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On “Organizing Principles” and Ideology

Christopher Preble points out that having an “organizing principle” for foreign policy isn’t obviously desirable: Beyond that crucial vote, however, Clinton’s comments to Goldberg represent the essence of the hawks’ critique: a big, important country like the United States needs an organizing principle, she explained, and “don’t do stupid [stuff]” doesn’t suffice. This is a […]

Christopher Preble points out that having an “organizing principle” for foreign policy isn’t obviously desirable:

Beyond that crucial vote, however, Clinton’s comments to Goldberg represent the essence of the hawks’ critique: a big, important country like the United States needs an organizing principle, she explained, and “don’t do stupid [stuff]” doesn’t suffice.

This is a debatable point. An organizing principle isn’t necessarily superior to ad hocery. Many organizing principles have turned out to be flawed or immoral, or both (e.g. imperialism, racism, communism, totalitarianism, the list goes on).

Weighing the evidence on a case by case basis, and making judgments based on the specific circumstances that prevail at that particular moment, can work rather well. An organizing principle — some might call it ideology — might cloud rather than clarify one’s assessment of the facts, and the prudent courses of action.

Preble is right about this, but I think this can be put even more strongly. It is usually the case that an “organizing principle” for foreign policy compels people to simplify and reduce problems overseas so that they will fit the worldview that the principle is supposed to express. For that reason, it isn’t just that this can potentially distort how our government sees things, but it virtually guarantees that it will. When the U.S. was pursuing a policy of global containment, that often caused Americans to downplay or ignore local conditions and national differences because of a mistaken belief in a monolithic communist threat. To the extent that the U.S. has subordinated its other foreign policy goals to the “war on terror,” that has had a serious distorting effect on how we assess foreign threats and how our government has chosen to react to them. This has led to the conflation (and inflation) of different kinds of threats and the imagining of cooperation between mutually hostile forces. The phony pre-invasion claim that Hussein and Al Qaeda were working together is just the most obvious example of this, but this is the sort of nonsense that comes from trying to force a variety of foreign enemies and rivals into a single overarching scheme.

When a government embraces an “organizing principle” in its foreign policy, there is also a temptation to assume that other states must be doing the same thing. This can lead Americans to view manageable tensions and disagreements with other major powers as non-negotiable ideological clashes, which can in turn inspire misguided demands for new policies of containment directed against those powers. Insisting on having an “organizing principle” in foreign policy seems almost inextricable from the desire to find a new global ideological struggle for the U.S. to be engaged in, and that requires foreign policy activism and interference abroad that have no obvious or direct connection to the interests of the United States.

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