THE LEFT’S IDEOLOGY: STUPID AND MEAN
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Y2ZmYThiOWMzYmU5YzI5NmNiNjJhODY1YzRiNTc1MGE=
Amir Shah/AP
Realism Minus Reality, Idealism Minus Ideals
The Left’s foreign policy waxes stupid and mean
JONAH GOLDBERG
The Taliban throws acid in the faces of little girls for trying to learn to read. It also bombs grade schools with poison gas, crushes homosexuals, and executes dissidents of every conceivable definition. Medieval, hyper-religious, misogynistic, homophobic, iconoclastic (in the literal sense of destroyers of art), and just plain cruel, the Taliban represents nearly everything today’s progressive liberals claim to despise. If only the Taliban could somehow be counted as capitalistic evangelical Christians, they’d have a perfect score. Still: They throw acid in the eyes of little girls. That should make up for quite a bit of the shortfall.
And yet it doesn’t.
As of this writing, we don’t know what the president’s Afghanistan policy will ultimately be. But we do know that the White House has been contemplating switching from a counterinsurgency policy to a counterterrorist policy, because it has contemplated very publicly. The former would involve defeating both the Taliban and the Afghan franchises of al-Qaeda and putting the country on a path toward something like a decent society; the latter would involve “surgical†or “targeted†strikes on al-Qaeda, leaving the Afghans to work things out for themselves. All sorts of trial balloons have been launched from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and to date, the reactions from liberals have varied. But as far as I’ve been able to determine, not one has expressed any righteous indignation over the suggestion that we might have to let the Taliban off the hook.
Now, the soundness of an al-Qaeda-centric strategy or something like it is a question for another time. It may be that the Afghan people will, of necessity, become a write-off. America has betrayed allies, broken promises (explicit and implicit), and abandoned subjugated peoples before. Just ask the Poles, the Hungarians, the Hmong, the South Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Shiites, the North Koreans, the Kurds, and, if trends continue, quite possibly the Israelis. For the most part these decisions didn’t spring from villainy, but from necessity, or at least the perception of necessity. Sometimes the options are limited, and the choices are very bad. If moral imperatives were not constrained by the demands of political, not to mention physical, reality, America would have liberated Eastern Europe from Stalin’s clutches the day Hitler blew his brains out, if not sooner.
Today’s question is, rather: Whatever happened to liberal idealism?
When the White House started floating the idea of moving from a “war of necessity†with the Taliban to what might be called a “peace of necessity†with the Taliban, the response from liberals was either relief or concern that Obama was still being too belligerent. Arianna Huffington and Rachel Maddow want America to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban. The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne articulated well the conventional wisdom among liberals: Afghanistan is an acceptable loss if it means the rescue of Obama’s presidency and the success of his domestic agenda. “Those most eager for a bigger war have little interest in Obama’s quest for domestic reform,†Dionne writes. “As he ponders his options, theirs are not the voices he should worry about.†In other words, since the top priority for Obama’s generals is winning in Afghanistan and not, say, socialized medicine, the president should ignore their counsel.
Put the question of Afghanistan aside for a moment. During the campaign, when it was suggested to Obama that a premature American withdrawal from Iraq might cause a full-blown genocide, the candidate said, in effect, So what? “Well, look,†he told the Associated Press, “if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done.†He continued, “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.â€
There were a few problems with Obama’s response. The first is that we did not cause the genocides in the Congo or Sudan. The AP’s question was, What if an American withdrawal led to genocide? And Obama’s answer was that that would be a risk worth taking.
Second, Obama’s position was a reversal. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama speculated that an American-led “show of force†might have prevented the Rwandan genocide. In 2005, he suggested that arming African Union forces and even forming “a U.N.- or NATO-led force†to stop the slaughter in Sudan might be necessary.
But most fundamentally, what on earth happened to liberalism so that even the self-styled embodiment of not just hope but the audacity of hope can talk like Henry Kissinger in his darkest mood? What use is liberal idealism, if not for expressing righteous indignation at American inaction during a genocide?
There was a time when liberals had the capacity to evoke some amount of shame from non-liberals when it came to foreign affairs. I wouldn’t want to overstate things and say that liberals served as America’s conscience, but they certainly appealed to it. Liberal harangues about, say, supporting various sons-of-bitches had a certain bite, even if they naïvely ignored the necessity of such support (strategic suicide cannot be morally obligatory). Nor would I wish to say that conservatives were pure cynics and disciples of realpolitik: Anti-Communism had a profound streak of moral idealism in it, and the alliances that liberal idealists opposed contributed to the ultimate defeat of the evil empire, a very great good.
But one could generalize by saying that there was a useful division of labor whereby liberals directed our collective gaze toward various evils and injustices (famines, apartheid, illiberal regimes) and it fell to conservatives to explain why America could do only so much, if anything, to remedy them. This is one of the reasons conservatism has always had a reputation for hard-heartedness. As Emerson put it, “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.†Conservatives are supposed to look for the downside, the cost; this is in the national interest. The damn hippies are supposed to dream of buying the world a Coke and the conservatives are supposed to sniff that it costs too much and there’s a moral hazard in handing out soft drinks for free.
At some point over the last decade, that division of labor broke down. Consider that conservatives today are the foremost champions of democracy promotion, in all its forms, while liberals are inclined to argue that we should not — or cannot — impose our values on others. And one could even argue that conservatives became, under George W. Bush, the leading advocates of human rights and global charity. The Bush White House certainly did more to fight AIDS and other afflictions in sub-Saharan Africa and to promote women’s rights in the Middle East than President Clinton had done, and more than President Obama seems prepared to do. It is on the right that you will hear moralistic rhetoric about the evil of our enemies, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Taliban. At the same time, it is among conservatives that you will hear the most forceful calls for a hard-headed national-security policy. The debates on the right — even in the pages of National Review — show that serious realism is alive and well among conservatives.
Meanwhile, liberalism has largely checked out on both fronts, hitching both liberal realism and liberal idealism to a distinctly post-American vision. Today, the typical liberal idealist’s highest priority is for the United States to become a “member in good standing of the international community†— a euphemism for acquiescence and subservience to the mores and dictates of the European Union, the Hague, the United Nations, and, as we’ve recently seen, the selection committee for the Nobel Peace Prize. And the conventional liberal realist’s idea of clear-eyed realpolitik is for America to do — the exact same thing.
That in the progressive mind the U.N. has replaced the U.S. as the legitimate engine for global progress is hardly a new insight. Over the last decade, liberals have increasingly embraced the propositions that unilateralism — more properly: unilateralism by the United States — is necessarily a grave transgression against all that is right and good, and that it is often better to do wrong in a very large group than to do right alone. In the 1990s, these views — associated with what Charles Krauthammer calls the “New Liberalism†— were a major current in Democratic thinking, but it was not yet dominant. Before there was Barack Obama’s global “apology tour,†there was Bill Clinton’s. He apologized to Guatemala for U.S. interventions there; in Uganda, he apologized for slavery; in Rwanda, he rightly apologized for doing nothing to stop the genocide, but — in perfect Clintonian fashion — lied that we hadn’t known about it. He sent his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, essentially to apologize to Iran for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953.
At the same time, though, the Clintonites talked of America as “the indispensable nation†and in fact supported essentially unilateral action by the United States. Tellingly, it often seemed that there was an inverse relationship between our national interests and liberal willingness to intervene: the less important to our bottom line, the more worthy the cause. The first Bush administration sent troops to Somalia largely because liberals successfully appealed to our decency, not our national interest (many conservatives were convinced — William F. Buckley Jr. supported the effort). Clinton’s comic intervention in Haiti stemmed from similar appeals. The war in the Balkans was a more complicated affair, but Clinton intervened there without U.N. authorization (to the cheers, it is worth noting, of National Review, and the catcalls of The Nation).
The New Liberalism had a long gestation. None other than Harry Truman carried in his wallet a copy of Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall,†which dreamt of a day when the world would be governed by a “Parliament of man.†But while New Liberalism’s gestation was long, its delivery — at the hands of George W. Bush — was quick. In response to, among other things, Bush’s “freedom agenda†and the Left’s revolt over the Iraq War, liberal idealism and liberal realism fused, producing an alloy that is neither honorably idealistic nor profitably realistic.
This ideology is recognizably progressive in that among its defining features are a fetishization of expertise and power and an indifference to the consent of the governed. Every day, another EU brahmin waxes indignant over the idea that voters should have a say in his bureaucracy’s project. A more disturbing illustration can be found in Thomas L. Friedman’s envious words about Chinese authoritarianism: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,†he grudgingly conceded in a recent column. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.†This mindset is metastasizing throughout American progressivism today, as idealism downgrades the importance of democracy while inflating the value of power within extra-constitutional and globalist institutions.
President Obama, whom John Bolton has aptly dubbed “the first post-American president,†is the incarnation of the New Liberalism. When asked whether he believes in American exceptionalism, Obama replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.†This is a profound rejection of both reality and ideal. One doesn’t have to be a jingoist to appreciate what everyone from Tocqueville and Marx to Werner Sombart and Seymour Martin Lipset recognized as the unique nature of America’s origins and character. When Obama says America is exceptional to Americans just as Greece is exceptional to Greeks, what he is really asserting — beyond the idea that no nation is really exceptional — is that exceptionalism is a kind of superstition (perhaps akin to the superstitions that prevented those western Pennsylvanians from understanding that they should vote for him in their Democratic primary). Obama seems to think it his mission to help us get over fairy tales of America’s unique role and status. Perhaps that’s one reason — in addition to his arrogance — for his declaration to members of the U.N. General Assembly in September that they could measure the character of the American people by his nine months in office and not by, say, the graves at Normandy, the moon landing, the Declaration of Independence, or other hallmarks of America’s uniqueness.
So the old concept of American exceptionalism is dead, but fear not: America remains a standout in other ways. We produce too much carbon. We drain too many of Gaia’s resources. We haven’t “caught up†with the European Union’s enlightened policies on health care, gay rights, and transnationalism. We support Israel when much of the U.N. is dedicated to grinding it away. (The necrosis of liberal idealism was acutely evident when the Democrats’ top “realist,†Zbigniew Brzezinski, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, recently insinuated that America should be prepared to shoot down Israeli jets to defend Iran’s nuclear program.)
Hence the New Liberal idealists’ top priority is for the American Gulliver to fall into line with the ranks of Lilliputians. And this is pretty thin gruel as far as idealism goes. The actions of the U.N. are, on a global level, the equivalent of seeing a little girl fall down a well and saying in response: “Let’s form a committee.†Actually, they are worse than that, because some of the committees at the U.N. are notorious for throwing little girls down wells. That’s why the excitement among liberal commentators over Obama’s decision to join the U.N. Human Rights Council — a den of villainy if ever there was one — was so depressing, and why Obama’s touting this decision as one of the noblest accomplishments of his administration is nothing short of perverse.
To see the enervating effects of this new idealism, consider Darfur. The genocide there was so bad it distracted George Clooney from supermodels. But what, exactly, does George Clooney want America to do? If you visit the website of “Not On Our Watch†— an organization founded by Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and other very concerned attractive people — you’ll be hard pressed to find an answer. “Not On Our Watch is committed to robust international advocacy and humanitarian assistance. . . . We encourage governing bodies to take meaningful, immediate action to protect the vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced.†Let’s form a committee!
Darfur activists implore Obama to “find†a “resolution†to the Darfur problem, as if such a resolution were like a lost cufflink. Just find it! In the meantime, what can you do? Well, Not On Our Watch says you can “stay informed†and tell your representative that you are concerned. You can give money to relief groups. You can “take a stand.†But once you get beyond the high-school-oral-report rhetoric, you’ll discover that taking a stand means asking the U.N. to adopt a binding resolution to form an ad hoc committee on stand-taking. The U.S. government — run entirely by the group’s fellow liberals — isn’t to be part of the solution at all. Last year, at the U.N. ceremony for Clooney’s anointment as a “Messenger of Peace with a special focus on peacekeeping,†Clooney recounted his most recent visit to Darfur. The people there “see these bright blue hats and they feel a new energy in the air. They feel for the first time that this is the moment that the rest of the world, all the nations united, are stepping in to help them. There is only one chance to get this right. They believe you when you tell them that hope is coming. They know that only the United Nations can help on this scale. They know it, and you know it.â€
Of course, whether Clooney knows it or not, this is laughable jackassery. The U.N.’s record of stopping ethnic cleansing and genocide is on par with its record of supporting winning NASCAR teams. That’s why Clinton “illegally†ignored the U.N. to intervene in Kosovo. In 1994, genuinely heroic U.N. blue helmets from Belgium were asked to maintain stability in Rwanda. Ten of them were captured by Hutu soldiers (some reports say they voluntarily handed over their weapons per U.N. guidelines). The Belgian paratroopers were mutilated and tortured to death. After this atrocity, the Belgian blue helmets quickly left Rwanda and the genocide commenced. U.N. failures — of either resolve or ability — can also be catalogued in East Timor and Iraq.
Likewise, there will never be an effective multinational U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, not least because the Russians and the Chinese represent two Sudanese vetoes on the Security Council. Indeed, as Mark Steyn noted in 2004, at precisely the moment the Sudanese Janjaweed intensified their slaughter at home, the Sudanese cookie-pushers at Turtle Bay were accepting a three-year stint on the Human Rights Commission (that was before it became a “Council,†by the way — and who among us doubts that the name change will make all the difference in the world?). The first task for the Sudanese “human-rights commissioners� Denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel, Israel, Israel.
The feckless asininity and moral bankruptcy of the U.N. are the best illustration of how confused both the so-called liberal realists and the so-called liberal idealists are. If something is truly morally compelling, if our conscience forces us to take action, who cares whether the U.N. approves? Obviously it’d be nice to get some help, but how is it a moral failing on our part to shoulder more of the burden? A similar argument holds for the realists. The notion that the “international community†has America’s best interests at heart is palpably absurd. According to the Nobel Committee, President Obama won the Peace Prize because “his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.†For someone who believes that “citizen of the world†is a serious and legitimate concept, that makes sense. But if you believe that the United States of America is a sovereign entity whose sovereignty rests in its people, and that its leaders have an obligation to be jealous guardians of the American people’s interests, then conducting a foreign policy according to a global opinion poll is nonsense on stilts.
Obama has now said twice — in his two most important foreign-policy speeches, the one in Cairo and the one at the U.N. — that no country “can†or “should†dominate, or impose a system of government on, another. No statement better encapsulates how unidealistic and unrealistic the New Liberalism is. Men should not murder other men, but they most certainly can. The story of international relations has been the story of domination and imposition, often for ill, occasionally for good. Any foreign policy that doesn’t recognize this cannot be called realistic. And, in an important respect, any foreign policy that thinks America has neither the power nor the moral authority to impose its will when our conscience moves us cannot be called usefully idealistic either.
So, again, what use is liberalism on questions of foreign policy, beyond the rah-rah-for-multilateralism stuff? The Taliban throws acid in the faces of little girls trying to learn to read. If conservatives have to be the ones to point that out, what are liberals good for?
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