My disagreement with Michael is an important one and he states it fairly. That said, I do not believe one has to follow Robert Kagan and say that the neo-conservatives are the sole heirs to the mainstream US foreign policy tradition in order to claim that the US is an expansionist imperial power rather than a status quo power. In fact, I don't share Michael's view that the prosecution of the Cold War was mainly responsive and defensive. I think Gar Alperowitz exaggerates the importance of warning of the Soviets in the decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan, but surely this was at least part of the story. And was Vietnam a defensive war against Communist aggression? The Kennedy and Johnson administrations said as much, but it seems to a dubious claim, not to say an outright lie. But even were I to concede point, the American informal  empire far predated the Cold War and in Latin America at least was a fact of life from Monroe to Reagan.

The problem I see with much of the discussion of Fareed's book -- and Michael Lind's response in particular-- is that it is so centered on relations and conflicts between nation-states and seems to leave little room for analyzing the conflicts between social and economic groups that exist within nations and extend across multiple nations.

Let me jump off from Matt's comment that those attacking China from the left seem to be "focused on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty."  Actually, for most of those "bashing China", they are far more attacking the multinational companies-- American and Chinese -- that are getting rich at the expense of the average American and Chinese worker.   Since the main leftwing position on trade with China is not to shut down trade but to demand that workers have the right to demand higher wages and to end the confinement of labor union organizers to mental hospitals, this is hardly a demand to confine the population to poverty.

Read more »

I'm eager to read Fareed's next post. In the meantime, I'd like to indicate my agreement with Fareed and Josh, and respond briefly to the latest posts by Anne-Marie and David.

I stand by my observation that what Anne-Marie and John Ikenberry call the postwar liberal international order was in fact two distinct orders. Plan A--the UN, Bretton Woods, the Four (or Five) Policemen--was reluctantly set aside in favor of a hastily improvised but ultimately successful Plan B--NATO, the Marshall Plan, what became the EU--when the Soviet Union chose to act as a revisionist power instead of a status quo power after 1945.

Read more »

Taking up Fareed's invitation to respond to Michael's post, I would say that I see more continuity than discontinuity in US foreign policy up to an including the Bush administration. Robert Kagan's phrase 'dangerous nation' seems to me to describe the reality of America's self-appointed mission in the world better than the account that suggests that the post-World War II United States previously was committed to a benign, internationalist, multilateral order but has now fallen for siren songs of unilateralism and empire (of course, Kagan thinks it's a good thing that we're this 'dangerous nation,' whereas --- surprise, surprise --- I don't).

To accept Michael's argument, one really has to believe that the Cold War was fundamentally an act of self-defense, and I don't think that was the case. To say this is emphatically not to argue for some false equivalence between the Soviet Union and China on the one hand and the US and its allies on the other, or to deny that the American empire was infinitely superior in moral terms to its adversaries. There is no such moral equivalence; the US was morally superior. But it is to say that the United States was an empire and empires in my view are entities which one admires at one's moral and intellectual peril.

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 »

Let me follow Fareed's suggestion and respond to Mike Lind's arugment, with which I find myself very much in sympathy. I might quibble with some of Mike's history. But his prescription seems sound. Indeed, the persistent maximalism of American foreign policy thinking -- whether writ-medium sized in Iraq or large in the 'concert of democracies' idea -- seems wholly out of touch with the challenges facing the country today.

We have a number of factors playing out right now that bear an uncomfortably strong resemblance to other great and/or imperial powers at their moments of overstretch and decline. I'm talking about the rapidly eroding strength of the dollar (judged in exchange rates and reserve currency status), our mounting indebtedness to one of the autocratic powers we're now supposed to democratize and our increasing reliance on military power as the tool to resolve international disputes. A country's military power seldom long outlasts its economic foundations. And nations with ebbing economic power often find themselves relying increasingly on military power -- since it is the realm in which they remain unchallenged.

That sounds a lot like the position America finds itself in today.

Read more »

I think the discussion has moved in a very interesting direction, closing the first day's set of posts with Michael Lind. Rather than steer us onto new ground, I wonder if the other members of the panel would address Lind's interesting thesis.

Specifically: He argues that we waged the Cold War against two great powers -- Russia and China --because they refused to accept core rules of the road that would preserve international peace and stability. Now that they both do so (I would put in a few caveats about Russian behavior), we have pushed the bar higher, insisting that they sign onto a whole new set of core principles. For some people these two countries really have to do nothing less than reconfigure their domestic politics.

Well, regime change in the short term in unlikely in either country, Is this kind of maximalist US policy seems designed to produce great power tension and conflict. I have some elaborations of my own to make and responses to various points that Anne Marie and David made (and to praise Matt's perspicacity) but I don't want to sidetrack the conversation just yet.

Fareed is right that we're living in unusually peaceful times, by historic standards, notwithstanding jihadist terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ethnic battles, many of them generations or centuries old. Here I suppose I am as "state-centric" as Fareed is, according to Anne Marie. Great power cooperation is essential to addressing most of the issues she raises, and great power struggle would make many of them worse.
That's why I agree with Fareed's warning about cheap talk of a new cold war with Russia, China and a supposed "axis" of authoritarian states. Such talk is blatantly hypocritical--what is America's ally Pakistan if not a rogue state, and what is Saudi Arabia if not a petroleum-fuelled autocracy? The "concert of democracies" alliance proposed by McCain and endorsed, in various forms, by most neoconservatives as well as many Democrats like Anne Marie, John Ikenberry, James Lindsay, and Ivo Daalder, would treat China and Russia as pariah states. By treating those countries as enemies, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact that the "concert of democracies" school wins the support of reputable thinkers of various political persuasions suggests that it cannot be dismissed as right-wing scare politics. What we have here is a serious philosophical disagreement about which version of liberal internationalism we want the U.S. to promote. Call these the 1945 Postwar version and the universalized Cold War model.

Read more »

I hope that Fareed Zakaria is right in his contention that we are living in, and, unless we completely blow it, will go on living in "scarily peaceful times." But I very much doubt that he is. The problem with his argument, I think, is that he reads too much into into two indisputable facts of the current moment --- that there are fewer major wars taking place than in living memory and that there is a greater level of global economic integration than at any time in history.

The principal reason, I think, that these facts are less significant than Zakaria believes they are (and that both he and I would like them to be) is that they are backward rather forward looking --- much in the way certain economic statistics better reflect the past state of the economy than serve as a useful basis for predicting its future. As I expect Zakaria would agree, there have been such periods in the recent past. Think of the 1990s, when after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed for those brief, happily self-deluded years that the liberal capitalist model had swept all before it, and that this capitalist tide was lifting all economic boats; that the wars that great powers, and above all the US, would likely be engaged in would henceforth be wars of choice, not necessity, and likely wars like Bosnia and Kosovo --- that is to say wars in which the national interest, from a realist perspective anyway, were less than self-evident; and that, grave as they remained, problems of want, above all disease and hunger, and threats to the environment were diminishing.

The picture in 2008 is very different from the one I have just described.

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'm really in overwhelming agreement with what Fareed Zakaria's written below, but I thought I might alienate the audience by noting that while China panic genuinely "is largely a product of the right" one shouldn't let the left off here too easily. Liberals' problem has less to do with security concerns posed by China than by economic ones. It seems to me that if I were a Chinese official sitting around in Beijing listening to how some Democrats talk about the national and global economy, I'd be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that their international economic agenda was focused on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty. I don't think that's really what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to say as they race around the country denouncing trade deals left and right, but I'm pretty sure that is how they sound.

Read more »

I wrote this book for many reasons and it has many themes. But one of them - that I'd like to start with today - is about nature of the world out there. What is the international system in which the United States currently exists? How dangerous is it? Why? Those questions are in some ways fundamental to our understanding of American foreign policy. In my book, I take the unconventional view that we're living in a remarkably benign international environment.

We have done a great job of scaring the hell out of people, telling them that they are living in frightening times. You know the list: terrorism, rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russian, an expansionist China. Throw into this mix suspicions of Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration and it seems as if the world is ganging up on the United States. In fact, the data overwhelmingly shows that we're living in more peaceful times than at any point since the early 1950s, and perhaps in several centuries. (Harvard's Steven Pinker says, "the most peaceful times in the species' existence.") Wars, civil wars, deaths are all down, down, down over the last twenty years. And economic growth is up across the globe.

Read more »

We're very excited that this week we'll be discussing Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. Joining Zakaria is a great group: Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, Ann-Marie Slaughter of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias, and prolific journalist David Rieff.

It's going to be fascinating, so finish up your reading.

I have a number of thoughts about Jeff's and Jacob's points about Reagan, but I first want to respond to Ken because it seems to me that he's glossed over a tremendous number of important distinctions in U.S. foreign policy--indeed, perhaps over the very idea that there are distinctions in U.S. foreign policy.

Ken writes that "conservatism as defined by Peter fits pretty squarely into the broad tradition of American foreign policy as practiced by all ideological camps: namely promoting American economic, military and political power overseas under the guise of do-gooding." That suggests that I defined conservatism simply as an ideology that promotes the national interest and that sugarcoats its self-interested behavior. But that's not how I defined conservatism. I defined it as an ideology that sees the world strictly in binary terms: us-versus-them, good-versus-evil. It's true that that view was prevalent in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it became far less so during the 20th. Sure, conservative ideology fits into a broad tradition of pursuing the national interest--but so does every foreign policy pursued by every country around the world throughout history. The differences lie in how you define and pursue the national interest. My point is that during the Cold War, U.S. policymakers increasingly agreed that you could not see the world in strictly good-versus-evil terms because we needed to coexist and negotiate with the Soviets--in no small part because nuclear weapons rendered coexistence and negotiation a matter of national survival. Conservatives, because of their fealty to Manichaeism, did not. They defined the national interest very differently.

Read more »

Well, as I said in my first post, I have a tendency to be argumentative, so I'll again focus here on a few disagreements with Peter.

Peter ends his most recent post by saying that conservatism at times has been "marked by distaste for humanitarian interventions." and quotes John Bolton, who he calls a "wonderful example of conservatism," as being an enemy of "nation-building and democracy promotion. Last year, Peter writes, Bolton told him "how he would have managed the invasion of Iraq: 'My thought was--and this is exaggerating--we hand 'em a copy of the Federalist Papers, say good luck, and then we're out of there'." Which primarily demonstrates to me that Bolton, whether he is a "wonderful example of conservatism" or not, is first and foremost insane.

Read more »

Jeffrey Lewis complains about Ronald Reagan's joke about outlawing the Soviet Union. But he fails to allude to an important distinction between Reagan and George W. Bush. Note that Reagan said he had "signed legislation" that put an end to the USSR. Bush, by contrast, would claim he didn't need Congress' permission. At least give the Gipper some credit for adhering to the Constitution!

More seriously, I wonder about Peter's doubts concerning Reagan's role in helping to bury the Soviet Union. It's true that conservatives (and neoconservatives) bridled at his outreach to the Kremlin (credit goes to Nancy Reagan and George Shultz for helping push him in that direction). But liberals, including Strobe Talbott, complained, at the outset of Reagan's term, that his policies were bound to create catastrophe. But they didn't. Instead, Reagan's arms buildup surely helped put paid to any lingering Soviet illusions that Moscow could keep up with the U.S. Gorbachev's own advisor Alexander Yakolev said as much after the end of the cold war. John Patrick Diggins gives Reagan a lot of credit as well in his recent biography. Yes, the triumphalism that emerged after the cold war, in which the U.S. was supposedly invincible was off-base. But I continue to think that Reagan deserves some credit for: 1) being genuinely horrified at the prospect of a nuclear war; and 2) reaching out to Mikhail Gorbachev to wind down not only the arms-race, but also the cold war. Such flexibility and caution have been sorely lacking in the current administration. So contra to Peter, I think there is a chasm between Reagan and Bush.

Well, I am now through section one. It was an interesting read. In particular, Peter provided a nice summary of the 1970s Team B exercise, which has far too many parallels to the WMD intelligence fiasco that helped the President get us into Iraq. I won't say more about that, other than to recommend Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, by Anne Cahn.

Instead, I really wanted to focus on the chapter about Reagan, who I think exerts a profound influence over contemporary public discourse. I've always wondered about the transition during which a President goes from being a controversial figure, of whom a relatively small segment of the population actually votes for, to being "Great."

After all, in 1864 and 1936, Abraham Lincoln and Frankling Delano Roosevelt each took 55 percent of the votes cast -- a solid win, but not a landslide. In retrospect, of course, it is hard to imagine that a significant fraction of the population would have rather seen George McClellan or Wendell Wilkie in the Oval Office.

Read more »

As I expected, Jacob, Jeff, and Ken have each made excellent points, and I want to thank them for taking the time to write such thoughtful posts. And, although they've made individual arguments (which I'll try to address in more specific posts later), I wanted to first tackle a theme or question that's run through each of their posts (as well as through a number of comments, like Don Bacon's). That is, is "conservatism," as I've defined it, really so different from other traditions in American foreign policy, or is it, in essence, just a recent version of a centuries-old American exceptionalism? The answer, I think, is both: yes, it is a form of American exceptionalism, but, yes, it's also distinct from other ideological camps that have battled over U.S. foreign policy for the last 50 years.

Read more »

Thanks for the invitation to participate in the Book Club and first off apologies for being slow to engage in the debate, which is the result of my having to travel unexpectedly for a family matter. I'm returning to Washington tomorrow and hope to be more active after that.

U.S. vs. Them is a provocative read and there's much in it that I agree with. However, since it's always more fun to disagree, my main point of contention with Peter's first post is the sharp distinction he seems to draw between "conservative" foreign policy and American foreign policy more generally, which has been fairly consistent in the post-World War II era whether the president in power is a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat.

Read more »

Peter Scoblic's US vs. Them is heck of a good read. I say that based on a single chapter -- I am working my way through the book while I post. It will be interesting to see how reader feedback shapes my reactions to future chapters.

After chapter one, I am excited about where Peter is heading. He tackles something of a cliche that is ubiquitous at Washington cocktail parties. Many of my Republican friends, when asked to defend one or another foreign policy blunder, will disown the Bush Administration with the claim that the policies pursued by the 43rd President are dramatically at odds with those of the 41, The Gipper, Tricky Dick and, above all, Ike.

Now these are normally social circumstances, so one can't really pursue the argument with too much vigor -- that would be ugly.

Read more »

Peter has done a splendid job of reminding us of the far right's embrace of rolling back communism in the early 1950s. He scores conservatives for offering a simplistic, one dimensional view of foreign policy. He's dead-on about the Bush administration's lamentable record on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

But having read (and immensely enjoyed) his book, I also wonder if he himself hasn't engaged in a little binary thinking himself. Put simply, I think he scants the role of the left and, by extension, the neocons in helping to propagate a view of America as the indispensable nation, setting wrong aright around the globe. What he is objecting to, I suspect, is less conservative foreign policy than the consensus view that America is an indispensable nation and the belief in American exceptionalism--that we are uniquely endowed with the obligation to spread democracy and freedom around the globe.

Read more »

Hello TPM readers! Thanks for stopping by this discussion of my new book, U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. Let me tell you a little bit about why I wrote U.S. vs. Them--the questions that led me to start the book and the answer I ultimately found--and then we'll throw open the doors to your comments, as well as to posts by the fantastically smart and knowledgeable group of foreign policy experts that have agreed to participate in this Book Club.

U.S. vs. Them is the product of my chief post-9/11 fear and of my confusion about the Bush administration's response to the attacks. After September 11, I made an assumption: I assumed that the president and his advisers understood that their top priority had to be preventing a nuclear 9/11. The United States had survived al Qaeda's attack, but it had changed us. We had lost thousands of lives and billions of dollars; and our politics, our national psychology, and our foreign policy had all suffered. I wondered what would happen after an attack that was 100 or 1,000 times worse. The United States would survive, but would it survive in anything resembling its present form? I didn't think so, and my apprehension was reinforced by further research. For example, I was startled to find these emotional lines in the middle of one government report on homeland security:

The personal loss of loved ones would be immeasurable. The health consequences to the population directly impacted would be severe. The physical damage to the community would be extreme. The costs of the decontamination and rebuilding would be staggering. But these losses do not begin to address the true implications of this type of an incident[.] The detonation of an IND [improvised nuclear device] in a U.S. city would forever change the American psyche, as well as its politics and worldview.

Read more »

Having just argued, in agreement with Matt, that progressives need to get out there and argue for the vision that Matt lays out, I offer a playbook for that argument. Working with the excellent US in the World project, whose mission in life is to make us better communicators, the Stanley Foundation (my employer) convened a group to help identify the strongest messages in favor of liberal internationalism. The result is this message builder, How to Talk About the Connection Between US and Global Security.