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.

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I'm grateful to Michael Signer, David Schorr and Charles Kupchan for their comments on The American Way of Strategy. Charles has long argued for a concert of power approach, even when that was unpopular during the heyday of American triumphalism a few years back. And in his forthcoming book Demagogue, Michael emphasizes that there is far more to liberal, constitutional government than elections alone, an important truth that we need to be reminded of.

David thinks that liberal internationalism as I describe it is "too passive, heartless and unambitious." However, by the time he has finished qualifying what he calls a "more carefully calibrated liberal interventionism," he has arrived at a position very close to mine in practice. I am opposed to wars to "spread democracy" or "enforce human rights." But the U.S. and other countries can and sometimes should use moral suasion and in extreme cases embargoes to encourage justice in other societies.

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I am in substantial agreement with Mike's post. Indeed, I think he does an excellent job of critiquing a brand of liberal internationalism which, although currently in vogue, has gotten ahead of itself. Historically, liberal internationalism has been about fostering international stability by coupling the projection of American power abroad with the fashioning of international partnerships. To be sure, the founders of liberal internationalism and many of its adherents today (myself included) would be delighted if all the states of the world were democracies. But, as Mike points out, the goal of liberal internationalism was to make the world safe for democracy, not to engage in coercive democracy promotion and nation building. Roosevelt and Truman sought to make partners of the Soviet Union and China; they hardly conditioned their participation in the proposed "Four Policeman" or the UN Security Council on their readiness to embrace democracy.

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What I appreciate most about this book is that it takes the goal of democracy (or in Mike Lind's words, republican liberalism) and subjects it to the most searching, pragmatic critique, in the process providing a vision of how democracy best fits into a non-ideological, non-faith-based foreign policy programme. Particularly because democracy is such an intensely hopeful and optimistic political theory, it can elicit a kind of chaos when it comes to strategy. Freedom, it seems to me, is like that. Like pure oxygen, it can inspire and vivify but also make us dizzy. We've seen this from our politicians, whether Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush, and we've also seen it from theorists of democracy -- whether Patrick Henry saying "Give me liberty or give me death" or Natan Sharansky saying that freedom should always be pursued, even if it might give violent extremists even more power than they already have.

One of the many changes that President-elect Barack Obama promises is a shift from an ideological or even faith-based reasoning behind our foreign policy to one grounded on the edits of pragmatism -- over and over again, Obama invokes "what will work" as the major criterion. This is a richer standard than you might at first think -- what "works" for a republican liberal, in Lind's terminology, will not "work" for a neoconservative or a paleoconservative. The traditional progressive will be examining whether results are helping the world become more progressive -- they might apply a more traditionally "pure" ethical standard to foreign policy. Lind applies a more hard-eyed, nationalistic analysis -- the American republican liberal will be looking at whether results on the ground square with an increase in liberty that redounds to America's security interests -- whether, in Lind's words, the strategy has resulted in the "defense of the American way of life."

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Basically, Michael is asking how much we should care about goings-on in other lands; how much we should do about them; and how the first question relates to the second. It's one thing to be horrified by man's inhumanity to other (wo)men, but another to view it as an imperative to get involved. Doesn't the nation-state system offer valuable stability, which we weaken at our own peril?

The arduous efforts to democratize Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing if not injunctions to be less ambitious, meddlesome, and presumptuous. But how cautious should we be? Can the values agenda be pursued more prudently, or would the truly prudent course be to ditch that agenda altogether?

Michael's safe-for-democracy strategy is too passive, heartless, and unambitious for my taste. On the other hand, I think many of the related concerns can be assimilated into a more carefully calibrated liberal interventionism.

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I'd like to thank the Book Club for hosting this discussion of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, which is now out in paperback just in time for the change in administrations. I should mention that Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, in its latest issue has published my exploration of the implications of the book's thesis for U.S. military strategy in "A Concert-Balance Strategy for a Multipolar World," for those who are interested.

I wrote The American Way of Strategy for two reasons. The first was to describe and rehabilitate an important but almost forgotten way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy. The second reason was to defend an older tradition of liberal internationalism which seeks to promote nonintervention as the chief norm in world politics and holds that a concert of status quo great powers can preserve international peace at the lowest cost to a free society in the United States and similar democracies.

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