Neocons everywhere

Just the other day I wrote a hastily tossed off defense of Obama's Peace Prize, where I argued that Obama was an inspired choice, because by turning away from the inherently destabilizing Bush-era foreign policy, which was built on the premise of U.S. dominance in a world lacking any comparable power, Obama has begun to map out a more fluid, engaged, responsive, and - yes, I'll say it - diplomatic strategy. My argument, perhaps not articulated with rhetorical or scholarly precision, was (and is) that we should never aspire to dominate the international system. We can't - the system resists the imposition of order - and we shouldn't - because other actors in the system always seek to discipline any state or actor that seeks to impose its will on the system.

In the last day or two, though, I feel like the neocons, who should have slinked away to hide under the porch after the debacles they have engineered, have taken center stage. John Bolton recently gave a high-profile talk on my campus, and now Charles Krauthammer has published a venomous and deeply misguided new essay in The Weekly Standard.

Let me point out the things that I find inexcusable in the essay, then I'll take on his claims. Krauthammer surrenders any chance he might have had to be taken on simply on the basis of his ideas by carrying forward three parallel efforts that the GOP has been marketing since last summer. By describing Obama's recent overseas visit as a hajj, Krauthammer advances the detestable narrative that Obama is (wink wink) secretly but inescapably a Muslim. Then he reaches all the way back to Obama's speech on race in March of 2008 to re-reposition Obama as an angry black man, and then uses that as a jumping off point to question Obama's patriotism and love for the country he leads. This is political work, not commentary. And it aims to inject more poison into our already venomous national conversation about our way forward out of the mess George Bush left us.

Let's focus on Krauthammer's themes. His core argument is that Obama is choosing to facilitate, even deliberately propel, America's "decline". We stand at a moment in history where, according to Krauthammer, we can choose to retain our influence and authority, or we can surrender our global dominance - and for Krauthammer this also means surrendering our power and security. In Krauthammer's view, Obama is a doing all of this, walking away from our role as the greatest power in the world, giving up our strategic gains, surrendering in the war on terror, abandoning us to harmful forces that seek to destroy our civilization.

Krauthammer argues that the U.S. has a "moral" justification to dominate global affairs. In his view, we guard the door from the wolves who will tear apart civilization. He argues that our global dominance has been benevolent, and a historical accident, resulting from two events, the destruction of the European powers in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This view that our global dominance can be justified on moral grounds links Krauthammer's neocon ambitions to some awful historical precedents - a similar view carried the crusaders to the holy lands 900 years ago, accompanied the colonialization of Africa and the New World, and motivated the Holocaust. Further, any moral claim we might have had we surrendered long ago. After World War II we played the role of a hegemon, supporting the construction of institutions and systems that laid the groundwork for a new system of global monetary policy, trade, and cooperation. All of this work served our own interests, but it also carried the promise of rebuilding a world that had collapsed under two decades of economic chaos and global conflict. But, when confronted with the rising threat of the Soviet Union, we chose to side with dictators around the world, suppressing through our own intervention (in Vietnam most disastrously) or through proxies the genuine aspirations of local populations to build more representative and just systems of government. After the fall of the Soviet Union we had a chance to adopt a braver, more principled foreign policy. But we didn't, walking away from genocides, failing to use our leverage to build sustainable peace in the Middle East, or protect Africans from a slide into dark, dark years, filled with war, famine, disease and misery. Krauthammer's belief is that Obama is walking away from our moral claim to dominate world affairs. The reality is that choice was made long ago.

My argument would be that morality is a peripheral concern in international affairs. Power is what matters. I would love to see the United States use its power to lift up those in poverty, to defend those who are persecuted because they are minorities, to make peace where aggressors make war. I don't want to see America decline, I don't want to see it become less powerful. And neither does Obama. The question isn't: Should we renounce our power in the global system? It is: How should we use that power? And: What is the best way to preserve it? Here is where Krauthammer and his neocon friends are wrong: America's decline will be guaranteed if we continue with the destabilizing foreign policy he advocates. Krauthammer seems to recognize that the geopolitical system has always risen up to punish powers that attempt to dominate. He tries this preposterous bit of sleight of hand:

There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance--as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom. And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.

Well, I don't think I have a shovel big enough to take on that steaming pile of elephant droppings. But I'll try. First of all, what was the Cold War but a historic example in counter-hegemonic confrontation? I'm not picking sides here. I'm not saying the Soviet bloc rose up to oppose our diabolical plans for the world; I think, in fact, our immediate plans after the war aimed at institution building, not wide-scale aggression. My point is there is a triggering mechanism in the system - states with enormous power are viewed with fear and suspicion and counter-hegemonic alliances emerge, formed by the states that bristle at living in the shadow of the hegemon. Secondly, what Krauthammer does here borders on defilement: he disingenuously links Bush-era preventive war unilateralism with the post-World War II "benign" institution-building hegemony that produced the U.N., the IMF and the World Bank. That earlier era of unilateral action was beneficent and widely supported by the major powers. Bush's aggressive and intimidating cowboy foreign policy has been widely opposed. There isn't a thread of continuity joining these two eras, these two fundamentally different efforts to exercise American dominance. To propose this is all part of a single beneficial impulse is laughable.

Finally, his claim that we are a "welcome" "balancer of power" and guarantor of freedom in the Middle East, the Pacific, and Latin America can only be true if you imagine that the grateful royal family in Saudi Arabia somehow reflects the mood of the Islamic world, or ignore the emergence of terrorist networks in Indonesia, or forget about the standing of Hugo Chavez in Latin America. No one salutes Chavez because he is effective - he isn't, for an effective leader Latin Americans look to Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - but powerless countries in South America applaud him for giving the U.S. the finger. America is not, as Krauthammer will want you to believe, well-loved. I suspect the reason there hasn't been a more widespread counter-hegemonic movement is because coordination of such a movement has been extremely difficult. And although it is an unwelcome truth: the radical Islamic movement that engineered 9/11 and much of the chaos and harm that came before and continued after is a counter-hegemonic response. They don't fear our freedom, as George Bush would have had you believe, nor do they aim at destroying our civilization, as Krauthammer argues, they oppose our dominance and our support of reform-resistant dictators throughout the Middle East.

Krauthammer's hysterical fears that Obama is making us less safe have no support in the available evidence. When pressed to produce evidence that Obama's foreign policy has failed, he can't point to a single strategic threat that is more relevant now than before Obama took office. In the end, all he can point to as a meaningful Obama failure is the IOC vote to send the Olympics to Brazil rather than Chicago.

Baffled by Obama's foreign policy, Krauthammer proposes that Obama has been duped into believing an "illusion that human nature has changed;" so we no longer need to be vigilant, we no longer need to protect our borders, we no longer need to invest in defenses. Wherever this Obama doctrine was published, I missed it. In fact, it doesn't exist. It is a fantasy.

Finally, near the end of his essay, Krauthammer gets something right:

The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power.

But he fundamentally misunderstands the implications of this for the U.S. at this point in history. If John McCain had been elected president, and continued Bush's reckless, destabilizing foreign policy, aimed at global dominance, we would been disciplined by a concert of nations, and a patchwork association of non-state actors. Our efforts to dominate the world would have over-extended our forces, drained our resources, and exhausted our resolve. In the Hobbesian world of global politics, our vulnerabilities would have been continuously challenged. Defeat and decline in this McCain-led era, while not inevitable, would, in my opinion, be very likely. No one in the Obama administration is asking us to renounce power, only reshape how we use it. We have a chance to retain our power and influence if we stop trying to rule the world and find ways to use our power intelligently and strategically.