Redefining US National Interests

NOTE: This review of Sands of Empire was published in the October 6, 2005 edition of Real Clear Politics

“It was if in the Providence of God a continent
had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful
people who loved liberty and the rights of men
more than they loved anything else, to come and
set up an unselfish commonwealth.”

-President Woodrow Wilson

The debate over how the United States should engage the world is as old as the republic itself. Before the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, American foreign policy had been dominated by “virtuous isolationism”, with the exception of President Theodore Roosevelt’s flirtation with American imperialism. Wilson revolutionized American foreign policy, and international relations, by making American exceptionalism and international liberalism the basis for American engagement with the world. In Sands of Empire, Robert Merry, the president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly, argues that America’s post-Cold War foreign policy reflects a triumph of Wilsonism. This triumph has transformed the United States into a Crusader State, with serious consequences for American global leadership and strategic interests.

Leftist opponents of the present Bush administration’s foreign policy might agree with Merry’s Crusader State critique, but Merry also takes aim at the Clinton administration’s humanitarian interventions. For Merry, the key divide is not between Democrat and Republican, or liberal and conservative, but between two views of history that are as old as Western thought. In one corner stand the adherents of what Merry labels the “Idea of Progress” – who believe in universal values and whose view of history is based largely on the views of Rousseau (and his belief that the state could perfect human society) and Hegel (and his prediction of the end of history). Standing in opposition are those who subscribe to a “Cyclical View of History”, who argue that history does not follow a linear course with Western civilization emerging triumphantly, but a cyclical course in which civilizations rise and fall.

Sands of Empire is largely a book about ideas, and Merry produces an intellectual tour de force. He includes a concise survey of significant works of political theory throughout history, a review of 20th Century American diplomatic history, and an analysis of who the neoconservatives really are, what they believe, and how they have changed American foreign policy. Merry makes a convincing case that beginning with Wilsonism, extending through two major “publication events” – Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” and Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree – and culminating in the rise of the neoconservatives, the Idea of Progress has been deeply imbedded in American intellectual life and has changed the direction of American foreign policy.

Is Merry correct? After all, by his own admission, expressions of Wilsonism were often used to justify foreign policy actions. Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently pointed out in Foreign Affairs that the “containment” doctrine of the Cold War had a subordinate goal of regime change in the Soviet Union (Haass characterizes this goal as “regime evolution”, since it was intended to take place gradually). It was also the United States which advanced the United Nations, and the systems of international trade, finance and law that the world abides by today. All of this Wilsonian sentiment, however, was – as John Mearsheimer puts it – liberal spin for realist policies. Before the end of the Cold War, however, American foreign policy was guided by vital national interests, not by the Idea of Progress that traditional liberals and neoconservatives subscribed to. Merry provides a fascinating account of how neoconservatives turned on Ronald Reagan, expressing disappointment with the fact that he did not commit to bold action against the Soviet Union. But it was not bold action based on ideology or divine motivation that made the United States a superpower that won two World Wars and the Cold War – it was a doctrine of conservative interventionism that linked the commitment of American blood and treasure to achievable national interests.

The end of the Cold War, however, changed the nature of the debate. Defining national interest was an easier task when the threat (whether it be the Nazis or the Soviets) was clear. By the mid-1990’s, containment could no longer serve as the guiding light for American foreign policy. In fact, no one was sure how to characterize the nature of the world we were now living in. Fukuyama, for one, looked at the new world in a more positive light, advancing the argument that the U.S.’s Cold War victory represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” He dismissed alternative forms of government – whether in Asia or in Islam – as having little global appeal and being vulnerable to the pull of liberal ideas. He addressed the rise in local conflicts apparently based on nationalism or ethnicity by claiming certain peoples had not yet reached the end of history, but that they would get there. A few years later, Thomas Friedman argued that globalization had replaced the Cold War system with the democratization of capital, technology and information across national borders. These two commentators were trumpeting the triumph of the Idea of Progress. For them, mankind had graduated from the Hobbesian world, and with the exception of disgruntled groups or “super empowered angry men”, people would work together to create a peaceful world where we all get rich together.

Merry rejects the conclusions of Fukuyama and Friedman, decrying their naïveté and arguing that ignoring the forces of history and counting on the end of history to happen is dangerously delusional. Take for example Friedman’s theories of conflict prevention. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree and the more recent The World is Flat, Friedman advances “The Golden Arches” and “Dell” Theories of Conflict Prevention. The first notes that no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s. The second argues that no two countries that are in the Dell supply chain will risk war with each other. For Friedman, national interests have been so transformed in the globalized world that the quest for prosperity trumps all else. In The World is Flat, Friedman recounts the lobbying effort by Indian businesses to prevent a shooting war between India and Pakistan during their last crisis, but provides no analysis of the role of nuclear weapons in preventing such a war.

There is little in the world today to convince one of the worldview of either Fukuyama or Friedman. The Iranian people – after two terms of a “reformist” president – just elected a leader whose goal is a modern Islamic democracy. The debates over the Iraqi constitution have more to do with how Islamic it is going to be rather than how liberal. And after more than a decade of “engagement” with China, there is no democracy brewing in Beijing. Friedman’s theories have yet to be tested, as most countries have not yet been faced with the choice of sacrificing vital national interests in the name of globalization. But in the late 1990’s Greece and Turkey – both members of NATO, and two countries with several McDonald’s restaurants, nearly came to a shooting war over a pile of uninhabited rocks in the Aegean. Neither McDonald’s, Dell, status within the European Union, or anything else was going to make the Aegean less important to either country. Moreover, greater economic integration is not unique to our age. Starting in the late 17th century, Europe experienced a revolution of sorts in the areas of international trade and finance. This, however, did not prevent even minor great power wars, much less two world wars. Friedman’s theories leave several important questions unanswered: What if a great power – say China – buys Dell? What if a great power starts a war (that it can win easily) with a country not in the Dell supply chain? Can Dell afford to “punish” potentially aggressive nations – China, India, the U.S. – if it relies on their markets? Prosperity is not synonymous with peace.

Despite these problems with the Idea of Progress as a world view, can the Cyclical View of History guide American foreign policy any better? Merry points to Sam Huntington’s theory on the Clash of Civilizations as the torchbearer for the Cyclical View of History. Huntington argued that the emerging structure of international relations will center on conflict between groups from different civilizations, and that the best way to ensure international order was to have nation states coalesce on the basis of shared cultural values to meet challenges from different civilizations. In the interest of full disclosure, the present author reviewed Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1997 (in this publication), and found much to argue with. Twelve years after Huntingon’s thesis first appeared in Foreign Affairs (8 years before September 11), it is difficult to deny Huntington’s prescience. Huntington predicted that conflict in the future would result from “the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.” He noted the demographic explosion of Islam (in the form of “youth bulges” where 15-24 year olds make up 20% or more of the population) would present a major challenge to the Western-dominated world order. And he points out that modernization, urbanization and globalization have left many feeling uprooted and making “where do I belong?” the most critical question in the world.

Merry picks up on this thesis, and argues that making foreign policy decisions a matter of morality ignores the history of intractable conflict among civilizations. One critic has accused Merry of “old-fashioned racism” for advancing the clash of civilizations theory and making recommendations on that basis. Such a critique is not only wrong and unfair, but it proves Merry’s assertion that the Idea of Progress is deeply embedded in American intellectual life. If national interest suggests that we need Europe to remain “Western” and it would be to our advantage for Turkey to emerge as the leader of the Islamic world, why is it wrong to suggest that Turkey should focus on such Islamic leadership and not become part of the EU? The Idea of Progress (and the Western experience) has so advanced the idea that multi-ethnic democracy works, that we are promoting Western versions of it even where it might not make sense. Merry’s critique of the Clinton Administration’s interventions in the former Yugoslavia are particularly instructive here. NATO’s actions ignored legitimate Serbian grievances (e.g., if Croats or Bosnian Muslims can secede from Yugoslavia to escape minority status, why do Serbs have to remain part of Bosnia?), took definite sides against a single civilization, and imposed a system of government that will only work as long as NATO peacekeepers are in Bosnia. The same would happen a few years later in Kosovo. Many commentators are not convinced that the NATO interventions in the Balkans have changed the region’s status as “The Powderkeg of Europe.” As the Bush Administration tries to forge a new Iraqi identity for people who consider themselves Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis first, it should note that neither Bosnia nor Kosovo are truly functional states, and it should heed the words of Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia: “Iraq wasn’t created by God. It was created by Winston Churchill.

Merry, like Huntington, is trying to advance a theory of conflict prevention. They both realize that the United States is a status quo power and has an interest in the maintenance of an international order that it helped establish. They both realize that a “crusade” to remake the world in its image risks upsetting that order. They focus on a trend that the adherents of the Idea of Progress give little, if any credence to: the Decline of the West. In Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy details the failure of the Holy Roman/Habsburg Empire to establish hegemony in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Despite the decisive advantages in its military and the resources available to it, a century’s worth of Habsburg efforts not only left the empire weaker, but allowed the rise of other great powers. The reasons for this failure were several, and they are all relevant given America’s post Cold War foreign policy. The Habsburg bid for mastery was in part motivated by ideology (the Counterreformation), which made the Empire vulnerable to Catholic leaders (like France’s Cardinal Richelieu) who would “ally” with Protestant princes if it advanced pure national interests. Peter Peterson – former Secretary of Commerce – has argued in his book Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It that the costs of waging the war on terrorism, the U.S. economy’s increasing reliance on foreign capital, and the rapid aging of the Western world potentially make the role of hegemon cost-prohibitive for the United States. This is a very important observation given that Kennedy points out that spiraling costs of war left the Habsburgs too weak economically to be able to establish hegemony. Finally, as the Pentagon insists on having the capabilities of fighting two major wars at once, and we send more troops overseas (without a clear timetable for their return), we must take note of what Kennedy detailed as the second chief cause of the Habsburg failure: “the Habsburgs simply had too much to do, too many enemies to fight, too many fronts to defend.”

Early in The Peloponnesian War, Pericles urged his fellow Athenians to wage the war conservatively, and without extending their empire. After Pericles’ death, the Athenians abandoned his strategy, and as a result overextended themselves – leading to the disaster at Syracuse and to ultimate defeat to the Spartans. Thus ended the Golden Age of classical Greece. Merry gives a similar warning. The United States has never been an imperial power, and the success of American foreign policy has been based on a conservative interventionism. To abandon such traditions in favor of an imperial strategy (whether it be to establish democracy or human rights), is unprecedented, and most likely unsustainable. Hopefully, we heed Merry’s warnings better than the Athenians heeded Pericles’.