Democratic Realism
Political Eclectic
An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World
By Charles Krauthammer
http://aei.org/news/newsID.19912,filter./news_detail.asp
A Unipolar World
Americans have healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a
sense of thrift: Who needs it? We're protected by two great oceans. We
have this continent practically to ourselves. And we share it with
just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people
seem intent upon moving in with us.
It took three giants of the twentieth century to drag us into its
great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II,
Truman into the Cold War. And then it ended with one of the great
anticlimaxes in history. Without a shot fired, without a revolution,
without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up
and disappeared.
It was the end of everything--the end of communism, of socialism, of
the Cold War, of the European wars. But the end of everything was also
a beginning. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something
new was born, something utterly new--a unipolar world dominated by a
single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in
every corner of the globe.
This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the
fall of Rome. It is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to
deal with it. Our first reaction--the 1990s--was utter confusion. The
next reaction was awe. When Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the
idea of American decline, saw what America did in the Afghan war--a
display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a
distance of 8,000 miles--he not only recanted, he stood in wonder:
"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power;" he wrote,
"nothing. . . . No other nation comes close. . . . Charlemagne's
empire was merely western European in its reach. The Roman empire
stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in
Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no
comparison."
Even Rome is no model for what America is today. First, because we do
not have the imperial culture of Rome. We are an Athenian republic,
even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens. And
this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the
history of the world--acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness
greater even than Britain's. And it was not just absent-mindedness; it
was sheer inadvertence. We got here because of Europe's suicide in the
world wars of the twentieth century, and then the death of its
Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and
economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective
organism, it simply expired in its sleep. Leaving us with global
dominion.
Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and
the other classical empires of modern times, in that we do not hunger
for territory. The use of the word "empire" in the American context is
ridiculous. It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first
instinct upon arriving on anyone's soil is to demand an exit strategy.
I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British
into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. They were
looking for entry strategies.
In David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence: "I
think you are another of these desert-loving English. . . . The
English have a great hunger for desolate places." Indeed, for five
centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans
and new continents.
Americans do not. We like it here. We like our McDonald's. We like our
football. We like our rock-and-roll. We've got the Grand Canyon and
Graceland. We've got Silicon Valley and South Beach. We've got
everything. And if that's not enough, we've got Vegas--which is a
facsimile of everything. What could we possibly need anywhere else? We
don't like exotic climates. We don't like exotic languages--lots of
declensions and moods. We don't even know what a mood is. We like Iowa
corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese or Indian or
Italian, we go to the food court. We don't send the Marines for
takeout.
That's because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial
republic. We don't take food; we trade for it. Which makes us
something unique in history, an anomaly, a hybrid: a commercial
republic with overwhelming global power. A commercial republic that,
by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the
international system. The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to
Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia; Arab and Israeli, Irish and
British, North and South Korean are upon us.
That is who we are. That is where we are.
Now the question is: What do we do? What is a unipolar power to do?
Isolationism
The oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and
retreat. This is known as isolationism. Of all the foreign policy
schools in America, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising in the
only great power in history to be isolated by two vast oceans.
Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually
superior to the Old World. We were too good to be corrupted by its low
intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.
Today, however, isolationism is an ideology of fear. Fear of trade.
Fear of immigrants. Fear of the Other. Isolationists want to cut off
trade and immigration, and withdraw from our military and strategic
commitments around the world. Even isolationists, of course, did not
oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so obviously an act of
self-defense--only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose
that. But anything beyond that, isolationists oppose. They are for a
radical retrenchment of American power--for pulling up the drawbridge
to Fortress America.
Isolationism is an important school of thought historically, but not
today. Not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but
because it is so obviously inappropriate to the world of today--a
world of export-driven economies, of massive population flows, and of
9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern
technology and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier
between "over there" and over here.
Classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete; it is
politically bankrupt as well. Four years ago, its most public
advocate, Pat Buchanan, ran for president of the United States, and
carried Palm Beach. By accident.
Classic isolationism is moribund and marginalized. Who then rules
America?
Liberal Internationalism
In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. Liberal
internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the
religion of the foreign policy elite. It has a peculiar history. It
traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson's utopianism, Harry Truman's
anticommunism, and John Kennedy's militant universalism. But after the
Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity,
acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman's and Kennedy's roles in
containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last
half of the Cold War, liberals used "cold warrior" as an epithet. In
the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of
unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. Today,
John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald
Reagan's "illegal war in Central America"--and oppose he did what was,
in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately
succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy
in all of Central America.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last
half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When
Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to
war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The
Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No.
The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more
than four to one in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to
power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration,
it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in
military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti,
bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War
doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference
is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights
for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only
humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of
national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of
force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals
have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an
aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone
believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about
national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the
international environment by projecting power abroad to secure
economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for
that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy
and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely
self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national
selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was
multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The
Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment
promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon
emissions, antiballistic missiles, etc.
Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or
biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently
useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons
Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on
the grounds that it would "provide us with a valuable tool"--the
"moral suasion of the entire international community."
Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom
of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the
first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the
bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of
interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of
this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons.
Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. Why then this obsession with conventions,
protocols, legalisms? Their obvious net effect is to temper American
power. Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by
these treaties? The ABM amendments were aimed squarely at American
advances and strategic defenses, not at Russia, which lags hopelessly
behind. The Kyoto Protocol exempted India and China. The nuclear test
ban would have seriously degraded the American nuclear arsenal. And
the land mine treaty (which the Clinton administration spent months
negotiating but, in the end, met so much Pentagon resistance that even
Clinton could not initial it) would have had a devastating impact on
U.S. conventional forces, particularly at the DMZ in Korea.
But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise:
To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to,
dependent on, constricted by the will--and interests--of other
nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate
the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the
planet--ours.
Today, multilateralism remains the overriding theme of liberal
internationalism. When in power in the 1990s, multilateralism
expressed itself as a mania for treaties. When out of power in this
decade, multilateralism manifests itself in the slavish pursuit of
"international legitimacy"--and opposition to any American action
undertaken without universal foreign blessing.
Which is why the Democratic critique of the war in Iraq is so
peculiarly one of process and not of policy. The problem was that we
did not have the permission of the UN; we did not have a large enough
coalition; we did not have a second Security Council resolution. Kofi
Annan was unhappy and the French were cross.
The Democratic presidential candidates all say that we should have
internationalized the conflict, brought in the UN, enlisted the
allies. Why? Two reasons: assistance and legitimacy. First, they say,
we could have used these other countries to help us in the
reconstruction.
This is rich. Everyone would like to have more help in reconstruction.
It would be lovely to have the Germans and the French helping
reconstruct Baghdad. But the question is moot, and the argument is
cynical: France and Germany made absolutely clear that they would
never support the overthrow of Saddam. So, accommodating them was not
a way to get them into the reconstruction, it was a way to ensure that
there would never be any reconstruction, because Saddam would still be
in power.
Of course it would be nice if we had more allies rather than fewer. It
would also be nice to be able to fly. But when some nations are not
with you on your enterprise, including them in your coalition is not a
way to broaden it; it's a way to abolish it.
At which point, liberal internationalists switch gears and appeal to
legitimacy--on the grounds that multilateral action has a higher moral
standing. I have always found this line of argument incomprehensible.
By what possible moral calculus does an American intervention to
liberate 25 million people forfeit moral legitimacy because it lacks
the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen Square or the cynics of the
Quai d'Orsay?
Which is why it is hard to take these arguments at face value. Look:
We know why liberal internationalists demanded UN sanction for the war
in Iraq. It was a way to stop the war. It was the Gulliver effect.
Call a committee meeting of countries with hostile or contrary
interests--i.e., the Security Council--and you have guaranteed
yourself another twelve years of inaction.
Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply
their power by attaching themselves to stronger ones. But
multilateralism imposed on Great Powers, and particularly on a
unipolar power, is intended to restrain that power. Which is precisely
why France is an ardent multilateralist. But why should America be?
Why, in the end, does liberal internationalism want to tie down
Gulliver, to blunt the pursuit of American national interests by
making them subordinate to a myriad of other interests?
In the immediate post-Vietnam era, this aversion to national interest
might have been attributed to self-doubt and self-loathing. I don't
know. What I do know is that today it is a mistake to see liberal
foreign policy as deriving from anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism
or a late efflorescence of 1960s radicalism.
On the contrary. The liberal aversion to national interest stems from
an idealism, a larger vision of country, a vision of some ambition and
nobility--the ideal of a true international community. And that is: To
transform the international system from the Hobbesian universe into a
Lockean universe. To turn the state of nature into a norm-driven
community. To turn the law of the jungle into the rule of law--of
treaties and contracts and UN resolutions. In short, to remake the
international system in the image of domestic civil society.
They dream of a new world, a world described in 1943 by Cordell Hull,
FDR's secretary of state--a world in which "there will no longer be
need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or
any other of the special arrangements by which, in the unhappy past,
the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their
interests."
And to create such a true international community, you have to temper,
transcend, and, in the end, abolish the very idea of state power and
national interest. Hence the antipathy to American hegemony and
American power. If you are going to break the international arena to
the mold of domestic society, you have to domesticate its single most
powerful actor. You have to abolish American dominance, not only as an
affront to fairness, but also as the greatest obstacle on the whole
planet to a democratized international system where all live under
self-governing international institutions and self-enforcing
international norms.
Realism
This vision is all very nice. All very noble. And all very crazy.
Which brings us to the third great foreign policy school: realism.
The realist looks at this great liberal project and sees a hopeless
illusion. Because turning the Hobbesian world that has existed since
long before the Peloponnesian Wars into a Lockean world, turning a
jungle into a suburban subdivision, requires a revolution in human
nature. Not just an erector set of new institutions, but a revolution
in human nature. And realists do not believe in revolutions in human
nature, much less stake their future, and the future of their nation,
on them.
Realism recognizes the fundamental fallacy in the whole idea of the
international system being modeled on domestic society.
First, what holds domestic society together is a supreme central
authority wielding a monopoly of power and enforcing norms. In the
international arena there is no such thing. Domestic society may look
like a place of self-regulating norms, but if somebody breaks into
your house, you call 911, and the police arrive with guns drawn.
That's not exactly self-enforcement. That's law enforcement.
Second, domestic society rests on the shared goodwill, civility and
common values of its individual members. What values are shared by,
say, Britain, Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe--all nominal members of this
fiction we call the "international community"?
Of course, you can have smaller communities of shared
interests--NAFTA, ANZUS, or the European Union. But the European
conceit that relations with all nations--regardless of ideology,
regardless of culture, regardless even of open hostility--should be
transacted on the EU model of suasion and norms and negotiations and
solemn contractual agreements is an illusion. A fisheries treaty with
Canada is something real. An Agreed Framework on plutonium processing
with the likes of North Korea is not worth the paper it is written on.
The realist believes the definition of peace Ambrose Bierce offered in
The Devil's Dictionary: "Peace: noun, in international affairs, a
period of cheating between two periods of fighting."
Hence the realist axiom: The "international community" is a fiction.
It is not a community, it is a cacophony--of straining ambitions,
disparate values and contending power.
What does hold the international system together? What keeps it from
degenerating into total anarchy? Not the phony security of treaties,
not the best of goodwill among the nicer nations. In the unipolar
world we inhabit, what stability we do enjoy today is owed to the
overwhelming power and deterrent threat of the United States.
If someone invades your house, you call the cops. Who do you call if
someone invades your country? You dial Washington. In the unipolar
world, the closest thing to a centralized authority, to an enforcer of
norms, is America--American power. And ironically, American power is
precisely what liberal internationalism wants to constrain and tie
down and subsume in pursuit of some brave new Lockean world.
Realists do not live just in America. I found one in Finland. During
the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the
rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. The Finnish prime
minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban. And for that he was
scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors. To which he responded tartly
that this was a "very convenient" pose for the "other Nordic
countries"--after all, Finland is their land mine.
Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia. America is
the land mine between barbarism and civilization.
Where would South Korea be without America and its land mines along
the DMZ? Where would Europe--with its cozy arrogant community--had
America not saved it from the Soviet colossus? Where would the Middle
East be had American power not stopped Saddam in 1991?
The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not
parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power--wielded,
if necessary, unilaterally. If necessary, preemptively,
Now, those uneasy with American power have made these two means of
wielding it--preemption and unilateralism--the focus of unrelenting
criticism. The doctrine of preemption, in particular, has been widely
attacked for violating international norms.
What international norm? The one under which Israel was universally
condemned--even the Reagan administration joined the condemnation at
the Security Council--for preemptively destroying Iraq's Osirak
nuclear reactor in 1981? Does anyone today doubt that it was the right
thing to do, both strategically and morally?
In a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass
destruction, the option of preemption is especially necessary. In the
bipolar world of the Cold War, with a stable nonsuicidal adversary,
deterrence could work. Deterrence does not work against people who
ache for heaven. It does not work against undeterrables. And it does
not work against undetectables: nonsuicidal enemy regimes that might
attack through clandestine means--a suitcase nuke or anonymously
delivered anthrax. Against both undeterrables and undetectables,
preemption is the only possible strategy.
Moreover, the doctrine of preemption against openly hostile states
pursuing weapons of mass destruction is an improvement on classical
deterrence. Traditionally, we deterred the use of WMDs by the threat
of retaliation after we'd been attacked--and that's too late; the
point of preemption is to deter the very acquisition of WMDs in the
first place.
Whether or not Iraq had large stockpiles of WMDs, the very fact that
the United States overthrew a hostile regime that repeatedly refused
to come clean on its weapons has had precisely this deterrent effect.
We are safer today not just because Saddam is gone, but because Libya
and any others contemplating trafficking with WMDs, have--for the
first time--seen that it carries a cost, a very high cost.
Yes, of course, imperfect intelligence makes preemption problematic.
But that is not an objection on principle, it is an objection in
practice. Indeed, the objection concedes the principle. We need good
intelligence. But we remain defenseless if we abjure the option of
preemption.
The other great objection to the way American unipolar power has been
wielded is its unilateralism. I would dispute how unilateralist we
have in fact been. Constructing ad hoc "coalitions of the willing"
hardly qualifies as unilateralism just because they do not have a
secretariat in Brussels or on the East River.
Moreover, unilateralism is often the very road to multilateralism. As
we learned from the Gulf War, it is the leadership of the United
States--indeed, its willingness to act unilaterally if necessary--that
galvanized the Gulf War coalition into existence. Without the
president of the United States declaring "This will not stand" about
the invasion of Kuwait--and making it clear that America would go it
alone if it had to--there never would have been the great wall-to-wall
coalition that is now so retroactively applauded and held up as a
model of multilateralism.
Of course one acts in concert with others if possible. It is nice when
others join us in the breach. No one seeks to be unilateral.
Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held
hostage to the will of others.
Of course you build coalitions when possible. In 2003, we garnered a
coalition of the willing for Iraq that included substantial allies
like Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy and much of Eastern Europe.
France and Germany made clear from the beginning that they would never
join in the overthrow of Saddam. Therefore the choice was not a wide
coalition versus a narrow one, but a narrow coalition versus none.
There were serious arguments against war in Iraq--but the fact France
did not approve was not one of them.
Irving Kristol once explained that he preferred the Organization of
American States to the United Nations because in the OAS we can be
voted down in only three languages, thereby saving translators' fees.
Realists choose not to be Gulliver. In an international system with no
sovereign, no police, no protection--where power is the ultimate
arbiter and history has bequeathed us unprecedented power--we should
be vigilant in preserving that power. And our freedom of action to use
it.
But here we come up against the limits of realism: You cannot live by
power alone. Realism is a valuable antidote to the woolly
internationalism of the 1990s. But realism can only take you so far.
Its basic problem lies in its definition of national interest as
classically offered by its great theorist, Hans Morgenthau: interest
defined as power. Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations, what
motivates their foreign policy, is the will to power--to keep it and
expand it.
For most Americans, will to power might be a correct description of
the world--of what motivates other countries--but it cannot be a
prescription for America. It cannot be our purpose. America cannot and
will not live by realpolitik alone. Our foreign policy must be driven
by something beyond power. Unless conservatives present ideals to
challenge the liberal ideal of a domesticated international community,
they will lose the debate.
Which is why among American conservatives, another, more idealistic,
school has arisen that sees America's national interest as an
expression of values.
Democratic Globalism
It is this fourth school that has guided U.S. foreign policy in this
decade. This conservative alternative to realism is often lazily and
invidiously called neoconservatism, but that is a very odd name for a
school whose major proponents in the world today are George W. Bush
and Tony Blair--if they are neoconservatives, then Margaret Thatcher
was a liberal. There's nothing neo about Bush, and there's nothing con
about Blair.
Yet they are the principal proponents today of what might be called
democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national
interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme
value, what John Kennedy called "the success of liberty." As President
Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: "The United
States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the
balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the
advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings."
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That
is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political
appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or
consanguinity, but on a proposition--to which its sacred honor has
been pledged for two centuries. This American exceptionalism explains
why non-Americans find this foreign policy so difficult to credit; why
Blair has had more difficulty garnering support for it in his country;
and why Europe, in particular, finds this kind of value-driven foreign
policy hopelessly and irritatingly moralistic.
Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to
power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a
dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman
Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan's "evil
empire" speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power
between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and
unfreedom, and yes, good and evil.
Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists
like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan--and Reagan was vilified by the
entire foreign policy establishment: for the sin of ideologizing the
Cold War by injecting a moral overlay.
That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar
existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism,
but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and
Blair are similarly attacked for naďvely and crudely casting this
struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil.
Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed
in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war,
you would have to give Bush and Blair's moral claims the decided
advantage of being obviously true.
Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people
are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine--many conservatives in
particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: "The
spread of freedom is . . . our last line of defense and our first line
of attack," they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian
foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson.
Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin' words. Yes, this
vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain't Wilsonian.
Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be
invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In
1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those
international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of
bitter experience later--with Libya chairing the UN Commission on
Human Rights--there is no way not to know.
Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely
that it shares realism's insights about the centrality of power. Its
attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the
fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism.
Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it
can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end
but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests.
The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the
United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more
inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests
you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head.
But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some
point, you have to implant something, something organic and
self-developing. And that something is democracy.
But where? The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its
open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the
flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it
does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or
countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like
Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy.
Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.
Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I
propose a single criterion: where it counts.
Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support
democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in
places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central
to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses
a global mortal threat to freedom.
Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why?
Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom
in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into
bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.
Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the
beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against
the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the
Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its
secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini
revolution of 1979.
Establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities
in Afghanistan and Iraq and ultimately their key neighbors would, like
the flipping of Germany and Japan in the 1940s, change the strategic
balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.
Yes, it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against
the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of
some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they
may yet be right. But how do they know in advance? Half a century ago,
we heard the same confident warnings about the imperviousness to
democracy of Confucian culture. That proved stunningly wrong. Where is
it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?
Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious
and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There
is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for
attacking the monster behind 9/11. It's not Osama bin Laden; it is the
cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social
ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by
regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.
It's not one man; it is a condition. It will be nice to find that man
and hang him, but that's the cops-and-robbers law-enforcement model of
fighting terrorism that we tried for twenty years and that gave us
9/11. This is war, and in war arresting murderers is nice. But you win
by taking territory—and leaving something behind.
September 11
We are the unipolar power and what do we do?
In August 1900, David Hilbert gave a speech to the International
Congress of Mathematicians naming twenty-three still-unsolved
mathematical problems bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the
twentieth. Had he presented the great unsolved geopolitical problems
bequeathed to the twentieth century, one would have stood out above
all--the rise of Germany and its accommodation within the European
state system.
Similarly today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can see
clearly the two great geopolitical challenges on the horizon: the
inexorable rise of China and the coming demographic collapse of
Europe, both of which will irrevocably disequilibrate the
international system.
But those problems come later. They are for midcentury. They are for
the next generation. And that generation will not even get to these
problems unless we first deal with our problem.
And our problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism.
September 11 felt like a new problem, but for all its shock and
surprise, it is an old problem with a new face. September 11 felt like
the initiation of a new history, but it was a return to history, the
twentieth-century history of radical ideologies and existential
enemies.
The anomaly is not the world of today. The anomaly was the 1990s, our
holiday from history. It felt like peace, but it was an interval of
dreaming between two periods of reality.
From which 9/11 awoke us. It startled us into thinking everything was
new. It's not. What is new is what happened not on 9/11 but ten years
earlier on December 26, 1991: the emergence of the United States as
the world's unipolar power. What is unique is our advantage in this
struggle, an advantage we did not have during the struggles of the
twentieth century. The question for our time is how to press this
advantage, how to exploit our unipolar power, how to deploy it to win
the old/new war that exploded upon us on 9/11.
What is the unipolar power to do?
Four schools, four answers.
The isolationists want simply to ignore unipolarity, pull up the
drawbridge, and defend Fortress America. Alas, the Fortress has no
moat--not after the airplane, the submarine, the ballistic
missile--and as for the drawbridge, it was blown up on 9/11.
Then there are the liberal internationalists. They like to dream, and
to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don't like
it. They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or
reflexive self-defense as an expression of national selfishness. And
they don't just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to
yield it piece by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global
architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international
events, but a good and tame international citizen.
Then there is realism, which has the clearest understanding of the new
unipolarity and its uses--unilateral and preemptive if necessary. But
in the end, it fails because it offers no vision. It is all means and
no ends. It cannot adequately define our mission.
Hence, the fourth school: democratic globalism. It has, in this
decade, rallied the American people to a struggle over values. It
seeks to vindicate the American idea by making the spread of
democracy, the success of liberty, the ends and means of American
foreign policy.
I support that. I applaud that. But I believe it must be tempered in
its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic
globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and
limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it
really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent
stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.
In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we came to the edge
of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we
both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of
Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back.
This time the enemy knows no reason.
Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation
would be hopeless. But there is a second difference between now and
then: the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever.
That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond
our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if
that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions
but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of
freedom as an antidote to nihilism--we can prevail.