A utopian’s re-education in realism

Future historians are likely to remember the abbreviated post-Cold War era from 1989 to 2001 as a time of remarkable illusions. Over the course of little more than a decade, Big Thinkers promoted a variety of Big Ideas, each advertised as a sure-fire antidote to the world’s ills. For many, that idea was globalization, the prospect of an open world promising peace and prosperity for all. For others (mostly on the right) benign hegemony enforced by the sole remaining superpower had great allure. For still others (mostly on the left), humanitarian intervention, with the superpower henceforth acting on behalf of the weak and oppressed, sounded like just the ticket.

Events soon exposed each of these notions for what they were: bumper stickers masquerading as enduring principles. Interventions touted as possessing great therapeutic potential often as not left patients the worse for wear.

David Rieff, a writer for the New York Times Magazine who combines progressive inclinations with an acute moral sensibility, is among those who succumbed to such illusions. Here, he recants. Indeed, to the extent that “At the Point of a Gun” constitutes a whole larger than the previously published essays comprising its parts, it does so in charting the trajectory of the author’s disillusionment. The collection opens in 1999 with Rieff intent on preventing any further recurrence of genocide and ethnic cleansing and calling for a “New Age of Liberal Imperialism.” It ends with the author quoting John Quincy Adams’ admonition of 1821, in which the then-secretary of State warns against the United States “enlisting under other banners than her own,” lest the “fundamental maxims” of U.S. policy “insensibly change from liberty to force.” Rieff now contends that such an insensible change has become not a danger but an appalling fact.

From having entertained his own millenarian dreams that through the skillful use of armed force enlightened nations might put the world right, Rieff has moved to a position he describes as “fervent anti-utopianism.” That journey included stops in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, the latter two instructive for demonstrating how quickly “victims were ready, willing and able to become the victimizers when they got their turn.” Politics, it turns out, is not a morality play.

But it has taken Iraq to complete Rieff’s political re-education. Over the course of several trips, he has spent a total of six months observing at close quarters the Iraq war and the U.S.-led occupation in all of its brutality and ineptitude. Conceding that the war’s architects may well have conceived of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a genuine act of liberation, Rieff describes the actual outcome as illustrating “the speed with which altruism can become barbarism.” However high-minded the initial motivation, armed intervention all but inevitably breeds contempt, stokes resentment and paves the way for corruption and abuses of power. His blunt conclusion: “Stipulate our good intentions, if you wish. The road to hell still yawns before us.”

Why did the utopian visions of the 1990s come to naught? Rieff offers several explanations, including the persistent weakness of “that toothless old scold,” the United Nations, and the inability of political leaders, not least of all in Washington, to conceive of interests except in the narrowest and most parochial terms. Above all, he points to the problematic nature of war itself, which time and again -- nowhere more so than in Iraq -- has demolished the pretensions of those who claim to have transformed force into a precise and predictable extension of politics.

Rieff states his own (revised) view with admirable directness: “I believe we should lean away from war, lean as far as possible without actually falling over into pacifism.” From that perspective, he judges “the endless wars of altruism posited by so many human rights activists” and “the endless wars of liberation ... proposed by American neoconservatives” to be equally wrong-headed.

In leaning away from war, what would the anti-utopian have the United States lean toward? Here Rieff hints at but does not fully develop an answer. With the Bush administration charging off on its crusade to end tyranny around the world, he wonders if just perhaps “an opportunity to rethink realism” might be at hand.

Coached to see themselves as dyed-in-the-wool idealists, many Americans instinctively recoil from realism, a baggage-laden term “usually ... conflated with cynicism and resignation” and suggestive of 19th century European statesmen Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck (or worse, Henry A. Kissinger). Rieff understands this but advances the proposition -- daring for someone hitherto identified with the left -- that realism may have been misunderstood.

He dismisses the notion that realism is isolationism in disguise. Modest in its claims and skeptical of the claims of others, realism doesn’t imply passivity. Rather, the realist “acts from the conviction that while there are many wrongs that do indeed need to be righted, and many causes worth defending, not everything is possible.” Hence, realists today reject neoconservative ambitions to reinvent the Middle East for the same reasons that they rejected Marxist aspirations to create a New Man a generation ago. They appreciate both the limits of power and the dangers of hubris. Wisdom lies in picking the fights that are both worthwhile and winnable. And from women’s rights to preserving the environment to debt relief, Rieff finds many “issues and causes ... that are usually conjugated in the language of idealism, but are actually easier to argue for in the name of realism.”

Absent from “At the Point of a Gun,” however, is any appreciation for the actual richness of the realist tradition, which did not begin with Adams and did not reach its apotheosis with Kissinger. Unmentioned by Rieff, historian Charles A. Beard, journalist Walter Lippmann, diplomat George F. Kennan and, above all, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr are proponents of a distinctively American realism who wielded enormous influence in the 20th century, not least of all in calling attention to the moral dimension of policy as the United States began asserting the prerogatives of a great power.

Events have long since rendered the policy prescriptions of these thinkers obsolete. To the extent that their legacy lives on, it does so less as a specific approach to strategy than as a temperament.

The great challenge of the present day is to adapt that tradition to the needs of the moment. Converting what survives as a realist disposition into a coherent basis for policy, realism may yet offer a plausible alternative to the runaway globalism that dominates the political mainstream, conservative and liberal alike. To this urgent task David Rieff, chastened but wiser, may well make a considerable contribution. *