Dr. Condi and Ms. Rice
Michael Young | December 11, 2005, 5:38am
In the Washington Post, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is at her have-it-both-ways best, penning an important piece on the transformation of U.S. foreign policy. Her argument is best summed up in this line:
In times of extraordinary change such as ours, when the costs of inaction outweigh the risks of action, doing nothing is not an option. If the school of thought called "realism" is to be truly realistic, it must recognize that stability without democracy will prove to be false stability, and that fear of change is not a positive prescription for policy.
One might of course reflect on what Rice is trying to say about Rice. Amid reports that she has rediscovered her "realist" roots (and even shared a meal with her mentor, predecessor, and devoted purveyor of stalemate, Brent Scowcroft), the secretary may be trying to say that things are more complicated than people imagine. She may also be reassuring her boss, President Bush, who seems to be among the last true believers in spreading democracy left in his own administration--particularly democracy in the Middle East.
However, my sense is that there is something more important going on here--or also going on: Rice lays down, in a historical context of state relations so dear to academics, a new rationale for foreign affairs. She's not pandering to Bush's ill-explained gut feeling that democracy's spread means more international stability, she is giving it intellectual validation; and she is doing so by, of all things, co-opting the likes of Dean Acheson, old-line realists and "sovereignists" who also supported the emergence of the most idealistic of strategies: open-ended containment of Soviet-backed communism.
Rice also seems to be doing something else: trying to somehow reconcile realism with the ambitions of democracy-spreaders. She is, in many ways, also trying to reconcile two contrary sides of her own personality, since the secretary was for a long time a realist who, after 9/11, adopted many a neocon strophe when she understood that was what Bush wanted. She is also clearly trying to take the democracy argument out of the hands of the ideologues and push it into the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy.
Does it work? Not really, not when democracy comes out as a strategic goal, yet remains so incomprehensible to realists in that incarnation. In writing an unintentional epitaph for the realist in herself, Rice may also have written one for realism in general. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy may be going in quite another direction.
io1029 | December 11, 2005, 8:43pm | #
"Why did Bush go after Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia or North Korea or Sudan or Myanmar(sp?) or Cuba? I have (as is typical) no clue, other than a wild ass guess of GWB having a personal animosity towards Saddam Hussein, that he doesn't have toward the leaders of the other countries."
Shawn,
That assesment is so tainted toward getting the desired impact that I don't know if it even deserves a response, but here goes:
Because Saudi Arabia gives us BILLIONS in revenue and if our economy got mucked up the public would be truly outraged. Because N. Korea has nukes and a crazy fucking nutjob dictator that puts Saddam to shame. As bad-ass as the US millitary is, N. Korea could send us packing unless we went all-out, start the draft, send millions of young boys, nuke a few cities, crazy savage-style warfare on them.
In general you don't test your foriegn policy via warfare tactics on the HARDEST possible target that will cause great ecominic and human hardships. You start easy and see how things go. I mean think: The public isn't too happy about invading Iraq, even though we have a standing quarrel with that country. What the hell do you think would happen if the gov't decided "Crazy middle-easterner's attacked us on 9/11... lets go attack N. Korea!"
I don't even support the whole Iraq invasion, but Christ your question is so terribly leading and myopic as to be annoying.
Oh, and remember that Bush doesn't rule the world. He needs our support as US citizens to pull off this crap. So maybe you should look into what animosity the US public has towards the middle-east and Iraq that would let Bush go invade and be mostly un-questioned. I don't see you in the streets with millions of your peers demanding a withdrawl. Why not? Because in all the high-and-mighty retoric of those opposing the war, it isn't enough of a travisty to really risk their hides getting out there and stopping things by any means necessary.
Iraq is pretty obviously a country that our president can invade without too much flak. The others aren't.
Rick Barton | December 11, 2005, 9:57pm | #
Why did Bush go after Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia or North Korea or Sudan or...?
The US government attack on Iraq is the fruition of long standing neocon plans.
Many of the lies that came out of the Pentagon's OSP justifying the Iraq war were produced by neocons including Doug Feith whose office is at the center of the current Israeli government/AIPAC spy scandal,who had earlier written reports for the Israeli government advocating the removal of Sadom as a first step in a process to make the Mideast more friendly to the Israeli state. Note that Wolfowitz was one of the authors, with a number of neocon biggies, of
A Clean Break a 1996 policy advisory written for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The advisory advocated the elimination of Saddam Hussein as a primary goal. Baghdad was depicted as the lynch pin in the undermining of both Iran and Syria for the good of the Israeli State. After
A Clean Break the neocons start a campaign to put forth those goals laid for out the Israeli government as something America must do in its own interest. Fabrication and exaggeration of Saddam's WMD capacity are part of this campaign. Wolfowitz actually pounded the table for going into Iraq right after 9/11 instead of Afghanistan!
"Only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq . . ." PNAC founder Kristol wrote in a 1997 report. Kristol's Weekly Standard magazine is owned by News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox News
One of PNAC's first goals when it was founded in 1997 was to urge Congress and the Clinton administration to support regime change in Iraq. This was before the group approached Rumsfeld.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) sent a letter to President Clinton in January of 1998. It's signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Elliott Abrams and others. The letter argues for aggression against Iraq. They lobbied both Clinton and Gingrich to remove former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power using military force and indict him as a "war criminal."
Unsatisfied with Clinton's response, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Kristol and others from the Project for the New American Century wrote another letter on May 29, 1998, to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott:
"U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power..."
I posted this before with lotsa links but the Reason thing nabbed it cuz I had too meny of em. So here it is, sans any links. I think that Reason will post it with the links. If you don't want to wait, email me and I'll send em to ya. I'll find out what the rules are for links and start observing them. Sorry, Reason
thoreau | December 11, 2005, 11:38pm | #
I would love to argue with Andrew, as I often enjoy our debates. However, I must insist that he not accuse me of being indoctrinated by lefty college professors.
It's not that I'm too thin-skinned to take a few barbs and arrows. That's no big deal. But, you see, somebody else has determined that I'm actually a right wing corporate apologist gun nut. Simultaneously being the liberal in one man's head and the right winger in another man's head is simply too much. And don't even get me started on being the subscription renewal notice in Mona's head! :) So, you cannot accuse me of being a lefty until you've gotten that other guy's permission to do so. (Maybe if you buy a CD by his band he'll be nice.)
Anyway, with that humor out of the way, I don't know if I'm a realist in the paleocon sense, but my own take on some of the situations that you brought up:
Generally: improve our relationship with Putin's Russia...who cares if he's Vlad the Impaler? That isn't our problem, right?
Ditto with authoritarian China - it's the best we can get.
How, pray tell, is the current crop of leaders getting tough with either country? If you're going to argue that your approach is better, first explain how it's different.
Dump Pakistan and make love to India.
Um, I thought that realists would want Pakistan's cooperation, while neocons would be idealists who want friendly relations with the far more democratic India. I can't really argue with you here until I figure out what you're saying.
Dump Israel and find new friends in Egypt, Jordan, SA and Libya.
As has been observed, we already give money to Egypt and Jordan. And while the exact nature of our oft-criticized (from the left, at least) "support" for Saudi Arabia remains murky, the Saudi leaders sure seem to be friendly with our government. So, um, are you arguing with us or with the allegedly neocon-friendly Bush administration?
Make love to Persia...mullahs and all!
If I were President, I'd do everything in my power to allow the free flow of American goods and services into Iran, with the stipulation that Americans cannot trade with Iran's state-owned firms. Americans should be free to trade with Iran's private sector, but their government is an enemy and should remain off limits. (Sorry, Oliver North.) And I'd unilaterally lift all tariffs on products produced by private firms in Iran.
Andrew | December 12, 2005, 2:51am | #
thoreau, Ken and Rick
I am not setting up a straw-man. For yhe past couple of weeks I have been engaged in a personal thought experiment...trying to imagine what a Realist foreign policy would actually look like, and would have looked like, throughout the 20th century and till today.
Interesting....because the longer I played this game, the better I liked it!
You can discern three schools of American foreign policy:
Isolationism
May only have been an actual policy during the 20's (or maybe not) and otherwise has been an armchair theory.
Realism
Actually WAS pretty much American FP from 1860 (or earlier) until 1914...but it would be unfair to lean too hard on examples from the period (when that Realism was spectacularly sucessful) because this was not quite the modern world ushered in by WWI.
Idealism
This has often been the FP of the Center-Left, at least when OUT OF OFFICE, and has recently been adopted by the Right - sincerely, I believe. To some considerable degree, this was American FP under Wilson and FDR.
To describe the positions -
Isolationists hold that NO American intervention
in world affairs can possibly benefit either the US or the world. Strict neutrality and peacableness is the only thing the US can contribute to world order.
Idealist hold that American intervention in world affairs that benefit the world, benefit the US...at least long-term: what is good for the world is good for US.
Realists believe the US can actively intervene in world affairs on behalf of fairly immediate American interests...and might argue that in most cases the outcomes (when the interventions are successful) would be beneficial to the rest of the world - in the long run, and usually in the short run: what is good for US, is good for the world.
The interesting game is to take each year from 1914 forward, given the actual circumstances in each year, and speculate on what each school would have advised, and the probable outcomes.
The schools could overlap, of course - Realist might (or might not) have agreed that the US had an insufficient stake in WWI. Realist might agree that the US had a real interest in thwarting the Axis and containing Communism. But where they differ, Realists look pretty good, most times.
Take the 30's. The FDR admin entered office with an ideological loathing for Mussolini, and went ballistic when he invaded Ethiopia. Why? What did we care how Italy was governed, or Ethiopia? And the embargoes didn't save Ethiopia, anyway (Or Greece, or Yugoslavia).
A good relationship with Benito might have checked Hitler, apart from modest re-armaments and retaking the Rhineland (both reasonable, anyway). No Anschluss, no invasion of Checko...no general European war.
In Asia the US had a real interest in preventing the Japanese conquest of China...something we failed to do under FDR, but might have done given a stable European situation.
The world thus crafted by the Realist would not have looked very glamorous, short-term.
Hitler rules Germany, and harasses Jewish citizens. Mussolini rules Italy, Franco Spain, Salazar Portugal. Most of Eastern Europe from Greece to Finland is dominated by strong-men (Checko excepted). The Japs still live under somewhat chasten Samurai. Hell, even the Soviet Union is still run by Stalin.
But...no fifty million causaulties - including most European Jews, no Stalinist empire bestride half of Europe for another generation...and NO WAY Chiang loses to Mao absent the Japanese occupation!
And those are just the immediate benefits. What you get in perhaps a generation? Communism, absent the tribute states, dissolves after Stalin dies, and the rest of the countries mentioned are well on the way to becoming commercial republics. Was it SO distasteful to treat with Mussolini?
