American Exceptionalism . . . Again Posted by Michael Cohen

David Rieff is exhausting! I mean that in both a good and bad way. Obviously he's an interesting writer with some compelling ideas about humanitarian intervention and foreign policy in general - and when it comes to writing stem-winding, but thought-provoking blog posts the man should get an award or something. But when it comes to the issue of American exceptionalism (an issue on which he and I have furiously engaged both online and off) his arguments tend to make me want to pound my head against a wall.

In his latest missive he actually takes on me and fellow DAer Heather Hurlburt:

. . . If you believe the United States is fundamentally a force for good in the world then you should be appalled by the emergence of Wikileaks, for it does indeed make the job of American diplomats more difficult. If, on the other hand, you believe that America is an empire (one does not have to believe that this makes the United States a malign force, just not a benign one, any more than any other empire has ever been), and, if you are an American, anyway, you believe that this imperial vocation is destroying the country, and therefore you want to see the empire’s end, then of course you will enthusiastically welcome the advent of Wikileaks.

The first an most obvious rejoinder to this is that even non-exceptional countries require diplomatic secrecy! So if you embrace the notion that confidentiality is a sine qua non for the ability to conduct effective diplomacy then you would certainly believe that Wikileaks' modus operandi is dangerous and counter-productive. (And Josh Foust makes a good point here about how Wikileaks is likely to make the US government even less transparent, not more).

But that leads to the second problem with Rieff's argument. Indeed, one of the things that I've found so striking about the Wikileaks debate is the difficulty that many critics seem to be having (both pro and anti-WL) with holding two separate thoughts in their head.

I basically expect this from Glenn Greenwald, who has a rather exquisite ability to reduce every policy issue to a simplistic black and white narrative where one side is good and one side is irredeemably evil (and then takes sadistic delight in degrading the evil side in the most hurtful manner possible) Although I suppose this makes sense: after all they are evil! 

And Rieff falls victim to the same affliction - as he seems unable to wrap his mind around the notion that one can believe that America's imperial mindset is doing great damage to the country; or that one can embrace Barry Rosen's persuasive case for restraint in American foreign policy and yet STILL think Wikileaks is really, really bad. Apparently this individual doesn't fit into the rubric that Rieff has created. In Rieff's world all Wikileaks opponents seem to hold the same view of American exceptionalism and American hegemony.

So for example, I do believe that America, like every single other country, has the potential to be a legitimate force for good in the world. The problem with Wikileaks is that it makes such a goal that much more difficult - while also making it much harder for the United States to operate on a global stage in the same manner by which every other country operates; namely with diplomatic secrecy. 

But, as the argument goes, that's ok because Wikileaks assumes that all US behavior in the world is a bad thing (a view Rieff implicitly embraces). As I noted the other day, Wikileaks rejects "the notion that US actions on the global stage are legitimate or serve a global public interest. They reflect a view of American power that is nearly uniformly negative and adversarial." So Wikileaks has fulfilled the goal of weakening American empire.

Again, Wikileaks opponents thinks this is a very good thing. But, to be overly blunt and perhaps a bit catty, this is deeply childish. The Wikileaks disclosure may not only do real damage to US national security, but it may also have a detrimental impact on issues that have global import. One would imagine, for example, there are other countries in the world cheering for the US to be successful in securing Pakistan's highly enriched uranium. 

But these good deeds don't seem to interest Rieff; because America's imperial desire has infected the country and it must be destroyed. Even if these disclosures do damage to US efforts to support democratic reformers or even opposition movements in authoritarian states or help regional powers think about ways to deal with potential crises, let it be . . . because after all "this imperial vocation is destroying the country, and therefore you want to see the empire’s end." The fact that you might in some cases actually be discarding the baby along with the bathwater . . . meh.

There's something almost vaguely Bolshevik about this argument. But to be honest it's completely legitimate. You believe American empire is bad; you believe that it must be destroyed and so all hail Wikileaks for bringing that day closer. Throw the good out with the bad etc.

Of course legitimate doesn't equal defensible or even useful. For example Heather, who has devoted yeoman effort to reducing the amount of nuclear weapons in the world, actually has to think about the impact of Wikileaks on the realization of critically important national security objectives. She and others don't have the luxury of living in a black and white world.

Of course, for those who reside on soap boxes - the choices are a bit less complicated.

Comments

[Mike Drew]

Word.

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[Frank Wilhoit]

The framing is all wrong here; it is in terms of foreign policy, "force for good in the world" vs. "empire". This is "not even wrong". The US has no foreign policy; hasn't had one for over thirty years. The map on the wall might as well be of a fictional planet. The only uses of Other Places in our political discourse are as allegories for the domestic factional struggle; that struggle is the only thing that is real.

Nothing is about what it pretends to be about. The debate about Wikileaks is about the documents that they haven't released yet: the documents that prove that the Bush Administration's domestic wiretapping began in mid-February 2001 and what its targets were. That's the ball game. Everything else is just hints and euphemisms and didactic fiction.

As far as any American political actor cares, the rest of the world may as well not exist: none of them have a sense of historical time or a sense of place. They all make their own reality. We just have to live in it.

[destor23]

I surprisingly agree with this because I think it makes sense to take a pretty wide and complex view of Wikileaks, it's contribitutions, achievements, demerits and motivations.

But I don't see that Wikileaks is all that special in this regard. Everything we do in the global arena involves trade offs. It's just a matter of whether or not we know what the trade offs are and how well we calculate what we lose for what we gain.

You seem to be taking a pretty absolutist stance on Wikileaks -- that it's a bad thing that harms our ability to conduct foreign policy and that it interferes with the good at least as much as it interferes with the bad and so people shouldn't support it.

But another view, accepting everything you said, would be to say that Wikileaks, like the weather, does some good and does some bad and we should probably just learn to live with it and deal with it. We should let it power our sails when it does and we should keep the ship from tipping over when it storms.

[Taylor Wray]

Michael, I'm with destor above: You're just imitating your caricature of Glenn Greenwald (who's dead-on about this topic, I think) and reducing WikiLeaks to a completely negative force on American diplomacy.

For instance, you claim that WikiLeaks impedes our country's ability to be an international force for good. But then, doesn't it also impede our country's ability to be an international force for evil? On balance, I think you just assume that America's actions are more good than evil, so WikiLeaks is preventing more good stuff from happening than it is exposing bad stuff that we've done.

I disagree, and I'm surprised you take that view, considering your writings on Afghanistan in particular. I'm somewhat ashamed of America's role in the world over the last decade, and so I'm glad to see an organization emerging that undermines what I see as spurious, "official" justifications for that ever-expanding, increasingly negative international role - i.e., the need to prevent terrorist safe havens from existing anywhere, the need to increase involvement of our military across our the Middle East (even in Yemen, now, apparently, which we learned thanks to WL), the trumped-up WMDs in Iraq, the embarrassment that is Guantanamo Bay, etc.

I can't believe you don't condone WikiLeaks for helping to undermine these very negative actions by the U.S. I mean, it seems to me you're weighing the increased difficulty that diplomats have doing their jobs against the actual human deaths and suffering that's been caused on a massive scale - it should be a pretty easy decision to support WikiLeaks based on all that past wrongdoing.

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[Diomedes]

There are those of us outside of the United States who have keenly observed the last decade with mounting horror and trepidation. I, certainly, view the work of Wikileaks as being essential: the lies, half-truths and dissembling which has characterised American foreign policy are being laid bare.

As for this statement: "...US actions on the global stage are legitimate or serve a global public interest. They reflect a view of American power that is nearly uniformly negative and adversarial," I couldn't disagree more vehemently. "Global public interest"? What on earth do you mean? There IS no global public interest. There is only the American national interest. They're not the same thing. The truth is that countries like Australia, for example, parrot US strategic aims because the US is the only game in town.

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