The politics of power

In “The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror,” Michael Ignatieff addresses the ethical problems faced by liberal democracies, noting that “the beginning of wisdom ... is that democracies should not attempt to rule others against their consent.” Good advice. Unfortunately it is a rule the United States too often breaks, as in Iraq today. The issue lies at the core of what Walter Russell Mead and the historian John Lewis Gaddis have to say about Iraq in their books on American foreign policy.

The United States is assumed to be the most powerful nation that ever existed. It has been taken for granted that no one could stand against it. Its military forces were believed to be unbeatable, and its political capacity to remake what were considered backward societies from Morocco to Pakistan was taken for granted in the mainstream foreign policy community.

When Ignatieff, Mead and Gaddis wrote their new books, America’s prestige remained high. Washington’s allies might have sometimes criticized the uses of American power, but they respected Washington values. Outside the Islamic world (where its reputation was compromised by uncritical support for Israeli policies), the United States enjoyed respect, even if this was not quite so unanimous as neoconservative publicists believed. (One such, Joshua Muravchik, writing in 1996, when American international hegemony was already a gleam in the neoconservative eye, asked who could possibly “fear or distrust a righteous [American] leadership ... aside perhaps from the French.” Those were the days.)

Ignatieff’s is the odd book out of this trio but the more important in that he soberly deals with permanent problems of American foreign policy, not only those specifically provoked by the Bush administration’s war on terror: the problems of attempting to rule without demonstrated legitimacy, the prudential problem of choosing the lesser evil, the expedient choice of deliberate abuse or suspension of rights considered defining qualities of democracy, the limits of acceptable violence and coercion, and the problems of arbitrary detention, torture, assassination and disregard of the rule of law -- all the subject of policy choices made in Washington since September 2001.

While Ignatieff is reluctant (or too courteous) to say it, they are issues on which the Bush administration has consistently made bad choices and even righteously rejoiced in those choices. Consider its declaration that the U.S. no longer would be bound by the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners and the withdrawal of Army rules on war prisoners. Consider its use of punitive action against civilians in Iraq, meant to intimidate, and closer to home, its claim that an administration that is not at war (only Congress declares war) possesses the authority to suspend habeas corpus, a doctrine at the core of English and American common law liberties.

Also notable is Ignatieff’s discussion of nihilism’s dark allure for those who battle to defend their cultural identity, and equally for those drawn to suppress terrorism by means of torture and exemplary violence. He asserts that democracies are at risk when they “are driven by the horror of terror to torture, to assassinate, to kill innocent civilians, all in the name of rights and democracy.”

Ignatieff entered the Iraq controversy a year ago with an article in the New York Times Magazine endorsing the “imperial” responsibilities of the United States in a disordered world. He has subsequently rather uneasily backed away from his original strong support for the war, which was based on his conviction that Saddam Hussein indeed had and would use weapons of mass destruction.

He considers it useful to compare the threat Al Qaeda poses to Western democracies to that of international anarchist and Bolshevik radicalism after 1918. However, the Comintern was not a movement of religious enthusiasts and political radicals. It was a disciplined clandestine agency of an ideologically motivated and powerful national government. The undisciplined anarchists were an irrelevant as well as spent force after 1918.

Ignatieff is more interesting on the philosophical issues posed by violence and terrorism than when he conducts political and historical analysis, where he is earnest but poorly informed. His high-mindedness is evident in his conviction that Bush administration policies have been motivated by disinterested concern for the liberties of the Iraqis. I would assume that the revelations of recent days will have shaken him.

Ignatieff wrote a more discouraged New York Times Magazine article earlier this year, saying that what will justify the U.S. is that it leaves Iraq in better condition than it was before Americans arrived, thus proving that the dead are not dying in vain -- an admirable sentiment, whose validation we await.

Mead’s “Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk” and Gaddis’ “Surprise, Security, and the American Experience” are straightforward foreign policy books, tracing historical precedents for the war on terror, and in Mead’s case, proposing where the United States should go next. For that reason the books are victims of what has happened since they were written, the situation having since fundamentally changed.

The Mead book is a serious and comprehensive survey of the American situation as it appeared when delivered to the publisher. He writes confidently about America’s overwhelming power, essential attractiveness to global society, centrality to “harmonic” international convergence and capacity for remaking the world order. That was a time when the views of the “old” West Europeans and their votes in the U.N. Security Council could be ignored or described as irrelevant to the development of a new world order, which Washington had well in hand.

Mead also defends the continued relevance of Wilsonian internationalism, anticipated by the neo-imperial ideas of Theodore Roosevelt, reformist in international as well as domestic affairs and greatly influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan’s notions of sea power and the need to possess colonies. The first Roosevelt launched the new American internationalism, and Woodrow Wilson developed it during the first world war (meant to “end war” and “make the world safe for democracy”). The effort was flawed, Mead writes, “yet over the next century much good has come from [it].

“So the froth and spray of the first waves of a new version of American grand strategy do not determine where the tide is headed,” he concludes, implying that the same is likely to be true of the present policies of the Bush administration. He accepts those policies as fundamentally valid expressions of permanent elements in the American relationship with the world.

Mead writes that in the future, reform of the U.N. and a new emphasis on regional institutions of security and economic development can recapture American popular support for an expanded American internationalism. A quieter and more tactful diplomacy will be able to “restore American soft power” and renew international support for American policies. We can, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has written in “The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership,” another recent book offering not dissimilar proposals for policy reform, maintain our role of international leadership and avoid the dissonance that has come from efforts by the Bush administration to dominate allies as well as enemies.

What Mead calls the new “millennial capitalism,” introduced to the world by the United States, can be expected to continue to work miracles of development. However, he asserts, the United States must change its approach to the world -- and indeed change itself -- so as to be seen “as a servant of all” in helping to solve global problems. Mead says that he “is optimistic about the future.” Wilson once said that he was called an optimist, but that was how he knew that he was an American.

Like Ignatieff’s book, which began as the Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh, Gaddis’ book is also made up of a series of endowed lectures, these for the New York Public Library. They were inspired by the reactions of his Yale students to the 9/11 attacks and his belief that they had shattered “the boundaries between everyday existence and a dangerous world ... [as well as] the assumption of safety that had long since become ... part of what it meant to be an American.” He compares the attacks to the burning of the White House and Capitol by British invaders in 1814, saying that Americans then, as in the time of George W. Bush, rather than retreat behind their defenses, chose to “take the offensive ... by confronting, neutralizing, and if possible overwhelming the sources of danger rather than fleeing from them.”

He says that John Quincy Adams was the “most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century,” making American “expansion ... provide security.” Adams’ methods as a diplomat prior to his becoming president “sound surprisingly relevant in the aftermath of September 11th: they were preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony.” After the War of 1812, the United States preempted possible threats by annexing Spanish Florida, forcing Seminoles westward across the Mississippi. A decade later the U.S. annexed Texas, provoking war with Mexico, and seized California, helping itself to the “derelict” territories that lay between: present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada.

Bush’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks and rogue or failed states, according to Gaddis, reproduces what Adams and his successors did. “[The solution] is breathtakingly simple: it is to spread democracy everywhere.” Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and preemptive war against Iraq, together with his declared program to remake, under American leadership, what his administration now calls the Greater Middle East -- extending democracy from Morocco to Pakistan -- is no more than the old American way of handling these things.

Gaddis asserts that applying this strategy today (through “shock and awe”) has turned the United States from the principal stabilizer of the international system into its greatest destabilizer, and the consequences of this raise the question of whether the U.S. should continue to look for international domination through the exercise of power or cultivate leadership through diplomacy and persuasion, as Brzezinski puts it. Gaddis does not conclude with the unqualified approval of Bush administration strategy that his discussion of its predecessors might suggest. However, like the other authors considered in this review (and Brzezinski as well), he has little doubt that the U.S. has the power to choose and accomplish whatever it wants.

This is why these books all seem irrelevant today. They derive from the discussion going on before and immediately after the invasion of Iraq, when very few in American policy circles, and none at all among Bush administration officials, would have dared say that the United States might not possess the power to impose democracy in Iraq, would not be able to stabilize Afghanistan or Iraq if nationalist resistance developed in either country, might indeed be defeated and forced to retire from one place or the other and certainly will not impose democracy across the Greater Middle East.

Each of these books is a demonstration of how grave and deep is the isolation, even of intelligent Americans, from elementary realities of the world. All are discussing other societies, and American possibilities, as they imagine them to be -- because it is how they wish them to be -- and indeed as they are ordinarily portrayed in an American press, itself conditioned to the virtual realities of a Washington whose sole point of reference is itself. The rest long ago was dismissed as “irrelevant.”

How else to explain the radical discrepancy between what the American foreign policy elite thought, “knew” and expected one year ago, and where the country finds itself today? *