“He brings to the presidency a belief in multilateralism
unequaled since Woodrow Wilson.” So said former Ambassador to the
United Nations John Bolton in his speech Saturday at the
Conservative Political Action Conference. Bolton was talking
about Barack Obama, and he did not mean it as a compliment.
Bolton noted that Obama was echoing Wilson’s declaration that
“the interests of all nations are also our own” when he went
before the UN General Assembly and said “the interests of nations
and peoples are shared,” that “power is no longer a zero-sum
game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another
nation.” (Bolton cites the same quotations in
this article, where he covers much of the
same ground he did in his speech.)
The Wilsonian tradition is one of four strains in American
foreign policy identified by Walter Russell Mead in his
influential book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy
and How It Changed the World, and Bolton’s implicit premise
that it has no value is not strictly correct. The faith in
international institutions like the UN and the willingness to
sacrifice American sovereignty and hegemony is indeed a deep
weakness of Wilsonianism, but the belief that our interests are
intimately tied to the interests of foreigners is not entirely
wrong, so long as we don’t confuse the interests of people with
the interests of their government.
Increasing the freedom and well-being of people around the
world does indeed improve our security. This is something that
most conservatives understand, because Ronald Reagan understood
it, which is why he succinctly stated his approach to the Cold
War as “We win, they lose.” The “they” in that statement was the
Communist regimes, and there can be no doubt that the fall of
those regimes and the rise of Eastern European democracy has
improved American security as it has improved the lives of the
people in those nations.
Bolton’s critique comes, more or less, from the Jacksonian
tradition, which, as Mead put it in an interview, holds to a
simple principle: “Don’t bother with people abroad, unless they
bother you. But if they attack you, then do everything you can…
when somebody attacks the hive, you come swarming out of the hive
and you sting them to death.” To judge from the discussions of
foreign policy at CPAC, Jacksonianism is currently the dominant
foreign policy orientation within the conservative
movement.
Liz Cheney is usually thought of as a neoconservative. But
in the sense that the term came to be used in the past decade,
when what had previously described an approach to domestic policy
came to refer almost exclusively to an approach to foreign policy
(Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan’s more apt label “neo-Reaganism”
never really caught on), neoconservatism is supposed to combine
the Jacksonian and Wilsonian traditions. Neocons believing in
fighting for America’s national interest as hard as necessary,
and are unwilling to be hamstrung by appeals to the opinions of
the “international community” — but also believe that the spread
of democracy and freedom is an essential part of that national
interest. So it was striking that when Cheney spoke at CPAC on
Thursday, her critique of Barack Obama was purely Jacksonian: she
attacked the President for weak counterterrorism policies, but
said nothing about his weak support for dissidents and
democrats.
The only mention of the protests in Iran that I heard in
three days of CPAC was a single line in the introduction to a
panel called “What Is a Conservative Foreign Policy?” in which
moderator Van Hipp said that the Obama administration has been
“AWOL” while “hundreds of thousands in Iran, yearning for
freedom, try to rise up against the Ahmadinejad regime.”
This
is true, but the impression one got from CPAC is
that conservatives are AWOL on that subject, too. The only
speaker on that panel — and indeed at the whole conference — to
discuss at length the link between improving our national
security and improving the lives of foreigners was Joanne
Herring, the former Pakistani Ambassador at Large (and the
conservative activist who was portrayed by Julia Roberts in
Charlie Wilson’s War), who discussed the need for aid to
non-government organizations in Afghanistan.
The largest rival to undiluted Jacksonianism at CPAC was
not neoconservatism but Jeffersonianism, the orientation that
views involvement with foreigners as a threat not primarily to
safety but to liberty, and is thus reflexively anti-war. This was
mainly a function of the large presence of the Campaign for
Liberty, the successor organization to the Ron Paul for President
campaign. Campaign for Liberty’s presence was so large, in fact,
that Paul, whose appeal for his supporters came primarily from
his anti-war message, came in first in the CPAC presidential
straw poll, winning 31% of the vote.
A little bit of Jeffersonianism is a good thing, even an
essential one; to run a foreign policy without being mindful of
the threat to our civil liberties that is inherent in war-making
is to court disaster. The question of how to strike a balance
between liberty and security is always difficult, and the debate
on the topic, which featured a fairly broad spectrum of views,
represented CPAC at its best.
But Jeffersonianism in the pure form that Ron Paul and his
supporters espouse is so unworkable that no American President
has ever quite embraced it — not even Jefferson, who sent the
Navy to the Mediterranean Sea to fight the First Barbary War.
Campaign for Liberty sponsored a panel called “You’ve Been Lied
To: Why Real Conservatives Are Against The War On Terror,” where
panelist argued that we shouldn’t treat terrorist attacks as acts
of war at all, merely as a criminal matter. But radical Islamists
are at war with the United States today just as just as surely as
the Pasha of Tripoli was in 1802, and there could hardly be a
better illustration of the fundamental unseriousness of the
more-Jeffersonian-than-Jefferson mindset than the spectacle of
adults wishing away a reality that their worldview is unequipped
to handle.
Jacksonianism, in some iterations, can be nearly as
unserious. A panel called “Jihad: The Political Third Rail,”
sponsored by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s newly formed
Freedom Defense Initiative, neatly illustrated the limits of the
Jacksonian mindset. The project of this panel was an important
one: Understanding the ideology of America’s enemies. It included
an excellent presentation by Pentagon analyst Steve Coughlin on
how radical Islamists understand the Koran, and several visitors
from abroad who explained how conflicts with Muslim groups are
playing out in their countries. But there was no talk of how
non-violent Muslims understand their religion, or how they can be
persuaded not to support the radicals. In fact, it was clear that
several of these speakers believe that there is no such thing as
a non-radical Muslim — “Islam is the problem,” as one panelist
put it. If the Muslim world were as unreformable as they think,
though, there would be terrorist attacks every day.
Both the Jacksonian mindset and the Jeffersonian mindset,
because they begin with a reluctance to engage in the world, can
provide fertile ground for a suspicion of foreigners that can
lapse into bigotry. It’s not too much of a surprise that one of
the speakers on Campaign for Liberty’s panel, Philip
Giraldi,
seems to have roughly the same view of Jews that
some of the FDI panelists have of Muslims.
The Obama administration offers up fairly undiluted
Wilsonianism, sometimes coupled with some Jeffersonian tendencies
(and also a dash of Mead’s fourth strain, Hamiltonianism, which
is driven by economic interests — the newly strengthened G-20 is
an institution meant to serve Hamiltonian ends). The conservative
critique of this approach should aim to do better than a grumpy
alliance of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians.
Neocon-bashing has become awfully fashionable in recent
years, thanks mainly to the Bush administration’s tactical
failures (never mind that it was the neocons who crafted the
tactical correction that saved Bush’s foreign policy from total
disaster, namely the troop surge that led to new hope in Iraq).
But the Jacksonian-Wilsonian synthesis that seeks to reform the
countries where our enemies are bred without hesitating to pursue
those enemies aggressively and maintain American hegemony —
tempered with a pinch of Jeffersonian concern for the civil
liberties of Americans — remains the most coherent and effective
approach to the world we live in. That approach doesn’t seem to
have a place on the left these days; if it loses it’s place on
the right as well, we are in for some dark days indeed.
