Michael Hirsh Responds
I appreciate Peter’s inviting me into this forum, especially since I’m sure that he suspected I was going to rain on his parade. I am. This is a very reasonable, very intelligent discussion. And to me, that’s the problem. The unspoken premise of forums such as these, and of current questions about how to create a new “liberal” foreign policy, is that America’s current set of foreign challenges—and what President Obama will face after Jan. 20—is in some way the outcome of a normal, albeit conservative, foreign policy direction rather than what we have been going through, which is a catastrophe. Think “Deep Impact,” only the asteroid this time was Bush’s White House. In the history of U.S. politics and statecraft over the past century — let’s confine it to the Wilsonian century — the Bush administration cannot be seen as just another broad swing to the right like, say, Reagan. In other words, a shift to the right to which a “liberal” response is required. It needs to be viewed instead as an aberration so far off the scale, both as an embrace of extremist policy and as a display of incompetence, strategic and tactical, that it is probably unprecedented in American history (I would argue in the entire history of great powers, but that’s for another forum). Not just Bush’s going into Iraq in the middle of his war in Afghanistan, or Bush’s profound misconception of the nature of al Qaeda, but in terms of his complete misunderstanding of the way the world works and America limited power and resources within it, despite our continuing role as the “lone superpower” (a problem neatly captured, most recently, in Niall Ferguson’s concept of “Chimerica”). At least that was true in the first term (in the second, after Condi decorously advised him what a mess he had made, he got a little better.) Rather than being examined as an alternative “foreign policy direction,” the Bush administration needs to be seen as something pathological, a giant tumor of strategic misconceptions, mindless hubris and plain stupidity. And like any tumor, this period in our history needs to be simply cut out so the healing can begin.
That’s why Obama, in his interviews, is not talking about his foreign-policy philosophy. Instead he sounds like a clean-up guy standing in the middle of post-Katrina New Orleans. Whatever works, we’ll do it, he said in his 60 Minutes interview, and we’ll throw out what doesn’t. He doesn’t care if it comes from “FDR or Reagan.” His pragmatism doesn’t mean his world view isn’t philosophically grounded; it’s simply driven by necessity. He knows we can’t AFFORD ideology. When you’re drowning, you don’t have the luxury of conceptual debates about the best lifesaving techniques (though we might end up having a big one in a year or so over redesigning the global financial system).
So I don’t see, for the moment, how we can be having a polite discussion about how to reclaim a “liberal” foreign policy in this environment. Let’s just talk about reclaiming reason, recovering our sense of national self and dignity, and thanking Heaven we survived the asteroid. Let’s just concentrate on getting grounded again. To me, one of the main benefits of Obama’s election is that we won’t have to pretend any more, for the sake of civil conversation in Washington, that invading Iraq was ever a rational act. Forget for the moment whether Bush did it because he was simply a small man trying very hard to be a great man (my theory), or wanted to outdo his father at la the movie “W,” or whatever. The fact remains that it was the act of a fool, and was known to be such at the time by anyone who had a grasp of the strategic realities (a short list that did NOT include Thomas Friedman and most of the rest of the craven media elite who went along with Bush). Bush cited not a single study to justify such a dramatic move at such a critical moment in history, nor did he convene a single strategic meeting to discuss it. Forget the now-established dishonest manipulation of the WMD “evidence.” Did it ever occur to anyone to ask where the conceptual linkage between the rise of al Qaeda and the lack of democracy in the Arab world came from? The answer is: nowhere. No such study exists in the academic or intelligence world. In order to sell this neck-wrenching and nonsensical shift away from the actual culprits of 9/11—al Qaeda–to the American public, Bush then broadened the grim and necessary war against al Qaeda (yes, it was ONLY ever about this one group) in Afghanistan into the strategic fraud we now routinely refer to, the “global war on terror.” And of course he had a lot of help from all those Dems who suffer from national insecurity about national security (whom Peter has written so well about) as well as our unrepentant media elites.
But now President-to-be Obama will dictate a new reality in Washington. I predict you won’t hear a lot about the GWOT. Obama, recall, first came to national attention back in 2002 arguing that Iraq was a “dumb” war unrelated to the real fight against al Qaeda (a fact now borne out by the resurgence of the Taliban in the only battlefront that ever really counted, Afghanistan and Pakistan). That’s the new reality now, and this isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking. Obama, after all, was just a smart guy from Chicago back then. How did he know? Because all the facts were on the table back then for anyone who had the clarity of mind and the simple courage to question Bush. Very few people in Washington did. Anyone who understood the nature of al Qaeda — the fact that it was always an organic outgrowth of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan — and understood how tough a battlefield Afghanistan always was and how critical it was to bring the entire world onto our side against al Qaeda (the reason that 9/11’s silver lining was the grand opportunity to re-take strategic leadership in the world) knew at the time that the turn to Iraq was an act of lunacy. And now even the “media elites” who’ve managed to escape whipping for their strategic blindness will have to quietly acknowledge this reality, even if they still can’t bring themselves to admit their errors.
Now don’t get me wrong: The advent of this new era of pragmatism doesn’t mean we’re going to have to forget about the philosophical debate entirely. But with some exceptions (again, the global financial system needs to be rethought, although all we may need to do is go back to Keynes’ concerns about curbing “hot money” at Bretton Woods—with a strong dose of Stiglitz thrown in) it won’t matter very much. I know some people in this group and elsewhere have been engaged in efforts to reconceive the global system from the ground up. But I think many of these efforts are misplaced because, again, they underestimate how much of an aberration Bush really was. Once you put that into the equation, it becomes less necessary to do the sort of radical reform being discussed.
Look, American leaders have been merging liberalism (or idealism) and realism in practice, some deftly, some not, at least since Woodrow Wilson. The major difference between presidents has been the tilt in emphasis (OK, some, like Warren Harding, were just nitwits). Just cast your mind back six years, remember where we were, at the (relatively quiet) end of the Clinton administration. America presided over a deeply flawed but remarkably functioning global system, one that we ourselves had had the biggest hand in creating. The founding of the U.N. in 1945, with its Security Council designed around Roosevelt’s Four Policemen concept—the U.S., Russia, Britain and China each overseeing stability in their regions—was itself a major attempt to combine idealist international law with realist armed might. The U.N. hasn’t worked as it was designed but it’s not completely broken either, and it’s had many unheralded moments: the East Timor intervention of 1999, the swift creation of an Afghan government at the Bonn conference in November 2001 organized by U.N. senior official Lakhdar Brahimi. (Inside Afghanistan too the world body was crucial, almost single-handedly organizing the loya jirga that set Afghanistan on the course to democracy, and transporting the 1,200 delegates in the largest airlift in U.N. history). The Security Council is still the main source of international legitimacy for intervention of any kind, and despite repeated failures at reforming its musty, World War II-era structure, everyone still wants to get on it. The International Criminal Court is, despite savage U.S. opposition at its formation, about to launch historic prosecutions in Darfur.
Compared to previous periods of imperial rule, this international system was—and still is—unmatched by any other in history in the depth and breadth of its reach, economic and political. No country, not even would-be rogues like Iran and (now) Russia, has found a way around the iron law of this global order: in order to be influential or powerful, a nation must be prosperous; and in order to be prosperous, its economy must take part in the international system (Deng Xiao-ping’s great “black cat-white cat” apercu in the 1970s, as he sought to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union). And if we can keep ourselves from electing another president who came as close to destroying this system as Bush did, I think that Obama and every other president to follow will find himself tinkering with it, not remaking it. His will be a more liberal emphasis, no doubt, than say Reagan or Nixon’s. But it’s still just tinkering. And that will be the extent of your debate.
