# Posted 11:55 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE LEFT VS. ITSELF: An extremely important debate is taking place right now on the left-hand side of the blogosphere. It begins with this post by Michael Totten, who charges that liberals as a whole suffer from a serious deficiency in their knowledge of foreign affairs. According to Totten,

This is not a partisan point I’m making. I’ve been on the left forever, and I have no reason whatever to shill for the right...

[So] why are liberal intellectuals less interested in the history of foreign countries than conservatives are?...

I‘ve pondered this for a while now, and I think I have part of the answer.

Liberals are builders and conservatives are defenders. Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established. This is what the left and the right are for.

I strongly recommend that you read the whole post. Totten's arguments are the result of considerable reflection, as one might expect from a liberal criticizing his own comrades-in-arms. Even so, they have set off a firestorm that has drawn in conservatives as well, including Joe Katzman and Patrick Ruffini.

Before adding my own to cents to this discussion, I think it is important to note that Michael's draws on Gary Farber's response to recent WaPo article by liberal sociologist Todd Gitlin. The first two-thirds of Gitlin's column consist of an attack on conservatives for demonizing the anti-war left. But that is just a set up for the final third, in which Gitlin charges that the left has no foreign policy whatsoever. It is simply anti-Bush.

The Totten and Gitlin arguments complement each other rather well. One is an argument that liberals have a deficient knowledge of foreign affairs while the other states that liberals have no foreign policy.

The most forceful response to Totten's post is from Kieran Healy, who argues that Totten depends far too much on vague generalizations and circular logic. Kieran scores a few points, but in the end he just avoids what Totten has to say.

One of the most interesting responses to Michael's post comes from Matt Yglesias, who agrees with Totten and notes that there a number of former Clinton administration officials who are doing their best to improve the situtation by developing a liberal approach to foreign affairs.

Pre-empting such efforts, I am going to try and define such an approach right here and right now. A critic might object that my self-identification as a centrist will prevent me from empathizing with liberalism well enough to elaborate a compelling liberal approach to foreign affairs. Yet I would counter that the policies I have advocated on this site over the past nine months have a solid foundation in liberal principles. If you disagree, then all I ask is that you hear what I have to say and judge it on its merits.

So where to begin? With history, of course. While a comprehensive discussion of liberalism ought to start with the Founders, I will begin by addressing the misunderstood legacy of Woodrow Wilson. (If you do want to know more about the Founders, consult Louis Hartz's 1952 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America.)

Today we associate Wilson's name with the naive and tragic multilateralism of the League of Nations. Those who insisted that United States had no right to invade Iraq without a second resolution from the United Nations often found themselves tarred as unrepentant Wilsonians. Yet I would suggest that Wilson would have done exactly what George W. Bush did had he been faced with a similar situation. He would've sought a second resolution but taken decisive action if he found it impossible to secure.

Why? If one explores the principles on which Wilson's multilateralism rested, one discovers that the modern-day United Nations is a poor reflection of it. As any compelling liberal foreign policy must be, Wilson's was founded on the idea of protecting individual rights. Having witnessed the horrors of the Great War, Wilson belived that such tragedies could be avoided if governments would only listen to the voice of their citizens.

Anticipating the democratic peace theorists of today, Wilson believed that no democratic government would commit acts of agression against any other. Thus he insisted that the German Empire be replaced by a German republic.

Yet Wilson also recognized that most governments at the time were not democratic and would not become so. Thus, he sought to project democracy onto the international stage by creating the League of Nations. Its purpose was to create a forum for "world opinion", which Wilson believed would be an unfailing opponent of war. While this approach has considerable merit, critics point out that the people of the German Reich overwhelmingly supported war when it was declared in 1914, as did the citizens of most other nations.

Confronted by the United Nations of today, I think that Wilson would conclude that it has done very little to project the democratic spirit onto the international stage. Rather, it is a forum in which semi-authoritarian states such as China and Russia exert a dangerous and disproportionate influence while the protection of individual rights is entrusted to a forum headed by Libya. Ironically, however, the voting public in both the United States and Europe identifies the United Nations as the greatest international expression of the democratic spirit.

In order to understand why the United Nations has become what it is, one has to understand how Franklin Roosevelt's realism altered the institutional design laid out by Wilson in the aftermath of the Great War. While I am no realist, it is hard to disagree with Roosevelt's assessment that no international institution could function without the consent of the great powers, including Soviet Russia. Thus, the Soviet Union had to be given a veto despite its fundamentally illiberal nature.

When Roosevelt died, the reigns of leadership fell to a true heir of Woodrow Wilson, namely Harry Truman. Exactly as Wilson did, Truman believed that American national security was inextricably bound up with the spread of liberal democratic ideas across the globe. Whereas realist critics described the United States as facing a choice between prudence and principle, Truman and Wilson believed that prudence was principle.

One of the little known facts about Truman -- one which I focus on considerably in my doctoral dissertation -- is that he did not abandon his commitment to promoting democracy regardless of how intense the American conflict with the Soviet Union became. Whereas Eisenhower did not hesitate to overthrow the left-leaning but democratic governments of Guatemala and Iran, Truman defended them to the hilt.

Following in Truman's footsteps, John Kennedy implemented a forceful liberal foreign policy that rested on the twin pillars of fighting Communism and promoting democracy. To this day, Latin Americans revere Kennedy for his commitment to an Alliance for Progress that sought to reverse decades of disinterest in the freedom of the Western Hemisphere.

Whereas Johnson remained relatively loyal to Kennedy's approach, Nixon and Kissinger were unabashed advocates of a realist approach to foreign policy that considered no dictator unworthy of an American alliance provided that his brutality was matched by his anti-Communism. And if a democratic nation elected a Communist -- as did Chile -- Nixon and Kissinger had no qualms about supporting a coup d'etat.

Thus, until the end of the Vietnam War, it was not at all had to identify the essence of a liberal approach to foreign policy. It was about the belief that American national security depended on the promotion of democratic principles. In contrast, conservatives found themselves divided between isolationists on the one hand and realists on the other. What united the realists and isolationsts, however, was their commitment to a defensive approach to foreign affairs.

Interestingly, this description of the divide between liberal and conservative approaches to foriegn affairs fits very neatly with Michael Totten's broader generalization that liberals are "builders" whereas conservatives are "defenders". Where Totten goes astary is in his assertion that,

The first priority of builders is the immediate surrounding environment, starting with the home and moving outward from there. Next is the community, followed by the city, the region, and the nation. The other side of the world is the lowest of all priorities. “Think globally” but “act locally” is a bumper sticker for the left...

Defenders, unlike builders, are on the lookout for threats. This is what conservatism is for. In the absence of civil war or revolution, threats exist abroad. Canada isn’t a problem, and Mexico isn’t really either. The biggest threats are on the other side of the world.

While Totten's observation has a certain plausibility when applied to today's partisan politics, that is only because modern liberalism has fallen away so dramatically from the Wilsonian vision, later embraced by Kennedy and Truman. As these great presidents demonstrated time and again, "builders" are no less interested in the world abroad. As Kieran Healy rightly says, only a builder could have come up with the Marshall Plan. (TR Fogey makes a similar point as well.)

So what happened to this compelling and successful liberal vision? Answer: Vietnam. I am extremely surprised that not a single response to Totten's post recognized Vietnam as the event that has done more than any other to shape modern liberal foreign policy (or lack thereof). In addition, almost no one mentioned the liberal approach developed by Jimmy Carter, who explicitly described his anti-interventionist multilateralism as a response to the lessons of Vietnam.

At the same time that Carter was directing the Democratic party away from the aggressive idealism of Kennedy and Truman, Ronald Reagan was busy destorying the realist and isolationist foundations of Republican foreign policy, instead insisting that it, too, must be based on principle. While Reagan often managed to persuade himself that whatever was good for the United States was also consistent with principle, the fact is that he established ideology as the foundation of Republican foreign policy.

Under Clinton, the role reversal of the Carter-Reagan era began to give way to traditional approaches to foreign affairs. When Clinton wanted to bomb Kosovo, Trent Lott responded that he ought to "give peace a chance." In the 2000 campaign, Al Gore vigorously defended the use of force to promote American principles while George Bush called for "humility" and Condi Rice expounded on the virtues of realism.

But times they are a changin'. Few conservatives regretted the absence of humility in George Bush's approach to Iraq. While Democrats tried to avoid the whole issue, critics on the left demonstrated a commitment to multilateralism even stronger than Jimmy Carter's. Carter himself never conditioned his policies on the approval of semi-authoritarian states such as China and Russia. Thus Carter never found himself going against the grain of Wilson's democratic multilateral vision. (Although Jimmy Carter circa 2003 most certainly did.)

In contast, President Bush has gone far beyond President Reagan in committing himself to democratic principles as the foundation of American foreign policy. While there are definite grounds on which to criticize the President's implementation of such policies, his commitment to promoting democracy in Iraq has consummated the role reversal that began in the Carter-Reagan era. Strange as it sounds, Bush is a Wilsonian. And his critics tend to sound like Kissingerian pessimists who fret that intervention in Iraq will promote instability in the Middle East, or even an Arab backlash against the Western world.

As you might have guessed by now, I believe that the foundation of a liberal vision for American foreign policy must entail a return to the Wilsonian vision that animated American liberalism from the First World War until the tragedy of Vietnam. Perhaps the greatest flaw of such a foreign policy is that it does not provide Democratic candiates with a credible means of differentiating their views from that of the current administration.

But over time, that can be done. As Tom Friedman has written,

If Democrats' whole analysis of this war is determined by whether or not it helps Mr. Bush, then they are never going to play the role they must play -- constructive critics of how we rebuild Iraq.

This is such an important moment in U.S. foreign policy. How people view American power is at stake in the outcome in Iraq, and Democrats can't be missing in action. They have to help shape this moment, and not leave it to the Bush Pentagon. But it won't happen if Democrats are sulking in a corner, just trying to point to everything that is going wrong in Iraq, and not offering their ideas for making it better.

Why should Democrats trust the Bush people to win the peace in Iraq the way they won the war? It is clear the Bush team had no coherent postwar plan in place. This administration, with its deep mistrust for diplomacy and diplomats, may be way too ideological and Pentagon-centric for nation-building. We need alternative voices. What is the Democratic view on the proper role of the U.N. or NATO in rebuilding Iraq? How much emphasis do Democrats believe the U.S. should put into the Arab-Israeli peace process to support peace in Iraq? Is a principled and muscular internationalism now the private property of the Republican Party?

In other words, the Democrats will have to establish their Wilsonian credentials by demonstrating that they have better ideas than the GOP does about how to put Wilsonian principles into practice.

Can the Democrats establish such credentials in time for 2004? I don't know. If the Bush Administration's intermittent hostility to nation-building produces an embarrassment in postwar Iraq, the Democrats may have their chance. Still, it will be extremely hard to match the credibility of an President victorious in war.

Ultimately, what the Democrats need is a successful president from their own party who can demonstrate the efficacy of a Wilsonian approach to national security. In that sense, Bill Clinton did his party a tremendous service. But his achievements in Bosnia and Kosovo have now been overshadowed.

The road ahead for liberal foreign policy will be long and difficult. But there is a Wilsonian light at the end of the tunnel.

UPDATE: If you think my response to Totten goes into too much detail, then take a look at Tristero's statistical analysis of it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion