The Belgravia Dispatch: Rosy Gaddis, Incensed Freeman

October 30, 2006

Rosy Gaddis, Incensed Freeman

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The speaker could have been Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. In fact, it was George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address; and what he said is what historians will probably remember as the Bush Doctrine. This poses a serious challenge for Democrats. What do you do when Republicans steal your principles?
You can yell, "Stop, thief!"--but that's not likely to be very effective. You can deny that you ever held those principles--but then you have sold out what you stand for. You can acknowledge that you once held those principles, but that now that your opponent has endorsed them, you are compelled to abandon them--but that would be to surrender to partisanship, even to pettiness. You can question your opponent's sincerity, claiming that he doesn't really mean what he has said--but there is every reason to believe that he does. Or you can say, "Delighted you've come to see it our way."

Democrats so far have tried all of the above, except the last. This is short-sighted, because political parties in the United States have always appropriated each other's ideas. Jeffersonian Democrats started out as a states' rights party, but took over the Hamiltonian Federalists' view that there should be a strong central government to ensure national security. Lincoln Republicans re-affirmed the Jeffersonian commitment to liberty, while insisting that the Democrats' toleration of slavery was inconsistent with it. Progressive, New Deal, and Great Society Democrats embraced the Lincoln Republicans' principle of social justice, while noting that Republican policies for decades after the Civil War had fallen far short of it. Formerly isolationist Republicans converted to Roosevelt's internationalism during World War II, while arguing that they could make that strategy work more effectively. Clinton-era Democrats endorsed Republican calls for fiscal restraint and welfare reform, while claiming that they could implement these with greater compassion. So when Bush, in the aftermath of September 11, evoked the Jeffersonian idea of a world free from tyranny and the Wilsonian idea of a world safe for democracy, he was doing nothing radical or unprecedented: he was well within the tradition of American two-party politics.

It's strange, then, that so many Democrats today are outside this tradition. They have responded to the first Republican president to have become a liberal interventionist by quivering--and blogging--with rage. They have offered no plan for building on the Bush Doctrine and moving on. It's as if they're imitating the Republicans of the 1930s, who quivered with rage at Roosevelt (blogging had not been invented yet) while neglecting his warnings about tyrants, as well as his vision of what a world without them might be.

Meantime, quite a less innocuous take on the Bush Doctrine, from veteran diplomat Chas Freeman:

No country was then more widely admired or emulated than ours. The superior features of our society - our insistence on individual liberty under law; the equality of opportunity we had finally extended to all; the egalitarianism of our prosperity; our openness to ideas, change, and visitors; our generous attention to the development of other nations; our sacrifices to defend small states against larger predators both in the Cold War and, most recently, in the war to liberate Kuwait; our championship of international order and the institutions we had created to maintain it after World War II; the vigor of our democracy and our dedication to untrammeled debate - were recognized throughout the world. Critics of our past misadventures, as in Vietnam, had been silenced by the spectacle of our demonstrable success. This, our political betters judged, made the effort to explain ourselves, our purposes, and our policies through public diplomacy an unnecessary anachronism. The spread of global media and the internet, many believed, made official information and cultural programs irrelevant.
Our values were everywhere accepted and advancing, albeit with some lingering resistance in a few out-of-the-way places. Our policies would speak for themselves through the White House and State Department spokesmen. Why not save the money, while simplifying the organization chart?

That was, of course, before we suffered the trauma of 9/11 and underwent the equivalent of a national nervous breakdown. It was before we panicked and decided to construct a national-security state that would protect us from the risks posed by foreign visitors or evil-minded Americans armed with toenail clippers or liquid cosmetics. It was before we decided that policy debate is unpatriotic and realized that the only thing foreigners understand is the use of force. It was before we replaced the dispassionate judgments of our intelligence community with the faith-based analyses of our political leaders. It was before we embraced the spin-driven strategies that have stranded our armed forces in Afghanistan, marched them off to die in the terrorist ambush of Iraq, and multiplied and united our Muslim enemies rather than diminishing and dividing them. It was before we began to throw our values overboard in order to stay on course while evading attack. It was before, in a mere five years, we transformed ourselves from 9/11's object of almost universal sympathy and support into the planet's most despised nation, with its most hateful policies.

Gaddis seems to think the Bush Doctrine is solidly in the mainstream of bipartisan foreign policy tradition, while Freeman is all but declaring the end is nigh. Frankly, of late, I've found the Bush Administration's missteps so gross, its '03-'05 blunders in Iraq so collosal, its torture policy so despicable and counter-productive, and its inability to make significant course corrections so depressing--that Gaddis' piece seems strangely disconnected from reality, up in the clouds of grand strategy, while Freeman's piece rings much more true. Could I be losing perspective given my dismay? Or is the situation as awful as Freeman (and to some extent BD) sees it? Like often in life, the reality is likely somewhere in between, though I must say for Gaddis to suggest that the Democrats should be focused on "building on" the Bush Doctrine strikes me as rather odd advice. The Bush Doctrine, in North Korea, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iraq--well, it lies in tatters. And it could get worse, if we see a greater Islamist resurgence in countries like Egypt and Syria (further fueled by recent events in Lebanon and Iraq), or radicals in Washington persuade Bush to mount a military operation in Iran. What do commenters think?

Posted by Gregory at October 30, 2006 03:00 AM

Comments

I know Gaddis is a very big deal in the foreign policy field, with a very specific, and much honored reputation (I thought, as a realist), but if someone publishes bilge in a neoconservative rag like the The New Republic, it's likely to be neoconservative bilge he's spilling. I vote with Freeman. People may have said they admired us for our "democracy" and "freedom," but that was just the name they gave to the basic decency and security and absence of fear of most American lives. Bush has tarnished the latter, and so the former isn't worth as much. Nobody has a problem with the words Bush uses; our problem is with the actions he sees as appropriate in support of it.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim at October 30, 2006 03:43 AM | Permalink to this comment

Had Bush actually followed through (successfully) with the statement instead of violating it time and time again with black prisons, torture, and propping up of dictators while simultaneously laying the foundations of a tyranny at home then perhaps Gaddis would have a salient point.

But alas (or rather as many predicted at the time) Bush did not follow through honestly with his stated policy. I'm not even going to touch the successful bit of it--after all when was the last time the Bushies did anything successfully that was positive?

Posted by: MNPundit at October 30, 2006 04:27 AM | Permalink to this comment

I had a long comment in response to this, but it was all stuff that's already been said, many many times.

So I'll be brief:

A doctrine is nothing but words unless there are actual, workable policies to go with the words. The Bush Administration has at no engaged in actual, workable policies to match its putative goal of "seeking and supporting the growth of democratic movements and institutions."

Nation building is, to borrow a Bushian phrase, "hard work." The Bush Admin has never wanted to do the hard work. It's hard to take seriously a "Doctrine" that consists of nothing beyond its own empty rhetoric.

Posted by: CaseyL at October 30, 2006 04:48 AM | Permalink to this comment

History doesn't embrace nearly as many foreign policy "doctrines" as Gaddis suggests it does, and he of all people ought to know that. The Monroe administration had its Doctrine, and so did the Truman administration. They were statements of policy directed at specific threats and conditions that were embraced and elaborated on by succeeding administrations.

There were not statements of millenarian aspiration. While addressing specific political issues they did not assume that all problems had political solutions, and they had very clearly in mind the national interests of the United States. Their limited scope and relation of ends to means were the reasons they lasted and why history remembers them now.

History is likely to remember the Bush Doctrine as a collection of nice phrases assembled to get one President through a speech. Taken at face value, it repeats Wilson's mistake of treating a secondary purpose of American foreign policy as the primary purpose of American foreign policy, a position the American public will never support more than intermittently. Moreover it proclaims global ideals as justification for a foreign policy self-evidently not global in scope, one indeed that is focused on one, mid-sized Arab country. The Bush Doctrine's language seeks to inspire and draw applause, not to inform domestic and foreign audiences as to the direction and content of American foreign policy.

Gaddis isn't wrong that similar language has been used by American Presidents in the past. I'm sure it will be in the future, but if it is used wisely it will not seek to leave the impression that America is motivated only by its values and not by its interests. No one overseas will believe this, because it isn't true. Nor should it be; America is a nation, not a church. It should oppose tyranny as it should oppose sin, but it should not pretend it has the answer to either one.

Posted by: Zathras at October 30, 2006 04:56 AM | Permalink to this comment

I don't believe the problem is the policy of supporting democratic movements around the world; it is the strategy of imposing democracy on nations through force of war that has failed. Instead of overthrowing our enemies and attempting to build democracy from a broken state, we could attempt to encourage our non-democratic allies to affect incremental democratic reforms. This could limit the risk that extremists can obtain unchecked power through popular vote (or civil war), and over time marginalize them. Of course, as Freeman has pointed out, Bush has severely damaged our credibility and our influence is currently limited, but this can be substantially corrected with new leadership and repudiation of the real Bush doctrine of regime change through preemptive war.

Posted by: Tim at October 30, 2006 07:31 AM | Permalink to this comment

Tim has it exactly right. There's nothing more depressing than the attitude, which you come across all over the media, that the alternative to the Bush Doctrine is giving up on democracy building. The actual alternative is doing democracy building right.

Posted by: william at October 30, 2006 09:52 AM | Permalink to this comment

One needs to compare Bush's second inaugural with his second State of the Union speech -- it is in the latter that one finds Bush's meaning of "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

The second inaugural was, of course, the "Axis of Evil" speech in which Bush condemns three nations where we did have substantial opportunities to "support the growth of democratic movements" -- but Bush chose policies toward those nations anti-thetical to democracy. By abandoning the talks under the Agreed Framework with North Korea, Bush not only shut down the efforts to integrate NK into the international community, he effectively neutered the on-going negotiations between North and South Korea aimed at opening up North Korean society to "outside" ideas. By taking an openly hostile attitude toward Iran, Bush obliterated the growing pro-democracy/liberalization movement in that nation, and strengthened the hand of the hard-line theocrats. And in Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion Bush shut down local elections, and refused to hold national elections until Sistani signalled that Bush had a choice --- elections or a full-scale Shiite uprising.

In other words, it was never Bush's intention to "support democratic movements...with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny" -- it was a policy designed to destroy pro-democracy movements by creating an external threat to nations which inevitably resulted in more oppressive governments.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at October 30, 2006 12:58 PM | Permalink to this comment

Bush never took the steps to actually implement the policies needed to bring his words -- both the fearsome ones and the idealistic ones -- into practice. Frankly, if he wanted to invade Iraq, he either needed a real coalition or a draft. He couldn't bring himself to do either. The question "why" will have to be answered by historians. The answer will likely be that he was too foolish to see the need, or too cowardly to risk the 2004 election. or some toxic combination of both. Since Bush was not adverse to doing all sorts of things to support the "fearsome" stuff in secret, I begin to lean towards cowardly.

Frankly, now, the words don't matter much, and the concentration for the moment probably needs to be on tactics to get us out of the mess, than shining words elucidating grand new foreign policy doctrine, or silly little scare words.

Posted by: Appalled Moderate at October 30, 2006 02:13 PM | Permalink to this comment

The main problem is that we've always felt we were somehow "tasked," or "anointed," by history with a Big Idea, or a Special Mission, and that it was not only within our grasp to realize this Mission or Idea, it was within our providence to force it through whether anyone liked it or not. The difference with us (so we thought) is that in the end, the world would appreciate us for it, that it would come to its "senses" and give us our due, and "bask" in the afterglow of our Providence, and that it would be a different one than what the big powers of yore offered, meaning that it would be at the worst a benign enforcer on the block, but hopefully, more like a deliverer...or something like that.

The rhetoric of people like Gaddis is the rhetoric of empire. There is really nothing to distinguish this from the core of Britain's White Man's Burden, or Greater Germany's Hegelian G-Spot, or any of a number of cliches of any of a number of great powers of history. If there's any real difference between us and the powers of the past, it may be in the fragmented character of our society and culture - egalitarian for the most part, but increasingly thrust with the kind of risk on ordinary citizens that most people with sense know is unreasonable and unsustainable, and which is a breeding ground for anti-egalitarianism; one that supposedly worships efficiency yet tolerates mechanisms and institutions that are thoroughly inefficient for the sake of preservation of power and wealth in the hands of a few; one that enshrines moral deliberation at home while enforcing moral bankruptcy abroad, and asks ordinary citizens to regard this as an acceptable price for their freedom and security; one that preaches such freedom to its own people while only knowing how to coddle or threaten them.

In such a state (in the literal and figurative sense of that term), say, the autoworker from Detroit, the churchgoing family in Kansas, or the inner-city young person in any of a number of Third-World American urban basketcases is asked to reserve full measure of gratitude to a nation that can muster a far greater sense of mission for a half-baked enterprise in a country that can only be imagined, and reserve a similar sense of greatness in summing up the country that does this, with the knowledge that such gratitude, and greatness, will do nothing to reclaim jobs, or livelihoods, or security, or peace for themselves.

The truth is that in such a state, real people's lives are not dependent on such a messianic mission for their security or even survival; in fact, such a mission has at most only a passing glance at them. Indeed, what Americans have increasingly lost sleep at night over is what threatens their actual security - the increasing devaluation, and in some cases, outright loss, of their livelihoods. Here is where Freeman's narrative, as compelling as it is, misses something deeper: we were admired abroad because of how well we were able to package, and sell, an image of ourselves that has never been completely true to our own citizens given the actual lives most of them have led. We have been an empire abroad, but something more like an extended string of townships socially at home.

Our real problem is much more dense - we have saddled ourselves with a mission that hasn't been necessary to ordinary Americans. Our sense of providence is a self-appointed one upheld by a relatively small handful of people who have made their wealth and power from it, and made their careers dependent on it. What 9/11 did was scare not most ordinary Americans - after the dust, we could see our way to recover, to move on when we were most honest about ourselves (and I believe most Americans were honest with themselves about it) - it was rather the great power in the minds of those hooked into it that were scared. And because they have a half-million-odd army, several thousand aircraft, a few hundred ships with planes that can fly off a number of them at their fingertips, they could marshal them to do their bidding and hide behind the rhetoric of Idea and Mission and Providence and all that other crap to lie to themselves, and use that as a stick to marshal the American people behind them - and if they wouldn't be behind them, well, dammit, we'll lie and coddle and threaten them into what scares us.

I'll end this cataract like this: the historic mission America has appointed itself is something most Americans have really been able to live without. It is ordinary Americans who need liberating - from the delusions of a power they feel the bit of, rather than command the reigns of.

Posted by: sekaijin at October 30, 2006 03:52 PM | Permalink to this comment

Instead of overthrowing our enemies and attempting to build democracy from a broken state, we could attempt to encourage our non-democratic allies to affect incremental democratic reforms.

I don't want to disagree, but I find I have to. Incremental democratic reform is a snare and a delusion. The question is, who has the power when it comes to the crunch? If it's our non-democratic allies, then as soon as the incremental reforms get too much in their way they'll just get rid of them.

Most places, if the army supports democracy then the democracy will stand. And if the army supports something else then that will stand. Incremental reforms that the army accepts because a foriegn power bribes them to, will not make much difference.

Democracy comes when a sufficient number of people make a stand for democracy -- to the death if needed. Without that, there will be no democracy. The USA can't create that in other countries. We can't even create that here if it isn't here. And it's as likely to hinder as to help when the US government supports democratic insurgents in foreign countries, or even democratic opposition parties.

What we can do is to offer political asylum to people who would otherwise be oppressed. And we can perhaps spread their words that would be more effectively censored without us. And when a nation is ready for democracy they'll let us know by being a democracy.

Posted by: J Thomas at October 30, 2006 04:11 PM | Permalink to this comment

J. Thomas-

When I recommend incremental reform, I am not imagining some 5-part, 5-year plan to turn Saudi Arabia from a monarchy to a constitutional democracy. I think the transition to a democracy is a long-term, fluid movement, that may or may not culminate in a revolution when the populace is ready. Your suggestions - offering asylum and encouraging dialogue - are not inconsistent with this approach. Political openness should be emphasized, instilling democratic ideals while moderating extremist views over time. The extent of American involvement is a matter of debate, but I think we agree in principle that democracy should be encouraged.

Posted by: Tim at October 30, 2006 05:26 PM | Permalink to this comment

Bravo to sekaijin, who's given us one of the most eloquent, yet concise, summaries of the actual State of the Union that I've seen in some time. I think he alludes to real solutions to the malaise here:

"And because they have a half-million-odd army, several thousand aircraft, a few hundred ships with planes that can fly off a number of them at their fingertips, they could marshal them to do their bidding and hide behind the rhetoric of Idea and Mission and Providence and all that other crap to lie to themselves, and use that as a stick to marshal the American people behind them..."

Our $3/4 TRILLION military establishment is an invitation to all kinds of hare-brained schemes abroad, and it's a poison to whatever's left of our "democracy". Before we start coming up with Iteration 94 of My Plan for "Solving" Iraq and "Fixing" Southwest Asia, or, Catching the Unicorn, let's worry about fixing things a little closer to home, shall we?

Posted by: sglover at October 30, 2006 06:25 PM | Permalink to this comment

The trouble with Gaddis is that the stuff Bush says, the stuff he labels as the Bush doctrine isn't policy being directed by the Bush administration.

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

You cannot point to actual actions taken by the administration that has sought to support democratic movements and institituions. They tried to undermine Chavez. They had absolutely no intention of having an elected parliament--they intended to install a government. Al-Sistani forced them to live up to this rhetoric by having actual open election, but this was not their policy position.

Moreover, they have (as promised) not engaged in the nation-building necessary to establish a democratic society in any country. The Israelis (and any sensible person) knew who was going to win the palestinian election. Hamas won for the same reasons that Havel, Mandela and Walesa won--because they were the opposition to their predecessors' failed governance. They appear to believe that election=democracy, in the same kind of blindingly oversimplification that characterizes all their foreign "policy."

So, yes, Bush has tried to steal democratic rhetoric. But the theft is hollow if it doesn't actually make some attempt at implementing policy that reflects the rhetoric.

Posted by: jayackroyd at October 30, 2006 07:26 PM | Permalink to this comment

I would second jayackroyd's account - the Bush administration has essentially done something more like create mass mayhem (Iraq), or encourage someone else to do it (Israel's outright incursion into a sovereign country - Lebanon - and their perpetual door-banging in the West Bank and Gaza), then expect those left in the ruins to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and put it back together themselves. Yet when those do manage to put something together -the outcome of the Palestinian elections, for example - the Bushies don't like it, and scheme to undermine it.

I don't want to go into another cataract here (which is my wont - sorry to all and sundry), but I'd like to suggest something to add to jayackroyd's point, and probe further with it. The Bush administration talks "democracy," but as with the Palestinians, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and any one of a host of countries out there somewhere, that means something different, in at least nuance, but more often than not, substance. Democracy to the Bushies seems to mean something like a kind of governance that is there, and not there, at the same time - it's there to be controlled by Americans directly or at least indirectly, amicable to American interests and to control the citizenry, but not there to be responsive to the incremental wants of people if those contradict our control and our interests. Once you introduce elections, once people finally feel some sense of empowerment, they're going to act on it based on their interests, not America's - especially when, for so long, America has been seen to be one of the key agents that has been, if not directly disenfranchising the Palestinians (to use their situation as an example), then at least done nothing to pressure their strongest ally to stop perpetuating a disenfranchisement they are responsible for.

If you take the implications of Bushian rhetoric on democracy to its logical expression (that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but bear with me here) what you would have, in actual execution, is something more along the lines of a string of far-flung American commonwealths rather than fully-fledged nation-states. What they have actually had in mind, if not in expression, are creations more along the lines of say, the pre-WWII Philippines - political situations where, to use the Pilipino example as a case in point, a Pilipino government existed purely for local affairs and gave voice to a Pilipino sense of identity, but an American one existed for "national" affairs, and "represented" it internationally. I am no scholar of Pilipino history, and if there's anyone out there who knows more than I do please post in - but my impression is that while it served America well, I'm not sure how well it served the Philippines. They had to wait until 1946 for their independence, and that was only came about when we decided they could have it.

Something like this is what I believe the Bushies have actually hoped for - that if Palestinian (or Iranian, or Venezuelan, or wherever-en) elections mean anything to them, its for populations putting aside their national interests to turn their countries into essentially American commonwealths.

There. I said that wouldn't be another cataract, and off I've gone and done another one. This one may also be veering off into another direction as well - I'll let others bring it back to focus.

Posted by: sekaijin at October 31, 2006 07:24 AM | Permalink to this comment

Or as one of the bravest once put it so eloquently and tersely,

War is a Racket

Posted by: Dudley at October 31, 2006 01:22 PM | Permalink to this comment

Of course, one significant factor in Philippine occupation was that the Japanese colonial powers employed physical punishment unlike, by and large, the US colonial powers. Therefore, the Japanese were hated fiercely, and resisted even more fiercely.

There is an obvious moral here, in that the nation that descended to beating prisoners was ill-served by this choice in their colonial affairs

(Note: Actually the Japanese even used torture, as doe the modern US, but that isn't directly relevant -- it was the sanction of physical beating that cost them so much.)

Posted by: segovia at October 31, 2006 01:27 PM | Permalink to this comment

We used pretty intense brutality when we broke the filipino resistance the first time. But that had been a long time ago. It had been more than 30 years since we did large-scale atrocities in the philippines.

Another factor that made the japanese hated all over the pacific was their fetish for cleanliness. Everywhere they went they forced the native populations to tidy up. I don't claim that was more important than the torture, but I claim it *might* have been more important than the torture. It's one thing to get tortured for resistance activities. It's something else to get a whipping for haviing a messy yard.

Posted by: J Thomas at October 31, 2006 02:21 PM | Permalink to this comment

When on earth did The New Republic become a neoconservative magazine? If anything, it's left of center.

Posted by: Dan at November 1, 2006 04:26 AM | Permalink to this comment

Dan, it used to be consistently left of center, and now I would consider it mostly centrist, or Democratic-Right, with the exception of editor Marty Peretz on anything to do with Israel. As soon as Eretz Yisroael is involved, he turns into an AIPAC spokesman. (This phenomenon is not entirely unknown among otherwise center-left American Jews.)

I'm not sure that 'democracy-building' should be a priority of the United States at all, as opposed to encouraging liberal society with rule of law. If you have a society where the rulers do not exercise arbitrary authority but submit themselves to the law, and where the economy is liberal enough to enable meaningful class mobility and a broad elite that is not beholden to the state, you will end up with democracy. Or at least some form of diffused political power. (Yes, I admit I am actually more of a Liberal Tory ala Canning than an admirer of Wellington, despite the handle.) I also am very skeptical of any country's ability to engineer the political system of another, at least without levelling the place and rebuilding it from scratch ala postwar Germany and Japan. I'm also very suspicious of what jayackroyd called the 'election=democracy' oversimplification.

I'd like to think that the rule of law and economic liberalization could be encouraged by American economic and development policy. But I forget that the US is 1) inconsistent about this and 2) liable to define 'economic liberalization' as either some laissez-faire fantasy that has never existed and that only people already rich and completely detached from reality would ever think was a good idea, or an all-at-once opening of a country's markets in a way that benefits American companies but may not be in the target country's best interests. What I mean is the breaking of Statist patronage.

Posted by: Antiquated Tory at November 1, 2006 10:25 AM | Permalink to this comment