Liberals, Neocons, and the Grid of American Foreign Policy

In his opening post and in the opening chapter of his book, Tom Farer gives us a tour of the horizon of how international law and self-interest interact in American foreign policy thinking. He paints a picture which focuses on a struggle between two different views of America’s role in the world, the Liberal view and the Neocon view.

In this opening post, I want to press Tom on his use of this dichotomy and ask if the story here is really one of Liberals versus Neocons or rather a more complex picture where there is a cross-hatching of aims, means, and political preferences. Rather than two different world views along a spectrum (Liberal and Neocon), perhaps what we have is more like a grid with varying degrees of multilateralism and unilateralism as well as degrees of interventionism and noninterventionism. I think it is otherwise quite difficult to describe the various voices in American foreign policy debates.

For example, Tom writes in his post: “A defining feature of the Right-Wing in every country is belief in the virtue of seeking gains for one’s own national community whatever the cost to others.”

But is this really a “Right-Wing” view or is it a Realist view, more generally? This description if not far off from ideas of Dean Acheson, Zbigniew Brzezinski and other Democratic Party policy experts throughout the 20th Century. The issue is not so much whether we place our national interest above those of other states (which I think anyone does, across the political spectrum) but rather how we calculate what our national interest really is. For some, maintaining a multilateralist foreign policy is crucial to our national interest, for others it is anathema, and for many people it falls somewhere in between. Thus, I think what we really discern in the U.S. (and in other countries)  is a gradation  of people who are more or less unilateralist or multilateralist.

Besides the unilateralist/multilateralist spectrum, another specific policy concern that does not plot easily on a Liberal/Neocon graph is whether someone is more or less likely to favor intervention in the domestic affairs of another country.  Tom notes that Liberals and Neocons may both be interventionist, but for different reasons:

Neo-Cons purport to constitute the more authentic form of Liberalism at least in foreign affairs, more authentic in the sense of less willing to compromise with authoritarian regimes and movements and more willing to use all of the instruments of statecraft to protect and promote human rights, democracy in particular.

As I see it, they have appropriated the rhetoric and symbols of human rights on behalf of policies that have, on balance, savaged human rights, not merely since 9/11 but much earlier, beginning with the Central American Wars of the 1980s.

However, beyond this there is also the issue of people from the Left or the Right who, for different reasons, are against U.S. intervention (military, economic, and/or political) in the affairs of other countries. Here, too, I think there is a continuum charting those who favor highly interventionist foreign policies to those who are against almost any U.S. foreign intervention. 

Consequently, I don’t think we have one main spectrum–between Liberals and Neocons–but rather a grid. I borrow this idea from Thomas Friedman, who had used a different grid to describe American politics concerning globalization during the debates over NAFTA. One axis maps the continuum between multilateralist and unilateralist.  The other maps the continuum between interventionist and non-interventionist.

As a result we can find some politicians who are mulilateralist/ interventionists. These would be Liberals in the Woodrow Wilson vein.

There are also unilateralist/interventionists. These may be Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, essentially the current administration’s views.

However, we can also find multilateralist/noninterventionists. I think we tend to find such people in the left wing. They are skeptical of the use of American power and of the use of international organizations to intervene in the workings of foreign countries (or our own). However, in the rare cases where there is to be some sort of intervention, it should be multilateral, such as under UN auspices.

Finally, there are unilateralist/noninterventionists. As a general rule, the U.S. should not intervene in foreign problems. However, in the rare case it should choose to do so, America should not shackle itself to multilateral institutions or rules. Think Pat Buchanan and the America Firsters.

I think there are a series of arguments currently occuring in the U.S.  I think one is that the unilateralist/interventionists are being criticized by all sides.  However, I am not sure if the view we are moving to is one of mulitlateral/interventionism (which I think most closerly comports to Tom’s use of “Liberal”) or some mode of noninterventionism.

I leave this open as a question for comment by Tom or any readers.