The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal - New York Times
The New York Times
April 30, 2006
The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal
By
PETER BEINART
This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose
between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes
about
national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the
subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004,
John Kerry
substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive
foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's
Senate
and House races, the party looks set to reprise Michael Dukakis's old theme:
competence. Rather than tell Americans what their vision is, Democrats will
assure them that they can execute it better than
George W. Bush.
Democrats have no shortage of talented foreign-policy practitioners. Indeed,
they have no shortage of worthwhile foreign-policy proposals. Even so, they
cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world. And they cannot do
so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past. Such
stories,
after all, are not born in focus groups; they are less invented than
inherited. Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they
must first
conquer their ideological amnesia.
Consider George W. Bush's story: America represents good in an epic struggle
against evil. Liberals, this story goes, try to undermine that moral
clarity,
reining in American power and sapping our faith in ourselves. But a
visionary president will not be constrained, and he wields American might
with relentless
force, until the walls of oppression crumble and the darkest region on earth
is set free.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It was
Ronald Reagan's
story as well. To a remarkable degree, the right's post-9/11 vision relies
on a grand analogy: Bush is Reagan,
Tony Blair
is
Margaret Thatcher,
the "axis of evil" is the "evil empire," the truculent French are the
truculent French. The most influential conservative foreign-policy essay of
the 1990's,
written by the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan of
the Carnegie Endowment, was titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy."
And
since 9/11, most conservatives have seen Bush as Reaganesque. His adherence
to a script conservatives know by heart helps explain their devotion, which
held fast through the 2004 election, and has only recently begun to flag, as
that script veers more and more disastrously from the real world.
Liberals don't have a script because they don't have a Reagan. Since
Vietnam, they've produced two presidents:
Jimmy Carter
and
Bill Clinton.
Carter's foreign policy is widely considered a failure. Clinton's foreign
policy is not widely considered at all, because he governed at a time when
foreign
policy was for the most part peripheral to American politics. Ask liberals
to describe a Carteresque foreign policy, and they tend to wince. Ask them
to
describe a Clintonesque one, and you'll most likely get a blank stare.
But before Vietnam, and the disappointment and confusion it spawned,
liberals did have a clear story of their own. In the late 1940's and 1950's,
intellectuals
like Reinhold Niebuhr and policymakers like George F. Kennan described
America's cold-war struggle differently from their conservative
counterparts: as
a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in
the belief that the former required the latter to survive. Even more
important,
they described America itself differently. Americans may fight evil, they
argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that
very
recognition makes national greatness possible. Knowing that we, too, can be
corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing
that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we
advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in
ourselves.
The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common
fallibility, we inspire the world.
To understand this liberal story, it helps to understand the origins of the
conservative one that we hear all around us today. George W. Bush's foreign
policy is often attributed to neoconservatives, the ex-liberals and radicals
who began moving right in the 1960's. But in fact, the vision Bush inherited
from Reagan dates back a generation earlier, to the birth of the modern
conservative movement itself. Since the mid-1950's, when
William F. Buckley's
new journal, National Review, created the ideological synthesis that still
defines the American right, one overriding fear has haunted conservative
foreign
policy: the fear that Americans cannot distinguish good from evil.
Over and over during the last half-century, conservatives have looked at
America and seen a society enfeebled by moral relativism. In the 1950's,
they saw
America's enemies on the march - with China, half of Europe and half of
Korea newly in Communist hands. The culprit, they argued, was liberalism.
The New
Deal, with its collectivist principles, had blurred the distinction between
Soviet Communism and American freedom. And modern culture was undermining
old
certainties, above all the belief in God. As a result, Americans lacked the
ideological confidence of their fanatical totalitarian foes. And that
self-doubt
was making them weak. Whittaker Chambers, the communist turned conservative
whose 1952 conversion tale, "Witness," strongly influenced the early
cold-war
right, said Americans would suffer defeat after defeat until their "faith in
God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man." The
West, added James Burnham, the most influential foreign-policy thinker in
the National Review circle, was losing "the will to survive."
After Vietnam, conservatives saw the disease of self-doubt growing even more
acute. Many on the American right hailed "How Democracies Perish," by the
French
author Jean-François Revel, which declared, "Democratic civilization is the
first in history to blame itself because another power is working to destroy
it." Into this dark, dispirited landscape came Ronald Reagan, saying the
things conservatives had been waiting three decades to hear. "The era of
self-doubt,"
he announced, "is over." And in perhaps the most famous speech of his
presidency, Reagan in 1983 invoked Chambers to denounce the right's old
scourge:
moral relativism. Calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," he admonished
listeners to resist the temptation to "label both sides equally at fault,
to.
. .remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and
evil."
When the Soviet empire fell, it became an article of conservative faith that
it was Reagan's policies, and in particular the moral clarity that underlay
them, that had turned the tide. In this way, the old story was transmitted
to a new conservative generation, which made it their guide to the post-9/11
world.
The liberal story also finds its roots in the early cold war. If cold-war
conservatism began with the founding of National Review, cold-war liberalism
emerged
slightly earlier, in 1947, when Niebuhr, along with
Eleanor Roosevelt,
Hubert Humphrey and the United Auto Workers' chief Walter Reuther,
established Americans for Democratic Action. The A.D.A. was born amid a
civil war on
the American left, which pitted anti-Communists like Humphrey against Henry
Wallace and those liberals who saw communism less as an enemy than as an
ally.
But by 1949, Wallace was vanquished, and the A.D.A. increasingly defined
itself against the right.
The liberal story began with a different fear about America. If cold-war
conservatives worried that Americans no longer saw their own virtue,
cold-war liberals
worried that Americans saw only their virtue. The A.D.A.'s most important
intellectual - its equivalent of James Burnham - was the tall,
German-American
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a dedicated opponent of communism,
but he was concerned that in pursuing a just cause, Americans would lose
sight
of their own capacity for injustice. "We must take, and must continue to
take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization," he wrote. "We
must
exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable
of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about
particular
degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the
exercise of power is legitimized." Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not
emulate
the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that
a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure.
Rather,
they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the
Communists', their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism.
Open-mindedness, he argued,
is not "a virtue of people who don't believe anything. It is a virtue of
people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true."
George Kennan, architect of the Truman administration's early policies
toward the Soviet Union, called Niebuhr the "father of us all." And in the
first
years of the cold war, Niebuhr's emphasis on moral fallibility underlay
America's remarkable willingness to restrain its power. In the aftermath of
World
War II, the United States represented half of the world's G.D.P., and the
nations of Western Europe lay militarily and economically prostrate. Yet the
Truman administration self-consciously bound America within institutions
like
NATO,
which gave those weaker nations influence over American conduct. "We all
have to recognize, no matter how great our strength," Truman declared, "that
we
must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please." As the historian
John Lewis Gaddis has written: "It was not that the Americans lacked the
capacity
to force their allies into line.. . .What is surprising is how rarely this
happened; how much effort the United States put into persuading - quite
often
even deferring to - its NATO partners."
Kennan believed America's great advantage in the cold war was that the
Soviet Union constituted an empire, which held its alliances together by
force. By
contrast, he argued, if the United States resisted the imperial temptation
and built alliances that respected foreign nationalism, those alliances
would
endure. In 1947, when the Truman administration announced the Marshall Plan
to help rebuild postwar Western Europe, he resisted using the aid to recast
European economies in America's image. Indeed, his administration assisted
socialist parties, recognizing that while they might not always prove
ideologically
pliant, they represented home-grown bulwarks against Soviet power. As one
Truman State Department official put it, America should seek European allies
"strong enough to say no both to the Soviet Union and the United States, if
our actions should seem so to require."
For conservatives, this willingness to indulge governments that would not
bend fully to American principles and American wishes was yet another sign
that
Americans did not truly believe in the righteousness of their cause. While
Kennan saw the Soviet empire as brittle, Burnham envied its lockstep unity
and
urged America to build its own equivalent. "The reality," he wrote, "is that
the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire,
which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of
exercising decisive world control."
If different views about moral clarity produced different views about
American restraint, they also produced different views on how best to defend
democracy,
at home and abroad. The Marshall Plan's premise was that the survival of
European democracy depended on its ability to deliver economic opportunity.
In
"The Vital Center," his famed 1949 statement of cold-war liberalism, Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. compared communism to an intruder trying to enter a house.
The American military could keep it from knocking down the door. But if the
people inside were sufficiently desperate, they might unlock it from the
inside.
To conservatives, this talk of communism's root causes looked like an effort
to rationalize evil, to suggest America's real foe was not communism itself,
but the forces that produced it. "The fact that some poor, illiterate people
have 'gone Communist' does not prove that poverty caused them to do so,"
insisted
Barry Goldwater, the first National Review-style conservative to win a
Republican presidential nomination.
On domestic policy, the argument was similar. For liberals, the New Deal had
tempered capitalism's instability and inequality, thus preserving Americans'
belief in democracy when people were losing it around the world. America's
ongoing task, Niebuhr argued, was to "make our political and economic life
more
worthy of our faith and therefore more impregnable." But for conservatives,
the liberal push for equality at home did not strengthen America in its
cold-war
struggle; it undermined the very ideological clarity upon which that
struggle relied. Viewed from the right,
Franklin Roosevelt
had already moved America perilously far along what the Austrian émigré
economist Friedrich von Hayek famously called the "road to serfdom." And the
more
the United States aped communism, the less it would recognize its evil. "The
liberal's arm cannot strike with consistent firmness against communism,"
Burnham
wrote, "because the liberal dimly feels that in doing so he would be somehow
wounding himself."
In the years since 9/11 restored foreign policy to the heart of American
politics, these cold-war debates have returned in another form, with the
critical
difference that only one side knows its lines. Even before the attacks, many
conservatives feared America was emasculating itself yet again. In a
one-superpower
world, they argued, America no longer had to tailor its foreign policy to
the wishes of others. And yet, in the conservative view, the Clinton
administration
had permitted constraints on American power, playing Gulliver to foreign
Lilliputians intent on binding it in a web of international institutions and
international
law. Predictably, conservatives attributed this submission to America's lack
of faith in itself. The "religion of nonjudgmentalism," wrote William
Bennett
in the book "Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism," "has
permeated our culture, encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty."
In his first eight months in office, President Bush aggressively reasserted
American freedom of action, repudiating no fewer than six international
agreements
or institutions. And after 9/11, he began depicting this freedom to act
alone as a means not merely of safeguarding American interests but also of
liberating
American virtue so it could remake the world. In 2002, the conservative
columnist Charles Krauthammer noted that "people are now coming out of the
closet
on the word 'empire.' " And that discussion had an idealistic cast. For its
proponents, "empire" was usually preceded by the adjective "benign" or
"liberal."
In other words, the United States would rid itself of external impediments
but nonetheless act in the global good, uncorrupted by the temptations of
unrestrained
power.
It has not turned out that way. On
global warming,
an America liberated from international restraint has acted irresponsibly;
in our antiterrorist prisons, we have acted inhumanely. And from the moment
the
United States invaded Iraq, the Bush administration's complacent certainty
of its own benevolence has blinded it to the dangers of colonial rule. While
the authors of the Marshall Plan avoided remaking Europe's economy, for fear
of sparking nationalist resentment, the head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority,
L. Paul Bremer III,
unilaterally rescinded Iraq's import tariffs on foreign goods. Bremer may
have thought he was acting on Iraq's behalf, even without its people's
consent.
But that is only because he lacked the self-consciousness and humility to
see that he was not. As Larry Diamond, a more reflective C.P.A. official,
noted:
"American political leaders need to take a cold shower of humility: we do
not always know what is best for other people, even when we think it is
their
interests we have in mind. And as I saw during my time in Iraq, it was
frequently our interests that were driving decisions we were trying to
impose."
Niebuhr couldn't have said it better himself.
But for all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a
coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps
America
safe and what makes it great. Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives
drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme. In
his 2004 convention acceptance speech, John Kerry used variations of the
word "strong" 17 times. For the 2006 campaign, Congressional Democrats have
unveiled
a national-security vision they call "tough and smart." It calls for more
spending on homeland security, energy independence and Special Forces. But
these
disparate, worthy proposals are not grounded in an account of the world
America faces, or the sources of American strength.
In fact, present conditions make liberalism's forgotten story especially
compelling. The unprecedented post-cold-war gap between America's military
power
and every other nation's does not make international institutions
unnecessary, as the right argues; it makes them even more essential. The
liberals of
the early cold war, who had seen depression and war cross the oceans and
imperil the United States, believed America could guarantee neither its
prosperity
nor its security alone. And globalization makes that even truer today. The
world's increased integration has left the United States more vulnerable to
pathologies bred in other nations. So more than ever before, American
security requires economic, political and even military interventions in the
internal
affairs of other nations: to stop bird flu from spreading in rural China,
corruption from sparking a banking collapse in Thailand or jihadists from
plotting
in Pakistan.
Yet if America pursues those interventions itself they will spark exactly
the nationalist backlash that Niebuhr and Kennan feared. As Princeton's G.
John
Ikenberry has put it, a one-superpower world is like a town where there is
only one policeman and the houses have no locks. In such a world, America's
challenge isn't proving that it can wield unrestrained power; it is proving
that it won't become a predator.
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were reaching this conclusion near the end of
Clinton's second term. In Kosovo, NATO waged war so
Slobodan Milosevic's
domestic terror would not again destabilize his neighbors. As the bombs
fell, Blair linked that intervention to the world's efforts to stabilize
East Asian
economies, so that their financial crisis would not spread. "We are
witnessing," Blair argued, "the beginnings of a new doctrine of
international community."
In other words, the more aggressively America and Britain wanted to
intervene in the internal affairs of other states, the more they needed the
legitimacy
that powerful international institutions bestow.
With Clinton crippled by scandal, Blair's vision was stillborn. But it
offers an intellectual foundation upon which liberals can build. In recent
years,
new evidence about global warming and potential pandemics has forcefully
illustrated the need for coordinated action on the environment and public
health.
And of course, 9/11 has showed that distant countries can incubate
fanaticism that can strike America without warning. Unfortunately, liberals
themselves
have turned away from Blair's vision. Alienated by the war in Iraq, many
have grown suspicious of intervening in other countries' affairs. A recent
Gallup
survey shows Democrats twice as likely as Republicans to say that America
should mind its own business internationally. And a 2005 poll by the Century
Foundation and the Center for American Progress found self-described
liberals far less interested than conservatives in promoting democracy.
Indeed, in
their recent manifesto, Congressional Democrats barely mentioned it as a
foreign-policy goal.
But George W. Bush is not wrong to think that America's security depends on
how other countries, particularly in the Islamic world, govern themselves.
In
the long run, more accountable government can help drain the fury upon which
jihadism feeds. Where Bush - like Burnham before him - goes wrong is in
believing
that America can unilaterally declare a moral standard while exempting
itself. For President Bush, freedom is a one-way conversation. The United
States
calls on other countries to embrace liberty; we even aid them in the task.
But if they call back, proposing some higher standard that might require us
to modify our actions, we trot out John Bolton. For the rest of the world,
freedom requires infringements upon national sovereignty. But for the United
States, sovereignty trumps all.
Most Muslims, according to polls, do not consider democracy an alien notion;
in fact, they hunger for it. They simply do not believe that it is America's
real goal. And that is largely because they do not feel that America abides
by the principles it preaches. As the Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri has
noted: "George Bush talks in terms of the U.S. having a national mission to
promote freedom in the world. . .everybody in the world looks at the U.S.
and
asks, Where is the moral and the legal and the political authority for you
to do this? The authority has to come out of some kind of reference point,
some
legitimate reference point - treaties, international law, international
conventions,
U.N.
Security Council resolutions, General Assembly consensus, some mechanism
that has credibility."
What Khouri is talking about - and what international law and international
institutions imply - is reciprocity. To be sure, such institutions must
acknowledge
the realities of power, as did NATO, the U.N. and the other international
bodies born at the end of World War II. But by mildly redistributing power -
by conceding that even the mightiest country must sometimes modify its
behavior in pursuit of a higher good - they build international norms that
seem
legitimate rather than hypocritical. In the liberal story, America's power
to intervene effectively overseas depends on its power to persuade and not
merely
coerce. The power to persuade depends on a willingness to be persuaded. And
that willingness depends, ultimately, on America's willingness to entertain
the prospect that it is wrong.
If liberals have lost faith in promoting democracy abroad, they have also
lost faith in the connection between democracy and economic opportunity.
From
Franklin Roosevelt's global New Deal to the Marshall Plan (and Truman's
efforts to extend aid to the third world) to
John F. Kennedy's
Alliance for Progress, which promoted land reform and economic development
in Latin America, liberals have traditionally distinguished themselves from
conservatives
by insisting that to promote liberty, America must promote opportunity as
well. Today, however, in a historic shift, polls show liberals no more
inclined
to prioritize foreign aid than conservatives. And this shift, combined with
the perception that Iraq has drained Americans of their willingness to spend
money trying to solve other countries' problems, has left Democratic
politicians virtually mute on the subject of economic assistance.
This is particularly unfortunate, because leading voices in the Muslim
world - for instance, the scholars who wrote the U.N.'s Arab Human
Development Reports
- have themselves highlighted the old link between political freedom and
economic despair. In recent years, exploding populations and stagnating
economies
have left governments from North Africa to South Asia unable to provide
decent schools, free medical clinics, even clean water. And with states
failing,
Islamist groups - some violent and theocratic - have filled the void. As
Omar Encarnación of Bard College puts it, the Middle East has experienced a
"general
'Islamization' and radicalization of society ensuing from the rigid
religious and often intolerant character of the civil society organizations
now performing
functions previously in the hands of state authorities."
It is true that jihadists are often middle class. But that's because
terrorist groups are like other employers: they accept the best candidates
who apply.
After examining data on terrorists and would-be terrorists, Ethan Bueno de
Mesquita of Washington University in St. Louis concluded that "individuals
with
low ability or little education are most likely to volunteer to join the
terrorist organization. However, the terrorist organization screens the
volunteers,"
accepting only the best recruits.
But without a sympathetic population, this murderous elite finds it far
harder to operate. Like all insurgents, jihadists rely on those around them
for
encouragement, legitimacy and protection. When terrorists lack popular
support - think of
Timothy McVeigh
in Oklahoma City - they cannot survive for long. But when they do, they can
menace the world.
Fostering economic opportunity in the Islamic world will require
substantially reducing the Middle East's illiteracy rate among women, which
is twice East
Asia's, and promoting economic reform so more of the world's 57 Islamic
countries - which today receive only slightly more foreign investment than
Sweden
- can compete in the global economy. And that will require a major
commitment from the United States and its rich allies, along with Islamic
nations themselves.
But while the United States can propose an Islamic Marshall Plan, it cannot
dictate it. To have any chance of success, its specific features must come
from
the region. And if they do, they will partly diverge from American
preferences, as did the Marshall Plan itself. A serious reform effort, for
instance,
will most likely involve those Islamists who have embraced democracy and
oppose violent jihad, but otherwise offend Americans at least as much as did
the
socialists whom the United States aided after World II.
It is admittedly hard to imagine leaders in today's Washington who are
modest enough to choose the pursuit of local legitimacy over the exercise of
American
fiat - or ambitious enough to generously finance such an effort. But as
conservatives understand better than liberals, that is the value of a usable
past:
it frees you from the intellectual confines of the moment. In 1947,
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal declared: "At the present time we are
keeping
our military expenditures below the. . .minimum which would in themselves
ensure national security. By so doing we are able to increase our
expenditures
to assist in European recovery." It is that spirit - alien today, but not
alien to the liberal tradition - that liberals must recover to tell a
post-9/11
story of their own.
But generosity abroad also requires generosity at home. At the start of the
cold war, when the United States was helping rebuild Western Europe, it was
also building an economic order that provided tremendous opportunity for
Americans. Between 1947 and 1973, family income roughly doubled, and
significantly,
it grew even faster for the poor and working class than for the rich.
Since the 1970's, blue-collar families have seen their incomes stagnate. And
the only reason it hasn't dropped outright is that women have entered the
work
force in droves; today the average two-parent family works a full 12 weeks
more per year than it did in 1969. Facing harsher international competition,
employers have reduced health benefits and eliminated defined-benefit
pensions. And rather than fill the gap, the federal government has retreated
as well.
Unemployment insurance and food stamps have become less generous, and taxes
have become markedly less progressive.
Such issues may seem distant from foreign policy. But for the liberals of
the early cold war, the security of average Americans was essential to
America's
security in the world. "Every courageous and incisive measure to solve
internal problems of our own society," Kennan wrote, "to improve
self-confidence,
discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic
victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint
communiqués."
A government that leaves its people to fend for themselves in the face of
rising economic insecurity will face grave difficulty asking them to support
enlightened
policies aimed at helping people in other corners of the globe. That is the
hidden backdrop to the great popular revolt against the Dubai ports deal
earlier
this year - an isolationist, nationalist spasm by a public that feels the
government is more concerned with the interests of foreigners than with its
own.
Since 9/11, President Bush has often been criticized for not asking
Americans to sacrifice. But government cannot just tell Americans we are all
in it together;
it must show them. And in recent decades it has been doing the opposite. One
result has been a rise in public cynicism and a retreat from political
participation,
which leaves government easy prey for the forces of private interest and
concentrated wealth, which - in a vicious cycle - further erodes the trust
that
government needs to call its citizens to action.
In America, no less than in the Islamic world, the struggle for democracy
relies on economic opportunity. To contemporary ears, the phrase "struggle
for
American democracy" sounds odd. In George W. Bush's Washington, such
struggles are for lesser nations. But in the liberal tradition, it is not
odd at all.
Almost six decades ago, Americans for Democratic Action was born, in the
words of its first national director, to wage a "two-front fight for
democracy,
both at home and abroad," recognizing that the two were ultimately
indivisible. That remains true today. America is not a fixed model for a
benighted world.
It is the democratic struggle here at home, against the evil in our society,
that offers a beacon to people in other nations struggling against the evil
in theirs. "The fact of the matter," Kennan declared, "is that there is a
little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and
every
one of us." America can be the greatest nation on earth, as long as
Americans remember that they are inherently no better than anyone else.
Peter Beinart is editor at large of The New Republic. This essay is adapted
from "The Good Fight: Why Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on
Terror and Make America Great Again," which will be published in late May by
HarperCollins.
Posted by Miriam V.
