# Posted 11:07 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

TOTTEN ON A ROLL: The WSJ Online has now republished Michael Totten's provocative post on the downfall of liberal foreign policy as an op-ed with the same name, "Builders and Defenders".

In the blogosphere, the excitement surrounding Totten's ideas continues to thrive. Kieran Healy defends himself from my charge that Healy's original response to Totten avoided the main points of Totten's argument. Kieran says that Totten's description of liberals as "builders" and conservatives as "defenders" is so vague that it could easily be reversed.

Take, for example, this passage from Totten's argument:

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. That we shouldn’t meddle in other countries if our own needs work is also a liberal idea.

Kieran responds by imagining a similar description applied to conservatives:

Conservatives are oriented to their own back yard. Their view is that if everyone took responsibility for their own problems then we wouldn’t need a nanny state or world government to solve them for us. In this sense Conservatives are Builders...

Conservative builders have little interest in managing the problems of others. As Governor Bush said during the second Presidential debate, “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

What Kieran misses entirely is that a tendency to look inward has characterized liberals and conservatives at different points in American history. As my post from yesterday elaborated in considerable detail, American liberalism embraced the outside world from the time of Wilson until the end of the Vietnam war. Then, at the same time that liberals began to turn inward, conservatives began to become preoccupied with events abroad. As for Bush's nod to humility and aversion to nation-building, the President's superficial commitment to such preferences has become apparent in the aftermath of September 11th.

Kieran also stumbles quite a bit when he tries to argues that liberals are "defenders" as well. He presents a hypothetical argument that liberals are

Defenders, always looking out for the rights of the supposedly oppressed, even if those they protect don’t really want to be defended. Looking at international political interventionism from the ill-fated League of Nations to the United Nations to the Marshall Plan to the European Union, we see Liberal thinkers and politicians behind all of these grand schemes — schemes which are anathema to the Conservative way of thinking.

In this case, Kieran is simply distoring Michael's argument. When Michael described conservatives as Defenders, he made it extremely clear that what conservatives defend are themselves, not others. As for the Marshall Plan and the United Nations, what better evidence could there be of liberals being great builders in the decades before Vietnam?

Next up, the Armed Liberal directly challenges my application of history to the present day. But before getting to that, I think it's worth noting that AL said this:

I have to publicly go on record that this is an exciting time for me; I've felt isolated from much of the Democratic party and what passes for liberalism for some time, and am constitutionally incapable of moving to the other side of the aisle. But now, I feel that there is some ferment in the Left both here in the U.S. and in the U.K., and that we're starting a process that could well result in an effective, moral, and progressive vision of the country and the world.

I hope AL is right, but I sense that there are precious few signs of such ferment among the Democratic candidates for 2004.

Moving on, we come to AL main point: that I am wrong to call George W. Bush a Wilsonian. Or as AL puts it:

Uh, sorry?? Wilsonians are typically defined as attempting to enmesh nations in a framework of democracy and the rule of law. Bush?? I'd have to make him as a Jacksonian/Hamiltonian in the Mead framework.

"Mead" refers to Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

In Special Providence, Mead argues that there are four traditions that shape American foreign policy: the Hamiltonian, the Jeffersonian, the Jacksonian and the Wilsonian. For a brief definition of the four, see this review of Mead's book by Aaron Frieberg, who is the author of my favorite book on international relations.

When it comes to Special Providence, I am on unsure footing since I haven't read the book. Instead, I have had to rely on essays about the book, such as HW Brands' commentary in The National Interest. [All of NI's archive links are bloggered at the moment, so don't bother clicking through.]

That said, Mead's four categories are grounded in concepts familiar to most students of American foreign policy. So I will be somewhat bold in offering my thoughts about them. Basically, there are two main points I want to make: first, Mead seriously misunderstands Woodrow Wilson and his legacy. Second, there is no such thing as a Jacksonian foreign policy.

Both Mead and the Armed Liberal buy into the common misconceptions that Wilson was a multilateralist dove. As I wrote in my original post,

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.

In earlier, unpublished version of my post (which -- believe it or not -- was even longer than the first) I referred to a number of important initiatives which demonstrated that Wilson's was not at all gun shy when it came to using force in order to promote American ideals. Throughout Latin America, Wilson sent in the Marines to impose his version of a democratic order. And strange as it sounds, Wilson was the only president ever to order American forces into combat with Soviet Russia.

While American forces foundered in the snows of Murmansk, their invasion of Russia -- in concert with British, French and White Russian forces -- bring to a light a different side of Wilson than the one associated with the tragic Peace of Versailles. In fact, the invasion was taking place at the exact same time that Wilson was negotiating at Versailles.

Thus, Bush's aggressive foreign policy in no way contradicts my assertion that he is a Wilsonian. It precisely because Bush fights so hard for American ideals that he is a Wilsonian. As I wrote yesterday,

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.

Want a multilateralist dove? Jimmy Carter's your man.

Armed Liberal, of course, wants nothing to do with Jimmy Carter. AL is a self-proclaimed Jacksonian. What does that mean? I think I'll let AL speak for himself on this one:

First, and foremost we have to sell America...

Our foreign policy has to be based, not just in our mechanistic view of 'doing what's good for America', as one nation among many, but on the notion that we (along with many others) have something to offer the world. And what we have to offer the world – the reason why so many want to come here – is not only our prosperity, but our freedom, our belief in and respect for the individual, and most of all our belief in justice – that everyone is equal before the law, that everyone gets an opportunity, and that if we get it wrong once, we'll work and change and eventually get it right...

We need to make it clear that violence will be met with violence. Because we aren't ashamed to be Americans, we need not be ashamed of defending ourselves nor of taking threats to ourselves or others seriously. Out of a mixture of guilt and passivity, we've tolerated extremism and saber rattling and watched it turn into saber waving.

From where I stand, what AL is describing sound exactly like Wilsoniansim. Now, if AL wants to call that a Jacsksonian approach, I don't really mind. Given that Wilson is so widely misunderstood, it might be better just to take his ideas and attribute them to Jackson.

But that isn't what Walter Mead does. His Jackson is not a principled warrior, but a violent and unthinking nationalist. Mead wrote Special Providence not to glorify the Jacksonian tradition, but to prevent it its resurgence.

Less than one week after September 11th, Mead published an op-ed in the WaPo entitled "Braced for Jacksonian Ruthlessness". In it, he warned that the Jacksonians instinct for brutality might overwhelm the United States as it sought to wage its war on terror. Holding the Jacksonians' bloodlust responsbile for the death of 900,000 Japanese civilians in the Second World War, Mead suggests that

Like Pearl Harbor, last Tuesday's unprovoked sneak attack could rouse one of the great storms of Jacksonian war fever that periodically change both American and world history. And if so, some of Bush's most demanding challenges will come from the tensions between the kind of war many Americans instinctively want to fight and the kind of war forced on us by international realities.

After reading that, you'd be forgiven for confusing Mead with the irresponsible anti-war activists who predicted that 100,000 to 400,000 civilians would be killed as a result of the war in Afghanistan. Even when that prediction turned out to be profoundly wrong, the same activists went ahead and made similar predictions about the war in Iraq.

In the meantime, Mead seems to have gotten his head on straight. In a devastating op-ed in the WaPo this past March, Mead attacked anti-war activists for describing containment as a humane alternative to war. In fact, he argued, sanctions -- which only persist because of Saddam's refusal to disarm -- are responsible for far more deaths than any invasion would cause.

(In addition, it seems Mead is somewhat embarrassed about his initial warnings of a Jacksonian resurgence, since his Sept. 17th op-ed is inexplicably missing from the rather comprehensive list of publications on Mead's CFR homepage. Still, he did go on the record in Sept. 2002 to say that Bush is a Jacksonian.)

The point is that Mead has an entirely different definition of Jacksonianism than the Armed Liberal does. And I think it's safe to say that AL would not describe himself as a Jacksonian if he meant the same thing by it that Mead does. AL, my friend, you are a Wilsonian. Be proud of it! I'm one too and so is George Bush (even if we agree that he has corporate interests a little too close to his heart).

One of the fundamental problems with Mead's book is that it denies any sort of identity to individuals such as AL and myself who believe strength in the service of principle should be the foundation of American foreign policy. By imagining a Jacksonian tradition that is a repository for all violence in the American character, Mead prevents his readers from recognizing that the United States can use force without opening the Pandora's Box of mindless brutality. In fact, the measured use of force in the service of principle is what precisely what has enabled the United States to become the only dominant nation ever to persuade the world's other great powers that (even France) that the preservation of its strength is in their self-interest.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias provides the ultimate in praise: "I'm not sure that I really disagree with anything David says." The question is, what did I leave out? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion