*333Americans have a healthy aversion to foreign policy. it stems from a sense of thrift: who needs it? we're protected by 2 great oceans. we have this continent practically to ourselves. and we share it with just 2 neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us.
it took 3 giants of the 20th century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. and then it ended with one of the great anticlimaxes in history. without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up and disappeared.
it was the end of everything - the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European wars. but the end of everything was also a beginning. on Dec 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was burn, something utterly new - a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.
this is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. it is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to deal with it. our first reaction - the 1990s- was utter confusion.
the next reaction was awe. when Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the idea of American decline, saw what America did in the Afghan war - a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a distance of 8,000 miles - he not only recanted, he stood in wonder: 'Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power''; he wrote, 'nothing...no other nation comes close...Charlemagne's empire was merely western European in its reach. the Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another
*334 great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. there is, therefore, no comparison'.
even Rome is no model for what America is today. first, because we do not have the imperial culture of rome. we are an Athenian republic, even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens. and this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world, - acquired it in a fit of absentmindedness; it was sheer inadvertence. we got here because of Europe's suicide in the world wars of the 20th century and then the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its sleep, leaving us with global dominion.
Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and the other classical empires of modern times, in that We Do Not Hunger For Territory. the use of the world Empire in the American context is ridiculous. it is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone's soil is to demand an exit strategy. I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. they were looking for entry strategies.
In David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence, 'I think you are another of these desert-loving English... the English have a great hunger for desolate places'. in deed, for 5 centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents.
American do not. we like it here. we like our McDonald's. we like our football. we like our rock and roll. we've got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We've got silicon Valley and South Beach. We've got everything. and if that's not enough, we've got Vegas - which is a facsimile of everything. what could we possibly need anywhere else? we don't like exotic climates. we don't like exotic languages - lots of declensions and moods. we don't even know what
*335 a mood is. we like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court...
that's because we are not an imperial power. we are a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. a commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. the eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia, Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.
that is who we are. that is where we are.
now the question is: what do we do? what is a unipolar power to do?
1. ISOLATIONISM
the oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat.
this is known as Isolationism.
of all the foreign policy schools in america, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising in the only great power in history to be isolated by 2 vast oceans.
Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually superior to the Old World. we were too good to be corrupted by its low intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.
today, however, I is an ideology of fear. fear of trade. fear of immigrants. fear of the Other. Isolationists want to cut off trade and immigration and withdraw from our military and strategic commitments around the world. even isolationists, of course, did not oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so obviously an act of self-defence - only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose that. but anything beyond that, Iists oppose.
they are for a radical retrenchment of American power - for pulling up the drawbridge to Fortress America.
*336 Iism is an important school of thought historically but not today. not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but because it is so obviously inappropriate to the world of today - a world of export-driven economies, of massive population flows and of 9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern technology and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier between 'over there' and over here.
classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete, it is politically bankrupt as well. 4 years ago, its most public advocate, pat Buchanan, ran fro present of the US and carried Palm Beach. By accident.
classic Iism is moribund and marginalized. who then rules America?
II. LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM
in the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. it has a peculiar history. it traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson's utopianism, Harry Truman's anti-communism and John Kennedy's militant universalism. but after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman's and Kennedy's roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used 'cold warrior' as an epithet. in the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan's 'illegal war in Central America' - and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anti-communist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
*337 that boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. but that passivity outlived the Cold War. when Kuwait was invaded, the question was: should the US go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? the Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying no. the Democrats voted no overwhelmingly - 2 to 1 in the House, more than 4 to 1 in the Senate.
and yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just 2 years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist.it involved us 4 times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia and finally going to war over Kosovo. how to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? the crucial and obvious difference is this: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures - fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. and only humanitarian interventionism - disinterested intervention devoid of national interest - is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. the history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. they do not. they have and aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
and by national interest i do not mean simple self-defense. everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political and strategic goods. intervening military for That kind of national interest, literal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. it sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect a form of grand national selfishness. hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
the other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. the Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bio-weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, antiballistic missiles, etc.
*338 Why? no sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would 'provide us with a valuable tool' - the 'moral suasion of the entire international community'.
Moral suasion? was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? it was the suasion of the bayonet. it was the ignominious fall of Saddam - and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. the whole point of this treaty was to keep Rogue States from developing chemical weapons. rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? their obvious net effect is to temper American
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