Ross Douthat criticizes Michael Brendan Dougherty’s critique of Matthew Yglesias (this post is turning into quite a blogroll), but Douthat concedes an important point to Michael in his second paragraph. He writes, “unless you’re a very stringent non-interventionist (or a pacifist), no matter what theory of foreign policy you choose, you’ll always be able to find justification within the confines of that theory whenever a particular intervention seems like a good idea.”

Yes, exactly — which is why some of us at TAC (by no means all) counsel “very stringent” non-interventionism. Douthat is correct that whatever the theoretical differences between neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, and a variety of other interventionist perspectives may be, they all give policymakers — specifically, the executive branch — wide discretion for waging war. Stringent noninterventionism and pacifism provide a check against that. Douthat criticizes Michael by saying, “the paleocon lens tends to obscure some very real distinctions between neocons and liberal internationalists,” but Douthat himself acknowledges that, performatively, those “real distinctions” aren’t so real after all. I think Douthat would have to agree with Michael that Yglesias is wrong when he says, “America traditionally hasn’t engaged in Iraq-scale blunders.” Over 50 years, liberal internationalism, Cold War conservatism, and neoconservatism have engaged in many such wars, some rather bigger (Vietnam, Korea) and others somewhat smaller (Gulf War I, Kosovo) than our present neocon adventure.

But hope springs eternal for Douthat. Five decades of blundering interventions doesn’t convince him that interventionism in general is a bad idea. Like Doug Feith and everybody else, he just wants smarter interventions, prudent interventions — better management:

I don’t come away from the events of the last five years convinced that we should never intervene abroad on purely humanitarian grounds, or that we should never go to war without an international body’s authorization, or that the whole of American Middle East policy since 1991 (or 1945) has been discredited, or even that we should never launch wars of pre-emption. I come away from them convinced of a point that’s simultaneously narrower in scope, but more universal in its application: That whatever theory we take as our guide to international affairs, we need to proceed with greater caution than America displayed in the aftermath of 9/11 about the efficacy of military force, and the costs and consequences of using it.

But where is this caution going to come from? Who counsels it? There was at least a minority of liberal internationalists who opposed the Iraq War, and I tend to agree with Douthat that if Gore had been president we would not have invaded Mesopotamia. But I think it’s quite probable that Gore would have taken us into Darfur or Somalia (which, unlike Iraq, actually was and is an al-Qaeda base), and I doubt such an intervention would have proven much more prudent or successful than Bush’s Iraq farrago. Liberal internationalists have at least as bad a record as the neocons, both in how much they intervene (which admittedly, is not a problem for people who are not noninterventionists) and in how badly their interventions fare.

If you want a prudent foreign policy that keeps America out of unwinnable wars in places like Iraq and Somalia, you should support noninterventionism. Neither neoconservatism nor liberal interventionism nor old-fashioned Cold War conservatism will ever be cautious enough to avoid such entanglements. To hope that any of these ideologies of intervention will “proceed with greater caution” than they have in the past half-century is as vain as to hope that visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles will one day, under the right management, be an efficient and pleasant experience.

I should qualify my remarks just a little. The range of coherent foreign-policy positions may not be quite as narrow as most of what I say above would suggest. For example, I do think it’s possible that with a strict enough definition of the national interest, foreign-policy realists can avoid most troublesome interventions. And in general the more that anti-interventionist sentiment and logic seeps into any foreign-policy ideology, the less likely that ideology is to get involved in future Vietnams, Somalias, and Iraqs. There is a scale: but even the scale depends upon strong noninterventionist thought and advocacy.

p.s. I pine for the Ludlow Amendment.