Liberal Internationalism: What Is It Good For?
I thought I might reply to some of the comments left on my opening post before engaging with any of my esteemed co-bloggers. First off, Reece observes that "lots of liberals--presumably liberal internationalists--supported most of Bush's policies. Policies that created specific disasters. If liberal internationalism isn't going to keep that from happening; if it will sign on to bad projects motivated by other theories, then there isn't much use for it."
This highlights a bit of a dilemma I had when writing the book and that I try to address a bit in the text. On page 185, for example, I observe that "A January 2007 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, for example, portrayed Joe Lieberman, and to some extent his fellow hawk Evan Bayh, as representing a faction of the the Democratic Party interested in 'enlightened internationalism.' Presidential contenders such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards were then rated as internationalists based more or less exclusively on their willingness to prolong the war in Iraq indefinitely and go to war with Sudan and/or Iran." Suffice it to say that this isn't what I mean when I talk about internationalism.
Rather, I mean a more specific set of ideas that upholds the notion that the United States ought to be concerned about events outside of our continent, but that wants to engage with those events in a specifically internationalist way -- through international laws and international institutions -- rather than imperialist efforts at coercive domination.
I think it's too bad that the term's gotten used in a way that I think is wrongheaded, but I don't think that's a good reason to surrender it. You can't write a book without using some term for the thing you're advocating, but throughout the book I try to be appropriately modest about my own ambitions. I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but I also think it would be pretty absurd for me to claim to have thought up all on my own a brilliant and original doctrine for American foreign policy. Instead, I'm overwhelmingly working with ideas that have been pioneered by others.
Indeed, one of the points I want to make is that we have existing good ideas at hand in our own tradition and don't need any big new departures -- there's no reason to make a "war on terror" the organizing principle of our foreign policy or to think that we need to embark on a series of preventive military actions or use force to quicken the birthpangs of Arab democracy. Consequently, I liked the idea of using the old term "liberal internationalism." But by that term I don't mean just any old mucking about combined with the occasional offhand reference to human rights concerns. The view is that liberal internationalism would prevent disasters like Iraq because Iraq was, on internationalist grounds, a war without justification -- an illegitimate military adventure undertaken without authorization (and with authorization withheld for good reason!) for reasons other than self-defense.
Comments (15)
Thanks for responding. I'm not really worried about the term you're using, but rather what it represents. To avoid that confusion, let me use some symbols.
Let's say Theory X is the theory that Administration officials were using when they decided to attack Iraq, and it is through that theoretical framework that they justified and explained the war.
Now let's say Theory Y has a different content. In fact, it's theoretical terms and framework do not clearly overlap with those of Theory X. Perhaps it uses a lot of different language, and the concepts represented by the language differ from the concepts represented by the theoretical language in Theory X.
However, when put into practice, Theory X and Theory Y both allow the Iraq war. In fact, let me stipulate for the sake of argument that both theories always produce the same specific policies. X and Y both lead to Afghanistan. X and Y both lead to Iraq. Both theories produce the same good and the same bad outcomes.
In that case, the theories are exactly the same despite the differences in language and concepts used. Now, there are plenty of liberal internationalists hanging around in our "foreign policy establishment." (This may be where we run into problems of what you think and what they think. If so, then this post was probably unnecessary) Nonetheless, a lot of them thought it was just fine for us to invade Iraq. If you want to argue for liberal internationalism, you need to be able to explain this. Did those internationalists just not keep the faith? Or is it actually the case that liberal internationalism will produce the same outcomes as realism or neoconservatism?
So, are you just recommending that we recommit ourselves to the UN? Article 2, Clause 4. of the UN Charter would caution us against preemptive war. Or do you have something else to add?
April 21, 2008 4:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Alright, I'm going to take another shot at it. Feels like I'm still working out my thought here, so expect this multiplicity of posts to continue.
Matt, in your first post you stipulate that liberal internationalism would not have authorized the Iraq war because as a preemptive war, it isn't authorized in international law and furthermore, it didn't receive specific authorization from the United Nations.
My critique so far has been that some people who call themselves liberal internationalists actually supported the Iraq war. But maybe I'm wrong about that. In any case, to the extent that your version would have prevented the Iraq war, it has to be different.
So, the obvious question then is what's to ensure it's success? I guess US support will do some work--if it's going to work at all, we have to believe it.
Bah, not getting to what I want to say again. This is annoying. Whatever, probably best to move forward from here. Don't mind me.
April 21, 2008 5:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
'Liberal internationalism' certainly raised my hackles. I see what you are trying to say but the term immediately brings to mind 'humanitarian interventionism'. You separate your vision from gross imperialistic expansion. But what about our attack against the Serbs in 1999. There was no identifiable US interests in that civil war and it is a part of the world that no self respecting imperialist would want. It was never clear to me why went to war against Serbia but the justification was on what has turned out to be totally trumped charges of genocide, hence we justified our assault as humanitarian.
I haven't read much of your work so perhaps you have addressed this before. But what happens when some people who are the targets of liberal internationalism push back, will that justify humanitarian intervention? The war against Serbia did set a terrible precedent in that the liberal internationalist Thomas Friedman was able to argue for war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention.
I think you are on a slippery slope. Look what happened to Bernard Kouchner -- from doctors without borders to advocate of war against Iran.
April 21, 2008 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fair enough, Matt. But, a lot of liberals who supported the war supported it because they say they believed it was a war of self defense and that it was an international effort -- that the "Coalition of the Willing" legitimized it and that even the UN legitimized it with its past votes, but that the Security Council just didn't have the nerve to follow through on its own intents.
So I guess we need three principles here:
1) A pre-emptive military action is not an act of self defense.
2) No ad hoc coalitions in order to make a unilateral action seem international.
3) Past UN votes do not bind the UN to support any future military action.
April 21, 2008 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Truman's strategy is being promoted today, not only by Yglesias, but by the 'Truman National Security Project' which seeks to promote American Exceptionalism through Truman's strategy of strong alliances, a strong military, democracy promotion and free trade.
http://www.trumanproject.org/about/values.php
The Truman Project's advisory board includes: Madeline Albright, William Marshall, a DLC operative who advocates anti-Islam militarism, and Ann-Marie Slaughter, who advocates a 'Concert of Democracies' to get around the United Nations, similar to John McCain's 'League of Democracies.'
We don't need Trumanism.
We don't need another Cold War.
We don't need more militarism.
We don't need more flag-waving American Exceptionalism.
We don't need alternatives to the United Nations.
We don't need a new Project for a New American Century.
We don't need more democracy promotion.
We don't need a new neoconservatism.
We need peace and brotherhood, with a re-channeling of worthless military programs into useful domestic ones which address the problems of job loss, health care, education, global warming and peak oil.
April 21, 2008 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, at least we seem to have chased Rachel Kleinfeld out of here...
April 21, 2008 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I believe we need to fundamentally reassess our foreign policy and no old labels are likely to make that any easier.
It's no longer 1945 or 1965 or 1985. We face strong economic competitors from Brazil to Europe to Asia and we're still acting like we just won WWII and we've factories from sea to shining sea turning out tanks and refrigerators and cars that run on American oil.
Now, we have war profiteers like Halliburton moving their headquarters off shore and employing foreign resources on our tax dollar.
We're a disaster already happening
April 21, 2008 6:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seems to me that the imperialist arrogance of Wasington has been so ingrained that the real question is how supportive are liberals of the latest imperialist venture? Iraq is the most classic, blatant imperialist military aggression that we have engaged in since the Phillipines War. The difference is, of course, we managed to grind down and dominate the Phillipines, but there's absolutely no chance of that happening in Iraq. But even then, we could only keep our stranglehold on the Phillipines for about 50 years.
The arrogance of liberals and "conservatives" alike with respect to how we relate to the rest of the world has seduced us into believing that US military supremacy equals US dominance of the globe, but particularly the world economy which, of course, it does not. Seems to me it is becoming clearer with each passing day that we have blown it. The foolish arrogance of the political and corporate classes of the United States has completely undermined our global political and economic power in every respect. It is only a matter of time until the US military is no longer the dominant military force on the globe simply because we will be unable to sustain the obscene levels of spending we allocate annually for it.
I am of the opinion that until we begin honestly discussing the genuinely criminal nature of US foreign policy toward Iraq and other nations as well, we will be discussing only a fantasy of what we Americans believe to be happening as opposed to the cold reality that we have blown our wad and that Iraq is really our last imperialist hurrah. The President and the other top leaders of our government are war criminals. They aren't simply conservatives and it really is not okay to just ignore the crimes that continue even now with the full approval of the US Congress which includes the party of liberal imperialist enablers: the Democrats.
The best and wisest thing we can do, as far as I'm concerned, is to try and extract our military from Iraq as quickly and gracefully as possible in hopes of maintaining some semblance of our former power for another generation prior to becoming a second class power, steeped in debt, and unable to restore our former glory. Our fate is pretty much sealed. It's now a question of how we'll handle it.
It's very sad that we allowed it to come to this.
April 21, 2008 7:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Iraq is the most classic, blatant imperialist military aggression that we have engaged in since the Phillipines War.
I agree with you. But after several years now of trying to convince young mainstream liberals - like the folks at Democracy Arsenal, and some of the writers who used to post here at America Abroad - that this is true, I have just about thrown my hands up in despair. These post-Reagan liberals are so deeply committed to a collection of sophomoric, mythological tales and poetic images about US history, and the nature of the government and society of the United States, that they are simply not cognitively equipped to grasp what seems blatantly obvious to you and me.
Iraq was just a hostile takeover, effected with military tools. It's actually a pretty routine event in the course of human history. That's what large and powerful states tend to do to weaker states that possess desirable resources or strategic locations. But a lot of young liberals are stubbornly committed to the notion that the United States is an exceptional nation that doesn't act like that. They think Iraq was some kind of moral crusade. They do accept that it was a mistaken and misguided crusade, conducted by reckless ideologues, but they think it was an ideological crusade nevertheless.
But Iraq was about 3% ideology, and 97% pure business. Dick Cheney's "ideology" is little but the strategic business outlook with which he ran Halliburton, and which he and Bush then applied immediately in setting strategic goals for the US when they took office. Since the particular kind of young mainstream liberals I described don't understand what is happening in the world, they don't understand how to stop it or prevent it from happening again. They offer all the real resistance of a college student government, or the Boy Scouts, against a real government.
The difference is, of course, we managed to grind down and dominate the Phillipines, but there's absolutely no chance of that happening in Iraq. But even then, we could only keep our stranglehold on the Phillipines for about 50 years.
I tend to disagree. My view is that the imperialists have just about won this round. Although Iraq will be turbulent for many years, I think we are going to see gradual consolidation and extension of the power of the Iraqi government, and the continued pacification of the country over time, with US casualties and troop commitments eventually reduced to levels that are tolerable to most of the US public. We see that the Iranians are now throwing their full support to the government, and backing away from Sadr, which shows that they are also betting on the government's success. The oil ministry is in the process of negotiating with foreign firms for the development of their super-giant oil fields, and as those deals are made, the international community will become more heavily invested in the preservation of order in the country, and in the US provision of security in Iraq. The government is in the process of negotiating with the US over the terms of a permanent US military commitment to the country. The US Congress is not going to offer any resistance to the deal that is negotiated, especially once it is presented as a fait accompli. It's just about a done deal.
The problem, as several have already mentioned in this discussion, is that a lot of liberals who aspire to careers in government are intellectually and emotionally ambivalent about imperialism. One can't really work in the foreign policy establishments of the United States government and governing class without supporting US imperialism in some form, because that imperialism is built into the very foundation of the national security state and its military. But since liberals are liberals, they have to negotiate their relationship with imperialism through euphemisms, myths, and self-deception.
That's why they are so deeply committed to arguing that the main problem with Iraq is that it hasn't worked, and will never work. To admit that the US might actually succeed in seizing control of the Iraqi state and society would put these liberals in the uncomfortable position of having to declare whether or not they think that kind of takeover is a bad thing. They could say that even if the US succeeds in its endeavor to seize the Iraqi prize and incorporate it into the US empire, it is nevertheless evil to bomb and shoot up a country, kill hundreds of thousands of people for self-interested gain, and thereby to accumulate capital and acquire territorial control over others by force.
But take a trip over to Democracy Arsenal, and see if you have any success in getting the writers there to speak frankly about the murderous, brutal, amoral savagery of the US adventure in Iraq; or about the tawdy material motivations for this adventure. It's hopeless - it's like trying to get Boy Scounts to piss on the flag.
April 21, 2008 8:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
And for those younguns on the get-go better to be with Dewey than with Bourne. Don't want it said of them that they were unserious, dontcha know.
April 21, 2008 8:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
You might be correct in the short run, but I still think culture/civilization is going to win out there in the end. It's like trying to conquer mother Russia. Can't be done for long, though we're sure to have plenty who delude themselves from the Emerald City that they are in control.
April 21, 2008 9:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with much of what you've written here, but firmly believe there's no chance of any sort of successful consolidation of American power in Iraq so that whole idea that the imperialist move might work is not something I think is realistic. The very idea was hopeless from the start and no amount of shock and awe will ever prevail. Seems far more likely to me that, as in Vietnam, when it becomes so glaring that even the dimwit imperialists in DC understand they can not win this thing no matter how long they stay (unless they literally kill everyone in the country)and that it is a losing financial proposition, they will withdraw. I hope it just takes place sooner rather than later. Every day we stay there costs us dearly in myriad ways.
You wrote:
"Since the particular kind of young mainstream liberals I described don't understand what is happening in the world, they don't understand how to stop it or prevent it from happening again."
I think what may going on, at least in part, there is that these folks cannot fathom that they (like all of us to a degree) are a part of the crminal enterprise known as American Imperialism and that we share in the moral responsibility for all the crimes done in our name. The idea that we would ever become like the fascist imperialists we fought in WWII is not something they are able to grasp.
I don't see any other conclusion based upon our actions. I nearly cried when I first watched Fahrenheit 911 when they show the American guns bombarding Iraq at night. The pictures looked so much like the films of the Nazi guns shelling the cities of Europe it gave me chills. But that is precisely what our nation has become. We haven't carried out a genocide yet, but all the territorial expansion and resource grabbing is precisely what both the Japanese and Germans were up to.
Part of the problem here is that today's alleged liberal elected officials and pundits who say they oppose the war, never really condemn what has taken place as illegal and immoral. It's always characterized as a blunder or mistake that was poorly handled. When this is the premise from the so-called opposition it is difficult for many to understand the truly malignant motive behind the naked power grab. And this, even though the ringleaders of he illegal invastion themselves seized power here in defiance of the law and all precedent themselves in 2000!
History will look back and laugh at the gullibility and plain stupidity of the American population that witnessed with it's own eyes the theft of the government in a coup in all but name, facilitated by traitors on the Supreme Court and acquiesced to by the Democratic Party and its nominee who went into virtual exile after the election for two years until just before the illegal invasion. The terrified Democrats in Congress went along with war because they were too afraid to oppose it even though they knew it was wrong morally, politically, economically, militarily. Chief among those that knew in their hearts the immorality and stupidity of the war was John Kerry. I don't know if the immorality mattered to Hillary, but I know she knew it was a foolish, but politically popular move at the time that she now regrets but can't bare to admit was a mistaken calculation. It's incredible really how fast and far we have fallen.
The weirdest part of all of it in my opinion is that all may already be lost yet our pundit and policy classes still debate how we are going to "play" this situation. The Iraq debacle may well have sealed our fate and few see this as even a possiblity even while the dollar's value plummets daily and our financial system is falling to pieces, etc...
April 21, 2008 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . there's no chance of any sort of successful consolidation of American power in Iraq . . . .
The United States has any number of well constructed military bases -- Balad Air Base alone currently houses 40,000 military personnel and contractors and we have many, many more bases. The Green Zone has been hardened and will continue to be worked on. The Air Force will maintain attack aircraft cover in its defense. We have rear support facilities in the Emirates, carrier task forces in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and additional support facilities on Diego Garcia.
I don't know what you mean by a "successful consolidation of power," but it seems pretty clear -- at least to me -- that we can stay in Iraq as long as we want to. And when it comes to imperial adventures, being able to stay is a pretty good definition of success.
April 22, 2008 2:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Because of Iraq is has become unnecessary to discuss hypotheticals when it comes to the unilateral use of force by a superpower. I don't see a need to express this in terms of either liberalism or conservatism described in whatever terms may seem suitable.
There is really only the ethical and pragmatic use of force to reflect upon. Ideologies, political considerations and economic elements, in the case of Iraq, have been used to create an intentional construct to supplant basic ethical conduct. The Bush administration undoubetdly brought great pressure to bear upon our allies and others in order to compromise their more appropriate response of simply telling the U.S. to back off. In spite of some serious doubt and more than a little coersion the ultimate outcome was nations caved to U.S. pressure. In large measure this was mostly due to an absolute intent upon the part of the U.S. administration to attack Iraq no matter the political cost and without regard to the true, and I suspect thoroughly understood, nature of the threat. The rest is history. And just for good measure, I suspect that what has occurred regarding global energy prices was at least one of the desired outcomes being sought by the Bush administration.
April 22, 2008 4:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I managed to dig up my old TPM account to harangue you with, Matthew.
I think Reece got real close to the basic issue, Matthew. That is, that I could just as easily call 'liberal internationalism' Rooseveltian Hegemony, in which the liberal aspects are the velvet glove covering the imperial iron fist. Recall our our various misadventures in the Third world over the years.
In fact, I think it would be better, in the end, to see the post-WWII situation as a fight between two rival hegemonies, with the United States happening to be the nicer one ('Uncle Sugar'). Note that I said nicer, not non-imperialist.
So looking at it that way, it's perfectly sensible that 'liberal internationalists' saw the way open to expanding the hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thought well of themselves for it. If the reverse had happened the Soviets would have perceived themselves as bringing socialist utopia to the world. So the expansionist nationalist types and the liberal internationalist types in 1990 were in favor of the same actions for different reasons.
I think this follows directly from Wilson since Wilson tended to be messianic ('On my right was Napoleon, and on my left was Jesus Christ' -- Lloyd George); a militant Christianity bringing the light of the world to the benighted regions of the Near East is perfectly Wilsonian.
The problem is, is that the actual imperialism was sold under the banner of idealism, and idealism that either didn't exist, or tended towards military prostelysing. So here we you, saying that you want to resurrect the original vision as against those wrong-headed hawks, when in fact, the hawks may be wrong-headed but they are actually following the real thrust that was labeled liberal internationalism. In which instance, you are really trying to resurrect something that never existed.
Note that I don't mean actions reflecting the ideals never happened, just that the ideals are icing for the sawdust cake. Sometimes you get lots of icing, but usually not so much.
To cure this sort of random invasion problem would require giving up the Empire, in which instance you just might not have anything left at all of the ideals, and that might be y(our) only choice.
max
['I'ma shuttuppa now.']
April 24, 2008 8:15 AM | Reply | Permalink