Michael Lind's analysis of the current impasse in American foreign policy is characteristically lucid, and I find both his optimism (the three-level chess scenario) and his pessimism (the concluding predictions) persuasive. But what is missing from this important essay is a sense of the underlying moral failures of the current administration. Behind the diplomatic and strategic choices Lind enjoins lie moral ones that must be addressed first.
While he glosses some of the reasons the United States has lost traction both in the middle east and elsewhere, Lind does not highlight the complex of lies and indecency that make it unlikely this administration or the next will be able to engage the global diplomacy sorely needed. This for two reasons: because it entails the loss of moral authority that alone legitimates strategic power; and because it shows a painful lack of character at the highest political levels in the US.
Mark Kingwell is responding to the article by Michael Lind:
"What next? US foreign policy after Bush"
(12 February 2007)
Also in openDemocracy:
Mary Kaldor, "Americas Iraq plight: old and new thinking"
(13 February 2007)
Richard Falk, "On a collision course with the future"
(14 February 2007)
Sankaran Krishna "Looking into America's dark places"
(15 February 2007)
We can chart these failings from the inside out:
Lind rightly mentions Abu Ghraib prison (though he neglects the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp). In the jargon of just-war theory, these violations of prisoner rights count as jus in bello crimes - that is, ones committed within the engagement of an armed conflict. But there also are clear, prior jus ad bellum violations, which - though unmentioned - are arguably worse. Jus ad bellum concerns the decision to go to war in the first place. Without just cause, even an honourably fought war is unjust.
The current Iraq war is neither: the ostensible justifications have been discredited. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and any liberation from Saddam Hussein's oppression has simply cleared the ground for a protracted Sunni-Shi‘a conflict. (Meanwhile, De Oppresso Liber - "to liberate the oppressed" - the motto of the US Army's Special Forces has been reduced to a fashion accessory. The regimental badge of the 5th Special Forces Airborne, whose responsibilities include the Persian Gulf region, is available as a pendant at the clothing chain Urban Outfitters. No kidding.)
The first point, though familiar, is still worth making because it highlights the second indecency of the current regime, which is a direct consequence of pursuing an unjust war. I mean it's forcing on everyone, especially challenging Democrats, the moral entanglements of "cut-and-run" rhetoric. The reasoning goes this way: "Well, we're in now; stop telling us we shouldn't be and start telling us how to get out." This is akin to a murderer forcing one into an accessory role by saying, "Well, the murder is done now; stop telling me not to do it and start telling me how to get away with it." President George W Bush's recent escalation of the troop presence in Iraq, even as the US military death toll passed 3,000, shows he is himself a prisoner of this thicket.
This kind of thinking is evidence of a cramped and self-serving vision. The decision to pursue the Iraq invasion shows that the US does not believe in an international order, nor is it prepared to view China and Russia as anything other than dangerous competitors - even as it struggles to gain access to their markets (especially in the former case). Once again, a familiar point needs new emphasis in the current situation: American foreign policy continues to combine exceptionalism with imperial ambition. The metaphor of global policeman, which recurs in Lind (albeit to be rejected), is not apt: a policeman serves the interests of legitimate power, not simple self-interest. The United States does not police, it marauds.
That is why the current resurgence of "America Alone" bellicosity is so naive and morally corrosive. It reveals itself as a central part of the global problem, not part of its solution. If the scenario really were one of civilisations clashing, or liberal America against "Islamofascist" Iran, then such rantings might enjoy a grain of truth - though even that would not vitiate the racism and xenophobia that too often come bundled with celebrations of patriotic glee.
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His books include A Civil Tongue (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), Dreams of Millennium (Penguin, 1996), Practical Judgments (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams (Yale University Press, 2006)
But that is not the current situation. It is, rather, one outlined by John Rawls in The Law of Peoples: an international order exists, however loosely, and it can serve the ends of justice without insisting on liberal democracy as the single solution to the problem of social structure. Among other things, it is essential to distinguish between authoritarian states and rogue states. America, in any event, is not alone.
Likewise, truly toxic and stupid is recent "enemy within" rhetoric. The "cultural left" - whatever that is - did not cause the 9/11 attacks. Political correctness - again, whatever that is - and falling birth rates among western white populations are not the problem. Neither is anti-Americanism, French snobbishness or Dutch gay marriage. The one thing that can be said in favour of the high-stakes, war-for-survival talking heads is that they are correct that the threat posed by fundamentalism - Islamic and otherwise - Is real. But while they are publishing columns condemning the left, or the liberals, or the gays, or Hollywood, or Hillary Clinton, that struggle is slowly being lost for lack of a coherent policy on the enemy without.
Global cooperation is the right answer because it is the only answer, on the middle east as well as such non-military threats as environmental change. We will not get there under current modes of thought. It has been argued that the main problem with western liberal democracy - the reason it can seem vacuous to those inside and pernicious to those outside - is that it has a "God-sized hole" at its centre. The response to this problem cannot be to find a new god to fill it; it must rather be to stop seeing it as a problem.
A god cannot save us; only we can save ourselves. Seeing that as everyone's business would be a start.
