Towards a new realism, or why American interventionism fails

By Uditha Devapriya

In hindsight the interventionists got it wrong: they relied too much on the middle-classes, the civil societies, and the potential for permanent democracy in the countries they intervened in. After four years of entertaining doubts about interventionism, Condoleezza Rice argued, “A rising middle class also creates new centres of social power for political movements.” Today the middle-class in the Third World continues to grow and civil society continues to flourish. Yet democracy, apart from a roller-coaster ride of regime change which never seems to end and always produces electoral backlashes against it, has not. How come?

Charles Krauthammer called the US a “commercial republic.” If it is a commercial republic, it probably is the only one operating in a political system run by an oligarchy, maintained by an upper middle-class, tolerated by a lower middle-class, and suffered by a working class. In this it surpasses not only Athens, but also the European Powers.

What Clinton humanitarians and Bush realists failed to realise was that the rest of the world, barring Western Europe and South-East Asia, does not fit this description: we not only are averse to democracy maintained by a middle-class, we also don’t buy it. Joe Biden may write that “[t]he world does not organize itself” and that for 70 years the US “played a leading role in… animating the institutions that guide relations among nations.” Yet 70 years have ended in the present. Now is not 70 years back. Now is now. The world does not let one country, let alone one superpower, organise everything. The world does not wait.

In trying to intervene and imposing democracy, America hence strove to create an order in its image. “We’ll win hearts and minds”, ran the refrain when US forces pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square in April 2003. On the eve of the invasion a Congresswoman went on television and declared, “We’ll go in there, take out Saddam, destroy his army with clean surgical strikes, and everyone will think it’s great.” A year earlier, Dick Cheney made his case for regime change quoting Washington’s favourite Arab expert Fouad Ajami, who apparently believed Iraq would “erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.” But then the throngs didn’t greet the Americans in Kabul. They weren’t going to do so in Basra. What resulted from these interventions was an aberration.

US foreign policy has always been guided by national interest. Only once did it enjoy the status of a sole superpower, and that was between 1991 and 2001. Two camps surveying the world came up with two conclusions about the role of the US in the world order then: the end of history theorists and the clash of civilisations theorists.

The fall of the Soviet Union, which was less the work of Reagan Republicans and Thatcherite Conservatives than of Brezhnev’s entrenchment of the Nomenklatura and its contradictions with a supposedly egalitarian Communist state, was followed by ethno-nationalist-religious uprisings outside the West. Yet in the aftermath of Soviet collapse, the US gained supremacy. There was no one to challenge it. Not even Islamic fundamentalism.

The reaction in America was, as Charles Krauthammer put it, first of confusion, then of awe. Even so not all political pundits felt or believed that America should take over the rule of the world: the isolationists, or the paleoconservatives as they were to be called later, wanted out. But then this was not the time of the paleoconservatives: that would come a quarter century later with the Tea Party Movement, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump.

In the meantime, civilisation-states propped up their struggle for regional hegemony with one another: Japanese and Chinese in East Asia, Buddhists and Hindus (or rather Sinhalese and Tamils: the clash of civilisations theorists always get it wrong with South Asia) in Sri Lanka. Yet in the absence of a counterweight, the US attempted to carpet the world with the kind of order it had wanted to impose for over half a century. What resulted was the suppression of nationalism on the one hand and the frothing of nationalist tensions on the other.

Accompanying all this was a shift to the neoliberal right by political parties associated with the left or the left-of-centre: the Democrats in the US, the Labourites in the UK, the Congress in India, and of course the SLFP in Sri Lanka. Underlying them was one simple, undeniable fact: for the first time since the beginning of it all, a disparity of power put one country at the helm of the world. “There is no comparison,” Paul Kennedy famously observed.

I’ve observed that American foreign policy has always been driven by national interest. It has also been driven by the need to promote national interest. Yet with Bill Clinton’s presidency there came an impasse: a dove on the Vietnam War who rejected Reagan’s neoconservatism yet embraced his promise of free markets, how was he to reconcile his anti-conservatism with the imperative to exert US strength abroad? The Clinton administration did this by looking at the world through a new lens: liberal interventionism.

On four occasions under Clinton, liberal interventionism resorted to military action: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. How did Cold War doves turn into humanitarian hawks there? Simple, Krauthammer argued: they saw in these countries a cause for intervention “devoid of raw national interest.” In other words these were propelled by a call to promote US interests, but those interests weren’t national interests. They were more values than interests: they used the force of moral suasion, rather than the threat of war, to intervene.

The issue here was that while liberal interventionism operated on the premise of multilateral action, it didn’t need multilateralism to act. The truth was that US administrations, regardless of whoever was in power, could have gone there and bombed the living daylights out of an entire civilisation without requiring a by-your-leave from the UN or the EU. Reagan didn’t inform Margaret Thatcher of his intention to invade Grenada even at the tail-end of the Cold War, so why should Joe Biden defend the Chemical Weapons Convention on the grounds of the “moral suasion of the entire international community”?

Liberal interventionism, then as now, works best when one superpower rules them all. It does not work when two or more rising powers challenge the hegemony of the one superpower. It does not work when multilateral institutions are used by these rising powers to pre-empt the choices that the superpower has to make to impose its will upon us all. Thus it was perfectly suited to 1990s, when Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo could happen with consensus. It was ill-suited to the end of the 1990s and the 2000s, when tensions between civilisation-states no longer made “moral suasion” good enough grounds for US intervention.

What could a viable alternative be? Certainly not Kissingerian realism. Even realists had long abandoned Kissinger’s axioms about the irrelevance of morality in relations between nations. The world was too dangerous a place to try that out: unlike earlier, when nuclear powers banded themselves into either of the two main camps (Communist and capitalist, aligned and non-aligned), now they were left to their own devices. Indeed, the flip-side to US power over the world after the Cold War was the “nationalisation” of the nuclear programme: India and Pakistan now would use the bomb not in the backdrop of detente between the US and the USSR, but in the backdrop of clashes between Hindus and Muslims. Amorality was no longer a card on the table because no one dealt that card any more: while nation-states were guided by the force of authority, there was now a moral aspect to that authority.

Iraq would have wanted to bomb Israel to preserve its power, but it also would have wanted to do so because of Arab tensions with a Jewish settlement in their territory.

In other words, what worked for the world before 1939 – Wilsonian idealism – and the world before 1991 – Kissingerian realism – would not work for the world after 1991. Underlying this disjuncture between idealism and realism was another crucial one: between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The two would meet in the Reagan presidency.

Under Reagan neoconservatism reared its head (mainly but not only) on the foreign policy front, and neoliberalism reared its head (mainly but not only) on the domestic economic front, promoting counterinsurgency in Latin America while cutting down the welfare state and also empowering the Christian Right and ballooning defence spending. It was a potpourri, and its relevance to post-Cold War US foreign policy lies in the fact that despite differences between the two, both tended to justify action with ideal: neoliberalism with its belief in free markets against government intervention, and neoconservatism with its championing of a traditional American order against internal threats and external enemies.

The neoconservatives found their home in the Bush II presidency. For a while, they grappled with what doctrine they could invoke to justify action. Then 9/11 happened. To validate US interventions in West Asia, the Bush troupe – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle – all resorted to what Charles Krauthammer called “democratic realism.” It strove to balance the concerns of liberal interventionism with the imperatives of realism; in other words, “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is strategic necessity – meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.”

To say that democratic realism squared the circle would be putting it mildly: in one stroke it assuaged the concerns of liberal interventionists, who didn’t want to impose order without a humanitarian rationale for it, while alienating the isolationists, who didn’t want the US to get involved in any order imposing project, period. What it did was to substitute values for power as the overriding principle of national interest, thereby distancing itself from the Morgenthau-Carr-Kennan-Kissinger school of international relations thought.

Francis Fukuyama criticised this new realism on the basis that it was aimed at a threat far removed from Soviet Communism.

To that Krauthammer retorted: “So what?” Islamists may not have had the means of “actualising their vision”, as Fukuyama claimed it didn’t, yet as Krauthammer observed, borrowing an analogy from Nazi Germany, Hitler did not have the means of actualising his goal of overrunning Europe when he marched into the Rhineland either. The argument was convincing, and it won over mild neoconservatives in the Bush II presidency. You see it crop up in Condoleezza Rice’s article, quoted above: she envisions an “American realism for a new world”, a fusion of power and principle. Instead of imposing our will upon them, she contends, an international order “that reflects our values” would be “the best guarantee of our enduring national interest.”

How prophetic those words were – not. 12 years later, we’re gorging on the leftovers of the Trump presidency, which in the popular consciousness of Republicans got the United States out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduced its military obligations in Europe, steered the country from globalist-internationalists and democratic realists to America First, and got the job done in the economy. Were it not for the “China virus”, his supporters declare, Trump would have easily won, a point confirmed in less than expected Democratic victories even in states where they were expected to lead by wide margins.

If, for a brief moment at least, the paleoconservatives had their day in the US, it was because democratic realism, which combined the humanitarian ideals of the Clinton presidency with the neoconservatism of the Bush presidency, ended up promoting a variant of interventionism which could not really go or think beyond recreating the world in America’s image. In that sense one can say it differed in degree and not in substance from the Wilsonian idealism and the Kissingerian realism which it eschewed. Coming in the wake of the “unipolar moment” in human history, it could not survive China’s rise and Russia’s shift to the East, or the coming up of regional powers, unless it evolved a strategy of engagement with them.

America’s belief in messianism must end, not because it isn’t a superpower, but because it’s not the only major power. Therein lies the key difference between the bipolarity of the Cold War, the unipolarity of the 1990s, the nonpolarity of the early 2000s, and the multipolarity of now: this is a world which pits the US and China on a collision course with each other, with regional players siding with either side. Interventionism by the US, no matter how pure the intentions it exhibits to the world may be, will invariably end up as a failure because every country it intervenes in will oppose it. Thus the world, contrary to what President-elect Biden says, can and will organise itself, and it will do so to oppose any one power leading the race to sort everything out. Think of it as a more interlinked order in which Rome reigns in one corner and the Persians and Chinese reign in another. In that sense this is not a Cold War. It is hotter than any Cold War. And interventionism will only make it hotter. To prevent that from happening, the US needs a new doctrine. A new realism, for a new order.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com