"Response
to Norman Podhoretz," by Peter W. Rodman
from Commentary, vol. 109, no. 1, January 2000, pp. 44-45.
Norman Podhoretz’s brilliant survey of the intellectual terrain of American foreign policy leads me to two principal reflections. One has to do with the important degree of political harmony that I now see on the Right. The second has to do with the state of the debate between neo-Reaganites and realists.
Both in content and tone, Podhoretz’s essay pays a kind of tribute to the easing of many previous intramural disputes on the Right. This is one of the positive developments of the present period. Differences there certainly are (as over China and humanitarian intervention), and they are not trivial. But Podhoretz’s historical survey also reminds us of the much more glaring gulf between Right and Left. The cliché that the end of the Cold War has abolished this distinction is mistaken.
As the Clinton Administration has brought home to us with a vengeance for seven years, Right and Left in America (even the internationalists among them) still have very different worldviews. The Left retains a certain liberal guilt about American power, which it assuages by an assertive faith in multilateral institutions (the UN, international law), in diplomatic nostrums like multilateral arms control, and in an agenda of "New Age" issues like environmentalism. The Right is more strategic-minded, less naïve about our ability to abolish the factor of power from international politics, and unapologetic about American strength, American sovereignty, and American preeminence. The Right puts more faith in military defense (including missile defense) and greater stock in the geopolitical components of our security (facing down Saddam Hussein and North Korea; preserving our alliance system). Clinton has been reported to dismiss this kind of strategic analysis as "Old Think."
Liberal guilt about American power also translates into a particular kind of scruple about the use of force. Here I have in mind not just the liberal assumption that the legitimacy of our use of force can come only from some international organization (as when the Clinton Administration obtained UN Security Council authorization before occupying Haiti in 1995). Nor do I mean only that the Left sees U.S. intervention as tainted if any "selfish" strategic interest gets in the way of humanitarian goals. In addition to all this, there is a moral discomfort with the actual use of force that leads liberal Democratic Presidents always to cut corners, to do the minimum, and to yearn for "surgical" or "calibrated" ways to do it.
This is the Bay of Pigs syndrome, the albatross of LBJ’s "graduated escalation" in Vietnam, the bane of Jimmy Carter’s abortive helicopter raid on Iran, and the pattern of Clinton interventions from Somalia to Iraq to Kosovo. By contrast, conservative Presidents have always had a more clear-headed understanding that, once one has made the decision to commit American power, the categorical moral as well as strategic imperative is to prevail.
Despite policy differences among conservatives, this picture illuminates the significant philosophical consensus that today unites them. We can thank Bill Clinton for setting this in such sharp relief.
The second observation I would venture is that the intraconservative debate over humanitarian intervention is also becoming more moderate. Where Norman Podhoretz sides, on balance, with the more ideological enthusiasms of William Kristol and Robert Kagan, I see the tides shifting in the other direction. I think realism is making a comeback.
For better or worse, neither Congress nor the country exhibits an eagerness for humanitarian intervention. The more expansive Kristol-Kagan definition of America’s sense of mission has not taken root. The public seems quite hesitant about new ideological crusades (even against China). Clinton’s military interventions have prompted many Americans to ask: what is our national interest in this? (Sam Donaldson of ABC News asked this question repeatedly during both the Bosnia and the Kosovo crises. Vox populi.)
The American people seem to want reassurance that their leaders can tell the difference between what is important to us in the world and what is not. Indiscriminate humanitarianism seems unsustainable. If President Clinton was afraid to risk any American casualties in Kosovo, what more damning confession could there be of how thin even he knew public support to be?
The Kristol- Kagan view deserves the label Wilsonian because, even while it clearly represents a muscular, strategic-minded Reaganite rather than Clintonite variant, it is part of the dominant 20th-century trend that has emphasized the moral/ideological wellsprings of American international engagement. Indeed, it vigorously rebuked the Nixon-Kissinger brand of Realpolitik in precisely those terms. But just as Nixon and Kissinger’s attempt to win the country over to their realist philosophy failed during the Vietnam era (spawning the resurgence of Wilsonianism that was reflected in both Carter and Reagan), now Bill Clinton’s misadventures have triggered a reaction to Wilsonianism. With humanitarian intervention quite discredited in this country after Kosovo, it is intriguing to see Podhoretz toward the end of his article, and Kristol and Kagan in an October 25 New York Times op-ed piece, all running away briskly from the Wilsonian label.
It is the Republicans’ task (in the next presidency, one hopes) to rebuild the American people’s self-confidence about American international leadership and engagement out of the wreckage that Clinton has wrought. Probably this will require some selectivity rather than universalism, some re-emphasis on the national interest rather than moral and ideological enthusiasm. American predominance in the world is fine with me. But we need to sustain the domestic base for it.
(Peter W. Rodman is Director of National Security Programs at The Nixon Center and a Senior Editor of National Review.)
