GARY ROSEN writes:
Stephen Walt is right to be concerned about how the rest of the world views the United States. The good will of other nations makes it easier for us to pursue our goals, just as their hostility makes it more difficult. But it is impossible to assign the proper weight to such factors without first determining what U.S. interests are at stake in the matters that most agitate international public opinion. I should not have to tell a card-carrying realist that there are questions more fundamental to American security and well-being than how a given policy plays in Brussels or Riyadh.
My deeper point was one that I also assumed to be axiomatic for foreign-policy realists: that we should gauge the disposition of other states not by the rhetoric of their leaders or the polling of their publics but by their actual behavior. The fact is that, despite unhappiness with our policies in Iraq, the U.S. continues to enjoy substantial international cooperation on a range of issues, from containing the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea to stabilizing Afghanistan to isolating the Syrian regime. In the fight against jihadist terror, mutual assistance in intelligence and law enforcement has grown and intensified. All of this is happening because even our most disaffected allies and sometime friends understand that we share not just common enemies but a host of important interests—again, the sort of point one might expect a realist to make.
But Mr. Walt's realism is pulled this way and that by the hobbyhorses he rides. He is determined to cast the Bush administration as a rogue aggressor and international pariah, a threat to peace likely to generate a counterbalancing alliance. And because he is incapable of finding any mundane explanation for America's close ties with Israel—he might start with the survey research, which shows consistent, overwhelming popular sympathy for the Jewish state over its Arab foes—he joins the crackpot fringe in pointing an accusing finger at the "Israel lobby." His smoking gun? A quote from former Congressman Gephardt flattering the aspirations of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. For more such supposedly damning evidence, I would direct Mr. Walt to AIPAC's website, which abounds with similar testimonials.
Mr. Walt suggests that "offshore balancing," his own alternative to our current strategy, would amount to a mere "adjustment" in America's global position. But he fails to do justice to the extremism of his proposal. He wants the U.S. to withdraw from the central theaters of our struggle against Islamic militancy and Arab backwardness—from Iraq certainly and, I assume, from Afghanistan and other outposts where our presence (like the Israeli presence in the West Bank, if not in the Middle East) is now, in his view, the prime cause of violence, radicalism, and instability. Even at the level of public diplomacy, he would like the U.S. to stop hectoring the region's various autocrats about (as he puts it in his book) "what to do and how to live." Though I risk being accused of another "scare tactic," I somehow doubt the U.S. would be made safer by rethinking its long-overdue commitment to liberalization in the Middle East. Still less do I understand how Mr. Walt could derive any comfort from the prospect of watching the nascent democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan disappear under a tide of civil war and jihadism.
Mr. Walt is proud of realism's track record, but its legacy in the Middle East is not a happy one. The last half-century in the region may have looked from a certain perspective like "50 years of peace," as the realist eminence Brent Scowcroft audaciously suggested in a recent New Yorker interview, but it has left behind the world's most illiberal regimes, replete with mass graves, secret police, and profound deficits in human development (exhaustively catalogued in recent UN reports). Worse, this "peace" has incubated and allowed to spread a virus-like politico-religious ideology that now threatens to wreak havoc on our own way of life. An argument can be made that during the long years of the cold war the U.S. had little choice but to reach an accommodation with the sheikhs and strongmen of the Middle East. Today, prudence and self-interest, to say nothing of moral considerations, point us in a very different direction.
Mr. Walt's letter is seconded, as if on cue, by the allies he has found in his campaign to tame America's dangerous global ambitions. Scott McConnell of the American Conservative wonders how the once "prudently hawkish" neoconservatives could have strayed so far. But he forgets the hysterical accusations that flew against neoconservatives during the cold war—and that he and his magazine now eagerly repeat. For today's Old Right, as for yesterday's New Left, neoconservatives are propagandists for American empire, drunk with military power and visions of domination and driven by forces invisible to the naive political observer. It is in the pages of the American Conservative that one reads about the "brownshirting" of the conservative movement and, in an article by Mr. McConnell himself, about a "mood" on the pro-war Right that is "at least latently fascist."
Mr. McConnell's newfound pessimism about America's role in the world springs, I would suggest, from distinct sources on the paleoconservative Right. There is a natural affinity between nativism at home and defeatism (or worse) abroad. After all, who are we—mongrelized and cosmopolitan as we have become—to serve as any sort of model for the rest of the world? What good can come of trying to promote overseas the very sort of liberalization that, in the paleocon scheme of things, has corrupted our own once proudly Anglo-Saxon polity?
Where such thoughts lurk, anti-Semitism is seldom far behind, and there is no avoiding its presence in the long record of Mr. McConnell's boss, Patrick J. Buchanan. The irony cannot be lost on Mr. McConnell that the leader of his own movement, which claims to resist an incipient American fascism, is himself guilty of indulging in the most au courant of anti-Semitic tropes. As Buchanan, writing in the American Conservative, so neatly encapsulated his view: "Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud." Was Mr. McConnell proud to publish this obvious play on the Nazi slogan, "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer"?
Bringing up the rear we find the libertarians, represented here by the letter of Justin Logan and Christopher Preble. (Mr. Preble is the director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, which houses the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.) I have never been called a Manichaean before, but if it means wishing to combat those who behead captives, blow up schoolchildren, and reject every sort of modern liberty, I proudly wear the label. I never said that the jihadists had no politics. They do: they wish to reestablish a medieval caliphate. Accomplishing this, however, would require a good deal more than reversing a few of America's "hated policies." I suspect that bin Laden and Zarqawi would not be satisfied if we simply ceded Iraq to their tender mercies.
Messrs. Logan and Preble parrot a few of the more credible assertions made by critics of the war in Iraq, but they should not pretend to come to these matters with an open mind. The Cato Institute is dogmatically laissez-faire in foreign policy just as it is on every other policy question. Fearful of statism at home, libertarians have reflexively resisted virtually every assertion of American power and influence since the cold war: no to the National Endowment for Democracy, no to NATO expansion, no to the first Persian Gulf war, no to engagement in the Middle East, no to American intervention in Haiti and the Balkans.
The frame of mind behind this agenda was summarized almost a decade ago by Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at Cato and now a charter member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy:
For nearly five decades, the United States has acted more like an empire than a republic, creating an international network of client states, establishing hundreds of military installations around the world, at times conscripting young men to staff those advanced outposts and fight in distant wars, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the military. Indeed, [this] globalist foreign policy [has] badly distorted the domestic political system, encouraging the growth of a large, expensive, repressive, and often uncontrolled state.
Despite the upheavals and changed circumstances in America's international situation in recent years, this continues to be Cato's basic outlook. It leaves little guesswork in predicting the foreign-policy views of the institute's staffers, which is why, in my article, I called them ideologues.
I agree with Robert F. Ellsworth that we cannot think of our aims in the Middle East simply in terms of democratization, not least because Islamists are often the ones most capable of exploiting an immediate turn to elections. I prefer to think of our agenda as one of liberalization, entailing progress not just on the electoral front but also in establishing civil society and a full range of modern rights. Our military presence has certainly encouraged this trend, as Mr. Ellsworth suggests, but more fundamental, I would argue, has been the example shown to the region by our halting but very real achievements in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Where would Hans Morgenthau, the founder of modern foreign-policy realism, come down in today's debate? Michael Balch feels sure that Morgenthau would recognize the threat posed by the aggressive ideology of the Islamists. I have my doubts. Like his intellectual heirs, Morgenthau had trouble taking seriously anything but states as actors in international relations. I suspect he would have regarded the jihadists as at most a serious nuisance, and would have opposed any effort to use American power to change the political and cultural dynamic of the Middle East. I trust, though, that he would have avoided the more reckless rhetoric of those who now claim to speak in his name.