Realism, Indignation, and American Foreign Policy

A radical and a neoconservative change their political stripes.

Michael Young from the February 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Fukuyama seems to think the neocons' arrogance is the best argument against them. He may be right. Who can deny there was overconfidence in how they approached Iraq, or brashness in their faith in the boundlessness of U.S. power? But there is otherwise little to agree with in Fukuyama's book, amid all the provisos, caveats, and convenient memory lapses. We are left with a spiritless hybrid to guide American foreign policy, one not conceptually more persuasive than what the neocons have offered and not particularly original either.

As Fukuyama turns into a castaway of the right, Paul Berman pursues his own journey toward the center from the radical left. In a 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism, written as a postscript to 9/11, this professor of journalism and writer in residence at New York University argued that totalitarianism, whether fascist, communist, Arab nationalist, or Islamist, was still totalitarianism. Berman saw a parallel between totalitarian ideologies: They all put forward an "ideal of submission. It was submission to the kind of authority that liberal civilization had slowly undermined...it was the ideal of the one, instead of the many. The ideal of something godlike. The total state, the total doctrine, the total movement."

Paul Berman resembles Woody Allen, not Captain America. His speech is diffident and stuttering. If he tried to stand up to the globe's hooligans, you could imagine them stepping on his glasses. But under the temperate demeanor is a biting essayist who has deftly zeroed in on the subtleties and incongruities of ideologues. His deeper purpose-at least in Power and the Idealists-is to show how prominent figures of the left have, over time, come to embrace liberal interventionism, but also how the left has often abandoned its humanism when coping with dictatorships. This is why Berman is loathed by many of his former political brethren, who have accused him of being a neocon in mufti when he discusses Islam or the Iraq war, which he supports.

Berman focuses on three figures: Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister from 1998 to 2005; Bernard Kouchner, the former United Nations representative in Kosovo who founded the organization Doctors Without Borders in 1971; and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student leader in the French uprising of May 1968 and now a European parliamentarian. But he also brings in the French philosopher André Glucksmann, who jettisoned Leninist pretensions before most of his companions did, as well as the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya and the Iranian writer Azar Nafisi, all refugees from '60s and '70s radicalism.

What these people have in common is outrage. It isn't so very different from the outrage fueling the neocon human rights agenda. It is also aimed against a relativism that renders tenuous the defense of liberal values. Totalitarianism, Berman writes, is "the system of oppression that reaches into the coziest and most private corners of life, into questions of sexuality, conscience, and personal behavior, and sets out to squeeze each of these intimate and individual matters into the exact and peculiar shape that is required by the governing fantasy." Anger is as palpable here as it is lacking in Fukuyama's tome.

But Berman is not the kind to grab a pitchfork and hiss about America "going soft." He very much remains a mild man of the left, a lover of Europe, a man with limited patience for neocon bombast or the excessive use of force.

An underlying theme in his book is that the '68 generation tried to advance its revolutionary objectives in myriad ways short of violence. Kouchner became the guru of international humanitarian action. Cohn-Bendit ran a kindergarten for two years, a project of the New Left "to perform radical surgery on the German national character." Fischer became an environmentalist, joining the Green Party. Berman has no contempt for the '60s generation; he isn't out to liquidate his ideological inheritance the way Fukuyama is. But he believes that, in some cases, force cannot be avoided in defeating autocrats. This was most evident, he argues, in Iraq, over which the left split in the run-up to the conflict.

Fischer's metamorphosis was charged with revealing inconsistency, which perhaps is why the former foreign minister emerges as the leading character in Berman's book. But Berman is confused. How is it, he wonders, that someone who put his career on the line by approving of military intervention in Bosnia after the Srebrenica massacre could oppose a war to terminate Saddam Hussein's murderous terror state in Iraq? "[Iraq] was studded with Srebrenicas," Berman writes. How is it that Fischer, who took on the pacifists in his Green Party with the declaration "No more Auschwitz," never seemed to conjure up a true picture of Iraq's dictatorship, with its genocidal Anfal campaigns against the Kurds in the 1980s and its colossal massacres of Shiites after the 1991 Gulf War?

Berman concludes that Fischer was more than a little confused himself. At a conference in Munich in 2004, Fischer admitted that the status quo in the Middle East was no longer acceptable. He "advocated a subtle and complicated fight against the new totalitarianism-a program to bring about some fairly big changes in the Middle Eastern political atmosphere, to transform what had now become intolerable." That sounded strangely like what George W. Bush was saying at the time. It sounded no less strangely like what the neocons said Iraq was about. But Fischer wanted to work lightly, "to tiptoe carefully" and avoid awakening memories of imperialism past. Here he echoed the nervous tropes of a European approach to the region that wants to have it both ways-speaking softly and carrying a big carrot while imagining glorious change. Fischer's stance risked being as contradictory and circular as what Fukuyama now advocates, a case of "non-action through action," to quote Berman in another context.

The anti-imperialist in Fischer couldn't endure marching in lockstep with Bush's neocons while they re-engineered the Arab world. As an American and an internationalist, Berman had fewer qualms. But if there is a question Berman leaves unanswered, it is where he now stands with respect to his objective neocon allies. Like Fischer, he looks in their direction with a faint expression of distaste. But the dividing line often seems one of style more than substance, at least on the subject of Iraq. Berman, like the neocons, presumes that history must progress toward the liberal ideal-a progression that occasionally needs to be defended by force of arms.

That's not how resuscitated realists see things today. Many have excluded liberalism from their proposals for ways out of the Iraqi debacle. My view is that if they prevail, the U.S. would make the same error it did previously by assuming that Middle Eastern stability, and therefore American security, can come at the expense of greater freedom. Washington's Arab allies, authoritarian regimes all, are in terminal decline, utterly illegitimate to their peoples. Force alone won't change them for the better, but unless the U.S. pushes them to open up in fundamental ways, all its chips will be placed on failing states that bigoted Islamists are most likely to inherit. That said, those of us who have argued this also realize that America is in no mood to listen. The botched war in Iraq has poisoned the waters.

Fukuyama and Berman have both moved toward the center, but it isn't easy to synthesize their stances. Berman can agree with details of Fukuyama's plea for a more diverse foreign policy, and Fukuyama can surely see the merits of using force when necessary. But indignation will keep the two apart. Berman has written a book that shows it makes a difference to him what happens to human beings in the pulverizing commerce of international politics. We're never sure that's the case with Fukuyama.

Contributing Editor Michael Young ([e-mail]) is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

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