I am very sorry to be coming in so late to this debate; I wanted to join it earlier in the week but simply could not. All the more so because predictably, as much as I respect Michael Lind, I disagree strongly with his characterization of traditional liberal internationalism and "new liberal internationalists" (he never makes clear how he would characterize us other than as neo-con fellow travelers.) In the first place, the liberal internationalism of Roosevelt and Truman believed both in having a concert of all great powers (the UN Security Council) and of democracies (NATO, the Marshall Plan, and ultimately the EU). They absolutely recognized the pragmatic necessity of talking to everyone, and they were right. But they also recognized that it was vital to develop institutions that would deepen cooperation among liberal democracies, both for strategic and moral reasons. That is precisely the position that John Ikenberry and I have taken with regard to our proposed concert of democracies -- we have made clear repeatedly that we would never want it in place of the UN but only in addition to. We also explicitly argued that it should not be a military alliance; indeed we proposed it as a much more informal alternative to a global NATO.

Read more »

Michael Lind argues that we have "a serious philosophical disagreement" between proponents of 1945 Postwar liberal internationalism, which envisioned an international order based on a "loose concert or concerts of nonaggressive, but not necessarily democratic, great powers," and the Cold War model of liberal internationalism, which is "an attempt to universalize the norms of NATO and the EU."

Let's start with the history. I take it that Lind's postwar model refers to the UN, with the provision for the P-5 members of the Security Council, three of which were democracies and two, Russia and China, were not. That was indeed Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the "four policemen (+ France); he was realist enough, rightly, to recognize that you could not have an international order unless all the great powers signed on. But that was only one plank of the postwar liberal order, as John Ikenberry and many others have argued. The others, were NATO, the Marshall Plan to get Europe back on its feet as a group of democracies rather than watch various European states turn community, and the EU to keep it as a strong economic and political entity. That was the US strategy throughout the Cold War - in keeping with the second half of Kennan's containment strategy, which was to strengthen the West until the Soviet Union collapsed from within. So I honestly don't know how Lind is distinguishing between a "postwar" and a "Cold War" model here.

Read more »

I agree with Fareed that about the use of fear-mongering on the right and occasionally the left for domestic political purposes. And I agree that by a number of measures we are actually much better off than in many previous eras. But in his list of threats he betrays his realist roots, and thus misses some of the most important reasons for worrying about the current international environment. When Fareed lists usual suspects, he starts with terrorism, but the rest of the list - rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russia, an expansionist China - is completely state-centric. It's a Bismarckian tableau - who is up, who is down, who needs reassurance, who bears watching. He then throws in, slightly tongue in cheek, two economic threats - Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration. But he completely ignores many of the threats I would put at the top of my list - nuclear proliferation, global epidemics, and climate change. In the case of both global epidemics and climate change, we face the direct threats of disease, flooding, drought, desertification, etc, but also the secondary security threats of profound domestic dislocations, causing government collapse, refugee flows, border wars, and conflict that appears to be ethnic in nature but that is in large part driven by resource scarcity (Darfur is a partial example).

The tertiary effects are even more worrisome.

Read more »

I have responded to Matt Yglesias’s op-ed in the LA Times last week today on the LA Times website. I would welcome further responses on the actual strategy I am proposing re Iraq; I will respond later today both to Max Sawicky and on how I think there is a chance of developing a bipartisan group that can actually put real pressure on the Administration to change its strategy now, rather than just running out the clock and handing the mess over to a new Administration. But before everyone jumps in, let me try to respond generally to the many (almost 100) comments to my post yesterday and to Max’s response.

Read more »

The debate over bipartisanship continues. I wrote a response to the many responses I got, on this blog and others, to my initial article calling for more bipartisanship in the Washington Post. I've just submitted an op-ed to the LA Times that is really a response to Matt Yglesias's piece there last week.

But Max Sawicky's post last week attacking what he sees as the entire American national security establishment summarized EXACTLY what I am worried about in the current state of netroots politics. He argued that "to set the ship on a better course, you have to be able to sink it." That was Ralph Nader's view in 2000, and he succeeded precisely in sinking Al Gore's candidacy. That was a victory?

Here is my nightmare. The Cheneyites succeed in creating a situation in which Bush does decide to bomb Iran. Iran retaliates, as they openly threaten to do, with terrorist attacks against us on U.S. soil. That tilts the election. I can imagine a Karl Rove political calculation that would buttress a Cheney-Addington national security calculation, probably with Eliot Abrams' support.

Read more »

As my final post in the book club, I would like to react specifically to a long post from Dan K, as a number of readers urged me to do. I have reprinted his post here, with my response following each paragraph.

Why did I have such a strong reaction to Dean Slaughter's initial piece? Because in my view American intellectual life, in the public sphere at least, is sbsolutely chocking, gagging, suffocating on patriotism. Patriotism is a legitimate emotion; most of us have affection for the places we're from - nothing wrong with that. But there is surely such a thing as too much patriotism. And in my view, American culture is smothered in patriotism, and emotionally addicted to it, to the extent that it is impeding clear, constructive and broad-minded thinking about other matters.

This is an important point, one that I understand and can sympathize with. Patriotism, like religion, is often turned to bad purposes or used to shield things from scrutiny that should absolutely be scrutinized. But my perception is really that patriotism has been hijacked in American politics, in ways that are very bad for our country as a whole. After 9/11, the reaction everywhere was to fly the flag or wear it on lapel pins. I remember being puzzled by that, as I saw the attacks not simply as an attack on American but as an attack on the West, on an entire value-system that is by no means unique to this country.

Read more »

Wow. It’s hard to know where to start, particularly as I realize that I should have done a bit more to situate the book before providing an excerpt from the conclusion. Let me do that briefly now, both with a link to the book’s website, and an explanation of at least where the title comes from. Some of you may remember my link to Captain Ian Fishback’s letter to John McCain back in 2005 explaining his vain efforts to try to get his superiors to articulate clear standards of interrogation and describing the abuses he witnessed committed against detainees as the result of the lack of standards. He ended that letter by asking whether we as a people were going to sacrifice our ideals to our security, arguing that our true strength lies in trying to uphold our ideals. For himself, he said that he “would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America.” I chose that title because it came from a soldier (who has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan) writing to a former soldier in a way that directly refutes the Administration’s claims, as Sy Hersh quotes in the New Yorker this week, that “Abu Ghraib is just the price of defending democracy.”

Read more »

American patriotism is grounded not only in our love for our country itself, but also in our love for the values our country stands for—of the idea that is America, no matter how far short we may fall in practice. It is the idea that knits us together in our vast diversity. It is the idea that our soldiers fight for. It is the idea that all patriotic citizens stand for, even against our own government. It is an idea that ultimately belongs to all the world’s peoples.

Americans are hardly unique in having forged a national identity based on a set of fundamental principles. The French glory in their country’s heritage as the source of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” The English rightly love their tradition of individual rights and restrained rule begun with the Magna Carta. The Chinese venerate many of the principles of Confucianism as part of the bessence of being Chinese. South Africans celebrate ubuntu, the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects humanity. Indeed, a journalist’s story about the near destruction of a fabled Baghdad street of booksellers in the late summer of 2006 closed with a heart-wrenching description of the last bookseller to remain open breaking down in tears. “Iraq,” he said, as he wiped his eyes, “it is the first country. It set the laws of Hammurabi.”

But values play a particularly important role in the American national psyche for a unique reason: Although we inhabit a common land that we love, we do not share a common race, creed, or national origin.

Read more »

Legal Adviser John Bellinger is taking on his critics over at Opinio Juris, in a very interesting discussion about interrogation standards and detainee policy. Check it out.

Two of the most frequent criticisms or concerns that John and I hear when we present the Princeton Project final report are ones raised by Dan and Peter in their thoughtful and helpful posts. First is the charge that a multidimensional national security policy will have too many dimensions for the American people to swallow; that it will be trumped every time by the appealing simplicity of the war on terror with Islamo-Fascism as the enemy. That was the appeal of containment, the argument goes: it was wonderfully simple. We can argue all we want that we face multiple threats, but voters simply won't buy a national security strategy with too many moving parts. Second, as Peter argues particularly, the votes just aren't there for engagement with international institutions on any basis, a strategy that he characterizes as "substituting international partnership for national power."

Not surprisingly, we disagree on both counts.

Read more »

There false premises that Democrats, or indeed Americans, simply have to get past to get anywhere on foreign policy generally and nationals security policy more particularly. They are evident in Steve’s comments on the Princeton Project report, and also in the debate on Anatol Lieven’s excellent new book, Ethical Realism, over on America Abroad.

Read more »

John and I can certainly thank our commenters for vigorous discussion, even if they didn’t seem to find much to like. Let me address some of the comments we have gotten in three separate posts. First is the debate over whether we actually offer a strategy or not. Second is the core debate between ever-shifting versions of isolationism versus internationalism – this time around framed as “give up on promoting values of any kind and simply stick to balance of power politics” versus “pay attention to the actual life conditions of individuals within states around the world and recognize the ways in which their governments treat them can threaten us.” As usual, there are caricatures aplenty floating around in all the comments on this issue, but if we can't have an honest debate here and move on then we can’t get anywhere. Finally, I will address those critiques that charge us with and unrealistic expectations, either in terms of domestic politics (Peter Trubowitz), or international politics (Steve and Dan).

Read more »

John Ikenberry and I have been directing the Princeton Project on National Security for two and a half years. We set out to "write a collective article" -- to use Princeton's convening power and academic nature to bring together a bipartisan group of almost 400 current and government officials, policy experts, and professors on a wide range of issues. John and I have periodically reported on how the Project was going in our posts on America Abroad, but on September 27th we released the final report, which is available here. What follows below is the executive summary of the first half of the report; the second half offers specific recommendations on a set of policy issues ranging from the implosion of the Middle East to global pandemics, including nuclear proliferation.

Which brings me to today's news. North Korea's actual or claimed test of a nuclear weapon makes the central point of our report more strongly than we ever could.

Read more »

As global leaders gathered this week in New York to denounce each other and popularize Noam Chomsky, they ignored the issues that could actually help the U.N. become a far more effective institution in addressing global problems. One is Security Council reform, about which more later. Another is "the mandate gap," the huge disparity between what the Security Council resolves, with great fanfare, and what happens on the ground. See the following op-ed, which I published through Project Syndicate in a number of different papers around the world.

The value of the "war on terror" as a construct for U.S. foreign policy is much in debate these days, with a recent cover article by James Fallows in the Atlantic. George Soros has made the best case that I have seen yet for why the phrase and the underlying concept are leading us deeply astray. See his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (which I have reprinted below to get around the pay wall). My colleague John Ikenberry has also deployed some great arguments on this score; I will let him weigh in when he is back from vacation.

Read more »