Politics at the Water's Edge

BOOK REVIEW: Matthew Yglesias, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008), 272 pages, $25.95 (hardcover).

Fall 2008 -- Matthew Yglesias, a rising young star in liberal journalism, has written a superb and well-documented history of the problems the Democratic Party has had in recent years with selling itself to the American public as credible on national-security issues. His new book is an informative and enjoyable critique not only of cowardly spinmeisters but also the strategic viewpoints of neoconservatives and liberal hawks alike.

Yglesias contends that “Democrats are reluctant to address security issues except when forced to do so, and, as a result, they discover that when they are so forced, they aren’t very good at it.” Their preference is to retreat to domestic policy and thus concede to the GOP a huge advantage in presidential politics, even when they’re flatly wrong. Beyond that, “Democrats, simply put, tend to think of national security as a political problem that should be avoided to the greatest extent possible.”

The argument that this hurts the Democrats and that their reluctance to engage is unfounded is well told and persuasive. Despite the subtitle’s clever parallelism, however, Yglesias does less well making the case that Republicans are uniquely bad at foreign policy. To be sure, the Bush administration has given him much ammunition. And the sainted Ronald Reagan gave us Iran-Contra and the Beirut debacle. But then again, Harry Truman gave us Korea. Liberal hero John Kennedy gave us the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, not to mention taking the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust. For good measure, LBJ escalated Vietnam into (despite what critics of the Iraq War would have you believe) the worst foreign-policy disaster in American history. Then there was the Carter administration: the Iran hostage crisis, Desert One, boycotting the Olympics. Bill Clinton gave us Blackhawk Down and gave Osama bin Laden a virtual free pass. For that matter, as Yglesias points out repeatedly, the Democratic leadership went along with Bush on Iraq.

The Preface is a stroll through Thomas Friedman’s columns on Iraq for the New York Times—a man who, as the most influential liberal foreign-policy pundit, “stands in . . . for a much broader trend of conventional wisdom that’s come to acknowledge that Bush’s policies have led to disaster but can’t quite bring itself to reject them.” Friedman’s continual pointing to short time horizons, usually six months, as the crucial phase, has become the subject of much derision and led to the coinage of the mocking “Friedman Unit.” But, as Yglesias writes, that tendency has characterized many Democrats—“rather than admit error and simply cut bait, prominent opinion leaders preferred the sort of shuffling abdication typified by Friedman’s endless delaying.”

As with the Iraq War, which serves as the analytical backdrop of most of the discussion, the book fails at its more ambitious goal of forging a new, more ambitious way ahead for American foreign policy. Yglesias rightly rejects as true but not practical the so-called Goldilocks lesson, that “one should avoid unwise extremes and hew to a soundly moderate course of action.” Instead, he offers an idyllic liberal internationalism as the way ahead, contrasting it with a caricature of conservative foreign policy and that of the liberal hawks who serve as Republican enablers.

An entire chapter sets forth a conservative straw man he dubs “the Nationalist Alternative.” This school eschews humanitarian intervention and therefore “is less likely to use force in certain circumstances than a liberal United States is, but is more likely in other cases.” Yglesias contrasts this Jacksonian tradition against a “neoconservative strain” that he insists isn’t much different. After all, “both traditions share a rabid detestation of the United Nations and universalistic treaties that tends, in practice, to go along with a casual disregard for international institutions generally.”

The problem with this, though, is that while both groups concern themselves first and foremost with U.S. interests, the neocons define that term so broadly as to be meaningless. Both, for example, would have bought into the idea that Saddam Hussein was dangerous and needed to be toppled. Both might have couched their rhetoric in humanitarian terms to sell it to the public. Only the neocons, though, would have thought that turning Iraq into a democracy—for the sake of the Iraqi people—was a legitimate use of American military power.

His preferred alternative is a liberal internationalism that, first and foremost, seeks to use international institutions to establish and enforce compliance with universal norms. Ironically, given the books’ title, the best example of this preferred approach was Republican George H.W. Bush, who acted “within the internationalist tradition” in the first Gulf War and thereby “established a new, long-dreamed-of norm—the principle that aggressive war, long notionally banned by various treaties, would actually be repulsed by concerted international action.”  Yglesias claims the liberation of Kuwait as “a great liberal victory,” even though he acknowledges that “it was backed by only a minority of congressional Democrats” and in fact achieved no such lasting norms.

Indeed, as he notes two pages later, by the early Clinton years, the “UN and similar structures began to look like obstacles to effective action at best, and cynical pretexts for avoiding action at worst.” Kosovo was the chief example. China and Russia were prepared to veto any action, so Clinton and Tony Blair bypassed the UN altogether and NATO “simply commenced the bombing campaign,” citing previous resolutions and an “international humanitarian emergency.” No worries: “Despite the lack of UN authorization, the Kosovo War fit reasonably well into the liberal framework.” Why? Because it was done with an eye toward “preserving the tighter institutional web of Western Europe and expanding this web eastward.” That this was done while ignoring “more serious humanitarian problems in Africa and elsewhere” was fine, because Kosovo “presented a mixture of humanitarian and interest-based reasons for intervention.” Then again, so did Iraq.

Yglesias blisters Michael O’Hanlon and other liberal hawks for having overly ambitious agendas, such as intervening “whenever the rate of killing in a country or region greatly exceeds the U.S. murder rate” and doing so “utterly without reference to the UN or any other sort of multilateral authority.” Following through on this, he believes, would have “an overwhelmingly pernicious effect on the country, the world, and progressive politics.” Contrasting this with the justification for Kosovo, though, pretty much takes us back to Goldilocks. More cynically, it leads to a post hoc Potter Stewart vision of foreign policy: We know good interventions when we see how they turn out.

“Liberals seek reciprocal reductions in national sovereignty wherein every nation commits to abide by certain standards,” Yglesias says, whereas isolationists take a live-and-let-live approach, and neocons, “in echo of the imperialistic tradition, seek an asymmetrical sovereignty wherein the United States is unencumbered by rules, while seeking to impose them on others.” Then again, as we saw in Kosovo, liberals are perfectly willing to eschew the rules in order to achieve their aims—albeit, in that case, aims that sought to further international norms.

Satisfied that he’s managed to make “the right” a monolith, and ignoring the fact that the “liberal hawks” he decries elsewhere have very different goals than his “liberal internationalists,” Yglesias proceeds to contrast “the right” and “the left” vis-à-vis the Iraq War.

He argues that “the right” failed to adopt a policy, a là George Kennan’s Cold War “containment,” based on a serious study of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, but instead used the 9/11 attacks as a justification for carrying out preexisting desires. He ascribes to “the right” what he terms the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” the idea that “U.S. force can achieve essentially anything as long as the will to use it exists.” He ascribes this view, for example, to those who believe we could have won in Vietnam if not for the antiwar movement. He cites, in particular, a Weekly Standard piece by Fred Kagan calling for the toppling of the Taliban government and Saddam Hussein, and “[e]liminat[ing] to the best of our ability known terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.” Yglesias describes this as, “to put it mildly, an ambitious agenda,” notwithstanding that we accomplished the first two rather easily. His chief objection here is that Kagan lumped in anti-Israel groups, which Israel has been fighting for years, with al Qaeda. Kagan would argue, however, that all these groups are anti-Western and backed financially by anti-American governments or groups. Further, if enforcing international norms is the supposed sine qua non of good foreign policy, surely the norm against the murder of innocent civilians to achieve political aims should be high on the list.

Among the others in this group was James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA Director, who in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks called for us to “at least consider” Saddam’s involvement. Yglesias says Bush and his fellow righties ignored “the mainstream consensus among most relevant professionals” that we should concentrate on fighting the Taliban while gaining Arab cooperation by broking an Israel-Palestinian settlement, but instead “embraced the far right’s preferred focus on Iraq.” This, notwithstanding liberal internationalist Clinton’s repeated calls for regime change.

Yglesias laments that the Democrats abjured the obligations of an opposition party and provided cover for Bush on the invasion, actually losing seats in 2002 and making it very hard to mount opposition. Liberal hawks from George Packer to Christopher Hitchens to Ken Pollack were leading voices in that effort, justifying the war on various liberal grounds. As such, “the case for war was to be judged according to its very best arguments, while the contrary case was rightly judged by its very worst.”

He notes that many Democratic politicians feigned support for the war, for fear that doing otherwise would hurt them with voters. More sinisterly, liberal experts at Brookings and elsewhere did so because they were angling for jobs in a Democratic administration, and “when it became clear that leading Democrats would support the war, it was useful from a careerist perspective to likewise back the war, cast doubts about its feasibility only in the form of advice about its conduct, and mute or otherwise downplay criticism.” This, in turn, “merely served to further entrench the cycle.” Yglesias adduces no evidence whatever for these charges. Indeed, looking at the broader careers and philosophies of the individuals in question, it seems far more plausible that they actually believed what they wrote.

He believes that this reaction stemmed largely from Democrats having been frightened because Sam Nunn and others were punished at the polls for voting against the 1992 Gulf War. Yglesias contends that “the Democrats’ political problem with the Gulf War wasn’t that they’d opposed it, but that they wrongly opposed it. They should have fully endorsed it as a necessary and practical step in strengthening global institutions and restoring international stability.”

The problem with this analysis is that the war—in which I participated as a rocket artillery platoon leader—accomplished nothing of the sort. While ostensibly authorized by the UN Security Council, it was, like the current Iraq War, essentially a United States plus Coalition of the Willing operation. At war’s end, the Security Council was no more effective a collective security institution than before, and the result not only left Saddam in power but set the stage for multiple U.S. military operations and strikes against Iraq, which culminated in the 2003 invasion.

Because Democrats want first and foremost to seem “tough” on foreign affairs, they made the mistake of criticizing Bush’s tactics rather than the underlying rationale for the war and its strategic relationship with the War on Terror. They compounded this error in 2004 by nominating John Kerry, who, along with his top advisers, supported the war, rather than Howard Dean, who was generally right on the war. Again, however, while there were no doubt Democrats who supported the war for political reasons, there was a universal consensus going back to the days of the Clinton administration (which, you’ll recall, exemplified liberal internationalism) that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program and that toppling his regime was necessary.

Ygelsias asserts that “the imperialistic, hypernationalist influence has long been with us and probably will long be with us, but it’s also always been wrong—from the Spanish-American War to the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, to Vietnam, to the neocon critics who slammed Ronald Reagan for negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev—and it always will be wrong.”  The problem, though, is that it’s not considered to be “imperialism” when a Democrat does it, as with Bill Clinton’s many adventures.

Indeed, Yglesias continually criticizes the administration’s “botched” war in Afghanistan, particularly its “unwillingness to commit large numbers of troops”; but the post-regime-change phase of the war in Afghanistan is no less “imperialistic” than that in Iraq. Further, there’s no more international mandate to remake that country.

The author points to the blowback of so much use of force, which constitutes “an intolerable threat to the interests of other nations.” He believes neither neocons nor liberal hawks “attempt to seriously consider other countries’ perspectives on events.” He suggests an alternative: “reciprocity, rules, institutions, and cooperation.” The exemplar cited is the Clinton administration’s treaties banning land mines, imposing environmental regulations, banning nuclear testing, and establishing the International Criminal Court, which the Bush administration stopped in its tracks. He attributes this to Bush’s desire to “shed international obligations” rather than the simple fact that he simply disagreed with those policies, while Clinton favored them. The Clinton administration didn’t advance those agendas because of its love for international institutions but rather because they were in accord with its ideology.

Toward the end of the book, Yglesias makes the vital point that a “foreign policy that accepts more constraints on what we may try to do is likely to broaden the range of things we actually can do.” That, rather than the notion that military interventions should be judged by the degree to which they conform to some elusive set of international norms, strikes me as a much more profitable avenue for achieving consensus between left and right.

Given the United States’s military and economic might and broad definition of national interest, it’s a fool’s errand to try to persuade the American public or its presidents that getting buy-in from the Red Chinese or the Russian autocrats is a necessary precondition for action. That’s particularly true given that the USA bears the lion’s share of the burden in the UN, NATO, and other international institutions.

The reason, then, to consider the wishes of the other permanent members of the Security Council, or the judges on the International Criminal Court, or the bureaucrats at the World Trade Organization, is the longer view. It may well be worth taking minor losses on occasion if the end result is more obedience to norms that we’ve helped set, and therefore less need for America to expend its resources trying to enforce them. Ultimately, though, the argument has to take place using the measuring stick of American national interests.

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