``[Krauthammer]...defined four different schools of thought on foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and his own position that he defines as "democratic globalism", a kind of muscular Wilsonianism-minus international institutions-that seeks to use U.S. military supremacy to support U.S. security interests and democracy simultaneously...
..Reading Krauthammer, one gets the impression that the Iraq War-the archetypical application of American unipolarity-had been an unqualified success...There is not the slightest nod towards the new empirical facts that have emerged in the last year or so: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the virulent and steadily mounting anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, the growing insurgency in Iraq, the fact that no strong democratic leadership had emerged there...
It did not have to be this way. One can start with premises identical to Krauthammer's, agree wholeheartedly with his critiques of the other three positions, and yet come up with a foreign policy that is very different from the one he lays out...
...There were some in the room during the dinner who thought that Frank Fukuyama's remarks didn't really define true neoconservatism because he didn't acknowledge the universalism of American ideals and institutions and acknowledged that America's predominant power would breed rival balances of power in the future...
This battle matters as the neocons populate many important positions throughout the Bush administration -- and knowing that they may be divided, or even that they could be divided, may present significant opportunities for advancing U.S. foreign policy thinking towards a more enlightened direction..
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I love the way neo-cons presume to cover `all sides' as Krauthammer claims, then take on the mantle of history a la Fukuyama and proceed with the facade of debate completely circumscribed by their own assumptions.
It is important to outline the liberal alternative to these so-called foreign policy options and their presumptive international history and to link that alternative to US and western international history and its consensus ideals.
Consider the phrase, ``...he [Fukuyama] didn't acknowledge the universalism of American ideals and institutions...''
Whatever the reason Fukuyama forgot to pay homage to a so-called universalism of American ideals, the plain fact is there is no such universalism of American ideals.
The concrete political history is the other way around. There are features to US institutions and political ideals that are shared among a predominately western European liberal consensus of how governments ought to be structured and how they ought to behave. This European consensus was created through the political history of the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions, the 19thC geo-political conflicts between rival European imperial powers and most especially the mass slaughters of WWI and the Russian Revolution. This liberal political consensus was re-assessed in the post-Cold War and came to more or less the same conclusions with the addition of Russia and Eastern Europe when these countries followed more or less the same basic political outline.
The post-WWI European liberal consensus on the nature of a modern political state was characterized by a de-militarized, social democratic state, ruled by a coalition of political parties under a representative government, with a relatively weak executive. In the wake of WWI slaughters, such national governments were to join together in an international body, The League of Nations, and were supposed to sort out their differences. This international consensus and its ideals failed miserably to confront the militaristic imperialism of Third Reich and WWII was the result.
In the wake of WWII, the same consensus re-emerged, founded the United Nations, and the former Axis powers were reconstructed as de-militarized parliamentary social democratic states with socialist welfare state trappings and with coalition governments formed among rival political parties, roughly representative of their populations. (Never mind the US and western European post-war purges of their Communist parties or the Cold War and containment for the moment..and suppression of movements for social justice...)
The important thing to remember in this crude outline are the concepts of political party coalitions with representation roughly equal to their respective populations within the state; a system of checks and balances to prohibit the development of an authoritarian central executive; the establishment of a quasi-socialist welfare state to counter abuses of capitalism; and the founding of an international body for conflict resolution (the UN) to prevent the build up of military power, imperial expansions, and wars.
These political ideals were historically created to opposed any domination by a militaristic imperial power. It is exactly that kind of imperial program the neo-cons are debating in the above article. Whether one wing of these reactionaries supports a `realism' which is nothing more than opportunistic and temporary military alliances without reciprocity, or a more pure strain of unilateral and pro-active war mongering is irrelevant.
All these so-called reactionary options and their political ideals are completely beyond the bounds of and opposed to the western international and liberal consensus that was formed in the wake of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. And it needs to be pointed out that this international liberal consensus was forged specifically to counter-act the sort of unilateral imperialism and war mongering that the US is engaged in at the moment.
CG