Liberal internationalists are now doing their utmost to distance themselves
from Bush, but Wilsonian liberal internationalism is what got us into Iraq; and Hillary Clinton is the "paladin" of these liberals. That is realist Mike Desch's argument in the latest National Interest, at newsstands (are there still newsstands?), and not yet online, but soon to be.
Let me lay out the argument. Wilsonian internationalists are selling themselves to Obama in the book Desch is reviewing as a departure from the last 8 years. But in fact, they were a big part of the problem. They supported the interventions in Europe of the 90s out of Wilsonian exceptionalism: the idea that democracies make peace, militarist states violate human rights–and so regime change is a good thing. The book's co-author Anne Marie Slaughter, dean of the Wilson School (and moderator of the Ross-Mearsheimer debate on the lobby at Cooper Union two years ago) supported the Iraq war on that basis.
The core of the rush to war was the Wilsonian view that Iraq would
become benign if it was a democracy. And this hubris wasn't just Bush's
hubris: it was the liberal internationalists', who were as excited as
the neocons were by the idea of the US as a progressive hegemon post
Cold War. Madeleine Albright called the US "the indispensable nation." The WMD claim and the link to Al Qaeda claim were added on later, Desch says. Some excerpts:
addition to both exaggerating the threat from Saddamâs tin-pot dictatorship and
underestimating the difficulty in substituting democracy for it, the bridge
between Wilsonianism and the Bush Doctrine is the post-Holocaust development of
international law to include âduty to protect,â which justified the violation
of Iraqi sovereignty on human rights grounds. A major part of the story
of the Iraq War is the broad domestic âcoalition of the willingâ the Bush
Administration assembled, including many Democrats in Congress and the
chattering classes. The fact that this war could also be seen as a
humanitarian operation undoubtedly contributed to the flock of liberal hawks who roosted with the Bush Administration on the pro-war perch.
[Co-authorTony] Smith makes the provocative claim that âto the extent that there was an
organized caucus on foreign affairs within the Democratic Party, its members
supported the terms of the Bush Doctrine as their own, modified only by their
invocation of multilateralism.â
[O]n two
key elements of the Bush Doctrine â the imperative of the spread of democracy
and the potentially benign role of U.S. hegemony â there was actually a fair
amount of continuity between the Clinton and Bush Administrations…
Slaughter presents herself as the repentant hawk, who like Wilson ,
learned her lesson after the disastrous unilateral intervention into Iraq.
Unfortunately, Wilson
was a recidivist who, rather than consistently embracing multilateralism
and international law after 1914, continued his unilateral interventions.
And one suspects that given her support for the Clinton Administrationâs
humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which even though conducted
under the rubric of NATO were widely regarded in Europe as unilateral,
Slaughter would not be averse to the Obama Administration doing the same in
Darfur, particularly it it was also conducted behind the fig-leaf of an
international organization.
I'm reminded of James North's patient analysis of the Darfur situation on this blog, showing that intervention would be hairy. And also of the reasons I'm isolationist: I'm not for any war I wouldn't be willing to fight in. (I was for the Afghanistan war; they were harboring the bastards who attacked my city.)
