5/25/07
WILSONIANISM AFTER IRAQ: THE END
OF LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM?
1) A signature feature of the Bush Doctrine as it was formulated in 2002 and used
as the policy framework for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was its assertion that the
national security of the United States in the “global war on terror” required
“democratic regime change” in the Middle East. Such a conviction made the
Doctrine a Wilsonian, or liberal internationalist, framework for American foreign
policy. 2) While the Bush Doctrine is usually thought to have been authored by
neoconservatives within the Republican Party, in fact the most critical arguments
on the importance of democratic regime change came from neoliberals, most of
whom are at home in the Democratic Party. 3) The failure of the war in Iraq
necessarily means a crisis in Wilsonianism as a compass for American policy in
world affairs. But the commitment of much of the Democratic Party’s intellectual
elite to liberal internationalism means the crisis of Wilsonianism has yet to be
addressed. 4) The result of a bipartisan consensus—the neoconservative Project
for the New American Century and the neoliberal Progressive Policy Institute
have effectively been a single intellectual operation--is that there is no meaningful
debate over the proper course of American foreign policy and the anti-war
movement remains weak. 5) Although the Democratic victory in the November
2006 election was based in important part on anti-war sentiment, no coherent
position has emerged to unite opponents of the Iraq invasion. Whatever the
problems of the Bush Doctrine both theoretically and practically, in the 2008
election campaign and should they take power in 2009, the Democrats may find
themselves repeating the Republican arguments in their own terms. The Bush
Doctrine is Dead; Long Live the Bush Doctrine.
The repeated assertions by President George W. Bush since 2002 that the national
security of the United States depends on the spread of democratic government to the
Middle East qualify to make the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 a Wilsonian
undertaking. While definitions of what constitutes Wilsonianism, or liberal
internationalism, most certainly vary, and while the implementation of Wilsonian foreign
policies by American presidents have shown greater variance still, it nonetheless remains
the bedrock conviction of this framework for American foreign policy that wherever
democratic government appears, American security interests are likely to be served. By
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contrast, corrupt and cruel authoritarian regimes (Wilson died in 1924 before the concept
of totalitarianism was formulated) are likely to be untrustworthy partners in the pursuit of
world peace if not actively responsible for the wars that plague the human condition. As
President Woodrow Wilson put his position in his War Message to the Congress on April
2, 1917:
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a
partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be
trusted to keep faith within it or observe its convenants. It must be a
league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals
away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and
render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a
common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of
their own.
Accordingly, nothing could have been more Wilsonian than President George W. Bush’s
oft-cited words in his Second Inaugural in January 2005:
We are led by events and common sense to one conclusion: The survival
of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in
other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of
freedom in all the world… So it is the policy of the United States to seek
and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every
nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world
Following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the Bush Doctrine emerged
in a series of presidential addresses in the course of 2002, and in its most definitive
statement in the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States published that
September. As a framework for American foreign policy, the Doctrine is usefully
analyzed as having two major pillars, the one of power and the other of purpose. As its
authors recognized, power without purpose is ephemeral, while purpose without power is
impotent. Although the immediate aim of presidential policy was to justify the decision
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to invade Iraq, the ultimate ambition of the Bush Doctrine was to leave an enduring mark
on world affairs by a confident combination of power and purpose, leaving as its
testament the example of a policy that was comprehensive, long-term, and capable of
reworking the terms of international relations to favor American security and world peace
for generations to come. The ingredients for the success anticipated in “winning the
peace” after winning a war was the confidence the Bush administration placed in the
universal appeal of spreading market democracy and the capacity of the expansion of this
economic, social and political form of interaction around the globe to create a stable
environment for international relations. Here was the quintessential expression of the
Wilsonian dream: that war could be replaced by peace if the peoples of the world but
came to agreement on how rightly to govern themselves. As the NSS put it:
The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and
totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—
and a single sustainable mode for national success: freedom, democracy,
and free enterprise….These values of freedom are right and true for every
person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against
their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the
globe and across the ages…Today, humanity holds in its hands the
opportunity to further freedom’s triumph over all [its] foes. The United
States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.1
The Bush Doctrine’s pillar of power was American military primacy, a trump that
this country would continue to possess “beyond challenge,” as the administration
repeatedly phrased it in 2002. We can concede paternity of the military pillar to the
neoconservatives, a group of Republicans whose intellectual roots go back to the 1940s
1
President George W. Bush’s public statements can be retrieved through early 2009 at
www.whitehouse.gov. Many of the arguments in this essay have been developed at greater length in Tony
Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American
Promise, Routledge, Taylor, Francis, 2007.
4
but whose emergence as a self-conscious public policy-making association dates from the
late 1960s. In 1992-93, during the last year of the administration of President George H.
W. Bush, the neocons in the Pentagon under the direction of then-Secretary of Defense
Richard Cheney authored position papers on the need to maintain American military
primacy over world affairs that leave no doubt as to the intellectual origins of this aspect
of the Doctrine. Their formulation was refined by studies published during the Clinton
years by the leading neoconservative organization, the Project for the New American
Century, founded in 1997 in league with the Weekly Standard, founded two years earlier.
A moral and practical imperative for neoconservatives was that the United States
remain the dominant world power militarily. Preemption, unilateralism, and above all a
determination to maintain a preponderance of force worldwide are all aspects of the
Doctrine that may safely be ascribed to neoconservative thinking.2 That said, the
neocons had no monopoly on such thinking. Other Republicans from Donald Rumsfeld
and Richard Cheney to then-Governor Bush endorsed such ideas without being part of
their school of thought. The bottom line was that the Bush Doctrine’s pillar of power, its
confidence in America’s military supremacy and its willingness to reshape global events
through the use of force, encompassed a variety of perspectives within the Republican
Party even if the neocons were particularly articulated exponents of the viewpoint.
2
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 75, 4,
July-August 1996; Kagan and Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and
Defense Policy, Encounter Books, 2000; Kristol and Kagan, contributions to “American Power for What: A
Symposium.” Commentary, January 2000; Thomas Donnelly et al., “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” The
Project for a New American Century, 2000.
5
The aspect of the Bush Doctrine that asserts the imperative of American military
supremacy in world affairs is somewhat difficult to reconcile with traditional
Wilsonianism. Woodrow Wilson favored proposals of disarmament and collective
security that dictated multilateral decision-making and a limited surrender of sovereignty
to international institutions. Wilson was no pacifist, to be sure, and as his salute of the
taking of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898 by President William McKinley and his
own seizure of the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua indicate, Wilson could be an
imperialist as well. On balance, nevertheless, Wilson counseled prudence, restraint, and
cooperation with other democratic states while seeing collective action with them as key
to the pursuit of their common interests. Seen in this light, it is understandable that some
liberal internationalists today are reluctant to see the Bush Doctrine as in the Wilsonian
tradition.
Where the Wilsonian tradition contributed fundamentally to the Bush Doctrine
was in its pillar of purpose, with its assertion that with the expansion of “free market
democracies,” the United States possessed a blueprint capable of fostering global
freedom, prosperity, and peace. If power without purpose was ephemeral, here was a
mission to make American foreign policy a beacon to the ages. This grand design for
world order was the necessary complement of the military pillar, for it promised to
restructure domestic and international politics in such a way that future generations
would come to bless the American Peace. Its origins lay with Woodrow Wilson.
Sympathetic though the neoconservatives were to the notion of the global
expansion of market democracies as a way of assuring American national security, they
did not engage in the intellectual heavy-lifting required to elaborate a blueprint for the
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world-wide expansion of the American way. Instead, the analysis of the intellectual roots
of the Doctrine’s pillar of purpose leads to two surprising and important conclusions.
First, its basic terms were conceived by those who might be called the “neoliberals,”
intellectuals mostly to the left of the Republican Party, rather distant from the Bush
administration. Second, the home of most of these intellectuals was the Democratic
Party, not the Republican. Because many leading Democratic intellectuals became as
committed to the invasion of Iraq as the neoconservatives ever were, the anti-war
movement has been weak and the appeal of the kind of thinking one finds in the Bush
Doctrine seems likely to endure. Seen from this perspective, Wilsonianism is in crisis—
the dimension of the defeat in Iraq makes any other conclusion impossible to sustain—
yet given its resonance with American interests and values, its tenets may well endure in
modified form to guide this country in world affairs.
DEBATING THE BUSH DOCTRINE’S “WILSONIANISM”
There should be no doubt but that the intellectual centerpiece of the Bush
Doctrine lay in its confidence that backed by military power the appeal of market
democracy could transform the Middle East in ways friendly to American security. The
debate among liberal internationalists accordingly centers on the importance of the
democratization project to the identity of the Wilsonian tradition.
Central to my argument is the conviction that the intellectual origins of the call to
democratize the world and open its markets that we find in the Bush Doctrine lie in
Wilsonianism, the liberal democratic internationalist package put together by President
Woodrow Wilson when in office from 1913-1921. True, Wilson’s program was more
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complicated than simple democratization. In fact, his design for world order was
premised on four concepts, whose character and interrelationship have a complexity that
invites disagreement on what constitutes the heart of the Wilsonian project.3
First, and most fundamentally, Wilson called for the spread of liberal democratic
government, constitutional orders limited by checks internal to the government and
coming from society that would make the state transparent, predictable, and accountable.
The expectation was that just as non-violence and the rule of law came to dominate
domestically so they could spill over into world affairs and so promote peace among
democratic peoples. Immanuel Kant had been the first to advance such a proposition in
the 1790s, and liberals in the 1990s worked out empirically based conceptual schemes to
demonstrate the argument was sound. A world at peace and safe for democracy would be
world of democracies. It is my contention that the importance of the spread of
democracy constitutes the first and most essential ingredient of liberal internationalism,
for without it none of the other elements of the doctrine would be viable.
Second, Wilson wanted open international markets. In line with traditional liberal
thinking inherited from arguments first formulated by the British in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, his expectation was that a world increasingly integrated
economically would be more prosperous, and that interdependence would also
necessarily promote peace among those countries participating in it. It appeared obvious
3
On Wilsonianism in terms of its historical origins, see John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the
World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations, Cambridge University Press, 2001;
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for World Order, Oxford University
Press, 1992; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for
Democracy in the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, 1994, chpts. 3-4.
8
that where countries enjoyed both democracy and open markets there peace was even
more likely to reign.
Third, Wilson called for multilateral institutions to mediate conflicts and provide
for collective security against aggression. Organizations as varied as the United Nations
(UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the World Trade
Organization (not to speak of the success of the European Union) are testimonies to this
dream. “Multilateralism” emerged, then, as a leading tenet of the liberal internationalist
creed for its functional utility, which was also directly related to the prospects for peace.
Finally, Wilson understood that American leadership would be indispensable for
the success of his vision. His thinking was hegemonic, not imperialist, in that he
expected fellow market democracies to understand the compatibility of their interests and
values with those of the United States and so act in league with Washington. Still, as the
American occupations of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic during Wilson’s years
in office attest—armed interventions aimed at creating what today might be called
“democratic regime change”—imperialism could most certainly be a feature of his
thinking.
The Bush Doctrine may be called Wilsonian, for it embraces all but the third of
these propositions. Because the fourth pillar may be seen as substituting for the third—
that is, American leadership is a plausible alternative to collaboration in multilateral
institutions on an equal basis—I maintain that the bona fides of the Doctrine as Wilsonian
are very much in order.
However, the contention that the Bush Doctrine is properly Wilsonian is open to
debate. In their contributions to this volume, both Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie
9
Slaughter insist in different ways on multilateralism as the most important feature of the
Wilsonian foreign policy agenda. If their positions are accepted then it could be
maintained that the invasion of Iraq, which was the product of an high-handed
unilateralism flouting both the UN and NATO, was not a Wilsonian undertaking. The
implication of their arguments is that liberal internationalism may be spared serious
intellectual damage from the fallout of this calamitous conflict and so continue to serve as
an important framework for making recommendations to our foreign policy elite.
At first approach, Knock and Slaughter’s positions may seem plausible. Doubtless
an array of international institutions would be necessary for liberal internationalism to
function successfully. A world of democratic states would necessarily be politically
plural, an order in need of mechanisms to integrate it so as to resolve conflicts and to
handle the requirements of an open international market. Wilson saw the League of
Nations as the greatest of the international institutions he hoped to bequeath to future
generations for he maintained that a concert of powers, a system of collective security,
alone held the promise of peace that balance of power politics had never been able to
deliver. Seen from this perspective, the morally arrogant and practically imprudent
unilateralism displayed by the Bush administration as it charged to war in Iraq was
strikingly illiberal, a road that Wilson himself surely would never have sanctioned.
But I question that multilateralism should be selected out as the chief, or defining,
element of Wilsonianism. It was clear that in Wilson’s mind, effective international
organizations capable of preserving the peace and ushering in a new day in world affairs
presupposed that their members be predominately democratic and already committed to a
high level of free trade for them to function harmoniously in the international arena. That
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is, democratic political organization and market capitalism would seemingly be prior, and
more far more critical, features of a Wilsonian world order than simply sponsoring a
sytem of international organizations blind as to the political character of their
membership. In a word, the keystone of Wilsonianism is democratic government built on
strong foundations of national self-determination. Multilateralism is accordingly seen as
the necessary outcome of a politically plural world of democracies. But international
organizations not dominated by market democracies may fail to protect the peace.
Whatever the importance of the UN, for example, it is of less obvious utility to American
security than is NATO.
Here is why Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proposed in the late 1990s that
a “Community of Democracies” be established to oversee world order. Albright
recognized, as Wilson had before her (and indeed Immanuel Kant had before him), that
cooperation among market democracies was of an altogether different character than
could be provided by organizations such as the UN (or the League after it admitted
authoritarian states as members). Nor would NATO alone suffice, for the world of
market democracies needed to expand to protect its perimeter of security to include such
distant lands as Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and India, as well perhaps
as Taiwan and Israel. In sum, not “multilateralism” considered as an anonymous set of
organizations was important for the Wilsonian project so much as a concert of democratic
countries organized on the basis of common values and interests for the sake of their
common defense from the threat of war.
Moreover, Wilson himself recognized that the relative power position of the
United States meant that it had a leadership role to play in world affairs. Multilateralism
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thus needed to be inspired and maintained by vigilant American participation. The failure
of the League of Nations in the 1930s was the inevitable outcome of a system of
international order where America was absent. In the aftermath of World War II, it was
abundantly clear to leaders in the world democracies that the United States alone had the
power to coordinate what was understandably called “the free world” for the sake of its
common peace and prosperity Multilateralism (be it in the creation of the Bretton Woods
system, the UN, or NATO, for example) was therefore a product of America’s relative
power position after 1945. Such a system of international institutions could not have
come about without such a preponderance of power. Here was the meaning of Secretary
Albright’s baptism of the United States as “the indispensable nation,” the only power
capable of effectively organizing what she labeled “muscular multilateralism.”
To the extent that the organizational unity of the market democratic world
depended on American hegemony, then multilateralism could evolve in the direction of
unilateralism, for the implicit understanding was that America’s fellow market
democracies would on balance find it in their interest to follow Washington’s leadership.
Here was the essence of French President Charles de Gaulle’s constant quarrel with the
United States during the 1960s. De Gaulle hoped to see Europe break lose of the
embrace of Soviet and American power, but he nonetheless had to concede that his
ambitions were likely to fail and that if a choice were necessary, then France would
support Washington in its existential struggle with Moscow.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the American victory in the Gulf War
in 1991, America’s paramount leadership of a multilateral security community became
even more pronounced. The problems of handling the Balkans in the 1990s underscored
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the point even more. With the enunciation of the Bush Doctrine in 2002, the United
States found the ability to protest loud and far its commitment to multilateralism while at
the same time insisting that its leadership needed to be respected, failing which
unilateralism might well be the path the country would take in world affairs. The NSS of
2002 is a perfect illustration of Washington’s ability to play up its commitment to
multilateralism at the very moment it proposed to act unilaterally if necessary.
Thus to suggest, as Slaughter and Knock appear to do, that unilateralism and
multilateralism are somehow polar opposites, is to misunderstand the nature of
multilateralism as it emerged after 1945 (and indeed as it was understood by Wilson
himself). American hegemony was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of a
Wilsonian world order and would remain so for a goodly length of time into the future.
As the structure of world politics changed after the Cold War, so too did the relative
meaning of multilateralism as an operative feature of American foreign policy. In time it
came to mean that America’s allies would help bear the burden of decisions made in
Washington as it pushed abroad the perimeter of the world of market democracies.
In sum, the crux of my disagreement with Knock and Slaughter is the different
relative weight we give to democracy as opposed to multilateralism in our understanding
of the Wilsonian project. I maintain that democracy is an independent force critical to the
emergence of multilateralism and therefore the basic building block of the Wilsonian
vision. I also maintain that the primacy of American leadership of a community of
democracies was always understood to be an aspect of the organizations that tied the free
world together. Multilateralism always has had as its prior condition democratic
government and has always presupposed American leadership. Seen from my
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perspective, there is no difficult at all in identifying the Bush Doctrine as safely within
the Wilsonian tradition despite its unilateralism.
WILSONIANISM AS AN EVOLVING FOREIGN POLICY DOCTRINE
As the preceding comments suggest, to call the Bush Doctrine “Wilsonian,” as if
it grew out of an immutable orientation toward America’s role in the world on hand for
nearly a century now, would be misleading. For Wilsonianism has changed over the
decades, and at no time more drastically than in the aftermath of the Cold War. Thanks
to new categories of understanding world affairs generated during this period, we may
now speak of “neo-Wilsonian” and “neoliberal” as terms born of the 1990s that have
serious meaning.
The historical evolution of liberal internationalism indicates the importance of
changes that have occurred to it since the late 1980s.4 In a “preclassical” period that
started with the American Revolution and stretched through the nineteenth century, we
find the nation’s leaders speculating on this country’s role in serving as a beacon for
liberty that might be followed by peoples worldwide. Still, such thinking remained
largely rhetorical and, exception made for the arguments underlying Manifest Destiny,
seldom involved thoughts of using force under the terms of what might be called a
doctrine of progressive imperialism.
With the Spanish American War in 1898, numerous foreign peoples in the
Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico fell under American control. Now the practical terms
of liberal progressive imperialism might be more clearly defined.
4
For an extended discussion of these stages, see A Pact with the Devil, chpt. 3.
14
It was not to happen immediately. Liberal internationalism’s “classic” phase as a
grand strategy for the United States to adopt had to await Woodrow Wilson’s presidency
between 1913 and 1921. The concepts for the doctrine to guide American foreign policy
were now rather clearly spelled out—as we have seen, the United States would foster
democratic governments, economic openness, and multilateral institutions--and the belief
that what was good for American national security (the expansion of democracy
worldwide) was also good for world peace became the operative assumption. However,
the vicissitudes of the interwar period meant that Wilson’s design was left on the drawing
board. The Bolshevik Revolution and the Depression, combined with the Nazi
movement in Germany, meant that Wilson’s ambitions (which were also damaged by the
president’s inept handling of his case with the American Congress) came to naught. Still,
the policy framework Wilson left behind constituted enough of an ideological statement
of American interest and purpose that later generations might well use it should the
occasion be warranted.
And warranted it soon was. For the follow-up stage of liberal internationalism that
we might call “hegemonic” appeared in the 1940s building on Wilson’s “classic” design.
Under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the United States gave birth to a
series of initiatives and organizations that in the minds of most students of American
foreign policy constituted the finest days of the Republic in world affairs. With the
Occupation of Germany and the Marshall Plan, Washington would promote in Western
Europe both democratic government and economic integration. The fact that today war is
unthinkable within the European Union is a testament to the boldness and the acuity of
the Wilsonian vision. The glory days of liberal international hegemonism stretched from
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the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO in the late 1940s to the expansion of NATO
and the European Union into Eastern Europe some two generations later.5 Here is the
period of liberal internationalist “hegemonism,” when the United States emerged as the
leader of the free world, a collection of countries united by their commitment to
democratic government and open market economic arrangements whose unified strength
eventually led to victory in the Cold War. That said, for the duration of the Cold War,
“containment” remained the first track of American foreign policy, with liberal
internationalism consigned to an important, but nonetheless secondary, track.
It was natural enough in the aftermath of the Cold War that liberal internationalist
thinking would evolve. Its ideological rival had gone down to defeat with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, and a vacuum opened, with other peoples asking how they might join
the club of market democracies. The United States was the undisputed center of power
internationally, and a new nationalism based on liberal values might define the way
forward. The moment was seized as men and women in American academic life
especially, and usually center left politically, came to redefine Wilsonianism in ways that
made it fundamentally more assertive than it had ever been previously. With
“containment” as the leading doctrine of American foreign policy a thing of the past, the
“enlargement” of the “Community of Democracies” (terms from the Clinton
administration) would take its place.
5
G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after
Major Wars, Princeton University Press, 2001; Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on
American Power and International Order, Princeton University Press, 2006.
16
The important point to stress is that it was not neoconservatives, but instead
neoliberals, who did the intellectual heavy lifting at this point. To be sure, the
progenitors of neoconservatism (as the movement came to be called in the early 1970s)
were champions of liberal democracy and unrelenting opponents of totalitarianism in
whatever form. But with the exception of Francis Fukuyama, not a single idea in the set
of concepts that lead to a doctrine of ”progressive” liberal imperialism came from a
neoconservative. Nor can Leo Strauss, the eminence grise of the neoconservative
movement, be invoked as the father of the idea that the goal of American foreign policy
should be ending tyranny in our time. Strauss had a healthy skepticism about
Enlightenment notions of social engineering and human perfectibility. While his
influence may explain some of the behavior of high officials in the Bush
administration—their elitism, their use of “noble lies,” their conviction that liberals were
their own worst enemies, their insistence on executive privilege—Strauss’s fingerprints
are not on the Wilsonian aspects of the Bush Doctrine, for which he surely would have
had a healthy disregard.6 If we would look for the arguments underlying progressive
imperialism after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 we must turn to the
neoliberals.
THE RISE OF THE NEOLIBERALS AND NEO-WILSONIANISM
For the classical and hegemonic periods of liberal internationalism to give way to
a stage that was frankly imperialist, seeds dormant in earlier years needed to germinate.
6
Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legac,.
Yale University Press, 2006, 21ff; Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism,
University of Chicago Press, 2006, chpt 8.
17
The spring showers that brought forth these ideas came from world affairs. The triumph
of America over the Soviet Union was better seen by this school of thought as the
decisive victory of liberal over proletarian internationalism. Whether in Latin America or
Eastern Europe, South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, what the Chinese students called the
Goddess of Liberty in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 seemed everywhere the
aesthetic to be emulated.
Crisis called for a reformulation of liberal thinking as much as opportunity. In
Central Asia and many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, in the Balkans, Cambodia, and Iraq,
murderous civil strife and cruel dictatorships seemed enduring features of political life.
Given America’s preeminent role in world affairs, did some kind of Good Samaritan
argument not apply saying that we should come to the aid of these peoples in distress?
Given the demonstrated success of the West in providing peace and prosperity, what role
could now be played to help these parts of the world, so desperately at risk? A host of
non-governmental institutions, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International,
the Open Society Institute, and Freedom House responded in the affirmative to these
appeals.
But a mood of the times is not an ideology. For liberal internationalism to
become the voice of American foreign policy more robust concepts were called for than
had hitherto been articulated. Three sets of ideas were soon forthcoming, born not of
9/11 but of 11/9, that is November 9, 1989, the date chosen by the Germans to
commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each set contributed of itself to the emerging
imperialist consensus on the part of American Wilsonians, but taken together they were a
18
veritable witches’ brew capable of leading a global crusade, a bid for global supremacy
on Washington’s part for the sake of freedom and peace and American national security.7
The first, and most important, of these ideas is called “democratic peace theory.”
Its essential claim is that democracies do not go to war with one another. According to
the tenets of the argument, democratic governments are instead predisposed to
cooperation and the peaceful resolution of differences with their sister republics. The
non-violent practices that govern state/society relations domestically, and that are held in
place by the rule of law, spill over into interactions with other democracies. When,
moreover, these peoples are integrated economically and participate jointly in multilateral
institutions, the propensity for violence is dampened even more.
Consider the reasons for the relative success of the European Union, born of this
liberal internationalist vision. Here was a fratricidal region second to none that in the
course of two generations had found peace and prosperity based on an embrace of the
liberal internationalist creed. The success of democracy in Germany combined with the
economic integration of the European Community had given rise to one of the marvels
of world history, a zone of wealth and freedom where war among its constituent peoples
was impossible to imagine.
The example of Western Europe could be a model perhaps for reform worldwide.
According to democratic peace theory, which was able empirically, theoretically, and
philosophically to defend the proposition that it would be highly desirable were all the
world democratic, the American government should see human rights and democracy
promotion as in the national interest. Should such a conversion take place, international
7
Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil, op. cit., chpts. 4-6.
19
affairs, a state of nature described by Hobbes as nasty, brutish, and short, would come to
be replaced by a Kantian order of “perpetual peace.” A “zone of democratic peace,” a
“pacific union,” could expand, and in its enlargement bring a new order to world affairs
from which all democracies would benefit including, of course, the United States.
With democratic peace theory the Wilsonian notion that the spread of democratic
government worldwide could have a decisively positive impact on world affairs reached a
new level of conviction. What previously had been a conviction lacking a substantive
argument in the hands of the neoliberals of the 1990s seemed to have established beyond
reasonable doubt the Wilsonian faith in democratic government.8
But if the spread of democratic government around the globe were desirable was
it feasible? New reasons were found to be optimistic. For the second important
ingredient of neoliberal reconceptualization during the 1990s had to do with the
understanding of the transition from authoritarian to democratic government in a way that
made the process easier to contemplate fostering.
During the Cold War, the American academy had been skeptical that
democratization could be easily or quickly undertaken. True, Japan and Germany had
each become liberal democracies under American occupation, yet that had as much if not
more to do with the internal character of these countries as with the compulsion of U.S.
8
Three different approaches to international relations have endorsed democratic peace theory. On the basis
of empirical evidence, see Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy,
Interdependence, and International Organizations, Yale University Press, 2001. On a theoretical level, see
Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,”
International Organization, 51, 4, Autumn 1997. On a philosophic level, see John Rawls, The Law of
Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1999, chpt. 5.
20
authorities. These two countries aside, all kinds of “sequences” and “preconditions” were
advanced by specialists on the topic of political transformation that made it seem unlikely
liberal democracy would quickly spread worldwide. 9
In terms of “sequences,” American experts spoke of the way advances in
liberalizing the political order by making constitutions work might precede the
incorporation of social forces into a newly emerging democracy. Nevertheless, peoples
unacquainted with democratic life would doubtless benefit from having certain
characteristics that could be seen as “preconditions” for any sequencing to work.
Thus, a middle class and an industrial economic base seemed necessary, if not
sufficient, for democratic government to emerge. A middle class had the values and
interests that called for responsible, limited government, while an integrated, specialized
economy called for the kind of decentralized regulation that had an affinity with the rule
of law. As the political sociologist Barrington Moore famously put it, “no bourgeoisie,
no democracy.”
A tradition of limited government might also help the emergence of democratic
rule. Such constraints might come either from within a traditional state—some form of
checks and balances—or from an institution outside the state, such as a religious
authority, that made the rule of government less than absolute. In either case, peoples
wanting to democratize could work to some extent with established habits, values, and
institutions.
9
Probably the best know series of mainstream books on the topic appeared during the 1960s and 1970s
published by Princeton University Press. See, e.g., Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political
Development, Princeton University Press, 1971.
21
So, too, an ethic of civil tolerance would aid in the emergence of democratic
government. For the social contract that underlies democratic life is not simply between
the state and society but also, indeed especially, among social forces who otherwise
might tear each other apart in the presence of limited state power. A sense of national
unity combined with a recognition of social difference hence contributed to the likelihood
of a successful democratization project.
Finally, international conditions might facilitate democratic transitions. Where
neighbors not simply refrained from fishing in troubled waters but actually reinforced
practices of constitutional government, then the consolidation of democratic life might be
promoted. The experience of West Germany illustrated this proposition as it was
incorporated into the European Community under the terms of the Marshall Plan and
NATO, while the transition in Japan was aided by its incorporation into an American
dominated order in the Pacific.
The result of these considerations formulated in the American academy between
roughly 1950 and 1980 was a decided skepticism that democratic government would
come quickly or easily to peoples who had not experienced the historical evolution of the
Western world or who, unlike the Japanese or the Indians, had not been exposed to
Western ways on a sustained and intimate basis. Consider, for example, the opinion of
Yale professor Robert Dahl in his book Polyarchy, published in 1971. Probably no work
on democratization was cited more frequently in the vast literature on the subject prior to
the 1990s. The book’s opening line poses our question: “Given a regime in which
opponents of the government cannot openly and legally organize into political parties to
oppose the government in free and fair elections, what conditions favor or impede a
22
transformation into a regime in which they can?” Dahl devotes a short chapter to
“foreign control” in the birth of democratic regimes and acknowledges that in lands as
different as Japan and Jamaica, American or British imperialism made for important
differences. Yet at the point where one would expect a discussion of how these
democratic grafts onto foreign cultures occurred, we find a warning that such efforts
should be avoided:
The whole burden of this book, I believe, argues against the rationality of
such a policy. For the process of transformation is too complex and too
poorly understood to justify it. The failure of the American foreign aid
program to produce any transformations of this kind over two decades
gives additional weight to this negative conclusion.
Writing eighteen years later, in 1989, Dahl’s position had not changed. He continued to
caution that “the capacity of democratic countries to bring democracy about in other
countries will remain rather limited.”10
Arguments such as Dahl’s were characteristic of the mainstream of American
academic thinking on the question of democratic transitions from the 1950s through the
1980s. But then came the quick and surprising end of the Cold War on terms that favored
the globalization of open markets and the spread of democratic governments among
peoples as different as the Czechs and the Chileans, the Poles and the South Koreans, the
Hungarians, Slovenes, and South Africans. Mexico and Brazil made new efforts toward
constitutional government as did Turkey. In the early 1990s, serious hope was held that
Russia and China might move in the same direction.
10
Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, Yale University Press, 203, 214; Dahl,
Democracy and Its Critics, Yale University Press, 1989, 317.
23
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, then, a new confidence was born that democracy
could appear virtually anywhere. Part of the fresh conviction was due to the apparent
success of economic globalization, bringing with it the rise of an international middle
class, growing prosperity, the increased interdependence of peoples, and the spread of
agreements that required a rules-based order domestically as well as internationally. But
more of the faith was due to the recognition that liberal democracies had a claim to
humane treatment of their citizenries and each other. Liberty, justice and peace were not
hollow words, but concepts capable of having meaning, here and now, and for all
peoples.11
The 1990s thus witnessed the growth in numbers and strength of a wide variety of
human rights organizations including in the United States most notably Human Rights
Watch, Freedom House, the Open Society Institute, and Amnesty International. Great
men such as Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, John Paul II, or Kim Dae Jung attested to
the ability of leaders to move nations. And so the mood grew that “sequences” and
“preconditions” for democracy were of by-gone importance. A new optimism for the
possibilities of the human spirit took wing, the result being the increased sense that
11
See Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions, University of
California Press, 1990. See too, Larry Diamond, “The Global Imperative: Building a Democratic World
Order,” Current History, January 1994; Diamond, “ Building a World of Liberal Democracies,” in Thomas
H. Henriksen ed., Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-first Century, Hoover Institution Press, 2001;
Diamond, “Can the Whole World Become Democratic? Democracy, Development and International
Politicies,” University of California, Irvine, Paper 03/05. For an example of how neoconservatives could
easily borrow these ideas see, e.g., Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy: The
Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, Public Affairs, Press, 2004.
24
democracy had a “universal appeal,” that “freedom” was a birthright of all peoples, now
theirs to be taken. Great men plus great ideas at certain historical junctures can make
history. Was this not the story of the American Revolution and our Constitution? Could
not similar examples be seen in lands as different as Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic, Slovenia, Chile, South Korea, South Africa, and Taiwan—all richer, freer, and
more pro-American once they became democratic?12 Why not then too in Mexico,
Turkey, China and Russia if the right leaders stepped forward backed by Washington and
its fellow democrats in Europe and the Far East?
A third neoliberal argument came from international lawyers who began to
redefine the meaning of “sovereignty.” A “right to intervene” became a “duty to
intervene” if a state’s “responsibility to protect” were not honored. The genocide in
Rwanda in 1994 had its parallel in the murderous civil war launched by Serbia even
earlier. Regimes that did not have legitimacy based on the consent of the governed might
find themselves stripped of the protections normally associated with membership in the
international community if they were unable to protect their subjects or were themselves
guilty of gross and systematic human rights violations. While the United Nations was
most certainly seen as the appropriate body to decide which states should enjoy sovereign
immunity and which should not, other multilateral groups such as NATO, or perhaps
12
For critics of this development, see David Rieff, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed
Intervention, Simon and Schuster, 2005; Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism Transformed,” Perspectives
on Politics, 3, 4, December 2005.
25
eventually the hoped-for Community of Democracies, could, and should, take on the
challenge.13
In short order, neoliberal jurists expanded their argument. Non-democratic states
amassing weapons of mass destruction, like those guilty of serious human rights abuses,
were increasingly considered pariahs of the international system. As with pirate ships or
slavers of old, they might be attacked by whoever would assume the responsibility for
righting the wrongs that these regimes caused or who could claim to be acting in
legitimate self-defense.14
What was occurring during the 1990s was a three part argument, each of whose
elements was volatile but when combined added up to a powerful inducement for
American imperialism. Thanks to the neoliberals who assured us that the enlargement of
the “zone of democratic peace” meant a more secure America and a more peaceful world,
a Kantian moral imperative emerged to argue that where feasible such change should be
promoted.15 Thanks to the neoliberals who brought about new ways of thinking about the
universal appeal of democracy and the relative ease of a transition from authoritarianism,
one could champion the feasibility of the expansion of democratic government more
13
Maro Bettati, Le droit d’ingérence: mutation de l’ordre international, Jacob, 1996; Thomas M. Franck,
“The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” American Journal of International Law, 86, 1, January
1992; International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, “The Responsibility to Protect,”
2001.
14
Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,” Foreign Affairs, 83, 1, January-February
2004.
15
See, for example, Russett and Oneal, op. cit., chpt. 8.
26
confidently than ever before. Thanks to neoliberal jurists, a blessing could be given to
the tanks that might be called for to bring about a new world of freedom and peace.
In sum, the period of liberal internationalist hegemonism that characterized the
Cold War years gave way to a new phase of thinking best labeled progressive
imperialism. Perhaps the worm had been in the fruit since the beginning; evidence is
there that it was present in the policies of Woodrow Wilson. Certainly in the aftermath of
World War II, one can discern an American will to power worldwide blocked only by the
existence of the Soviet Union and later China. However, American power prior to the
1990s had always been obviously limited by other forces in the world arena. Washington
would back a liberal program where it could to the national advantage, but it was
generally prudent enough to scale back its expectations in situations where the promotion
of democratic government could be seen as of little value, or even counter productive, to
what it defined as the national security.
With the end of the Cold War this was to change. American nationalism could
now deck itself out in an internationalist attire that thanks to liberal internationalist
thinking had become a veritable ideology, a framework for political action that combined
a reading of history with a guideline on current policy that was as self-assured as it was
self-righteous.
In sum, a potent ideological brew had been prepared by the neoliberals, eventually
to become the substance itself of that pillar of the Bush Doctrine that gave purpose to
America’s bid for world supremacy. Not the neoconservatives—much less their hapless
mentor Leo Strauss—but men and women of the center left must be seen as the authors of
27
ideas of enormous consequence, the concepts that made the will to power of the Bush
Doctrine seem so legitimate, indeed so compelling.
What the Bush Doctrine came down to in intellectual terms was a cross
fertilization by first cousins, the neoconservatives and the neoliberals. To be sure, there
were tensions. The neocon insistence on American supremacy in world affairs
contradicted long-standing liberal convictions that cooperation, not domination, should
be the hallmark of a liberal order, just as the neolib idea that all the world might be
democratized ran up against some resistance among neoconservatives better known for
their pessimism than for their faith in human perfectibility. But in short order, world
events played their part in easing these tensions. Already the two camps were moving
together over events in the Balkans in the mid-1990s, encouraging the Clinton
administration to move more decisively against Slobodan Milosevic. And then came
9/11.
THE NEOCONSERVATIVES AND THE BUSH DOCTRINE
In order to appreciate the depth of the bipartisan consensus over the terms of the
Bush Doctrine, it is critical to be disabused of the belief that policy in Washington flowed
directly from neoconservative thinking. We must see instead the fundamental
contribution of neoliberal concepts to the intoxicating ideas of progressive imperialism.
However, if we are to believe the neocons, they fathered the Bush Doctrine. As
William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on March 17, 2003, “Our policy specified
in 1997 is now official. It has become the policy of the U.S. government…History and
reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their
28
verdicts.” Months later, in Commentary, Joshua Muravchik explained that 9/11 revealed
what his school had understood all along: “a sharp change of course was required” in
American foreign policy, “and the neoconservatives, who had been warning for years that
terror must not be appeased, stood vindicated…Not only did the neocons have an analysis
of what had gone wrong in American policy, they also stood ready with proposals for
what to do now…”16
Whatever the lessons of the Iraq War, they did not diminish neoconservative pride
in their accomplishment. In 2004, Max Boot called the National Security Strategy issued
in 2002 (and commonly identified as the single best statement of the Bush Doctrine) “a
quintessentially neoconservative document.”17 Hence, it was quite in order in the
summer of 2005, for Charles Krauthammer to write in Commentary that, in effect,
everyone was now a neocon. “The remarkable fact that the Bush Doctrine is, essentially,
a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism’s own transition
from a position of dissidence…to governance.”
What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being
articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war
cabinet composed of individuals …[whose] differences have, if anything
narrowed…it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has
come.18
16
Joshua Muravchik, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” Commentary, September 2003, reprinted in Irwin
Stelzer, ed., The Neocon Reader, Grove Press, 2004. See Muravchik’s later affirmation of seriousness in
“How to Save the Neocons,” Foreign Policy, November-December 2006.
17
18
Max Boot, “Myths about Neoconservatism,” Foreign Policy, 2004, reprinted in Irwin, ibid.
Charles Krauthammer, “The Neoconservative Convergence,” Commentary, July-August 2005.
29
By the fall of 2005, however, many neoconservatives were coming to believe that
the Doctrine they had authored was in crisis. Given their presumed paternity of the Bush
Doctrine, they apparently felt they had something of a father’s privilege to scold those
entrusted to implement it. The first significant grousing surfaced in November 2005,
when Commentary published a Symposium evaluating the Doctrine by 36 intellectuals,
most of them neocons, and most of these dissatisfied with the way the President’s second
term was heading.
So Robert Kagan lamented that the White House, “has not applied its ‘Doctrine’
very broadly or systematically…for instance to North Korea and Iran….the
administration has almost entirely ignored the quashing of what little democracy remains
in Russia and it no longer makes more than the barest pretense of caring about the lack of
democratic reform in China.” Kagan opened his statement asking, “Is there a Bush
Doctrine?” He concluded it affirming, “I support the Bush Doctrine and an expansive
vision of America’s role in the world. I do. The question remains whether there is a
Bush Doctrine to support. The answer is still unknown.”
William Kristol’s contribution to the Symposium paralleled Kagan’s. Kristol was
concerned by the future trajectory of the Doctrine and pointed again to lands where it
needed to be exercised, including Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and North Korea.
The proliferation of nuclear technology to Iran was a theme in the Symposium
that Richard Perle fixed on with special concern: “While Tehran and Damascus work
hard to undermine the fledgling Iraqi democracy and American influence in the region,
the administration dithers…Soliciting cooperation from duplicitous Iraqi Baathists,
making deals with Kim Jon Il, indecision on Iran, seemingly limitless patience with
30
Syria’s support for the insurgency in Iraq, pretending the Saudis are our friends…these
are the products of your tax dollars at work.”
For Max Boot, by contrast, the Doctrine “has been largely successful.” That said,
Boot reminded his readers that the other two members of the “axis of evil,” Iran and
North Korea, remained to be dealt with, worried about Syria, and was bothered that
“Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia appear not to have gotten the message.”
For Eliot Cohen, not enough had been done to alert us to the dangers of Islam as a
religion: “Anodyne formulations like ‘a perversion of a great religion’ or ‘a few
extremists’ do not capture the power of this movement. There is a great need for a sober,
detailed, and educated rhetoric about whom we are fighting. Happy talk to the Muslim
world about what nice people Americans are is not only no substitute—it fools only those
who utter it.”
Frank Gaffney agreed. In the “global conflict imposed upon us by a dangerous
totalitarian ideology that has properly come to be known as Islamofascism…the
administration has largely refused to go beyond euphemisms like ‘terror’ and ‘an evil
ideology.’ The unwillingness to declare Islamofascism the force that drives our foes…”
meant, Gaffney argued, that we have not taken on “the nation that is arguably most
responsible for the worldwide spread of Islamofascism: Saudi Arabia.”
Six months later, the mood had grown even gloomier. With the apparent decision
by the Bush administration in the spring of 2006 to shelve the option of attacking Iran for
its failure to cease the development of nuclear technology, the Weekly Standard began
Bush bashing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that “the United
States understands that Iran is not Iraq,” William Kristol struck back on May 6: “Much of
31
the U.S. government no longer believes in, and is no longer acting to enforce, the Bush
Doctrine…the United States of America is in retreat.”
Two months later, all was forgiven. The Bush administration’s support for Israeli
strong-arm tactics in Lebanon, reassured the neoconservatives that the White House was
on script again. On July 31, 2006 the Weekly Standard published three essays celebrating
positions staked out by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair with respect to
what was now being called “the new Middle East.” By late in the year, however, the
mood had changed once again. With the creation of the Iraq Study Group under the
direction of James Baker and Lee Hamilton to evaluate American policy in the Middle
East, the neoconservatives once again found themselves potentially in opposition to the
President, a crisis quickly alleviated when Bush proposed in January 2007 a “surge” in
American military forces in Iraq so as to end the struggle there on terms favorable to
Washington’s continued influence in the Broader Middle East.
In short, like playwrights proud of their handiwork, the neoconservatives could
heap praise on the Doctrine one day, or protest its performance as a pirated production
the next, as they charted the twists and turns of American involvement in the Middle East
and gave lectures on what its course should be. The neocons’ confidence in the soundness
of their judgment came from their assurance that the script they had written was now
public policy. It just remained for those in power to listen to their counsel as policy in
theory was converted to policy in practice.
But why should we accept the neoconservative view of things? In fact, as we
have seen, key aspects of the Bush Doctrine did not originate with them. And given the
strong support the Doctrine continues to possess in concept, if not in name, within the
32
Democratic Party, how likely is it that it is about to fade into history? Neither the pride
shown by the neoconservatives in fathering the Doctrine, nor their misgivings as to its
possible future trajectory, seem justified by the record we have before us. Whatever the
day by day alternatives debated by policy makers, and however strong the growing
dissatisfaction among the Democratic electorate may be, the winds behind the ship of
state are constant enough, thanks to agreement on the theoretical “givens” of the Doctrine
assented to it by some many Democratic intellectuals. Despite what one might assume to
be the lessons of Iraq, and now Lebanon, American policy in the Middle East is likely to
stay on course unless a new consensus can be reached on the American role in world
affairs.
In effect a “war of ideas,” as it is often called, is being fought both in the Middle
East and at home saying that armed intervention in that region is unavoidable, and indeed
welcome. If public and elite opinion in the Middle East roundly rejects such arguments,
at home an elite consensus seems able to maintain itself despite growing popular
discontent. The terms of the Bush Doctrine still seem persuasive to many (who blame the
execution of policy, but not its initial formulation) and for those who disagree the
question remains open of how to define America’s place in the world.
NEOLIBERALISM AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Given that the neoliberals were in the Wilsonian tradition, it should come as no
surprise that the pillar of purpose in the Bush Doctrine should appeal to many on the
center left. They, and not the neoconservatives, had authored it after all.
33
To be sure, we must be careful not to exaggerate the similarities or reduce the
differences. Most liberal internationalists were multilateralists, not sponsors of world
supremacy for the United States. They thought of themselves as cosmopolitans more
than nationalists; they were intent on doing what was right for world order, not simply for
American security. And there is a good argument to be made but that had Al Gore been
president in 2001, the United States might well have attacked Afghanistan, but it is rather
unlikely that Iraq would have been its next target.19
Yet under the impact of 9/11, and thanks to the seductive arguments made by the
neocons that unilateral action alone was called for, many liberal internationalists joined
the war party led by President George W. Bush. Consider, for example, the case of
Michael Ignatieff, founding academic director of the Carr Center for Human Rights
Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Although Ignatieff
presumably regretted the lack of multilateral support for the invasion of Iraq, his outrage
at Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity and the failure of the United Nations to act
moved him to join forces with the Bush Doctrine and its unilateralism. “Human rights
groups [objecting to American unilateralism] seem more outraged by the prospect of
action than they are by the abuses they once denounced,” he wrote in January 2003.
“Multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth
unless America bares its fangs.” Recognizing that America was creating an empire—“if
America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region”—Ignatieff
19
Al Gore, The Assault on Reason, Penguin, 2007
34
endorsed Herman Melville’s words that Americans “bear the ark of the liberties of the
world.”20
Nor was Ignatieff to change his position once the War was well underway. “Just
remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the
British,” he declared in a surprising historical analogy in mid-2005. “Who else is
available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly not the Europeans
who themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to
home…when the chips were down, in the dying years of Soviet tyranny, American
presidents were there and European politicians looked the other way.”21
But while Ignatieff was a neoliberal, a “liberal hawk,” he was a Canadian and thus
far from the center of power in domestic American politics. In terms of the dissemination
of ideas from the intellectual kingpins of the Republican Party to those who were
Democrats, the story appears to be fairly clear. The self-described “think tank” of the
Democratic Party, Bill Clinton’s “idea mill,” the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) of the
Democratic Leadership Council founded in 1989 was root and branch taken over by the
arguments of neoliberal imperialism.
A comparison of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century
(PNAC) and the PPI shows a virtual convergence of opinion. To be sure, in order to see
that the Democrats regained control of the White House and the Congress, the PPI made
a great deal of noise about the failures of the Bush administration. But after we cut
20
Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden.” New York Times, January 5, 2003.
21
Michael Ignatieff, “Who are Americans that Think that Freedom is Theirs to Spread?” New York Times,
June 6, 2005.
35
through the smoke and mirrors, the bottom line of these Democratic charges was that the
Republicans had not succeeded in the Iraq War when it might have been won, and so had
jeopardized the likelihood that American bayonets might push the perimeters of the “zone
of democratic peace” beyond Iraq. These Democrats wanted to support America’s bid for
world supremacy based on the promotion of market democracies every bit as much as the
Republicans. The difference was therefore one of tactics, not strategy.
Consider as Exhibit A, a volume published in 2006 and edited by Will Marshall,
the president of the PPI since 1989, entitled With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy
for Defeating Jihandism and Defending Liberty.22 Among its line-up of nineteen writers
were such familiar neolibs as Ronald Asmus, Larry Diamond, Michael McFaul, Kenneth
Pollack, Jeremy Rosner, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Stephen Solarz. The difference
between a volume like this and something PNAC would produce is negligible, a point
illustrated by a favorable review it received in the Weekly Standard from Tom Donnelly
on May 22, 2006.
The book presents itself is oriented around “five progressive imperatives for
national security:” 1) “we must marshal all of America’s manifold strengths, starting with
our military power, but going well beyond it…;” 2) “we must rebuild America’s
alliances…;” 3) “we must champion liberal democracy in deed, not just in rhetoric,
because a freer world is a safer world;” 4) “we must renew U.S. leadership…;” 5) “we
must summon from the American people a new spirit of national unity and shared
sacrifice.”
22
Will Marshall ed., With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending
Liberty, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
36
To the extent there was an organized caucus within the Democratic Party on
foreign affairs, its members supported the terms of the Bush Doctrine as their own. Like
the neocons, “progressive” neoliberal members of the party supported American primacy
militarily over all the globe (which they understood to require expanding the country’s
armed forces), and they saw democracy promotion and global markets as the key to
world peace. “Make no mistake,” wrote Will Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their
Introduction to the PPI volume, “we are committed to preserving America’s military
preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership…”
And again, “Progressives must champion liberal democracy in deed, not just in rhetoric,
as an integral part of a strategy for preventing conflict, promoting prosperity, and
defending human dignity…We believe Democrats must reclaim, not abandon, their own
tradition of muscular liberalism…violent jihadism, like fascism and communism, poses
both a threat to our people’s safety and a moral challenge to our liberal beliefs and
ideals.” Still again, “Progressive and Democrats must not give up the promotion of
democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service.
Advancing democracy—in practice, not just in rhetoric—is fundamentally the
Democrats’ legacy, the Democrats’ cause, and the Democrats’ responsibility.”
The individual contributions to the volume are mostly variations on these themes.
A Muslim American writes of how important it is to win the war of ideas to overcome the
“cosmic war” of terrorism and so win “The Struggle for Islam’s Soul.” Another chapter
addresses the youth of America as “The 9/11 Generation.” Several essays deal with
making the military dimension of the struggle in the Middle East more effective. Stephen
Solarz worries about Pakistan; Anne-Marie Slaughter would “Reinvent the UN.” Larry
37
Diamond and Michael McFaul are once again “Seeding Liberal Democracy.” And
Kenneth Pollack, whose 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
was as influential as any single writing in justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is still at
it with a chapter entitled “A Grand Strategy for the Middle East.”
“For better or worse, whether you supported the war or not, it is all about Iraq
now,” writes Pollack. His political vision? “The end state that America’s grand strategy
toward the Middle East must envision is a new liberal order to replace a status quo
marked by political repression, economic stagnation and cultural conflict.” The problem
with the Bush administration? “It has not made transformation its highest goal…Instead
the administration seems to have made advancing reform in the region its lowest priority.
Iran and Syria’s rogue regimes seem to be the only exceptions. The administration insists
on democratic change there in a manner it eschews for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other
allies…The right grand strategy would make transformation of our friends and our foes
alike our agenda’s foremost issue.” Several contributors to the volume, Diamond and
McFaul most explicitly, might agree wholeheartedly with Pollack’s suggestions.
Consider as Exhibit B the position of Peter Beinart, an editor of the New Republic.
Calling for Democrats to rally to support the War, Beinart was widely cited for his essay,
“A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism,” which appeared in his journal
on December 13, 2004. After reporting on the “barbaric interpretations of Islam” that
underlie “totalitarian Islam,” Beinart asserted that for Democrats, “the struggle against
America’s new totalitarian foe [must be] at the center of [our] hopes for a better world.”
Today’s “softs,” as he repeatedly called those who failed to take with utmost seriousness
the menace of “Islamofascism,” were similar to those who failed to take the Soviet
38
menace seriously in the 1940s. For our day, he declared, Democrats had to come to
understand that defeating “Islamist totalitarianism…must be liberalism’s north star.”
In 2006, Beinart published a book wherein he persisted in his admonitions. Its
title strikingly sums up its bombastic, militaristic message: The Good Fight: Why
Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great
Again.23 The volume’s cover describes it as “a passionate rejoinder to the conservatives
who have rule Washington since 9/11…an intellectual lifeline for a Democratic Party
lying flat on its back…a call for liberals to revive the spirit that swept America and
inspired the world.” Its primary purpose is to challenge the “narrative” produced by the
conservatives that established and justified a grand strategy for American foreign policy
with a “narrative” suitable for liberals in today’s world to do the same.
Whatever its brave ambitions, the Beinart book summed up the dilemma of the
war party among Democrats in the election year of 2006: they could not find any serious
ground on which to distinguish themselves from the Bush administration. These
Democrats agreed that “totalitarianism” was on the march, and that fighting it with an
expanded military force was the answer to the challenge. They also concurred that once
the struggle of arms had been concluded, then to consolidate victory, state and nation
building based on democratizing the conquered peoples was the proper way to proceed.
Nor did they see any limit to such ambitions; Iraq was understood to be only the
beginning of the challenge. Finally, they saw their goal as character building and morally
23
Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and
Make America Great Again, HarperCollins, 2006.
39
uplifting, a fitting international accompaniment to what they hoped to see flower
domestically if ever they again took control of the national government.
For a final Exhibit C, consider the writing of Larry Diamond, an active member of
the PPI, who damned the handling of the War in a book entitled Squandered Victory: The
American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, modestly
dedicated “to my students, may they learn from our mistakes.”24 Yet it turns out that the
“mistakes” were not to attempt to assert American military and ideological primacy over
the entire international system, or even over the Broader Middle East, or even simply
over Iraq, but instead to have botched the job. In a companion article to his book
published in January 2005 in the Journal of Democracy and entitled “Lessons From
Iraq,” Diamond presented a series of seven considerations for future armed, democracy
promoting interventions elsewhere including: “1. Prepare for a major commitment…;”
“2. Commit enough troops…;” “3. Mobilize international legitimacy and cooperation…”
Diamond did not criticize the Bush Doctrine. He had no apparent criticism to
make of the American determination top dominate the Middle East, installing democratic
governments there in the name of American national security and world peace. Instead,
like most Democrats involved with the War, he was rather working day and night to
make the terms of the Doctrine more effective. One might say no more for Richard Perle,
whose testimony before the House Committee on Armed Services of April 6, 2005,
entitled “Four Broad Lessons from Iraq,” had nothing in it to which Diamond could
object. The neocon Perle and the neolib Diamond were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
24
Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring
Democracy to Iraq, Holt, 2005.
40
The only apparent difference was that Diamond could list seven lessons to be learned, not
just four.
Intellectuals alone cannot move the Democratic Party, to be sure. Enter Illinois
representative Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat whose fortunes could serve as a marker for
where the party is headed. Emmanuel was chair of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee and widely agreed to have played an important role in the
Democratic take-over of the House in the November 2006 election. He was also
president of the Democratic Leadership Council, and was in close contact with the
Progressive Policy Institute. In November 2005 when Pennsylvania Democrat John
Murtha called for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, Emanuel was the first to slap him down.
Shortly before the 2006 election, Emanuel published a book with Bruce Reed,
editor of the PPI magazine Blueprint. In The Plan: Big Ideas for America, Emanuel and
Reed call the book edited by Marshal described earlier an “important anthology” that
“breathes new life” into the Democratic Party. Beinart’s book they call “fascinating.”
“Winning at war is not a partisan or ideological question…but a fiercely pragmatic one.”
Emmanuel and Reed thus position themselves as “centrists” around the “vital
center,” while denouncing Republican strategists like Karl Rove as “polarizers.” But the
entire exercise is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s assertion in 1968 as he ran for president
that “new leadership will end the war,” a phrase often referred to as Nixon’s “secret plan”
to arrange an American withdrawal from Vietnam. In the event, Nixon’s plan turned out
to be based on an effort to prevail in Southeast Asia. With leaders like Emanuel
weighing in on foreign policy, will Democrats be any different in 2008 than Nixon was
forty years earlier? America’s hegemony project is made of strong stuff ideologically
41
and in terms of the interests it represents. The failure of the Iraq War at Bush’s hands
may not mean the Democrats wash their hands of an American ambition to dominate the
Middle East. Emanuel and Reed’s decision to cite positively work by the
neoconservative Tom Donnelly indicates how far they are from opposing the Bush
Doctrine.25
Can Democrats rise above the temptations of a superpower?26 Can they recognize
the limits of American power and the appeal of its blueprint of market democracy? Or in
will they stay wedded to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s words on February 18,
1998? “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable
nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future.” At present writing, the most
trenchant opposition to American imperialism seems to come more from old-line
Republicans associated with former President George H.W. Bush—men like James Baker
and Brent Scowcroft—than anyone with national prominence in foreign affairs the
Democrats put forth. Bob Woodward reported in the Washington Post on December 28,
2006 that Gerald Ford had said to him in July 2004, “I can understand the theory of
wanting to free people,” but he doubted “whether you can detach that from the obligation
number one, of what’s in our national interest. And I just don’t think we should go
hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our
national security.” Who in 2007, among nationally recognized Democratic potential
candidates for the presidency in 2008, could be found saying any such thing? That such a
position can emerge among Party leaders is certainly the case. But that when it does so it
25
26
Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, The Plan: Big Ideas for America, PublicAffairs, 2006, 152ff, 192f.
Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower, Harvard University Press, 1995.
42
will run headlong in to the intellectuals grouped in the Progressive Policy Institute is
almost certain.
LONG LIVE THE BUSH DOCTRINE
This essay has tried to establish that the paternity widely ascribed to the
neoconservatives (and claimed by them as well) for authoring alone the Bush Doctrine is
misplaced. Instead, it was the neoliberals, men and women of the center left, distant from
the Republic Party, who conceived the critical part of the Doctrine that called for
democratizing the world. Moreover, the essay has argued that because of the intellectual
control exercised by these neoliberals over the Democratic Party, as late as 2007, there
was no meaningful debate in the United States over any other coherent framework of
action than the effective implementation of the Bush Doctrine. The anti-war sentiment
that helped the Democrats in the November 2006 elections was limited by the simple fact
that it did not represent a united movement with an alternative plan for America’s place
in the world. While in January 2007, the Democratic Party debated the option of
withdrawing from Iraq, it coupled such thinking to plans to increase military spending in
the years ahead as an indication of America’s plans to remain the world’s sole
superpower with a global mission to perform. The war of ideas, often said to be one
within the Muslim world, has in fact been waged within the United States, so effectively
that no credible anti-war movement exists capable of taking power and redirecting
America’s role in the world. Whatever the theoretical and practical failings of the Bush
Doctrine, in intellectual terms it still reigns supreme.
43
To be sure, opinion polls and the results of the November 2006 elections show
that the Democrats finally have an issue to use against the Republicans in foreign policy.
But we would rightly be suspicious of Democrats in the 2008 election unless they
forthrightly reject American pretensions to world supremacy, make a variety of difficult
new choices for how American power is used in the world, and find ways to act
constructively with our closest allies on dangers that threaten us all. The unlikelihood
that they will do so lies in the nature of American interests, character, and values as well
as in its continued relative military primacy whatever the debacle in Iraq.
If a way forward exists, it involves acknowledging in debates in 2007-2008 over
the future of liberal internationalism that the United States is in the grips of an intellectual
stalemate that makes it unable to deal with the crisis it has provoked by its own actions in
world affairs. Blinded equally by its will to power, by its self-righteous conviction that it
has found the key to the worldwide promotion of freedom, prosperity, and peace, and by
a legitimate concern that defeat in Iraq could lead to reversals elsewhere, a good part of
the political elites in this country, Democrats and Republicans alike, appears wedded to a
self-perpetuating and self-defeating framework for action more dangerous than any other
initiative ever undertaken in the history of American foreign policy. Realists who are
Republicans, Democrats, or independents may ultimately be the best suited to reorient the
nation given the unwillingness, or perhaps better the inability, of liberal internationalists
to remake their arguments in light of the calamity of Iraq.
In a sense, Wilsonianism has always been in crisis. Wilson himself was unable to
get the Congress to join the League of Nations. During the Cold War, the requirements
of containment repeatedly meant that liberal internationalism had to take an
44
uncomfortable back seat in Washington. Again and again following the Greek Civil War
that ended in 1949, Washington would back authoritarians against communists without
giving much consideration to what such policies meant for liberal democrats abroad.
This time, the difficulties are even greater. Given its self-inflicted wounds, liberal
internationalism may never again be other than a very minor theme in the making of U.S.
foreign policy.
If there is reason for hope that a faction of either major party that sees American
power and interests in a more realistic light may have a chance at coming to power, it lies
not in elite thinking, so much of which is hopelessly mired in “the fog of war” and the
intoxicating notions of a democratic peace, but in public opinion polls taken on the
importance of democracy promotion over the last generation. Tracing this evidence from
1976 through1996, professor Ole R. Holsti found democracy promotion abroad to be a
low priority among Americans of all political persuasions. Even among those who
defined themselves as “very liberal,” only 25% in 1996 thought this end was “a very
important foreign policy goal.” Only 10% of those questioned felt that “the U.S. should
not hesitate to intrude upon the domestic affairs of other countries in order to establish
and preserve a more democratic world order.” 27
The attack of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq only slightly altered these figures. In
August 2004, the Pew Research Center released a public opinion poll that had asked
respondents to rank a list of 19 foreign policy “top priorities.” Human rights promotion
came in 16th, democracy promotion 18th. A poll released by the Chicago Council on
27
Ole R. Holsti, “Promotion of Democracy by Popular Demand?” in Michael Cox ed., American
Democracy Promotion, Oxford University Press, 2000.
45
Foreign Relations in September 2005 asked whether respondents favored “promoting
democracy by military force,” and found that 35% did while 55% did not. The
experience of trying to democratize Iraq made 72% of respondents less positive about
using military force in the future to promote democracy, and only 26% agreed that “when
there are more democracies, the world is a safer place” (versus 68% who disagreed).
Again, in July 2006, a New York Times/CBS poll found that 59% of the public “did not
believe the United States should take the lead in solving international conflicts in
general,” while 31% said it should, a development the pollsters called “a significant shift”
from earlier results toward an “isolationist” direction.
Here, then, is a popular base for a more realistic approach to America’s place in
the world. But the opponents of the Bush Doctrine are unlikely to prevail. Serious as the
crisis is, the internal forces pushing to dominate the Middle East are simply be too
powerful easily to be unseated. As the anchors of America in the Middle East are both oil
and Israel, not to speak of the will to global domination that continues to warm the hearts
of many in Washington, how likely is it that the terms of the Bush Doctrine will be
rejected, even if it is clear, intellectually speaking, that the emperor wears no clothes?
Should there be another serious terrorist attack, might not public opinion change again in
the direction of supporting liberal internationalism as a form of patriotic American
nationalism?
Is Wilsonianism in crisis? Yes, because at a theoretical and practical level its
bankruptcy is apparent. The emperor wears no clothes. No, because no alternative
framework for America in world politics has yet emerged, and because powerful
domestic forces, combined with the clear and present danger posed by terrorism
46
worldwide, are skillfully conducting what they call a war of ideas that denies there is any
other course of action for this country aside from that already laid out in Washington.
Between the inauguration of a new Congress in January 2007 and that of a new
president and Congress in January 2009, debates are sure to be sharp on the future
direction of American foreign policy. The intellectuals in the PNAC (which as an
organization formally dissolved at the end of 2006) and the PPI are past masters at the art
of persuasion. Their insubstantial differences can maintain the pretense that alternative
courses of action are being debated. The reality, then, is that the constituent elements of
the Bush Doctrine have a great deal of staying power yet. As we are likely to see in future
national debates, the United States still conceives of itself as “the indispensable nation”
enjoying military primacy and with a blueprint for postwar construction based on fitting
other people out for a Pax Americana based on open markets and democratic government
that allegedly should ensure world peace. The Bush Doctrine is Dead. Long live the
Bush Doctrine.