To paraphrase Stalin: How many divisions does the UN have?
I read that article in the print paper on Saturday, and it’s excellent. Politicians always seem so - well, dumb and childish to me, it’s nice to see an advisor that actually has an intelligent grasp of what’s going on.
They are, as Kagan points out, internationalists to the core, displaying a thoroughly misplaced confidence in institutions that have a lengthy lineage of failure. The "reality" behind this is a very arguable limitation on the U.S. employment of force, an outlook that has achieved both currency and senescence with the developing events in Iraq. That intervention was, incidentally, a perfect example of Kagan's thesis: originally an international coalition with all the bells and bows of UN approval in 1991, it was, in execution, largely American in makeup. And because it was treated as a coalition it turned out that the Syrians, among others, exercised a veto power on continuing the offensive into Baghdad that cost the Iraqis and the world another dozen years of hell. Those are the hazards of a coalition consisting of entities with such dissimilar aims.
Bush the younger's great crime in the eyes of the internationalists was to fail to grant a similar veto power to the institutions he spent 14 dreary months trying to convince to support the finishing of the job. But in fact the institutions he was attempting to sway consist of entities with far more dissimilar aims than the situation in 1991. Given the money to be made under Oil For Food, the very institutions themselves were too corrupt to employ. These are the institutions and processes dear to the internationalist "realists," and one wonders precisely whence the touching faith? It is not, I think, so much a faith in the efficacy of the UN but a despair at the efficacy of U.S. power projection, typified by the "imperial overstretch" argument of yet another "realist" Paul Kennedy.
Either way it is clear that U.S. power projection has never pretended to be able to pluck Georgia from the Soviet sphere, for example, or to protect the Tibetans from the depradations of the Chinese. That isn't the game, and it is a bit disingenuous of the "realists" to pretend that it has become so. And just as clearly internationalist institutions aren't up to the job either. Moral suasion and "soft" power are wonderful public relations but they haven't any divisions, and Putin knows that as well as Stalin before him.
There will indeed be difficult times in the face of intractable autocrats, and nothing in the fall of the Soviet Union has changed that. It is a situation as old as history. Thucydides relates the very essence of realpolitik in his Melian Dialogue, and the only mistake the "realists" have made with respect to it is to misidentify the Athenians with the U.S. The Georgians know full well what it is to be a small state in the way of a larger neighbor's path to power. They have not altogether escaped the fate of Melos; Putin, for his part, would do well to recall the ultimate fate of imperial Athens.
Honest realists recognize both the limitations of finite power and the necessity to employ it judiciously in preventing the instabilities that are the inevitable results of the success of naked aggression. International institutions cannot replace it; they need it to survive, all the while cursing that reality as insufficiently moral, and detrimental to the illusion that soft power can succeed by itself. The wolf may be forced to negotiate with his prey but he certainly won't do so on his own. And because he has done so once does not make him any less a wolf.