<<...John Mearsheimer, one of the pre-eminent representatives of the realist school of international relations, voted for George W. Bush in 2000. But not this time. Come November, he's not only voting for John Kerry but "will do so with enthusiasm."
As a realist, the University of Chicago political scientist liked Bush's anti-nation-building rhetoric during the 2000 debates, and was displeased by Al Gore's support for the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. But Bush's handling of foreign policy -- particularly the Iraq War -- has turned Mearsheimer and other realists into some of the administration's sharpest critics. "[T]he more time goes by," he says, "the more Bush makes [Bill] Clinton look like a genius in both domestic and foreign policy."
Indeed, not only is the American right a house divided on Iraq but over the intensifying imperialist drift of U.S. foreign policy more broadly. A convergence of realists, libertarians, and traditionalists (or "paleocons") has taken shape in opposition to the neoconservative foreign-policy agenda. In October, they came together to form the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, which holds that "the move toward empire must be halted immediately."
Spearheaded by Christopher Preble, director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, the coalition's signatories include Mearsheimer and fellow realist Stephen Walt of Harvard; Andrew Bacevich, author of American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy; Ted Galen Carpenter and Charles Peña of Cato; Christopher Layne and Scott McConnell of Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative; and Jon Utley of the organization Americans Against World Empire. A handful of left-of-center types are also onboard, among them Blowback and Sorrows of Empire author Chalmers Johnson, Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former Colorado Senator Gary Hart.
"Empire is problematic," reads the group's founding statement (titled "The Perils of Empire"), "because it subverts the freedoms and liberties of citizens at home while simultaneously thwarting the will of people abroad." "The defenders of empire," it goes on, "assert that the horrific acts of terrorism on September 11, 2001, demand that we assume new financial burdens to fund an expansive national security strategy, relax our commitment to individual liberty at home, and discard our respect for state sovereignty abroad. Nothing could be further from the truth." The group calls for the United States to jettison its imperial designs and adopt in their place a "restrained and focused foreign policy" for the 21st century.
Members have gone public with their concerns. Writing in the October 6, 2003, issue of The American Conservative, Layne argued that the Bush administration's "go-it-alone hubris" and "sledgehammer diplomacy" have led to a "fiasco" in Iraq -- "[a]nd a foreseeable one at that." McConnell, that magazine's executive editor, wrote that with their "incessant warmongering," the "belligerent" neocons have "led the United States into an extremely perilous situation, perhaps the most dangerous in its history." And Walt, in a talk before the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the case for the invasion of Iraq is "empty," a "combination of bad history, inconsistent logic, wishful thinking, and old news." The realists' case against the war gained perhaps its widest visibility with the publication of Mearsheimer and Walt's "An Unnecessary War" in the January-February 2003 issue of Foreign Policy, an article that radiated across the Internet and stirred far-reaching discussion.
Though this alliance against the expanding imperium is a work in progress, the phenomenon's raw ideological ingredients are nothing new. Self-styled traditionalists or paleocons like Buchanan have been arguing since the end of the Cold War that America should be "a republic, not an empire." Libertarians, deeply suspicious of "activist" government, were consistently against all of the interventions of the 1990s -- Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor -- and are positively choleric in their opposition to the global designs of Team Wolfowitz. And the realists have long maintained that the United States should go to war only when its vital national-security interests are at stake, with most realists believing that Iraq did not meet that standard. Realists figure prominently in the foreign-policy establishment, staffing institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations. The council, itself divided over the war, held a debate in February 2003, with the anti-war Mearsheimer and Walt squaring off against the neocon Weekly Standard's William Kristol and Max Boot, who advocated invasion.
The first Bush administration, says Mearsheimer, was a "paradigmatic realist administration." The current Bush administration "looked a lot like Bush I" in its first few months. The events of September 11, however, "flipped" Dick Cheney from the realist camp to the neocon credo. Up until 9-11, the neocons "could get to first base with their agenda but no further," Mearsheimer says. After the terrorist attacks, "they were able to make it all the way."...>>
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