Liberal Interventionism vs "Conservative Pessimism". posted by Richard Seymour

I'm going to break my own rule - it's my rule and I'll do what I like with it. Oliver Kamm has written an article which appeared in The Times on Saturday. In it, he makes the liberal case for returning President Bush to the White House this November - on the basis of his foreign policy, rather than his domestic agenda which isn't referred to.

Aside from referring to John Kerry as an "obscurantist reactionary" (as if President Bush were a secular liberal), he offers this assessment:

Liberal internationalism envisages an order founded on constitutional democratic principles. It stands, as Woodrow Wilson declared in 1917, "for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience". It advocates maintaining peace through collective security and non-discriminatory trade.

John Kerry is no inheritor of this tradition. His foreign policy reveals a conservative pessimism about the limits of political action (a stance that will be familiar to Michael Portillo from his service in a Government that declined to confront Serb aggression against Bosnia). Kerry’s distaste for American exceptionalism runs deep. Lawrence Kaplan recently recorded in the American political journal The New Republic that when, in 1997, President Clinton described the United States as the "indispensable nation", Kerry retorted, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?"

President Bush's administration, by contrast, does embody Wilsonian idealism. In fact, I agree with Kamm here - the neoconservative right have adopted the language of liberal internationalism and coupled it with a characteristic realpolitik. Robert Kagan, in Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), argues that "The United States is a behemoth with a conscience... Americans do not argue, even to themselves, that their actions may be justified by raison d'etat... [T]o the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilisation and a liberal world order." (Page 41) I doubt that most Americans are that interested in spreading Wilsonian ideals throughout the world, but the elision is standard. On the other hand, while Kerry may dislike the language of Pax Americana, he has no objection to it in principle.

Kerry's policy adviser Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute (a Clintonite think-tank) described the Kosovo war as "a policy consciously based on a mix of moral values and security interests with the parallel goals of halting a humanitarian tragedy and ensuring NATO's credibility as an effective force for regional stability". Kerry himself recently propounded a profoundly liberal interventionist foreign policy:

"There was a time not so long ago when the might of our alliances was a driving force in the survival and the success of freedom -- in two world wars, in the long years of the Cold War, then from the Gulf War to Bosnia, to Kosovo," he said. "We extended a hand, not a fist."

In the same article, Kerry is reported as saying he would return to multilateralism, and repair relations with key allies and the UN. Indeed, the Democrats were committed to liberal interventionism when the incoming Bush administration was abrogating such policies. David Benjamin, a member of the US National Security Council under Clinton, took Bush to task over his criticisms of "nation-building":

Mr Bush showed a misunderstanding of a major strategic achievement of the Clinton administration ... In particular [he] missed the intrinsic connections between enlargement and the conflict in the Balkans ... NATO enlargement advanced US interetsts in dealing with one of the country's foremost strategic challenges: coping with a post-communist Russia whose trajectory remains in question. (Quoted in Vassilis K. Fouskas, Zones of Conflict: US Foreign Policy in the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, Pluto Press, 2003, p 49).

One of Oliver Kamm's consistent themes has been how the war on Iraq fulfilled both humanitarian and strategic criteria, and he continues this theme in his article:

No more facile remark has been uttered about the Iraq war than John Kerry’s lament that it diverted the focus of the War on Terror. Overthrowing Baathist totalitarianism was a humanitarian cause, but it also buttressed Western security. Recent academic research suggests that — contrary to numerous confident episcopal assertions — the "root cause" of terrorism is not poverty but political repression. Societies where dissent is confined to religious absolutism are incubators of violent anti-Western fanaticism. The authors of one study, the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova of Charles University in Prague, maintain that terrorism, rather than being generated by poverty or lack of education, may be "more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances."

Kamm will be delighted to note that he is in partial agreement with Noam Chomsky on the latter point. Chomsky has consistently argued since September 11th that terrorism has nothing to do with globalisation and only related to poverty at some remove. (See, for example, his 9/11 or the most recent Hegemony or Survival). But what is more important is that he is again more aligned with Kerry than he would like to admit, which I'll explain after a further excerpt from his article:

Postwar American foreign policy has been consistently compromised by tactical alliances with authoritarian regimes. These were a moral failure but also a strategic blunder — in Vietnam, Latin America, or the notorious tilt to Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War. President Bush, by contrast, maintains that the spread of liberty, not the balance of power among states, is the best assurance for Western security. It’s a premise that explains his contempt for the duplicitous autocrat Yassir Arafat while — a fact lost on many of Bush’s European critics — aiming explicitly for a Palestinian state.

Enlightened self-interest, then, is the cri de coeur of the liberal interventionists. The implication would be, presumably, that Bush is intent on "spreading liberty" and thus ending US support for autocratic regimes. But this is not so. Saudi Arabia, notwithstanding the mild chilling of relations in recent years, remains a close strategic ally of the Bush administration, as does the dictatorship in Pakistan. One could also mention the support for far right terrorist groups under the rubric of the Uribe administration in Colombia (which at least accentuates the sole saving grace of the 'war on terror' - namely, that there is no such thing). Meanwhile, John Kerry has criticised Bush

for coddling Saudi Arabia. "To put it simply, we will not do business as usual with Saudi Arabia," Kerry said. "They must take concrete steps to stop their clerics from fueling the fires of Islamic extremism."

And what is more, although it is generally true that political repression contributes to the formation of extremist ideologies among the educated middle class in the Arab world, it is also true that much of the impetus for radical Islamist ideological expansion derives itself from the incursions of Western capital and imperialism. (See, for example, Dilip Hiro, Islamic Fundamentalism, 1988). Hence, the current situation in Iraq. Far from being a simple "failure of postwar planning" as Kamm describes it, the present condition of Iraq is an entirely predictable consequence of the decision to occupy. I am not here making the case against the war with Iraq, merely highlighting the fact that is possible to criticise the war on intelligent grounds within the framework of a liberal internationalist outlook.

In short, Kerry (or even the late Al Gore) would make a far more persuasive Wilsonian progressive than Bush. Although Kamm is critical of the ineptitude of the Bush administration in the implementation of their foreign policy goals (which, including the opposition to the ICC and Kyoto, are considerd by Kamm to be of some merit), he does not draw the obvious conclusion that a Democratic administration would have been able, post-9/11 to have mustered a much more substantial "coalition of the willing" than the Bush administration. If Clinton had met with Chirac's scepticism, he would have offered a self-effacing smirk and glossed over it. If he had thought that the UN were unlikely to approve any military adventure of his, he would simply have circumvented the entire process, as he did over Kosovo. He would have appealed over its head to individual nation-state actors and probably would have done so more effectively than Bush. I don't think this is because of Clinton's unique charisma, but rather because Western European governments are usually open to US foreign policy goals and their uncharacteristic hostiltiy over Iraq has more to do with the extremism of the Bush administration than anything else. Attacking Iraq would not have been so widely objected to, I would argue, had it not been conceived of as part of a new era of "preemptive strikes" - that is, had not the fundamental rules of international engagement been subject to radical change in the process. In that sense, the global sense of relief that would be eventuated by a Kerry victory would reflect a feeling of returning to normality, and would be coupled by a new readiness to cooperate with US strategic priorities.

I am not, in case anyone new to this blog has missed the point, arguing that you should go out and vote for Kerry - and least of all on these grounds. Personally, I wouldn't vote for either of the two charlatans currently vying for control of Pax Americana. But the charge of "conservative pessimism" simply does not fit. Paleoconservatives may find their views adequately caricatured in that turn of phrase, but New Democrats? No, my advice is: if you want more of the same, vote Bush. If you want even more of the same, vote Kerry.