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| Speaker: | Peter Beinart, Author, New Republic |
|---|---|
| Moderator: | Derek H. Chollet, Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies |
September 15, 2006
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, DC
DEREK CHOLLET: Okay, welcome, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for being here bright and early on a Friday. I’m Derek Chollet. I’m a fellow at CSIS. And it’s a real honor for me to be here with my friend Peter Beinart to talk about liberalism’s past, present and future and what that means for U.S. foreign policy in the debate in the Democratic Party.
Before I start, I’ve got some housekeeping: Please turn off your cell phones and Blackberries, and the meeting is on the record today.
Peter is a long-time—or for several years was an editor of the New Republic; he’s now an editor-at-large. Many of you in this room, I’m sure, are familiar with his writing, whether in the New Republic or at The Washington Post where he has a monthly column. His own work has been especially insightful for me.
Several years ago he wrote an article in the New Republic, about two years ago or so, that sort of struck a chord with me and, I think, many of us involved in the Democratic debate. I had just gotten off the 2004 campaign, and sort of I was here, I was sulking, I was reintegrating back into society, and this article landed in my in-box and it was called, “A Fighting Faith.” And it was about the Democrats and the debate in 2004 and little bit of a postmortem, what went wrong and what happened.
And I was struck by two things in reading the article. First, I was depressed because the postmortem struck me as fairly accurate, both in sort of what had happened in the 2004 campaign as well as the state of the Democratic Party debate and the left’s debate on foreign policy and national security issues. But I was also very struck with the argument, both in terms of his call for the liberals and the left to find a useable past and a useable history as they move forward and sort of try to frame a narrative for the debate on national security issues, and also this history that was unearthed again, that I’d either never learned or had long forgotten, about the debates on the left within the Democratic Party in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s about Communism and the approach towards Communism.
I found myself sort of reading that article. It had been passed around, you know, back and forth between those of us who had been on the campaign, like Samisdat (ph). You know, we all sort of read it and commented on it and sort of argued about it among ourselves. I found I sort of left that thinking I wanted more, and lo and behold I got more. About three months ago, four months ago, Peter expanded that article greatly, changed it somewhat—into a book, “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”
It’s a provocative title. It’s a provocative book. It’s one that’s been very well received here in Washington, around the country and indeed around the world, and much debated here in town among Democratic circles, I can say authoritatively among politicians, as well as policy wonks and just common citizens. I think he puts forth a lot of information and argument in that book that is certainly going to be part of the debate as we move forward in the next few weeks of the 2006 midterm election and certainly through 2008 and beyond as liberals and conservatives and those who are probably just in the middle are trying to think about America’s role in the world and the road ahead.
And so with that, I’m going to turn it over to Peter. He’s going to talk for about 10, 15 minutes or so, then he and I will talk for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then we’ll open it up for questions for the last half-hour. Over to you.
PETER BEINART: Well, thank you very much to Derek and to Nancy and to everybody.
It’s flattering, I guess, to be called a voice of the new generation, although I have to say in my house a voice of the new generation has a somewhat different connotation. For instance, my wife and I would tell you that it was a voice from the new generation, our eight-month-old, last night who at 2, 3 and 4 a.m. woke us up in the middle of the night with screams. So we tend to think of ourselves as the old generation, and the new generation speaks very loudly but usually somewhat incoherently in the middle of the night, a somewhat frightening new generation sometimes.
This book and the article that preceded it were inspired by an unlikely source. It was inspired by George W. Bush and something that he said a number of times during the 2004 presidential campaign. I think it was arguably important to him winning the 2004 presidential campaign. And he said, “You may not always agree with me, but at least you know where I stand.”
And that resonated to me because when I go on the road sometimes to speak to student groups, liberal and conservative groups, one thing always bothers me. It is this: When you ask conservative students to name a book that has influenced what it means for them to be a conservative, you get a catechism of books. You get Friedrich Hayek, “Road to Serfdom”; William F. Buckley, “Up From Liberalism”; Barry Goldwater, “Conscious Conservative”; Russell Kirk, “Conservative Mind.” You get these books. Even if they haven’t read them, there’s an acknowledgement of these books. The Cliff Notes version.
In my experience, you ask the liberal students that same question, you just get nothing. You might maybe get a biography of someone who they look up to. In terms of the kind of the political-theoretical tradition out of which their liberalism stems, it’s remarkably thin, particularly when you think that these are people, liberals on college campuses that are supposedly hegemonically dominated by liberals.
That’s something that has been bothering me a great deal, and I think it particularly worries me in foreign policy since I think one can make an argument that since the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party has not won a single presidential election that’s been contested on national security; the one in 1976, after Vietnam during detente, when polling showed a quite significant drop in public attention to foreign policy, and of the course the two elections of the 1990s when America again turned inward.
So if you want to go back to a time when Democrats won presidential elections on national security and when I think liberals had a narrative, a vision of national security that they could tell to the country and to themselves, you have to go back before the Vietnam War. And this book was an attempt to kind of rummage through the history of the first two decades of the Cold War and to try to understand what the liberal principles that guided foreign policy were at that time.
So I want to say something about first what I think the roots of the conservative story that we have heard from the Bush administration and affiliated intellectuals since 9/11 has been, then this liberal story that I think has been forgotten, and then end by saying something more specifically about what I think it means for today.
The Bush administration’s foreign policy is often characterized as neo-conservative, and neo-conservatism is a movement that starts really in the early 1970s. But what’s striking to me is that if you go back to the intellectuals who really founded the modern conservative movement, this remarkable constellation of people associated with William F. Buckley’s National Review, people like Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, there are striking similarities between the way they talk about American foreign policy and the way George W. Bush and Dick Cheney do.
At the center of it is this great conservative fear that Americans do not believe strongly enough in ourselves; that we are plagued by kind of a debilitating self-doubt, a tendency toward moral relativism. So conservatives of the ’50s look at the Soviet Union and say, look, we have more money than them, we have more weapons, but they have this fanatical self-confidence, this absolute belief that they represent good, we represent evil. We, by contrast, as a democracy are prone to thinking that maybe this is all a big mistake. Maybe we’re not really any better than them after all.
And so if you look why conservative intellectuals get behind Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, I would argue it’s largely because they feel that McCarthy is the first guy to come along and draw a clear line in the sand between American freedom and Soviet Communism, say Communists will not be tolerated in the institutions of American life. Again, from the conservative perspective the distinction between American freedom and Soviet Communism has been diminishing because of the expansion of the American welfare state, which has put us on the road to serfdom.
Again in the ’70s after Vietnam, this neo-conservatism partly emerges because of this great fear that the left has inculcated this enormous self-doubt about America’s virtue in the wake of Vietnam, and that the role of America, if we’re going to get our groove back in the Cold War, is to convince ourselves that we really are better than the Soviet Union, to eradicate this new kind of relativism. And Ronald Reagan takes power and says, famously, “The era of self-doubt is over.”
Then again a third iteration after 9/11. What strikes me is how much of conservative writing after 9/11 focuses on the fact that we have been morally disarmed in a struggle against a totalitarian enemy because of the ascendance of this relativistic Clinton baby-boom generation that can’t tell right from wrong; that the great cause is going to be to reestablish clear categories of good and evil. So Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address talks about the “axis of evil.” He’s, of course, referring back to Reagan’s 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals where Reagan talked about the “evil empire.” And interestingly, Reagan in that speech quotes Whittaker Chambers, from Whittaker Chambers’ 1952 book “Witness.”
So you see this kind of historical arc on the right that the role of government in confronting a fanatical foe is to cleanse America of its debilitating self-doubt so we can be strong. And I think this has enormous implications for the way the conservative instinctively responds to criticisms that America is not living up to its own ideals.
Then if you believe that our Achilles’ heel is our tendency toward excessive self-doubt, lack of belief in ourselves, nothing is more threatening or sinister than the suggestion that we are not as good as we say we are. So George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have almost virtually verbatim the same response to the Amnesty International criticism of Guantanamo Bay. They say it’s absurd, everyone knows America is a country that stands for freedom around the world—at the very time that fewer and fewer people around the world in fact believe that America is a country that stands for freedom around the world.
The liberal story, I think—it’s a stylized story, of course, but I think stories have to be stylized, in a way. (Laughter.) The liberal story, I think, in some ways is exactly the opposite. And if the critical conservative intellectual, I would argue, was Burnham, the critical liberal intellectual is Reinhold Niebuhr, the kind of the Kevin Bacon of Cold War liberalism in the sense that he links to so many people. Very, very influential. Has a huge influence on Schlesinger. Niebuhr called him the father—I mean Kennan called him the father of us all. King, Martin Luther King, is very influenced by him.
Niebuhr argues that in fact the right kind of self-doubt is our critical strength in the struggle against this totalitarian foe. It’s what gives us our critical advantage. That American virtue is not simply assumed or inherited, it has to be earned in every generation by struggling against our own very human capacity for injustice. That Americans are no different than anybody else, but paradoxically it is that very recognition that leads us to build in the kind of democratic and international restraint that make us different from the predatory powers of the past and give us the capacity to inspire the world.
This idea, I think, has huge implications at the dawn of the Cold War. America in 1946 represented 50 percent of the world’s GDP. You think about how someone with Dick Cheney’s perspective might have responded to that enormous discrepancy between American power and just about everybody else’s power at the dawn of the Cold War.
Instead, of course, what the Roosevelt and Truman administrations do is they go on this frenzy of institution building—the U.N., NATO, what become the IMF and World Bank, what becomes the World Trade Organization—partly because of the recognition that there are problems that are too big for America to solve alone, but partly because in fact America does not want to be an empire, because America wants to give weaker nations some influence over our power so they will help us but also so that American power will be considered legitimate.
And Kennan is fond of saying that the Soviet Union is an empire and that its great weakness is that empires historically crack from the periphery. It’s an empire because it rules in Eastern Europe based on coercion and brute force. The challenge for America is to resist the imperial temptation, to develop a relationship in Western Europe, in particular, that’s based on consent and persuasion; and that alliance will endure long after the Soviet Union’s empire has cracked. That the critical test for the United States is to convince people that America’s primacy is good for them, a thing that the Soviet Union can never do (in its fear ?).
This idea also has, I think, enormous implications for domestic policy, this idea that American virtue is not simply assumed and declared, but struggled for against our own capacity for injustice, our very human capacity to do the same bad things that everybody else does.
Liberals, I think, have also been confused by George W. Bush’s soaring rhetoric about democracy, particularly since his second Inaugural Address. But if you listen to Bush’s rhetoric about democracy, what strikes me is that he tends to talk about American democracy, democracy as kind of a finish line that America has crossed, and we kind of look back at the benighted countries of the rest of the world and we urge them to kind of get their act together and kind of cross this finish line as well.
It’s really not the way that Cold War liberals talked about American democracy in, say, 1953. It wasn’t that America would inspire the world as a settled accomplishment, kind of a fixed fact; it was that what would inspire the world, if anything, was America’s struggle to use its democratic processes to become a better nation, recognizing our own capacity, our own very real capacity, which was evident to the world and to ourselves, for injustice.
That’s why liberal anti-communism and civil rights were so critically fused, because the idea was that only if America used its democratic institutions to overcome its capacity for injustice would it inspire people around the world. That Kennedy’s deputy secretary of State, Chester Bowles, said the world will see us as no better than we really are—which, if you think about it in today’s globalized world, where people have ever more access to what happens inside our borders and even inside our prisons, is more true than anything else.
And I was very struck, researching this book, by a quote from the Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri, who’s really been one of the important, I think, intellectuals arguing for democracy and against authoritarianism in the Middle East. And he had something interesting to say about Bush’s speeches. He said: They’re nice speeches, but in Bush’s rhetoric I see an America which is stringent about democracy and human rights around the world but complacent at home; and I contrast that in my own mind—I’m paraphrasing—with America between1956 and 1964, when we saw the most powerful country in the world struggling, accepting its own capacity for injustice and struggling against that. That that is much more inspiring to me about America, because sermonizing to others is easy, and confronting your own capacity for injustice is hard.
I just want to end by saying something about what I think this means today. The liberals of the Cold War believed the world was interdependent. They believed this in large part because they had experienced the 1920s as young men and women, seen America’s attempt to isolate itself and seen that Fascism and depression had emerged in Europe and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and imperiled the United States.
This reality of interdependence is obviously much more true today in a globalized world, when there are many, many more ways in which things that happen in much more remote countries can threaten the United States much faster than ever before. You know, who would have thought on September 10 th , 2001, that anything that happened in a country as backward and as remote as Afghanistan would really matter to the United States, or that a Chinese village that no one’s ever heard of could incubate a bird flu that quickly spreads across the world and threatens a global pandemic, or that the collapse of the Thai banking system almost plunges the world into recession in the late 1990s.
In such a world, the United States has to be more concerned than ever before with how other countries govern themselves, because if other countries can respect human rights, if they can provide public health, they can regulate their financial systems, if they don’t massively degrade the environment, if they can secure their loose weapons of mass destruction, they don’t breed the pathologies that now spread across the world much faster than ever before.
But I think the key Niebuhrian insight is that if America tries to do that alone, it’s not simply that of course we lack the capacity, as we’re learning so tragically in Iraq, but if we try to do that alone, if we take it upon ourselves to declare for ourselves, for the world, what the standard of governance is and try to enforce it ourselves, we start to look to the rest of the world like an empire—just what Kennan said we must not become because it would make us weaker.
And that the answer to that dilemma for the liberals of the 1940s was these international institutions which could hold other countries to a higher standard of governance but also hold the United States to a higher standard; that moral progress requires some degree of moral reciprocity. But our ability to hold other countries to a higher standard for how they govern themselves has been massively undermined by our unwillingness to hold ourselves to a higher standard—on Guantanamo Bay, on the environment, on things like the selling of small arms around the world.
And this is why I think Tony Blair, who gave a speech about two months ago at Georgetown that I think was very, very significant, has really more and more focused on the need to rebuild the international institutions of the 1940s that have atrophied, that have not kept pace with these changes in the international system both on the economic front and on the national security front.
And Blair said something very striking and, I think, very brutally frank, directed toward the United States implicitly in that speech at Georgetown, which is this will not happen unless the most powerful countries of the world are willing to sacrifice some degree of sovereignty themselves.
I think it seems to me likely that if Derek does his work and a Democrat is elected in 2008, conservatives may well move back into a more isolationist phase. You can make an argument that conservative foreign policy going back to the ’40s tends to oscillate between a kind of isolationism and what you could call a kind of neo-imperialism; conservatives isolationist in the ’40s, isolationist again in the ’90s to some degree, somewhat neo-imperialist in the ’50s and ’60s, somewhat, I think, neo-imperialist again today.
The great danger for liberals will be to follow conservatives, I think, into that isolationist trend. Isolationism you see on the conservative side in immigration, but on our side on trade, on the Dubai Ports deal, where I don’t think the Democratic Party really covered itself with glory. And I think the building of international institutions through which America can act proactively and aggressively may be our best shot at preventing that renewed isolationism.
And the case that I think needs to be made to liberals in particular is that while there is this mounting sense in America that since 9/11 we’ve taken our best shot at creating a better world with this very ambitious agenda and we found that in fact that the world wants nothing from us, what the world is really saying to the United States is something quite different, something more along the lines of when do we get America back? When do we get America that saw itself as a country that was aspiring to higher standards that were universal, rather than taking upon itself to define standards for the whole world that we ourselves don’t live up to, the America that in fact by struggling to become a better nation at home inspired people to make their own society better?
So I’ll stop there. And thank you again for having me.
MR CHOLLET: Peter, thanks a lot. I’ll just start off the question just to kind of complete the diagnosis or the sort of stylized history as you’ve outlined it. How did liberals lose this usable past? How did this usable past in a sense become either forgotten or, if anything, sort of toxic within the left?
BEINART: I think liberals had an enormously difficult task in the wake of Vietnam. Liberals were not going to say, I think rightly, that we would have won the Vietnam War had it just been for greater will. There had to be some recognition that Vietnam had really been a disaster.
And yet the very difficult intellectual work that I think liberals failed to do—but I don’t want to be patronizing, I think it was enormously difficult to do—was to find a language and a set of policies that could recognize the hubris of Vietnam while also maintaining the idea that the Cold War anti-communism should be considered a legitimate area for liberal ideals and liberal values. And I think that very difficult balance was not achieved. Of course, it was made much more difficult by the fact that you were in the middle of kind of a fairly radical cultural transformation as well that was very destabilizing and upsetting to many traditionally Democratic working-class voters.
So this general sense that liberals had basically thrown out traditional American values both in foreign policy of anti-communism and on the domestic front, when liberalism seemed to be associated with the forces of disorder and cultural anarchy, I think made it very difficult for liberals to reconstruct that.
I think that one of the things that I think was very important about the Clinton administration, working with Blair particularly in the second term, was starting to find a way to talk—to get back to what I think were the critical synthesis for those early Cold War liberals, which was the willingness to consider the aggressive use of American power, but a very, very important focus on how you legitimize that power in the eyes of the world. That’s why I think that Kosovo was important, because it was America using military power under a Democratic administration, but in a way that was much more internationally legitimate than the Iraq War was.
I think it’s even why what the DLC did on Central America was important. I think the DLC’s attempt to find a third way on both Nicaragua and El Salvador, between basically the Reagan view, which is that we’re going to win militarily, and the liberal kind of view, which was basically that it wasn’t any of our business, but to find a way in fact to say that America should be opposing Communism in Latin America, but it needs to do so in a multilateral way, not in an overly militaristic way, I think was also a beginning of this kind of slow climb back from the debilitating legacy of Vietnam.
CHOLLET: Well, sort of to draw on your comment about the Clinton administration and the issue of intervention, I mean it seems to me that in the 1990s the big debate within the administration, within political circles when it came to the U.S. national security policy, is, when is it justified to use U.S. force abroad? How many casualties are acceptable? How much multilateralism is acceptable? Do you need U.N. Security Council? Do you need NATO? And then also, is it a legitimate mission for U.S. foreign policy to nation-build, post-conflict reconstruction, stability ops, whatever we call it now?
Nine-eleven, temporarily, at least, solved that debate because I think most of the strategic community and I think many Americans believed, yes, it’s legitimate for us to use force in places like Afghanistan and also to put enormous resources into rebuilding a country and helping to bring democracy.
The question I have is whether Iraq will solve that debate going the other way, and that the lesson for, say, the 9/11 generation, so-called, would be, guess what, it’s too hard. And in the 1990s it worked when we had small goals, relatively speaking, but we shouldn’t be doing this anymore. And not just sort of the fringes would say that, but the mainstream
would say that.
BEINART: I think that’s a great question. You know, something that Derek and I were just mentioning yesterday is there is an interesting generational issue here. I think that people, in my experience—you can’t generalize too much—people who are in, say, their mid-thirties, like me, the first formative, really, experience in foreign policy was in 1989. And then you had the Gulf War. You basically had a series of experiences that take you from 1989 to the war in Afghanistan, so a series of experiences that basically seem to teach first a lesson about the potential efficacy of American power, and second about the potential universality of American ideals.
It’s a very, very different lesson than the lesson that the Vietnam generation, the kind of baby boomers had. And I think perhaps when I look back on my utterly misguided support for the Iraq War, I think that perhaps it was partly because of those experiences I had had and not having lived through a chastening event like Vietnam, and being far too willing to dismiss Vietnam as an irrelevant relic.
I think that the hope for, I would say, people who are really of the new generation, not like our eight-month-old Ezra (sp), but our 25-year olds, will be that they can find a way of learning from both 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and also the war in Iraq and so have some of that chastened experience without seeing the world only through the prism of Iraq.
Because I think, to go to your point, it seems to me America has a history of saying, “To heck with nation building.” This is an old story. “It’s too difficult, we don’t want to do it, screw it,” and we never plan for it very much. And then lo and behold we always find ourselves doing it. It’s not a new thing, we’ve been doing it over and over and over again.
Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t better circumstances and you shouldn’t try to be wise about when you have a realistic chance of successfully doing it or not, but the idea that we’re going to be able to say we’re not getting into this nation-building stuff anymore is historically, it seems to me, probably misguided. We probably will sooner or later. We should try to choose wisely when we do it, but that we should actually start planning for the fact that we’re going to have to. That if you believe we’re going to have to use military action, most likely the places in which we’re going to need to use military action, there’s going to have to be some post-conflict nation building.
And that I think what’s striking about the RAND study that James Dobbin did about both U.S. and U.N. nation-building is that to some degree, nation-building had gotten a bad rap and that the term can be used to mean different things, but you can actually look to a surprising number of cases where nation-building has been a pretty good use of American or international resources in terms of preventing countries from sliding back into conflict and even moving countries towards democracy.
So I think nation-building will be required. I think what’ll probably happen is we won’t want—unfortunately what may happen is we won’t want to think about it, we won’t continue doing the work of thinking about how we change the State Department and other international institutions to make it better, and then we’ll find ourselves in fact having to do it and perhaps not being any better prepared than we were for Iraq.
CHOLLET: Just to return to Iraq, which will be my last question, obviously your book, and your article first, a lot of the focus of the debate and the commentary around it was about Iraq and about your position on Iraq. And I, like you, as a supporter of the war, believed, you know, from my sort of experience in the ’90s, that Saddam was a threat and what-not. Your book, I think, is a very heartfelt and honest sort of statement saying, “I was wrong,” although I remember you telling me that there were only so many ways you can say “I was wrong” but people still didn’t accept your “mea culpa” there.
But sort of looking forward, how does the outcome in Iraq affect what you think the narrative needs to be moving forward? In other words, obviously the big debate not just in Democratic circles, but in Republican circles now too, is when do we get out, how do we get out, and how does whatever that turns out to be affect sort of the recapturing of this bigger narrative about America’s role in the world?
BEINART: Yeah, that’s a very, very interesting question. It’s actually something that I’m trying to think about in a kind of larger essay I’m working on about how America tends to react to loss in war and what you can learn from previous experiences.
I think there’s no question that the challenge will be that the lessons that are being drawn from Iraq, I think almost inevitably, first of all are several-fold, none of which are particularly conducive to, I think, what both you and I both took from the 1990s, which is that American power is necessary and that America can be an important force for the spread of democracy.
The first, I think, lesson will be that American values are much less universal than we thought. That there has been a re-appreciation of the intransigence of culture. It’s interesting if you go back and read, as I was just reading, Frances Fitzgerald’s book “Fire in the Lake.” It’s a very striking book to read now if you then compare it and go read, say, Anthony Shadid’s book about Iraq; there are a lot of parallels; read George Will’s columns.
And maybe too to some degree this was a useful corrective, but I think it’s a corrective that could go too far. I mean, I think it’s important to remember that the fact that Iraqis may not be able to, tragically, may not be able to achieve democracy, that this was an effort certainly coming as it did from a foreign power that was too great, does not mean to say that the preference of most Iraqis was for Saddam Hussein or for Muqtada al-Sadr. I mean there’s some support for Muqtada al-Sadr, but I think it is important to recognize that there is a difference between the limits of what we can achieve and what people actually want.
I think the second lesson that will be drawn is a kind of declining power in the idea that America can re-make societies, can come up with rational principles by which other societies can draw themselves. And so I think this is likely to produce a greater sense of the limits of what America can achieve around the world.
I think that the moment right now is open, I think, for people—in a very different way than it was it was in 2002, 2003—who are particularly skilled in thinking about second-best options, something that does not come naturally to the American psyche, one might say, who can look a series of very bad options in the face and make very intelligent decisions about them.
And that’s why I think, although I wouldn’t see it as a political tradition out of which I come from, I think that there are things to be learned from the Kissinger-Nixon years, in the sense that I think one of Henry Kissinger’s strengths was a willingness to look at a series of bad options and stare them in the face and make hard decisions.
And I think that the great achievement of that period of American foreign policy was the recognition that America—to recognize that America was in a weak position, something the Bush administration has not recognized, and to recognize that we had too many enemies, that the correlation of forces against us was too strong, and to do something very ingenious to turn things around with the opening to China.
And that’s why I think that people are going to have to start thinking, even though it may be hard to talk in a public way about it, are going to have to start thinking about where you could change the balance of forces in the Middle East given that the United States now looks at kind of a constellation of forces where we have massive hostility on basically every front.
And of course, that leads you to think whether there is any opportunity to change the relationship with Iran, in particular.
CHOLLET: Well said.
The floor is open. We’ve got mikes here, and please identify yourselves. First question here, yes.
QUESTIONER: Edwin Williamson, Sullivan and Cromwell. As I hear what you’re saying, it seems to me that we have an interesting laboratory of comparison that we can make between Iraq and Afghanistan, as Afghanistan has all those things which you say should be done, we’re doing it. It is more explicitly U.N. authorized than Iraq, although I’d argue that Iraq was authorized by the U.N. as well. And it’s being done by a coalition, et cetera.
But yet what is really different, and what is going to make Afghanistan more successful than Iraq because it’s being done on a multilateral basis—and in fact there are some signs—I read a report that a British general said that the level of hostility in Afghanistan is more intense then it is in Iraq. So is this coalition fighting really working better in Afghanistan than Iraq, and is that really the solution?
BEINART: Well, I think it’s worth saying that the degree of international support is not obviously to say the only factor in determining success or failure. And in some degree the degree of international support can be as much effect as cause, which is to say one of the reasons America could not get international support for the war in Iraq—or at least, we say, more international support—we had some countries that support us, we couldn’t get U.N. Security Council support—was that the case America was making was perceived to be weak to many countries, and in fact the problem that the Bush administration faced was that once we got the inspectors there, rather than making the case stronger, they ended up making the case weaker because of what they were not finding in terms of WMD.
The case for Afghanistan was considered stronger, and I think partly because the strength of the case was stronger I think it would be easier to convince Americans to stay the long haul in Afghanistan than it is in Iraq, particularly in an Iraq where we didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.
I think even if America were sustaining as many casualties in Afghanistan as in Iraq, which we’re not, I think it would be easier to make the case to Americans that we have to stay in Afghanistan.
One of the things that I think we didn’t do a good enough job in Afghanistan—is another part of my book that I haven’t talked about—is non-military, is development, is non-military reconstruction. I think that one of the things that the liberals of the Cold War understood—it was a radically different environment—was that democracies that don’t provide material benefits for their people don’t necessarily survive. And that was basically the idea behind the Marshall Plan. I mean, democratic governments that we feared would fail if they couldn’t do something about the post-war chaos and depression of post-war Europe. And I think the Bush administration has not been nearly aggressive enough in trying to make economic development in Afghanistan a real priority.
That said, you know, as disturbing as the developments in Afghanistan have been in recent periods, and the mounting disillusionment, there was certainly a period, at least, at which there was a political legitimacy to the Karzai government at least at one point, and one could argue about how much it’s lost it, which is much greater than anything—is greater than what we had in Afghanistan.
I mean, you know, I think Karzai had a political legitimacy in Afghanistan that, say, Iyad Allawi in Iraq, for instance, never had, and so that gave us an opportunity, and I think that it still gives us, an opportunity in Afghanistan that I think we never had.
And I think that the problem was that once there was the sense in the region that America was not committed to the long haul in Afghanistan, that may have had very disturbing, very problematic implications for how it led Pakistan to act. That once Pakistan felt that America was not necessarily in it for the long haul, that they began to doubt that we were really going to do what it takes to make this government work, that changed their perspective on things, led them to hedge their bets, and that that has produced a series of downwardly kind of moving forces in Afghanistan.
CHOLLET: Right over there. Yep, right there.
QUESTIONER: I’m Seyom Brown from Brandeis University. It appears to me a distinction has to be made between postwar nation-building and prewar nation-building as a rationale for going to war. The liberals that you referred to earlier—Niebuhr, Kennan, you could put Morgenthau there also—were very reluctant to countenance the use of military force for regime-change purposes unless it was a situation in which what happened in another country could tip the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union; then they were willing to overcome their reluctance to prescribe for others what kind of regime they should have.
It appears to me that this is still a dilemma, an unresolved dilemma. Yes, we can say we all have to take the responsibility for the wars we have been involved in and get into nation building, reconstruction and so on, but I’d like to hear you a little bit more on the rationale for using force in order to effect a regime change. Under what circumstances is that justified?
BEINART: I think that is a very, very valuable and important question, and I think it touches on something Derek has said. I think what the war in Iraq has certainly put to rest is the idea of regime change purely for the promotion of democracy. I think that one could argue about how much of a rationale it really was for the war anyway, but I think that idea is probably dead and buried for a long time and, as you say—you’re right—is not really in the tradition of what I’m talking about.
I think that I guess I would say a couple of things. When America faces a situation where we feel that a country is a threat to our national security—you know, Germany and Japan in World War II—at that point I think, as you say, the reluctance to become involved in nation building has to be overcome.
The other situation, I think, is when you have—which, you know, I think we have become more attuned to, perhaps, in the ’90s—is the situation of genocide, massive, massive violations of human rights, from a country that may not be—that is probably not a direct threat to American national security. That’s a very difficult situation, which is different than going in to promote democracy. I think that there’s a valuable distinction made to go in, and I think it was an important rationale in Bosnia and Kosovo, and would have been in Rwanda, to try to prevent some massive violation of human rights in a kind of ongoing genocide situation, which is different than simply just trying to turn an authoritarian state democratic. That is going to confront you ultimately with these same circumstances; I mean, which is going to put you in some kind of nation-building situation.
I think we did as good a job of that in Bosnia and, I think, in Kosovo as realistically could have been expected. How realistically we would have done it in Rwanda, for instance, I think is a very important and difficult question and leads you back to, I think, the institutions question. Because of course one of the big differences between Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda is the much greater strength of the institutions that we have in Europe to try to act. And I think this is a long-term and difficult effort, but I think you would want to think about how you could try to strengthen institutional structures in Africa, in the Darfur or Rwanda situation, so that you have the option of being able to act against an ongoing genocide, and then you have circumstances in place that you could try to do some kind of nation-building. The nation-building might not in an African context get you to a country with the political development of Sweden, but at least a country that was stable and not massively violating the human rights of its citizens.
CHOLLET: Chuck.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Charlie Stevenson, SAIS. First, some of your comments remind me of those two golden years of 1949 and ’50 when the State Department budget was fully half of the Defense Department budget. That’s not likely to occur again. (Laughter.)
CHOLLET (?): Kind of a frightening—(off mike). (Laughter.) I used to work at the State Department.
QUESTIONER: For your recommendations to have any real force and effect, liberals have to win elections. So my question is, how resonant with public opinion—how do you see American public opinion is—how receptive is it to the kinds of things you’re saying compared to the well-tested, well-honed rhetoric of the Republicans?
CHOLLET: Let me just put a finer point on that.
BEINART: Yes.
CHOLLET: (Inaudible)—hear you out, which is the Niebuhr argument, which I actually buy intellectually; America is a sort of morally flawed country, so therefore we need these institutions and what-not to make sure we stay on the right path. I don’t see how that sells. (Laughter.)
BEINART: Let me say something. First of all, I think just to go to your point about the State Department—I mean, you’re absolutely right about the—you know, I think one of the important things to recognize, and we recognize now, this kind of vast discrepancy between the military and the State Department, is that unfortunately the more that discrepancy, the greater the division is, the more the military has to start taking on the role that we think would be better served by the State Department. So in a certain kind of way, we still have the same demands.
I was just talking to someone who—(inaudible)-- talked about how the military in Africa is now involved in kind of—you know, building schools and hospitals. So in a certain kind of way you’re doing it, some degree of it, anyway. It’s just that basically our governmental system has not rationalized that process, and where you’ve given it to the institution that has not been trained to do that, which I think is part of it.
I think when you write a book, I found, you confront this choice about kind of to what degree you’re kind of writing with an eye towards how you win elections and what degree you’re just trying to say what you think is best. And then you need people like—very skilled people like Derek who can walk the line between both of them.
I would say this. I agree that the Niebuhrian language of self-doubt is not the language that you want to bring to American elections, but I think there is what you might say a related language that politicians have at times used which I think is more palatable. And I think of particularly Kennedy’s ’60 campaign, and I would put it this way. I think if you look at the classic conservative political campaign, particularly in a time of threat, I would call it a campaign of pride, basically an argument that liberals don’t believe enough in America, that they don’t love America, they’re always running America down. “We believe in America, we’re the party of pride.” I mean I think that you can look even going back to Nixon’s early campaigns in ’46 and ’50, but Reagan’s ’84 campaign would be a great example of this, or Nixon’s ’72 campaign.
It is very difficult for liberals to out-pride conservatives if conservatives are willing to virtually deify America as it is, again to say that whatever America does is the gold standard for morality and freedom around the world.
I think the option that liberals have is, to put it in stylized terms, to run a campaign of hope against pride, or put another way, to say that what conservatives call pride is really complacency. Say, you know, Kennedy in his ’60 campaign will go around—I mean, it’s bizarre to think a politician would say this now, but Kennedy would go around and loved to say, you know, Goethe said that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: Stand, thou art so fair.
Now I’m not suggesting that, you know, John Edwards should say this—(laughter)—but what Kennedy is basically saying, I think, if you unpack that—or he loves these nautical metaphors. He’d say, if America lies at anchor, the tide will go out for the United States. What he’s really after—wind-surfing—(probably nautical ?) metaphors are out, too. (Laughter.) But the idea is that America admiring itself as it is, America patting itself on the back as it is is an un-American idea. That the American story is about the reckless pursuit of a better country, never accepting—that’s what makes us different from Europe—never accepting America as good enough as it is, that idea is un-American, and indeed the very notion that we stand back and say “What a wonderful thing we’ve achieved” is a moment that younger, hungrier nations like India and China eat our lunch.
And so it’s the argument against complacency and the attempt to try to suggest that what they call pride is really complacency, and that, in fact, is an un-American idea. I think that’s what I would try to say if I were advising a politician. I don’t know if it would work or not.
CHOLLET: That will sell, I think.
Yes, all the way in the back there.
QUESTIONER: I’m Marco Vicenzino, Global Strategy Project. Thank you for your comments this morning. But one thing I see is that much of this debate between standard left and right is a debate that’s pretty much insulated to the Beltway. It means very little to the outside world. To much of the outside world there’s actually no debate in American foreign policy. As you pointed out, there was no debate on Iraq, the Dubai Ports there was absolutely no debate. I think it was shameful the way our Congress acted.
And one thing you didn’t mention was Lebanon. I think Lebanon just for the outside world highlighted, quote-unquote, to many people what they would call the hypocrisy of American foreign policy. What I mean by that is that you have votes up in Congress, I believe it was 418 to about eight, with absolutely no debate. And the people who attempted to debate on Capitol Hill, one Democrat, Van Hollen in the House of Representatives, and one senator, Hagel, who actually dared to stand up to say something different, were basically condemned across the political board.
So to a large extent, as long as we have our foreign policy pretty much being outsourced to ethnic lobby groups, to religious lobby groups, to single- issue lobby groups also—we need to get down to the fundamentals.
And I spent most of May in Lebanon, part of June. I was speaking throughout the Middle East. Ninety percent of my work is done with foreign media. And believe me, working with foreign media 90 percent of my time and hearing much of the debate here in Washington, it’s like night and day. It’s completely different.
So one speaks about liberal, one speaks about conservative, yet we need to go beyond that; we need to question the very fundamentals. When we had that one-sided vote on Capitol Hill, and then you take something beyond that, you go to Rome, to the international conference in Rome, where the entire world was calling for a cease-fire, and you had just one country having a different view, and quote-unquote, Blair joined us, but the reason why Blair is going to be losing his prime ministership, apart from the Iraq, was further accelerated by the Lebanon case.
So if you look at the domestic debate and then you transfer that to the international level, using the U.S. domestic Congress and using the Rome conference it’s just two examples, and Dubai Ports I would add to that, you can see that the lack of a foreign policy debate in our country is damaging us.
And we can talk about left, right, we could talk about so many different things, but as long as we don’t get down to the substance of questioning our fundamentals, that real debate in foreign policy is going to be forced upon us from the outside in an unpredictable and a very devastating way, I think.
BEINART: There’s a lot in there. I guess I would say a couple of things. I disagree that there was no debate on Iraq. I think there was a debate on Iraq. I may have been on the wrong side of it, but there was a debate on Iraq. I remember, I remember it.
I think it is important—I would say a couple of things. When America loses a war, as I think we may be in the process of doing in Iraq, there will be a natural tendency to look for scapegoats. And I think it is important, it is important, I think to not allow this idea that—Iraq was an enormous self-inflicted wound by American foreign policy with quite wide-spread support along the political spectrum. The entire Republican Party was virtually united in support of it, not just the neocons, but basically all of the traditional conservatives behind it, and half of the Democratic Party.
I worry that this idea exists around the world, and maybe has some—(inaudible)—in the United States, that the only way that you can explain such an enormous blunder was that there must have been a hidden hand, and that the hidden hand comes in the form of a Zionist lobby. And that, I think, was not the case, that is not the reason we went into war in Iraq, and I think it’s an idea, I think it’s a toxic idea.
I agree with you that war in Lebanon was bad for Israel and bad for the United States and bad for the region. And I think that it is incumbent on—I think people who care and support the state of Israel, as I do, should recognize that while there may have been something understandable in the psyche of the Israeli reaction—given that Israel looked at a situation in which they had withdrawn from Gaza, withdrawn from Southern Lebanon, and then found that in fact Hezbollah had been emboldened by that—to want to respond in a way that would reestablish deterrence, re-establishing deterrence is too vague a principle by which to justify the kind of massive bombing of Lebanon that Israel did; that justifying deterrence does not substitute for a clear vision of strategy realistically of how you’re actually going to weaken Hezbollah in the region and strengthen Israeli security, which I think the Israeli action didn’t do, and had enormous cost in terms of public opinion in Lebanon and in the Arab World. And I think that a stronger, wiser Israeli government would have responded in a different way.
So I agree with you that I think Lebanon, the way that the Lebanon war was prosecuted was a mistake both on the part—and I think there is a mounting recognition of that in Israel today and in the United States.
CHOLLET: The gentleman right here.
QUESTIONER: Guy Erb. Much of what you said this morning seems to be much more conciliatory than your subtitle. Why did you choose that subtitle and then cite Nixon or Kissinger or other people who have had and will continue to have valuable input into the determination of American foreign policy?
BEINART: Well, you know, partly this becomes, I guess, a terminological game, in the sense that when I talk about conservative, I’m thinking about the conservative movement, and so I don’t see Kissinger and Nixon as part of the conservative movement. In fact, conservatives have arguably, if you think about the conservative movement, as hostile a view towards Kissinger and Nixon as liberals do, particularly on foreign policy. I mean, that was really what the Reagan challenge was really all about, was the Kissinger and Nixon foreign policy.
Nixon at the beginning of his career is different, obviously, I think, Nixon in the ’40s and ’50s. But I think Nixon by the 1970s is someone who the conservative movement would really repudiate and not see in that tradition, which starts with the small group of intellectuals, moves through the Goldwater campaign, and then to Reagan and now to Bush. So that’s kind of the way in which I use the term “conservative.”
I think partly the subtitle was also an attempt for me to address liberals, because I have been associated amongst liberals as someone who is considered to have much too harshly attacked my own side on the left. And one of the things that I wanted to make a statement about in the book, and it’s something that I believe, was my faith in the liberal tradition, given that I think that I have been perceived as someone who likes to go around attacking liberals and denigrating them.
CHOLLET: Right here. Sir.
QUESTIONER: Thanks. I’m Terry Deibel. I teach at the National War College. A simple question. Is there any room in the Democratic Party for a realist foreign policy; or are we condemned simply to an alternation between liberal idealism, which gets us involved in perhaps over-extended enterprises for a different reason than the idealist, neo-conservative, imperialistic projects also get us involved in over-extended efforts?
BEINART: I think the answer is yes, but the caveat to that is that I think “realism” is a term broad enough to mean a whole host of things to different people. But look, I would say that I think I here would follow John Ikenberry, that the great in some ways value of the liberalism that emerges at the end of World War II, unlike the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, is it in some sense is a marriage of liberalism and realism; I mean the institutions, like the U.N., for instance, are less an effort to radically reshape the terms by which international states interact, but that the brilliance of the U.N. is it is an institution which is partly just a concert of the great powers, but also tries to, within that, tries to kind of put a layer on top of that which suggests a more ethical way of states interacting.
So there is a marriage of liberalism and realism that I would like to think at its best is part of the liberal tradition.
To go to Kosovo, I would say, you know, there has been an interesting debate historically amongst liberals between liberals who basically believe that there is no legitimate use of force outside the U.N. and liberals who believe that international institutions are important but you can’t be wedded to the U.N. itself.
So Henry Wallace opposes Truman’s aid to Greece and Turkey because it doesn’t go through the U.N. Liberals who opposed the war in Kosovo because we didn’t have U.N. support. And I think that it’s worth noting that that debate even plays out on Darfur to some degree today now.
And I think to me it’s a sign of a kind of liberal realism to recognize that you want to try to create, in Francis Fukuyama’s world, kind of multi- multilateralism, a kind of host of international institutions that give you more options, rather than taking what Arthur Schlesinger would have called the kind of doe-faced liberal view that basically unless you can get a united international community behind it, basically, or united great powers, you can’t act. So I think there are elements within the liberal tradition that are open to realism.
One of the great questions, I think, for realists is, do realists believe in international institutions? I mean, there is a certain strain of realism that basically has always seen international institutions as irrelevant window dressing. States act according to their perceived interests in a system of international anarchy, and institutions just kind of muddy everybody about what states are really doing and what their real interests are, whereas, to put it (in other terms ?), the neo-liberal institutionalist position would be in fact that international institutions can change states’ perceptions of what their self-interest is. So I would see that as an anti-—anti-realist position.
But one of the things that interests me, if you look at self-proclaimed realists out there today, someone like Anatol Lieven or some of the guys at New America, they seem very open to international institutions. So to me that’s a different interpretation of realism than the one that I learned when I was in graduate school.
CHOLLET: Okay, we’ve got time for one more question. Yeah, right there.
QUESTIONER: Laura Holgate from the Nuclear Threat Initiative. It’s been a great conversation so far. I’d like to draw you back to your title a little bit and move away from the “isms” and so on and just ask you very concretely, what would a war on terror based on liberal principles look like? How would it be different from what we’re undertaking now? Is it just that the Bush administration has the right answer but that they’re giving lip service to the pieces, like democratization or like development that would be part of a liberal base, or would it be a whole different set of principles and look very different from a liberal perspective?
BEINART: Well, I think it would look a lot—it would look in many ways kind of similar to the kinds of things Tony Blair says, I think, or at least I would like to think. And I think that would be (credible ?). First of all, I think it would be much more focused on rebuilding international institutions.
Second of all, I think the rhetoric about democracy would be much more tightly linked to a rhetoric about development. No, to be fair to the Bush administration, there has been some more money that’s gone into (aid/AIDS ?) and things, but it’s still basically, I think, lagging behind where most of the other governments are, and certainly where Blair is. It would be much more of a belief that in fact economic development, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, has to be critically married to the idea of promoting democracy and liberty. And the 9/11 commission talked about this to some degree; you know, literacy for women in the Islamic world.
I think it would be much more open to the idea that American domestic policy has to be that public diplomacy is less about finding the right slogans and the right catchy tunes, and more about what America actually does, which would require, I think, very obviously a very different policy in terms of Guantanamo Bay, and I think even, you know, this is not too idealistic, a different perception about the international Criminal Court.
I mean again, for me, I think it should be a matter of principle. I don’t see why America should say categorically that it is simply beyond human conception that we could ever commit a human rights violation. Obviously, one needs to be very careful, as the Clinton administration, I think, was, to make sure that is not abused by people who have a political agenda. But that idea that simply Americans, by the virtue of being Americans, cannot commit a human rights (violation), I think is simply wrong, and alienating for the rest of the world.
And lastly, I think, it would take more seriously the idea that America needs to become a stronger country at home if we’re going to be a stronger nation around the world. And again, this is not an exclusively liberal idea, but I think that, you know, Kennan in his famous long telegram has some line—I’m paraphrasing him: Every concrete effort that America makes to solve a difficult domestic political, economic, social problem is worth a thousand demarches and diplomatic notes to Moscow.
That idea, I think, has not really been very much part of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. I mean, obviously on energy independence; on America’s abysmal lack of a savings rate, which means we’re at hock to competitors; the unwillingness to call Americans to any kind of sacrifice or service; the kind of dis-uniting of America by using the war on terror as a wedge issue that has basically pushed the Democratic Party into a position where they’re extremely suspicious of anything that the Bush administration says now, which makes it much more difficult; I think all of those things would be thought of as part of this effort.
CHOLLET: Well, thanks a lot, Peter.
As this morning’s session has shown, as Peter’s book has shown, there debate is not winding down, it’s just beginning. And it seems to me, as someone who just follows politics and these issues very closely, next year’s going to be really exciting because one thing we know for sure is in 2009 there’s going to be a new administration and for the first time since ’52 there won’t be a sitting president or vice president in the race. So all these issues are on the table and I think are going to be debated very heatedly in both parties.
So I encourage everyone to buy the book if you don’t have it, for sale out there, and have a great weekend. Thanks a lot.
(Applause.)
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