Digby's Hullabaloo

Still Trying To Make The Case

by digby

The Prime Minister will appeal to his critics to look at his record in a different light after the formation of an Iraqi government. He will say the war in Iraq was in line with an interventionist or “activist approach” to foreign policy he also pursued in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, which enjoyed greater public support.

He will also say it was consistent with his policies on the Middle East, Africa and climate change.

Mr Blair will say he floated the idea of humanitarian interventionism, dubbed “liberal imperialism” by some of his advisers, in a speech in Chicago in 1999.

In the last of three speeches on foreign policy, Mr Blair will call for reform of the United Nations, saying that today’s international institutions were designed for the Cold War era.

He believes that the UN’s failure to approve a fresh resolution authorising military action in Iraq in 2003 showed that the organisation shies away from rather than confronts problems.

That’s the kind of speech that’ll make Peter Beinert feel all funny down there. This is the vision of liberal hawks who insist that we need to keep invading countries for their own good because underneath all the death and destruction is a humanitarian mission. (Meanwhile, in Darfur, well….)

I’m not sure if Blair has deluded himself into believing this horseshit to justify his actions or whether he really is a member of the future neocons club. (I suspect that Joe Lieberman, if he remains a Democrat, is going to be the new Scoop Jackson around whom all the little liberal hawks will flock.) It doesn’t really matter: he’s throwing down the gauntlet. What is the left’s foreign policy philosophy?

A lot of people are talking about this and it’s important. Foreign policy is not going to go away just because Bush has fucked things up so badly. And we can’t just accept the Beinert wing’s romantic WWII fighter ace version of liberal hawkishness just because it’s the only idea floating around. I’m waiting for a big name Democrat to articulate a foreign policy philosophy that makes sense.

In the meantime, I think I’ll go with a couple of big name bloggers’ approach as a starting point instead. Here’s Matt Yglesias:

Dan Drezner notes that “liberal internationalism” is a term “foreign policy wonks like to throw around, but often means very different things to different people” and offers his own definition: “A marriage between the pursuit of liberal purposes (security, free trade, human rights, rule of law, democracy promotion, etc.) and the use of institutionalist means to pursue them (multilateral institutions of various stripes — not only the UN, but NATO or the G-7 as well).” I prefer an alternative formulation of my own recent devising. Liberal internationalism not as a method, but as a goal: The creation of an international order that is effectively governed by reasonably just rules.

Clearly, in the wrong hands, ideas about pursuing liberal “purposes” can be very, very dangerous if they stand without any limits by law or philosophy. Might cannot make “spreading democracy” right all by itself as we have just proved to the entire world. Perhaps it would be best to be a bit more humble in our purposes than Drezner, but a bit more explicit in our methods than Yglesias.

In any case, it is impossible to withdraw from the world even if we wanted to so liberals do have to make a decision about our relationship to it going forward. Iraq was a nonsensical, inexplicable action, but that does not mean we will be spared having to make much tougher calls in the future. It seems to me that the best hope is through cooperation with others toward the plain goal Yglesias lays out. That is not a pie in the sky, kumbaaya dreamworld goal, nor is it mired in cynical, national interest “realism.” Indeed, it is the most likely to produce the kind of necessary coordination we will need to handle the emerging challenges and threats of a global nature, like terrorism and global warming.

Tony Blair is apparently still going to insist that Iraq was a “threat” that had to be met come hell or high water, (let no facts interfere with that judgment.) He will attack international institutions for failing to intervene. In truth, the international institutions (which are hardly infallible) made the correct decision this time. The alleged “liberal internationalist” Blair made the wrong one. The lessons there are clear. When a nation decides that it is “good” enough or strong enough to up-end the rule of law and international civilized norms, that is a signal that they are neither. Liberal internationalism, if it is to be credible, has to admit this, repudiate the actions of Blair and Bush and make it explicit that its goals are reasonable and constrained by the rule of law. Otherwise, “liberal internationalism” is just another way of saying we can do as we choose. I’m not signing on to that; I don’t care whether Joe Klein says that means I hate America or not. After Vietnam and this latest debacle, I’m through with both dreamy, romantic notions of interventionist foreign policy and manipulative Great Gamesmanship. Keep it simple stupid.