Page 3 of 3 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA The 'X' dreams of
Washington's wonks By Leon
Hadar
terrorists access to
weapons of mass destruction and not on exporting
democracy.
But while both Lind and Etzioni
are marketing substitutes for the Bush Doctrine,
the debate between the two reflects a deeper
division among members of the post-neo-con
foreign-policy community in Washington. Forget
about the never-ending
ideological and political
struggles between realists and idealists, or
between hawks and doves, and instead contemplate a
clash between foreign-policy wonks like Etzioni,
who are trying to rearrange the neo-con memes,
assign to them new labels and assemble them into a
more user-friendly meme complex, and between more
contrarian neo-realists like Lind, who are
conceptualizing new and ground-breaking memes and
now-for-something-completely-different
presidential doctrines.
One of the first
observers to draw attention to these new
foreign-policy divisions, columnist Are Berman of
The Nation magazine, argued that many of the
leading wonks who are expected to occupy top
positions in the US National Security Council,
State Department and Pentagon under a Clinton II
or Obama administration, members of the "strategic
class" - the foreign-policy advisers, think-tank
specialists and pundits - have supported the
ouster of Saddam Hussein and are now basically
promoting a set of neo-con-lite foreign-policy
ideas.
These "muscular internationalists"
or "liberal hawks" include wonks associated with
prestigious think-tanks such as the Brookings
Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, and
the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, where wonks
including Martin Indyk, former ambassador to
Israel; Kenneth Pollack, a former Central
Intelligence Agency official whose book The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
played a crucial role in persuading wavering
Democrats and liberals to back the run-up to the
Iraq war; Peter Beinart, former editor of The New
Republic and author of The Good Fight: Why
Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on
Terror and Make America Great Again
(HarperCollins, 2006); and Ivo Daalder and Richard
Holbrook, who advise Democratic leaders on foreign
policy.
Not unlike Amitai Etzioni, these
wonks are proposing that their ideas would permit
the United States to maintain its hegemonic
position in the Middle East and elsewhere by
adopting more cost-effective and marketable
policies: the US will remain in the driver's seat
but allow the allies to check the tires and
replace the oil, and more efforts would be made to
sell the continuing US drive toward supremacy as a
"multilateral" project.
In fact, a veteran
wonk, Will Marshall, president and founder of the
Progressive Policy Institute, predicted during
another National Interest seminar on "What a
Post-Bush Foreign Policy Might Look Like" that the
foreign-policy doctrine that will be adopted by a
new Democratic president will probably be even
more aggressive in terms of fighting the "war
against terror", strengthening America's military
presence abroad as well as exporting democracy -
the same argument that Beinart has made in his
book.
In contrast to the Next Not So Big
Thing advanced by the members of Washington's old
"strategic class", the neo-realists, and
associated with the New America Foundation, the
Cato Institute (with which I'm affiliated as a
research fellow), the Coalition for a Realistic
Foreign Policy, and such publications as The
National Interest and The American Conservative
(where yours truly serves as a contributing
editor), most of which opposed the "liberation" of
Iraq, are disseminating new foreign-policy memes
that run contrary to conventional wisdom that
guided US foreign policy since the end of the Cold
War, and particularly since September 11: adopting
a strategy based on the protection of core US
security and economic interests abroad; replacing
the unipolar Pax Americana strategy with an
approach based on multipolarism, with the United
States accepting the right of other great powers
to dominate their regional spheres of influence
(China in East Asia; Russia in the "near abroad";
the EU in the eastern Mediterranean); a gradual
military disengagement from the Middle East,
including a more "normal" relationship with Israel
and with the United States playing a role of an
"offshore balancer" in the region; and an end to
the global crusade for democracy with the US
helping to advance political liberty and free
markets as a role model and through trade and
targeted economic assistance.
Some of the
major foreign-policy wonks who have been advancing
these ideas for several years include in addition
to Michael Lind, Steven Clemons, Jim Pinkerton and
Nikolas Gvosdev such scholars and writers as
Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation and
John Hulsman, co-authors of Ethical Realism: A
Vision for America's Role in the World
(Pantheon, 2006); Jonathan Clarke of the
Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy and Stefan
Halper, co-authors of Silence of the Rational
Center: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing
(Basic, 2007); Ted Carpenter and Christopher
Preble of the Cato Institute; Patrick Lang and
Larry Johnson of The National Interest; and Scott
McConnell Andrew Bacevich and Michael Desch of The
American Conservative.
The neo-realists
still lack the kind of financial resources that
have been available to the neo-cons and helped
them spread the message and eventually win the
foreign-policy debate after September 11, 2001.
And as Lind points out in his book, a strategy
based on the assumptions that Washington would
play a less interventionist role in global affairs
runs contrary not only to the ideas and interests
of the neo-cons but also to those of the elites in
Washington whose power and prosperity are tied
very much to the continuing global hegemonic
position of the United States.
These
elites like the idea of residing and operating in,
and ruling over, the New Rome, and they are not
going to give up their jobs in government,
Congress, the media, and K Street, unless they
come under pressure at home from a growing number
of Americans who are less inclined the pay the
costs in blood and treasure that are involved in
maintaining the American Empire, and as these
costs become more apparent as a result of
opposition from counter-hegemonic global powers
(Russia, China) as well as global players (Iran,
Venezuela).
Indeed, the neo-realist memes
would continue to evolve for some time, but they
would only turn into a meme complex, the Next Big
Thing in foreign policy, and a perhaps even a
presidential doctrine, if and when a global crisis
of the magnitude of September 11 that will expose
the high costs of the current policies, say a war
with Iran coupled with rising oil prices and a
deteriorating dollar, will also force leaders in
Washington to reverse course and search for ideas
that make sense of the new global realities and
could help transform a wonk into a Wise Man.
Leon Hadar, a Washington-based
journalist and foreign-affairs analyst, is a
research fellow with the Cato Institute and author
of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle
East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He blogs
atGlobal Paradigms.
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