First, I think Ygelsias is somewhat misrepresenting that dominant conservative position. I’d argue that conservatives seem to agree that some aspects of the world are indeed positive sum: the U.S. military as a global police force protects our interests but also lets allied states peacefully pursues theirs. They do not see the accumulation of U.S. power as a zero-sum affair because American power supports the positions and interests of a host of other nations. ~Greg Scoblete

One reason why Yglesias might think that conservatives typically view international relations as a zero-sum game is that many of the top foreign policy conservative commentators insist that this is how they see the world (and that this is how Obama should see it, too). Robert Kagan has an entire series of articles dedicated to mocking Obama’s supposed rejection of the zero-sum view, based originally on one throwaway line in Obama’s Cairo speech that I very much doubt he meant.

Nonetheless, Greg is partly right here, and I have argued before that defenders of Pax Americana and U.S. hegemony or primacy frequently assume that what is good for America (as they understand this) is good for the world, so much so that they have some difficulty grasping that other nations might resist U.S. “leadership” out of anything other than ideological fanaticism, anti-American hatred or greed. As I said in January:

For believers in Pax Americana, the only time when there are “zero-sum games” is when other states resist the supposedly benevolent intervention of the U.S.

Put another way, when other nations align themselves with the U.S. and do what Washington wants, these people believe that everyone benefits (even if the U.S. and our allies are embarked on a disastrous course that harms international stability and security). It is only opposition and resistance to the U.S. that create the conflicts where only one side can gain. A key difference between right and left, or rather between the prevailing view on the right and progressive realism, is that the former tends to see (or imagine) far more opposition and resistance to the U.S. around the world and it seems far more likely to view this opposition in terms of threats, challenges and unwavering ideological hostility. A key difference between the non-interventionist right and progressive realism is that progressive realists still insist on trying to solve all of the same “problems” through international institutions and “smart power” that the interventionist right believes can be solved through power projection and freedom-babble, whereas the non-interventionist right is much less likely to see these “problems” as American problems in the first place.

In the last ten years, something else has distinguished the prevailing foreign policy views of right and left, and this is their relative amount of respect for state sovereignty and international law. While there continue to be humanitarian interventionists preaching the “responsibility to protect,” humanitarian interventionism has been losing ground on the left as the terrible costs of these interventions have increased. The absurdity of destroying entire countries as a way of aiding and freeing them has begun to dawn on more people on the left. As Mark Mazower has observed in his interesting World Affairs essay:

But the more thoughtful of them [interventionists] have come to realize that the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs. On the contrary, if the history of the past century showed anything, it was that clear legal norms, and the securing of international stability more generally, also serve the cause of human welfare [bold mine-DL]. Let alone the fact that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them. Liberalism’s characteristic indifference to institutions, both domestic and international, has thus been called into question. In short, the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.

Contrast this more sober-minded progressive realism with the interventionist sabre-rattling and freedom-babble of Michael Barone, who cited Mazower’s essay to use as his foil for reciting an already very tired complaint against Obama. You see, Obama’s foreign policy “has shown a cold indifference to human rights that contrasts vividly with those of his five predecessors.” Leave aside the accuracy of this observation for a moment, and consider that it is the Republican and supposed conservative writer here who is complaining that a President is not engaged in enough preaching, lecturing and warmongering on account of human rights abuses in other countries.

Yglesias claims that mainstream conservatives don’t actually believe the human rights rhetoric they’ve been using in the last decade, and he says that their “professions of humanitarian concern” are “hollow and opportunistic,” but in my view the far more worrisome possibility is that they are absolutely sincere and have no idea what a dangerous position it is that they have taken, tied as it is to hegemonism and support for perpetual war. No doubt some mainstream conservatives simply use human rights claims as a cudgel with which to beat their opponents, and some use other regimes’ human rights abuses as a pretext for aggressive policies they already want to see realized, but for the time being humanitarian interventionism is not so much dying as it has simply migrated from its theoretically more natural home on the left to its new environs on the mainstream right.

In a strange move, Barone then drags in Walter Russell Mead’s article declaring the twilight of liberal internationalism to try to counter Mazower, but Barone seems not to understand that Mead is to a large extent talking about something else. Mead’s main point was this:

The world is inexorably developing in directions that undermine the authority and efficacy of big international institutions, and American power (not, I think, doomed to decline) will increasingly have to operate outside of institutional frameworks, like it or not.

If Mead is right, and there are reasons to doubt this, that does not necessarily contradict what Mazower says in his essay. On the whole, Mazower’s essay was descriptive and provided an account of developments over the last twenty years. Indeed, if the authority and efficacy of international institutions are being undermined, that could improve the stability of internationally recognized borders and reduce the chances of future humanitarian interventions. After all, it is U.N. sanctions and Security Council resolutions that have served as the legal fig leaves for unnecessary and illegal warfare in the recent past. The developments that are undermining international institutions, and which are making the fictions of an “international community” and “rogue states” more preposterous every day, are also developments that will tend to reinforce state sovereignty. Regardless of the efficacy and authority of international institutions, it was unipolarity that made humanitarian interventionism possible, and the shift to multipolarity means that there will probably be fewer and fewer states that can be treated as Yugoslavia and Iraq have been treated in the last twenty years. Other major and rising powers, such as Russia, China, India and even Brazil and Indonesia, have no interest in encouraging more border changes, especially not if they are in service to ethnic separatist causes. Almost all of them have enough concerns with ethnic tensions and separatist movements already that they have no incentive to intervene on behalf of separatists or repressed ethnic groups inside another state.

On the whole, it has not been the non-Western states that have engaged in gross violations of international law and state sovereignty in the last twenty years. Even the partition of Georgia by Russia was a direct response to the partition of Serbia, which was entirely the work of western European and American governments. It has been European and American governments that have been intervening in strictly internal affairs, carving up sovereign states and occupying other states. Strange as it may seem, it has been the non-Euro-Americans, to use Mead’s term, plus the Russians that have consistently opposed these moves. For whatever combination of reasons, it has been Europeans and Americans who have wanted to increase international instability, foment political upheaval and spread revolution. The relative decline of Europe and America may not lead to a situation where “rising new powers will continue to lead the world down the path the Americans laid down,” but it very well could lead to a world in which certain international norms, such as state sovereignty, are more fully respected and where international stability has increased.

P.S. On a related note, I recommend picking up the new issue of TAC or subscribing and reading online our Left/Right symposium on the prospects of forging a left-right alliance against empire and the warfare state.