The “Realism” Fad, Truth in Labeling, The Obama Doctrine, and Godot

Jeff Jacoby asks how many Democrats still believe in the moral superiority of democracy.  Nowadays, I wonder.  I frequently hear it said, especially by adherents of the fad mislabeled as “realism,” that nations have the “right” to choose their own way.  The problem with this argument is that invariably, “nations” really means a tiny clique of thugs and oligarchs with the keys to the helicopter gunships, who exercise that “right” by proxy and do the choosing for everyone else.  I’ve also wondered how happy the voluble chatterers who espouse this theory would be without their rights to speak freely.  This is just one level of hypocrisy away from the pederast mullahs who want to save the purity of their societies from the destructive urges of other people to hold hands.

The new crop of realists being stamped out of grad schools today reminds me of nothing so much as the shiny new neoconservatives of 2003 — enthusiastic ideologues who have been compressed by their philosophy’s basic truths, but who will in due course be unleashed with the excess that faddish views inevitably produce.  In the case of the neoconservatives, with whom I admittedly share many points of agreement, the excess was to go beyond the moral and pecuniary superiority of propogating personal freedom to support for “using U.S. power, including military force, to bring democracy and human rights to other countries.”  Neoconservatism has become such an ill-defined epithet that it’s fair to suspect that a straw man is being attacked here.  But to the extent that this is an accurate characterization of neoconservatism, it’s a not view I’m often inclined to join.  Indeed, I’ve wanted to remove most of our troops from South Korea and Europe for years, and I’ve been less solicitous of using force against North Korea than either William Perry or Newt Gingrich.  It would be far better to sell the Koreans and the Europeans all the arms they choose to buy, in much the way that Israel does and Taiwan doesn’t.  I believe that foreign deployments risk entanglements in foreign wars not of our choosing, and I believe we can continue to exercise as much influence as we need to through the supply of superior weapons, intelligence, air and naval superiority, command/control, and logistics.

My hopelessly out-of-vogue view derives from the old Nixon/Reagan Doctrines of helping people to either defend or win their own freedom with their own arms and blood, but with arms we provide if diplomatic means fail.  I recognize the basic impatience of Americans with foreign wars, and that freedom fighting is best left to the people who must live or die on the land they fight for.  At the same time, I recognize that some societies (Lebanon) are relatively better prepared for democracy than others (Palestine), and that the pursuit of democracy should be a gradual, Hegelian thing calibrated to a society’s maturity, education, and capacity for self-government.  I believe in the importance of diplomacy, but I recognize the pointlessness of diplomacy with nations that don’t share our values or basic interests, unless that diplomacy is backed by the alternative of political, economic, or military consequences.
I still remember when most “realists” and neoconservatives agreed on something:  like the vast majority of Americans, I supported the decision to invade Iraq based on what I thought we knew in 2003.  At the time, I was wearing a uniform myself.  I don’t regret my views, and history is gradually revealing how much better off the world might just become because of the invasion.  I also have a fairly vivid picture of what the Middle East would be like today with Saddam in power and the U.N. utterly powerless to contain him.  True, we suffered needlessly because of the misbegotten tactics of 2004 and 2005, but if you’ve studied insurgencies through history, our casualties and the time it took for us to achieve a decisive shift in popular attitudes in Iraq will — from the safe distance of time — mark Iraq as one of history’s more successful counterinsurgencies.

Ironically, I let the ex-interventionist, born-again “realist” Kenneth Pollock talk me out of the idea of helping the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam on their own, but unlike Pollock and most of the intellectuals in this town, I opposed the panicky flight for Iraq’s exits after we’d already made the decision to invade and things got hard.  Wars cannot be retracted ex-post-facto based on shifting intelligence without inviting an even greater disaster.  Unlike most war-weary intellectuals, I’ve actually served in the military and know what defeat would have done to our morale and to our standing as a nation.  Thank God George Bush made the single best decision of his otherwise dismal presidency and ignored the herd then.  Today, we and the Iraqis have a decent shot at avoiding a catastrophic defeat and catalyzing Iraq’s evolution into a habitable place.  Certainly Iraq is not approaching Jeffersonian democracy, nor was it ever realistic to expect as much.  If it can be as free as South Korea was in the 1960’s, it may eventually evolve into something as free as South Korea is today.  Just as certainly, the “realist” views that we could negotiate our way to a peaceful Iraq with Iran and Syria from a position of prostration, or that we could leave a victorious al Qaeda in possession of vast swaths of Iraq, were madness.  That view would have brought Iraq to a place somewhere between 1990’s Afghanistan and 1970’s Cambodia.  It could have been the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster since 1945.

The “realist” view of North Korea is equally unrealistic.  After all we’ve experienced in the last two decades, one self-described “realist” at Real Clear World even said this:

[T]he best way of gaining the support of the North Korean regime to stop nuclear proliferation is…by diplomacy and offering the North Koreans incentives.  [Real Clear World Blog]

Here is someone who has never heard of the al-Shifa reactor, which North Korea was building at a furious pace at the height of Agreed Framework II, as American fuel oil warmed Kim Jong Il’s clot-sodden veins.  Quite the contrary — Kim Jong Il used diplomacy to hoodwink us into relaxing the enforcement of UNSCR 1695 and 1718, thus licensing even more proliferation and letting him cross more “red lines.” The “realist” way accomplished absolutely nothing of value toward disarming North Korea, but did much to undermine international counterproliferation and the authority of the U.N. in general.  In the end, to have a “realist” view requires belief in a whole series of wishful delusions:  that Kim Jong Il can be persuaded to give up his nuclear weapons, that he proliferates because of rational incentives rather than malice, that he seeks to open his society to the world to improve the lives of his subjects, and that China means us no harm and really wants North Korea to play nicely with everyone.  It is not possible to defend any of those views against a rational interpretation of recent history.

But is Obama’s foreign policy “realist”?  Frankly, I have no idea.  What I see is a vaporous muddle without any coherent world view.  Ex-post-facto opposition to the war in Iraq seems to be the whole extent of its unanimity — all together now:  “We’re tiiiiired.”  Take the incoherence of Obama’s North Korea policy.  Just after North Korea’s missile test, Special Envoy Bosworth was telling us that we’d be back to bilateral talks with them shortly, as though nothing more was amiss than the usual kidnapping, genocide, and threats to turn Tokyo into a sea of fire.  Today, we’re hearing that bilateral talks aren’t going to happen just yet (but just give them time).  This smacks of the sort of gridlock that the Bush Administration, notwithstanding its portrayals for ideological rigidity, never quite overcame.  This is how presidencies fail to deal with crises, and the urgency of creating coherent policies (ie., “ready from Day One”) is why we give presidents-elect nearly three months of transition time from election to inauguration.

When did I realize we were in trouble?  When I heard that Obama had brought three hundred foreign policy advisors aboard his campaign, an image that smacks less of “brain trust” than “circus tent.”  Now whittle that understrength battalion down to the collection of svengalis who’ve emerged as influential figures since the transition:  liberal interventionists (Samantha Power),  Jew-baiting kooks (Chas Freeman), panda-huggers (Dennis Blair), left-wing Machiavellians (Hillary Clinton, Christopher Hill) and traditional liberal doves (Susan Rice).   Mix  them all  that together and you have scrapple,  with just as much mystery about the beast of origin.  Imagine what fun it would be — to say nothing of the pay per view revenues — to arm them with sharp pencils and letter openers, lock them in a gymnasium, and tell them that no one leaves until we have a written statement on our new Tibet policy.

The question remains:  what is the Obama doctrine?  To say that it is not the Bush Doctrine isn’t enough anymore.