There is no ethical in realism
Having just been brought on as a more permanent member of America Abroad, it's a great pleasure to start by finally have the chance to debate Anatol Lieven.
Lieven's push to move liberals away from our beliefs in building a more just and stable world, and towards a dessicated, Kissingerian realism, has long catlyzed the Truman National Security Project. In his recent post Anatol tries to retake the founders of strong security liberalism, and remove the liberalism from their actions and values. In doing so, he is also moving all of the left away from fighting our real enemy: the current Administration--and towards the in-fighting that weakens the left.
Lieven seems to conflate believing in liberal values, with backing the Iraq war--which is ridiculous in the case of the Truman Project, founded over a year after the war began. Other than that, it is a bit difficult to understand Lieven's objections in the mass of blogging he has produced--so instead, we will state positively what we, at least, stand for.
The Truman Project believes that it is time for liberals to sit down and think hard about what our values lead us to believe in the national security realm. Liberals are not pacifists. But we do deeply believe in Niebuhr's philosophy of radical doubt --that we should always retain doubt as to the rightness of our own actions. This radical doubt means that we are aware of unintended consequences--which can be particularly great during wartime. It also means that we do not go on ideologically inspired crusades, but carefully weigh the facts in any given case.
A true national security liberalism, then, would have taken a very hard look at the forces that pushed us towards the Iraq War--and would likely have judged that the consequences of that war--and the lumping of very different supposed "enemies" into one camp--was poorly conceived, long before we reached the stage of incompetent implementation.
It also would have weighed the costs of not acting--the fact that ongoing sanctions were resulting in mass civilian death thanks to Saddam's manipulation, and the reality of Saddam's brutal human rights abuse. It would have judged that these were real problems with the status quo that required improvements in order to make the status quo more humane, given that war in Iraq was not the proper answer.
But there is another strain in liberalism, and this is the strain Lieven completely ignores--but which the Truman Project believes we must revive.
Liberalism is a postive philosophy founded on the principle that there can be progress in the world, and that progress moves hand in hand with greater freedom and justice. Liberal thinkers such as Locke and Mill believed in pressing progress through greater freedom of belief and freedom of opportunity--philosophies that eventually led to the ideas of basic human rights.
Liberals believe that humans do not have to accept set orders based on calcified conservative norms--but that we have a duty to press for greater opportunity and rights for the mass of mankind. These ideas of justice, and creating a more just social order, underlie the work of great liberal thinkers from Rawls to Bruce Ackerman. They are active, difficult questions--and the answers are not always clear. But the search for greater justice, built on individual freedom and opportunity, underlie the basic building blocks of liberal thought.
Anatol Lieven's realism is a philosophy of pragmatism, it's best statement was in Thucydides' famous Melian dialogue: "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must". While realism dresses up that basic story line with various discussions of uniploar-bipolar-multipolar worlds, and black boxes into which we should place the goings-on within a state, it is at the heart of their philosophy. Theirs is a world where mass imprisonment of the homeless in China, starvation in North Korea, or the stoning of women in the Arab world, gets nary a nod. These issues do not matter to realists--they are not geopolitical.
The Cold War, however, showed that human rights mattered very much. They mattered so much that they eventually brought down the Soviet Union, because people yearned to live free from fear, and gravitated towards the world system that--at that time--seemed to be based on the pull of opportunity and freedom, rather than the darkness of repression.
The current war against Islamic fundamentalist jihadism also shows that basic beliefs matter. While President Bush's neocons serve as shills, claiming that he is fighting on behalf of democracy, his actual policy is realist. Cozying up to dictators in Central Asia who provide military basing rights, ignoring the worldwide spread of rights-destroying ideas pushed by the Wahhibists in Saudi Arabia--these are the policies of a realist.
We will not beat the growth of fundamentalism this way. Instead, we create new terrorists every day with shows of thoughtless force that increase humiliation.
We will beat it when we recognize that ideologies and beliefs matter, and that we are fighting the belief that humilitation can be remedied by violent acts of terror that turn one into a hero of the disenfranchised Muslim street. Fighting such a philosophy may at times require our military--for instance, we could use a much greater presence in Afghanistan to reduce the growing rebirth of the Taliban there.
We will not win, however, until we can reform our own actions so that we are once again seen as a country offering a different philosophy of hope to the disenfranchised--a hope that Harry Truman offered through his creation of development aid, NATO, and the Marshall Plan that stabilized Europe. This was the meaning of George Kennan's long telegram, when Kennan explained that the seeds of beating the Soviet Union lay in our own actions in America. When we can act as a country that is a beacon to the world, and that does offer hope--then we will not be contributing to the growth of new terrorists. When people like Lieven accept that we must use some force, in some cases where the benefits will outweigh the harms, then we can work to capture existing terrorists.
And when we can accept that foreign policy has a place for values and beliefs, then we will start healing the rifts within our own ideology at home so that we can join together to fight the real enemies of the left who are currently in power.
Bush is not realist. It is always dangerous to assume that you know what a politician really believes, but I think he sincerely thinks he can transform the ME into a Jeffersonian democracy. Or so he thought when he invaded Iraq. Cozying up to dictators is a fact of the foreign policy of even the most avowedly liberal presidents. Bush just has the extra quirk that he convinces himself they're good men.
When you get away form overblown rhetoric and lofty abstractions and down to actual policy questions, I can't escape the feeling that there's really nothing at stake between realists and liberals anymore. The old lines of demarcation no longer apply, even if the same tired arguments continue in universities.
October 10, 2006 8:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you, thank you, thank you Rachel! I've been trying to find the words to express that thought for months! I'll quit looking now and just plagiarize yours :-) (I'm still looking for the T-Shirt version, hint hint....)
With the growing prospect of a landslide sweep in the November elections one of our urgent tasks will be to re-examine the failed Rambo response to 9/11. As one CIA analyst put it, "They don't hate us for who we are, they hate us for what we do." Doing more of what we were doing on 9/10 was a really stupid move, and doing more of it will be disastrous. We are prisoners of our own self-confidence, this nation fails to realize that we really can lose this thing if we don't "change the things we do".
Well how damned hard can that be! The ability to change course is more American than apple pie, it is our defining trait as a nation. If your competitor is beating you up in the marketplace what do you do? Do you bomb his factory? Do you spread rumors about the sex lives of people in his advertising department? Do you take out an ad on TV and call him evil? No, you redesign, retool, redistribute, reprice, re-source and hire a new advertising agency. You "change what you do". You improve your offering. We can do this. We're good at this!
Our core values are the only real "product" we have to offer. And hey, we do have a track record of that working. Soviet citizens did NOT stand around in the factories throwing their hands in the air bellowing, "That's it! That's it! I've had enough! Reagan's out spending us on star wars, it's time to throw in the towel". That did NOT happen!!!
October 10, 2006 9:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Globalization has largely obviated traditional (some might say Kissingerian) realism. When non-state actors and individuals have the power to significantly affect a nation's interests (whereas such power used to be generally restricted to states), everything is geopolitical. Values in foreign policy, including human rights, equality of opportunity, etc., are drastically increasing in moral, political, and security importance.
Of course, to the extent that realism says you should understand the reality of an international situation before plunging into it, that fits well with virtually every lefty foreign policy framework. Not so much neoconservatism, obviously.
October 10, 2006 9:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are probably right that, underneath his neocon clothes Bush's heart beats to a realist cadence. But in some ways, the clothes only make it worse: what happens when you combine the interventionist urge of neoconservative foreign policy with the disregard for values of the realist? What we have today, I guess.
October 10, 2006 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frankly, this is such a convoluted, contradictory, and non-sensical post that it's hard to know where to begin. A few points:
-Early on, Ms. Kleinfeld writes, "It also means that we do not go on ideologically inspired crusades, but carefully weigh the facts in any given case." But then what follows? Basically, a call to arms for an ideological crusade in the name of liberal beliefs as if these are self-evidently wonderful values in which the rest of the world surely shares. If one reads the post carefully, I'd suggest there isn't much room between Ms. Kleinfeld's liberalism and neo-conservatism. Her trite story about how the cold war ended is the same trite (and simplistic) story advanced by the neo-cons. No wonder it was liberals and neo-cons who pushed the Iraq War.
-I believe Ms. Kleinfeld is correct to note that "ethical realism" is something of an oxymoron. But then she goes on to label George Bush as a "realist." Huh? Perhaps Ms. Kleinfeld needs to read a bit beyond Kissinger and standard Thucydides throw-away lines to understand the realist tradition in foreign policy. Realists eschew ideological crusades of precisely the type that the United States went on in Iraq. Realists were overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq (see the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy). Realists question whether others will be attracted to American values while Ms. Kleinfeld takes it as unproblematic that others will embrace these same values. Realists believe that the only reliable way to make foreign policy is to base it on a cold, calculating, sober, and prudent calculation of national interests and the threats to those interests. States get in trouble when they have Ms. Kleinfeld's hubris; when they believe that the attractiveness of their ideas can trump the realities of their capabilities and the threats those capabilities pose.
A truly realist foreign policy wouldn't have us in this mess that the United States is in today. It's neo-cons and liberals--liberals precisely of Ms. Kleinfeld's ilk--that have gotten us into this predicament.
October 10, 2006 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Cold War, however, showed that human rights mattered very much. Rachel Kleinfeld
The Truman Project has been doomed from the start, and principally, because it has misread the history of the Cold War. It has connected the 1947 Truman Doctrine with the 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall and surface-read (read out of history?) the forty year span between the two.
I take Kleinfeld's assertion to mean that the demise of Communist regimes was the result of our support of "human rights," generally or specifically -- that is, the rights of East Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Chinese(?), etc. In fact, "ideas" had little or nothing to do with the demise of the Soviet Union or the economic liberalization of China. Both countries "came in from the cold" for pragmatic reasons.
To maintain its status, each country's elite depended upon a dictatorship of control of information. Unfortunately for them, a modern economy cannot operate efficiently under such restrictions. It may be fine for an elite who chooses to live in anachronistic palaces -- Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, for example -- to deny their citizens information, but for a country which understands itself to be a major force in the world, such limitations must be anathema.
Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping understood the economic writing on the wall and the expectations of their elites to be world players. The Cold War ended when dictatorially directed sclerotic Communist economies could no longer guarantee their elites a place at the head table or satisfy their amour propre.
October 10, 2006 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
In doing so, he is also moving all of the left away from fighting our real enemy: the current Administration--and towards the in-fighting that weakens the left.
I see. When someone criticizes your views, the criticism amounts to destructive in-fighting that weakens the left and takes us away from the fight against our "real enemy". When you criticize the views of others, the criticism is constructive.
October 10, 2006 3:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Charity begins at home. Hubris seems to begin at the waters edge. When you've finished making the US just and good then you may ethically expand your horizons.
October 10, 2006 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
This post is dead on from start to finish. Thank you, irscholar.
October 10, 2006 5:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
This post is so crude, offensive and muddled it is almost not worth a response. A little education is truly a dangerous thing. But just a few points:
I have read much af Anatol Lieven's work for several years now, and it is hard to recognize him in your silly caricature. Incredibly, you even seem to suggest Lieven is a person who doesn't believe in progress.
Lots of people believe in the possibility of sustained human progress. They do, however, tend to differ widely in their conceptions of what progress consists in, of what actions are conducive to it, of what compromises must be made in tolerating lesser evils to bring about greater goods, and of the risks attending overreaching. They also tend to differ in their views about how good and evil arise in human life and about the grave risks posed by moral vanity and inflated self-regard. But to suppose that only Truman-style liberals believe that human beings can escape from a fatal cycle of eternal sameness is to indulge in monstrous, self-serving arrogance.
For such a young organization, the Truman Democrats have already compiled an astonishing record of revising their own history. They would now have us believe that their dominant goal all along was to challenge neoconservativism, that the rift among Democrats that they helped to broaden was all a big mistake, and that the criticisms they have had to endure from other Democrats are the fruits of misunderstanding. It is now their critics who are responsible for the "in-fighting that weakens the left." Indeed there was some criticism of neoconservatism from the Trumans from the beginning. But I have read the foundational materials on the Truman Project many times, and its is clear that their overriding obsession, at the dawn of their creation, was what was wrong with Democrats. Their avowed aim was to transform the Democratic Party. So the current whining about criticism and infighting rings hollow.
Consider leading Truman light Peter Beinart. The vigorous democratic opposition to Beinart and Beinartism began when he declared his purge of the left in the New Republic back in 2004. Well I don't like being purged, and have no intention of standing still for it. Since then, that gutless weasel has been running away from his bold declaration of war, with his "fighting faith" tucked between his legs. His various manifestos have been getting lamer, woolier and less consequential ever since. Perhaps he should have thought about the consequences of a war on his fellow Democrats before he declared it. Come to think of it, that same stupid impetuosity was at work in his embrace of the Iraq War as well.
And I can barely express how deeply offensive and stupendously arrogant are such statements as "when we can accept that foreign policy has a place for values and beliefs, then we will start healing the rifts within our own ideology at home so that we can join together to fight the real enemies of the left who are currently in power." Do you honestly think that you and your sophomoric little Truman club are the only Democrats whose foreign policy preferences are built around "values and beliefs"?! Do you think Lieven has no values and beliefs, or that his passionately argued commitments and recommendations are somehow value-neutral and amoral? I almost can't believe the amazing levels of immodesty and chutzpah embedded in such an assessment.
And can you begin to grasp the smug presumption contained in statements such as "the Truman Project believes that it is time for liberals to sit down and think hard about what our values lead us to believe in the national security realm." Where do you come by the gall to presume that most of the rest of us Democrats have not already thought long and damn hard about what our values lead us to believe in the national security realm, or that we have not been thinking long and thinking hard about these matters for many years? When I was writing long essays to mailing lists before the war, arguing vigorously against that war in what turned out to be a vain attempt to save the lives of Iraqis and American soldiers, and to prevent a catastrophic destabilization of the Middle East that could lead to a major global war that would wreck the lives of younger people like you and my son, do you think I was doing it because I didn't know what "my values lead me to believe" in the national security realm? I'm 47 years old! I wasn't going to be called on to fight in the damn war; and I'm not going to have to live in the shitty world it is creating as long as you will. But here you are lecturing us, and wiser and better-eduacated heads like Anatol Lieven, on our supposes absence of values and beliefs. Amazing.
October 10, 2006 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another millisecond of the Chimperor's lethal decisions -- ratified by his accomplices in Congress-- is an expense beyond measure. Do we need any more trillion-dollar decisions to clusterbomb infants and innocents? How much more unethically realistic can it get? One way or another, they f children.
October 10, 2006 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ms. Kleinfeld, you reject the incompetence dodge, saying the Iraq war was flawed in its conception.
Where was the Truman Project on the advisability of the Iraq war in the runup?
I recall seeing some earlier exchanges involving you in which you indicated that Truman Project members had different views on the advisability of the war.
Is this revisionist history at work? What does the Truman Project purport to offer that is of use if it did not offer a straightforward yes or no recommendation on the Iraq war prior to the war? If the philosophy of the organization does not offer clarity on matters such as these, what does it offer that is of use as a guide to how to think about foreign affairs?
October 11, 2006 9:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are taking this too seriously. I read her use of the 'realist' label, as applied to GW, as something more of an epithet than a philosophical description: when she says that the P is a realist underneath it all, I take it that what she means is that the neoconservative, values-driven talk is just so much talk, and that it's about projecting power in the national interest, not about freedom being on the march, etc.
October 12, 2006 6:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Devon,
First, I don't think this topic can be taken too "seriously."
Second, let's read Ms. Kleinfeld's own words: "While President Bush's neocons serve as shills, claiming that he is fighting on behalf of democracy, his actual policy is realist. Cozying up to dictators in Central Asia who provide military basing rights, ignoring the worldwide spread of rights-destroying ideas pushed by the Wahhibists in Saudi Arabia--these are the policies of a realist." I think Kleinfeld's claim (though, honestly, it's hard to tell) is the following:
-GWB is a realist.
-GWB's foreign policy has failed.
-Therefore, realism has failed.
Unfortunately, the first premise, as I noted in my prior post, is demonstrably false. Sure, there are elements of the policy that are realist, but there are elements of any foreign policy that are realist (even in Jimmy Carter's foreign policy). But let's look at the overall tenor of the foreign policy: the belief that regime change by invasion and occupation was advisable in Iraq, the belief that states would simply rollover in the face of US aggression, the belief that there is something ineluctable about the spread of democracy. These have been central tenets of this administration's foreign policy, and they are anything but realist.
October 12, 2006 10:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
If your reading is correct, I have no disagreement with this, but I'm not sure that this is quite as much an attack on Realism per se as an attack on Bush. I'm no Realist myself, but I acknowledge it as a viable approach to foreign policy, and one that everybody has to adopt sooner or later.
October 12, 2006 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ethical realism is an oxymoron. There are no ethics in realism. Just because a realist would scoff at the premise of war as a means of nation-building or the whole premise of using a state's martial resources for ill-planned, naive altruistic purposes doesen't make them ethical.
Realists have no scruples about mobilizing a state's martial forces in defense, protection or service of it's hastily defined "interests". Most of our nation's bloodiest extra-national atrocities were committed in direct pursuit of such realist ends. Their policy, instead of trying to overturn thugs & autocrats, is to play kissy face with them & fascillitate continued cozy capitalisy relations between them & American oligarchs which serve to worsen the situation for the oppressed in those countries.
We need a foreign policy that is liberal, global, multi-lateral, humble, internationalist, committed to democracy, human rights, freedom & peace & anti-war. If the realists can't suspend their reactionary views to get on bosrd with this, they can find an illiberal country to go to & practice their bullshit there instead.
October 12, 2006 9:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, I strongly diagree with this, it's the kind of false dichotomy that plagues many of our national debates. Its easy to say we want policies committed to human rights, freedom and peace. And its a strawman to say that "realists" simply believe that ends justify means. *How*, exactly, do we achieve these objectives? You can't just say "freedom" and it happens. You need to encourage these things through institutions, mechanisms, negotitations, campaigns. So if the US supports dictatorships that are not moving us towards these goals, I wouldn't at all call this realism. It's just stupid.
So *how* do we, as a country, encourage peace, properity and freedom across the globe? It's both an empirical and moral question. There may be multiple ways of going there, so let's choose paths that are most consistent with our values and most likely to actually work. But its also likely that all of these paths require some kind of short-run sacrifice. Conversely, if we focus only on short-run strategies that are 100 percent consistent with our values, then we may be doing so at the expense of long-term outcomes that are consistent with our values.
I just think its important to understand the consequences of our actions on multiple timescales. Over the long run, I'd argue that "realism" and "ethical" are two sides of the same coin.
October 13, 2006 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
RogerGathman
The problem with this post begins with the title. Contrary to Kleinfeld's claim, ethics without realism is blind, realism without ethics is false -- since a large part of reality is the fact that every culture developes and identifies itself with an ethos.
Kleinfeld compounds her original mistake by identifying realism with the idea that might makes right. No, realism is about what has really happened. And what has really happened tells us about the way means and ends in human projects have worked before. To use the example of Truman, for instance, it tells us that Truman used a certain means -- dropping two atom bombs - to end the war with Japan partly because, as James Carroll shows in his book on the Pentagon, Truman was stuck with the idea that the Japanese had to surrender unconditionally. In the end, of course, the Americans actually fudged that condition -- they retained the Emperor.
Realism takes the lesson from that not that might made right, but that the conditions which we set on our policies might drive results that are - ethically - wrong, and practically unnecessary.
So, for instance - in making Communist China an ally, the U.S. was not condoning the massive crimes the Communist party committed against the Chinese, but finding a way to influence the Communist party to lessen these crimes, and even, gradually, infiltrating structures that may someday replace authoritarian rule. A policy based simply on ethical condemnation, and hence, non-recognition, of China would not have had an ethical result -- far from it, actually. Realism, recognizing that there are multiple vectors of influence that drive progressive goals, don't reduce those vectors to an either/or of formal aggression.
If the Truman group continues to talk in terms that are so clearly unrealistic, then I think we can conclude that they aren't serious -- that is, about ethics. Rather, under the cover of ethics, they are simply trying to retain power over the Democratic party for the usual powerhungry reasons. Ethicists who think they can cavalierly dismiss realism usually end up being the worst Machiavellis.
October 13, 2006 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Or to put it another way -- as is said of Hope, Ethics is not a plan.
October 13, 2006 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Realism" is supposed to be the name of a particular school of thought in foreign policy. However, ever since I first encountered the doctrine in my undergraduate IR class, it has always seemed to me that there are about as many varieties of realism as there are individuals who call themselves "realists". Rather than try to argue about the ethical dimensions of realism is in the abstract, it is more constructive, I think, to examine the particular views of individual authors, thinkers and government officials. In this case we have the opportunity to look at several books by Anatol Lieven, including his recent one, in which he describes his foreign policy proposals and outlook.
Anyone who is committed to the pursuit of values and ends that transcend their own personal well-being is, I would say, animated by moral or ethical purpose. Clearly Lieven has such values, and therefore his particular variety of realism certainly has an ethical dimension.
October 13, 2006 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
To my ears, this statement is an exquisite example of "realistic" thinking. Kissinger would probably agree except for the liberalism part.
The problem with sorting out policy incentives on the basis of bald self-interest vs. the pursuit of a universal good is that the debate itself leaves behind an honest discussion of what that self-interest really is.
As a form of rhetorical bamboozlement, is there any difference supporting or taking down a regime in the name of freedom when Bush says it or a truly progressive leader speaks the same way with better intentions?
As it stands, the proponents of liberal and conservative agendas amongst our representatives (and those who help express those agendas) have an unspoken agreement between themselves: Only discuss foreign policy in a way that depicts the U.S. as the “indispensable nation.” One side threatens that we will lose that status if we don’t do X and the other is sure we will be diminished if we don’t do Y.
Losing that status will be a significant and difficult change. But it is wrong to make our interest in maintaining that status stand as the complete expression of what is in our national interest.
Put most bluntly, the pursuit of our "national interest" is a matter of securing what will maintain our form of life. The difference of opinion about what that should be, what nourishes, or what might destroy that life is an ethical issue that doesn't get deeply examined when we imagine that we are exporting values.
Having said this, there is an element in your juxtaposion of the real vs the ethical that I would like to defend. The sort of Realpolitik that Bismark exemplified was a practice that put convenience and oppurtunity above principle.
The unethical basis of realpolitik comes from being willing to cut deals with unsavory people to get what you want. In the political realm, the alternative to these methods is not more "ethical" deal making but the effort to widen and deepen the reach of law.
In this sense, Bush is, as you say, a practitioner of Realpolitik. To maintain his freedom to operate as a maker of deals, he must maintain the chaos of the Frontier and weaken the instruments of Law.
October 15, 2006 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink