http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/grosenexchange0106.html
>... COMMENTARY
January 2006
Realpolitik
To the Editor:
Gary Rosen and I agree that the United States should pursue its national interests ["Bush and the Realists," September 2005]. We disagree on the best way to pursue these interests, however, and our differences nicely reflect the competing foreign-policy prescriptions of realism and neoconservatism. Let me comment briefly on why his views are mistaken.
First, Mr. Rosen dismisses my discussion of America's declining international popularity by suggesting that "it is difficult to see why [public-opinion polls] would figure in the reckonings of a hard-edged realist." It is not difficult at all: realists worry about public opposition because it makes it harder for foreign governments to back us. Mr. Rosen admits that "the support of other countries can help us to shape the international climate to our own goals." Anti-Americanism encourages leaders who might otherwise support us to tread warily, and has led some—such as former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder—to oppose us openly. Rising anti-Americanism also increases the population of genuine extremists who use violent means (e.g., terrorism) against us. Realism says one should isolate one's enemies while maximizing allied support, and a foreign policy that is doing the exact opposite is hardly in the U.S. national interest.
Second, Mr. Rosen believes I am too critical of U.S. support for Israel. In particular, he claims the two countries are united not by the efforts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) but by the "sense of shared trauma and threat" from the "vicious onslaught of Muslim 'martyrs.'" Here Mr. Rosen has the causality backward. We do not support Israel because we face a common threat from terrorism; we have a terrorism problem today in good part because we have been backing and bankrolling Israeli expansionism for several decades. Furthermore, if our two countries are such natural allies, why do AIPAC and its allies work so hard to intimidate U.S. politicians and silence potential critics? Remember what former minority leader Rich-ard Gephardt (D-MO) told AIPAC's annual meeting: "without your constant support . . . and all your fighting on a daily basis to strengthen [the U.S.-Israel] relationship, it would not be."
Third, Mr. Rosen believes that my proposed strategy of "offshore balancing" would be a "strategy of retreat" whose cost to our credibility would be "incalculably high." This accusation is an old scare tactic, but hardly a convincing one. Hardliners routinely warn that any adjustment in America's global presence would have catastrophic effects on our credibility, but there is scant historical support for this claim. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam did not cause any important dominos to fall; instead, it allowed us to rebuild our conventional forces and tacitly ally with China against the Soviet Union. Today, of course, Vietnam is a friendly country that is embracing Western-style market reforms.
Mr. Rosen is clearly uncomfortable with realism as a guide to U.S. strategy, and he approvingly quotes President Bush's rejection of realism in a 2002 speech at the Air Force Academy. But realism's track record as a guide to foreign policy looks far better than Bush's dismal achievements in this arena.
In the early cold war, realists like George Kennan helped invent the strategy of containment, while correctly warning against trying to control the developing world by force. In the 1960's, Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz—the two preeminent academic realists—were early opponents of the Vietnam war, on purely strategic grounds. In the 1980's, Waltz and fellow realists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen published careful analyses showing that the Soviet Union was not the military titan that right-wing ideologues depicted. As Waltz noted in 1979, the real question was whether the Soviet Union could keep up, and the Soviet Union's rapid demise demonstrated that Waltz and other realists were correct. In the early 1990's, Posen and Mearsheimer also recognized that Iraq was a third-rate power and were among the few analysts to forecast correctly the stunning U.S. victory in the 1990-91 Gulf war.
Finally, realists were in the vanguard of the opposition to war with Iraq in 2003. While publications like Commentary were beating the drum for war and assuring Americans that the occupation would be easy and cheap, realists like Mearsheimer and myself were warning that preventive war was unnecessary and the consequences would be dire. Today, with thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, a price tag that will eventually exceed $1 trillion (!), and no end in sight, which group seems to have the clearest vision of our national interest? For all its limitations, realism remains a more valuable guide to U.S. foreign policy than the idealistic fantasies offered by its primary intellectual opponents.
Stephen Walt Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts
...>...To the Editor:
Considering the catalog of gallingly naive prognostications made by neoconservatives about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is remarkable that anyone from that camp would go on the offensive against foreign-policy realists, whose predictions have been much closer to the mark. Nonetheless, we are pleased that Gary Rosen has decided to confront our ideas.
It has become a cliché to refer to the Manichaean nature of neoconservatism, but it features so prominently in Mr. Rosen's analysis that it bears highlighting. He explains that Islamic terrorism, whether in "Sharm al-Sheikh, Baghdad, Jakarta, Istanbul, [or] elsewhere," amounts simply to a "nihilistic threat to any kind of civilized order." For Mr. Rosen, such attacks are "far from being a 'strategy' for reversing hated policies." Unfortunately, he presents no evidence to support this claim, clinging to the conventional wisdom that the terrorists hate us because of our freedom, and defying the wealth of evidence to the contrary compiled by scholars like the University of Chicago's Robert Pape.
Denying that politics lies at the heart of most terrorism precludes the possibility of victory against those who use it. As the author Robert Wright has pointed out, the conception of evil shared by President Bush and Mr. Rosen is dangerous: "Evil in the Manichaean sense isn't just absolute badness. It's a grand unified explanation of such badness, the linkage of diverse badness to a single source." When one accepts this reductionist explanation, shades of gray disappear. One must confront this badness with unswerving determination, at any and all costs, because the alternative is the total collapse of Good in the face of Evil.
This is absurd. Islamic terrorism, threatening as it is, does not ascend to such towering heights that it can precipitate a total war with America. It has neither the mass appeal, nor the institutional cohesion, to overturn the Western liberal order. The greatest threat posed by Islamic terrorism—undeterrable non-state actors with a nuclear weapon—will not be eliminated by invading armies, civil policing, or even democracy.
It is also worth pointing out that the leaders of Israel, who have been more educated and brutalized by fanatical terrorism than their counterparts in the United States, do not share President Bush's (and Mr. Rosen's) utopian view of what can be wrought in the Middle East. In fact, they consider it so much bunkum. Ariel Sharon has told Natan Sharansky that his theories about democracy as a solution to terrorism "have no place in the Middle East." The fact that the security situation in Iraq has worsened since the January elections illustrates this point all too clearly.
Mr. Rosen protests that a refusal to continue to occupy territory in the Middle East amounts to a "strategy of retreat." He worries that a posture of "offshore balancing" (in Stephen Walt's phrase) would deliver an unacceptable blow to American credibility. But a tactical retreat is better than "staying the course" all the way to strategic disaster.
Ronald Reagan had the presence of mind to marginalize his neoconservative advisers at just the right moment, facilitating the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. Unfortunately, President Bush has taken a bit longer. Unless neoconservatism is once again relegated to the fringe of American politics, the sapping of American strength and the exposure of American weaknesses will continue unabated.
Christopher Preble Justin Logan Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy Washington, D.C.