Rules of the Road

By PeterBeinart

Jul 14th, 2008 at 10:53 pm EDT

As I think I’ve said a couple of times now, I don’t support the League of Democracies because I think its benefit in facilitating necessary humanitarian interventions would be minimal, given the opposition to such intervention among many developing democracies. And it would be seen in Moscow and Beijing as a vehicle for a strategy of containment, if not rollback. That would undermine the potential for cooperation between the democratic and authoritarian great powers, cooperation that is vital for solving common threats, while sparking a potentially dangerous and costly new cold war. The original cold war was, at best, a necessarily evil, and there’s no reason to be fatalistic (or worse enthusiastic) about a new one, especially given that neither China or Russia are totalitarian powers, and thus George Kennan’s central argument for why cooperation with the USSR was impossible in the short-term (because totalitarian regimes need external enemies to survive) doesn’t necessarily hold.

The reason I keep amending your characterization of the League’s supporters is because you keep mischaracterizing their views. The League is not a vehicle for unilateralism, nor does supporting it imply opposition to all constraints on American military intervention. Indeed, I suspect that the constraints on US intervention imposed by the League would be quite significant: just think how hard it would be to get India or South Africa or Indonesia to back coercive, non-UN authorized military intervention in the third world. I’m not correcting your characterizations because I’m in favor of the League, but because I’m in favor of honestly depicting the views of those with whom one disagrees.

I think your suggestions of guidelines for military intervention are useful, but pose some problems. You say that in the name of collective self-defense, we should be able to go to the aid of an ally under attack. But, of course, not all allies are well-chosen. In the 1950s, John Foster Dulles went around creating mini-NATOs in South and East Asia that formally obligated the US to defend, among other places, South Vietnam. So it’s probably too broad to say the US should go to war to protect every nation with whom we have signed a mutual defense pact. The security of that ally has to be important to our own security, or else there has to be some particularly important moral obligation, of the kind we would feel towards a fellow democracy threatened by tyrannical neighbors. (Again, we’re talking about defensive military action here, not regime change).

I’m with you on the importance of UN peacekeeping, but this only applies to countries in which peace deals have already been signed. I think the UN does that well. Sending blue helmets into countries where there is no peace to keep, by contrast, is usually a serious mistake–as we learned in Bosnia.

Your suggestion of a sphere of influence model, in which we get to intervene in our backyard, and permit Russia and China to do the same, has a good liberal pedigree. It’s an updated version of the “Four Policemen” vision that animated FDR after World War II. But I’m not sure it’s applicable to the world in which we currently live. Right now, although we have something of a sphere ourselves in Latin America (and the moral basis for that is certainly questionable), we don’t permit our rivals one in their regions. To do would mean a dramatic contraction of US power in East Asia, and a green light for Beijing to wage war in Taiwan, the Philippines, or anywhere else in East Asia–as the price for our intervention in the Western Hemisphere. And since Japan would surely seek to deny China that sphere (as China sought to deny it to Japan in the 1930s), the result would probably be less peace and more war. The same goes for the former USSR, where we would presumably have to retract our NATO obligations to the Baltic States. It’s even harder to know which “policemen” would patrol the Middle East or Africa, though I suspect Iran would be happy to sign up in the Persian Gulf. In a sense, you could say we gave the European sphere of influence idea a try in the early 1990s, when the Bush I and Clinton administrations said that the Balkans were a European problem the Europeans were obligated to solve. That didn’t work out very well.

I don’t think I remotely said that “we’ll intervene whenever we want to but we promise it will only be for good humanitarian reasons and no Russia and China don’t get to follow this rule.” My standard for non-UN sanctioned military interventions would be that we should do them 1) to protect the US homeland or large numbers of Americans living abroad. 2) When key allies are threatened, meaning allies whose defeat would threaten our security OR democratic allies faced with clear aggression from their neighbors, 3) to protect people from genocide (if at all possible in conjunction with NATO or some regional organization) when circumstances make that feasible and where it does not threaten the core security concerns of another great power. Thus, I wouldn’t do it in Chechnya, even were there a moral rationale, because it would court military conflict with Russia, and I wouldn’t do it in North Korea, because it might spark conflict with China (it did once before, after all).

In other words, I’m not saying we get to intervene “whenever we want.” These principles would have ruled out Iraq, Panama, Grenada, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and CIA coups against Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende and others. And I’m not saying that interventions will be only for “good humanitarian reasons”–sometimes they may be for quite realist ones.

These principles won’t thrill the regimes in Beijing or Moscow. The Russians would surely prefer it we didn’t defend Lithuania, just as the Chinese would prefer we not defend Taiwan. And the Russians would have preferred we not bomb their traditional ally, Serbia. But global cooperation doesn’t require complete harmony, which is impossible, just some deference to the core interests of other states. By ruling out non-UN authorized regime change or humanitarian intervention in places like North Korea or Chechnya, which Moscow and Beijing see as vital to their own security, I think these principles do that. They are compatible with an aggressive bid to revitalize collective security institutions aimed at combating universal threats.

No principles are full-proof, of course. As Kennan said, foreign policy isn’t engineering; it’s gardening. You’re dealing with organic material, which doesn’t always conform to abstract principles. But you need some rules of the road none the less, and these are mine.

This is my final post. I’ll give you the last word.

Killing Babies

By MatthewYglesias

Jul 14th, 2008 at 4:22 pm EDT

The beginning of wisdom on the issue of when to use military force without a UN Security Council authorization is those cases that the UN Charter itself lays out — cases of individual or collective self-defense, which I take to mean cases where the United States or one of our allies is attacked. Those cases — and the deterrence that comes from the implicit threat of action in those cases — are at the core of the mission of the United States military.

Beyond that, one of the best uses for our resources is traditional “blue helmet” UN peacekeeping missions. These are an unduly neglected (as I believe you pointed out once in an excellent column that went missing somewhere in the TNR archives) area in which the United States can and should do more.

Beyond that, I think the question is less one of particular cases than of whether we can come up with some kind of viable rules of the road for the international system as a whole. One could imagine a system of informally delineated spheres of influence wherein the U.S. and China have a tacit understanding that intervention in Panama isn’t a precedent for intervention on China’s borders. Or a more formal system based around regional security organizations, where the U.S. might partner with African nations to do something on that continent under A.U. auspices kinda sorta along the lines of Kosovo.

Both of those options have their unsatisfactory elements and, of course, one’s hope would be to work over time with Russia and China (and also developing democracies like India and South Africa who tend to see everything through the lens of imperialism) toward a broader understanding of the circumstances under which UN intervention might be authorized.

But to flip this around, our dialogue has left me a bit unclear on where you stand. Formally, you’re against the League of Democracies proposal, but seem more interested in standing up for its proponents than to standing up for the need for universal institutions. Beyond that, what sort of institutional constraints do you think we should follow? If we want to avoid a renewed era of great power conflict, as I think we agree we should, then I don’t think “well, we’ll intervene whenever we want to but we promise it will only be for good humanitarian reasons and no Russia and China don’t get to follow this rule” is going to fly in Beijing.

Babies and Bathwater

By PeterBeinart

Jul 13th, 2008 at 11:12 pm EDT

Matt,

I applaud your baby-killing instincts. You’re right, embracing collective security does require uncomfortable restraints on American power, restraints that might prevent us from doing things that most liberals would consider morally worthwhile or strategically advantageous. It’s too easy to imagine that one can develop a doctrine that prevents all bad military interventions and allows all good ones: in the real world, you have to err on one side or the other. You’re willing to throw out “some baby”–meaning some worthwhile military interventions–to make drain the bathwater of Iraq. Now you just have to say which ones.

I still think you’re being unfair to the League of Democracies folks when you accuse them of wanting “to avoid any real institutional constraints on the deployment of American military power.” In Kosovo, NATO did impose real constraints, constraints the Bush administration was determined never to permit again. Kosovo is the model for many liberal League of Democracies types. And in fact, if the League ever did sanction a military intervention, it would probably impose even greater restraints than NATO did in Kosovo, because it would include post-colonial countries with a greater attachment to sovereignty. So you’re not being fair to the Slaughters and Daalders of the world when you suggest that they have essentially the same view on this as Dick Cheney.

But the more important point goes back to that bathtub: Which of the post-cold war babies do you want to throw out: Panama, Bosnia or Kosovo? (Ironically, I think the less successful interventions–in Somalia and Haiti–enjoyed greater UN support, as did the Gulf War, of course). If you believe all US military interventions require UN Security Council backing, then you must ditch them all. And you’re also foreclosing various hypothetical future interventions. Would you really be comfortable if the US sat back and allowed genocide in Central America or the Caribbean, where we could intervene relatively easily (and maybe even get OAS support) because some dictator had a cozy financial relationship with Beijing? Or, on the more realist side, would you permit an anti-American regime to shut down the Panama Canal? What if China threatened Japan, South Korea or Australia, countries we have treaty obligations to defend? We wouldn’t get UN support for that either.

Even Howard Dean said he would act unilaterally to prevent genocide. Obviously, one doesn’t want to act unilaterally (or even multilaterally outside the UN framework) if one doesn’t have to. And in some–perhaps most–cases, one might not act for purely prudential reasons: the circumstances make intervention too hard. But I wouldn’t throw that baby out a priori.

I’d also reserve the right to act if an American ally were threatened or if there were a grave threat to the American homeland or to the lives of significant numbers of Americans abroad. For instance, I wouldn’t have had any problem with a military operation against Iran when they were holding US hostages–even if the UN or some other international body disapproved–if there had been a realistic chance that such a strike could have gotten them out sooner. (As it turned out, there was no such chance). Similarly, I don’t have a problem in principle with Clinton’s retaliation for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, even if in practice the Sudan target was badly chosen.

Under my standard, we’d still have done Bosnia and Kosovo. (And it’s worth noting that a failed, morally hideous UN intervention like UNPROFOR, which forces peacekeepers to watch as Serbs herd Bosnians into concentration camps, doesn’t do a lot for the institution’s reputation). But we might not have done Panama, since there was no genocide and no real threat to American security or to a significant number of Americans. That’s the baby I’d sacrifice in return for a set of norms that clearly rules out Iraq, even though the Panama invasion almost certainly made Panama a better place.

Where do you come out?

Best,

Peter

The Past is a Foreign Country

By MatthewYglesias

Jul 10th, 2008 at 10:38 pm EDT

Remember the nineties, you say. And it was just this morning that I was reminiscing about Garbage — one of the great nineties alt-rock bands. More seriously, your point about the real successes of 90s-vintage interventionism is well taken. But this is, in part, my point. There are more disagreements within the liberal camp than those motivated purely by politics. In particular, there’s a strong desire among many liberals to avoid any real institutional constraints on the deployment of American military power precisely because they think that to accept such constraints would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I sympathize with this point of view and I certainly sympathized very strongly with it back in 2002 and 2003 when, I think, an unduly strong level of sympathy for this perspective let all-too-many people to embrace Bush’s war in Iraq.

But beyond Iraq, over the past several years I’ve come to the view that some baby really does need to be thrown out. What a lot of folks seem to want, it seems to me, is to secure the gains of an approach focused on collective security without paying any price. But some kind of price really does have to be paid in terms of accepting some constraints on American freedom of action. The League of Democracies set on the left aren’t bad people (they’re nice people!) but a bad idea is still a bad idea even when advanced with good intentions.

Most of all, with respect to Barack Obama I hope that he and his team won’t spend too much time remembering the nineties. I worry that many of the people who were involved in nineties foreign policymaking don’t fully grasp that we can’t just turn back time and restart things where they were — the United States is going to have to commit itself to the “collective” part of “collective security” more rigorously than might have been necessary had the Iraq fiasco never happened.

Remembering the 1990s

By Peter Beinart

Jul 10th, 2008 at 12:38 pm EDT

Matt,

It’s true that in my World Affairs essay I don’t delve into why my views have changed over the past few years. Autobiographical writing is a tricky thing, and although Norman Podhoretz has written four autobiographies charting his intellectual transition, I suspect no one is terribly interested in mine. I’ve written a little about my changing responses to Iraq, and I may return to the subject. But to be honest about it requires going into fairly personal things, the kind of things one should write about only sparingly. If I’m not mistaken, you also initially supported the Iraq War. I’d probably be interested in reading about why, but I suspect most people are more interested in why you believe what you believe now.

I agree that there are important intellectual differences among liberals underneath the political ones, but I think you overstate things when you say that “an effort to use unilateral American power to impose American values on the world is, no matter how well-intentioned, every bit as doomed as an effort to use unilateral military power to impose anything else would be.”

I’m not a fan of the League of Democracies, but to be fair to its proponents, they back it precisely because they want to avoid unilateral military interventions. You can’t understand people like Daalder and Cohen without understanding how deeply they–and a whole generation of liberals, including myself–were shaped by the Balkan debates. I think we should invest more effort in making the UN a workable tool of US foreign policy, but the UN was a disaster in Bosnia. Cohen and Daalder both have books on this subject. It was NATO, and the US violation of a UN embargo–allowing us to help arm the Croats and Bosnians–that saved Bosnia. (To understand Cohen’s line about Holbrooke, you have to understand that it was Holbrooke’s almost Cheney-like aggressiveness that got the deal at Dayton. Had they sent a gentler person, who had done more genuine consulting and less hardball arm-twisting, the war would have gone on). Kosovo was done without a UN resolution.

The League of Democracies is a way to expand the Balkans model outside of Europe, recognizing that NATO has too European a face. I don’t think it will work, because i think (and this is really a more conservative than liberal insight) that culture and tradition matter, not just regime type, and that we can’t possibly get South Africa and India to back a Kosovo-style intervention in the developing world.

But to be fair to the Slaughters and Daalders of the world, they’re not proposing unilateral intervention to promote our values. And are you really sure you want to categorically rule out even unilateral intervention? Sure, it’s a very dangerous thing, to be done extremely sparingly. But Panama was unilateral. It was condemned by I think every country in the OAS. It wasn’t mostly about democracy; it mostly about the politics of drugs, strangely. But it did overthrow a nasty dictator and install a guy who had won a democratic election. And the Panamians were happy about it. Haiti didn’t work out as well, but it was pretty unilateral too, as I recall. I’m not sure the Clintonites were wrong to reinstall Aristide essentially by force.

Overall, I think we largely agree: the institutions of global cooperation are very important. And we should to avoid new balance of power alliances (which is what the League of Democracies would be, if it became something real). But in your zeal to distinguish liberalism from neoconservatism, be careful not to put things so broadly that you rule out out the successes of the 90s as well as the disasters that have followed.

Best,

Peter

Not Just Politics

By MatthewYglesias

Jul 10th, 2008 at 11:10 am EDT

Peter: I was a little disappointed when I read your World Affairs essay earlier this week because, lo and behold, I think we may not disagree very much anymore. Which is of course another way of saying that I think the essay is extremely insightful. As long as we’re plugging stuff, I should obviously mention my book, Heads in the Sand (a Progressive Book Club selection) where I advocate a renewed commitment to liberal internationalism, precisely the collective security aspect of the Wilsonian legacy that you identify as so vitally important.

One thing I was puzzled by in your essay, however, was its lack of engagement with views you’d expressed in the past, both in The Good Fight and before that during your New Republic days. These days, you seem to implicitly believe that the only thing holding Democrats back from sound opinions is political fear. But while I certainly think political timidity is a real problem (and to some extent a self-fulfilling prophesy since timid, unconfident politicians really do look weak and lose elections), I always took it that a lot of people who would consider themselves Democrats just disagreed on the merits with the emphasis on institutions and process that a real commitment to collective security requires.

In particular, back in the day you noted that there was a substantial divide between the views of the Democratic Party’s liberal base and those of its national security elite, quoting with approval Paul Starobin as saying “Kerry and his foreign-policy advisers are not doves. They are liberal war hawks who would be unafraid to use American power to promote their values.” I think that charactierization of the situation was (and is) quite right, but I think the underlying ideas are pretty wrongheaded. Our values are excellent things, of course, but an effort to use unilateral military power to impose American values on the world is, no matter how well-intentioned, every bit as doomed as an effort to use unilateral military power to impose anything else would be.

It was about a month ago that we had former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright musing that it was unfortunate that post-Iraq public opinion doesn’t seem amenable to an invasion of Burma. And this morning I read Roger Cohen in the same paper urging that Barack Obama needs a bit more Richard Holbrooke on his national security team, the same Holbrooke who’s big critique of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq was that they were too eager to seek UN authorization before invading.

I don’t think this kind of thing is just about political opportunism. Rather, I see a relatively narrow, but disproportionately powerful, spectrum of thought within the Democratic Party that has something of a neocon-lite attitude toward Wilsonian values. You correctly critique John McCain’s embrace of the League of Democracies concept, but this is an idea that’s gained a lot of support from left-of-center elites endorsed by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Ivo Daalder, James Lindsay, and others. So beyond confronting fear and the Republican Party, I think that steering a sound course in difficult times requires a rejection on the merits of ideas that are dear to many influential Democrats.

Starting things off

By Peter Beinart

Jul 10th, 2008 at 10:18 am EDT

Matt,

I guess I’m supposed to start, so here goes. My own foreign policy views–like those of a lot of people–have shifted in recent years in response to the disasters of the Bush era. I not only see foreign policy differently, I see the politics of foreign policy differently as well. I try to spell this out in the most recent issue of World Affairs, and in a related Washington Post oped, and because no piece of writing should go unflacked (but also because it might help start our conversation), I thought I’d briefly recapitulate the argument.

On the politics of foreign policy, I think the era of liberal vulnerability may be over. People usually date it from Vietnam, but the vulnerability really starts earlier, with the red scare of the early 1950s, prompted by the communist victory in China, the Soviet atomic test, the Alger Hiss spy scandal (which fueled accusations of a Democratic betrayal at Yalta) and the Korean War. Long before John Kerry or even George McGovern, Democrats like Helen Gahagan Douglass saw their careers ruined by claims that they were soft on national security.

Since then, every time foreign policy has hurt Democrats, one of two factors has been at work. The first is a rising perception of foreign threat. Since they generally see the world as less Hobbesian, and more amenable to cooperation, liberals are politically vulnerable when the world seems particularly dangerous. That was the dynamic in the red-baiting midterm election of 1950, and in 1980, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis helped destroy Jimmy Carter, and in 2004, an election fought in the shadow of 9/11. But it’s not the case today. Today, Americans are a lot less afraid than they were even four years ago, mostly because there has been no second terrorist attack on US soil. In that way, 2008 is more like 1976–when détente and the end of Vietnam eased public fears about the communist threat–or even 1992, after the cold war. And in those elections, foreign policy didn’t hurt Democrats much at all.

The second–and more important–factor that killed Democrats in past elections was the sensitivity of Republican candidates to public opinion. Listening to contemporary debates, one would think hawkishness is always a recipe for political success. But that’s emphatically not what Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan believed. Eisenhower was seen as a strong figure on national security because of wartime leadership, but he won the 1952 election by promising to go to Korea to end the war. Nixon in 1968 promised to end the war in Vietnam, and withdrew almost all ground troops by 1972. Reagan’s advisors got him to liquidate his Lebanon peacekeeping mission (his most significant overseas troop deployment) and to abandon his harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric in the run-up to his reelection campaign in 1984. I don’t think people have sufficiently focused on how historically unusual Bush’s surge decision was. Every other post-war Republican president, in the face of unpopular military interventions, has liquidated them while simultaneously calling Democrats weak. They isolated Democrats on the left while hugging the center. Bush and McCain have fundamentally broken with that tried and true strategy for Republican success.

That’s the politics. It’s why I don’t think Obama is very vulnerable on foreign policy. He’s liberated in a way that I don’t think Carter in 1980, or Kerry in 2004, was. But in a way, it’s a little scary for Democrats to be politically liberated on foreign policy, since it invites the kind of first principle conversation that, in my experience, is usually smothered by the sense that if Democrats really did talk first principles, they’d get creamed.

In my book, The Good Fight, I stress anti-totalitarianism as a central feature of the cold war liberal foreign policy tradition. (One can even date it earlier, if you look at the debate among American progressives over the Soviet Union from the late teens through the 1930s). I still think that. But in the years since I wrote the book, I’ve come to believe that while anti-totalitarianism is an important intellectual and moral framework for battling salafist-jihadist terrorism, it’s insufficient, since jihadist terrorism simply isn’t the overriding foreign policy challenge of our time. It can’t serve the same function that anti-communism did. (Even anti-communism was problematic from the beginning, of course, and highly problematic after the Sino-Soviet split, but it was particularly valuable during the Stalin years, and retained some value even after that). The rise of global warming as a threat, plus the inability of Al Qaeda to replicate–and surpass–9/11 makes it much harder to see jihadist terrorism as even first among equals on the foreign policy landscape.

Given that, I argue in the World Affairs article that Woodrow Wilson’s concept of collective security represents a broader liberal foreign policy vision. Collective security, as Wilson understood it, requires seeing America’s foreign policy interests as deeply intertwined with those of all other nations, not just our allies. It requires seeing national security as less zero sum than realists (and contemporary American conservatives) do. And it stresses the importance of cooperation against common threats, through international institutions and international law. Wilson was not unconcerned with regime type: in that way, someone like Robert Kagan is a Wilsonian. But unlike Kagan, or the more Wilsonian Reaganites and Bushies, Wilson did not want to use democracy as a weapon in a struggle of us (the democratic nations) versus them (the authoritarian ones). He believed in the possibility of a universal global community, with all nations banding together against the common threat of war.

It strikes me that some of today’s threats–global warming, pandemic disease and international financial collapse–lend themselves better to a collective security vision than one state invading another, which was the common threat that occupied Wilson. Global warming really can’t be understood in realist, security-dilemma, zero-sum, balance-of-power terms.

In its purest form, collective security–which requires building all sorts of common institutions of global cooperation–can never be fully realized. But even if only partially realized, as it was in the 1940s through institutions like the UN, IMF, World Bank and GATT, (I’d even include the Marshall Plan, which we offered to the Eastern Bloc countries) or in the 1970s through the Helsinki Accords, which bound the Eastern bloc to human rights pledges that empowered dissidents, the benefits are enormous. Collective security is much harder in an era of intense great power conflict. It has been most successful when the United States is politically-militarily engaged in the world (as it wasn’t in the 1920s and 1930s) and when great power hostility is relatively low, as it was between 1945 and 1947, or in the early 1990s, when the UN authorized the Gulf War.

I think one of the important challenges for liberals in the upcoming years will be to argue that great power conflict (with China and Russia) is not inevitable, and would be a great tragedy, since it would imperil efforts at global cooperation against common threats. It is enormously significant that Kagan–by far, in my mind, the most important and talented conservative foreign policy thinker of the post-cold war era–is now arguing that the new focus of American foreign policy should be leadership of a united democratic bloc against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia. It’s a return to pre-9/11 conservative foreign policy, when China was the key enemy. Motivated by a strong Cold War nostalgia, it seems likely that conservatives will spent the coming years arguing that a new great power showdown is inevitable, and attacking liberals for not preparing sufficiently to fight it. They may reassemble a version of the conservative cold war coalition: with realists signing up to battle China because it’s a great power and neoconservatives signing up to battle China because it’s authoritarian. Obviously, there are many foreign policy battles left to fight over the Middle East, but I wonder if perhaps they aren’t all warm-up for the China and Russia struggle, for which Kagan has now rung the opening bell. (Or re-rung it, since it was his and William Kristol’s major focus in the late 1990s).

Collective Security is my effort at a liberal alternative, and I think today’s politics would permit it. But I’ve been wrong before.

Best,

Peter