# Posted 6:35 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

FAREED BETWEEN THE LINES, PART IV: Here is the final insallment of my commentary. Click for parts one, two and three.

…But while [Bush] adopts some of Wilson's loftiest ideals, [he] is also following some of his most fatal practices. Wilson's means were often highly unilateral. When he took the United States into the war, in 1917, he insisted that although it fought alongside France and England, it was not an ally but an "associated power." His entire approach to the war and its aftermath was to dissociate the United States from the sordid desires of its allies.

A surprisingly effective strategy!

Impatient with other countries' cultures and uninterested in their views, Wilson tended to issue declarations for the whole world. He believed strongly in the righteousness of his cause, and that was enough to allay any concerns he might have had about the reaction of foreign countries. In fact, he thought, their hostility was often proof of the revolutionary nature of his ideas. Some of this may have been true—just as some of Bush's frustration with European and United Nations diplomacy is understandable—but it insured that Wilson was a practical failure. Bush's high-handedness also promises to make his policies ineffective. Yet there is a way to conduct a robust and visionary foreign policy without triggering an avalanche of anti-Americanism around the world. It's called diplomacy.

This is where Zakaria's analytical relativism becomes most apparent. He presumes that other nations – including other democracies – will become fiercely anti-American if the United States disrespects multilateral norms regardless of whether it does so in order to realize Wilsonian ideals that both Americans and Europeans share. Yet if past behavior is an accurate guide, Europe will hem and haw if the US does an end run around the UN, but then forget all about it once Iraq is disarmed and democratic. On the other hand, if Iraq becomes what Iran was under the Shah – a brutal pro-American puppet state – Europe will become truly antagonized. No amount of diplomacy, i.e. spin, will change that.

…Roosevelt and Truman knew that to transform the world one had to engage in it. Roosevelt thought poorly of many of his wartime allies and their goals—he despised French and British colonialism, for example—but he understood that those countries had to be accommodated. Truman understood that the United States could best combat Soviet Communism by creating permanent, entangling alliances with other countries. As a result, these two Presidents and their successors created the conditions for the triumph of a world quite different from any that existed in the past. Today, there is an international consensus in favor of democracy, some version of open markets and capitalism, and some international norms, rules, and restraints. This has happened because of the inherent strength of these ideas but also because they have been hitched to American power.

Perhaps most important, Roosevelt and Truman, having lived through the nineteen-thirties, knew how fragile the international system was and believed that it needed support. Having reaped the fruits of this system—upheld by all successive Presidents of both parties—we have come to believe that stability is natural. But the world order put into place by the United States in the past half century—an order based on alliances, organizations, and norms—functions largely because of the respect paid to it by its superpower creator. Without that support, it will crumble into chaos.

Here, Zakaria clearly elevates the importance of means, i.e. “alliances, organizations, and [presumably multilateral] norms”, over ends such as the defense of capitalism and democracy. But did the US win the Cold War because of its “respect” for the system or because it dedicated its unmatched power to the pursuit of its ideals? If one recalls such unpleasant events such as France’s effective withdrawal from NATO in the 1960s or Reagan’s insistence on funding the Contras despite widespread European resentment, it becomes clear that what kept anti-Communist alliance together was not a respect for multilateralism, but a commitment to the ideals threatened by Soviet power.

…The Bush Administration is right to recognize that consensus is not an end in itself. And some American concerns about international organizations are valid. Within these organizations, America faces a special challenge: the United States has only one vote in most international organizations, and when other countries want to gang up on it they use these organizations to do so. But these are the kinds of problems that skillful diplomacy can resolve.

As my posts have indicated, I share Zakaria’s view that the Bush administration fails to recognize that it can often accomplish via diplomacy as much as or more than it can without it. Still, Zakaria overestimates the dangers of unilateralism.

…[via cooperation] American hegemony would gain the legitimacy that comes from operating through an international consensus.

Without this cloak of respectability, America will face a growing hostility around the world. During the Cold War, many nations disliked or disagreed with America—over Vietnam, for example—but they despised the Soviet Union. The enemy of their enemy was, in the end, their friend. But today, with no alternative ideology and no competitors, America stands alone in the world. Everyone else sits in its shadow. This doesn't mean that other countries will form military alliances against America; that would be pointless. But countries will obstruct American purposes whenever and in whatever way they can, and the pursuit of American interests will have to be undertaken through coercion rather than consensus. Anti-Americanism will become the global language of political protest—the default ideology of opposition—unifying the world's discontents and malcontents, some of whom, as we have discovered, can be very dangerous.

It is interesting that Zakaria refers to respectability as a “cloak”, as if it were hiding something more sinister. I think this reflects his refusal – much like that of Joe Nye – to recognize that America’s allies accept it for what it is, not for what it seems to be.

Also, note the contradiction between asserting that other nations supported the US against the Soviet Union because the “enemy of their enemy was…their friend” but that other nations will not support the US war on Al Qaeda. Yet even if no Europeans had died on September 11th, I think Europe would recognize that Al Qaeda is its enemy. Even in the case of Iraq, I have a sense that Europeans know which side they want to win. They just want that victory on their terms, not America’s.

"It is better to be feared than loved," Machiavelli wrote. But he was wrong. The Soviet Union was feared by its allies; the United States was loved, or, at least, liked. Look who's still around. America has transformed the world with its power but also with its ideals. When China's pro-democracy protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, they built a makeshift figure that suggested the Statue of Liberty, not an F-16. America remains the universal nation, the country people across the world believe should speak for universal values. Its image may not be as benign as Americans think, but it is, in the end, better than the alternatives. That is what has made America's awesome power tolerable to the world for so long. The belief that America is different is its ultimate source of strength. If we mobilize all our awesome powers and lose this one, we will have hegemony—but will it be worth having?

No, Zakaria is not a moral relativist. I owe him an apology for once calling him that. But I believe I have made it clear that his idealism is strongly attenuated by his belief that only a fragile multilateral bond stands in the way of a chasm opening between the United States and its democratic allies.

The end!
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