Fukuyama's changed position to "Realistic Wilsonianism"

Rejection of the neoconservative position, and the resumption of the ideal of working thru international institutions in America at the Crossroads :democracy, power, and the neoconservative legacy by Francis Fukuyama. Do you agree/disagree/why?

This is my first forum and I'm not familiar with the rules, but I presume one can have interesting and useful opinions without necessarily being able to cite a book.

I'm not so certain that the chapter is entirely closed on that thing we call neoconservatism, because I don't think it is singularly expressed through military preemption. Nor can it be said that the political expression of neoconservatism through the record of Cheney, Feith and Wolfowitz was part of the accepted wisdom at the Pentagon. I think we can call the PNAC pioneers, but not the last of the mohicans.

What has Fukuyama done to expressly repudiate the charter of the PNAC?

I don't know what the "charter of the PNAC" is, but here is a quote from Fukuyama: pp. 190-191, inAmerica at the Crossroads where he himself repudiated the neoconservative position in favor of what he calls realistic Wilsonianism:

"The most important way that American power can be exercised at this juncture is not through the exercise of military power but through the ability of the United States to shape international institutions."........"The neoconservatives......failed to understand that that alignment (between ideals and self interest) most often occurred through America's ability to create durable political frameworks through which it could achieve long-term cooperation with like-minded nations.

I haven't read the book you reference, but based on what you say/quote so far, I'd have to disagree. I don't necessarily consider myself a neoconservative, but I think what Fukuyama is calling Wilsonianism would be a mistake.

Our country could not maintain (much less make any progress) it's current level/status in the world if we tried to partner with other countries. The simple fact that we'd have to concede and operate at "their level" would tie our hands and slow, if not halt, growth and stability.
I don't think any country, when it's a global power (even looking back 200, 400, etc. years) ever took the time to "create durable political frameworks". That's because those types of frameworks, while looking good on paper, very rarely work in real world situations. They just don't.
Back when France, England, Spain, etc. ran the world they didn't align themselves with anyone. They knew it would be harmful to their own progress and they didn't have to.
That same "fact of life" still applies today.
Nobody would gain from the US pulling back on the foreign policy reins.

I am going to order Fukuyama's book though. I am interested to see his examples of "the ability of the United States to shape international institutions." and "often occurred through America's ability to create durable political frameworks".

I see too many differences (historical and current) between the US outlook and the European outlook on things to give any real weight to his hope for cooperating with like-minded nations.

What an excellent idea for a Forum!

Hopefully, the narrow focus of the Forum can guarantee high quality debates and discussion.

And not only debates. May I suggest that one useful contribution to the Forum would be to post, perhaps giving each title a thread of its own, links to the two or three dozen major books on this subject, along with links to the best reviews of them, to provide background for informed discussion.

I would segregate country-specific books (books which focus on Iraq, or Afghanistan, for example) into threads, if not Groups, of their own, too. And the same for books looking at the nature of modern Islam. (In fact, both a start on readings lists for both Iraq and Islam has been made on the Political Conservatives site, and the conservative slant of this site should not discourage liberals or others from making contributions to these reading lists, which are works in progress.)

Some of the titles I have in mind are Kagan's Of Paradise and Power, Scharansky's book on democracy, Bobbit's The Shield of Achilles, books by Ralph Peters, Robert Kaplan and Victor Davis Hanson, Nye's Soft Power.

And both Democracy In America, by Tocqueville, and The Communist Manifesto, deserve to be in this list, because each in its own way was a prescient attempt to analyze how the world was going, a hundred and fifty years ago.

Also: we should have a thread exclusively for links to print journals and websites which are mainly concerned with this topic. (journals such as National Interest, American Interest, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Commentary, Weekly Standard, New Republic), and websites such as Stratfor, Last Superpower, Demokratiya, Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, etc.

I'm out of country right now but when I get back home in a couple of weeks I will make a start on belling this cat with annotated links to the titles and sites I have mentioned.

#4 We already do partner with other countries - NATO, GATT, WTO, the UN, WHO, the AEC, the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, etc. Fukuyama is saying that institutions like that are necessary, so we can gradually move others to our way of thinking without military force or coercion.

5- I would like to add some titles- Eternal Peace by Immanuel Kant, which sort of anticipates world government, Fiasco by Thomas Ricks which criticizes the handling of the war in Iraq and Niall Ferguson's books on the decline of Empire, which explain why Great Britain lost her empire, and the similarities with our situation. I'm glad you like my idea for a forum, and hope that the contributions remain civil even if we disagree heartily. Some of us are not conservative in all of our thinking but are liberal in some areas and conservative in others, like me.

Not sure why you needed to start a group for this topic instead of discussing it within one of the existing groups.

#6 Yeah, I'm aware of all those groups and I was hoping there was more. I honestly think (as sad as it may be) that those groups are not/can not be as effective as the US acting independently.

In a perfect world it'd be great if we could get all the nations to sit around a table and develop global policy that protected and progressed all the nations involved. But there are too many countries that can't even keep their own citizens from blowing each other up, much less being willing/having the strength to stand shoulder to shoulder with the bigger countries of the world.

I just don't see those groups being very effective.

And I have to second #5's recommendation of Kagan's Of Paradise and Power

#8 deniro: I started this group because I wanted to invite both conservatives and liberals, and they each have their own separarte groups. Political philosophy seemed more academic and theoretical, and this subject seems to me to be of utmost current and future importance.

I think it would be a mistake to attempt to distill the "neoconservative position" to any readily identifiable set of policy choices - neoconservatives occupy a wide range of positions on the Iraq war and the use of force, and those politicians who have chiefly architected the Iraq war - Cheney, Rumsfield, Bush - cannot meaningfully be called "neocons."

Nevertheless, there is a policy position which is clearly at the heart of Fukuyama's volta. In my reading, Fukuyama has recoiled from what he sees as the unilateralist impulse of the Bush Administration borne of it's own political incompetence. I think this perception of the Bush Administration stands clearly in opposition to Fukuyama's hopes for democracy as expressed in The End of History and the Last Man. In my understanding, Fukuyama's view of the end of history is predicated on a universally shared set of principals: the abandonment of utopian political experiments, social restraint of capitalist excesses, universal human rights, and the rule of law as the expression of the will of the people. In his view, the end of the Cold War represented not just the triumph of capitalism over communism, but of the ancient dream of democracy. (As Robert Kagan would later suggest in The Atlantic Monthly, the West had finally resolved the tensions between the militaristic and political democratic impulses representated by Sparta and Athens.)

But inasmuch as he was wrong about the end of history, Fukuyama is also wrong about the Bush Administration, or rather about the strategic difficulties facing it.

There is a contradiction in the Hegelian suppostion of historical evolution - at least in my understanding of Fukuyama's application of it. For while Fukuyama saw in the end of the Cold War the triumph of social democracy over utopianist Marxism, he did not correctly integrate the risk which failed states posed to the evolution of industrialised and developing nations. So while it is clear that Marxism, such as it exists at all, wanders the earth like the undead - a zombie ideology - the evolutionary process which should have been accelerated by the collapse of meaningful opposition instead spun out of control, or at best remains in a state of arrested development.

It is as a solution to this problem (of the failure of Western social democracy to advance it's cause globally since the end of the Cold War) that neoconservatism has lately made it's fortune. So far from representing the end of history, the West in the early 90s represented a fractured political organization of outdated and outmoded alliances which increasingly found the constituent states at odds with each other and, lacking any meaningful forces to unite them, were incapable of addressing the most pressing and intractable political crises with any sense of coherency. The conservative view held that international intransigence, as expressed by the spoiler role in the UN played by Russia and China and to a lesser extent France, was detrimental to Western interests and no longer meaningful in a material sense. The "neo" part of the equation provided a revolutionary ideology which, at least as far as the Bush Administration, overcame traditional conservative opposition to the radical break from the cautious statesmanship exemplified by James Baker or Henry Kissinger. (Consider here Bush's religiosity as it informs (neo)conservative triumphalism and infuses it with a messianic impulse which has had massive, if perhaps short-lived, influence on the American electorate.)

Fukuyama's shift from neoconservative to liberal conservative stems, in my view, from a rejection of the Bush Administrations' radicalism which is riving not just international politics, but domestic American politics as well.

Iraq is of course the test case, and it is tempting to attribute Fukuyama's shift to the horror that Iraq has become. However, in my reading his opposition to Bush's policies have usually been voiced in terms of opposing his unilateralism, which I believe Fukuyama senses as being antagonistic to his hopes for the end of history. And yet, to accede to this view is to accept an argument without it's having been made: while the tendency is to lay at Bush's (and the neocons') feet the blame for Iraq's condition, the reality is that the context of the war and it's aftermath is the result of an historical process many years in the making. It is not at all clear that alternatives existed to the debacle Bush has wrought.

So Fukuyama is faced with an irreconcilable contradiction. In rejecting the revolutionary will to force, the acceptance of violence, that has come to define neoconservatism in the popular mind, he is left with the only other possible alternative, which is the continuation of violence by other means (means other than direct Western involvement) as a result of continued inaction by the international community. But this is nothing less than a kind of historical apartheid by which vast portions of the world are simply excluded from the historical evolution which Fukuyama sees as bringing with it the end of history, as well as a rejection of the principle of universal human rights. In my view the fallaciousness of this position was portentiously revealed on September 11th. The alternative, however, is the rejection of the triumphalism which has animated his ideas since "The End of History," for by it's embrace of violence the West has become the very utopian menace Fukuyama believed we had overcome.

I think it is a profound kind of delusion to believe that by rejecting utopian violence, we can end dystopian violence.

Lastly I would add that I think Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground provide excellent insight into a kind of counter-historical evolution against which Fukuyama's is set.

Well, I don't think you need another group because this group posits a false dichotomy of either/or.

There are times when intervention is called for, and times for when it is not. There are many factors which might influence such a decision. But I wouldn't want to put forth an ideological template that says always or never. Foreign policy is a relative (relativistic?) business.

I think of Conrad's Secret Agent as a couner-revolutionary novel, a warning about terrorists (who in the book are called anarchists).

Assuming that we had the money, the soldiers, the armaments and the linguistic skills, would you recommend that we unseat all the dictators in the world? Or pacify areas of civil war like the Congo and the Sudan. If not, how would you choose which ones to try to unseat or pacify? Only those with oil and no nuclear weapons and no big brother?
I thought it was interesting that an important neocon thinker rejected interventionism. I didn't say it was always bad. I'd rather we were in Darfur than in Iraq, but not at the risk of war with China.

To me there is usually a range of possibilities for almost any political situation--with politicians very often whittling this range down for the public's perusal into one or two--an either this or that. This particular administration that we have now conducts business almost entirely in this way--more or less resting it's choice in the end on a dictum of 'we had no choice'. It seems to me that they almost always have an end in sight but they tend on getting lost along the way and we as passengers--reluctant or otherwise are expected to keep our mouths shut and just enjoy the ride to nowhere.

Deniro, I think you're right about The Secret Agent; consider this especially in light of attempts made against the Czar following the Crimean War and Conrad's own family's involvement in the January Uprising.

Almigwin, did Fukuyama really reject interventionism? Or has he merely distanced himself from the Bush Administration which, as I've suggested, is not really wholly neoconservative in particularly it's Iraq policies? To me he seems to have bought into the delusion that "multilateralism" is a discreet policy position which the Bush Administration has formally rejected. I believe he sees this as the least intolerable contradiction to his theory about the end of history.

Lupin3- I quoted him in message 3 above from America at the Crossroads. Here is some more from p.174, ibid.

"If the United States seriously committed itself to acting in the future through the NATO alliance, it would trade freedom of action for legitimacy. NATO supported the Afghan intervention but not the invasion of Iraq. Had the United States submitted itself not to a "global test" but to a test involving most of the world's developed democracies, it would not have launched the second war* and in the end would have been better off for having observed this self-restraint. It is not a bad habit of mind for policy makers in Washington to feel they have to be able to sway opinion in this key group of countries".

*the second Gulf war

Intervention/Non-Intervention perhaps focusses the options a bit too narrowly. But in any case, to return to a question asked earlier, any discussion about what the future foreign policy of the United States should be must include both liberals and conservatives.

This is because the United States is a "fifty-fifty" nation -- it will be governed by from time to time by politicians whose support rests mainly in one, or the other, voting blocs. As a conservative I deplore this fact, but I recognize that it is true (and I did so before last November).

Therefore, whether or not you are a liberal, or conservative, or something else, if you have well-founded ideas about what our foreign policy should be, you should want to take every opportunity to convince members of the Opposition of the validity of as much of your worldview as possible.

Next to being "correct", it is important that our foreign policy should be broadly bi-partisan (although within the limits of a valid foreign policy orientation there will be room for both conservative and liberal interpretations of it).

Thus the basic orientation of the United States towards international Communism was broadly bi-partisan, even if the particular application of this orientation had rather different applications under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. (Partisans and opponents of both men exaggerate their differences.)

We have entered a new phase of world history, one in which the future is especially unpredictable and fast-moving. I don't believe that any political tendency has yet advanced a really well-thought-out, deeply insightful analysis of where we are, or may be, going and what we should do to shape the future in a benevolent direction.

Thus argument and discussion among people who are concerned about this, and who, through reading and/or experience, have something to contribute, is to be welcomed.

Of course, if you believe that the supporters of "the other side" are uniformly fools or knaves, then it is perhaps pointless to argue or discuss with them.

But the reality is that most people, of whatever political persuasion, are broadly committed to the maintenance of the United States as a liberal democracy, and thus are open to arguments about how best to do that in a potentially dangerous world.

My nightmare President would be Hillary Clinton. But I don't suppose that she would deliberately choose to try to work against American interests in the world, or to try to advance the victory of the forces of Darkness. Therefore I seek to get a hearing from among her supporters for my own ideas about what our foreign policy should be, in case my nightmare comes true. And so for liberals, vice versa.

What are the goals of America's foreign policy?

I think the goal of foreign policy for conservatives and liberals is to have good relations with democratic governments, and non-belligerent relationships with the others (autocratic, unstable, communist or other). There are essentially 4 approaches to this goal: isolationism, multilateralism, realpolitik and interventionism.
1.The isolationists say "take care of our own problems and let the rest of the world take care of theirs". This may still include some charity toward underdeveloped countries, and continuation of multilateral alliances where we have treaty obligations. It would have a strong military capability for defense, but not for offense.
2. Multilateralism is the attempt to join with other democratic countries to form alliances for mutual security, and coordinated behavior in trouble spots and with intransigent governments or groups (like Korea, Sudan, Hezbollah or Hamas). Any military efforts would be taken in conjunction with other countries as was done in Bosnia/Kosovo.
3. Realpolitik is the approach that is determined by power relationships. You deal with the powerful and accomodate their points of view even if they are quite opposed to your own as in Saudi Arabia (with
a theocratic monarchy and disenfranchised women). Kissinger is the prime exponent of realpolitik.
4. Interventionism is messianic. It attempts to change other govenments through force, subversion, propaganda or a combination of all three, where it is believed that the change can be achieved without too great a loss of life, money or allies. This sometimes backfires as in the attempt to capture the Suez canal by France, Britain and Israel.

I think the problem is not the goals, but the methods chosen to achieve them. I am for a combination of multilateralism and realpolitik. Because of globalization, I would hope to see more training of our intelligence community, our diplomats and our military in other cultures and languages so that interventions, if they occur, can be more successful.

Re: #13 - I wouldn't have the US going all over the globe unseating all of the dictators. Though I think some need to go. I think the reasoning is universal (as you state in the #19 post) it's just a matter of degree/proximity.

The world may be flat when it comes to business, medicine, etc. (The World is Flat) but when it comes to defense and protection the US is still very much so an island nation. We're lucky to have two oceans on either side. (One reason why our defensive/military view of the world is and always will be different from our Europen friends). But that's not an excuse for us to ignore the plight of those not fortunate enough to live here. If we truly believe that there are certain "unalienable rights", then those surely extend to those unlucky souls born "in the bad places".

And if by helping those in need of help, we also strengthen our global position, add a little more resilence to our "global dependency" structure and make the world a little more democracy friendly, then that's a bonus. I means let's face it, democracies don't fight democracies. At least to date they haven't.

Longterm stability is a good thing.

A good one to read on this is Stephen Flynn's "The edge of disaster : rebuilding a resilient nation" (I couldn't find a touchstone for it)

In #19 it's stated that "Interventionism is messianic". I know how I'm interpreting what you said, but when you get a moment could you elaborate that point a little more?

Perhaps it was an exaggeration to call interventionism 'messianic'. What I meant was really hubris. Interventionists who believe in preemptive war or covert undermining of regimes take the position that they know what is best for another country, and if they can topple the leadership, the population will automatically see that our approach is the correct one (constitutional law, freedom of press and assembly, capitalism, separation of powers, independent judiciary, etc) and put it into effect like Japan and Germany did after WWII. It isn't that simple or easy, as we are finding out in Iraq.

Surely the goal, or, if you will, the meta-goal of American foreign policy should be to defend and advance the welfare of the American people.

"Good relations with democratic governments, and non-belligerent relations with others" could be proposed as a means of realizing that goal (or meta-goal), but are not ends in themselves.

And as commonsense first approximations of a sensible foreign policy orientation they are unobjectionable.

However, do they not imply a static view of the world, in which the relative power and attitude of all nations is a fixed quantity? Whereas in reality, the world is changing rapidly, as never before, and not necessarily in a benevolent way. So commonsense wisdom may not be adequate to deal with the on-coming reality.

Decades ago, conservatives argued for meeting the perceived threat of Communist expansion (via the subversion of non-Communist countries) with military force, often using very unpleasant domestic proxies for our own power.

This implied essentially supporting the status quo in those countries, although our actions were never as bad as painted by the Chomskyites. (We preferred to support moderate centrist democrats where we could, so long as they were unambiguously pro-American.)

The liberal critique of this at the time, as I recall, was that, where the Communists were garnering mass support, we must attempt to remove the reasons why the people in these countries supported the Communists.

Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, and the Peace Corps, were examples of this, albeit rather tepid ones.

Now it seems to me that the old liberal argument applies today. This does not mean we should send in the Marines to unseat every dictator on earth, or even any of them.

However, between waging open war against a noxious regime, and trying to keep on good terms with it, there is a whole spectrum of activities in which we could engage, aimed at eventually seeing it replaced by one more congenial to our real long term interests -- by which I mean a democratic government.

I hesitate to offer as the good example of this approach, the old Soviet Union, but what the hell: I offer as at least an example worth studying, of this approach, the old Soviet Union.

It tried to maintain diplomatic relations with all capitalist governments. Yet it labored mightily to prepare the way for the overturn of these governments, eventually, via domestic organizations who shared Soviet goals.

The Soviet leaders did this because they rightly did not see the world as static. They knew that in the long term, either the Soviet system, or capitalism, would prevail. And they were right.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, is not going to remain an absolute monarchy forever. A revolution is going to happen there, and probably one under the Islamic flag. Should this revolution be one which is violently hostile to us, we will have no choice but to oppose it, as happened in Iran.

But we should be open to the possibility that forces inspired by Islam, but not set on establishing a new kind of oppressive theocracy, may come to power there. And in any event we should attempt to be seen by the people in Saudi Arabia as a force which is on the side of democracy, rather than one which supports democracy only when it suits us.

How this perspective fits into the isolationist/multilaterist/realpolitik/interventionist spectrum set out by Almigwin in #19, I don't know.

At what cost do we attempt to singlehandedly change the world? The peace dividend has not been invested in infrastructure, and we cannot care for our own. Moreover, because the US has not exercised leadership on really important issues (such as climate), tomorrow's world will be a reduced one with many more Darfurs. What a sad example and legacy for our kids... Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Succeed by Jared Diamond. The rise and fall of the great powers : economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy.

We have to count both the cost of trying to change the world, selectively, and the cost of not trying to change it.

A surgical strike on Germany to remove Hitler in early 1933, or any time for a couple of years afterwards, would have saved tens of millions of lives ten years down the line, for example.

"Exercising leadership" on climate change is trying to change the world, and good luck on persuading the Indians and Chinese not to burn all that cheap oil and coal that we would highmindedly refuse.

Darfur is not being caused by climate change, and is in fact peripheral to American interests. (Which is, I suppose, why those war-mongers in the National Council of Churches, and George Clooney, want us to intervene there.)

The "peace dividend" should have been invested in re-orienting our military for the new kinds of wars which are approaching. We are going to pay, and are paying, for its having been weakened.

(And I am shocked to see a liberal recommending favorably a book by Jared Diamond, whose views on racial superiority in intelligence, I should have thought, would have placed him beyond the pale.)

Jared Diamond, whose views on racial superiority in intelligence

From where do you get this?

One other problem with Iraq is that it has legitimized in many middle eastern minds the fundamentalist hatred that al quaeda is behind. The unilateralist approach to resolving this question has fallen flat on its face. There's no way for us to deal with this problem on our own and in fact being in Iraq does nothing to solve the problem posed by al queda. It is wasted time, effort and lives--what we are now in the process of doing is avoiding a humiliation that is inevitable. This administration does not want to pay for the war until it is out of office and does not want to bear the responsibility for the defeat on its own. It wants to pass it along and however many more of our soldiers have to die or to be maimed for them to avoid admiting their mistake is of much less concern to them. Apart from that all though is something maybe even more troubling and that is the distance in time between Sept. 2001 and the day when its planners meet real justice. They still live and operate in this world as do their ideas. And even to say they'll eventually be brought to justice falls under 'only time will tell'. The failure to bring them to justice though allows them the opportunity to plan and to execute again and make no mistake it is the present administration that is at fault for that.

Onto our foreign policy it seems to me it is built around a capitalist economic model which gives free rein to banks and multi-nationals to the point where they've become a kind of government behind the government (or to extend it globally a government behind all governments). There is resistance to this in grass roots movements throughout North America and Europe. There is also resistance from many South American states and not just the socialistic. Argentina, Brazil, Chile seem to think they can think their way out of their own economic problems without our or other international making organizations (IMF, Worldbank, WHO) help. There is also resistance by States determined just to use the apparatus to benefit of themselves. Even thinking in global terms--it seems to me that there are some states out there who still think of themselves as sovereign and at least in certain circumstance capable of making internal decisions for themselves and one like us who think we can set the table and decide where everyone sits. It's time to rein ourselves in a little and think in more pragmatic terms.

LolaWalser: he states his views explicitly in Guns, Germs and Steel. When I get back home and have access to my library (end of the week) I will cite the relevant, shocking pages. For some reason, the anti-racists seem to have overlooked his opinions on the genetic basis of the superior intelligence of one race over another.

Iriley:
With respect to your first paragraph: there is an old Jewish joke, about a Jew named Cohen trying to immigrate, illegally, from Czarist Russia, using a passport with a false name. At the frontier,the suspicious border guard scrutinizes the passport, and then asks the would-be immigrant: "What's your name?" Panicking, the poor man forgets the false name, and says ... "Well .... it's not Cohen!"

Let us stipulate, as the lawyers say, that you are entirely correct about our intervention in Iraq: a disaster at every level, in every conceivable way.

That still leaves the question: what should our foreign policy be?

Okay, it shouldn't involve invading countries where there is a huge amount of evidence that we will end up hated by most of the population, inflamed by national and religious feelings, and bogged down in the middle of an intractable civil war, and where there was very little evidence of an immediate threat (WMD, etc). You won't get much argument there.

But that still leaves open a wide range of alternatives.

As for your second paragraph: there is some truth in the idea that economic forces are outrunning the abilities of governments to control them, but this is not entirely a bad thing.

You assume that governments are necessarily more benevolent than corporations, but this is not always so. Most Third World countries would be better off if they were the direct responsibility of some multi-national corporation. If Sony or BMW or McDonald's ran Nigeria, maybe the roads would get paved.

However, you do raise an important point: the relationship between economic development, and how best that can happen, and foreign policy.

I think it confuses more than clarifies to lump, say, Chile in with Brazil, or either with Argentina. Each has its own problems, unique to it, and none of these three are particularly hostile to capitalism or international corporations, or, for that matter, the World Bank, IMF, or WHO (! did you mean to include the World Health Organization in this list?).

This is worthy of a separate thread: what is clear is that capitalism of some sort is the road forward for the Third World, and also engagement with the world economy. Within that broad perspective, there are many possible paths: the Asian Tigers show one successful model (one with a fair amount of government intervention, contrary to some free-market dogmatists), Chile shows another.

Clearly the American government needs to restrain itself from appearing to meddle with the internal economic arrangements of other countries, even when they are making mistakes.

On the other hand, all governments must seek to defend the interests of their own nationals abroad. I expect the Argentine government to do its best to get access for Argentine producers to the American market, and vice versa.

And on the third hand, it may be necessary, sometimes, to subordinate the immediate economic interests of our citizens to broader foreign-policy objectives.

But while admitting the truth of these bland generalities, a concrete foreign policy has to be conducted. And concretes is what we should argue.

So wherein do you find something objectionable in our foreign policy towards, say, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil?

Perhaps I can start the ball rolling with a contribution: I think we made a grave error in being seen to be associated with the coup attempt against Mr Chavez in Venezuela a few years ago.

I won't motivate my belief here, except to say it is not one based on abstract principle, but on pragmatic considerations.

LolaWalser: he states his views explicitly in Guns, Germs and Steel. When I get back home and have access to my library (end of the week) I will cite the relevant, shocking pages. For some reason, the anti-racists seem to have overlooked his opinions on the genetic basis of the superior intelligence of one race over another.

My goodness, shocking "pages" of racist stuff in a Pulitzer-winning bestseller that no one until you has noticed! :)

It's been years since I read it, but I'll wager you seriously misunderstood him.

Doug1943, re Darfur not being caused by climate change, I'm no expert, but our own State Dept reports , “The arid climate and the competition for scarce resources over the years have contributed to recurring conflict between nomadic Arab herders and non-Arab farmers, particularly over land and grazing rights.” http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/36028.htm

Desertification due to climate change can only exacerbate such competition and result in more such conflicts in future. I really wish you were right on this one...

Will a unified world economics lead to a unified world government?

Among our most pressing concerns are our internal situation. To me you could say foreign policy is like inhaling and domestic like exhaling. One doesn't happen without the other. We have reached the 300 million population this year with a projected 400 million in the not so distant future and it looks to me that political foresight of either party is unable to look past the next election. I understand the need to think globally but one has to also understand that in a short period of time we are going to have to meet the needs of another 100 million in population in housing, education, health care, employment, energy etc. etc. This is huge and I don't see very much discussion anywhere about it. Who are these 100 million going to be? and what are they going to do? Can we or should we continue to draw down the manufacturing and industrial sectors of our society? Would be policy makers need to think about this. It's not foreign policy that I'm concerned about more. Our standing in the world--how others will see us 20 years from now is important but the internal economic engine that is going to keep 400 million people relatively happy is a bigger concern.

FWIW I will say this about our government's foreign and domestic policy and how they seem to work in conjunction with each other--and this goes back longer than Bush's presidency. It's like our left lung (inhaling) sometimes doesn't know what our right lung (exhaling) is doing. Domestic policy should inform on foreign policy--they shouldn't be separate from each other. As long as they follow separate agendas (as I see them now) we're going to be a little short of coherence from either. Iraq is just another symptom of that--in his critique given for turning down the military overlord's job Gen. Sheehan more or less cited that same lack of a coherent plan.

Almigwin said:
“Lupin3- I quoted him in message 3 above from America at the Crossroads. Here is some more from p.174, ibid.

'If the United States seriously committed itself to acting in the future through the NATO alliance, it would trade freedom of action for legitimacy. NATO supported the Afghan intervention but not the invasion of Iraq. Had the United States submitted itself not to a "global test" but to a test involving most of the world's developed democracies, it would not have launched the second war* and in the end would have been better off for having observed this self-restraint. It is not a bad habit of mind for policy makers in Washington to feel they have to be able to sway opinion in this key group of countries'."

And, quoting Fukuyama:
“"The most important way that American power can be exercised at this juncture is not through the exercise of military power but through the ability of the United States to shape international institutions."........"The neoconservatives......failed to understand that that alignment (between ideals and self interest) most often occurred through America's ability to create durable political frameworks through which it could achieve long-term cooperation with like-minded nations.”

I don’t see Fukuyama’s comments here as clearly repudiating interventionism per se. Clearly he believes in the supremacy of “shap{ing} international institutions,” as opposed to the implicitly unilateralist abnegation of “self-restraint,” in the imposition of force to remove the Ba’athist regime. But the test for him isn’t interventionism as a principle, it is simply obtaining the approval of “most of the world’s developed democracies.” Had these democracies bestowed their blessings upon the US to act in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan, presumably, by implementing there the international institutions he considers so important, the war would have gone much better.

But these comments to me reveal what I consider most contradictory about Fukuyama’s “realistic Wilsonianism” and his theory of the end of history, upon which it is based. For, if history has revealed Western social democracy as the undisputed vehicle of man’s evolution, then does not the collusion of Western democracies to prevent nations from obtaining this political transformation threaten the process of history outlined in “The End of History?” Yet this is exactly the outcome favored by Fukuyama’s switch to realistic Wilsonianism. France, China, and Russia did not oppose US intervention in Iraq because they feared the US would fail, but because they fear it will succeed, and with an American success will come a requisite loss in their “realpolitikal” situation there. As long as the US remains the object of Iraqi or Arab or Muslim frustration, there simply is no compelling reason for these developed democracies to alter their decades of imperialist policies in the region.

I believe that Fukuyama has not adequately accounted for the political breakdown in the Western alliances following the collapse of the Soviet Union and prior to the ascension of China and India. His faith in the international relationships between democracies presupposes that one nation can and would place it’s own well-being behind the interests of other nations. But this is not what national leaders are elected to do.

Now, one could certainly argue that in specific cases subsuming the interests of the nation into the interests of nations as a collective (ie, the UN) is, in the long term, more in the interests of that nation. But in this regard, I don’t think there is any light between neocons like Fukuyama or Wolfowitz. Where they differ is in the arbitrary manner in which they assign collective responsibility: is the US better off serving the interests of the UN, or the Iraqi people?

This of course touches on your definition of interventionism as foreign policy hubris, which I think is much more to the point, and more accurate, than “messianism.” But this is a trap from which no one in the West can escape: who is guiltier of hubris, one who decides to act against tyranny, or one who decides to act with it? There is an escape route which is so appealing that we pretend it is actually possible to take. We pretend we can defer the question to the people most at risk, in this case the Iraqi people. But obtaining this answer is so fraught with difficulty as to be essentially impossible, and I don’t merely mean the difficulties of statistical polling. Natan Sharansky writes in The Case for Democracy about the difficulty not just of obtaining a straight answer to these complicated questions (polling), but of producing one (thinking). The deformations “fear societies” create in one’s will, spirit, and mind have been explored by philosophers and politicians alike, from Stalin to Hannah Arendt. The answer to such a question, in the form we need it, does not exist. To ask it is to gaze into a reflection pool. So yes, hubris is perhaps inescapable in interventionist foreign policy. So too, is it in “non-interventionist” policies.

I believe Fukuyama’s retreat into supposed multilateralism is a similar kind of escape from the contradictions and ambiguities in the dialectics of history.

Re:#30 if the EU and their Euro currency are indications then I think that even if everyone agreed to use the same money (letting all the bottom folks drag down the value) and business laws, I still think the governments will remain autonomous.

But I really think even a global currency is too far out there, regardless of what the EU and PayPal say. It's a fact that those who control the global wealth make a lot of that money in trades, exchange rates, etc. So being in control I don't see them allowing one of their biggest money makers go away.

#33: A unified economics is a great deal more than the same currency. The productivity, the balance of payments, the economic structure (capitalism, socialism, dictatorship, etc) would make that kind of unity impossible. Autonomy in the "world is flat" world of globalization doesn't really exist. Neither does real economic freedom. We are all hemmed in by trade agreements, need for markets, need for resources, need for labor, need for investment, political changes, demographic changes, etc. You would have to see some kind of supra-control, leveling the playing field, bringing the underdeveloped countries up to par, and restraining monopolies/cartels link OPEC. I don't see how it is remotely possible, although we can all work toward it.

Lupin3:
You are absolutely right that I mixed interventionism with acting without allies, and they are two separate issues. It seemed to me that Fukuyame was primarily talking about the unwisdom of acting alone rather than the problems of intervention.
My own opinion is that intervention, whether acting alone or in concert, carries many unforeseen dangers, both during the intervention itself, and afterward. If it succeeds, we are left with the responsibility of occupation and redevelopment. If it fails we are left with vets with PTSD, guilt, loss of prestige and economic losses. It should not be attempted unless the situation is dire- of imminent danger to our republic like a rogue state sabre rattling a bombs.
The other reason for intervention in my opinion is preventing or stopping genocide which should be the job of the UN. Perhaps that will happen soon in Darfur after 200,000 to 400,000 deaths and 2 million displacements. Not a very efficient way of stopping genocide, but better late than never.

Should the UN have the only standing army?

Geneg's questions in #30 and #35 actually admit of two contradictory answers:

No, not within the lifetime of anyone reading this, nor within the lifetime of their descendants unto the third generation.

But beyond that ... maybe.

It seems to be the case that about a hundred thousand years ago, give or take a few tens of thousands of years, a band of humans left Africa. Their descendants slowly spread over the globe. Genetic drift and differing selection pressures gave rise to racial differences. Cultures and languages also multiplied.

Now we may be seeing the reversal of that process, the ingathering of the tribes, the slow evolution of a single world culture, the elevation of all of humanity to a more or less common economic plane with shared political values. Organized religion, which has separated mankind for millenia, may fade into the background. The End of History.

If that happens, what country you are from may become as relevant as what state you are from, for Americans.

It may not happen. There is no benevolent Deity overseeing events, and human beings can be very nasty creatures under many circumstances.

And in any case, we are going to wade through blood before we even get near that possible end-state, because the necessary changes will disrupt the power-positions of some very potent social groups, who will not roll over and die -- are not doing so, in fact.

Engels said that history pulls her chariot forward over mountains of human corpses.

She may be pulling her chariot forward in Iraq today, and in Afghanistan, but we will not know for many years yet.

My goodness, shocking "pages" of racist stuff in a Pulitzer-winning bestseller that no one until you has noticed! :)

It's been years since I read it, but I'll wager you seriously misunderstood him.

Lola: Yes, of course I may have mis-read what he said. You can decide when I provide the quotes.

But on the other hand, perhaps his racialist speculations were overlooked, or looked upon benevolently, because they implicitly attacked a race that most of his readers despise. (The "cancer of humanity" one prominent intellectual called it.)

And by "pages", I meant that the relevant material is, on my edition, spread over two pages. And it is not a major thesis, just a casual observation.

On the other hand, it does definitely undermine the Dogma of the Blank Slate (all races and both sexes are absolutely equal in cognitive capacity -- all perceived differences must be due to the social environment). So I was surprised to see it pass without comment.

almigwin re:#19 under which label would you place the US's plan to install interceptor missles in Poland and the Czech Republic?

Do you folks on the "anti-intervention" side of the aisle see this as intervention? Or what?

A so-so background article can be found here:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/03/21/europe.missile.reut/index.html

>37 Doug1943: Doug,

Yes, now I'm certain you misunderstood him. While it may seem reckless to go out on a limb trying to guess which parts of the book you had in mind, I don't see that I have much choice, as I'd like to wrap up quickly and get this digression out of the way of the larger discussion.

So I'm going to venture a guess that it's in the very beginning, when Diamond speculates about (modern) New Guineans being mentally MORE able than (modern) Westerners. He bases this on his observation of their intellectual alertness and curiosity and contrasts this with (also his observation) the relative sluggishness and intellectual passivity of the Westerners.

Well, Diamond is a evolutionary biologist, interested in adaptations, and he proceeds to speculate that New Guineans exhibit these heightened-mental-activity traits in response to their environment, which presents them with constant and varied challenges. Briefly, there is less routine in the jungle than in the life of a couch potato.

Now, the question of whether New Guineans are "smarter" than the Westerners, isn't the one Diamond is posing or is interested in answering at all--he observed (correctly or not, but since HE lived there 33 years I'm inclined to believe at least his description of their abilities) a difference, and used his observation as a springboard for explaining differences in human societies in the evolutionary context, as adaptations to specific circumstances.

In fact, his entire main argument, the explanation of differences in human societies in terms of the environment and chance goes AGAINST racism, is the very opposite of its essentialism and fatalism! This is so glaring you must forgive me if I say it makes your misunderstanding positively comical.

Racism posits inherent unchangeable differences in so-called human "races": blacks were ever and ever will be (mentally etc.) inferior. Or, Jews were ever and ever will be superior.

Diamond, otoh, speculates how unique human intelligence--a flexible, develop-able, changeable, pan-human trait--adapted to the original (and in many cases still present) specific constraints of the biogeographical and historical circumstances in Australia, Europe, New Guinea, the Fertile Crescent, Mesoamerica and so on.

I hope this might help you to reconsider some of your conclusions, but if you wish to continue the discussion, perhaps we could start another thread so as not to derange the rest.

#39 Thanks Lola. I didn''t pick up any racist stuff when I read the Diamond book last year, but Doug1943, I would like to see the quote, anyway.
#38 trav:
I don't believe it is intervention if the other countries accept the interceptor missiles. It is intervention if the interceptor missiles are forced upon them.
We have treaties, and bases with and in many countries. In some, it is a matter of great concern and strife. Osama bin Laden claimed to have masterminded the 9/11 attack because of our bases in Saudi Arabia which he thinks is holy ground, and we are infidels, violating it.

Almigwin, in #19, could you add "prevention" to your list four approaches toward good relations with democratic governments, and non-belligerent relationships with the others (autocratic, unstable, communist or other). Examples might be creation of the UN, US support for Germany and Japan after WW II, Shogun conservation of Japanese forests (Collapse: how societies choose tofail or succeed again). Prevention is difficult for leaders and democracies, though--unless the need for action has been accepted by the broad public (as with smoking or environmental protection), because the timeline is rarely short, and it's difficult to claim laurels by proving that one's efforts prevented something.

I think most people could agree that there are some situations for which each strategy is/was warranted, e.g.,

prevention--tragedies of the commons (climate??)

multilateralism--UN Peacekeeping in Suez Crisis?

realpolitik--Putin's Russia?

interventionism--In retrospect maybe eliminating Pol Pot or Hitler or Idi Amin would have been useful? But as you noted intervention was problematic in the Suez Crisis and I'd add that I don't think that it worked very well with Cuba, either.

I think #39 LolaWalser did a great job of explaining the main point of Guns, Germs and Steel, I can't comment on Collapse because I haven't read it yet. I get depressed just thinking about our God given right to destroy our environment, and besides environmentalism is just to expensive a bauble when we need to protect business at all costs.

As far as the hubris that drives the idea that because democracy (or more accurately republicanism) and capitalism have been so good (?) for us that everyone has a genetic predisposition to want them too is concerned I look to Noam Chomsky in Hegemony or Survival in which he speculates along with Ernst Mayr that the history of life on earth shows that it is better to be stupid than smart. He suggests that humans may prove to be a spectacularly unsuccessful species. Indeed, there are people working as hard as they can to see that we are.

I've seen enough worlds blown up or blow themselves up to realize how utterly spectacular that kind of death can be.

My question becomes: who is more likely to effect such an end, us super intelligent Americans, or those less intelligent Africans, or New Guineans?

The same cultural evolutionary processes that gave us flush toilets gave us two devastating world wars and the H bomb. As with many aspects of our culture our ability to destroy one another has outgrown the nature of our humanity.

#41 mdochoda:
I consider prevention either multilateralism, realpolitik or interventionism depending on our allies or lack thereof, and our motives. you might think of it as good or bad interventionism depending on the cost and the outcome (if you live long enough to see it)

Lola: you are probably right that this little discussion doesn't really belong in this thread; but it probably doesn't really belong in this Group, either.

However, I will start another thread for it, and try to summarize our two views.

Actually, I do believe that the general issues discussed, or implicitly addressed, in Guns, Germs and Steel -- where has the human species come from, why do we have so many deep differences among human cultures, and where are we all going? -- are relevant to this Group.

And I agree with Diamond's general method: to look for materialist, environmental factors to explain the different development paths among human groups. I think the differences we see are, in the broad view, superficial.

Diamond's belief in the genetic superiority, with respect to mental ability, of one race over another is a tiny issue which should not distract from the many interesting hypotheses he posits in his book.