kennedy’s) stance in the Cold War only in terms of alliances with other democracies, you miss an essential part of that struggle, with obvious relevance to the War on Terror. Even in Europe, Truman supported anti-communist authoritarian states in Turkey, Greece and elsewhere. In Asia, American regional power was inevitably founded on alliances with dictatorships in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and other states.
In the very long run, U.S. protection and massive U.S. economic aid contributed to the democratization of these countries. But if the United States had insisted on democracy as a precondition, the Cold War in Asia could not have been waged—any more than the War on Terror can be waged today without the help of authoritarian regimes in Muslim states.
Yours,
Anatol
Dear Anatol,
I am glad you found something to like in With All Our Might, as I have in the book you’ve written with John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World. Your points about the stubborn strength of nationalism and the need to distinguish carefully among our adversaries’ various motives are well taken. Our critiques of President Bush’s foreign policy are quite similar, and we both put jihadist extremism atop the hierarchy of urgent threats to America’s security. And I even admire your attempt to make neo-realism more palatable to Americans by giving it an ethical dimension—though in the end I’m not convinced.
The purpose of With All Our Might is to spell out—really for the first time since 9/11—a comprehensive response from the center-left to that challenge and to offer a distinctly Democratic alternative to Bush’s War on Terror. Our disagreement seems to turn on your claim that our strategy isn’t a “truly different alternative” to the Bush doctrine of military dominance, unilateral assertion and preemptive war.
A central premise of our book is that Bush has over-militarized America’s response to jihadism. We call for using all of America’s might—not just a military revamped for counterinsurgency and unconventional war, but also the power of trade, investment and development aid, strong alliances based on mutual respect, multilateral diplomacy and the broad attraction of liberal democracy—to prevail. The book’s second chapter, by Reza Aslan, argues that Bush’s reductive, good-vs.-evil rhetoric unwittingly miscasts what is essentially a civil war within Islam as a clash of civilizations between Muslims and the West. He advocates recruiting Muslim Americans to start a “dialogue between civilizations” aimed at throwing America’s weight behind Muslim moderates in their struggle against Salafist extremists.
Other chapters propose specific ideas for reviving the transatlantic alliance; bringing U.S. detention, interrogation and surveillance activities under the rule of law; investing serious money in economic and political reform in the greater Middle East; launching a major trade initiative to spur jobs in that economically stagnant region; giving collective security real teeth by reinventing the United Nations system; restoring fiscal sanity in Washington and enhancing U.S. competitiveness; and spreading the sacrifices this long struggle will entail, for example, by rolling back tax policies that have aggravated economic inequality and capping carbon emissions to accelerate America’s drive toward a clean energy economy.
Now this is hardly Bush-lite. It’s an updated version of the liberal internationalism that has defined our party’s outlook since Woodrow Wilson introduced it as a distinctly American alternative to European realpolitik and imperialism.
It’s puzzling, therefore, that in your book you insist on lumping us progressive internationalists—“liberal hawks” to use your term—with the neoconservatives you blame for crafting Bush’s calamitous policies. This isn’t analysis, it’s a polemical trope that obscures the basic distinctions summarized above. And while the neocons can defend themselves, trying to pin the rap for Bush’s misadventures entirely on them also seems intellectually sloppy. After all, the chief architects of the war on terror are Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the president himself. All of them, before 9/11 anyway, were fairly conventional gop nationalists, if not card-carrying realists.
The false conflation of neoconservatives and “liberal hawks” appears to rest on three main points:
First, you assert that liberal hawks endorse preventive war. Yet many saw the Iraq vote as sui generis and explicitly denied they were endorsing the Bush Doctrine. Some cited humanitarian reasons, while others said they wanted to strengthen the president’s hand in going to the United Nations and challenging the international community to enforce its own mandates. You may think them naive; you may think them wrong. But there was no general endorsement of preventive war.
It’s important that Democrats who supported Saddam’s ouster think hard about why things have turned out so badly. Several contributors to With All Our Might have written post-mortems that examine not only the Bush Administration’s well-known blunders, but also the limits of military coercion, the costs and difficulty of counter-insurgency and the stunning ferocity of communal hatreds in Iraq. Our book, however, has a different purpose: to offer a principled, Democratic alternative to Bush’s War on Terror. Hence we argue that the question of what to do next in Iraq must be viewed through the prism of America’s larger strategy for defeating jihadism.
Second, you seem unable to distinguish President Bush’s grandiose vision of a democratic revolution in the Middle East from the very pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts approach to advancing democracy spelled out in With All Our Might. Yes, Bush’s simplistic “freedom agenda”, yoked mainly to the blunt instrument of military force, has discredited the idea of democracy in too many eyes here and abroad. But that’s all the more reason for Democrats to reclaim what Arthur Schlesinger called in The Vital Center their “fighting faith”—the conviction that liberal ideas must be defended in international affairs no less vigorously than in domestic politics.
Nowhere do we argue, as you suggest, that democracy is a “precondition” for constructive U.S. relations with other countries. Nor do we assume that elections will always produce committed democrats. Instead, Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul lay out a patient, ground-up strategy for enabling indigenous reformers to build the civic institutions that underpin liberal societies. The United States can work with autocratic regimes in the daily battles against jihadist extremism while at the same time encouraging them along the path of gradual economic and political liberalization. That’s what we did during the Cold War with key allies like South Korea, Turkey and Taiwan. It’s what we should do now with Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Finally, you claim we fail to make “concessions to the views and interests of other states on concrete issues.” Not so: I refer readers to Ron Asmus’ chapter on why the United States should embrace the European Union as an equal partner, and to the many references throughout the book to the need for Washington to engage in tough bargaining with such difficult customers as Iran, Syria, Pakistan and the Palestinians.
But it’s true that we favor a more robust concept of U.S. leadership than you do. We share your view that America should show humility and self-restraint, defer more to the wishes of friends and allies and show a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” These are all cardinal tenets of internationalism.
But we are wary of a neo-realism—however “ethical” you try to make it—that defines America’s role too narrowly or selfishly or assumes that our fitness to lead depends on global opinion polls. The ethical restraints in Ethical Realism seem chiefly designed to restrain U.S. conduct. But America is a global power with global reach and responsibilities. Of course we must exercise our preponderant power responsibly, but we can’t escape the costs and risks of leadership, which include some irreducible quotient of envy, resentment and conspiracy mongering along with some more valid qualms about U.S. motives or the unintended consequences of U.S. actions.
From one international crisis to the next, we’ve seen that if America doesn’t lead, all too often nothing happens. If ethical realists dread imperial overstretch, progressive internationalists worry about the consequences of inaction. In trying to organize solutions to tough problems the United States will make mistakes and perhaps overreach, and here the realist perspective can be valuable in tempering America’s ambitions and insisting that policy makers match ends to available means. But non-intervention—as we learned from the steady escalation of largely unanswered Al-Qaeda attacks in the 1990s, the world’s failure to stop genocide in Rwanda and now its inability to stop the slaughter in Darfur—also breeds danger and exacts a heavy price.
That’s why the tough-minded liberalism of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy is still the best guide for Democrats, and for our country.
Cordially,
Will
Dear Will,
To begin with where you ended, John Hulsman and I strongly support a continuation of American global leadership, while believing that this leadership would become stronger and more secure by being more limited. We are in no sense of the word “isolationists”, at least if that word is used fairly and not, as it so often is, as a rhetorical hammer (a sort of internationalist version of the Republican use of the “L” word).
And it’s quite true that “if America doesn’t lead, all too often nothing happens.” But it’s also true, alas, that all too often if America leads, no one else follows—and terrible things are likely to happen. When it comes to the great majority of countries around the world, America’s moral leadership is not enough. They also need to be convinced that supporting U.S. policies is in accordance with their own national interests and with their own national pride. This is above all true in the Muslim world, where truly essential help in the war is to be found, or lost.
One central problem with the liberal hawk positions set out in With all our might is therefore that, with rare exceptions, the authors do not set out how specific existing policies should be changed in order to attract more international support and reach compromises with key regional players. You may well as you say differ from the Bush Administration on points of underlying principle, but—to quote a famous Democrat phrase from the past—where’s the beef?
On issues like Iranian uranium enrichment, the support of Pakistani Pashtuns for the Taliban, Russia and further nato expansion, Syrian support for Hizballah and so on, your group recommends in essence a somewhat modified version of existing U.S. approaches—which, to put it mildly, do not appear to be succeeding very well. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kenneth Pollack recommends a new U.S. engagement but fails to set out what he thinks a final settlement should be.
On two issues where—as you rightly say—your authors do speak out strongly, there is a gap between their words and the reality of other approaches being advocated either by your group, by the bulk of the Democratic Party establishment, or both. Thus, Reza Aslan does indeed condemn the Bush Administration for miscasting a struggle within Islam through its “good-vs.-evil rhetoric.”
But as witnessed by many publications and congressional votes, both most of your authors and the Democrat politicians whom they advise have also failed to publicly acknowledge the deep mutual hostility between Al-Qaeda and its allies, the Iranian regime and its Hizballah allies and the forces of extreme Arab nationalism represented by Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘ath Party. Through blind hostility to Syria, for example (reflected in support for measures like the Syria Accountability Act), they too have failed to exploit the differences between our enemies and have instead helped drive them closer together.
Your book does indeed, quite rightly and honorably, argue strongly for “bringing U.S. detention, interrogation and surveillance activities under the rule of law”—though one might remark that this is not a specifically Democrat policy, since it has also been urged by certain leading Republicans, including most notably Sen. McCain. Unfortunately, however, this noble ambition is in direct conflict with your continued enthusiasm for U.S. military interventions, even at the risk of involving the United States in new guerrilla wars.
For, as John and I point out in our book, the melancholy fact is that every modern democratic state that has found itself in really savage conflict with guerrilla groups based in an alien population has seen its forces commit serious, and sometimes massive, abuses of human rights. This was true of the British in Iraq in the 1920s, Kenya in the 1950s and elsewhere; France in Indochina, Algeria and Madagascar; and the United States in Vietnam and Iraq. The British even committed some limited but quite nasty crimes as part of their struggle against the ira in Northern Ireland.
We must therefore accept that although governments and militaries have a duty to try to prevent atrocities, they are to some extent inherent in the nature of such conflicts. The obvious lesson to be drawn is that we must avoid such wars whenever possible, and launch them only when they are strictly necessary by the traditional rules of international law or when we have the overwhelming support of the region concerned. We should never launch “preventive wars” against threats that are unclear and remote. Nor should we launch military interventions simply in response to the urgings of a humanitarian conscience. For while honorable and sincere, these urgings may also prove—as in the wretched case of the eminently well-meaning U.S.-led intervention in Somalia—to be accompanied by a total misunderstanding of the political, social, cultural and military realities of the country concerned, with disastrous results for American prestige and the lives of American and allied soldiers.
Yours,
Anatol
Dear Anatol,
You warn of the “terrible things” that may happen if others fail to follow America’s lead, or if we engage in guerrilla wars, or intervene to avert humanitarian disasters in faraway countries of which we know little, such as Somalia. Let me stipulate again that in reacting to overseas crises, the United States will make mistakes, sometimes big ones. But let’s not confuse cause and effect. Misapplications of American power are not the main source of instability and conflict in the world, or of danger to the United States. Much more terrible is the all-too-likely prospect of further mass casualty terrorist attacks, the spread of nuclear technology to scofflaw regimes in Iran and North Korea and a worsening bloodbath in Darfur.
Neither your letter nor your book is clear on how limiting the scope of American power, as ethical realism prescribes, would help to avert these threats. Would a posture of “national modesty” have prevented 9/11? On the contrary, U.S. forbearance in the face of mounting attacks by Al-Qaeda only emboldened them to up the ante. And even if we had not invaded Iraq, we’d still be facing an upsurge of violence in Afghanistan as Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants regrouped in the relative safety of Pakistan’s lawless border regions. I agree with your point that guerilla warfare always confronts democracies with tough moral dilemmas. But we didn’t pick this fight. Salafist extremists did, and before any U.S. troops set foot in Afghanistan or Iraq.
We share the view that President Bush has been deaf to the legitimate interests of other countries whose help we need to defeat jihadism. But it isn’t true that Democrats don’t understand the value of reciprocity. Instead of splitting Europe into “old” and “new” camps, Ron Asmus in With all our might argues for embracing the European Union to strengthen Europe’s political cohesion, so that it can play a truly global role in advancing our mutual security interests. Instead of treating the United Nations as an irrelevant nuisance, Anne Marie Slaughter calls for expanding the un Security Council to accommodate rising powers, so that the international system’s “steering committee” reflects the world of 2006, not the world of 1946. Ken Pollack and Graham Allison fault the White House for failing to negotiate seriously with Iran and North Korea, and propose bigger carrots, such as security guarantees, to facilitate agreements.
But diplomacy isn’t foolproof either. Realism assumes we’re dealing with rational actors, but the real world often confronts us with delusional dictators and regimes driven at least as much by ideology (or religion) as by unsentimental calculations of national interest. When diplomacy fails, someone has to apply pressure along a continuum that runs from economic sanctions and political isolation to the use of military force. By virtue of its unmatched combination of strengths—military, economic and moral—the United States inevitably will be called upon to act. The notion that we can somehow hand off our leadership responsibilities to as-yet nonexistent regional concerts of power, as your book proposes, seems anything but realistic.
Instead of limiting American power, progressive internationalists want to embed it in an expanding global alliance of democracies, as well as in a modernized collective security system. These overlapping networks of power and legitimacy, in which America will often play a catalytic and enabling role, should take on the tasks of stabilizing failed states, spurring trade and development, combating global terrorism and proliferation and enforcing the international community’s “responsibility to protect” people from genocidal violence.
Finally, you tell us that ethical realism, in the name of prudence, explicitly rules out U.S. military interventions on humanitarian grounds. This will not be welcome news to the people of Darfur and future victims of mass murder, who might have expected help from the world’s strongest countries.
We can all agree it would be foolish for the United States to feel obliged to right wrongs everywhere. But where is it written that the American people may not decide to use some modest increment of the nation’s power to stop extraordinary massacres or genocide? You cite the debacle of Somalia, but what about the tens of thousands of lives likely saved in Bosnia and Kosovo? I wish the United States had organized the small force that Gen. Romeo Dallaire, in Shake Hands With the Devil, said would have been sufficient to stop Rwanda’s machete-wielding genocidaires in 1994. I hope we and the international community will not allow Sudan to hide its atrocities behind the cloak of national sovereignty. As Tony Blair said recently, “Showing an African life is worth as much as a Western one—that would help defeat terrorism too.”
No foreign policy that ignores or devalues Americans’ moral sensibilities is likely to command support for very long. Nonetheless, the tension between internationalists and realists is probably a healthy one. Even if realism’s rules are too hard and fast for a messy, morally complex world, it can still play an essential role in alerting Americans to the potential costs and risks of various courses of action. These realist critics won’t always be right—recall the prophecies of mass U.S. casualties in the 1991 Gulf War—but they can help ensure due diligence in the exercise of America’s power. When America does decide to intervene, let it be without illusions.
Cordially,
Will
Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, dc and a contributing editor to The National Interest.
Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (ppi), a center for policy innovation in Washington, DC.