I’m afraid that Rachel Kleinfeld has seriously misunderstood my views – and by the look of things has certainly not read my book. Its principal philosophical and moral inspiration, Reinhold Niebuhr, was anything but a “dessicated Kissingerian realist." He was a progressive, an anti-totalitarian, and as perhaps the greatest theologian that America has ever produced, was concerned throughout his life to place moral considerations at the heart of his realist philosophy of international relations.

This involved on the one hand a profound commitment to support for both human progress and international peace, but on the other a deep skepticism concerning American national messianism: the tendency of Americans to identify human progress unconditionally with the power and greatness of the United States. Or in the words of Niebuhr’s colleague and friend Hans Morgenthau:

“Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe…The light-hearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is the very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets warned rulers and ruled. The equation is also politically pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgment which, in the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations.”[i]  

Concerning the Truman Project – come off it. To the best of my knowledge, this project contains not one of the Democrats who took a firm stand against launching the Iraq War. Instead, it is packed with those who either supported the war outright, or engaged in weaselly, time-serving equivocation on the subject. There is no sign in the writings of leading members like Michael Signer of “radical doubt” concerning the rightness of America’s actions. On the contrary, his recent piece for the first issue of “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas” was aptly entitled “A City on a Hill” and was packed with statements about America’s innate greatness and goodness, and natural right to lead the world (see also my response to him “Reality Check”, in the second issue of that journal, on www.democracyjournal.org). How exactly does this differ fundamentally from the views of the Bush administration?

Ms Kleinfeld also completely misrepresents my views on democratic progress. Following humbly in the great footsteps of Niebuhr, my co-author John Hulsman and I devote a whole section of our book to the need to create stable, successful democracies over time. We insist however that in most cases, to be stable and successful these democracies will have to have genuine democratic and legal institutions at every level (and not just in the form of ostensibly “free ‘n’ fair elections), they will have to be reasonably prosperous, and that prosperity will have to be reasonably distributed throughout society. Given the utter absence of such conditions in – for example – Pakistan or the Philippines today, and the domination of the political and electoral system in those country by brutal and predatory elites, there can be no real democracy in these countries at present, whatever Freedom House may say.

To see what happens to pseudo-democracies if these conditions are not present, you do not have to go to Afghanistan today, or Russia in the 1990s. How about the long history of Latin American countries on the US doorstep? How exactly does it contribute to real progress, or US interests, to pretend that a country like Venezuela in the 1980s is in any real sense a “democracy”, just because it holds elections? What are the real chances of creating real democracy in most of the Middle East today, in association with US and Israeli policies which the overwhelming majority of people in this region detest?

Ms Kleinfeld however misrepresents not just me, but also the legacy of Truman. By suggesting that the Truman strategy was only about supporting democracy, she ignores the fact that in Turkey, Greece, and still more in east Asia, the Truman administration gave massive economic aid to anti-Communist authoritarian states, and equally important maintained open trade with them. However, in the cases of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, it also insisted that its clients implement radical land reform. In the short term, this US strategy played a key role in the economic miracles in these countries. In the long term, this led to their democratization.

And incidentally, I don’t know what she means by my learning to accept that we must sometimes use force. I have supported a large majority of the US and Western exercises of force over the past generation, including both the intervention in Bosnia and the war against the Taleban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. I am a strong supporter of the war on terror in its original conception, against the perpetrators of 9/11. I utterly oppose the irresponsible, immoral and utterly stupid extension of that struggle to targets that had nothing to do with 9/11, like Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinians. In this, I also regard myself as following in the footsteps of Reinhold Niebuhr, who strongly supported the Korean War, and equally strongly opposed the US intervention in Vietnam. Or as Edmund Burke put it:

“Circumstances (which for some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”