Michael Lind: A new-model American foreign policy that unites liberal internationalism and Realpolitik is intellectually and politically flawed
[Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford University Press, 2006).]
During the George W Bush years, two great currents of thinking about United States foreign policy - progressive and realist - have shared a critique of a third - neo-conservative. Both liberal internationalists and proponents of hard-nosed Realpolitik have rejected a US foreign policy that aims to achieve indefinite US global hegemony - but from quite different perspectives. Indeed, most realists have been as contemptuous of the liberal-internationalist alternative as of neo-conservatism.
Recently, some thoughtful observers of foreign policy have proposed that progressives and realists move beyond a shared critique of neo-conservatism in the direction of a commonly-held philosophy. Robert Wright has proposed that this be called "progressive realism", while the British writer Anatol Lieven and the American conservative foreign-policy analyst, John Hulsman (both openDemocracy contributors), have called for "ethical realism". (The need for apologetic adjectives implies - correctly, in my view - that there is something wrong with unmodified realism).
Whether progressives have anything to learn from realism depends on what is meant by the word. In connection with foreign policy, realism is used in two different ways. Sometimes realism simply means pragmatism. At other times realism is identified with Realpolitik, an elaborate ideology developed in pre-first-world-war continental Europe, especially Germany, and transplanted into the US academy in the 1930s and 1940s by European émigrés like Nicholas Spykman, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, along with the American diplomat and historian George Kennan. Realpolitik holds that states should pursue their interests, narrowly defined in terms of relative power and security, to the exclusion of other concerns.
Realism in the sense of pragmatism is obviously desirable. Any public philosophy or strategy can be implemented in a pragmatic rather than reckless and utopian way. There can be, and have been, pragmatic liberal internationalists, pragmatic Marxist-Leninists and even pragmatic jihadists. Their pragmatism has not made them Kissingerian realists. Woodrow Wilson may have been a utopian and reckless liberal internationalist, but his successor Franklin D Roosevelt was a pragmatic, cautious and sober one.
Realism-as-pragmatism may involve the use in strategy of the classical methods of power politics: alliances, concerts of power, spheres of influence, zones of hegemony. But these are stratagems which can be employed by statesmen with moral visions and world-order goals that have nothing to do with what realists narrowly define as the only legitimate objectives of statecraft, like military security.
Once it is conceded that liberal internationalism comes in pragmatic as well as impractical forms, much of the case for a synthesis of realism and liberal internationalism or progressivism collapses. Realist writers tell progressives ad nauseam that they must learn to be humble and cautious in foreign affairs by studying canonical realist writers like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr. But one need not study any of these authors to understand that it is foolish to expect liberal democracy to take root overnight in former despotisms, that multi-ethnic states frequently break apart along ethnic lines, or that wars often go horribly wrong. This is common sense. Bush and his advisers may have lacked it, but the major statesmen in the liberal internationalist tradition have not.
What is more, the hackneyed realist explanation of foreign-policy disasters like Vietnam and Iraq is dubious. Again and again, realists claim that "hubris" led America to disaster in Vietnam and "messianism" led to catastrophe in Iraq. Every US foreign-policy failure, realists would have us believe, results from culturally-ingrained American messianism or idealism run amok. Realist polemics are tediously predictable: "The American disaster in [insert country] once again shows the failure of American leaders to heed Morgenthau and Kennan and to restrain America's messianic and hubristic impulses..." In both Vietnam and Iraq, US military commanders underestimated the ability of insurgents to resist foreign armed forces. Realists are not content to identify these mistakes; inevitably they rush into print to blame these strategic failures on the alleged design defects of American culture, "Wilsonianism" or "manifest destiny". But an intellectual miscalculation that leads to catastrophic failure is not necessarily evidence of moral hubris or crusading zeal. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes miscalculation isn't manifest destiny or Wilsonian hubris, it's just miscalculation....
Read entire article at OpenDemocracy.net
During the George W Bush years, two great currents of thinking about United States foreign policy - progressive and realist - have shared a critique of a third - neo-conservative. Both liberal internationalists and proponents of hard-nosed Realpolitik have rejected a US foreign policy that aims to achieve indefinite US global hegemony - but from quite different perspectives. Indeed, most realists have been as contemptuous of the liberal-internationalist alternative as of neo-conservatism.
Recently, some thoughtful observers of foreign policy have proposed that progressives and realists move beyond a shared critique of neo-conservatism in the direction of a commonly-held philosophy. Robert Wright has proposed that this be called "progressive realism", while the British writer Anatol Lieven and the American conservative foreign-policy analyst, John Hulsman (both openDemocracy contributors), have called for "ethical realism". (The need for apologetic adjectives implies - correctly, in my view - that there is something wrong with unmodified realism).
Whether progressives have anything to learn from realism depends on what is meant by the word. In connection with foreign policy, realism is used in two different ways. Sometimes realism simply means pragmatism. At other times realism is identified with Realpolitik, an elaborate ideology developed in pre-first-world-war continental Europe, especially Germany, and transplanted into the US academy in the 1930s and 1940s by European émigrés like Nicholas Spykman, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, along with the American diplomat and historian George Kennan. Realpolitik holds that states should pursue their interests, narrowly defined in terms of relative power and security, to the exclusion of other concerns.
Realism in the sense of pragmatism is obviously desirable. Any public philosophy or strategy can be implemented in a pragmatic rather than reckless and utopian way. There can be, and have been, pragmatic liberal internationalists, pragmatic Marxist-Leninists and even pragmatic jihadists. Their pragmatism has not made them Kissingerian realists. Woodrow Wilson may have been a utopian and reckless liberal internationalist, but his successor Franklin D Roosevelt was a pragmatic, cautious and sober one.
Realism-as-pragmatism may involve the use in strategy of the classical methods of power politics: alliances, concerts of power, spheres of influence, zones of hegemony. But these are stratagems which can be employed by statesmen with moral visions and world-order goals that have nothing to do with what realists narrowly define as the only legitimate objectives of statecraft, like military security.
Once it is conceded that liberal internationalism comes in pragmatic as well as impractical forms, much of the case for a synthesis of realism and liberal internationalism or progressivism collapses. Realist writers tell progressives ad nauseam that they must learn to be humble and cautious in foreign affairs by studying canonical realist writers like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr. But one need not study any of these authors to understand that it is foolish to expect liberal democracy to take root overnight in former despotisms, that multi-ethnic states frequently break apart along ethnic lines, or that wars often go horribly wrong. This is common sense. Bush and his advisers may have lacked it, but the major statesmen in the liberal internationalist tradition have not.
What is more, the hackneyed realist explanation of foreign-policy disasters like Vietnam and Iraq is dubious. Again and again, realists claim that "hubris" led America to disaster in Vietnam and "messianism" led to catastrophe in Iraq. Every US foreign-policy failure, realists would have us believe, results from culturally-ingrained American messianism or idealism run amok. Realist polemics are tediously predictable: "The American disaster in [insert country] once again shows the failure of American leaders to heed Morgenthau and Kennan and to restrain America's messianic and hubristic impulses..." In both Vietnam and Iraq, US military commanders underestimated the ability of insurgents to resist foreign armed forces. Realists are not content to identify these mistakes; inevitably they rush into print to blame these strategic failures on the alleged design defects of American culture, "Wilsonianism" or "manifest destiny". But an intellectual miscalculation that leads to catastrophic failure is not necessarily evidence of moral hubris or crusading zeal. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes miscalculation isn't manifest destiny or Wilsonian hubris, it's just miscalculation....