Chris Bowers has a great piece up about a renewed and concerted effort by the Liberal Hawks to marginalize the netroots. He takes particular note of a column by David Greenberg, wherein he draws a dichotomy within the party:
heard increasingly from a host of younger journalists and policy
mavens-from newly formed groups like the Truman National Security
Project and the Foreign Policy Leadership Council to New Republic
editor-at-large Peter Beinart, the author of a much-discussed new
manifesto. It’s an approach that repudiates the Democrats’ post-Vietnam
reluctance to use military power.(…)
Such a vision would seem quite appealing, especially in a global age
when there’s no drawbridge for America to pull up. Yet no sooner had
reports of Bayh and Warner’s remarks appeared than they-and their way
of thinking-came under fire from the bloggers and pundits whose
influence among party activists they were seeking to curb. Across the
Web, the politicians and their ilk were slammed as ”warmongers,”
”Vichy Democrats,” and ”enablers” of a Republican regime. And such
attacks are nothing new. For months the left has been belittling the
thinking of the internationalists, scoffing at how many of them backed
Bush’s invasion of Iraq, with The Nation-the flagship magazine of the
antiwar faction-refusing to support any Democratic office-seeker who
won’t seek a speedy pullout.
Beneath this internecine party warfare lies a fundamental, and possibly
debilitating, ideological divide. Liberals, who tend to view terrorism
as the chief foreign policy concern, have been trying to revive the
philosophy of internationalism-the belief that US intervention abroad
can be noble in intent and beneficial in its results. Leftists, on the
other hand, viewing the Iraq War as the most urgent problem, more often
subscribe to a philosophy that might be called anti-imperialism-the
belief that US intervention abroad is typically avaricious in intent
and malign in its results.
I could write a dissertation on this and I don’t want to make this into a history of U.S. intervention since World War Two. So, right from the start I am going to avoid debating whether U.S. intervention is typically avaricious in intent and malign in results. Instead, I will stipulate that our intervention has often been avaricious in intent and malign in results…but not always. I’m not even sure that the net effect of U.S. international policy hasn’t been positive. To determine that conclusively one would have to know what would have happened in the absence of U.S. interventionism, and that is unknowable.
What history shows us is a decidedly mixed bag. And if there is a dichotomy is has been between the performance of international institutions and organizations like the United Nations and NATO, on the one hand, and our covert operations on the other. We would be hard pressed to look back at the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, our intervention in Indonesia, our performance in Vietnam, or our participation in Operation Condor and find anything that didn’t fit the description of avaricious and malign. Our intervention in Lebanon was a disaster. Our invasion of Grenada was dishonest. We did not invade Panama because Noriega was a drug dealer. We did not liberate Kuwait to restore democracy there. Our massive operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan was certainly malign in effect, if probably not avaricious in intent.
For this leftist, it isn’t a matter of U.S. interventionalism being predominantly good or bad. It’s a matter of it being all too often dishonest, avaricious, and malign in effect. I know that we restored the Shah for the benefit of British Petroleum. We may have enjoyed a higher standard of living as a result, but that doesn’t make it consistent with American values of respecting self-determination and encouraging human rights and democracy. I know that we toppled the Guatemalan government because they nationalized property belonging to the United Fruit Company (of which DCI Allen Dulles was a major investor). I can’t justify that at all on any level.
Other actions have been more ambiguous. Supporting anti-communist military juntas in South Korea and Greece, or messing with elections in Italy and Germany might have been justifiable in a Cold War setting. At least, the end result turned out to be tolerable for the citizens of those counties. But, I would argue, that the end result turned out tolerable in spite of this type of meddling and could be ascribed more accurately to the programs and organizations like the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and NATO.
When the United States has stood for human rights, civil liberties, representative government, and collective security, we have done extremely well. And nations that have allied (and have been allowed to ally) themselves with us and with those values, have prospered.
Ever since World War Two, American foreign policy has been at once aimed at securing and expanding the benefits of freedom, and at securing and exploiting scarce natural resources. If we have sacrificed much to secure the liberty of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and Taiwanese, we have done little to secure the liberty of Latinos, Africans, and Muslims. Our performance on East Asians has been mixed, at best.
Taking in the scope of our history, it seems like we have been fighting a running battle with the right. The right continually hyped the threat of communism, and now terrorism, in order to secure higher military budgets, demonize socialist policies, and justify dubious interventionism. The left continually questioned and resisted these efforts.
The dual legacy is now fairly clear. If we are the target of terrorists or we encounter regions that are hostile to our business interests, those nuisances arise from the very regions where America has acted against the advice of the left. Where America is popular and where American business is welcome, is in precisely those regions where we were most true to our commitment to human rights, international organizations, and collective security.
Does America have a vital role to play in the world? I believe it does. But, until we learn to internalize the lessons of our history and engage the world as a partner, not as a lone superpower…until we stop creating bogeymen to justify avaricious interventions…we will not be able to carry out that vital role without malign effects.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Iraq (and the Bush administration more generally) is that it finally put the lie to the idea that America is a force for good in the world. We have often been a force for good. We have made some serious mistakes. But, no one is looking to us for leadership any longer. The industrialized world has internalized our message and our freedoms. The rest of the world can just as easily look for inspiration from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, or Europe as they can look to us.
Our example has always been mixed, but only under Bush has our example become one of hypocrisy. We used to have a plausible claim that we were an indispensable power that had protected the world from totalitarianism. Now we are just a rogue power whose influence must be diminished.
I believe we can restore our position in the world and once again become a partner with other advanced economies and representative democracies, and that together we can safeguard liberty and provide economic growth and opportunity. But, we can only do that by refinding our roots in the international cooperation and institutions that we developed in the aftermath of the second World War. We cannot do it unilaterally.
