The realist view held sway with Bush the Father:
The era began with the senior George Bush and a classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without Kissinger--although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe its vision--the New World Order--captured the core idea: an orderly world with orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.
The elder Mr. Bush had two enormous achievements to his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure of imagination...
Clinton and his entourage ushered in eight years of liberal internationalism, buoyed by the belief the post Communist world indeed was "the end of history" and that democracy had triumphed.
Liberal internationalism's one major achievement in those years--saving the Muslims in the Balkans and creating conditions for their possible peaceful integration into Europe--was achieved, ironically, in defiance of its own major principle. It lacked what liberal internationalists incessantly claim is the sine qua non of legitimacy: the approval of the U.N. Security Council.
Otherwise, the period between 1993 and 2001 was a waste, eight years of sleepwalking, of the absurd pursuit of one treaty more useless than the last, while the rising threat--Islamic terrorism--was treated as a problem of law enforcement. Perhaps the most symbolic moment occurred at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France in October 2000, after Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's peace offer at Camp David and instead launched his bloody second intifada. In Paris for another round of talks, Arafat abruptly broke off negotiations and was leaving the residence when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ran after him, chasing him in her heels on the cobblestone courtyard to induce him, to cajole him, into signing yet another worthless piece of paper.
The neoconservative view came to prominence with Bush the Son through, well, Divine Providence according to CK.
Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that he works in very mysterious ways.
In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. ...[I]ts most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."
The success [so far] of the neoconservative movement was a close thing; a child nearly stillborn if not for the re-election of George Bush and the subsequent successful elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. Krauthammer argues persuasively through the words of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt - no friend of Bush - that the Iraqi election could start for the Levant what Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech started for the Soviet Empire. [Natan Sharansky called it the most encouraging moment for dissidents in the Soviet Union.]
Krauthammer describes two schools of neoconservative foreign policy, that of democratic globalism vs. democratic realism.
The chief spokesman for democratic globalism is the president himself, and his second inaugural address is its ur-text. What is most breathtaking about it is not what most people found shocking--his announced goal of abolishing tyranny throughout the world. Granted, that is rather cosmic-sounding, but it is only an expression of direction and hope for, well, the end of time. What is most expansive is the pledge that America will stand with dissidents throughout the world, wherever they are.
This sort of talk immediately opens itself up to the accusation of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. After all, the United States retains cozy relations with autocracies of various stripes, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. Besides, if we place ourselves on the side of all dissidents everywhere, must we not declare our solidarity not only with democrats but with Islamist dissidents sitting in Pakistani, Egyptian, Saudi and Russian jails?
But we do not act this way, and we need not. The question of alliances with dictators, of deals with the devil, can be approached openly, forthrightly and without any need for defensiveness. The principle is that we cannot democratize the world overnight and, therefore, if we are sincere about the democratic project, we must proceed sequentially. Nor, out of a false equivalence, need we abandon democratic reformers in these autocracies. On the contrary, we have a duty to support them, even as we have a perfect moral right to distinguish between democrats on the one hand and totalitarians or jihadists on the other.
In other words why Iraq and not North Korea as tortured/indignant liberals ask. Because the opportunity presented itself and the correlation of forces was appropriate. Why not Saudi Arabia? Because the House of Saud is preferable for the moment to the House of Wahhabi.
One of Krauthammer's best insights is that the avatars of neoconservatism (Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld et.al) were all realists who found that realism was the right policy for the post-WWII period but one which would be ineffective against an Islamist foe who cannot effectively be deterred with the policies of containment.
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