After the Cold War

America’s Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy.
Edited by Owen Harries.
ICS Press.175 pp. $19.95.

About two years ago, I was invited by Owen Harries, the editor of the National Interest, to contribute to a series of articles he was planning on the role of America in a post-cold-war world. After thinking about it long and hard, I finally declined, mainly because I had been unable to make up my mind as to what I thought America’s purpose should be now that the threat of Communism, which had supplied the organizing principle of our foreign policy for more than four decades, had been decisively eliminated.

But quite apart from what I or anyone else thought America’s purpose should or should not be, I was growing more and more convinced that the debate over intervention was becoming academic. As I then saw it, the traditional isolationism of the Right was beginning to resurface now that the threat of Communism had subsided, and would soon converge with the equally traditional isolationism of the Left which had already returned in full force as a result of Vietnam. Thus, the slogan of the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, “Come Home, America,” would find an echo and a reinforcement in the call already being issued by the conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan for a policy of “America First,” and the two together would frustrate any interventionist ambitions, for whatever purpose, that George Bush or any other President might still entertain.

Well, as we know now, this analysis, though plausible enough, was entirely wrong. But then again, so were the analyses of the sixteen writers—all conservatives of one stripe or another—who did agree to write pieces for the National Interest. Those pieces have now been collected by Harries into a single volume entitled America’s Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy, and reading them today makes for an entirely different experience from the one they provided in their original incarnations. Then they were in varying degrees stimulating and provocative; now they teach a cautionary lesson in intellectual humility.

For the plain truth is that nothing any of these sixteen intelligent and learned writers said, either in the way of prediction or advocacy, envisaged the possibility of the great event that was to occur on January 16, 1991.

To be sure, a number of them (Charles Krauthammer, Carl Gershman, and Ben J. Wattenberg) came out swinging for continued American interventionism. But the whole point of the interventionism they advocated was the Wilsonian one of making the world safe, or at any rate safer, for democracy—an issue which was present only very indirectly, if at all, in the Gulf crisis. Kuwait was not a democratic country when it was invaded by Iraq, and the United States did not go to war to turn it into one but only to liberate it from foreign occupation. Nor did we go to war to turn Iraq into a democracy, nor even, as it emerged, to depose Saddam Hussein. It is certainly true that the world was made safer for democracy by the frustration of his effort to seize control of a large share of the oil on which the West depends, but that was not the kind of thing the interventionists writing in the National Interest had in mind (though all of them did in the event support both Desert Shield and Desert Storm).

On the other end of the spectrum, the contributors to the National Interest series who veered more or less sharply toward the isolationist pole (Patrick J. Buchanan, Ted Galen Carpenter, and Nathan Glazer) could perhaps see consoling traces of isolationist influence in the haste with which Bush ended the war and in his refusal to assume any responsibility for reshaping the internal affairs of Iraq lest we sink into that “quagmire” which is their chief bogeyman. But this is surely cold comfort to a group which was so wrong about so many things, including its conviction that the American people would never tolerate the kind of action that 90 percent of the American people would soon wind up enthusiastically supporting in the Persian Gulf.

Much the same criticism can be made of those like Irving Kristol and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick who, trying to escape or transcend the interventionist-isolationist alternative, took refuge in the realist argument for a foreign policy based strictly on considerations of national interest. Thus, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, in a piece called “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” flatly declared:

Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens, and responsibilities. It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again a usually successful, open American republic. . . . I believe these views are broadly shared by the majority of Americans.

Unlike the neoisolationists, however, Mrs. Kirkpatrick was not entirely sure that she was right in her belief that such views were shared by most Americans, and she immediately went on to add that “Should that not be the case, I would, of course, respect their decision.” No wonder, then, that after beginning with reservations about George Bush’s decision to send American forces to the Persian Gulf, she wound up supporting his decision to go to war.

As for Kristol, seeing Bush’s policy as falling clearly within the national interest of the United States, he supported it without reservations from the beginning. Yet from his essay it would not have been easy to predict either that so massive an intervention would soon occur or, for that matter, that the American people (let alone Kristol himself) would be in favor of it.

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What then does the Gulf War and its aftermath reveal about the debates so vividly represented in America’s Purpose?

First of all, to begin with the most obvious point (but one that was by no means obvious before January 16), the issue of whether the United States was once again ready and willing to use military force on a very large scale was unambiguously settled. This alone, of course, crushed the hopes and darkened what had seemed, to me and many other people, the bright prospects of the neoisolationists. Secondly, to the extent that this force was used by the U.S. in defense of its own economic interests, the Gulf War gave heart to the realists—although Harries (who originally supported Bush on realist grounds but who has retrospectively changed his mind) is correct when he writes in the current issue of the National Interest that it went beyond the realist prescription in its scale, in its resort to the United Nations, and in its appeal to the Wilsonian idea of a “new world order.”

On the other hand, one has to say that this talk of a “new world order” was revealed in the aftermath of the war as nothing but a meatless bone thrown to the neo-Wilsonians. Far from trying to create a new political system in the Middle East, the Bush administration set its face even against any change of regime in Iraq. Indeed, the only change it favored was the replacement of Saddam Hussein by some other Baathist thug, and when this failed to happen, the U.S. entered into what can only be called complicity with Saddam Hussein in putting down the Kurds and the Shiites who had risen up against him at least partly in the tragically mistaken belief that they would be supported by the United States. The war, it turns out, was fought merely to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and to “defang” him—not, in other words, to establish a new order in the Middle East (except on the West Bank!) but precisely to restore the old one and to make sure that it would remain secure from any further disruption by Iraq or any other ambitious local ruler.

In short, while the United States has inaugurated the post-cold-war era with a foreign policy which is both more interventionist than most realists, and all isolationists, would like, and is also cloaked in the kind of neo-Wilsonian rhetoric both of those groups deplore, our actions have nevertheless been much more closely in tune with the ideas of the realists than with the Wilsonian model.

Nor is the Gulf War the only example pointing to this conclusion. The same realist perspective that led to a preference for the alleged “stability” of the status quo in Iraq over a breakup of the country has also led to a preference—unenthusiastic and resigned but a preference all the same—for Mikhail Gorbachev over his opponents in the Baltics and within Russia itself. So too did it lead to a preference—perhaps even less enthusiastic—for the Communist rulers of China over their challengers in Tiananmen Square. Furthermore, in these two cases, where in contrast to Iraq we were actually presented with a democratic alternative to the powers-that-be, we in effect sided with the latter. What could be less Wilsonian and more realist than that?

I say this with no pleasure, since I myself sympathize with the Wilsonian perspective (which, incidentally, has found its most persuasive recent exposition in Joshua Muravchik’s new book, Exporting Democracy). Believing as I also do that the American national interest can only be served properly and fully by a foreign policy that does indeed work, prudently but surely, toward the Wilsonian ideal of making the world safe for democracy, I think that the evident triumph of realism in the Gulf War bodes ill for the future. Already, for example, we see that instead of producing the stability it always pursues and promises, the realist perspective has left Iraq in a murderous turmoil. Nor is the Soviet Union under Gorbachev exactly a stable country.

Still, chastened by the failure of the contributors to America’s Purpose to anticipate what was so soon to happen, I am prepared to make only two small predictions: that the realists will not be discredited by this sorry performance (any more than they were discredited by their even sorrier performance in the 70’s, when they brought us the blessings of détente), and that the neoisolationists, battered though they were in the Gulf War, and the neo-Wilsonians, in spite of the great disappointments they suffered in its aftermath, will both pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and come back to fight another day.

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