Neocons vs. Neoliberals Posted by Shadi Hamid

I mentioned on Wednesday that Tony Smith had just written a pretty shaky piece in the Washington Post on Democratic foreign policy. Normally, I’d say that flimsy pieces such as this one do not deserve a sustained response, except for the fact that I suspect many Americans agree with it. With that said, let us begin. Smith starts off with a pretty bold statement:

The fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the Bush-Cheney doctrine.

Hmm, really? He continues:

Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since.

Ok, well, on the surface of it, he’s right. Many Democrats have embraced the “idea of a muscular foreign policy.” Many of us believe that America should remain the world’s dominant power (if that strikes you as an unjustifiable position, think about China as the world’s next superpower and imagine what that would mean for international human rights norms). Yes, many of us believe that we have the “right to intervene” in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Sovereignty is not sacrosanct, and there’s no reason to think that it ever was.

Fair enough, but none of these things were ever the distinguishing features of the "Bush-Cheney doctrine." The Bush-Cheney conception of international affairs differs from the liberal interventionist one in several fundamental ways, ones in which Tony Smith seems keenly unaware of:

1. The reliance on military force as the primary instrument of US power. Liberals believe that the effective use of soft power is better suited for many, if not most of the challenges that America faces in the current global climate. Practical implications: the US should deemphasize the military component of the war on terror.
2. Military force can/should be used to promote democracy. Liberals strongly support an assertive democracy promotion policy, but we do not believe in “democracy at gunpoint.” Practical implications: we will pro-actively support democratic reform abroad, but only through peaceful means.
3. The moral infallibility of America (i.e. the assumption that the US is inherently and always “good”). Liberals believe that the exercise of power must be accompanied by a vigilant self-criticism. We must be constantly admitting our faults and revising our methods accordingly. As Peter Beinart wrote recently in an excellent piece: "Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United State has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn't have trusted ourselves."  Practical implications: Because we understand our own moral limitations (i.e. because we are human), we believe in wedding ourselves to multilateral frameworks and institutions which both serve to constrain and harness power in a more effective - and moral - manner. Practical implication #2: we know how to say we're sorry. See John Edwards, Exhibit A.
4. Fear is more important than respect and admiration. The Bush-Cheneyites don’t really care about what other people think about us. Liberals, on the other hand, are fully aware that billions of people not liking/hating us is probably not good for our national strategic interests.

Later in his article, Smith quotes Madeleine Albright, as if saying the following is somehow an indictment of, um, something:

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.

Well, I personally wouldn’t have used this particular phrasing (but then again she said this while we were trying to save a people from genocide). I think the problem here is that Albright is making what should be a prescriptive statement descriptive. We do not (currently) see "further into the future." But that is precisely what we aspire to. And that is what makes America America – the fact that we aspire to something greater than the standard, ad-hoc maneuvering of self-interested nation-states. We have a cause. Now, of course, we have not lived up to these lofty standards and we have betrayed our "cause" - however you wish to define it - time and time again. But it is my hope that a new generation of liberals can begin, slowly but surely, to bridge the gap between what is and what should be. Our politics were forged in the ashes of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s tragic response to it. We are fully aware of the destruction he and his supporters have wrought upon our greatest asset – America's moral standing. And we will dedicate our efforts to regaining the goodwill of the world’s citizens, aligning ourselves with their interest and aspirations, and demonstrating that we can and will be a force for moral good.

Comments

[Bob Narus]

There's an inherent contradiction between your points 1-4 and a "muscular foreign policy." (There's also a difference between being the world's dominant power and having a muscular foreign policy.) That's why John Edwards and Barack Obama are foreign policy liberals, and Hillary Clinton is not.

[Greg Sanders]

Regarding point #2:
"2) # Military force can/should be used to promote democracy. Liberals strongly support an assertive democracy promotion policy, but we do not believe in “democracy at gunpoint.” Practical implications: we will pro-actively support democratic reform abroad, but only through peaceful means."

I don't think this makes me a neocon, but I disagree. I think our occupations of Germany and Japan could be accurately described as "democracy at gunpoint" and while I have some problems with the way we bombed and war crimes trials on "Crimes of Agression" my support is fairly straightforward. Similarly, America didn't achieve our democracy by peaceful means and while peaceful means are preferable I don't see why they should be the only option. I personally am grateful that France intervened on ourside during the revolution, even if the King of France wasn't that interested in democracy.

I'd argue for a weaker version of #2:
Military force can/should be used to promote democracy. Liberals strongly support an assertive democracy promotion policy, but we do not believe democracy promotion is a reason to go to war. Practical implication: unlike preventing genocide, Democracy Promotion can not justify humanitarian intervention. Moreover, the U.S. will not support governments or non-state actors that commit human rights violations even when they call themselves freedom fighters.

[C. L. Ball]

Sady, Smith is right. The Democrats have not advocated a principled difference between their vision of US grand strategy and the dominant Republican one.

Re #2, in Haiti (1994) and Bosnia (1995) the US certainly used force to impose democratic rule. Does #2 renounce those efforts?

#1, #2, and #4 are about means to achieve ends rather than the ends themselves. This is what Smith is talking about. How are Democratic ends different?

#3 is less a foreign policy aim than an epistemological claim. If the US is morally fallible, so are other states, by your logic. Acting multilaterally will not improve the prospect for moral action unless multilateral institutions promote mutual criticism. "Vigilant self-criticism" would allow the US to act unilaterally but with greater moral clarity. The issue is "what morals are to be upheld?" and "at what price?". Multilateral cooperation can reduce the scope for moral action if least-common denominator logics apply.

[Greg Sanders]

Re: C. L. Ball

From the Smith article:
"Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions...
Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides damning Bush's handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the invasion. It has criticized Bush's failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better." (Emphasis mine)

The right to intervene and whether we should have invaded Iraq are both means questions that Smith discusses. Points #1, #2, and #4 are all quite relevant to the question of when we should invade. I disagree with #2, but I think it does provide a clear and relevant standard.

[J Thomas]

The logic here is more fundamental than you make out.

We can't very well cut military funding -- if we need our military we won't be able to build it up quickly. We *have to* keep the strongest military in the world in case we need it.

But it seems silly to have the most expensive military in the world and not use it. And large parts of our public very much like the idea of kicking somebody around to show how tough we are, to prove that America is #1.

So our politicians *have to* support the idea that it's right for us to attack anybody in the world provided we come up with some halfway-decent excuse. And it doesn't take much of an excuse, just something that a lot of the public will accept when they're ready for another war.

So, what do you think about the democracy in haiti today? Worth repeated interventions, right? Well, no. But we don't invade haiti to install democracy. We invade haiti because it's a convenient third-world hellhole that nobody cares about. So when we're preparing to invade some other third-world hellhole we can promote democracy in haiti as a sort of training exercise.

If we were to have a serious discussion about the morality of it, we might look at the soviets supporting international communism and the germans supporting the Third Reich. We think anything we do is fine provided it supports worldwide democracy. The russians thought anything they did was fine provided it supported worldwide communism. The germans thought anything they did was fine provided it furthered the Third Reich. What's the difference between us and them? The only possible difference is that we are objectively right while they were both objectively wrong.

But it doesn't really matter what we discuss. It isn't about right and wrong, it isn't about good and bad, it isn't about strong and weak. It's about which illusions the US public wants to believe and which they instinctively reject. When we want to kick ass we're going to kick ass, and the guys who come up with the justifications are mostly along for the ride.

[Dan Kervick]

Shadi,

I'm certain we can all come up with many differences between neoliberal Democrats and neoconservatives - not all of them insignificant. But I think Smith's basic point still stands. That point is that neoliberal Democrats are struggling to provide a compelling alternative to Bush because they do not differ much from Bush in the area of global strategy and long term ends. Where they differ is mainly in the areas of tactics, means and temperament.

In your own attempt to draw distinctions between neoliberal Democrats and neoconservatives, you really don't cite anything that could be characterized as a fundamental strategic difference, or a fundamental difference in ultimate aims. Reviewing:

1. The reliance on military force as the primary instrument of US power. Liberals believe that the effective use of soft power is better suited for many, if not most of the challenges that America faces in the current global climate. Practical implications: the US should deemphasize the military component of the war on terror.

This is simply a disagreement of degree over the proper balance of means directed toward one's chosen ends. It is not a disagreement over the ends themselves. Neoconservatives, of course, accept the reality of soft power, just as liberals accept the reality of hard power. They appear to disagree manly about their relative importance and the proper mix. But I would be more interested in learning about differences between what neoconservatives and neoliberals want to use all that hard and soft power for.

2. Military force can/should be used to promote democracy. Liberals strongly support an assertive democracy promotion policy, but we do not believe in “democracy at gunpoint.” Practical implications: we will pro-actively support democratic reform abroad, but only through peaceful means.

Well, maybe they don't believe in democracy promotion at gunpoint this week. That's because the most recent armed democracy promotion scheme turned into a fiasco. But in the pre-war environment, many, many neoliberal Democrats supported democracy promotion at gunpoint. And a good number of liberals have been arguing since the war went sour that the only thing that was really wrong with that project is that their were not enough guns and they were not intelligently pointed. It is still quite common for liberals to argue that had we listened to Shinseki and Albright, and managed this war in a more competent Clintonian fashion, it would have been a fine, successful and justifiable effort.

More problematic, to my mind, is the undue emphasis on democracy promotion. It is not that there is anything wrong with promoting more intelligent and effective governance around the world, as one component of progress. But many liberals seem positively obsessed with the problems of political systems to the exclusion of all other problems. In a world filled with expanding slums and and poverty, disease, war and violence, proliferation of dangerous weapons of all sizes and kinds, bitter and ruthless economic competition among heavily armed states and a collapsing environment, neoliberals seem only to to see the phenomenon of non-western and non-anglophone styles of government as the root of all evil.

The moral infallibility of America (i.e. the assumption that the US is inherently and always “good”). Liberals believe that the exercise of power must be accompanied by a vigilant self-criticism. We must be constantly admitting our faults and revising our methods accordingly. As Peter Beinart wrote recently in an excellent piece: "Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United State has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn't have trusted ourselves." Practical implications: Because we understand our own moral limitations (i.e. because we are human), we believe in wedding ourselves to multilateral frameworks and institutions which both serve to constrain and harness power in a more effective - and moral - manner. Practical implication #2: we know how to say we're sorry. See John Edwards, Exhibit A.

This is the lamest of the recent attempts to draw sharp distinctions between liberal and neoconservative foreign policy, and it is no surprise it comes from Peter Beinart, philosopher-king of the lame. Again, it doesn't bear at all on global strategy, but comes down to a temperamental difference. Liberals are better, in Beinart's book, because they are more humble and are plagued by more doubts. This may be true, and it is certainly the case that a foreign policy that partakes of a more healthy atmosphere of self-criticism and reflection is less likely to make catastrophic and impulsive mistakes. However almost every group of people with a common strategic agenda can be divided into the more cautious and reflective types, on the one hand, and the boldly aggressive and confident types. Is that the main difference between neoliberals and neoconservatives, or do they have different long term ends as well?

4. Fear is more important than respect and admiration. The Bush-Cheneyites don’t really care about what other people think about us. Liberals, on the other hand, are fully aware that billions of people not liking/hating us is probably not good for our national strategic interests.

This is a truism about human nature and human societies. Perhaps it is a truism to which liberals are more alert than neoconservatives - but what I want to know about are the "national strategic interests" to which you refer, not just the instrumental value of being liked in achieving those interests, whatever they happen to be.

In my many discussions with neoliberal Dems over the past several months and years, perhaps the thing that frustrates me the most is the blissful naivete of many of these neoliberals. Frankly, it appears to me that they simply don't understand the nature of the world and country they live in, and don't understand the very unpleasant and aggressive forces that drive US engagement in the world - and the engagement of other countries as well. The underlying global commercial and financial rackets that propel the assasinations, coups, subversion, wars, extortion, torture, disinformation, exploitation and thievery that are the stock in trade of all of the worlds great powers - including the US - cannot penetrate their childlike faith in the exceptional wonderfulness of their country. They are always willing to accept that all manner of mistakes have been made, but they refuse to examine the violent, greedy and systematic ugliness beneath it all. Their "exceptionalist" self-image, and impossibly rosy and fanciful view of American history and motives, render them incapable of formulating a realistic critique of US society and foreign policy. And since they don't understand the world, they cannot devise a compelling strategy for changing it.

[robertdfeinman]

The people of the US demand a government that will assist them in keeping their present lifestyle. We are 4% of the world's population, but consume 40% of the materials. This is unsustainable. Nevertheless our demands are what drive our foreign policy. What this is is quite clear: we want raw materials and finished goods provided at prices favorable to us.

This is nothing new, it was the reason for the gunboat diplomacy in the 19th and 20th Centuries in Latin America, it was the reason for annexing Hawaii, and it has been the basis of our middle east policies for almost a century.

There are those who don't like to admit our selfish motives so we are provided with some convenient cover stories. The most popular one is a variation of the white man's burden - we are bring democracy to those unable to govern themselves.

We have now reached a stage where our dependence on militarism has distorted not only our foreign policy but our domestic spending as well. The consequence has been underfunding of social programs and infrastructure. This has weakened the US and made us dependent upon imports of workers as well as materials. Those with a sense of history like to point out parallels to other empires. They should be heeded.

As long as our economy is based upon consumerism and capitalism (which means continual growth) then who is in office will only result in minor changes to policy. I suggest looking at the historical CBO data, you won't be able to tell from the spending patterns which party was the majority at any given time.

As Pogo said: "We have met the enemy and he is us".

Liberals can stop pretending that their motives are more pure and so can the neo-cons. Bush, at least, makes it clear that he is playing pure power politics with no pretense (BS about Iraq and democracy aside).

[Don Bacon]

I just copied and saved the final paragraph Dan Kervick's posting in my neoliberal file. Actually, Dan, I'm not sure that neoliberals are as naive as you think they are. Deep down they must know that American "exceptionalism" requires military power to keep Wall Street humming along. But I copied it anyhow because you say it so well (as usual) and you may be right. And they (like Shadi) do profess such innocence. They're like Bill Clinton who smoked without inhaling, or virgins who only did it once, or twice.

Isn't it a shame that these foreign policy discussions have such a narrow range and never consider the possibilities of non-intervention and cooperation? I guess that that's why half the citizens don't vote--almost nobody represents their (our) interests.

Congressman Ron Paul represents my interests in foreign policy (but I don't live in Texas). He quotes George Washington: "It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

Paul: "I believe our founding fathers had it right when they argued for peace and commerce between nations, and against entangling political and military alliances. In other words, noninterventionism.

"Noninterventionism is not isolationism. Nonintervention simply means America does not interfere militarily, financially, or covertly in the internal affairs of other nations. It does not mean that we isolate ourselves; on the contrary, our founders advocated open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations."

Ron Paul is now running for President. I can guarantee that he'll receive zero consideration from the corporate media because non-interventionism not only hurts neocons and neoliberals it also affects the bottom line, for treasons that robertdfeinman describes so eloquently.

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"treasons" (last paragraph)--freudian slip.

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