I’d like to believe that Jack Hunter is right, but the more I think about it the more I think that the conservative base in this country, barring some cataclysmic event, will never be anti-war in any meaningful sense.  The sort of limited government and distrust of power advocated by folks over at The American Conservative like Daniel Larison will never appeal to the red-meat, America-first crowd unless it’s framed as opposition to the liberal agenda.  So when you have people like Rep. Jason Chaffetz calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan or claiming the mantle of the anti-war right, it’s really little more than an opportunistic gambit.  It can work because the strategy of opposition can work quite easily in this political climate.  It’s the same tactic neoconservatives use to get the base fired up in the first place.

The thing that I find so depressing is that the actual stance of the right toward interventionist war won’t change at all.  While Chaffetz and those sharing his political views may have some luck in the future convincing the American right that it is opposed to Obama’s wars, once conservatives are back in power and faced with their own foreign entanglements, the right will have forgotten entirely any opposition it once held toward interventionism.  Such opposition is grounded entirely in political maneuvering rather than any moral or philosophical framework.

In fact, I’ve argued myself away from my Glenn Beck piece almost completely at this point.  Not only is Beck the ultimate opportunist, the people he may convince of American empire or the danger of American foreign policy would be convinced as easily the next day of the need for more American power and further interventions once it is their own team were making the case. There is no philosophical bond between the current conservative base and the concept of limited government in foreign affairs. Limited government extends only to domestic issues, while the security state can grow unabated.

At best the new anti-war right will be something of a paradox, and doomed to expire.  I think Jack is engaged mainly in wishful thinking here, another problem currently afflicting many on the right.

Stranger things have happened, but this is still worth noting.  It turns out that a slim majority of Republicans now believe [pdf] that it is not America’s responsibility to “actively promote democracy around the world.”  I’m not sure Republican leadership has quite caught up with this sea change, but the sooner they do the better.  Even George W. Bush, despite his inevitable legacy as nation-builder, began implementing a more realistic foreign policy in his second term.

Apparently Americans are catching up:

According to AEI’s Datapoints:

A bare majority of Republicans (51 percent) and strong majorities of Democrats (63 percent) and independents (62 percent) agree that democracy promotion is not America’s responsibility. Americans have always been reluctant internationalists, aware of the global role that the United States must play, but at the same time, concerned about the costs that come with such responsibility.

So now that the neocon fervor is being supplanted by a more cautious foreign policy both in the oval office and in public opinion, what should we expect?  How do we begin to redefine not only American interests, but our pursuit of those interests?   “Democracy promotion” may be off the table (at least after Afghanistan), but a myriad other reasons to flex our military muscle still exist.  Genocide, natural resources, terror havens, piracy, and a plethora of other conflicts and will continue to test American resolve and restraint. [Read more →]

Chris and I pick up where Freddie and James left off, yakking about American foreign policy; Obama and his magic mirror trick; Bush; the future of interventionism (or lack thereof as the case may be); articulating a forward looking, non-reactive, positively defined foreign policy in a post-cold war world; our favourite foreign policy guru Thomas Barnett, why we love him and why when you love someone you have to set them free; the limits of superpowerdome; the relationship between economics and foreign policy; cultivating a greater American modesty; and working towards a mutually invested and appreciative, multipolar, dynamic geo-political stability. [Read more →]

I thought that I might take a moment to reflect on how muddied the waters of my thinking have become around interventionism and foreign policy of late on this American occasion for remembrance.

I have for some time now been a a reluctant and hesitant, but vociferous proponent of the idea that it is important to develop a coherent and articulate outline for how militarily advanced countries like the US ought to appropriate utilize that military might when it is needed. My arguments have orbited around the idea that while no one ought to relish the idea of going into a foreign place with weapons in hand, it remains a truism that just those situations necessarily arise and that we are best served to have a clear understanding of what we are to do and how we are to do when they do.

Insofar as I think said truism remains relevant, I take the discussion about what a properly constitute interventionist foreign policy might look to remain vital. [Read more →]

Keeping on as we keep on with the audio series, James Poulos and Freddie went a few rounds on American foreign policy with my very modest moderation. [Read more →]

Reading over this article from Jewcy while I was looking for updates on the recent Israeli elections about the proported rise in anti-semitism in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and Chavez’s support for groups like Hamas, I was struck by a question: is it intellectually and morally acceptable to attempt to understand where groups like Hamas are coming from and cultivate a certain degree of sympathy/empathy for the circumstances that have given rise to them?

This question is distinct from the notion of supporting a group like Hamas, which, by my lights, is a pretty difficult move given that one of its core principles is the complete annihilation of another state and its people. I believe pretty firmly that I would feel the same if that state weren’t Israel, so let us jettison both the “blind love of Israel” and “ignorant romanticizing of Hamas” arguments alike. I should also clarify that I am talking about finding sympathy and empathy in one’s heart for Hamas, as distinct from doing the same for Palestinians in Gaza generally — I don’t want to overstate my suggestion here, but neither do I want to falsey sugar-coat it.

The more I’ve thought about the question, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that finding such sympathy/empathy is a key component in understanding and successfully seeking a resolution to the generations long conflict in the region. For all my recent talk about cultivating a better interventionism, I continue to believe that there is no real military solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is only a human solution (call it a political solution if you like, but what I’m pointing to is human beings figuring out a way and cultivating an openness to living together). That there will by necessity, given the players in this conflict, be a military component to the lead up to such a resolution, as has already been abundantly demonstrated, is a sad fact, but I don’t think it detracts from the reality that at the end of the day the military elements of this conflict will eventually have to become exhausted and some kind of human solution will have to emerge if there is ever going to be a “just and lasting peace”. To perhaps assuage some of my interlocutors on interventionism, I don’t take that to be an isolated incident in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think it is true broadly that there are no real military solutions to what generally in geo and regional politics boil down to human conflicts, but I’m also aware that there are times when use of force becomes sadly necessary (so my whole track on interventionism is trying to formulate a better version thereof). [Read more →]

Mark raises an interesting point:

Finally, I’d put an end to the concept of economic or diplomatic sanctions as a meaningful manner of achieving most diplomatic ends (the exception being targeted sanctions solely intended to prevent hostile regimes from obtaining specific materials capable of being used for aggressive purposes).

Often left out of the discussion of interventionism vs non-interventionism is the subject of economic sanctions.  For instance, many Americans have been rightfully disgusted with the invasion of Iraq under the Bush administration, but few of those same, outraged people raised much of a hue and cry against the economic violence America used against the Iraqi people.  This is because it is a quiet sort of intervention, a subtle but devastating form of warfare, and while our sanctions against Iraq did nothing to stop Saddam Hussein, they did have a profound and dehumanizing impact on the Iraqi people.

Economic sanctions are often viewed as a tool of containment policies against hostile regimes, but they’d be better described with the term collective punishment.  Containment against the Soviet Union, of course, included economic and military interventions, whereas containment policies against Iran and other so-called “rogue” states, are today largely economic.  There is a justifiable fear that Iran will develop a nuclear bomb, but while sanctions against the proliferation of nuclear weapons make strategic sense, sanctions that weaken the civilian population of any nation should be avoided for the same reason we avoid targeting civilians militarily.  [Read more →]

I found myself nodding my head when Andrew Sullivan described E.D.’s piece on the “democracy fallacy” as a summation of neoconservatism. So too, I felt, was E.D.’s post that was in direct response to my ruminations on Iraq a take down of neoconservatism, which was ironic insofar as the post I referenced and quoted was entitled, “Interventionsm = Neoconservatism? Articulating A Cleaner Interventionism” and was an attempt to formulate an interventionism beyond the canons of neoconservatism.

The hang up seemed to be on my mention of democracy in Iraq, which tied in because of the current situation in Iraq — the provincial elections were a useful and topical segue into the arena of discussion around interventionism in which E.D., Mark, and I had been previously engaged. Chris’ exploration provides a pretty persuasive argument about my over estimation of the possible outcomes of those elections in Iraq, and so in that regard I’m inclined to retreat some. I think it’s worth noting, though, that the title of the post was “Some Big Ifs”, indicating that I didn’t take the hypothetical therein presented to be a determinative prediction in any regard.

E.D. suggested that,

Scott takes an “ends justify the means” approach when musing over this matter of Iraqi stability and democracy.

Which I don’t think is exactly right. I went pretty well out of my way to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq was as massive a blunder as common wisdom dictates and went so far as to call the decision, “a text book case of what not to do.” Insofar as the means were deeply flawed, I recognize that the ends have also been far from what one might have hoped for. My musing, then, was to wonder if the very contingent hypothetical I proposed were to come true, would it tell us something about an ability to realize an end to interventionism that could be achieved by a better formulated means. That might seem like the splitting of hairs on my part, but let me say unequivocally that at the time I deeply opposed the invasion of Iraq and that continue to see the decision as a stunning mistake both strategically and, more importantly, ethically/morally. That said, I feel obligated to observe the unfolding of events and ask questions from which we might learn something for future application, even if those questions come off as unpopular given the current political climate.

E.D. raises some serious concerns about my attempted formulation by saying,

Scott claims that “responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution.”  Let us for a moment pretend that our vision of geopolitical evolution is not that of an American, but rather that of a fundamentalist Islamic leader, or perhaps of  the grand maestro of terror himself, Osama bin Laden.  Would these visions align with our own?  Would the stated impediments be the same?  Or consider the Soviet interventionism into Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  To the Russians, liberalism was the impediment to “the deeper forces of evolution.”

My concern here becomes a slide into the malaise of complete cultural relativism where the differences between cultures and regions renders our ability to make any judgment about whether actions are good or bad null and void because the truth of such claims are culturally dependent. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that one ought to ignore the different cultural dynamics that form divergent world views, but neither am I willing to remain neutral on the slughter of innocent Kurds based on some notion that the actions are just the idiosyncrasies of a particular cultural perspective. But I acknowledge the tension here to be incredibly difficult to resolve, so neither do I want to address it from a place flippancy. [Read more →]

To recap a bit where we are in this discussion. So I would say Freddie and ED (to a degree) subscribe roughly to what I call the Radiohead Theory of Foreign Policy:  i.e. the US singing “I wish I were special but I’m a creep….What the hell am I doin’ here/I don’t belong here (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).”  While Scott is trying to stake out a moderated form of interventionism.

Then there was some pushback in the comments–e.g. every dominant power seeks to mold the world in its image, create a sphere of influence, etc.  Which is true but not always true in the same way.  When Woodrow Wilson said he wanted to make the world “safe for democracy” he didn’t mean creating a bunch of democracies around the world but making the world environment safe for the then existing democracies.  That was certainly Wilson attempting to influence the larger world to the benefit of America and allies but not necessarily in such a way as to create a new standard whereby the world must be democratic or rather naively believe that if the whole of the world were to become so (or more foolishly even inevitably so given globalized economics) that we would be approaching some envisioned End of History.

Generally I find these discussions difficult because they tend to expand out rather broadly and generally (both geographically and historically) from the original issue in question.  When the conversation so generalizes it becomes difficult (for me anyway) to make heads or tails of it.  I mean sure, the US empire (if that is what you would like to call it) is superior in my mind to say a Nazi or Soviet-style one, but there’s a difference in my mind between saying that and then excusing horrible (imo) acts of the US during the 20th and 21st century.  The alternative may be worse but that doesn’t make the present good.

So I would like to go back instead to the country Scott originally referenced in this discussion (Iraq) and its current situation.  He wrote:

So given that Iraq had largely peaceful provincial elections this past weekend, in which voter turn out was much higher than in 2005, where a certain proportion of the seats up for grabs were allocated to women who ran in the election, and where no one seems to be disputing the results, let me propose a highly contingent hypothetical.

If this is a trend that continues and increasingly results in a lowering of violence that both adds to the stability of Iraq and enables American troops to come sooner rather than later, and if the democratic process in Iraq presents the conditions under which a greater degree of civil society is able to take greater hold better integrating Iraq into the global economy and thereby raising the general quality of life for Iraqis and imporiving the degree of stability in the region, would we not count that as a positive development for Iraq and the world generally?

As a bit of a counterpoint, there has been a curfew imposed in Anbar due to the elections and as Marc Lynch pointed out the real question is what happens if somebody wins and isn’t seated in the government.  So while I’m not necessarily arguing dark days ahead, I think this has to play itself out before judgments are really made as to success/failure.

In response to Scott’s idea of releasing the pressure/impediment valves via intervention and not confusing modernization with Westernization, where can Iraq in the near term realistically go politically?  I think getting a handle on that question will go some ways (perhaps a long ways) towards evaluating Scott’s proposal.  [Read more →]

Here’s a line of reasoning I simply can’t follow:

The Islamic world is nothing like the Western world.  We have few, if any, of the same values and virtually no historical commonality save our shared, centuries-old conflict with one another.  The Islamic world, by and large, has none of the laws or customs necessary to develop an organic democratic society the way Western nations have.  Therefore, the only way to achieve peace with the Islamic world is for them to adopt our notions of plurality, democracy, and humanism.  They won’t do this on their own because of their lack of shared values, and so it follows that we must intervene on their behalf to impose these values, and fashion democracies for them in our image.

This is the neoconservative philosophy, at least in regards to the middle east, in a proverbial nutshell.  One would think the fallacy here too apparent, and yet it has shaped much of our foreign policy in regards to the region for the past three decades.  The very fact that the Islamic world does not have a similar body of customs and laws, or a similar canon of shared values should disqualify it even as a potential for imposed democracy.  And if this is the only means by which we can ever achieve peace with the region, then it would follow that peace with the region is simply not possible since the region is inhospitable to such imposition.

In other words, the very premise for invading countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan in order to democratize them and thereby impose peace through war, is a false premise.

Of course, bound part and parcel to this philosophy is the notion that two democracies will never war against one another.  That democracies did in fact make war on one another during World War II seems to go unnoticed.  That democratically elected Hamas and democratic Israel are in a perpetual conflict also seems to go ignored, or white-washed with the mantra of terrorism.

In any case, I wonder constantly at the acrobatics involved in composing this sort of rhetoric.  If only the Muslim world would be more like us then we could all live in peace.  They’re nothing like us and never will be, so we have to foist it upon them.   Never mind the war this causes, because in the long run, contra to all historical evidence, the defeated and subdued peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan will shed their thousands of years of historical conditioning in favor of our happy, Western traditions, brought to them with all the compassion shock and awe can muster.

In another attempt at cynicism, let me postulate that we can do more to Westernize the Middle East with McDonald’s and television sitcoms than we’ll ever achieve through democracy promotion and war.  Whether that’s the part of our culture we ought to be exporting is another question entirely, but it certainly beats killing people.  Better fat and lazy than dead.

Scott, remarking on the improving conditions in Iraq, asks:

If this is a trend that continues and increasingly results in a lowering of violence that both adds to the stability of Iraq and enables American troops to come sooner rather than later, and if the democratic process in Iraq presents the conditions under which a greater degree of civil society is able to take greater hold better integrating Iraq into the global economy and thereby raising the general quality of life for Iraqis and imporiving the degree of stability in the region, would we not count that as a positive development for Iraq and the world generally?

The “world generally” is a rather broad statement.  Few things beyond air, water, shelter and food can be considered good for “the world generally.”   What’s good for one slice of the globe may not be good for another.  For instance, once upon a time Iraq was ruled over by a secular Sunni dictator–a cruel man, to be sure, but one who cared little for the Islamists, and less for his neighbor Iran–strategically in line with our own views.  Saddam Hussein may have posed some small threat to our ally, Israel, but hardly more than the Iranians.  Now, with the Sunnis in the minority, strategic ties to Iran have been strengthened, and the anti-American sentiment in the Middle East has not only grown, but been bolstered by an Iraq/Iran alliance.  Certainly when Scott implies that a stable Iraq is good for “the world” we can see that no part of the world will benefit more than Persia, a once near-isolated power in the region, its potential threat to the West dampened by its hostile neighbors.

Scott takes an “ends justify the means” approach when musing over this matter of Iraqi stability and democracy.  But prior to our invasion was that country not stable?  Was it any less stable than any other dictatorship in the Middle East, or the world at large?  Burma, Syria, Saudi Arabia, North Korea–these nations, and many more, stand ideologically opposed to the United States.  All pose some potential threat.  And yet each nation is basically stable, essentially contained at least to some degree by the world community, through economic sanctions, trade barriers, and other means.  Iraq was even more contained, its economy and livelihood even more isolated than any of these nations are today–a strategy that was arguably nearly as ill-guided as our current efforts, given the ensuing poverty of the Iraqi people and the oil-for-food scandal that enriched Hussein and others at the expense of the national well-being of the Iraqi people.

Brent Snowcroft remarked recently: “We are the well-wishers of all who seek freedom. We are the guarantors only of our own.”  This sense of American interest is never so black and white as many would like.  The Middle East is the source of much of our oil, a commodity that America is sadly quite dependent on.  A stable, oil-producing Mid-East is essential to the American interest.  However, American interest does not require that the Mid-East is also populated with ideologically similar States, or that any of our oil exporters govern as Democracies.  The world, and the Middle East, have gotten along just fine without Democracy for centuries.  Saudi Arabia, one of the least Democratic nations on Earth has done a perfectly acceptable job of supplying us with our oil for decades, and this trade relationship has also ensured that we have never once gone to war, neither State has attempted to topple the others’ Government or “change” its regime, and neither has bothered to implement their own vision of what’s best for the others’ people.

Unfortunately, our meddling in the region and our lack of understanding of the culture, has lead to some rogue elements within Saudi Arabia to declare Holy War on us.  Suddenly the pragmatic relationship of trade is replaced by two ideologically opposed forces waging a sort of indeterminable war against one another: on the one hand, Democracy, on the other Islamism.  Gone are the notions of national self-interest; gone is the de facto peace that healthy trade creates.  Just ideology and guns.

Scott claims that “responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution.”  Let us for a moment pretend that our vision of geopolitical evolution is not that of an American, but rather that of a fundamentalist Islamic leader, or perhaps of  the grand maestro of terror himself, Osama bin Laden.  Would these visions align with our own?  Would the stated impediments be the same?  Or consider the Soviet interventionism into Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  To the Russians, liberalism was the impediment to “the deeper forces of evolution.” [Read more →]

So given that Iraq had largely peaceful provincial elections this past weekend, in which voter turn out was much higher than in 2005, where a certain proportion of the seats up for grabs were allocated to women who ran in the election, and where no one seems to be disputing the results, let me propose a highly contingent hypothetical.

If this is a trend that continues and increasingly results in a lowering of violence that both adds to the stability of Iraq and enables American troops to come sooner rather than later, and if the democratic process in Iraq presents the conditions under which a greater degree of civil society is able to take greater hold better integrating Iraq into the global economy and thereby raising the general quality of life for Iraqis and imporiving the degree of stability in the region, would we not count that as a positive development for Iraq and the world generally?

Now, let me say that in posing that question I’m not intending to be an apologist for the Bush administration and its decision to invade Iraq. It remains clear that the decision was based on the manipulation of information and the public, that it was accompanied by significant infringements of civil liberties, that it has contributed to dire economic consequences, and that the most heinous interrogation techniques and treatment of enemy combatants have been utilized in the overall “war on terror”. There is much that has been wound up in the invasion of Iraq and the corresponding war on terror that is despicable and to be condemned.

However, some time ago I made an argument for a sort of developmentally based interventionism wherein said intervention should only seek to remove undue barriers to the development of nations,

To my mind, the key in formulating an acceptable approach to interventionism is to decouple notions of modernization and evolution from ideas of westernization. It seems relatively evident to me that cultures and nations do in fact go through a process of evolution: these entities are dynamic and change over time. I would also be willing to suggest that the deeper structures of that evolution are the same across cultures and nations – which is to say that cultural and national evolution is, in fact, a teleological affair: it has a directionality. But I’m also inclined to suggest that each unique instance of culture and nation will instantiate that evolution in different surface structures. The evolution of China will not look the same as the evolution of America, or India, for that matter–though the direction of their evolution will roughly approximate one another. It is in regard to these surface structures that I think we need to pay the most attention when talking about intervention.

The break from neoconservative interventionism, then, is a move away from remaking nations in one’s own image. Rather, responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution. I say unwarranted because, of course, there are challenges that any culture or nation will face in manifesting its own evolution. But it is also the case that there are often brutal and corrupt forces that stand in the way of such a natural evolution, often against the will and desires of peoples within those cultures and nations. Such impediments seem to stand out in terms of their overt use of force and suffering to impede an evolution against which they stand to lose power and influence.

While it is true that the Bush administration’s  foray into Iraq is perhaps a text book case of how not to do this, I have to wonder if the potential evolution of Iraq demonstrates that, even accidentally, such interventionism can achieve its end goal.