Why do Republicans hate peace?

I learned that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize as I drove my kids to school this morning. The one or two of you who have read more than one or two of my postings might recall that I watched Obama's inaugural address at my son's school. Ellie, my soon to be two-year-old, started at the same school this Fall. I love their school - it is a perfect little glimpse of America's diversity.

I got back to my office and learned that conservative Republicans were already hurling ridicule and scorn at the news. Or worse. Rush Limbaugh, evidently viewing the U.S. as a huge, drooling dog - not really an unfair suggestion - characterized the award as a prize for Obama's efforts to "neuter" America. Michael Steele moaned and whined. Bizarrely, even, the New York Times declared the award "a potential political liability."

This reaction just seemed crazy to me. What kind of country views the awarding of a Peace Prize as a liability? Our country, it turns out. Or at least pockets of it. It seems pretty clear that part of this is politics. The same impulse that encouraged the right to applaud Chicago's Olympic loss, merely because Obama backed it, shaped this response. But there is more here too. This is another reaction by the right to a dim recognition that their world has been snatched from them. The age of America as the playground bully is over. It ended on 9/11, although the Bush administration, and the right, and indeed a large part of the country, didn't see it. Non-state actors, armed with nothing more than box cutters, can commandeer aircraft and turn them into cruise missles. This doesn't mean, as conservatives would have it, that we have a choice between fighting or fading away.

We need a smarter foreign policy, one that is engaged, assertive yet responsive, principled, and realist in a whole new way. In truth, American foreign policy hasn't been realist since the end of the Cold War. Bush's neo-con foreign policy was merely the last phase in an evolution of thought that led us away from realism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have been deluded by the idea that we can remake the world according to our wishes. Realists - best exemplified by Kenneth Waltz - believe that states interact in an environment best described as anarchic. That is, there is no overarching authority, no preexisting hierarchy, no defining orderliness. I haven't been dipping into the pool of readings on the topic lately, but my impression is that realist theory is still working to map out the implications of a post-Soviet world, where America is the stumbling, drunken giant in a world filled with a wide variety of beasts, some faithfully domesticated and others snarling pit-bulls ready to bite into our leg. That image, in my mind, is just about perfect. Let me, in my own misguided way, flesh this out a little.

Classic IR theory might situate the drama of international relations in a weight room. Every guy there - and don't imagine for a minute that the gym has any women around; IR theory is very guy-centric - is trying to bulk up. Some guys are massive, muscle-bound specimens, intimidating in their size, capable of bench-pressing small island nations. Others are 97 pound weaklings, hoping some work on the barbells will yield some results. But the truth is, the big guys are probably going to remain big, and the small guys won't get much bigger.

But the world we live in now is very different. It's as if someone has turned a bestiary loose in the gym. All kinds of beasts are running around. A variety of non-state actors - transnational terrorist groups and warlords - are important now, and we trip over them as we move around. If anything, the environment is more anarchic. But our policy makers haven't fully acknowledged this. To stick with my admittedly awful metaphor, scanning the gym, full of steroids and Red Bull, and seeing the weaklings all around us, we imagined we were the alphas in the room, and guessed that we could have anything we wanted. But we weren't paying attention to the snarling hounds nipping at our ankles.

This is where my metaphor falls apart, but that's OK. I'm sure we were all tired of it. My point is that the international system is still resistant to hierarchy - we can't impose order on it, just design strategies to move through it. The Bushies thought they could march into Iraq - as a first stop on a campaign of global domination - and subordinate its interests - and the interests of its people - to our own. We failed. And the very idea of commanding the world in this way failed too. An Obama foreign policy needs to be realist in the sense that it returns to the idea that international affairs mainly consists of actors with competing interests interacting in a venue where no one sets the rules. And an important part of the game is joining with others - in alliances and less formal agreements - to balance against destabilizing actors. The age of cowboy diplomacy is gone.

And Republicans regret seeing it go. Even though it never achieved anything. It appealed to a certain nostalgia they had for John Wayne's America. And, more importantly, in their view, it promised to guarantee our access to the things we wanted - oil, wealth, power - without compromise. The cowboys John Wayne played didn't trade with the Indians. Think of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He massacred them and took what he wanted. That was Bush's foreign policy. But - and this is an important fact - that type of behavior is destabilizing. And one essential truth about global politics is that destabilizing actors are disciplined. Actors ally and seek to balance or in some cases punish the destabilizing state. Republicans were foolish to think their foreign policy made sense, and we were more foolish to believe them.

Republicans hate peace because they imagine it means compromise. And, of course, it does. What the Nobel committee did was offer applause for the promise of an American foreign policy that is less destabilizing, less reckless, less blind to the realities and, it's true, more open to compromise. But Republicans like Limbaugh won't understand that, they are too reckless, too blind, too uncompromising to understand why the world was happy to see George Bush exit and Obama take the stage.