Catching up on the blogs after my conference (about which more later), my OC buddy Kevin Drum cites a Washington Monthly article by Michael Hirsch, titled ‘No Time to Go Wobbly, Barak.’
Kevin aptly sums up the article:
Hirsh’s piece is long and worth reading completely. He’s actually making one of the most difficult kinds of argument of all, an argument that the current system is fine and doesn’t really need big changes. The UN is flawed but workable. Muscular diplomacy produces results. Liberal internationalism as practiced by FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton is still workable, even (or maybe especially) in a post-9/11 world.
Here’s Hirsch:
It’s true that the system could use some serious fixing up. But are we to imagine that our leaders have learned nothing worthwhile about how to govern international affairs in the nearly 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian War? In truth, American presidents have been merging idealism and realism in practice – some deftly, some not – at least since Woodrow Wilson. Cast your mind back six years, to the relatively quiet end of the Clinton administration. America presided over a flawed but remarkably functioning global community, one that we ourselves had had the biggest hand in creating. The founding of the UN in 1945, with its Security Council designed around Roosevelt’s Four Policemen concept – the United States, Russia, Britain, and China each overseeing stability in their regions – was itself a major attempt to combine idealist international law with realist armed might. And it was created as a conscious effort to fix Woodrow Wilson’s mistakes with the League of Nations. Progress! And after a shaky start, Clinton used that system deftly to stop a civil war in Bosnia, end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and usher China into the WTO.
and
First, end the war on terror. Just declare it over. It is a historical cul-de-sac, an ill-defined conflict without prospect of end on the terms Bush has laid out. Having gradually expanded his definition of the war on terror to include all Islamic “extremists,” among them Hezbollah, Hamas, and radical political groups yet unborn, Bush has plainly condemned us to a permanent war – and one in which we are all but alone, since no one else agrees on such a broadly defined enemy. So let’s replace the war on terror with the kind of coordinated effort that the fight always should have entailed: a hybrid covert-war-and-criminal-roundup confined to al-Qaeda and its spawn, conducted with deep intelligence and special forces cooperation among states within the international system. Only if the next president focuses narrowly on true transnational terrorism, and wins back all the natural allies we’ve lost, can he or she finally achieve America’s goal of making the tolerance of 9/11-style acts as anathema to the international community as support of slavery. No state, no matter how marginal, would dare harbor al-Qaeda-type groups any longer, or even be able to look away if the terrorists tried to settle within its borders. This is the only way to finish off al-Qaeda once and for all.
Raw meat to much of this crowd, but let me take a moment to speak directly to the hawks. You’d better get used to this, and come up with some kind of strategy for dealing with it. The political base within the US (and other countries) for offensive action in the WoT is pretty much exhausted. On the other hand, the failure of the Democrats to have any kind of integrated, sensible response to the issues underlying the WoT hampers them severely – that’s why Guliani does well in the polls when it ought to be a blowout by the Democrats.
Hirsch’s article is critical of Obama’s core foreign policy team, Samantha Power (author of “A Problem From Hell”) and Anthony Lake, both of whom talk about reimagining the international relations mechanisms of the world, and suggests that things were – pretty much OK – until Bush came along.
I keep getting stuck on one or two pesky little problems. That wonderful collection of international organizations – didn’t work so well when Yugoslavia collapsed, did it? it wasn’t until France and the UK decided to act unilaterally – with the strong support of the US – than anything was done.
And the UN has done – exactly what – in the face of a worldwide Islamist movement that has thrown up a series of expansionist and unspeakably violent terrorist groups?
Now Hirsch would disagree; he doesn’t see Black September, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the variety of other splinter groups active from Africa to the Philippines as common actors in a worldwide movement that creates new gangs almost as fast as old ones are killed or captured, he sees them as “… small, fractious terror group[s]…”.
So I’ll disagree with Hirsch’s core premise; that the international system has worked well for the last 40 years. The failure to resolve issues in Yugoslavia; the failure to resolve issues between Israel and Palestine; the failure to resolve issues of genocide in Darfur and Zimbabwe – these aren’t any kind of success I want any part of. The fact is that Clinton’s approach to Islamic terrorism was remarkably effective – he found and arrested a number of terrorists. And the movement grew is stature, power, and deadliness all the same.
So no thank you, Mr. Hirch, I’ll welcome some changes in the international system, and the fact that Obama is being led by people who propose them is a feature, not a bug.
Having said, that I’ll make two followon points.
First, that it’s not likely that we’ll see a ‘For Sale’ sign on the UN headquarters any time soon. The reality is that institutions will change, but they will also persist. And as an interesting note, I’ll suggest that it may well be that one of the drivers of badly-needed institutional change may well be none other than – Cowboy George W Bush. Having broke the norms and walked away having said, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn…” everyone – both within and outside the US – seems anxious to get us back in our seat. That may be a good thing, and it may be something Bush can manage (and is, as he is managing the international coalition against Iran extraordinary well), or something for the next President to pick up.
Hirsch:
…Ronald Reagan, Bush’s putative model, acted more like Ike once he found his footing in office. People mainly remember the “evil empire” rhetoric from his first term and the overreaching of Iran-Contra from his second. What they forget is that Reagan outraged his right-wing China lobby by phasing out arms sales to Taiwan in 1982, and that he angered anti-Soviet hard-liners by moving from rhetorical brinkmanship to genuine negotiations with the Kremlin (prompting none other than Richard Perle to resign in protest in 1987).
…but isn’t that the same thing that Bush is doing now? (Hirsch again)
The best proof of how far overboard Bush went in his first term is how much he’s retreating from those extreme policies, and re-embracing the international system, as he enters the final two years of his presidency. Many of the neocon ideologues of the first term are gone, or marginalized. Bush’s current effort to isolate nuclear-minded Iran – including a very effective policy of asphyxiating Iran’s economy by pressuring international banks into cutting off dealings with it – depends entirely on the UN Security Council resolution passed last year, which legitimizes sanctions. And in mid-February, the president endorsed a fuel-for-nukes accord with North Korea, under which Pyongyang will immediately get 50,000 tons of emergency fuel oil with nearly a million more tons to come in return for shutting down its nuclear program. The agreement is plainly a betrayal of the administration’s previous principled stand against the “nuclear blackmail” that it accused Bill Clinton of succumbing to, and represents a 180-degree turnabout from Bush’s previous refusal to negotiate with a regime he viewed as illegitimate – so much so that its fiercest critic was none other than John Bolton, who had just resigned as UN ambassador. And it reportedly took the White House’s most senior neocon, Elliott Abrams, by surprise. Former senior administration members told me the pact could have been concluded only because several key hard-liners – including Rumsfeld and Bolton – had left, and because Cheney’s influence had waned.
I’ll revisit this issue in a year or so.
And finally, to get a real sesne of how I feel about the international institutions Hirsch loves so well, I’d suggest that you go rent Terry Gilliam’s brilliant movie ‘Munchausen’. Set in a proxy Vienna, as the Turk cannonades the city and prepres to sack it, the Administrator (‘First Citizen’ as I recall) Horatio Jackson rules with the iron hand of reason and law,and with little care for the reality around him.
…you have to see it, really. I don’t have time to transcribe his better speeches (although if any readers want to, I’d be happy to post them). But here’s one — Jackson and the Sultan are negotiating, as they do every week.
Sultan: What about the virgins?
Horatio Jackson: Sultan, forget about the virgins! We’re out of virgins!
