Real World Order query.nytimes.com
[ This is the review of Haass's book from last week. The reviewer ends with was seems to be to be an overly optimistic conclusion:
Nonetheless, Haass may be laying the groundwork for a counterrevolution. Just as the neoconservatives spent years churning out manifestoes to make their case for a more assertive foreign policy, so the realists have now become the embattled minority of the Republican Party. As this intellectual conflict takes shape and grows, Haass's pithy book will undoubtedly become one of the debate's more significant volumes.
I don't know, it seems W's faithful have been pretty good at stomping on the realists in the past, I don't see any particular reason to expect change there. But who can say? Maybe Haass is at least obscure enough to escape the obligatory smear campaign that most of the more prominent skeptics on W's war faced. In full: ]
By Jacob Heilbrunn
[ Review of
THE OPPORTUNITY
America's Moment to Alter History's Course.
By Richard N. Haass.
242 pp. PublicAffairs. $25. ]
WHEN the Soviet Union wanted to punish dissidents, it would often send them into ''internal exile.'' Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, enjoys more elegant surroundings, but the phrase might well apply to him -- as he, along with other traditional, cautious ''realist'' thinkers in the Republican Party who abhor neoconservatism, experiences something of a similar indignity at the hands of the Bush administration. Haass, who was director of the State Department's policy planning staff from 2001 to 2003, has suffered the fate of most of Colin Powell's aides, not to mention Powell himself, which is to say he's ended up with his nose pressed to the foreign policy windowpane. Now, in ''The Opportunity,'' he has gone public with his disquiet about President Bush's crusading. But instead of indulging in the polemical fireworks that have disfigured so many such books, Haass offers an admirably dispassionate, incisive and comprehensive, if not wholly persuasive, alternative from the right.
Haass resembles liberal critics of Bush in emphasizing that multilateral cooperation will strengthen rather than weaken the United States. But there the similarities end. Haass expresses ambivalence about the United Nations and about championing human rights. Instead, his ideal is a kind of Kissingerian order and stability that supposedly prevailed after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when the high and mighty carved up the map of Europe. According to Haass, history ''is largely determined by the degree to which the major powers of the era can agree on rules of the road -- and impose them on those who reject them.'' This imposition can take place, Haass suggests, if the United States works harder to bring China and Russia into an international community, and sheds the delusive notion that it can, or should, remain the dominant world power.
The question, of course, is whether foreign affairs can really be arranged as neatly as all that. Henry Kissinger instilled a worship of the Congress of Vienna in his disciples, but in so doing he drew a rather misleading portrait of European stability in the 19th century. Germany alone, for example, launched three successive wars of unification. Present-day relations are just as complicated, given the profoundly conflicting interests of Western Europe, Russia, China and the United States on issues like human rights, the future of Taiwan and North Korea's and Iran's possession of nuclear weapons. It's hard to believe that matters could be arranged as tidily as Haass appears to hope.
The trouble with the quest for order is that it tends to result in big countries running roughshod over little ones. It would mean, for instance, that the United States should accept a Chinese or Russian sphere of influence. Consistent with his embrace of realpolitik, Haass pours cold water on the notion that Washington should promote democratic reform. The issue should, he writes, ''be handled with sensitivity and perspective'' (by which he means America should butt out of other countries' affairs). Indeed, he continues, ''neither the United States nor anyone else should insist on any single or particular model of democracy or market.'' Well, why not? The administration has perhaps made a hash of things in Iraq (though there is still room for hope), but Haass shortchanges the promotion of democracy, which, as the popular movements in Ukraine and Lebanon indicate, remains worthwhile.
Nonetheless, Haass may be laying the groundwork for a counterrevolution. Just as the neoconservatives spent years churning out manifestoes to make their case for a more assertive foreign policy, so the realists have now become the embattled minority of the Republican Party. As this intellectual conflict takes shape and grows, Haass's pithy book will undoubtedly become one of the debate's more significant volumes. |
