I guess we should all be thankful that President Bush’s “freedom agenda” failed, right? This is Turkey – a NATO ally and prospective (although increasingly less likely) candidate for EU membership. Now imagine democracy taking root in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iran and elsewhere – would it surprise anyone if the regional atmosphere got a lot less friendly toward the U.S. and Israel?

As I said earlier, it’s very difficult to be an honest proponent of Middle East democracy and an advocate for perpetual American hegemony in the region. The emergence of true democracies is likely to reorient the geopolitics of the region in a manner that the staunchest hegemonists would sharply disapprove of. I wonder which aspiration they’ll jettison first. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg was responding to the same Continetti post I discussed yesterday. He is certainly right that hegemonists are inconsistent in their enthusiasm for democracy promotion, as I’ve mentioned many times before. In this view, Venezuelan and Bolivian democracies are blights on the earth, but Georgian democracy is wonderful and vitally important. They used to like Ukrainian democracy until the Ukrainians elected the wrong candidate, and now they’re not so sure it’s a good idea. It’s not hard to see that these reactions match up closely with the attitudes of the respective governments to U.S. influence in their parts of the world. Many democratists also work under the very misleading assumption that democratization necessarily fosters greater international stability. Many of them also believe democracies will not clash with one another because they have shared “values” and the democratic nature of their governments will reduce the chances of conflict. As far as I can tell, none of these things is true, or at least none of them can be taken for granted.

What gets lost in a lot of commentary on Turkey and the AKP is how illiberal and undemocratic the Kemalists in the army had to be for decades to keep Islamist governments from enduring for any length of time until the AKP’s “soft” or “reformed” Islamism made it difficult for the military to intervene against them. Washington’s ability to rely on Turkish support was artificially enhanced for a long time through the end of the Cold War by the unrepresentative nature of the Turkish government and the relatively limited U.S. presence in the region. All of this began changing in the ’90s as the U.S. became much more involved in Near Eastern affairs, and then in the last decade Islamists in Turkey have adapted to avoid provoking the military into defending Turkish secularism.

Let’s remember that less than ten years ago Erdogan was convicted of a crime for publicly reciting a somewhat militant poem by the CUP ideologue Ziya Gokalp, and a short time after that he had reinvented himself as a pro-European, pro-market reformer, and Erdogan then took the old Welfare coalition that had been forced out in the late ’90s on account of its Islamism and made it into the dominant ruling AKP. During the same time, the U.S. has become even more involved in the region in ways that almost all Turks find alarming and dangerous. There might have been a time in the past when a popular backlash in Turkey against U.S. policies wouldn’t have influenced whether its government cooperated with America, but it just so happened that Turkey experienced its first full taste of representative democracy at the moment when most of its people were strongly opposed to U.S. actions in the region. This popular backlash extended to Israeli policies, too, especially after 2006.

What bothers some hegemonists about Turkey is that they tend to assume that American interests, American power and American “values” as they define them all advance and retreat together, and if you define American interests as they do an independent-minded Turkey pursuing “zero problems” with Iran and Syria is a huge setback. Hegemonists seem to think that if other countries are becoming more democratic they ought to become more “like us” in their “values,” and therefore their governments should be more willing to align themselves with the U.S. As we are seeing all over the world, the more democratic other nations become the more their governments begin to pursue interests that diverge from American interests, especially as these are defined by hegemonists. A more modest, limited, rational definition of American interests would considerably reduce the number of clashes with other governments, and an administration following such a definition would actually welcome the regional leadership and gestures towards burden-sharing that some of our allies have started to offer.

It is not a question of whether we in the U.S. find this process desirable or not. It is not something that we would be able to reverse even if we thought it necessary (and I hope we don’t). Despite the failures of Hatoyama’s government, the DPJ in Japan is not going to recede back into permanent minority status, and it represents a shift in Japanese politics towards a competitive party system that will make it increasingly difficult to dictate the terms of the alliance to Tokyo in the future. Our bases in Japan are going to have to go sooner or later, so it should probably be sooner on amicable terms rather than later. Brazilian assertiveness on the world stage may wane once Lula leaves office, but the ambition to represent non-aligned and developing nations will remain, and that is inevitably going to put Brazil at odds with the U.S. from time to time, but there would likely be fewer clashes if Washington did not presume to make everything its business. Turkey may be the most dramatic case of an increasingly assertive allied democratic government challenging the American line on certain regional issues, and up to a point Turkey has been succeeding in its challenges.

All of this has happened because the governments of these countries have become significantly more democratic and representative than they had been previously. What many hegemonists find frustrating about these developments is that they have all happened without direct U.S. efforts. Hegemonists have supported democratization in the past when promoting democracy was a U.S.-led or U.S.-backed project, but when democratic politics flourishes on its own in other countries there is not much interest in it. This happens because democratic governance is itself just a frame that is filled by the political, cultural and religious values of the people who are enfranchised. Modernization and globalization result in a considerable amount of homogenization across nations, but they also facilitate the rise of new powers that have modernized and integrated themselves into the global economy in order to empower their nations. These new powers often have very different ideas concerning a host of international issues that put them at odds with the traditional major powers. Globalization also provokes religious and nationalist reactions that can make cultural and religious differences far more relevant to international politics, and democratic governments around the world are going to reflect those differences in how they relate to the rest of the world.

One way to begin adapting to this changing landscape is to acknowledge that our democratic allies and other rising powers have legitimate interests in shaping the response to a number of international issues, and then to react rationally when their governments and ours take different positions. Instead of complaining that the U.S. is “losing” this or that country, stop making our allies choose between their own national interests and support for unwise U.S. initiatives. Instead of berating independent-minded allies and democracies as traitors or sell-outs when they do things our political class doesn’t like, look on their newfound credibility with other nations as something that could be used to benefit the U.S. as well. Their interests will not always coincide with ours, but we will be pleasantly surprised how few conflicts of interest we will have with them when we understand that our national interests do not encompass the entire globe.

The argument for Middle East democracy that Hamid sketches above sees political participation as a release-valve for Arab grievances. But what are those grievances? As they relate to the United States they are: the basing of U.S. combat forces in the region and support for Israel.

So the idea that democratic participation would actually give aggrieved citizens some relief seems to imply that a democratic government would actually have to address and ameliorate those grievances.

In such a context, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that the advance of democracy in the Middle East could mean empowering governments that take a decidedly colder attitude toward America (and Israel). They might not go so far as to sever ties, but if you consider that a long-standing and democratic ally like Japan wants to reconfigure America’s basing agreements, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see newly empowered democratic states in the Middle East start pushing back against American military power in the region. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg refers to this column by Shadi Hamid, who mentions the phenomenon of “Bush nostalgia” among Arab reformers. This is sad for a couple reasons. No one in the region (or anywhere else) should ever feel nostalgia for the Bush years. However underwhelmed or disappointed one is with Obama for any number of reasons, Bush nostalgia is a horrible refuge. U.S. and allied policies during the Bush administration caused more harm and upheaval in the region than anything at least since the invasion of Kuwait. To the extent that the “freedom agenda” was welcomed by Arab reformers, the promises made in its name were never going to be applied consistently and regularly to Arab states.

So the more important point is that Arab reformers have little or nothing about which they can feel nostalgic. The “freedom agenda” was applied half-heartedly when it was applied at all in Arab countries, and the administration quickly abandoned its efforts in Egypt at the first sign of resistance from Mubarak. I don’t fault the administration for backing away from some of its more fantastical ideas, but I would stress that Arab reformers cannot point to much of anything substantive that they received as a result of the “freedom agenda.” Hamid mentions that Obama’s Cairo speech raised expectations that have since been dashed, which is true enough, but the “freedom agenda” was just the same: long on idealistic rhetoric and hints of changes in policy that never really materialized.

Were allied Arab states to become much more democratic, their governments would be obliged to pay more attention to the grievances Greg mentions, and that would make the divergence of perceived interests between our governments difficult to paper over. An important factor in determining how “cool” relations with the U.S. became would be the American response to the more forceful and frequent expression of long-held objections to U.S. policy and military presence in the region. So far, our official and popular reactions to Japanese objections to the Futenma basing deal does not give much reason to think that the response would be particularly constructive. Washington is not very used to having many allies that pursue independent foreign policies, and it does not respond well to allies that resist or criticize U.S. policies. Americans tend to expect deference and gratitude from our allies, and much of our political class tends to categorize anything other than this as evidence of growing “anti-Americanism.”

At some point, allied states might begin to question whether it is their security interests, rather than Washington’s geopolitical ambitions, that are being served by the alliance. Like Hatoyama’s rhetoric of solidarity and fraternity (yuai) and his tentative proposal for an East Asian union, these allied states might begin discussing the possibility of regional economic and political cooperation with the neighboring states against which the U.S. is supposed to defend them. It might be possible for Washington to adjust to a world with many democratized Arab states that distance themselves from the United States in some ways, but more likely we would have to endure years of acrimonious domestic debate and recriminations over “who lost Oman.” Our politicians would try to outdo one another with promises to restore American “credibility” in the region, and the government would probably back the occasional coup against Islamist or populist Arab leaders. If American reactions to political change in Latin America are any indication, we would start hearing grave warnings about this or that anti-American Arab demagogue representing the next great threat to global peace.

The upshot of these three trends will likely be a series of decisions to slowly, but irrevocably reduce America’s overseas global military presence and limit our capacity to uphold peace and intervene around the globe. And, as we hollow out our capabilities, China will be fielding ever more accurate anti-ship ballistic missiles, advanced fighter aircraft, and stealthy submarines; Russia will continue to expand its influence over its “near abroad” while modernizing its nuclear arsenal; and Iran will develop nuclear weapons, leading to an arms race or preemptive attacks in the Middle East.

Under such conditions, global trade flows will be stressed, the free flow of capital will be constrained, and foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions.

In other words, unsustainable U.S. hegemony will not be as great as it was, and that will mean that other major and rising powers will be able to exert something more like the normal influence in their regions that such powers have exerted throughout most of modern history. Will there be conflicts in such a world? Of course, there will be, but we already have a number of conflicts in the world that have either been deemed irrelevant to the maintenance of Pax Americana or they are the products of policies designed to perpetuate Pax Americana. In practice, securing this “peace” has involved starting several wars, the largest and most destructive of which has been the war in Iraq, as well as supporting proxies and allies as they escalated conflicts with their neighbors.

China will build up its military, as it is already doing, and Russia will continue to extend its influence into its “near-abroad,” and Iran will develop nuclear weapons. What is important to stress here is that all of these things already are or soon will be happening anyway. These things are happening despite, and perhaps in some cases because of, American military presence in their respective regions. The reality of multipolarity makes these first two more or less unavoidable, and as we have been seeing over the last few years there is nothing short of full-scale war with Iran that could realistically interrupt the development of its nuclear program. If Iran definitely decides to acquire nuclear weapons, there is remarkably little that any outside government can do to prevent this from happening. One sure way to guarantee that Iran pursues this route is to continue to act punitively towards Iran. If Western powers actively resist Russian efforts to exercise influence along its own borders as the U.S. and some European states have been doing, all that will result is the use of Russia’s smaller neighbors as Western proxies. This will have very unfortunate consequences for the proxies, which the Russians will intimidate and/or attack and which Western powers will not aid in direct conflicts with Russia.

Too many American policymakers and policy analysts remain devoted to restoring a degree of American preeminence that existed in 1991-92 and will probably never come again. The reality is that we may not even see American preeminence c. 2008, much less the way it was twenty years ago. Our policies and our military deployments around the world have not adjusted to this reality. Now some of our closest allies are forcing us to come to terms with the way the world has changed.

Of course, one could simply dismiss Auslin’s argument as an attempt to justify the current, indefensible size of the absurdly overgrown warfare and security state. This would hardly be the first time that a defender of an entrenched government program or institution resorted to exaggerating the calamities that reduction in services would create. It is also not the first time that such a defender simply imagines a threat to the program or institution. As usual, the danger/promise of reducing America’s overseas military presence is not nearly as great as Auslin claims.

What provoked this vision of the “dimming of our age”? The British Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report pronouncing the “special relationship” dead and the continued resistance by the DPJ government in Japan to the location of a Marine air station in Okinawa. Oh, and health care. It is telling that the foreign examples Auslin provides are the results of national backlashes against perceived excessive identification with or dependence on U.S. power. Britain walked in lockstep with the United States before and during the war in Iraq, and it was badly burned by the experience. Japan has tolerated a continued military presence on Okinawa despite a history of abuses suffered by the civilian population. Some of our best allies feel used or put-upon, and their complaints stem from precisely the sort of overbearing hegemonist attitude that tends to treat many of our allies more like satrapies rather than treating them as sovereign, independent states with their own interests.

So some of the countries that theoretically benefit most from the American ability to “to uphold peace and intervene around the globe” want to adjust their relationships with the U.S. so that their national interests are better served. Britain and Japan are not proposing to scrap their alliances with America, nor are they necessarily declaring their opposition to America’s active role in their parts of the world, but they do seem to be saying that they should give more thought to how often their security and foreign policies line up closely with our own. Instead of taking advantage of the potential for increased burden-sharing these moves represent and instead of encouraging allies to tap into their own resources to provide for their defense, we hear laments foretelling the “dimming of our age.”

As for the so-called “romantic belief in global fraternity,” which very few people actually hold, there have been no greater romantics than the idealists who have deluded themselves and many of us that the interests of the rest of the world and the interests of the United States frequently converge. American hegemonists have been fairly certain that democratization and globalization advance American power, and so they have tried to encourage both on the unfounded assumptions that economic interdependence and democracy will tend to prevent conflict and will lead other governments to align with Washington. As both emerging-market democracies and long-established industrialized democratic powers have been showing us in recent years, neither democratization nor globalization magnifies American power, but instead has tended to create more increasingly powerful centers of resistance to Washington’s policies. In a way, that is a credit to past successes of U.S. policy: American power provided the protection and shelter to permit war-ravaged nations to rebuild and become capable of providing for their own needs and defense. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us the chance to end our abnormal and untraditional global role, and Washington failed to seize the opportunity. We are now at a point when we can still disentangle ourselves from many places around the world largely on our own terms and when we can shift the burdens for regional security to the regional powers and institutions that are capable of taking them up, but there seems to be no political will and no imagination needed to make this happen.

We see that only 29% disapproved of Obama’s postponement of the trip to Indonesia and Australia to oversee the final stages of the health care voting. Of course, 59% of Republicans disapproved, which just drives home how far removed from the views of the rest of the country most Republicans have become. The particular complaint about the postponed trip is trivial, but it does touch on a seemingly more significant Republican objection, which is their claim that Obama is a domestic policy President who doesn’t care about America’s role in the world. This is nonsense, as even the briefest acquaintance with Obama’s activity over the last year should make clear, but this is what informs their ridiculous essays on American exceptionalism (and Obama’s supposed assault against it) and their newfound concern for the interests and concerns of allies. This can also be found in the recent warnings by Boot and Lowry that hegemony is incompatible with an expansion of domestic entitlement spending and that America is going to have to adopt a “European” foreign policy with all the disastrous results that are supposed to follow from that.

Naturally, Boot and Lowry prefer perpetuating hegemony and not going down the dreaded European path, and they seem to think that the possibility of reduced U.S. power projection and meddling overseas should make Americans more resistant to additional entitlements. However, as Greg observes, what Boot and Lowry are really proposing is that Americans should be more concerned that the U.S. subsidizes the security of other countries, most of them wealthy, productive, self-sufficient democracies, instead of subsidizing other Americans. Like Greg, I think additional entitlements are unwise and unsustainable, but how remarkable it is that the loudest American nationalists and neo-imperialists should so blatantly prioritize the well-being of other countries over that of their fellow citizens while lecturing Obama for his supposed Europeanizing ways.

This is the central and fatal contradiction in modern mainstream conservative thinking on the role and scope of government. They refuse to acknowledge that their foreign policy ambitions are much more modern and out of step with most of American history than the domestic progressive tradition they regularly attack as a foreign import. They seem incapable of recognizing the absurdity of defending the security and warfare state to the hilt while pretending that they are working to preserve a distinctively American political and economic system. The distortions of the former have done as much, if not more, damage to that system as the intrusions of government here at home.

I’m sensitive to this in part because I remember when pro-war conservatives spent huge amounts of time taking on the notion that President Bush wanted to invade Iraq to seize its oil wealth, to expand America’s empire, or to serve Israeli interests. It was a lot of fun to tackle these arguments because they made critics of the Iraq War look like kooky conspiracy theorists. And some of them — very large numbers of them, perhaps — were kooky conspiracy theorists! But I wish that we in the pro-war camp had spent more time thinking about and not dismissing arguments about the opportunity costs of a prolonged military occupation of Iraq or the dangers posed by Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divides.

Mind you, the vast majority of arguments put forward by antiwar conservatives (including most of the arguments published by TAC) and war opponents generally focused on “the opportunity costs of a prolonged military occupation of Iraq or the dangers posed by Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divides,” but there were also a good number that addressed the empire and “pro-Israel” angles. Pro-war conservatives preferred to fixate on the latter because these arguments made it easier to demonize the antiwar position in the eyes of other conservatives, most of whom support the empire and would be happy to serve Israeli interests (which many of them readily conflate with our own), but they never made much of a case that these arguments were wrong, much less obviously “kooky.” Yes, of course, pro-war conservatives believe them to be kooky, but these people also usually believe that the Iraq war was a vital and necessary campaign of national defense and some of them still hang on to the fiction that invading Iraq without cause had something to do with anti-terrorism, which are ideas so far removed from reality that one might almost call them kooky. So perhaps their judgments in this area should not be relied on too heavily.

I have always marveled at the pro-war right’s insistence that Iraq had nothing to do with imperialism or Israel. On the whole, pro-war conservatives agree that the U.S. should have an active, aggressive foreign policy, and they believe the U.S. should work to maintain and increase American primacy in the world. They fully support the empire of military bases we have scattered around the world, and they are quie convinced of the virtues of Pax Americana.

When hegemonists eagerly support a given policy overseas, it is not a great leap to conclude that they support it because they believe it will help preserve and extend American hegemony. As they often are, they may be spectacularly wrong in their expectations, but what they hoped to accomplish is quite clear. Furthermore, when you set out to launch a war of aggression to depose another country’s government and install one more to your liking, it is not unreasonable to describe this as imperialism. There are some, such as Max Boot, who positively gloried in the possibilities of neo-imperialism, while others were more circumspect, but what most pro-war conservatives seemed to share was a desire to project U.S. power and increase it. What is more, they wished to increase it through the blunt instrument of military invasion and occupation. Were any other state to do what our government did, we would immediately hear accusations of imperialism from the very same people who pretended that invading Iraq was nothing of the kind. Indeed, during a much less clear-cut war in Georgia it was Iraq hawks who were the loudest and most irrational in their warnings about “Russian imperialism.” When zealous “pro-Israel” advocates constantly agitate for aggressive policies in the Near East, it is difficult to pretend that their “pro-Israel” zeal and their desire to support Israel are not major factors.

Pro-war conservatives prefer to speak of U.S. hegemony rather than empire, but the case of the Iraq war reminds us that the distinction doesn’t mean very much in practice. They are also reliably among the most ardent and hawkish “pro-Israel” people in the country and they judge every U.S. policy in the region according to its impact on Israel, but it is somehow unforgiveably “kooky” to point out that their views on the Iraq war were driven to a significant extent by their (exaggerated) concern for Israeli security. What is even more strange is that pro-war conservatives always take great offense when they are “accused” of believing things that they believe as a matter of course.

To the extent that the ruin of remaining traditional European civilization in WWI can be laid at the door of mass politics, nationalism and mass mobilization for warfare, these elements of 19th century history offer warnings of the damage that can be done to social and political order as a result of breaking down barriers and loyalties as part of a political and economic project to consolidate power and organize resources inside larger nation-states at the expense of their various regions. Once nationalism was triumphant and nearly universal in Europe, it encountered some limited resistance from holdouts of traditional societies, which it mostly co-opted or marginalized, but then mostly faced the strongest competition from different varieties of international socialism. Nationalism eventually ate away at the latter from within because of its greater mobilizing power. After the second war, modified forms of liberal economic regimes had grown up in the midst of the social democratic West with an increasing emphasis on neoliberal trade abroad and a continuation of state capitalism at home. Finally, the social democratic West outlasted its communist rivals.

Inside the social democratic West, with some exception here in the U.S., nationalism was giving way to larger projects of political consolidation and economic “openness.” Within the U.S., nationalism was harnessed to what Bacevich has called “the strategy of openness” to make an American-led globalism palatable to people in the one Western country where there was still widespread resistance to transnational organizations and rules. For most Western nationalists, globalization is of questionable benefit both culturally and economically, but in the American context most globalists embrace American exceptionalism/Americanism to provide the popular rhetoric for their agenda and most American nationalists end up either supporting or acquiescing in globalist policies because they believe them to be necessary to preserve U.S. hegemony, which they, as nationalists, are unwilling to abandon, just as they are largely unwilling to reject the foreign wars fought theoretically to shore up or expand that hegemony. It should be the case that nationalism in the U.S. produces steady resistance to globalism, but in a way similar to the British experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries our nationalists’ energy has largely been channeled into support for aggressive or ‘forward’ foreign policy, and so it is not really an accident that the most nationalist party in the U.S. also happens to be most in favor of globalist trade policies.

Actual Bastiat-style economic liberalism perished in the West as a matter of government policy in the latter half of the 19th century and never really returned, which has not stopped globalists from dredging up classical liberal texts, including those of Bastiat, to browbeat people on the political right into accepting their policies. More than a few libertarians and “economic conservatives” today recite the lessons from these texts whenever someone challenges some aspect of the state capitalist system, usually pertaining to trade or immigration, and they vehemently insist that in doing this they are protecting economic liberty against encroaching statism or something of the sort.

Speaking of state capitalism and related matters, I have a new article in this month’s Chronicles discussing Lincoln and modern Lincolnism. Be sure to check out the entire issue in print, and look in at Chronicles‘ website for online versions of some of the articles.

It’s a pretty gloomy analysis from the man who is advising John McCain on foreign policy [bold mine-DL]…

This CFR page, which is a copy of this Newsweek article, includes a mention of Zakaria’s harsh critique of McCain’s Los Angeles foreign policy address in the passage discussing ”analysts not affiliated with McCain’s campaign.”  If he is acting in any formal advisory capacity, it isn’t listed on his bio page.  He is “advising” McCain in the same way that any number of pundits and public intellectuals ”advise” candidates to agree with them. 

As for the review itself, it is pretty useless.  Before making the programmatic warnings about “isolationism” and “protectionism,” Roberts concedes that an Indian hegemony wouldn’t be so bad, but Chinese hegemony would be, but this completely misses the point of Zakaria’s book: no other power is going to attain to the sort of unipolar dominance of the world that the U.S. has enjoyed, but the U.S. will not enjoy it in the future, either.  That is a far cry from making declinist arguments that America is doomed to become even a second-tier power, but then perhaps the rest of us are insufficiently “pro-American” to understand these things.

This is not the British in Malaysia.

Quite true.  Unlike the British, our government seems to have no intention of leaving Iraq under any circumstances. 

One wonders if these people understand how British rule, or Roman rule for that matter, was extended to many of the places that later became “the empire.”  In many cases, the Romans and the British alike initially made a number of treaties with local rulers, who agreed to submit to occupation and taxation in exchange for being secured in their traditional (or usurped) rights, and over time these local rulers became merely figureheads to maintain a useful fiction that helped maintain the imperial system or they were liquidated/removed and replaced with direct imperial administration.  Our useful fiction is that the Iraqi government is a sovereign democratic one, we are currently demanding the right to occupy their country militarily, but we seem to have done without demanding the ability to tax Iraqis for our own revenues.  As far as I can tell, that is the only significant structural difference between a long-term military occupation of Iraq and old-style colonialism.  British rule in India did not begin with anything so obvious as a direct invasion, the elimination or expulsion of the old ruling class and the creation of an entirely new political order from stratch.  First, they merely did business with the existing rulers, then co-opted them and then the relationship became more coercive and hegemonic.  All the while the formal domestic institutions of a representative constitutional monarchy not only remained in place at home, but were gradually liberalising at the same time that the empire was expanding.  Not only is there no contradiction in having an officially democratic regime engage in imperialism, but it has happened several times in the history of modern democracies.  The “liberal imperialism” of Gladstone and the ”Tory democracy” of the late 19th century helped fuel expansionist policies in Africa.  Roman rule throughout the Near East was the result of a series of treaties made with local kings (and, of course, backed up with military might).  Rome was just a republic making treaties with the legitimate rulers of various states, so why worry about empire?    

There is nothing “excessive” about the word empire to describe the political and military domination of other countries.  Hegemony may be slightly more precise, but the practical difference between hegemony and empire is not very great when hegemony entails the establishment of dozens of military bases on foreign soil.  Perhaps people who believe that Washington and Baghdad are merely negotiating a bilateral “status of forces” agreement as between two equal, sovereign states also think that the Batavian Republic was a free and independent state that just had a very friendly relationship with France.  Oh, but that couldn’t have been imperialism–France was democratic at the time!  France and the Batavian Republic also made a treaty, one that was quite disadvantageous to the Dutch but a treaty all the same, so that must have made the ensuing occupation all right.   

If there is one good thing that might come out of the disaster of the war in Iraq, it is that the absurd, excessive and naive faith that democracies are never aggressive and imperialistic may be shaken at least a little.

The most alarming thing he said in a generally fluid presentation concerned Georgia and the Ukraine. “Would the United States really want to live in a world where Russia held sway over Georgia and the Ukraine?” (I’m not sure the quote is verbatim, but the “really want to live in a world” is.) Kagan said this in the context of discussing potential “flashpoints” with other great powers, Russia and China.

As Scott says, this isn’t a terribly troubling thought for Americans.  Obviously, I understand why Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Georgians are not interested in having Russia hold sway over their countries.  They want to preserve their national independence, and they view Russia as the historic oppressor or occupier that must never be allowed to regain control.  I get it.  I can even understand why they, or at least some of them, would actively seek the protection of other great powers to prevent that happening, but what has never been clear to me is why Americans should be willing to harm our relations with the Russians for the sake of countries in which we have no particularly important interests and which Russians consider part of their sphere of influence, if not, in fact, historically theirs.  Georgians and Ukrainians may not want to live in the world Kagan paints, but an overwhelming majority of Americans would not be concerned one way or another.  To ask the question Kagan asked is to answer it right away in the affirmative.

The idea that places on the very borders of other great powers constitute “flashpoints” is evidence of the sort of reflexive, unthinking hubris that Kagan and others in his circle express all the time.  Why are these places “flashpoints”?  Because the government has made the independence of countries that border on other great powers our business, when properly speaking none of the disputes in question has anything to do with the United States.  Imagine the hysterical reaction if someone close to one of the major officials in the Chinese government said, “Does China want to live in a world in which the United States holds sway over Colombia and Haiti?”  The absurdity of the question would be apparent to all.  What if one of Medvedev’s advisors said, “Does Russia want to live in a world in which the United States holds sway over Panama?”  I suspect he would be laughed out of the room, or the question would be dismissed as irrelevant.  Our foreign policy “intellectuals” take for granted that everything outside (and perhaps quite a few things inside) other great powers’ borders are automatically our business, and if these other powers attempt to exert even minimal influence on their immediate neighbours it is evidence of their “imperialism.”  Meanwhile, we may launch any number of strikes and wars against states on the other side of the planet in the name of self-defense and bristle at the suggestion that this has anything to do with empire.  It’s a dangerous game to treat other great or rising powers in this way, as if their modest goals for wider influence in their region and in the world represent some dire threat that needs to be checked and rolled back.  This is the sort of thing that plunged Britain into an arms race and then into conflict with Imperial Germany when the two had no obvious or necessary conflicts of interest.  The greatest danger to continued American predominance is almost certainly the boundless ambition and recklessness of the people who are most enthusiastic about preserving hegemony.

Obama’s stress on how everything is interconnected not only sets up the United States to intervene everywhere, but it makes any coherent strategy impossible.  If every problem is an American problem, how would Obama set priorities or address one crisis instead of another?  It’s a question he hasn’t begun to answer.

Obviously, I agree with this analysis entirely, and I’m pleased to see this view of Obama catching on with others.  As I said in one of my first responses to Obama’s Council on Global Affairs speech:

Obama believes that by stressing interdependence and globalisation that he has seriously addressed complexity in foreign affairs, but he has simply replaced one rigid scheme with another, and in that scheme every problem on earth is potentially our problem.  If every problem is our problem, and everyone’s security is “inextricably linked” to our own, how can any President set priorities or address one crisis rather than another when all are potentially just as relevant and connected to American security?  

If there is any temptation to make comparisons with McGovern ’72, it should be clear after reading this that no one could be more vehemently opposed to the idea that America should come home than Barack Obama.  The two major party candidates offer competing hegemonist visions, and both of them are dreadful, but there are grounds for thinking that an antiwar voter has more to lose overall by backing Obama, which should be a sobering reality for those who understand how dangerous McCain is.  Far from challenging the “mindset” that led to the war in Iraq, Obama possesses the very same mindset that says that we govern the world and must police it.

Using the word “imperial” to describe what great powers have been doing for decades pretty much strips the term of any concrete meaning. ~Daniel Drezner

This doesn’t seem to make very much sense, since great powers usually are imperialistic.  This is part of how they operate as “great powers”: by dominating other powers and using force when they deem it necessary to enforce their will. 

But what, after all, do we mean by imperialism?  Here‘s one definition that sounds right to me:

The policy of extending a nation’s authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.

There is something of a technical debate out there over whether you can be a hegemonist without being an imperialist.  Empire usually implies sovereignty and direct control (people inevitably think of Rome or the little pink bits on the map representing British mastery), while hegemony need only imply supremacy and the ability to dictate policy to satellites.  Hegemony is supposed to be more morally acceptable because it is simply “leadership” and supposedly not coercive–the hegemon’s lackeys are willing servants, rather than subjects.  In practice, the policies of an empire and a hegemony are often so similar that the distinction is one of rhetorical presentation: to be an empire-builder today is considered unjust, but to be a hegemon “expanding freedom’s frontiers” is basically fine. 

However, if the definition of imperialism is not limited to direct control and administration of territories outside the Home Country, and it seems that it does not have to be, supporting policies that shore up U.S. economic and political hegemony could be very fairly described as imperialist.  (Never mind that we do actually wield what is effectively direct control over territories overseas in a quasi-colonial relationship with the locals.)  Indeed, the policies of Ethiopia and Eritrea towards each other and the surrounding region could also be described this way, especially since the conflict between them is centered around territorial acquisition and regional dominance.  At its most basic meaning, for a state to be imperialistic is for it to seek control and domination over others and to be willing to use violence to maintain that control and domination.  American empire is fairly unique today in that the U.S. is the only great power that states publicly that the entire globe should follow American “leadership” and that all policies that reinforce that “leadership” (i.e., superpower hegemonic status) are justifiable and serve the greater good.  

Obviously, the foreign policy establishment that has crafted and implemented the policies that have created and preserved this hegemony are dedicated to its continued preservation, which is Greenwald’s point.  Obviously, those who object in principle to this hegemonic status and regard it as the bane of this country are not to be found inside the “foreign policy community.”  Drezner’s counterargument that someone such as Scowcroft opposed the Iraq war is not at all persuasive.  Most foreign policy “realists” who objected to the Iraq war did so for pragmatic, technical reasons.  Above all, they feared that the war would weaken our ability to act as a superpower in other parts of the globe and that it would contribute to the decline of our status as the hegemon.  Scowcroft is reliably internationalist and has no qualms about U.S. hegemony in the region and in the world–he opposed the war at least partly because he wants to keep the hegemony going for as long as possible.  Those of us from left and right who regard this as deeply wrong are not fooled by such a person’s opposition to any particular conflict.  Obama always opposed the war in Iraq, but has demonstrated in all his foreign policy speeches that he is a true hegemonist.  Like the opposition between rival British advocates of a ‘forward’ posture and an approach of ‘masterly inactivity’ with respect to Central Asia, the opposition between antiwar internationalists and prowar internationalists is simply a disagreement over how to best secure the continued dominance over the region.  What Greenwald describes is most definitely hegemonism, and to the extent that hegemonism is simply a kind of imperialism Drezner’s reply on this point does not hold up very well.

Edwards’ essay, which was paired with that of Giuliani in this issue, is no prize, either.  Apart from a few points about the effects of the ”war on terror,” with which I basically agree, I find the essay unnerving and worrisome.  Consider this line from Edwards:

We need to reach out to ordinary men and women from Egypt to Indonesia and convince them, once again, that the United States is a force to be admired [bold mine-DL].

But you don’t admire a force.  I think we should persuade other nations that we are a nation to be admired, and we should try to make sure that our government acts admirably, or at least justly, in the world to that end.  To cast “reengagement” in the way that Edwards does confirms for me that he is not in the least concerned with the excessive overreach and abusive relationship that a hegemon has with the rest of the world, but rather that he wants to find a way to perpetuate hegemony through more subtle means.  What he says later makes this clear:

Iran has been emboldened by the Bush administration’s ineffective policies and has announced plans to expand its nuclear program. Meanwhile, other powers are benefiting, too. China is capitalizing on the United States’ current unpopularity to project its own “soft power.” And Russia is bullying its neighbors while openly defying the United States and Europe. 

That last bit is amusing, as if the U.S. and Europe are Russia’s masters that the latter should be obeying and Russia’s neighbours are our protectorates to be guarded against so-called Russian “bullying.”  This comes in a paragraph that refers to what “our enemies” are doing.  In Edwards’ eyes, not only Iran and China, but even Russia is an enemy.  As he sees it, Russia is not a potential enemy or rival, but already an enemy right now.  This will be popular with Cathy Young and The Wall Street Journal, as these already regard Russia as an enemy of our country.  They seem eager to encourage anti-Russian sentiments whenever possible to make supporting policies of renewed hostility between our two countries a more popular and politically viable option.

Of Iran, Edwards says:

Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.

To speak of allowing or disallowing is to claim the power and right to control something, and even Edwards must know that Iran’s nuclear program is beyond the control of the U.S. and the “international community.”  In any case, what does he propose to do about it?  He says:

For example, right now we must do everything we can to isolate Iran’s leader from the moderate forces within the country. We need to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions through diplomatic measures that will, over time, force Iran to finally understand that the international community will not allow it to possess nuclear weapons. Every major U.S. ally agrees that the advent of a nuclear Iran would be a threat to global security. We should continue to work with other great powers to offer Tehran economic incentives for good behavior. At the same time, we must use much more serious economic sanctions to deter Ahmadinejad’s government when it refuses to cooperate.

Which leader?  Does Edwards think Ahmadinejad is “the leader” in Iran?  That is incorrect, and it is unfortunate enough that he does not even understand this much about a country he is willing to attack.  How would additional sanctions on Iran help to separate “the leader” from “moderate forces,” when sanctions inevitably strengthen the hand of hard-liners and despots?  How does Edwards think that “the leader” can be undermined by challenging the Iranian government over the development of nuclear technology, when this is something that most Iranians believe they have a legal right to develop?  How does he propose to prevent the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons?  He remains open to starting a war with Iran–and he is allegedly the progressive “peace” candidate!  What a joke.

What of the other major candidates?  Over the years, McCain has been the neocons’ favourite and, as we all know, holds comparably dangerous views.  HRC is still supportive of the activist, aggressive foreign policy of the DLC/PPI, which is consistent with how her husband governed.  We can look forward to essays from McCain and Clinton in the future, and I expect that both of them will be filled with much of the same dreary excess and bombast. 

I would be willing to grant that Giuliani is the most dangerous out of seven dangerous candidates, but this is a matter of a few degrees and not a massive difference in substance.

Of course, Obama is being dishonest when he pretends that the U.S. government was trying to “ignore the rest of the world” prior to 9/11. Isolationism did not provoke the terrorists. On the contrary, the terrorist attack was partly a result of decades of U.S. intervention overseas–precisely the kind of meddling that Obama euphemistically calls “maintaining a strong foreign policy, pursuing our enemies, and promoting our values around the world.” This is the point made by Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a principled and consistent Iraq War opponent, and it is understood by millions of populist Democrats as well. When you stick your hand in a hornet’s nest, you may get stung. Perhaps the action is worth the possible consequence, but don’t pretend that the sticking of the hand into the nest had nothing to do with the stinging! ~Jeff Taylor

Price Floyd traces the decline of America’s standing in the world to this moment. “Back then, the USIA transmitted American values—and this was separate from selling American policy,” he said. “The two aren’t separated now. There’s no entity that makes it possible to separate them. So, if you disagree with our policy, which is easy to do now, then you hate America, too.” ~Fred Kaplan, Slate

I take Mr. Floyd’s point, and I think he is mostly right at least as far as government activity is concerned. It isn’t as if there are no other means of communicating to the rest of the world except by way of government, but I acknowledge that he is talking specifically about how the government does or does not successfully engage in public diplomacy.

This also highlights the terrible practical problems with a “values”-driven idealistic foreign policy or anything called the “Freedom Agenda.” When you take it as axiomatic, as Mr. Bush’s Second Inaugural did, that “our interests and our values are one,” you have prepared the ground for a continual identification of interests, values and policies that supposedly seek the former and allegedly protect the latter. As far as the state is concerned, the government’s policies are the embodiment of both American interests and values. To oppose or criticise that policy is to declare that you are somehow against one or both. To claim that foreigners resent U.S. policy is, for a foreign policy idealist, to say that they resent America; to say that policy causes terrorism (which it can and does do) is to say that America by its very nature causes terrorism. The special relevance of this conflation of “values” and policy for the recent dust-up between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani is obvious.

In this roundabout way, the idealists reason. We can understand how a foreign policy idealist probably genuinely believes that “they hate us for our freedoms,” because for him “our freedoms” involve the “freedoms” of, say, backing the Aliyev dictatorship in Azerbaijan or the “liberties” of selling munitions to Israel or the “rights” to launching aggressive wars against small, weak countries with which we have no real quarrel. Hegemony is itself an expression of freedom; our bases are extensions of our “values” and our cruise missiles the expression of our ideals.

For decades, the French supported the Hutu regime even when it became Nazi-like in its racial nationalism. It may be difficult for Americans to comprehend such imperialistic motivations, but the main reason for French support of Hutu power was that the Hutu are Francophone and the Tutsis Anglophonic, and that the latter group was aided by the former British colony of Uganda. ~James Kirchick

It may be difficult for Americans to comprehend such imperialistic motivations….Perhaps, though I daresay that the apparently numerous Churchill-idolising American fans of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (which, at least according to its critics, is not much more than a rather lengthy volume that repeatedly says in various ways, “Yay, go Anglophones!”) understand Paris’ support for Francophones in Africa just fine.  The odd people who have been propagating the idea of the Anglosphere, which I find totally uninteresting in almost every possible way, probably also understand this connection, though they pretend that Anglospherism is more than glorified Anglophonism (it’s about values!).  I wonder: what do Anglospherists think of this new history volume?  Excited?  Embarrassed? 

Come to think of it, France’s support for the Hutus was and is fairly easy to understand, since sharing a common language with the rulers of another country provides an automatic way in for spreading your influence.  That is part of the reason why colonialists who are actually intent on maintaining their control of another country learn the local languages, make sure the local elites understand theirs and attempt to introduce their culture by way of language.  The one good defense against the charge of colonialism over the Iraq war is the profound disinterest the government has shown in supporting programs for Arabic speakers and actively recruiting people to learn and study Arabic and Arab cultures.  The “empire of bases” doesn’t need any well-staffed colonial administration full of fluent speakers of the native languages–it will happily use other countries’ lands, but it won’t be bothered with the day-to-day affairs of the dependency.  That would be meddling in their internal affairs and therefore wrong!