ATTITUDES AND PLATITUDES
Liberal Warfare
The Democratic foreign-policy establishment has nothing to offer but clichés.
BY LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN
Sunday, December 21, 2003 12:01 a.m. WSJ.com
Mr. Kaplan is a senior editor at The New Republic and a Hudson Institute fellow.
<font size=4>
The discovery of Saddam Hussein has revealed, among other things, a liberal foreign-policy establishment utterly bereft of ideas. Responding to news of the capture, a parade of Democratic presidential aspirants and think-tank types took to the airwaves last Sunday to declare that now is the time to, as Howard Dean put it, "bring the U.N." back to Iraq. Never mind that this has been their refrain all along. Never mind, too, that the U.N. fled Iraq over the dying protestations of its representative there, and announced earlier this month that it has no intention of returning any time soon. The war in Iraq has generated a cliché industry, which, even by the standards of such industries, is distinguished by the absence of any relation to the world we happen to inhabit.
<font size=3>
Yet its platitudes have become canonical among the technocrats who populate think tanks like the Brookings Institution, moderate Democrats campaigning on the strength of their national security credentials, and the members of the liberal foreign-policy establishment who presume to advise them. <font size=4>This establishment does not represent the "Bush is a greater threat than Saddam" crowd, much less the antiwar students who have gone clean for Dean. No, its members have gone, as the saying goes, beyond ideology. And into banality.
Their most recent effort, on display Monday in a much-touted Dean foreign-policy speech, is an attempt to transform the candidate from an angry leftist with bad ideas into an angry centrist with no ideas.<font size=3> Mr. Dean's foreign-policy tutor, Ivo Daalder of Brookings, reports that President Bush has set in motion a "revolution" by relying on "the unilateral exercise of American power rather than on international law and institutions," the premise being that America consistently has done otherwise in recent history. Likewise, former Clinton secretary of state Warren Christopher scores the Bush team for slighting the U.N. and presuming that the U.S. does not require "consensus to work its will in the world." There speaks the man who, unable to secure such a consensus for action in Bosnia, dismissed the slaughter there as "a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle of another continent."
<font size=4>
Along with his own experience, what Mr. Christopher seems to have forgotten is that in sidestepping the U.N. on the eve of military action, the Bush team did exactly what its predecessor--and its predecessor and its predecessor--did repeatedly before it. Yet the robotic admonitions to heed the will of the "international community" persist as if nothing has been learned and nothing remembered, even from the past few months. Asked recently what America should do "if international forces don't show up" in Iraq, presidential aspirant John Edwards replied, "Well, I don't accept that premise." But the premise is a fact, and pretending otherwise hardly provides an adequate response to the challenges America faces on the Iraqi battlefield.
The insistence on subordinating fact to wish extends to America's "imperial" position in the world.<font size=3> Newsweek editor Michael Hirsh inveighs against America the "uberpower," whose vast might has been for the Bush team "almost like a narcotic to an addict." Echoing this diagnosis, presidential candidate John Kerry claims the administration has been "intoxicated with the pre-eminence of American power" and threatens to take us "down the false road of empire." But pre-eminence and imperial design are two very different things. As Mr. Kerry himself points out a few lines down in the same speech, the Bush team's imperialists seem poised to "cut and run" from Iraq. Leaving aside the senator's own vote to cut and run, is it really necessary to point out that exit strategies are not imperial strategies? To be sure, humility has never come easily to those who guide the fortunes of the world's sole superpower, pace Madeleine Albright's "indispensable nation" boast. But the dilemma here is not rhetorical. It is structural, the very same preponderance of power that had the French complaining about America the "hyperpower" during the Clinton years.
Absent that power, precisely who do these critics think could uphold a decent world order? The answer, it seems, is not a who but a what--namely, the Clinton-era buzzwords of "interdependence," "global integration" and "soft power." Democratic trade guru Jeffrey Garten has accused President Bush of presiding over the "militarization" of U.S. foreign policy, while faith in the magical qualities of interdependence even leads Wesley Clark to the ahistorical claim that the "way we won the Cold War was not by isolating Eastern Europe but by engaging it." U.S. foreign policy, however, was "militarized" long before George W. Bush came along. America's foes, moreover, have proved oblivious to the announcement that soft power now serves as the principal currency of international relations.
Yet untroubled by contrary trends as exemplified by, say, Sept. 11, too many have convinced themselves that the international scene can be reduced to a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement. Hence, billionaire-cum-wise man George Soros instructs us that "war is a false metaphor" for the war on terror, and proposes "replacing the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military action with preventive action of a constructive and affirmative nature." Fairer trade rules, Mr. Soros recommends, could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein.
Rather than being a realistic assessment of the world around us or a discernible set of political values, these slogans respond to nothing more than petulance. Instead of taking the administration to task for the sincerity of its commitment to exporting democracy or questioning the wisdom of its decision to keep troop levels to a minimum in Iraq, our foreign-policy establishment has busied itself debating the semantics of empire, as if smirking passes for wisdom. It does not. This sets its members apart from their "revolutionary" counterparts on the Bush team, who, whether critics agree with their ideas or not, manifestly do have ideas. And in the war of ideas begun by Sept. 11, you can't beat something with nothing. Unless, of course, you pretend the day never happened. |
