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Misunderstanding the ‘Restraint Coalition’

The differences Brands identifies may apply to generic Democrats and Republicans, but they don't describe us very well at all.
bernie lee

Hal Brands comments on the obstacles confronting advocates of foreign policy restraint. Here I think he makes too much of other political disagreements as a problem:

This creates a serious political problem for the restraint coalition: Supporting the administration on some issues while critiquing it on others is intellectually honest, but makes it hard to build the potent inside influence that sways policy. And as Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, has pointed out, many progressives will bridle at any cooperation with Trump, particularly as the 2020 election approaches. The reverse image of this problem will manifest should a progressive win the White House. The Democratic candidates who are the most sympathetic to progressive retrenchment, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, will be anathema to conservative members of the coalition because of their domestic policy preferences.

The fact that there is a restraint coalition at all suggests that this is not as much of an obstacle as Brands thinks. Conservative and libertarian supporters of restraint are interested in working with progressives toward shared foreign policy goals, and it is because we make changing foreign policy a priority that we aren’t going to let other disagreements get in the way of that. We know better than most that Sanders has been a vocal opponent of U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen and a leading critic of all unnecessary wars abroad. Warren has likewise been a fierce critic of U.S. support for the Saudi coalition. Opposition to involvement in the war on Yemen has been one of the things uniting antiwar activists on the left and right for the last several years. If one of them became president, conservative and libertarians advocates of restraint would be more than willing to support them on the policies that we agree with despite any other disagreements we might have with the rest of their agenda. Progressives could do the same thing with a Republican administration that actually practices restraint, but the Trump administration doesn’t do that. The only way that U.S. foreign policy is going to be reoriented towards restraint is if supporters of more peaceful and responsible statecraft build up support across the political spectrum so that restraint is always represented no matter which party happens to hold power.

Another one of the obstacles Brands identifies is also exaggerated:

Second, a progressive-conservative coalition is unstable by its very nature, because the differences between the two camps remain so profound.

There is no question that there are differences in emphasis, but antiwar and non-interventionist progressives and conservatives are united by quite a few things. There is a shared interest in holding the government accountable for its foreign policy decisions, democratizing foreign policy, and reasserting Congress’ role in matters of war and peace. There is the shared aversion to coercive and destruction policies of sanctions and military intervention. There is a shared recognition of the damage that indulging reckless clients can do. Supporters of foreign policy restraint are generally in agreement that the U.S. should respect international law, and we agree that the U.S. should seek diplomatic resolutions in our disputes with other states. By and large, advocates of restraint are also in agreement about the importance of arms control treaties and nonproliferation agreements, and that is certainly true of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute. I think we all see the value in keeping New START, and we all agree that reneging on the JCPOA was a terrible mistake. The differences Brands identifies may apply to generic Democrats and Republicans, but they don’t describe us very well at all.

Brands concludes:

Today, the state of U.S. opinion on foreign policy is ambiguous, which has created a window of opportunity for progressive and conservative advocates of restraint. But if a darkening geopolitical horizon, and especially the rise of a new superpower challenger in China, reawakens the globalist inclinations of the American public, that window may not stay open for long.

I’m not sure that there are “globalist inclinations” to be awakened. To the extent that the public favors U.S. engagement overseas, those inclinations have never been dormant, but “globalist inclinations” seems to suggest something more than that. The public is generally in favor of active U.S. engagement in the world, but the form of that engagement matters a great deal. Most Americans are not wedded to the U.S. being the global hegemon, and they strongly prefer engagement through trade and diplomacy. The less militarized, less ambitious foreign policy that supporters of restraint offer is very compatible with these preferences. Public opinion has been moving in the direction of restraint for many years, so that is probably not as much of an obstacle as it seems. There are many obstacles ahead for advocates of restraint, but for the most part they are to be found in the entrenched resistance to changing U.S. foreign policy and the vested interests that want to keep things the way they are.

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