THE REAL WORLD
IT'S NOT HARD THESE days to find a magazine full of articles contending that the United States under George W. Bush has shattered important alliances, launched an ill-advised imperial project, and pursued a reckless, unnecessary war. But lately, such claims don't just fill left-leaning publications like The Nation. They also animate this summer's issue of The National Interest, a conservative foreign affairs quarterly whose contributors argue that the United States underestimates European power and risks overstretching its economic resources abroad.
In fact, a deep foreign policy rift has opened within the Republican party. On one side are the aggressive, idealistic hawks who advocated the war in Iraq and talk of democracy domino effect in the Middle East. On the other are pragmatic realists who disdain Bush's foreign policy not because they think it's immoral but because they think it's imprudent.
With American soldiers sifting through the rubble of Baghdad's UN headquarters, the administration's vision of a quick transition to safety, prosperity, and democracy in Iraq looks increasingly quixotic. The trouble, say realists, is that utopian strivings have gotten the better of a foreign policy leadership normally committed to a more hard-headed view of the world.
The history of American foreign policy is in large part the history of the tension between Wilsonian idealists, who believe that the United States has a special duty to spread American values, and realists, who distrust such moral and ideological crusades, arguing instead for a foreign policy based on the bare pursuit of the national interest, parsimoniously defined.
Where Wilsonianism is optimistic, often presuming that the international order progresses toward cooperation and lawfulness, realism takes a dark view of human behavior. The international system is inevitably anarchic, because states fear their neighbors and seek to grab power for themselves.
If one state amasses disproportionate strength, others form alliances in order to strike a balance of power. Democracies and dictatorships pursue the same logic of power and should be dealt with in the same way. To concern ourselves with the internal nature of other states is to step into a quicksand of limitless expense and obligation.
Realism is the unsentimental foreign policy tradition that runs from Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes to the first Bush administration, whose key security advisors, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, reacted cautiously to the breakup of the USSR and openly criticized the Iraq war plans last summer. Realists are not necessarily isolationists, but they believe force should be used sparingly. Explains realist John Mearsheimer, author of ``The Tragedy of Great Power Politics'': ``Realists tend to believe it is sometimes necessary to use the sword. But when you do, other states get very nervous and protect themselves, so it has limited utility.''
If realists have a house organ, it's The National Interest, established in 1985 to promote ``the primacy of self-interest as a motive, and of power as a means, in an international system that lacked a polity,'' as founding co-editor Owen Harries later wrote.
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No one would have described candidate George W. Bush as a foreign policy idealist in the year 2000. In fact, Bush campaigned as a realist, skeptical of nation building and disinclined to go to war. At the same time, future national security advisor Condoleezza Rice laid out her classically realist vision of the post-Cold War world in a Foreign Affairs essay. Of Iraq she noted that the Ba'athist regime was ``living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic''; even if Iraq were to acquire nuclear weapons, deterrence would suffice.
Robert Keohane, a political scientist at Duke and editor of the volume ``Neorealism and its Critics,'' notes that during the Cold War, realists saw poor, faraway countries like Afghanistan as irrelevant. On this they often differed sharply with neoconservatives who sought to engage the United States in proxy wars in the Third World.
But September 11 changed the landscape, says Keohane. ``We were attacked from Afghanistan. Until 9/11, there was assumed to be a close connection between resources and the ability to inflict destruction. But Al Qaeda inflicted much damage over long distances with few resources.''
Confronted with threats to which classical realism didn't offer obvious responses, the Bush administration charted a new course. Well before 9/11, neoconservatives like Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the son of National Interest cofounder Irving Kristol, had argued that maintaining American military predominance was paramount; that American values should be projected along with American power; and that a clear signal must be sent to rogue regimes that the United States would remove them from power if they attempted to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Where international institutions and alliances got in the way, the United States would act alone.
The talk of American values aside, this would not seem, on the face of it, a worldview inimical to the realist one. Indeed, The National Interest's outgoing editor Adam Garfinkle and executive editor Nikolas K. Gvosdev both believed that Iraq's potential WMD capacity posed a sufficient threat to justify invasion. But many of the realists who dominate political science departments were deeply skeptical. Deterrence and containment had worked against the Soviet Union, with its massive nuclear arsenal and megalomaniacal dictators. Why wouldn't it work against an incomparably weaker Iraq?
Particularly troubling to realists was the notion that the United States could or should bring democracy to the Arab world by force of arms. Even if the experiment did work, says Kenneth Waltz, whose 1959 classic ``Man, the State, and War'' launched him as this country's foremost realist foreign policy expert, ``chances are high that in open and free Iraqi elections, Islamic fundamentalists would win.''
There were also strategic problems. The neoconservatives assumed that a show of American force would lead hostile, WMD-seeking states to moderate their behavior and ``bandwagon'' on the side of the greater power. Says Mearsheimer, ``Realists believe that adversaries invariably do not bandwagon. They balance against you.'' The idea that our strike at Iraq will dispose Syria and Iran to cut terrorist ties is thus deeply misguided, in Mearsheimer's view. ``War with Iraq makes the terrorism problem worse, not better. The United States will be perceived as a bully that takes special pleasure in beating up on Arab Islamic states.''
Though skeptical of the idealism undergirding the UN and other international institutions, many realists question the administration's unilateralism. ``The US doesn't have enough resources. It needs other countries,'' says Gvosdev. ``That's not a value position. It's not because multilateralism is good. It's pragmatic.'' International institutions respond to the will of the strong, say realists, and that makes them useful tools for the United States.
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Because realism is more an outlook than an ideology, it's tempting to say that the differences between the two camps are superficial - that the neoconservatives are largely realists with a particularly expansive notion of the national interest. But political scientists believe the schism is more serious than that.
``These are not just differences of strategy,'' observes the Harvard historian of international affairs Stanley Hoffmann. ``The moderates are appalled. They consider this administration a bunch of radicals out to change a number of American institutions in ways they don't like. But there's not much they can do about it, because they don't want to split the party and lose their Congressional majority.''
Perhaps the most fundamental disagreement concerns the desirability, and sustainability, of American predominance. Neoconservatives believe that in a multipolar world, repressive powers like China and Iran will threaten democracy and human freedom. Realists are not so sanguine about the unipolar world we have now.
Kenneth Waltz, for one, sees a balance of power as healthy. ``It's very odd. We have this American tradition of belief in checks and balances internally. But this administration doesn't believe in checks and balances externally. Just as unbalanced power can be abused at home, it can be abused abroad.''
Such talk is a far cry from the prevailing view in Washington these days. Now Rice and the rest of the Bush administration talk about good and evil, about building democracy in Iraq, and about sustaining unchallenged American primacy. Meanwhile, a manifesto denouncing American imperialism has made the rounds in Washington, bearing the names not of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn but of C. Boyden Gray, a lawyer for the first Bush administration, and Chas. W. Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, among others.
So has the old bipartisan realist foreign policy establishment gone into eclipse? ``Almost certainly, yes,'' says Mearsheimer.
Waltz does not mince words. ``The Bush administration follows its own course. It won the presidency by the narrowest of margins, yet acts as if it possesses a commanding majority. It's an impressive performance. To my mind, a depressing performance. But boy, they've done it.''
By Laura Secor, The Boston Globe, August 24, 2003, page: D1
