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Beyond Our Shores: Today's "conservative" foreign policy has an idealist agenda (Francis Fukuyama, December 24, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

American foreign policy has always been pulled in two directions, toward a realist defense of national security defined in relatively narrow terms, and toward an expansive sense of American purposes that rests directly on the exceptionalism of American institutions and the messianic belief in their universal applicability. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger represents the realist strain. The liberal internationalist tradition is represented not just by historical figures like Woodrow Wilson, founder of the League of Nations, but by more recent administrations, Republican and Democratic, that have helped found international institutions like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.

How can we characterize the post-Sept. 11 foreign policy of the Bush administration?

At first glance, it would obviously seem to be conservative-realist, insofar as it has focused on pursuit of American national security through prosecution of a war on terrorism. The administration has been at odds with many of its traditional allies over its refusal to participate in a string of international agreements and institutions, from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming to the International Criminal Court. After Sept. 11, it made clear that it was intent on a showdown with Iraq, bringing about "regime change" through the unilateral use of force if necessary. Although the administration eventually went through the U.N. to win a Security Council resolution mandating new inspections, there is clearly deep-seated distrust of international agencies that earns it a "conservative" label in the eyes of most observers.

But look again: Behind the emphasis on power, sovereignty and self-help, the Bush administration has articulated a not-so-hidden idealist agenda that is encapsulated in the term "regime change."

I'm a big fan of Mr. Fukuyama, who's interesting even when he's wrong, but this seems like one of those times he might be wrong, or at least sculpting a molehill. His basic point about the security-minded, often isolationist, Right vs. the do-gooding, internationalist, Left is a common enough point of departure for foreign policy analysis these days: see Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State and Walter Russell Mead's Special Providence. What seems to be missing here is a recognition that the United States in general, and conservatives in particular, were perfectly happy to withdraw back into splendid isolation after the Cold War and to allow the Middle East to fester in totalitarian squalor, until three thousand people got killed, just as America generally, and conservatives specifically, were content for the Europeans to slog it out in two world wars, until first the Huns (in WWI) and then the Japanese (in WWII) likewise made the mistake of attacking Americans or America. Similarly, at the end of WWII, we could not demobilize fast enough, even as the Iron Curtain descended around Eastern Europe. It was only fear over communist penetration of our own government and hysteria over nuclear weapons that made it possible to drag America into the Cold War.

But in all those cases, even though conservatives were often the most reluctant to get involved in the first place, once war began they were the most steadfast warriors. Indeed, by the end of Vietnam and then by the end of the Cold War itself, it was only conservatives who remained willing to fight on to victory. Nor have conservatives ever been conservative about the means they would use to prosecute these wars once we were provoked into them. It remains difficult to imagine that the world today is a better place because we failed to bomb Moscow after Berlin fell, or failed to nuke China and North Korea, or failed to depose Castro, or failed to carry the war to North Vietnam, or at least used the specter of nuclear weapons to blackmail all these folks (though one imagines that had we acted immediately in the mid-1940s few of the later regimes would have come to pass). The scary, nutty hawks in town have always been the conservatives and they've always been willing to go whole hog once war begins. The Wolfowitzs, Rumsfelds, etc. of today--mostly civilian Pentagon leaders--were the Le Mays and Pattons and McArthurs of yesterday--when combat command was still more prestigious that a cabinet job. So, I'm just not sure what unusual moment in history it is that Mr. Fukuyama thinks he divines here. On December 7th, 1941, Charles Lindbergh went from isolationist to supporter of "regime change" in the Axis powers: why should it come as a surprise to anyone that on September 11th, 2001, his successors too went from isolationists--profoundly indifferent about the Arab world--to supporters of regime change throughout the Middle East?

Samuel Johnson observed: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged..., it concentrates his mind wonderfully." So does the prospect that one may be blown up.

MORE:
-Wilson's Fourteen Points
-ESSAY: The Bush Manifesto (Joshua Muravchik, December 2002, Commentary)

[T]he United Nations has been an almost wholly feckless body throughout its 57 years, except for those rare occasions on which it has in effect subordinated itself to U.S. policy. It is difficult to imagine any other nation engaging in the kind of self-abnegation that has been demanded of the United States vis-a-vis the UN, least of all some of the nations most critical of American unilateralism. There is in fact ample reason to believe that this demand is itself motivated by nothing more than national egoism on the part of states that envy America's power or see themselves as rivals. As Fareed Zakaria has put it: "France and Russia have turned the United Nations into a stage from which to pursue naked self-interest. They have used multilateralism as a way to further unilateral policies." Nor would such American truckling do anything but harm to the causes of peace and human rights, causes that are upheld more consistently by the United States than by the United Nations.

More important than whether the United States acts unilaterally or multilaterally are the purposes for which it acts. And here we come to the most interesting and important, not to say astonishing, aspects of the Bush strategy, if also the ones that have been the most overlooked. For these add up to nothing less than the resurrection of a Wilsonian approach to U.S. foreign policy.

THE TERM Wilsonian is sometimes used to suggest an obtuse utopianism. But in its best construction it connotes both a sensitivity to moral considerations and an enlightened self-interest that links our own well-being to the state of the world around us.

However much the new national-security strategy may contemplate unilateral action, its aims are to promote the general good. "We do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage," the document declares. "We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom." And it adds: "the aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better."

Those who are suspicious of American motives will dismiss these pronouncements as self-serving. But they are a very far cry from the words of George Bush during the 2000 election campaign. When asked, "Have you formed any guiding principles for exercising [America's] enormous power?," the Republican presidential candidate replied: "The first question is what's in the best interests of the United States."

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 29, 2002 7:02 AM