America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  President Obama, however, though he repeatedly stressed his belief in America’s unique democratic mission, also greatly toned down the Bush administration’s rhetoric of democratization as a central aspect of foreign policy, emphasizing that America needs to work closely with allies and, whenever possible, give regional states the lead—as in the Libya War, where America took a back seat to Britain and France. Obama’s inaugural address of January 2009 provided a good summary of contemporary American civic nationalism, expanded to take in multiracialism and softened so as to add a greater element of multilateralism:

  As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.

  Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

  We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort, even greater cooperation and understanding between nations …

  What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

  This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

  This is the source of our confidence—the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

  This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed—why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.94

  These are noble and inspiring words, which certainly do not contain any chauvinist spirit. Their emphasis on humility and restraint contrasts sharply with the approach of the Bush administration. Nonetheless, they embody a continued claim to American global leadership, even if it is a leadership that must be earned and not asserted as a right.

  Wolfish Wilsonians: The Bush Administration and America’s Mission

  While American civic nationalism has indeed been part of the foundation of America’s prestige in the world and of its consensual leadership, it has also been used on occasions to underpin American chauvinism and aggression—as by the Bush administration in its push to launch the Iraq War. As noted, this strategy helped Bush and his supporters to undermine opposition to the war among the Democrats and among the U.S. intelligentsia. For the future, two important questions for the United States and the world are whether belief in America’s role as leader of the world toward freedom can be mobilized as part of anti-Chinese propaganda, and as an argument—within the United States at least—for the creation of a NATO-style “democratic alliance” against China, and for a strategy of encouraging revolt against the Chinese Communist state.

  Connected to this is the question of the attitude of Republicans toward America’s mission in the world. As of 2012, two quite distinct tendencies can be seen—even if, bewilderingly, within the Tea Parties especially, they often seem to coexist within the same head. The first reflects the growing disenchantment of a majority of Americans with overseas wars and interventions, focused above all on hostility to a continuation of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. This was shown, for example, by the vote in the House of Representatives on Afghanistan in May 2011, when 26 Republican congressmen joined 178 Democrats to urge accelerated U.S. withdrawal.

  On the other hand, the Republican intellectual establishment shows almost no signs of rethinking the ideological approach of the Bush administration. As of 2012, it is very difficult to find old-style realists among the Republican staffers in Congress, and impossible to find them at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The rhetoric remains entirely that of America’s right and duty to lead the world toward democracy. As with Bush, absence of democracy is used as a matter of course to deny the legitimacy of rival states. In the words of Newt Gingrich, attacking Colin Powell and realists within the State Department and the Republican Party:

  The United States should actively stand for and promote its values around the globe. Every person deserves safety, health, prosperity, and freedom. The United States supports the core values of constitutional liberty, the right to free speech (including a free press), independent judiciaries, free markets, free elections, transparency in government, the equality of women, racial equality, and the free exercise of religious beliefs. Without these values, it is very hard to imagine a world in which U.S. safety can be secured. We should not confuse respect for others with acceptance of their values if they violate these principles.

  This passage formed part of a determined attempt by the Republican Right to reduce still further respect in the U.S. government for the opinions even of democratic Western allies, to undermine the chief government department entrusted with international relations, to open the door wider to unilateral American military actions, and to reduce genuine support in the administration for President Bush’s “Road Map” for peace between Israel and Palestine.95

  This was part of what might be called a “Jacobin” tendency in the neoconservative movement and the Bush administration: a refusal to grant any legitimacy to regimes that did not share America’s political system, unless they displayed complete subservience to American foreign and security policy. The dangers of this for international peace and order were described by the great historian of nationalism Elie Kedourie, writing of the effects of the French Revolution:

  The [traditional] society of European states admitted all varieties of republics, of hereditary and elective monarchies, of constitutional and despotic regimes. But on the principle advocated by the [French] revolutionaries, the title of all governments then existing was put into question; since they did not derive their sovereignty from the nation, they were usurpers with whom no agreement need be binding, and to whom subjects owed no allegiance. It is clear that such a doctrine would envenom international quarrels, and render them quite recalcitrant to the methods of traditional statecraft; it would indeed subvert all international relations as hitherto known.96

  C. Vann Woodward echoed this warning in writing about U.S. attitudes during the Vietnam War:

  The true American mission, according to those who support this view, is a moral crusade on a worldwide scale. Such people are likely to concede no validity whatever and grant no hearing to the opposing point of view, and to appeal to a higher law to justify bloody and revolting means in the name of a noble end. For what end could be nobler, they ask, than the liberation of man … The irony of the moralistic approach, when exploited by nationalism, is that the high motive to end justice and immorality actually results in making war more amoral and horrible than ever and in shattering the foundations of the political and moral order upon which peace has to be built.97

  This tendency among powerful sections of the modern American Right does not date from 2002. The most important historical moment in this regard was Ronald Reagan’s adoption of the language of democratic r
evolution and human rights as a key part of his struggle against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, involving a deliberate and open repudiation of the “realist” considerations that had supposedly governed the policies of the previous Republican administrations of Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower.

  Above all, a strong movement is afoot among the Republicans to concentrate on China the same degree of hostile rhetoric—in the name of support for “democracy” and hatred of “dictatorship” that was previously directed against the Soviet Union, Russia and parts of the Muslim world. This is not, of course, to say that a future Republican administration will necessarily adopt a much more anti-Chinese policy, or seek to subvert the Chinese state from within. The general pattern from the 1980s on has been for the U.S. party in opposition (whether Republican or Democrat) to attack China and to damn the government in power for being too pro-Chinese, and for not defending human rights and promoting democracy in China—only to pursue the same “pro-Chinese” policies themselves when next in power. However, this pattern was formed in a period when China, though growing greatly, was still very much inferior to the United States in wealth and power. Whether it can survive a period in which China overtakes the United States is another matter.

  Hawkish Republican views are distributed to the general public through Fox News and a huge array of conservative radio stations, but also through the media alleged by conservatives and the Tea Parties to be part of the “liberal establishment.” Thus, even in the comment pages of newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, hard-line right-wing nationalists like George Will, William Kristol, Robert Novak, William Safire, and Charles Krauthammer are to be found day after day.98

  In a softer and more diffuse way, the ideology of American democratic supremacy and America’s mission in the world is also enshrined in institutions created during the cold war as part of the ideological campaign against Communism. These include a range of private organizations, but also two congressionally funded institutions, the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House. Their origins meant that they were built around the idea of America’s struggle with the Soviet Union, and their propaganda tends to have a harshly nationalist tone toward any country seen as a rival of the United States, while being notoriously soft on U.S. allies. Despite extensive and detailed critiques of their work, their publications tend to be seen in the United States as possessing a mixture of intellectual objectivity, guaranteed quality of research, and semiofficial gravitas.

  Thus Freedom House’s annual survey of freedom and democracy in the world is treated as a kind of biblical authority by many American journalists and commentators. Yet this is an institution that from the 1970s to the 2000s advanced China precisely one grade in its freedom rating, from seven to six. That is to say, according to Freedom House, Chinese in 2004, after a generation of economic liberalization and the transition from fanatical totalitarianism to authoritarianism, were only very slightly more free than they were in the depths of the Cultural Revolution in 1972. India in 2002 rated a two, despite severe repression in Kashmir, and the massacre in Gujarat of more than 2000 members of the Muslim minority, with the active complicity of the local government and police. And so on.99 In this, Freedom House was simply following the pattern of many U.S. institutions during the cold war, when a range of dictatorships in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere were classified as part of the “Free World” because their allies were geopolitical allies of the United States.100

  And, of course, at the level of policy discussions, human rights abuses, whether real or exaggerated, can be cited in almost any circumstances as a reason to display hostility against a given country. Thus, in a small but typical example, a writer in the New York Times, arguing for a hostile American attitude to the Chinese space program, declared “amid calls for joint scientific or commercial ventures in space to improve Chinese–American relations, officials in Washington should consider what kind of cooperation is appropriate with a regime that does not share the United States’ tradition of freedom and respect for human rights.”101

  This kind of thing filters down through U.S. society. Thus in February 2004, the Washington Post’s “Parade” section asked its readers, “Who Would You Say is the World’s Worst Dictator?”—lumping together indiscriminately—just like Freedom House—Hu Jintao of China with Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Than Shwe of Burma, Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. In other words, this was a selection made with no reference whatsoever to the nature of the given regime, the role of the leader within that regime, or, most of all, the success of the regime in advancing the material well-being and economic freedom of its subjects—which when applied to themselves, Americans have defined as part of the essence of liberty.102 Hu Jintao came in third, counted as worse than the leaders of the catastrophic regimes in Zimbabwe and Guinea and the Wahabi Islamist totalitarianism of Saudi Arabia. Coupled with the incessant rhetoric of politicians, the media, and human rights groups concerning freedom in other countries, the effect is both to feed American chauvinist hostility toward other countries and to pour a continual nourishing rain of self-praise on Americans’ belief in their own country’s superiority.

  Many people from the former colonial world in particular are bound to see this mixture as simply a repeat of former European missions civilisatrices, as a hypocritical cover for imperial aggrandizement, and they are often right to do so. Moreover, as the next chapter will explore, America’s universal mission contains within itself certain elements of “universal values” that are in fact not universal at all, but very visibly part of a purely American culture and “way of life.”103 This too is clearly perceived by many people in the countries that Americans propose to liberate in the name of these supposedly universal values.

  The merger of the selective use of “democratization” with strategies based on ruthless “realism” has been central to the approach of the “neoconservatives” since the inception of this political tendency during the first decades of the cold war. In their program, the Soviet Union was to be driven to destruction by a mixture of military and economic pressure, the ruthless repression of Communist-backed rebellions against U.S. client regimes—including, where necessary, U.S. military intervention—and the rigorous preaching of democracy and liberty to Soviet subjects.

  The selective or instrumental use of moral outrage and calls for liberation—what Jeane Kirkpatrick, candidly enough, called “the utilitarian value of democracy” to U.S. foreign policy—is a very old pattern in human affairs, and especially perhaps in the Protestant and Anglo-Saxon worlds.104 Rarely, however, has it been used so systematically, or with such contempt for even the appearance of consistency or intellectual honor, as by American nationalists, especially from the neoconservative camp. Thus, in 1980, when attacking President Jimmy Carter’s attempts at consistency in the treatment of U.S. allies and rivals concerning their human rights abuses and lack of democracy, Irving Kristol sounded like George Kennan, Samuel Huntington, and other realist conservative critics of American messianism:

  It is the fundamental fallacy of American foreign policy to believe, in the face of all the evidence, that all peoples, everywhere, are immediately “entitled” to a liberal constitutional government—and a thoroughly democratic one at that…As a matter of fact, it is only since World War I—a war fought under the slogans of “self-determination for all nations” and “make the world safe for democracy”—that American foreign policy began to disregard the obvious for the sake of the quixotic pursuit of impossible ideals. Before World War I, intelligent men took it for granted that not all peoples, everywhere, at all times, could be expected to replicate a Western constitutional democracy.105

  Two years earlier, as part of the same hard-line campaign against Carter, Kristol had expressed himself categorically in favor of America’s mission as example, not intervention:

  The proper extent of political rights in any nation
is not something that our State Department can have any meaningful opinion about. It can only be determined by the people of that nation, who will draw on their own political and cultural backgrounds in arriving at a suitable disposition of this matter. We can try to set them a good example by making our democratic republic as admirable as possible—as our Founding Fathers urged. But that is about all we can do—as our Founding Fathers recognized.106

  But, of course, Kristol and his school have reserved such moderation for U.S. allies, however savage. Precisely such realist statements as Kristol’s have been attacked by neoconservatives when these have been applied to countries that they wish to weaken or undermine, and these attacks have been not only ferocious, but also phrased in terms of the most strident version of America’s messianic mission as intervention, and not merely example.107

  The most shameless example of this is the way in which the neoconservatives and other former anti-Communists in the United States have played around with the distinction between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” regimes. During the 1980s, this was advanced by a number of anti-Communist intellectuals as a key difference between the dictatorial, but still culturally, intellectually, and economically open pro-American regimes of Latin America and the Communist states. And this is indeed a valid distinction.108

  The amusing thing is that when Russia and China both in their different ways abandoned Communism, it turned out that the Americans who had most fiercely argued for this distinction did not really take it seriously themselves. Instead, in these and other cases (like Iran) they did their utmost to blur the line between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. For them, this had been nothing more than a cheap debating trick, intended to demonstrate that Washington’s Latin American dependents were better than Moscow’s in Eastern Europe.