Let's look at first principles and fundamental assumptions. The most basic tenet of US foreign policy has always been, through every administration, the concept of American exceptionalism. Currently no other country in the world (except Israel) has anything quite like it, the idea that the US is free to intervene militarily, economically or any other way in another country. You can go to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, or even China, any country, and not find a comparable feeling to the one that Team USA can arrogantly do whatever it wants, perhaps dragging some other countries along, including military action.

American exceptionalism has been historically referred to as the belief that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its national credo, historical evolution, or distinctive political and religious institutions. The difference is often expressed in American circles as some categorical superiority, to which is usually attached some alleged proof, rationalization or explanation that may vary greatly depending on the historical period and the political context.

No other country has been so "threatened" by Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or Yugoslavia that it had to drop bombs and kill so many innocent people. Panama, Grenada, Somalia, etc. -- same deal.

Until the subject of American exceptionalism is addressed then no rational foreign policy discussion can be conducted, because it drives every consideration. The assumption that the USA is the City on the Hill, able to get its way, is what has driven the country into debt and disarray, Americans into despondency and disdain for their government, and has brought us into the abyss of world hatred.

Re: Currently no other country in the world (except Israel) has anything quite like it,

France has something at least a little similar: The French do occasionally intervene in their former colonies and this is coupled with a chauvinistic national myth of France as the core and font of European civilization.

My problem with Matt's liberal internationalism is ultimately going to be that law is a very weak way to accomplish our goals. People like to complain that international law has no enforcement mechanism, but that's really beside the point. Even on the domestic level people only follow the law to the extent that they think it is just or expedient. If law actually constrained people, there wouldn't be murders or jaywalking. The fact that we punish murderers after the fact doesn't really say anything about the utility of law in constraining behavior--if you're going to kill someone, you'll do it regardless of the punish.

The same holds on the international level. If we're going to invade somebody, we're going to do it regardless of what the law says. Even if there were a retributive mechanism for holding people accountable, our leaders would still do it. Does anyone think that Bybee, Yoo, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cheney will actually be tried for war crimes?

The legal aspects of the lead up to the Iraq war demonstrates this. There is an argument that the war was legal. Maybe not a perfect argument, but it's there. In some ways, the problem with legalizing international relations is that it allows for legal arguments and legal distinctions. Fundamentally, law is not the moral project we want it to be. Thus, making international relations more legal--more based on law--won't make it more moral.

What we need is a national commitment to moral international relations. If the legal framework reinforces that, it'd be great. If not, we can still expect to do the right thing.

Suppose we have a theoretical debate here about whether certain international norms are or are not “binding” on various governments, or whether they have a “claim” on those governments. How does the outcome of that debate have any bearing on how people actually behave? The percentage of people in positions of power whose behavior is actually influenced by arguments in moral and legal philosophy is quite small.

Rules, laws, codes, compacts and conventions are things created by human beings to serve various ends. People can dream up all sorts of possible rules for conduct and systems of law and regulation. You might even get a fair number of highly rational people to recognize that there are collective benefits to be gained by instituting some such system of rules. But for law to move from the realm of wishes and fantasies to an instituted system of norms that actually influences the behavior of large numbers of human beings, it needs more behind it than the reasonings of moral philosophers and legal theorists. It must be made efficacious and held in place by various positive and negative sanctions.

Building any such international system, even a modest one, as opposed to just talking about it as an exercise in the philosophy of international law and cooperation, is an incredibly challenging task. But the first step must be to get clear about precisely what ends we are trying to accomplish with the system in the first place. And this is where I have my most serious issues with a lot of contemporary liberal thinkers. I just don’t think they are grappling with the major challenges facing the world, and so far most of them are not being serious about proposing, planning and pursuing global-scale solutions to these challenges.

We are getting a lot of continuing debate about “preventive war” and “humanitarian interventions”, with obsessive focus on a few problem cases. Based on a lot of contemporary liberal debate, you would think that the most pressing problems facing the world today are issues like Darfur and Tibet. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. It’s sad to say for the people of Darfur and Tibet, but I suspect that when the historians of 100 or 200 years from now look back on these times, Darfur and Tibet will barely merit a paragraph or two. What they will be interested in is how the billions of people in the US, in China, in Russia and in Europe failed to tame their extravagant hunger for the world’s resources, failed to restrain and manage their competition for these resources, failed to organize collective projects and plans for transitioning the global economy to a new post-petroleum economy, failed to prevent a new era of colonial competition and exploitation in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, failed to restrain the proliferation of massively destructive military machines, and how they thereby collectively blundered into a calamitous world war. Unless China, the US and other energy-consuming countries come to some sort of accommodation and organized framework for managing their competition, there are going to be a lot more Darfurs and Iraqs. But if leading liberal thinkers are so committed to impossibly rosy images of the behavior of states that they cannot even grasp the most obvious geopolitical root causes explaining why the US is in Iraq and is working to prevent the involvement of other countries there, or why the Chinese are in the Sudan and are working to prevent the involvement of other countries there, then how can they possibly hope to address these problems in an effective way?

This is why the romantic nationalism and exceptionalism of a lot of liberal thinkers is so dangerous and irresponsible. It flies in the face of the lessons of centuries of human history, and the overwhelming body of empirical evidence about the actual behavior of the United States and other countries in the present time, and substitutes for that reality some fantasies and wishes, and an image of a world that never did exist, and doesn’t exist now.

Should we try to build a strong international order that includes China, Russia and other non-democratic or imperfectly democratic countries, or should we instead invest our energies is a strong international order that excludes these countries and is rooted mainly in the aims and preferences of the more democratic countries? That’s a question that has been raised. In my view, the answer to this question has little to do with the answers to questions about the true essential nature of “legitimacy”, or the first principles of international legal theory. It is a question about the most optimal organization of power in the contemporary world, and about the ends toward which that power should be exerted. The reason we need to invest our energies in building a potent international order that includes China and Russia is that the chief challenges facing us over the coming decades - and by "us", I mean the people of the world, not just the United States - will require the participation of the Chinese and the Russians. China has a quarter of the world's population, and is an extremely powerful and influential country. It's just silly to think we are going to make substantial progress on the chief economic, environmental and security challenges facing the world if China and Russia are left out of the equation, or if the rest of the world attempts to dictate terms to such a large proportion of humanity through some sort of ideology-based Justice League.

David asks:

Is the United States capable of acting on behalf of higher principles and the greater good, or is it bound to be self-serving and generally make a mess of things?

But being self-serving is not the same thing as making a mess of things. Some self-serving people and countries are very prudent in their behavior. People and countries are in fact driven preponderantly by self-interested motives. And in most cases the greater good is served not by betting on unsustainable policies of selflessness and altruism, but by trying to organize circumstances in such a way that the pursuit of self-interest leads to broader benefits. The reason the US, the Chinese, the Europeans and the Russians need to cooperate more on collective goals and projects is that it will pay for them individually if they are able to achieve these levels of cooperation, and they might be able to avoid in this way the destruction of their economies, the collapse of global peace and security and the deaths of millions of their people. It’s not about the Magna Carta, Natural Law or the Rights of Man.

I've been looking for intelligent discussion on this issue..nice to have finally found some.

syvanen leads us toward the most interesting point, which is how can we support our government when they manipulate circumstances? Clearly, the ulterior motive of our involvement in Kosovo was the establishment of Camp Bonsteel and the attendant "protection" of the flow of oil from the Caspian Sea (don't trust me...do your own research). Oh...and of course Haliburton being able to make millions for the construction. But really, how can you believe anything they tell us?

Further, how is our country supposed to function...even within the "new world order" if it does not honor it's agreements. No one forced the US to sign UN 1244, which protects the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia (to which Serbia is the successor). Yet, we simply throw that out the window when it suits our needs and recognize an independent Kosovo. I think that it's very telling that only 37 other countries have recognized Kosovo - mostly our allies -and that includes only 1 predominantly muslim state, NATO member Turkey. (Who by the way is dealing with their Kurdish insurgency the same way Milosevic did with the ethnic Albanians).

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a 3rd generation American of Serbian descent (now Croation, Bosnian and Serbian), so much closer to this issue than many. However, it still makes me very uncomfortable to be living in times when our government so blatently manipulates circumstances to justify actions that they could never get the citizens of this country to support otherwise. And I am even more uncomfortable when our leaders make agreements that mean nothing in the real world. As long as this is the way we operate, when will our allies stop believing us...those of them who haven't already? It only leads to isolation....but the idea of that is another discussion, is it not?