NY TIMES Op Ed: Foreign Policy Concept: Progressive Realism
Robert Cohen
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Op-Ed Contributor
An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall
in Love With
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By ROBERT WRIGHT
Published: July 16, 2006
Princeton, N.J.
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George Bates
AS liberals try to articulate a post-Bush foreign policy, some are
feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance.
They have always thought of themselves as idealistic, concerned with
the welfare of humankind. Not for them the ruthlessly narrow focus on
national self-interest of the "realist" foreign policy school. That
school's most famous practitioner, Henry Kissinger, is for many
liberals a reminder of how easily the ostensible amorality of classic
realism slides into immorality.
Yet idealism has lost some of its luster. Neoconservatism, whose
ascendancy has scared liberals into a new round of soul-searching,
seems plenty idealistic, bent on spreading democracy and human rights.
Indeed, a shared idealism is what led many liberals to join neocons in
supporting the Iraq war, which hasn't turned out ideally. In
retrospect, realists who were skeptical of the invasion, like Brent
Scowcroft and Samuel Huntington, are looking pretty wise.
It's an unappealing choice: chillingly clinical self-interest or
dangerously naïve altruism? Fortunately, it's a false choice. During
the post-cold-war era, the security landscape has changed a lot, in
some ways for the worse; witness the role of "nonstate actors" last
week in India, Israel and Iraq. But this changing environment has a
rarely noted upside: It's now possible to build a foreign policy
paradigm that comes close to squaring the circle - reconciling the
humanitarian aims of idealists with the powerful logic of realists. And
adopting this paradigm could make the chaos of the last week less
common in the future.
Every paradigm needs a name, and the best name for this one is
progressive realism. The label has a nice ring (Who is against
progress?) and it aptly suggests bipartisan appeal. This is a realism
that could attract many liberals and a progressivism that could attract
some conservatives.
With such crossover potential, this paradigm might even help Democrats
win a presidential election. But Democrats can embrace it only if
they're willing to annoy an interest group or two and also reject a
premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a
winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party's manhood - just
take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch.
Even if that prescription did help win an election, it wouldn't
succeed in protecting America.
I.
Progressive realism begins with a cardinal doctrine of traditional
realism: the purpose of American foreign policy is to serve American
interests.
But these days serving American interests means abandoning another
traditional belief of realists - that so long as foreign governments
don't endanger American interests on the geopolitical chess board,
their domestic affairs don't concern us. In an age when Americans are
threatened by overseas bioweapons labs and outbreaks of flu, by Chinese
pollution that enters lungs in Oregon, by imploding African states that
could turn into terrorist havens, by authoritarian Arab governments
that push young men toward radicalism, the classic realist indifference
to the interiors of nations is untenable.
In that sense progressive realists look a lot like neoconservatives and
traditional liberals: concerned about the well-being of foreigners,
albeit out of strict national interest. But progressive realism has two
core themes that make it clearly distinctive, and they're reflected
in two different meanings of the word "progressive."
First, the word signifies a belief in, well, progress. Free markets are
spreading across the world on the strength of their productivity, and
economic liberty tends to foster political liberty. Yes, the Chinese
government could probably reverse the growth in popular expression of
the past two decades, but only by severely restricting information
technologies that are prerequisites for prosperity. Meanwhile,
notwithstanding dogged efforts at repression, political pluralism in
China is growing.
Oddly, this progressive realist faith in markets seems to be stronger
than the vaunted neoconservative faith in markets. After all, if you
believe that history is on the side of political freedom - and that
this technological era is giving freedom an especially strong push -
your approach to fostering democracy isn't to invade countries and
impose it. And if you believe that the tentacles of capitalism help
spread freedom, you don't threaten to disrupt economic engagement
with China for such small gains as the release of a few political
prisoners.
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Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the
author of "The Moral Animal" and "Nonzero: The Logic of Human
Destiny."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/opinion/16wright.html?ex=1153281600&en=e46f7e372d1c393f&ei=5087%0A
Immortalist
Robert Cohen wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/opinion/16wright.html?ex=1153281600&en=e46f7e372d1c393f&ei=5087%0A
>
> Here is the first page of four pages:
>
What do you think of this progressive realism? Is the bad side of
capitalism and socialism enough to make us move cautiously and how
resistent should we be to the good results of various degrees of
cooperation between corporatism and government?
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/opinion/16wright.html?ex=1153281600&en=e46f7e372d1c393f&ei=5087%0A