Ross Douthout: The Foreign Policy Debate, Past and Future
Of my various remarks about foreign-policy schools, a reader writes:
"I think you're creating all sorts of divisions where none really exist. There is NO substantive division between Democratic realists and Democratic internationalists and not much between them and their likeminded Republican brethren. The predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist...."
I think thus is rather like Robert Kagan's suggestion last year that we are all neocons of some sort or another: It emphasizes important commonalities - in this case, among post-WWII internationalists of various sorts, especially during the Cold War - but elides extremely important differences in order to make its case. Saying "the predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist" is like saying that "the predominant strain of thought in American domestic policy since WW 2 has been liberal/neoliberal/neoconservative." It gets at the important point that policymaking has operated within a more constrained range than many people think, but it obscures the fact that there are very important differences between domestic-policy neoconservatism and domestic-policy liberalism - or between, say, the realist internationalism of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the liberal hawkery of John F. Kennedy. (Just compare this speech to this speech ...) The latter set of differences manifested themselves most notably in our policy toward Indochina - and if your case that the Iraq War represents a unique break with five decades of unbroken foreign-policy consensus requires dismissing the years America spent embroiled in Vietnam as a case where the bus went "off the road" modestly but not for long, you're probably overselling your argument a bit.
Likewise, the fact that two out of the three living "Establishment" foreign-policy hands on my emailer's list - Shultz and Kissinger - publicly supported the invasion of Iraq, which supposedly represented a "quantum shift" away from their steady stewardship and into crypto-Likudnik jingoism, ought to be a tip-off that the landscape of foreign-policy debate is rather more complicated than he suggests. To the extent that there was an over-arching consensus that bound together the (pretty different, in my view) foreign-policy approaches of John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, it vanished with the Cold War, and the last two decades have sent members of every school of thought groping for new guideposts, a state of affairs that's produced strange bedfellows, peculiar political migrations (see Buchanan, Pat, or Hitchens, Christopher) and odd dissonances (compare Charles Krauthammer on Kosovo to Charles Krauthammer on, well, almost every foreign-policy crisis since). 9/11 and the Iraq War magnified this sense of dislocation, in a sense, first by temporarily forging a new interventionist consensus anchored by neoconservatives and liberal hawks and joined by many realists, and then by just as quickly unraveling that consensus, which has now given way to the (theoretically) united front of realists, liberal internationalists and progressives that's on display in the Obama Administration.
Maybe this unity will be permanent: Maybe Robert Gates (who, one might note, has been retained as a reward for his success implementing a strategy vocally championed by ... neoconservatives), Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice will establish a new consensus that lasts for years or decades to come, with neocons chattering their teeth out in the cold. But more likely, it will last right up until the first major foreign-policy crisis of the Obama years, at which point the sort of ideological debates you saw inside the Clinton Administration over issues ranging from Yugoslavia to Osama Bin Laden will flare up in new and different forms. (And no, pace my correspondent, it really isn't that hard to imagine scenarios in which Hillary Clinton and Dick Lugar - or, more aptly, Robert Gates - end up on the opposite sides of an issue.)...
Read entire article at Atlantic
"I think you're creating all sorts of divisions where none really exist. There is NO substantive division between Democratic realists and Democratic internationalists and not much between them and their likeminded Republican brethren. The predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist...."
I think thus is rather like Robert Kagan's suggestion last year that we are all neocons of some sort or another: It emphasizes important commonalities - in this case, among post-WWII internationalists of various sorts, especially during the Cold War - but elides extremely important differences in order to make its case. Saying "the predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist" is like saying that "the predominant strain of thought in American domestic policy since WW 2 has been liberal/neoliberal/neoconservative." It gets at the important point that policymaking has operated within a more constrained range than many people think, but it obscures the fact that there are very important differences between domestic-policy neoconservatism and domestic-policy liberalism - or between, say, the realist internationalism of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the liberal hawkery of John F. Kennedy. (Just compare this speech to this speech ...) The latter set of differences manifested themselves most notably in our policy toward Indochina - and if your case that the Iraq War represents a unique break with five decades of unbroken foreign-policy consensus requires dismissing the years America spent embroiled in Vietnam as a case where the bus went "off the road" modestly but not for long, you're probably overselling your argument a bit.
Likewise, the fact that two out of the three living "Establishment" foreign-policy hands on my emailer's list - Shultz and Kissinger - publicly supported the invasion of Iraq, which supposedly represented a "quantum shift" away from their steady stewardship and into crypto-Likudnik jingoism, ought to be a tip-off that the landscape of foreign-policy debate is rather more complicated than he suggests. To the extent that there was an over-arching consensus that bound together the (pretty different, in my view) foreign-policy approaches of John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, it vanished with the Cold War, and the last two decades have sent members of every school of thought groping for new guideposts, a state of affairs that's produced strange bedfellows, peculiar political migrations (see Buchanan, Pat, or Hitchens, Christopher) and odd dissonances (compare Charles Krauthammer on Kosovo to Charles Krauthammer on, well, almost every foreign-policy crisis since). 9/11 and the Iraq War magnified this sense of dislocation, in a sense, first by temporarily forging a new interventionist consensus anchored by neoconservatives and liberal hawks and joined by many realists, and then by just as quickly unraveling that consensus, which has now given way to the (theoretically) united front of realists, liberal internationalists and progressives that's on display in the Obama Administration.
Maybe this unity will be permanent: Maybe Robert Gates (who, one might note, has been retained as a reward for his success implementing a strategy vocally championed by ... neoconservatives), Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice will establish a new consensus that lasts for years or decades to come, with neocons chattering their teeth out in the cold. But more likely, it will last right up until the first major foreign-policy crisis of the Obama years, at which point the sort of ideological debates you saw inside the Clinton Administration over issues ranging from Yugoslavia to Osama Bin Laden will flare up in new and different forms. (And no, pace my correspondent, it really isn't that hard to imagine scenarios in which Hillary Clinton and Dick Lugar - or, more aptly, Robert Gates - end up on the opposite sides of an issue.)...