To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices [bold mine-DL]. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others [bold mine-DL]. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods [bold mine-DL], the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force [bold mine-DL]. ~Joshua Muravchik

Via Ross

Ross notes that there is nothing uniquely neoconservative about these tenets, and he’s right.  A great many people share these tenets, several of which are misguided or confused.  That is one of the reasons why the foreign policy of any future administration will be generally unchanged from the current administration–a depressing thought, I know, but true nonetheless.  There is a lot wrong with several of the tenets, and even more wrong with the way in which actual neoconservatives and internationalists employ them.  If these tenets represent the “only game in town,” as Muravchik claims, the country is in serious trouble.  In this post I will try to sketch out why these tenets aren’t, or don’t have to be, the “only game in town.”  The troubling thing is that most people “in town” are only too happy to keep playing the same, losing game. 

First, the moral struggle.  No one disputes that the methods employed by jihadis are vicious and evil, and virtually no one would deny that their ultimate goals are essentially contrary to our vision(s) of the Good.  Where the language of moral struggle becomes a liability is when it actually clouds our discernment and causes us to associate all manner of cruel or repressive regimes and groups with our specific enemies.  Indeed, this moralising tendency often causes us to make the wrong strategic choices, making us focus on a cruel or despotic regime that may not, in fact, pose any meaningful or uncontainable strategic threat.  The moralistic-legalistic streak, as Kennan called it, in our foreign policy thinking leads many of us to exaggerate the threats from such regimes and groups because we reduce them to forces of unreasoning malevolence.  The more we reduce these other regimes and groups to veritable embodiments of evil, the greater will be the temptation of an annihilationist or total war campaign against entire populations.  The “moralising” tendency has led our government, and will keep leading the government, to undertake policies of aggression that are immoral and indefensible.  To draw on Prof. Schroeder’s recent arguments in TAC, the problem with the Iraq war wasn’t that it went wrong, but that it was wrong, and this fundamentally morally wrong war derived from the rhetoric of “moral clarity” and “an end to evil” espoused by Muravchik’s confreres.       

One of the problems in ceding, or appearing to cede, the language of morality in foreign policy to those who have weak moral imaginations (for whom virtue entails willpower and violence combined with good intentions) is that it has made it more difficult to distinguish between a moral foreign policy and an unjust, domineering foreign policy that wears the mantle of morality. 

Second, the dimensions of the conflict.  Though I have also sometimes referred to the conventional phrase “global counterinsurgency” approvingly, I have to say that the conflict is not really global.  It is international, or rather transnational, and there is an important difference.  The conflict is not limited to just one country and it involves non-state actors, but it is not a struggle that encompasses the entire globe.  The Cold War was the closest to a complete global conflict or rivalry that has ever unfolded in modern history, in that it significantly affected every part of the world and, of course, had the potential to obliterate human life on this planet.  Right away we see the difference in scale and scope with the present conflict, which has neither the potential for destruction nor the fully global dimension that the “WWIV” crowd claim.  To grant that the conflict is in a meaningful sense “global” is to grant one of the interventionists’ dangerous assumptions without giving it much consideration.  Conceiving of the conflict as “global” makes it easier to engage in the aforementioned conflation of our specific enemies in Al Qaeda and their allies with any or all other despotic regimes.  The now unfortunately widespread language of “Islamofascist” or “Islamic fascist” that has gained currency among the presidential candidates and their advisors also serves to further this notion of a global threat, since the word fascist carries with it ideas of world mastery and conquest.  Applying it to the jihadis, while absurd on so many other levels, also exaggerates the extent and nature of the threat posed by them, since it suggests that they have it within their power to dominate the globe.

This brings into question the entire language of “theaters” and their interrelationship.  If we are fighting non-state actors, whose organisation is almost by definition loose and decentralised, it is as much of a mistake to talk about theaters as it is to talk about “fronts.”  If jihadis make up a transnational insurgency, there are no fronts and to the extent that we can speak of “theaters” they are going to be only very indirectly connected.  Indeed, the main thing connecting the “theaters” of fighting some handful of jihadis in Anbar and jihadis in eastern Afghanistan is our military, by which I mean that they are theaters in the “same” conflict only to the extent that we are engaged in a conflict in both places.  Otherwise, the “theaters” are not connected, and our relative failure or success in one will have negligible, if any, effects in the other.

We should always prefer nonviolent methods, which is how we can tell that this tenet has nothing to do with the neoconservatives.  These are the people who hardly ever prefer nonviolent methods when they are available, and are always looking for some way to justify recourse to violence.  One of the few nonviolent methods neoconservatives will prefer, at least rhetorically and superficially, is democracy promotion, which has resulted time and again in the strengthening of those forces that the neoconservatives in particular regard as our enemies.  It has certainly strengthened Islamists in essentially every part of the Islamic world where it has been introduced under the auspices or influence of the “freedom agenda.”  Perhaps someone could propose another justification for democracy promotion, since democracy promotion has not resulted in the weakening of “our foe” and the reduction in the need for force.