The Left and Realism

Nicholas Gvosdev, who I've quoted occasionally on this blog, is also a sometimes commenter here. He is also the editor of the National Interest, a realist foreign policy journal. According to Wikipedia, the Honorary Chairman of The National Interest is Henry Kissinger.

So there's two degrees between me and Henry Kissinger, a state of affairs I find bizarre and unsettling, given my belief that Kissinger belongs in prison. But that's basically where the left is at these days - espousing, in many places, the views of old realists like Kissinger or Scowcroft.

(My favourite Kissinger line is still his remark about the Iran-Iraq war: "It's too bad there isn't a way they could both lose.")

So do I find myself now talking in a raspy baritone, negotiating the Paris peace treaty, and advocating the aerial destruction of Cambodia? Not really, because while I appreciate and use the realist viewpoint to criticize Republican foreign policy, my core beliefs are still informed by liberals.

Probably my most basic belief when it comes to matters of war and peace still comes from Norman Angell, who wrote in the opening years of the 20th century that anyone who thought that war could gain a victorious nation wealth and power was suffering from "The Grand Illusion." In the modern era, wars are so ruinously expensive - even for the victors - that they are fundamentally irrational.

While Angell was a liberal - actually, his career in some ways resembles that of Thomas Friedman - that simple fact is neither liberal nor realist, it simply is.

Now, I'm not a particularly rigorous academic (I got my diploma, leave me alone!) so I'm free to take liberties with theory and writings that a serious professor of International Relations never would. So I can believe that Angell is right, but nevertheless think that the realists, especially the neorealists (Ken Waltz, etc.) also have some fundamental insights that liberals can't ignore.

(One of the best papers I ever wrote for school used Dale Copeland's [neorealist] theory of war and applied it to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.)

Matt adds that there's a fundamental - and crucial - difference between liberalism and Bush's nominal advocacy for human rights:

Countries rarely if ever flout the international community in a self-conscious effort to promote injustice. Indeed, national leaders during the high tide of colonialism invariably cited humanitarian rationales for imperial conquest. Whether these politicians were fully sincere is hard to assess "since one can't probe the minds of dead leaders and people's psychological motives are usually mixed. Yet certainly their writings indicate that they believed themselves to be sincere." The relevant policy question is whether or not one is willing to accept meaningful constraints on American power. Inserting a "peace, freedom, or justice" exemption to the need to "stand with the international community" is just to say that one will not. [emphasis mine.]

That distinction - whether or not you accept that America's will should be limited - is crucial, and once again I would say it is neither liberal nor realist, it just is. Andrew Bacevich (in the pages of the National Interest!) once wrote that there was almost nobody in Washington who saw fault with the idea that America should run the world, forever. Republicans and Democrats alike both find this idea to be common-sense, if they think about it at all.

But the mark of real liberals (in the international relations sense of the word) is exactly the opposite - people willing to accept serious limitations on their power, as Matt says. And this is where liberalism and realism actually do come in to conflict, or at least they have in the past. Realists generally don't talk about nations self-limiting their power.

But in this day and age, where military victories are difficult-to-non-existent, maybe it's time to make the realist argument for multilateralism. After all, we see both the US and Israel regularly appealing to the UN, NATO, or even the Arab nations for help in Iraq or Lebanon. In this sense, organizations like the UN are "force multipliers" for maintaining order in the international arena.

The old liberal argument - as far back as the League of Nations - is that a preponderance of power (all nations acting in concert) will keep the peace better than the balance of power (a bunch of roughly-equal powers, for example Europe circa 1913.) I don't know what a realist reformulation of this would be, but I think we could use one.

Domestically, the debate seems to be that the Democrats need a "serious" foreign policy to resond to the Republicans. Apparently "the Iraq war was a fuckup from beginning to end" doesn't cut it. If there is a need for a new foreign policy, going back to Clintonism would be a good start. It would not, I fear, be enough in the long run. We need to start preparing the ground for American leaders - and American voters - to accept the fact that America will not run the world forever. And every disastrous, illegal war brings that day closer, not further.