"What is a unipolar power to do?"

"So, as we approach Sept. 11, 2004, marking the start of year four of World War IV, here are some alternatives to watching the next talk show," writes Oil-for-Food maven Claudia Rosett of Opinion Journal, advising us to clear out the cobwebs of our Swift-Boat-dimmed minds by revisiting the founding documents (the blessings of liberty), brushing up on our Shakespeare ("this band of brothers") and re-memorizing The Gettysburg Address (honoring those who died to preserve this nation and what it stands for), among other uplifting substitutes for yelling at our TVs 24/7:

For a contemporary view, read Charles Krauthammer's speech at this past February's American Enterprise Institute annual dinner: "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World." Here you will find the real issues. Whether you agree or not, Mr. Krauthammer provides a brilliant and lucid account of America's character, culture and choices in this post-Sept. 11 world.

"What is a unipolar power to do?" asks Krauthammer, concluding toward the end of a long argument (excerpted below) that "realists are right that to protect your interests, you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But . . . at some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy." He begins his talk by noting the folly of using the word "empire" to describe our nation's foreign intentions:

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 . . . 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 . . . 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.

Krauthammer goes on to describe four possible foreign policy philosophies in terms of history, goals and relevance to today's geopolitical world: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and democratic globalism. He saves the best for last:

Isolationism. The oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat . . . 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 . . . an important school of thought historically, but not today [in] 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.

Liberal internationalism. In the 1990s it was . . . the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite . . . 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 . . . How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks [during the Clinton administration]? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures -- fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest.

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 . . . 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?

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 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.

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.

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 . . . Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia. America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

Now, those uneasy with American power have made these two means of wielding it--preemption and unilateralism -- the focus of unrelenting criticism . . . In a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction, the option of preemption is especially necessary . . . 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 . . . No one seeks to be unilateral. Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held hostage to the will of others [but while] realism is a valuable antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 1990s, [it] can only take you so far . . . Our foreign policy must be driven by something beyond power . . . 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

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.”

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 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 . . . 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.

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.

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?

Comments

[goomp]

What a great post you made today. Charles is absolutely right, and the people in this country who are still Old Europe in mind and soul are trying to lead us to oblivion.

[Teresa]

It was a wonderful speech - I saw it on C-Span. Thanks for linking it.

[Sissy Willis]

My pleasure.