During the George W Bush years, two great currents of thinking about United States foreign policy - progressive and realist - have shared a critique of a third - neo-conservative. Both liberal internationalists and proponents of hard-nosed Realpolitik have rejected a US foreign policy that aims to achieve indefinite US global hegemony - but from quite different perspectives. Indeed, most realists have been as contemptuous of the liberal-internationalist alternative as of neo-conservatism.
Recently, some thoughtful observers of foreign policy have proposed that progressives and realists move beyond a shared critique of neo-conservatism in the direction of a commonly-held philosophy. Robert Wright has proposed that this be called "progressive realism", while the British writer Anatol Lieven and the American conservative foreign-policy analyst, John Hulsman (both openDemocracy contributors), have called for "ethical realism". (The need for apologetic adjectives implies - correctly, in my view - that there is something wrong with unmodified realism).
Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford University Press, 2006) - available here
Also by Michael Lind in openDemocracy:
"What next? US foreign policy after Bush" (12 February 2007)
"The future of US foreign policy: a reply" (12 March 2007)
These two essays opened and closed a debate featuring contributions from Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Mark Kingwell, Sankaran Krishna, Mark Luccarelli and David Rief
Whether progressives have anything to learn from realism depends on what is meant by the word. In connection with foreign policy, realism is used in two different ways. Sometimes realism simply means pragmatism. At other times realism is identified with Realpolitik, an elaborate ideology developed in pre-first-world-war continental Europe, especially Germany, and transplanted into the US academy in the 1930s and 1940s by European émigrés like Nicholas Spykman, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, along with the American diplomat and historian George Kennan. Realpolitik holds that states should pursue their interests, narrowly defined in terms of relative power and security, to the exclusion of other concerns.
Realism in the sense of pragmatism is obviously desirable. Any public philosophy or strategy can be implemented in a pragmatic rather than reckless and utopian way. There can be, and have been, pragmatic liberal internationalists, pragmatic Marxist-Leninists and even pragmatic jihadists. Their pragmatism has not made them Kissingerian realists. Woodrow Wilson may have been a utopian and reckless liberal internationalist, but his successor Franklin D Roosevelt was a pragmatic, cautious and sober one.
Realism-as-pragmatism may involve the use in strategy of the classical methods of power politics: alliances, concerts of power, spheres of influence, zones of hegemony. But these are stratagems which can be employed by statesmen with moral visions and world-order goals that have nothing to do with what realists narrowly define as the only legitimate objectives of statecraft, like military security.
Once it is conceded that liberal internationalism comes in pragmatic as well as impractical forms, much of the case for a synthesis of realism and liberal internationalism or progressivism collapses. Realist writers tell progressives ad nauseam that they must learn to be humble and cautious in foreign affairs by studying canonical realist writers like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr. But one need not study any of these authors to understand that it is foolish to expect liberal democracy to take root overnight in former despotisms, that multi-ethnic states frequently break apart along ethnic lines, or that wars often go horribly wrong. This is common sense. Bush and his advisers may have lacked it, but the major statesmen in the liberal internationalist tradition have not.
What is more, the hackneyed realist explanation of foreign-policy disasters like Vietnam and Iraq is dubious. Again and again, realists claim that "hubris" led America to disaster in Vietnam and "messianism" led to catastrophe in Iraq. Every US foreign-policy failure, realists would have us believe, results from culturally-ingrained American messianism or idealism run amok. Realist polemics are tediously predictable: "The American disaster in [insert country] once again shows the failure of American leaders to heed Morgenthau and Kennan and to restrain America's messianic and hubristic impulses..." In both Vietnam and Iraq, US military commanders underestimated the ability of insurgents to resist foreign armed forces. Realists are not content to identify these mistakes; inevitably they rush into print to blame these strategic failures on the alleged design defects of American culture, "Wilsonianism" or "manifest destiny". But an intellectual miscalculation that leads to catastrophic failure is not necessarily evidence of moral hubris or crusading zeal. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes miscalculation isn't manifest destiny or Wilsonian hubris, it's just miscalculation.
The occlusion of reality
When it comes to predicting foreign-policy outcomes, the realists themselves have nothing to brag about. While the Korean war of 1950-53 waged, Hans Morgenthau declared that it was lost and that Truman's containment policy was a failure. In the 1970s Morgenthau claimed that nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union was inevitable. Also in the 1970s, little more than a decade before the Soviet Union's collapse, Henry Kissinger pessimistically viewed the US as a power in decline, and George Kennan predicted erroneously that the cold war would end if the US would withdraw from western Europe, where democratic socialists would then come to power and wean east-central European communists away from the Soviets.
In an article entitled "Back to the Future" in International Security in 1990-91, the realist scholar John Mearsheimer predicted the re-nationalisation of post-cold-war Europe. The arms races and geopolitical rivalries he predicted among Germany, France and Britain have yet to materialise. Around the same time, another prominent realist, Christopher Layne, predicted that following the cold war the other great powers of the world would unite to "balance" the United States - a prediction which Layne himself recently conceded has not come to pass. Yet other realists argued that it would be futile for the US to wage the Gulf war of 1991, because all of the Arab states would unite against the US; in fact, most of them sided with the US against Saddam. The neo-conservatives were wrong to think that the Iraq war would be a "cakewalk", but the realist track record when it comes to geopolitical prophecies is dismal. The fact that realists inspired by habitual defeatism and pessimism reflexively opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars proves merely (to paraphrase the old joke about economists and recessions) that they have predicted twenty of the last two foreign-policy disasters.
openDemocracy writers debate United States foreign policy:
Danny Postel, "Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neocons, and Iraq" (16 October 2003)
Anatol Lieven, "America right or wrong" (8 September 2004)
John J Mearsheimer, "Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism" (19 May 2005)
John C Hulsman, "Beyond the neocons: ethical realism and America's future" (21 September 2006)
Godfrey Hodgson, "America against itself" (19 February 2007)
Bob Burnett, "A liberal foreign policy for the US: ten maxims" (27 February 2007)
Ian Shapiro, "After occupation: a containment strategy for Iraq" (25 April 2007)
Unable to predict the future, realist thinkers cannot even explain the present. In their writings, realists like Morgenthau and Kennan and their contemporary successors take pleasure in dismissing liberal-internationalist statesmen like William Gladstone and Woodrow Wilson as absurd and contemptible fools because they supported ideas like anti-imperialism, national self-determination, human rights and the rule of international law. Such scepticism might have seemed justified in 1907. But look around the world, a century later. What were once the daydreams of liberal internationalists are now the widely-accepted norms of world order. The dynastic empires are gone. So are the European colonial empires in the global south. There are nearly two hundred sovereign states in the United Nations. While not all of them are liberal or democratic, more human beings live under governments they have had a role in choosing than ever before. Aggressive wars of conquest and annexation have been successfully banned. Great powers no longer fight wars over trade or bombard debtor nations, as they did up to a century ago. Liberal internationalism hasn't created utopia, and it won't, but it has succeeded in becoming the dominant system of world order, instead of alternatives like fascist imperialism and Marxism-Leninism.
The principle of order
Here the philosophical incoherence of contemporary realism is evident. Of course, the realists insist, we don't favour colonialism. Of course we don't support punitive wars against debtor nations, or preventive wars to preserve a balance of power by crippling a potential foe in the absence of any provocation. And they are quite sincere. But the liberal-internationalist norms that today's realists accept cannot be justified by their own realist theories.
There is a simple reason for this: liberal internationalism ultimately is justified by populist and democratic ideals which are repudiated by Realpolitik.
Modern liberal internationalism is an attempt to create, in Woodrow Wilson's words, not a world in which every country is a democracy in the short run, but rather a "world safe for democracy". The fundamental principle of world order should be popular sovereignty in its external form of self-determination and its internal form of constitutional democracy. Self-determination or political independence is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democracy for the obvious reason that a sovereign people cannot govern itself if it is ruled by foreigners without its consent. This is why decolonisation - not democratisation - was central to the liberal-internationalist project in the 20tth century. Although city-states like Singapore and multinational states like Switzerland still exist, the most common unit of democratic self-government in modern times is the nation-state, for the practical reason that John Stuart Mill pointed out - it is easier to establish representative institutions if the state corresponds to a people who share a sense of solidarity based upon a common language and a common identity.
If national self-determination follows from popular sovereignty, the other norms of modern liberal internationalism follow from national self-determination. Wars of conquest and annexation by one people against another are outlawed; wars of national defence and decolonisation are not. National self-determination required the dissolution of multinational empires and their replacement by nation-states, preferably but not necessarily with democratic governments. Voluntary alliances and trade blocs, as well as global collective security institutions like the United Nations and the global economy, replace imperial structures. The norms of any system of world order must be enforced; liberal internationalists, equally suspicious of world government and unilateral great-power spheres of influence, have usually concluded that the world should be policed by great powers acting formally or informally in concert with each other.
The realist nostalgia
In contrast, the intellectual tradition of Realpolitik is deeply hostile to both of the manifestations of popular sovereignty: national self-determination and democracy. Complaints that pesky small peoples seeking to govern themselves "destabilised" things by messing up the nice, orderly British, Habsburg, Romanov / Soviet and Ottoman empires are among the annoying tics of realist literature. The anti-nationalist bias of Realpolitik makes a mockery of the professed devotion of its adherents to "the national interest". They don't really mean the national interest as the interest of a nation or a people. Rather, they mean "reason of state" - the interest of the government as an actor in international affairs, no matter what its form. If "the national interest" of the US is, at least in theory, that of the American people, the "national interest" of Saudi Arabia is that of its ruling family and that of North Korea is that of its communist oligarchy.
Ironically, in their indifference to the nature of regimes, contemporary realists have little in common with the historical figures whom they admire. Machiavelli was an ardent republican, who declared that republics and monarchies inevitably have different foreign policies. Unlike Machiavelli, Metternich and Bismarck were aristocratic monarchists who supported collaboration among European royal houses to stamp out liberalism, nationalism and democracy in continental Europe. Their purpose was to prevent the evolution of anything remotely like the European Union, a voluntary pan-European confederation of post-imperial, democratic nation-states. Giuseppe Mazzini would be delighted - but even though his vision of Europe has defeated Metternich's, Mazziniis one of the liberal visionaries despised by realists.
Realists are as critical of internal democracy as they are of national self-determination. The heroes of contemporary realists are pre-modern autocrats and their ministers in monarchical and aristocratic kingdoms and empires: Cardinal Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, Benjamin Disraeli and Robert (Lord) Salisbury. Realist literature contrasts the ability of these idealised philosopher-kings to conduct foreign affairs on the basis of "reason of state" with the plight of embattled modern democratic politicians. No doubt it is indeed easier to carry out a coherent strategy if there are no elections or a limited suffrage and if leaders can censor, exile, imprison or execute critics.
The nostalgia of realists for pre-modern autocracies and aristocracies is manifest in the ritual complaint about the baleful influence of democracy on foreign policy-making that runs like a refrain through the work of Morgenthau, Kennan and their modern admirers. George Kennan, who has been canonised by American realists, was not an ordinary conservative but an extreme social reactionary. In the 1930s he regretted that women and immigrants had been allowed to vote in the United States; in the 1970s he praised the Soviet Union for suppressing pornography more effectively than the US; and in his honoured old age in the 1990s he suggested that US foreign policy would be pursued more wisely if it were insulated from democratic pressure and entrusted to a "council of elders" (a gerontocratic Politburo or ephorate that would have included the elderly Kennan, it must be presumed). Progressives who try to detach classical foreign-policy realism from contempt for public opinion and universal suffrage can do so only by ignoring the insistence on the part of Kennan, Morgenthau, and other saints of Realpolitik that democracy and sound statecraft are all but incompatible.
The false choice
Above all else, the realist disdain for democracy should give potential progressive allies of the realists pause. The foreign-policy elites in Washington and London generally supported the Iraq war. Thanks to democracy, American and British voters - the very unwashed mob despised by realists nostalgic for 19th-century elite diplomacy - were able to punish George W Bush and Tony Blair and force the Iraq war to be reconsidered. The US and Britain would be unimaginably worse off there were no frequent elections, or if elite foreign-policy makers were even more insulated from democratic politics.
A misguided earlier attempt at an alliance between progressives and realists should serve as a cautionary example to today's centre-left. Opponents of the Vietnam war, like opponents of the Iraq war, found themselves sharing many criticisms of US foreign policy with conservative realists like George Kennan. Some leftists at the time sought to rehabilitate the reputations of rightwing isolationist critics of Rooseveltian liberal internationalism like the Republican Senator Robert A Taft. This strange-bedfellows alliance of the radical left and the isolationist right was singularly ill-timed. It occurred at the very moment when Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan rejected the narrow Realpolitik of Richard M Nixon and Henry Kissinger and championed human rights. Dismissed as sentimental nonsense by cynical realists, the human- rights campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s inspired east-central European dissidents and helped to destroy the crumbling legitimacy of the Soviet Union and its satrapies.
The fact that neo-conservatives have sought to co-opt the language of human rights and democracy and internationalism should not lead progressives to reject their own heritage. It is not as though progressives have to choose between waging wars on behalf of human rights and democracy and keeping silent about tyranny and exploitation in other countries. Traditional liberal internationalism, far from being insincere or incoherent, embodies a well-thought-out theory of human-rights promotion. The only legitimate causes for warfare are defence against cross-border aggression or UN Security Council authorisation. But nothing prevents countries from using a range of methods, from verbal scoldings to economic embargoes, to pressure a vile regime to stop repressing minorities, executing and torturing dissidents, censoring the press, supporting terrorists and seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Such methods short of war brought down apartheid in South Africa and inspired Libya's rapprochement with the international community. The liberal imperialists of the "Euston Manifesto" school are wrong. The choice between invasion and silence as a response to human-rights abuses is a false one.
In seeking to promote a liberal international system based on the norms of national self-determination, cooperative security, international institutions and international law, progressives should be realistic. But they need not and should not be realists.
