The Schism In Liberalism

This column from The Weekly Standard was written by Adam Wolfson.

Which man is in the Oval Office could not be more consequential. Yet, it is often overlooked that their views on foreign policy spring from a common source -- a liberal idealism rooted in liberal hopefulness. It is no accident that we tend to think of liberals as starry-eyed dreamers and conservatives as hard-headed realists. Hope is integral to liberalism, not conservatism.

But in his foreign policy, Bush, as much as Kerry, is guided by hope. The word "hope" appears in most of Bush's speeches, and hope is central to his message. Certainly, the president puts his hopes in very different things than Kerry, but his political strength, his appeal to the American electorate, is largely based on his having stolen a card from the liberal deck.

Historically, liberal idealism in foreign affairs held up two central values, internationalism and democracy. The basic idea can be traced back to Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Kant. A lasting peace could be approached in a world of commercial republics united together in something like a League of Nations or a United Nations. That at least was the argument.

Up until the dislocations of Vietnam and Watergate and the presidency of Jimmy Carter, liberals reliably acclaimed both principles. But in the course of Carter's presidency, liberals lost their self-confidence and sacrificed their belief in democracy to their internationalist faith. They became relativists. Sure, democracy was fine for us Americans, they seemed to say, but who were we to claim it was right for others? In their view, to champion democracy abroad was at once hypocritical and chauvinistic. Indeed, their relativism only reinforced their internationalism. The less faith they put in the principles of democracy, the more liable they were to take their guidance instead from international opinion (as reflected, say, in votes at the U.N.). The tragedy is that in an undemocratic, illiberal world, this sometimes meant acquiescing to malevolent forces.

But then a strange thing happened. In the course of the 1980s, the old, neglected liberal faith in democracy took flight and migrated to the Republican party. During Ronald Reagan's presidency, conservatives began to make the democratic faith their own. A few embraced it as a universal cause and became "neo-Wilsonians." Others saw democracy not in idealistic terms, but more pragmatically (and conservatively) as a means of advancing America's national interest. With this correction of the traditional liberal ideal, these conservatives were seeking to transcend the modern realism-idealism dichotomy.

Reagan, a former Democrat, embodied this new turn in conservative thought. His embrace of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as a way of making nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," to use his words, exemplified his idiosyncratic hopefulness. The proposal befuddled his liberal opponents, who had always preened themselves as the anti-nuclear party, but it also worried his conservative supporters, who had prided themselves on their hard-headedness.

They should not have worried: We now know the Soviet leadership was shaken to its core by Reagan's SDI gambit. More to the point, Reagan backed democratic "freedom fighters," notably in Nicaragua, as a way of undermining the Soviet empire both strategically and ideologically and also of protecting America's vital interests. Yet if conservatives were willing to adopt Reagan's new hopefulness, they still firmly rejected internationalism. The Reagan administration was as famous for bashing the United Nations as for championing democracy.

To be sure, Reagan's optimism was hardly shared by all or even most conservatives. His successor, Bush I, was a conservative realist of the old Kissinger sort. Bush I went to war with Iraq in 1991 not to advance democracy but to preserve the region's balance of power in the narrowest sense. He was happy to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait -- but unwilling to take the fight to Iraq, either directly or by proxy. Bush I, like Kerry today, cared about "order," not democracy. So the Reagan mantle was there for the taking, and after September 11, George W. Bush made the hope of democracy, though not the internationalist credo, the centerpiece of his foreign policy.

Today, liberal idealism remains bifurcated, with each of the political parties claiming its half. Liberals like Kerry champion internationalism, while denouncing Bush's faith in democracy as a sign of arrogance or simple-mindedness. Conservatives like Bush sail under the banner of democracy, while skewering the liberal faith in internationalism as a sign of weakness or naiveté.

In this sense, the November election is about where best to place our hopes -- with Kerry in internationalism or with Bush in democracy. Kerry argues that we should not have gone to war without the United Nations' blessing. He would get us out of Iraq by "internationalizing" the conflict -- by which he means having the U.N. and the "world community" take over Iraq's governance and security. He considers U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan America's friend. In the first presidential debate, Kerry repeatedly called for world summits, and went so far as to say that future preemptive action by the United States must pass something called "the global test."

Kerry's internationalist hopes are demonstrably false, a case of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. The "international community" has no will of its own or guiding moral vision. The U.N. let Hussein off the hook in the 1990s, allowing him to defy its own sanctions. To believe that it would play any substantive, hands-on role in Iraq today is a pipe dream. It's even worse than that. Placing our hopes in the world community is really to put them in the likes of Saddam Hussein, since we know beforehand that the world community will do little to stop even such monsters.

Other problems beset the internationalist faith. Today's internationalism uncoupled from democratic principles is nearly indistinguishable from cynicism. The international community did nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, just as it stands idly by as genocide unfolds in the Darfur region of Sudan. Syria, a brutal dictatorship and state-sponsor of terrorism, sits on the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Taken by itself, internationalism is morally corrupting and politically bankrupt. Kerry's hopes are truly hopeless.

Bush's hopes in democracy are for the most part better founded. The basic idea is that democratic principles are the aspiration of all peoples everywhere, whatever their creed or culture, and that free societies will be basically peaceful ones: that a democratic Iraq or a democratic Iran will cease to bear murderous ill will towards the United States. As Bush put it in the first debate: "A free Iraq will be an ally in the war on terror... A free Iraq will set a powerful example in the part of the world that is desperate for freedom. A free Iraq will help secure Israel. A free Iraq will enforce the hopes and aspirations of the reformers in places like Iran. A free Iraq is essential for the security of this country." Bush's hopes for democracy are, in a word, strategic.

So whose message will resonate more with the voters? It's hard to imagine Kerry's internationalist hopes prevailing this November over Bush's democratic faith. Internationalism has a short history in this country, going back no further than Wilson, and its popularity always depended on its being paired with democracy. Once liberals dropped the latter, they faced a tough job selling the former to the American people.

The truth is that Bush has the more noble, uplifting vision, one more in accord with American ideals than Kerry's amoral internationalism. Bush's approach also has a better chance of success. We know for a fact that the U.N. will not protect our interests or our lives. In contrast, it seems reasonable to believe that most human beings reject tyranny, and that future democratic regimes in the Middle East would not export suicide-terrorists to our shores.

Of course, democracy remains a hope -- uniquely America's hope -- and Bush's policy has been criticized for its excesses. The Bush administration's hopes for democracy in post-Saddam Iraq led to the fanciful assumption that even months after their arrival, our troops would still be seen as "liberators." But Iraqi gratitude was never to be expected, since the war was undertaken more in self-defense than to end that country's misery. We must see our own motivations for what they are, if we are to understand the motivations of others. Similarly, the administration's undue hopefulness about the naturalness of democracy led it to mishandle the fighting of the war as well as postwar management.

But Bush has also been faulted for having too little hope in democracy, as when he enlists General Musharraf's very undemocratic Pakistan in the war on terror, or fails sufficiently to denounce Vladimir Putin's latest antidemocratic measures. The scheduled elections in Iraq are already being criticized by Bush's liberal "realist" critics for falling short of democratic standards.

The Bush administration will have the best chance of success if it keeps its democratic hopes firmly anchored in America's national interest. Rhetorically, Bush sometimes errs in the direction of abstract idealism, as when he claims that our action in Iraq has nothing to do with balance-of-power politics -- though surely one of our aims is to bring about, by a democratic transition, a political balance of power in the region more favorable to our security. Bush also seems to lose sight of the delicate line he must walk when he says things like, "We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom," or freedom is "the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world." Well, yes and no, but surely the principal task of our troops in Iraq is to safeguard America's freedom, not to do God's work. Usually, however, Bush avoids such rhetorical excesses. Certainly in his policy he is more restrained -- perhaps too restrained, given what is at stake for America strategically, and given the lofty goals he has set forth.

In the first presidential debate Bush said of his policy, "I think you can be realistic and optimistic at the same time." Seeking to help guide this new policy, Charles Krauthammer characterized it as "democratic realism." The point is that our democratic hopes are genuine, but we'll act on them militarily only when our national interest requires it. Which is to say that in our engagement in the Middle East we are not simply democratic altruists. Our ultimate goal is less to make the world safe for democracy than -- as Theodore Roosevelt said -- to make the world safe for America. It's a policy that will entirely satisfy neither liberal internationalists nor conservative realists, but for now it is the only serious game in town, and Americans once again, however reluctantly, must learn to play it.

Adam Wolfson is editor of "the Public Interest."

By Adam Wolfson
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