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The War Against World War IV - Norman Podhoretz
A Second-Term Retreat?
Will George W. Bush spend the next few years backing down from the ambitious strategy he outlined in the Bush Doctrine for fighting and winning World War IV?
To be sure, Bush himself still calls it the "war on terrorism," and has shied away from giving the name World War IV to the great conflict into which we were plunged by 9/11. (World War III, in this accounting, was the cold war.) Yet he has never hesitated to compare the fight against radical Islamism, and the forces nurturing and arming it, with those earlier struggles against Nazism and Communism. Nor has he flinched from suggesting that achieving victory as the Bush Doctrine defines it may take as long as it took to win World War III (which lasted more than four decades—from the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989).
Even more than the Truman Doctrine in its time, the Bush Doctrine was subjected to a ferocious assault by domestic opponents from the moment it was enunciated. Then, when Bush actually started acting on it, the ferocity grew even more intense, finally reaching record levels of vituperation during the presidential campaign. But in defiance of everything that was being thrown at him, and in spite of setbacks in Iraq that posed a serious threat to his reelection, Bush never yielded an inch. Instead of scurrying for protective cover from the assault, he stood out in the open and countered by reaffirming his belief in the soundness of the doctrine as well as his firm intention to stick with it in the years ahead.
Thus, over and over again he said that he would stay the course in Iraq; that he would go on working for the spread of liberty throughout the greater Middle East (and democratic reform as a condition for the establishment of a Palestinian state); that he would continue reserving the right to take preemptive military action against what in his best judgment were gathering dangers to the security of this country; and that he would if necessary do so unilaterally.
Why then, given that he was reelected on this pledge, should a question now be raised about whether he will keep it? And why—more strangely still—should the answer most often be that he is indeed about to renege?
Because, comes the response, whether he likes it or not, and whether he intends to or not, he will simply have no other choice. Either his resolve will be sapped by the knowledge that he lacks the necessary political support to push any further ahead with the Bush Doctrine; or he will be prevented by a certain "law" of democratic politics governing Presidents who win a second term; or he will (as Irving Kristol famously said of liberals who turned into neoconservatives) be mugged by reality.
War and Moral Values
The notion that the Bush Doctrine lacks solid political backing derives from the widely publicized National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll. According to this poll, more voters (22 percent of the sample) were motivated primarily by a concern with moral values than by anything else, and it was among these voters that Bush did best against his Democratic opponent John F. Kerry; and while he also won overwhelmingly among the smaller group (19 percent) who were mainly worried about terrorism, he lost by a correspondingly large margin with the still smaller proportion (15 percent) who chose Iraq as their paramount concern.
Not surprisingly, the President’s liberal opponents have interpreted this poll to mean that the election did not constitute a ratification of the Bush Doctrine. This is why they have been only too happy to second the claim pressed by spokesmen for various groups on the religious Right that Bush won because of the "faith factor" and the mobilization of the faithful around "family issues, including marriage [and] life."
As it happens, a few commentators associated with the religious Right are themselves opposed to the Bush Doctrine, which gives them, too, an incentive for minimizing its role in the President’s victory. But even those religious conservatives who support the Bush Doctrine have inadvertently played into the hands of his antagonists, both domestic and foreign. That is, by claiming the lion’s share of credit for November 2, they have made it a little easier for the antiwar forces to deny that the election held on that day was a referendum on the Bush Doctrine, and that it has the wind of a solid majority of the American people behind it.
Yet for all its intensity, this entire debate over the relative importance of moral values and the Bush Doctrine may stem from a complete misreading of the polls. For it is not in the least self-evident that the vague category of moral values was taken by the people who participated in the NEP survey merely as embracing abortion and gay marriage alone. On the contrary: in all probability they understood it more broadly to mean the traditionalist culture in general.
Recently the novelist (and former Secretary of the Navy) James Webb has been arguing, convincingly, that this traditionalist culture is rooted in and still fed by the Scots-Irish ethnic group that comprises a very large proportion of the population of the "red" states. It is a group, he writes, whose members are "family-oriented"; they "measure leaders by their personal strength and values"; they "have a 2,000-year-old military tradition"; and they "are deeply patriotic, having consistently supported every war America has fought, and [are] intensely opposed to gun control."
Looked at in this light, what the NEP poll reveals is that the "moral values" voters were in effect endorsing the very qualities needed in a wartime leader. Bush would therefore be justified in concluding (as I strongly suspect he has done) that these voters should be added to, and not posed against, the big percentage that supported him on the issue of terrorism. He would be equally justified in inferring that antiwar zealots must have been heavily represented among the 15 percent for whom Iraq was the burning issue, and that this (along with the relentlessly negative media coverage of the battle there) explained why he lost out by a great margin to John Kerry with that group of voters.
In 2000, Bush surprised everyone by proceeding to act boldly even after losing the popular vote to Al Gore. Why then would he become less forceful in pursuing his own policy after besting John Kerry in 2004 by three-and-a-half million votes, and after receiving such vivid evidence that the American people consider him the right man for the job of commander-in-chief in fighting the war on terrorism—which is to say, World War IV?
Post-Election Signals
Which, climbing up the ladder of plausibility, brings us to the second reason that has been advanced for speculating that, willy-nilly, the President will back away from the Bush Doctrine in his new term. In a piece entitled "Governing Against Type," Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies assures us that
"reelected Presidents tend to disappoint their most enthusiastic followers by changing direction: they go Right if they started on the Left (or vice versa); become active when they were passive; turn dovish if they were hawkish; and in all cases converge toward the center of gravity of American politics, as well as toward the mainstream foreign-policy traditions."
In backing up this thesis, Luttwak notes that Ronald Reagan became less rather than more hawkish in his second term, while Bill Clinton, after neglecting foreign policy in his first term, immersed himself in it with a vengeance once he was reelected.
Unlike other commentators, Luttwak does not attribute such turnabouts to "a desire on the part of the President to be more widely loved, or to court the approval of future historians." In his view, the driving force is instead "entropy," or the "natural tendency of democracies to revert to the moderate mean rather than go off the rails." Therefore, even if Bush tries to "go off the rails" (that is, if he insists on sticking with the Bush Doctrine), a kind of natural law of American politics will prevent him from doing so.
What we see here is yet another of those famous "misunderestimations" of George W. Bush. In common with almost every pundit and every inhabitant of every foreign ministry on the face of the earth, Luttwak fails to recognize the exceptionally strong leader America has found in this President, or to take the measure of his boldness, his determination, and his stamina. The poll-driven Bill Clinton may have reverted to "the moderate mean," but Bush, although an immensely skillful politician, is not nearly so poll-driven. And while the Bush Doctrine was certainly inspired and influenced by Ronald Reagan, Bush will just as certainly travel a different road from the one Reagan took in his second term.
During the campaign, at the very moment when things seemed to be going so badly in Iraq that even some previously enthusiastic supporters of the war were jumping ship, and when the abuse being hurled at him was reaching hurricane force, Bush was heard to say, "I’m just gettin’ started." That he meant every word of it became clear almost the minute he was reelected.
For openers, having dismayed his more hawkish supporters (myself included) by pulling back from Falluja in April, he now ordered a full-fledged assault on that terrorist stronghold. He also gave the go-ahead to similar operations against other pockets of the insurgency struggling to drive us out of Iraq and to prevent any further progress in the process of democratization.
At the same time, Bush moved with comparable forcefulness against the insurgency within his own administration. First he sent Porter Goss to the CIA with a mandate to clean out the officials there who (apart from providing faulty intelligence) had been hell-bent on sabotaging the Bush Doctrine. And then he turned his attention to the State Department. Under Colin Powell, it, too, had been actively undermining the President’s policy to the point where it came to be described by those in a position to know as the "most insubordinate" State Department in American history.
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic provides a number of blatant examples, of which the most outrageous concerns the very essence of the Bush Doctrine. When, he writes, the President "proposed an ambitious and concrete plan to promote democracy in the Middle East," the State Department bureaucracy,
"responding to the objections of Arab leaders, watered down the eventual proposals beyond recognition....And when, on the eve of the war in Iraq, Washington" distributed talking points in defense of its position to U.S. embassies abroad, several ambassadors in the Middle East cabled back to Foggy Bottom protesting that they would not make the case for war."
In replacing Powell with Condoleezza Rice, Bush was putting Foggy Bottom on notice that such activities would no longer be tolerated. As his National Security Adviser throughout the first term, Rice was a fierce loyalist, and she can now be counted upon to push the State Department bureaucracy into supporting the policies of the President it is supposed to serve instead of setting its face against them.
Or can she? Some "experts" think not. In fact, Kaplan reports that several of her former colleagues were spreading the word that Rice, "far from purging the State Department’s ranks," will try to mollify them. Other observers, mindful that Rice cut her teeth in government under Brent Scowcroft — a leading member of the "realist" school (about which more in a moment) and one of the most relentless critics of the Bush Doctrine — have raised doubts about how firmly committed she may be to Bush’s "own bent toward idealistic and assertive American missions." Concurring, Edward Luttwak points to "early signals that Ms. Rice will devote serious attention to the Europeans who did not support the Iraq war," and he takes this as additional evidence of an impending drift away from the Bush Doctrine.
These signals, however, such as they are, surely amount to nothing more than diplomatic politesse, no more portending a second-term retreat than the President did when, late last November, he declared that "A new term in office is an important opportunity to reach out to our friends," or announced that the first "great goal" of his second term was to build "effective multinational and multilateral institutions" and to support "effective multilateral action." That Bush was here practicing a little diplomatic politesse of his own was acknowledged by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. The President, Milbank reported, "made clear that such cooperation must occur on his terms, and he did not retreat from the first-term policies that angered some allies." What is more, Bush’s bow to "multinational and multilateral institutions" carried a sting in the tail:
"With Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin sharing the stage, Bush...implicitly rebuked Canada and the United Nations for not supporting the invasion of Iraq. "The objective of the UN and other institutions must be collective security, not endless debate," he said. "For the sake of peace, when those bodies promise serious consequences, serious consequences must follow.""
Mr. Blair Goes to Washington
An even more telling indication that there will be no retreat from the Bush Doctrine in the second term — and also that Rice is no longer, if she ever truly was, under the influence of Brent Scowcroft—involves policy toward Israel.
During the campaign, it was widely rumored that if Bush were reelected, he would change course on Israel. The thinking here was that he owed a debt to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had risked his own political career by supporting him on Iraq, and that the currency in which Blair needed this debt to be paid was greater pressure on Israel and more indulgence toward the Palestinians on the part of the United States. Then came the death of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in November. In the eyes of Blair and just about everyone else in the world, this event opened up an exciting new opportunity to restart the stalled "peace process." So off Blair went to Washington on a post-election trip whose purpose, as he himself announced in advance, was to get Bush to do just that.
On several earlier occasions when Bush, after seeming to tilt toward Israel, had then turned on the Jewish state for taking this or that action, it was assumed that he was trying to accommodate Blair (repaying the debt by installments, so to speak). But whether or not this was the case on such occasions, the situation changed dramatically after June 24, 2002. Having realized that, under the terms of his own doctrine, there could be no meaningful peace process so long as the Palestinians were living under the tyrannical, kleptocratic, and murderous regime led by Arafat, Bush now made American support of a Palestinian state contingent upon the emergence of new leaders who would devote themselves to building "entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics, and action against terrorism." In the meantime, Israel was justified in defending itself by military and other means, including through the security fence beginning to be built by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Under this new dispensation, Bush or one of his spokesmen might from time to time still chide the Israelis for going too far. But there would be an end to the zigzagging from green light to red that had characterized his position before he found his footing on this issue.
In an effort to get Bush to reverse course again, Blair came in November bearing two proposals designed to resume the old pressures on Israel while relaxing the demands the President was making on the Palestinians. One of these proposals was that Bush dispatch a special envoy to the area, and the other was that he convene an international conference. Contrary to Blair’s evident expectations, however, Bush rejected both proposals. He did so politely and gently, but reject them he did. The upshot was that, far from being "paid back" in the currency of pressure on Israel, Blair returned home empty-handed except for Bush’s fervent praise of him for participating in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Much as I hate to agree with anything the President of France says, Jacques Chirac was right for once when he sneered that Bush had given Blair nothing for his pains.
Then, sending out a very different signal from the one Edward Luttwak imagined he was hearing, Condoleezza Rice followed suit. In a meeting with Jewish leaders held about a week after Blair’s departure, she enthusiastically underlined the President’s rejection of the two Blair proposals. Immediately after this, the President once again picked up and ran with the ball: in his speech in Canada, he reiterated in the most unequivocal terms that he was, if anything, more firmly committed than ever to the conditions he had attached on June 24, 2002 to American support for the establishment of a Palestinian state:
"Achieving peace in the Holy Land is not just a matter of pressuring one side or the other on the shape of a border or the site of a settlement. This approach has been tried before without success. As we negotiate the details of peace, we must look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy.
So much for "entropy"; and so much, too, for the idea that once Rice is installed in her new office, she will dependably revert to the tutelage of Brent Scowcroft or morph into another Colin Powell.
Mr. Rumsfeld Stays in Washington
Finally, we come to the most plausible of all the reasons that have been given for predicting (or rather hoping) that Bush will spend his second term backing away from his own doctrine. This one can be summed up in a single word: Iraq.
The idea here is that Iraq represents the first great test to which the Bush Doctrine has been put, and that the count is now in on its miserable failure. The retrograde "red-state voters" may have been hoodwinked by the lies emanating from the White House and the Pentagon and amplified by Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel, but everyone who knows anything knows that Bush’s entire foreign policy now lies buried under the rubble of Baghdad and the smaller cities of the Sunni triangle.
Apart from all its other faults, this analysis is vitiated by the implicit assumption that, in his heart of hearts, Bush himself has come to agree with its take on Iraq in particular and the Bush Doctrine in general, and that he will now bow to reality and act accordingly. Yet if Bush believes that Iraq has been a disaster, why would he have decided to keep Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense?
As the architect of the battle for Iraq, Rumsfeld has been blamed for almost everything that opponents of the invasion (and even some of its vocal supporters) tell us has gone wrong there. He has been accused of underestimating the number of boots that would be needed on the ground; of doing nothing to prevent the looting and the general breakdown of law and order that followed upon the capture of Baghdad; of failing to anticipate, and therefore to deal effectively with, the insurgency that developed; of creating a climate that fostered the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other such crimes. In short, "having ignored the State Department’s postwar planning" (as the Washington Post delicately put the conventional wisdom in its story on Rumsfeld’s reappointment), he led this country into a great debacle that has discredited the very policy whose viability it was intended to prove.
But if Bush accepted this version of how and why the battle for Iraq has gone and is going, it is unthinkable that he would have come down on the side of the adviser supposedly responsible for all the "mistakes" and "crimes" instead of embracing Powell, the putatively wise counselor whose spurned advice could have averted the whole disaster.
Insurgents
All things considered, then, I feel safe in predicting that Bush will not reverse course in his second term, and that he will continue striving to implement the doctrine bearing his name throughout the greater Middle East—that, in short, he will go on "sticking to his guns, literally and figuratively," as Time put it in naming him "Person of the Year." But I feel equally safe in predicting that the forces opposing him, both in the region and at home, will persist in their struggle to nip this immense enterprise in the bud.
In Iraq, the insurgents — a coalition of diehard Saddamists, domestic Islamofascists, and foreign jihadists — have a simple objective. They are trying to drive us out before the seeds of democratization that we are helping to sow have taken firm root and begun to flower. Only thus can the native insurgents hope to recapture the power they lost when we toppled Saddam; and only thus can the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis, who have been dispatching and/or financing the foreign jihadists, escape becoming the next regimes to go the way of Saddam’s under the logic of the Bush Doctrine.
The despots tyrannizing these countries all know perfectly well that an American failure in Iraq would rule out the use of military force against them. They know that it would rob other, non-military measures of any real effectiveness. And they know that it would put a halt to the wave of reformist talk that has been sweeping through the region since the promulgation of the Bush Doctrine and that poses an unprecedented threat to their own hold on political power, just as it does to the religious and cultural power of the radical Islamists.
But the most important thing the insurgents and their backers in the neighboring despotisms know is that the battle for Iraq will not be won or lost in Iraq; it will be won or lost in the United States of America. On this they agree entirely with General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, who recently told reporters touring Iraq: "It is all about staying the course. No military effort that anyone can make against us is going to be able to throw us out of this region." Is it any wonder, then, that the insurgents were praying for the victory of John F. Kerry — which they all assumed would mean an American withdrawal — or that the reelection of Bush—which they were not fooled by any exit polls into interpreting as anything other than a ratification of the Bush Doctrine—came as such a great blow to them?
But too much is at stake in Iraq for them to give up now, especially as they are confident that they still have an excellent shot at getting the American public to conclude that the game is not worth the candle. General Abizaid again: "We have nothing to fear from this enemy except its ability to create panic...and gain a media victory." To achieve this species of victory — and perhaps inspired by the strategy that worked so well for the North Vietnamese — they are counting on the forces opposing the Bush Doctrine at home. These forces comprise just as motley a coalition as the one fighting in Iraq, and they are, after their own fashion, just as desperate. For they too understand how much they for their own part stand to lose if the Bush Doctrine is ever generally judged to have passed the great test to which it has been put in Iraq.
Isolationism, Right and Left
Consider—to begin once more on the lowest rung of the ladder—the isolationists of the paleoconservative Right. Their line is that a conspiracy of "neoconservative" (i.e., Jewish) officials holed up in the White House and the Pentagon is dragging this country, against its own interests, into one conflict after another with the sole purpose of "making the Middle East safe for Israel."
The words come from the pen of this group’s leading spokesman, Patrick J. Buchanan, who expatiates in characteristically pungent terms:
"Cui bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive" Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam" Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud. Buchanan also claims, on the basis of one of Osama bin Laden’s fatwas, that a major cause of 9/11 was "the United States’ uncritical support of the Ariel Sharon regime in Israel.""
This screed has elicited a trenchant comment from James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal’s website OpinionJournal:
"Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in 2001, three years after the fatwa that, according to Buchanan, condemned his "regime."...Labor’s Ehud Barak won election in 1999, and that didn’t stop al Qaeda from attacking the USS Cole in October 2000, even as President Clinton was struggling to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal."
In addition,
"Al Qaeda’s first attacks on American targets were in Yemen in 1992 and at the World Trade Center in 1993 — at a time when Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s prime minister. Rabin later reached an accommodation with Arafat....Bin Laden does not appear to have been appeased. Buchanan’s writings, emitting as they do an unmistakable whiff of anti-Semitism, have already marginalized the paleoconservative isolationists. If the Bush Doctrine passes its test in Iraq, there will be fewer and fewer ears to hear what will more and more sound like the crackpot talk it always was."
So, too, with the isolationists of the hard Left. These — exactly like their forebears in the late 1930’s who fought against America’s entry into World War II — have made common cause with the paleoconservatives at the other end of the political spectrum. True, the isolationism of the Left stems from the conviction that America is bad for the rest of the world, whereas the isolationism of the Right is based on the belief that the rest of the world is bad for America. Nevertheless, the two streams have converged, flowing smoothly into the same channel of fierce opposition to everything Bush has done in response to 9/11.
In the years before 9/11, Noam Chomsky, Buchanan’s counterpart on the Left, was very largely forgotten. After achieving great prominence in the 1960’s, he had come to seem too extreme — or perhaps too naked in his hatred of America — to serve the purposes of the New York Review of Books, through whose pages he had first made his political mark. But after 9/11 he found a newly receptive audience for his contention that this country had brought the terrorist attacks down upon its own head, and for his denunciations of our response to those attacks as nothing more than the latest stage in the malignant imperialism of which he had long since been accusing the United States.
Like Buchanan, Chomsky will go on railing against the Bush Doctrine for as long as his lungs hold out. So will Michael Moore and all the other hard leftists holed up in Hollywood, the universities, and in the intellectual community at large. Fixated as they are on the idea that America is the greatest force for evil in the world, they will always apologize for or side with — sometimes openly, sometimes only tacitly — any totalitarian despot, no matter how murderous, provided only that he is ranged against the United States. To these people, as they themselves cannot but recognize, an American success in Iraq will mean the loss of their mass audience and a return to the narrow sectarian ghetto from which they were able to break out after 9/11.
Superhawks
With no mass audience to lose, no such worry bothers the exponents of another line of attack on the Bush Doctrine that has emanated from a neighborhood on the Right where utter ruthlessness is considered the only way to wage war, and where the idea of exporting democracy is thought to conflict with conservative political wisdom. On the Right though it obviously is, this neighborhood of superhawks is as distant from the precincts of paleoconservatism as it is from the redoubts of the anti-American Left.
The most prolific member of the group is Angelo M. Codevilla who, in a series of essays in the Claremont Review of Books, has accused the Bush administration of "eschewing victory" by shying away from "energetic policies that might actually produce" it, and who makes no bones about his belief that we are losing the war as a result. In the same vein, and in the same magazine, Mark Helprin writes that we have failed
"adequately to prepare for war, to declare war, rigorously to define the enemy, to decide upon disciplines and intelligent war aims, to subjugate the economy to the common defense, or even to endorse the most elemental responsibilities of government."
In then piling a commensurate heap of scorn on the idea of transforming "the entire Islamic world into a group of peaceful democratic states" (Helprin), these two eloquent and fiery polemicists are joined by the more temperate Charles R. Kesler, the editor of the Claremont Review. If democratization is to succeed in the regimes of the Islamic world, a necessary precondition is to beat these regimes into "complete submission" and then occupy them "for decades — not just for months or years, but for decades" (Kesler). Even then, our troops may have to "stay and die...indefinitely on behalf of a mission...concerning the accomplishment of which there is little knowledge and less agreement" (Codevilla)."
Of all the attacks on the Bush Doctrine, this set of arguments is the only one that resonates with me, at least on the issue of how to wage war. I have no objection in principle to the ruthlessness the superhawks advocate, and I agree that it would likely be very effective. The trouble is that the more closely I look at their position, the more clearly does it emerge as fatally infected by the disease of utopianism — the very disease that usually fills critics of this stripe with revulsion and fear.
When these critics prescribe all-out war — total mobilization at home, total ruthlessness on the battlefield — they posit a world that does not exist, at least not in America or in any other democratic country. To the extent that they bother taking account of the America that actually does exist, it is only its imperfections and deficiencies they notice; and these, along with the constraints imposed by the character of the nation on its elected leaders, they wave off with derisive language, as when Codevilla refers sarcastically to "the lowest common denominator among domestic American political forces."
Yet while Codevilla, writing in his study, is free to advise ruthless suppression of these limiting conditions, no one sitting in the Oval Office can possibly do so. And even so, the wonder is not, contrary to Mark Helprin, how "irresolute" and "inept" Bush has been but how far he has managed to go and how much he has already accomplished while working within those constraints and around those imperfections.
As for democratization, Kesler is of course right: it is a hard thing to do, and it cannot be done overnight. But recognizing this truth is a very far cry from suggesting that it cannot be done at all unless the most stringent conditions are met. The conservative skepticism Kesler preaches on texts from Montesquieu and John Adams is all very well in the abstract; in practice, decades need not be required to get a process under way — to clear the ground and sow the seeds and help to water them as they flower and grow.
Unlike all other opponents of the Bush Doctrine, the superhawks are not driven by the fear that they will be discredited if the Bush Doctrine should succeed, if only because none of them imagines that a strategy based on so many false premises, and so much timidity and weakness, ever can or ever will succeed. Therefore they can be depended upon to go on excoriating those policies no matter what.
Liberal Internationalists
Moving now away from the margins and closer to the center, we come to one of the neighborhoods inhabited by the foreign-policy establishment.
Here — housed in bodies like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and the Carnegie Endowment, and surrounded by the populous community of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) — live the liberal internationalists, with their virtually religious commitment to negotiations as the best, or indeed the only, way to resolve conflicts; their relentless faith in the UN (which they stubbornly persist in seeing as the great instrument of collective security even though its record is marked by "an unwillingness to get serious about preventing deadly violence"); and their corresponding squeamishness about military force. Among their most sophisticated spokesmen are Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard, Charles A. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, and G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown.
Under Jimmy Carter (whose Secretary of State, Cyrus R. Vance, was a devout member of this school) and to a lesser extent under Bill Clinton, the liberal internationalists were at the very heart of American foreign policy. But while George W. Bush has thrown a rhetorical bone or two in their direction, and has even done them the kindness of making a few ceremonial bows to the UN, he has for all practical purposes written off the liberal-internationalist school. Nor has he been coy about this. As he declared in a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002:
"We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systematically break them."
The liberal internationalists were not slow to pick up on what statements like this held in store for them. While Kupchan thought that a number of other forces had already weakened their position before, it was, he said flatly, "the election of George W. Bush [that] sounded the death-knell for liberal internationalism" (defined by him as "a moderate, centrist internationalism that manages the international system through compromise, consensus, and international institutions"). Ikenberry, on the other hand, blamed Bush alone:
"[A] set of hard-line, fundamentalist ideas have taken Washington by storm and provided the intellectual rationale for a radical post-11 September reorientation of American foreign policy....[This] is not leadership but a geostrategic wrecking ball that will destroy America’s own half-century-old international architecture."
What Ikenberry does not say is that, thanks to the workings of this "wrecking ball," the liberal internationalists have been reduced to a domestic echo chamber for the French and the Germans. All they seem able to do is count the ways in which the "unilateral" invasion of Iraq has done "damage to the country’s international position — its prestige, credibility, security partnerships, and the goodwill of other countries" (Ikenberry). Since they refuse even to consider whether 9/11 demanded a "reorientation" — whether, that is, it demonstrated that "the tools and doctrines of the [old] system had outlived their utility" and had to be replaced with a "new set of rules for managing the emerging threats to international security" - they can hope for nothing better than a reversion to the status quo ante.
This dream, thinks Stanley Hoffmann, could yet be realized by a scuttling of the Bush Doctrine through a withdrawal from Iraq that
"would bring about a reconciliation with friends and allies shocked by Washington’s recent unilateralism and repudiation of international obligations, and thus do much to restore...American credibility and "soft power" in the world."
As against Hoffmann, neither Ikenberry nor Kupchan envisages so rosy a future for their common creed, even in the exceedingly unlikely event that the Bush Doctrine is abandoned. If, however, the doctrine should be vindicated by Iraq, they all fear — and rightly so — that it will be almost impossible, in Kupchan’s words, to "bring the U.S. back to a liberal brand of internationalism." Or, I would add, to bring its exponents back to the center of the foreign-policy establishment.
Realists
But of all the groups making up the coalition against the Bush Doctrine, the one with the most to lose is the realists.
The realist perspective is shaped by two related precepts. The first is that in international affairs the great desideratum is stability, which can be achieved only through a proper balance of power. Following from this is a very old principle, going all the way back to the arrangements of the 16th century that allowed for more or less peaceful coexistence among perennially warring Catholic and Protestant principalities. In its original form this principle was expressed in the Latin motto "cuius regio eius religio" (the religion of the ruler is the religion of the region). Translated into secular terms, it holds that the internal character of a sovereign state is strictly its own affair, and only the actions it takes beyond its own borders are the business of any other state.
In contrast to the liberal internationalists, the realists are not in the least squeamish about the use of force. But under the dictates of their basic principles, force is justified only in repelling another state’s aggressive effort to upset a previously stable balance of power, while to make war in order to institute "regime change" is almost always both wrong and foolish. A good example of these dictates at work was the first Gulf war, when George W. Bush’s father, with Brent Scowcroft as his National Security Adviser, used force to undo Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait but stopped short of removing him from power in Iraq.
Until 9/11, the realists undoubtedly represented the single most influential school of thought in the world of foreign policy, with all others considered naive or dangerous or both (though a patronizing pass might occasionally be given to liberal internationalists). It would not be going too far to say that for everyone of any great importance in that world, whether as a theorist or a practitioner, the realist perspective was axiomatic. And being, as it were, the default position, it was almost automatically adopted by George W. Bush, too, in his pre-9/11 incarnation. But on 9/11, Bush’s more or less reflexive realism took so great a hit that it collapsed in flames just as surely as did the Twin Towers.
Bush made no secret of his repudiation of realism, and he did not pussyfoot around it:
"For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy."
That took care of the first guiding precept of the realist perspective. And Bush was equally forthright — almost brutal — in giving the back of his hand to the realist prohibition against using force to transform the internal character of other states:
"Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.|
Farewell, then, to cuius regio eius religio as well.
What Bush was declaring here was a revolutionary change in the rules of the international game. If we are to grasp the full significance of this change, we have to start by recognizing that the invasion of Afghanistan was only a partial application of the new doctrine. Because the terrorists who had attacked us were based in Afghanistan, and were protected and supported by the Taliban regime ruling that country, going after it did not constitute a preemptive strike. It represented, rather, a conventional retaliation against an unconventional aggression: they hit us and we hit back.
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