John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven, Ethical Realism, (Pantheon Press, 2006), 224 pp., $22.00.

Will Marshall, With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy For Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, (Rowman & Littlefied Publishers, Inc.), 256 pp., $19.95.

Dear Will,

I have been reading with great interest the volume on Democratic foreign policy that you edited for the Progressive Policy Institute, With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, and I find parts of it admirable. This is especially true of your co-authors' arguments that the Democrats should look to the Truman era for inspiration; on the need for the United States to adopt a far more generous and far-sighted approach to foreign development aid, especially in the Muslim world; and on the absolute imperative of reducing America's dependence on oil, both for security and environmental reasons.

These are all points that John Hulsman and I make in our own book Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World, which was published in September. We also identify strongly with Melissa Tryon's argument for a reconciliation between Democrats and military culture.

However, I also have great reservations concerning both many of the details of the strategy that you advocate and its overall thrust. One central problem is that, in my view, you have confused a strategy designed to appeal to the U.S. electorate in the next elections with one designed to defend the vital interests of America in the world. Of course, as a Democratic Party activist you have no choice but to do this in public, but my fear is that you and many of your colleagues genuinely do not understand that many arguments that seem self-evident to Americans are likely to be rejected with scorn by other nations.

Secondly, in your concern that in the forthcoming election campaigns the Democrats should not appear "weak" and "unpatriotic", you have failed to produce a strategy which in most areas provides a truly different alternative to the disastrous approach of the Bush Administration. Thus you and your colleagues write repeatedly of the need to make greater effort to enlist support from allies, but this is always support for American leadership, and for policies laid down by America.

Nowhere can I find a real willingness to make concessions to the views and interests of other states on concrete issues. The emphasis in your work is all on American power, yet two of the critical lessons of recent years is that the United States is not in fact nearly as strong as it seemed to be, and other countries are stronger. You concentrate on gaining support from European nations who can hardly help the United States at all in the Middle East but ignore the wishes and interests of Muslim states whose support is absolutely essential.

In this book, and in the work of the Progressive Policy Institute and the Truman Project, you and your colleagues extend your electoral strategy into the past. You explicitly seek to enlist the memories of Truman, Kennedy and other tough-minded but idealistic Democratic leaders in the service of your version of Democratic strategy today.

This is not of course wrong in itself, since Truman was indeed an inspiring figure, to whom John and I pay deep tribute in our book. The problem is that in producing what is in essence a mythological portrait of the past for contemporary political purposes, you have ignored critical elements of the historical record.

Thus Truman will undoubtedly be remembered by history chiefly for two achievements: As you say, he rallied Americans and America's allies to resist the expansion of Soviet Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. What you do not, however, point out is that he also categorically and successfully resisted intense pressure for a preventive war against the Soviet Union and China, even when the United States enjoyed complete short-term strategic superiority, and yet the longer-term threat to the United States was vastly greater than anything existing today.

In Truman's (possibly apocryphal) words, "the only thing you prevent by war is peace." Eisenhower was able to continue this line, and was motivated not just by fear of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but also by a deep concern for how on earth the United States would be able to run a shattered and infuriated Russian society after victory. Clearly, if you include this aspect of Truman's record, then the support of many liberal hawks for the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war comes to seem much more questionable in terms of the Democratic tradition (or for that matter the Republican one).

This leads to the equally important question of who was proved right by history. Concerning the recent past, you evade the question of whether the United States was in fact correct to invade Iraq-not surprisingly, since, in Kenneth Pollack and others, your group contains some of the leading advocates of that invasion. Similarly, in your anxiety to identify with Kennedy and distance the Democratic Party from the anti-Vietnam left, you ignore the question of whether the United States was in fact right to fight in Vietnam. And by identifying opposition to that war only with the left, you ignore the opposition of a great pragmatic Democrat statesman, William Fulbright.

Finally, by identifying Truman's (and Kennedy's) stance in the Cold War only in terms of alliances with other democracies, you miss an essential part of that struggle, with obvious relevance to the War on Terror. Even in Europe, Truman supported anti-communist authoritarian states in Turkey, Greece and elsewhere. In Asia, American regional power was inevitably founded on alliances with dictatorships in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and other states.

In the very long run, U.S. protection and massive U.S. economic aid contributed to the democratization of these countries. But if the United States had insisted on democracy as a precondition, the Cold War in Asia could not have been waged-any more than the War on Terror can be waged today without the help of authoritarian regimes in Muslim states.

Yours,

Anatol

 

Dear Anatol,

I am glad you found something to like in With All Our Might, as I have in the book you've written with John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World. Your points about the stubborn strength of nationalism and the need to distinguish carefully among our adversaries' various motives are well taken. Our critiques of President Bush's foreign policy are quite similar, and we both put jihadist extremism atop the hierarchy of urgent threats to America's security. And I even admire your attempt to make neo-realism more palatable to Americans by giving it an ethical dimension-though in the end I'm not convinced.

The purpose of With All Our Might is to spell out-really for the first time since 9/11-a comprehensive response from the center-left to that challenge and to offer a distinctly Democratic alternative to Bush's War on Terror. Our disagreement seems to turn on your claim that our strategy isn't a "truly different alternative" to the Bush doctrine of military dominance, unilateral assertion and preemptive war.

A central premise of our book is that Bush has over-militarized America's response to jihadism. We call for using all of America's might-not just a military revamped for counterinsurgency and unconventional war, but also the power of trade, investment and development aid, strong alliances based on mutual respect, multilateral diplomacy and the broad attraction of liberal democracy-to prevail. The book's second chapter, by Reza Aslan, argues that Bush's reductive, good-vs.-evil rhetoric unwittingly miscasts what is essentially a civil war within Islam as a clash of civilizations between Muslims and the West. He advocates recruiting Muslim Americans to start a "dialogue between civilizations" aimed at throwing America's weight behind Muslim moderates in their struggle against Salafist extremists.

Other chapters propose specific ideas for reviving the transatlantic alliance; bringing U.S. detention, interrogation and surveillance activities under the rule of law; investing serious money in economic and political reform in the greater Middle East; launching a major trade initiative to spur jobs in that economically stagnant region; giving collective security real teeth by reinventing the United Nations system; restoring fiscal sanity in Washington and enhancing U.S. competitiveness; and spreading the sacrifices this long struggle will entail, for example, by rolling back tax policies that have aggravated economic inequality and capping carbon emissions to accelerate America's drive toward a clean energy economy.

Now this is hardly Bush-lite. It's an updated version of the liberal internationalism that has defined our party's outlook since Woodrow Wilson introduced it as a distinctly American alternative to European realpolitik and imperialism.

It's puzzling, therefore, that in your book you insist on lumping us progressive internationalists-"liberal hawks" to use your term-with the neoconservatives you blame for crafting Bush's calamitous policies. This isn't analysis, it's a polemical trope that obscures the basic distinctions summarized above. And while the neocons can defend themselves, trying to pin the rap for Bush's misadventures entirely on them also seems intellectually sloppy. After all, the chief architects of the war on terror are Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the president himself. All of them, before 9/11 anyway, were fairly conventional gop nationalists, if not card-carrying realists.

Essay Types: Book Review