FROM FREEDOM BACK TO FRENCH?:

Foreign Policy for a Democratic President (Samuel R. Berger, May/June 2004, Foreign Affairs)

The foreign policy debate in this year's presidential election is as much about means as it is about ends. Most Democrats agree with President Bush that the fight against terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) must be top global priorities, that the war in Afghanistan was necessary and just, and that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed a threat that needed to be dealt with in one form or another. Over time, moreover, the Bush administration has, at least rhetorically, embraced the Democrats' argument that to win the war on terrorism the United States must do more than destroy something bad; it must also construct something good, supporting other peoples' aspirations to live in freedom and peace and to conquer poverty and disease.

But the manner in which the Bush administration has advanced these goals has been driven by a radical set of convictions about how the United States should act on the world stage. Key strategists inside the administration appear to believe that in a chaotic world, U.S. power -- particularly military power -- is the only real force for advancing U.S. interests, that as long as the United States is feared it does not matter much if we are admired. These same people believe it is best to recruit temporary "coalitions of the willing" to back our foreign actions, because permanent alliances require too many compromises. They believe the United States is perforce a benign power with good intentions and therefore does not need to seek legitimacy from the approval of others. And they believe that international institutions and international law are nothing more than a trap set by weaker nations to constrain us.

These are not new ideas. During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, a hard-line faction of congressional Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, fought virtually every measure to build the postwar international order. They opposed NATO and the permanent deployment of U.S. troops in Europe, believing we should rely on the unilateral exercise of military power to defeat Soviet designs. They fought the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and turned against the un. And they disdained "one worlders" such as Eleanor Roosevelt for their support of international law. Taft Republicans were briefly dominant in the U.S. Congress (until the combined efforts of Democrats and internationalist Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower relegated them to the sidelines). But their radical world-view never drove policy in the executive branch -- until today.

The real "clash of civilizations" is taking place within Washington. Considering the open differences between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is even playing out within the Bush administration itself. It is not really a clash over discrete policy issues -- the merits of the war in Iraq, the costs of the Kyoto Protocol, or the level of spending on foreign aid, for example -- but between diametrically opposed conceptions of America's role in the world. It is a battle fought between liberal internationalists in both parties who believe that our strength is usually greatest when we work in concert with allies in defense of shared values and interests, versus those who seem to believe that the United States should go it alone -- or not go it at all.

Bush administration hard-liners have not been bashful about defining and defending their vision. In an election year, Democrats must also be clear about what they believe and about what they would do to advance U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic ideals, to restore our influence, standing, and ability to lead. Democrats must outline a foreign policy that not only sets the right goals, but also rebuilds America's capacity to achieve them. [...]

A posture of strength and resolve and a willingness to define clear terms and to impose consequences are clearly the right approach for dealing with our adversaries. But where the Bush administration has gone badly wrong is in applying its "with us or against us" philosophy to friends as well as foes. Put simply, our natural allies are much more likely to be persuaded by the power of American arguments than by the argument of American power. Democratically elected leaders -- whether in Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, or South Korea -- must sustain popular support for joint endeavors with the United States. When we work to convince them that the United States is using its strength for the common good, we enable them to stand with us. But when we compel them to serve our ends, we make it politically necessary, even advantageous, for them to resist us. It would have been hard to imagine a decade ago that leaders of Germany and South Korea -- two nations that owe their existence to the sacrifice of American blood -- would win elections by appealing to anti-Americanism. [...]

A Democratic administration will need to reaffirm the United States' willingness to use military power -- alone if necessary -- in defense of its vital interests. But it will have no more urgent task than to restore America's global moral and political authority, so that when we decide to act we can persuade others to join us. Achieving this reversal will require forging a new strategic bargain with our closest allies, particularly in Europe. To this end, Washington should begin with a simple statement of policy: that the United States will act in concert with its allies in meeting global threats as a first, not last, resort. When we ask our allies to join us in military action, or in nation-building efforts in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be ready to share not just the risks but also the decision-making. That is what we did when NATO went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo, and what the administration irresponsibly failed to do when NATO invoked its collective defense clause to offer aid to the United States in Afghanistan. The U.S. side of the bargain must also include a disciplined focus on our true global priorities, starting with the war on terrorism, undistracted by petty ideological disputes over issues such as Kyoto, the icc, and the biological weapons convention.

The Democratic approach to resolving disputes with Europe over treaties should be pragmatic, focused on improving flawed agreements rather than ripping them up. International law is not self-enforcing. It does not, by itself, solve anything. But when our goals are embodied in binding agreements, we can gain international support in enforcing them when they are violated. By the same token, nothing undermines U.S. authority more than the perception that the United States considers itself too powerful to be bound by the norms we preach to others.

What Mr. Berger seems oblivious to is that the internationalism he describes -- essentially a surrender of American sovereignty to transnational institutions and treaties -- is an end in itself, not just a means. And that end is to restrain American power and avoid conflict. The Europeans don't much care about fighting terrorism or bringing democracy to the Islamic world or depriving North Korea of nuclear weapons or any of a host of our goals, because all of these things are destabilizing, just as victory over Nazism and Communism destabilized the world.

Europeans are reasonably comfortable in their dotage and would like to be left alone to die in peace. What concern is it of theirs if the Muslim world is unfree, backwards, impoverished, and a breeding ground for radicalism? So long as totalitarian regimes have a reasonably firm grip on their populations, the worst that'll happen is a periodic bombing--hopefully aimed at the confrontational Americans, rather than the accommodationist Europeans.

That's all well and good for the Europeans--they aren't much use anymore anyway. But if we base our own foreign policy on keeping them happy then it seems obvious that we must act against our own interest and that of the people of the Middle East. You can't both satisfy Europe and transform Islam. So the difference between the foreign policy of George W. Bush and that of the Democrats is not a matter of means only but of ends.

MORE:
The Two World Orders (Jed Rubenfeld, Autumn 2003, Wilson Quarterly)

What’s the source of America’s growing unilateralism? The easy answer is self-interest: We act unilaterally to the extent that we see unilateralism as serving our interests. But the answer prompts a more searching question: Why do so many Americans view unilateralism this way, given the hostility it provokes, the costs it imposes, and the considerable risks it entails? Americans sometimes seem unilateralist almost by instinct, as if it were a matter of principle. Might it be?

It will not do to trace contemporary U.S. unilateralism to the 18th-century doctrine of isolationism, for unilateralism is a very different phenomenon. An isolationist country withdraws from the world, even when others call on it to become involved; a unilateralist country feels free to project itself—its power, its economy, its culture—throughout the world, even when others call on it to stop. Although there may still be a thread of isolationism in the United States today, unilateralism, the far more dominant trend, cannot usefully be derived from it.

The search for an explanation should begin instead at the end of World War II. In 1945, when victory was at hand and his own death only days away, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that the world’s task was to ensure “the end of the beginning of wars.” So Roosevelt called for a new system of international law and multilateral governance that would be designed to stop future wars before they began. Hence, the irony of America’s current position: More than any other country, the United States is responsible for the creation of the international law system it now resists.

The decisive period to understand, then, runs roughly from the end of the war to the present, years that witnessed the birth of a new international legal order, if not, as widely reported, the death of the Westphalian nation-state. America’s leadership in the new internationalism was, at the beginning, so strong that one might be tempted to see today’s U.S. unilateralism as a stunning about-face, an aberration even, which may yet subside before too much damage is done. But the hope that the United States will rediscover the multilateralism it once championed assumes that America and Europe were engaged in a common internationalist project after World War II. Was that in fact the case? [...]

At the risk of overgeneralization, we might say that for Europeans (that is, for those Europeans not joined to the Axis cause), World War II, in which almost 60 million people perished, exemplified the horrors of nationalism. Specifically and significantly, it exemplified the horrors of popular nationalism. Nazism and fascism were manifestations, however perverse, of popular sovereignty. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini rose to power initially through elections and democratic processes. Both claimed to speak for the people, not only before they assumed dictatorial powers but afterward, too, and both were broadly popular, as were their nationalism, militarism, repression, and, in Hitler’s case, genocidal objectives. From the postwar European point of view, the Allies’ victory was a victory against nationalism, against popular sovereignty, against demo-cratic excess.

The American experience of victory could not have differed more starkly. For Americans, winning the war was a victory for nationalism—that is to say, for our nation and our kind of nationalism. It was a victory for popular sovereignty (our popular sovereignty) and, most fundamentally, a victory for democracy (our democracy). Yes, the war held a lesson for Americans about the dangers of democracy, but the lesson was that the nations of continental Europe had proven themselves incapable of handling democracy when left to their own devices. If Europe was to develop democratically, it would need American tutelage. If Europe was to overcome its nationalist pathologies, it might have to become a United States of Europe. Certain European countries might even need to have democratic institutions imposed upon them, although it would be best if they adopted those institutions themselves, or at least persuaded themselves that they had done so.

These contrasting lessons shaped the divergent European and American experiences of the postwar boom in international political institutions and international law. For Europeans, the fundamental point of international law was to address the catastrophic problem of nationalism—to check national sovereignty, emphatically including national popular sovereignty. This remains the dominant European view today. The United Nations, the emerging European Union, and international law in general are expressly understood in Europe as constraints on nationalism and national sovereignty, the perils of which were made plain by the war. They are also understood, although more covertly, as restraints on democracy, at least in the sense that they place increasing power in the hands of international actors (bureaucrats, technocrats, diplomats, and judges) at a considerable remove from popular politics and popular will.

In America, the postwar internationalism had a very different meaning. Here, the point of international law could not ultimately be antidemocratic or antinationalist because the Allies’ victory had been a victory for democracy (American democracy) and for the nation (the American nation). America in the postwar period could not embrace an antinationalist, antidemocratic international order as Europe did. It needed a counterstory to tell itself about its role in promoting the new international order.

The counterstory was as follows: When founding the United Nations, writing the first conventions on international rights, creating constitutions for Germany and Japan, and promoting a United States of Europe, Americans were bestowing the gifts of American liberty, prosperity, and law, particularly American constitutional law, on the rest of the world. The “new” international human rights were to be nothing other than the fundamental guarantees made famous by the U.S. Constitution. Wasn’t America light-years ahead of continental Europe in the ways of democracy? International law would be, basically, American law made applicable to other nations, and the business of the new internationalism would be to transmit American principles to the rest of the world. So of course America could be the most enthusiastic supporter of the new international order. Why would it not support the project of making the world more American?

In the American imagination, then, the internationalism and multilateralism we promoted were for the rest of the world, not for us. What Europe would recognize as international law was law we already had. The notion that U.S. practices—such as capital punishment—held constitutional by our courts under our Bill of Rights might be said to violate international law was, from this point of view, not a conceptual possibility. Our willingness to promote and sign on to international law would be second to none—except when it came to any conventions that might require a change in U.S. domestic law or policy. The principal organs of U.S. foreign policy, including the State Department and, famously, the Senate, emphatically resisted the idea that international law could be a means of changing internal U.S. law. In the 1950s, the United States refused to join any of the major human-rights and antigenocide conventions. The rest of the world might need an American-modeled constitution, but we already had one.

What Mr. Berger and the Democrats seek is a world where we submit to Europe's vision rather than they to ours.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 28, 2004 9:01 AM