Chas Freeman Withdraws and … Is There a ‘New Liberal Realism’?

(Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks Glenn for the Instalanche!  Since you are likely already aware of the Freeman email, the discussion of a ‘new liberal realism’ is in the second half of the post.)

OJ readers being very alert to the latest happenings in international politics, I imagine that folks are aware that Chas Freeman has withdrawn from consideration for a senior Obama administration intelligence post.  But lest anyone think that this is solely about Freeman’s ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, or exclusively about the Middle East, I repost a Freeman email regarding China and Tiananmen Square from 2006 (update – but see Kevin’s dissent in the comments); the Weekly Standard published it and Freeman has not denied the text.  Foreign Policy magazine publishes Freeman’s own withdrawal statement here. Perhaps everyone else has long since read and digested this by now, but the text does not seem to have circulated widely in the US press (it wasn’t referenced, for example, in the US N&WR story above; I had frankly doubted NRO’s Mark Steyn’s quite amazing claim that the NYT , among a long list of others, had not covered Freeman’s problems at all, but after a few searches on their sites, it appears he is right; there was finally an article in the Post that, weeks into the controversy, finally appeared today).  The China listserv email from 2006:

From: CWFHome@cs.com [mailto:CWFHome@cs.com]
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 9:29 PM

I will leave it to others to address the main thrust of your reflection on Eric’s remarks. But I want to take issue with what I assume, perhaps incorrectly, to be your citation of the conventional wisdom about the 6/4 [or Tiananmen] incident. I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than — as would have been both wise and efficacious — to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at “Tian’anmen” stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.

For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ “Bonus Army” or a “student uprising” on behalf of “the goddess of democracy” should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government’s normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang’s dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

I await the brickbats of those who insist on a politically correct — i.e. non Burkean conservative — view.

Chas

Hmm.  A while back, in a couple of law review essays, I attacked what I then called the “new liberal realism” – a disenchantment with foreign policy idealism as having been sullied by neoconservatism, but also offering American liberals a certain bracing freedom to be, well … as I put it then, in the quote below.  I thought I saw a bit of this ‘new liberal realism’ in Hillary Clinton’s China visit, and its quite candid pushing aside of human rights in order to focus on two economies joined at the hip – they hold our debt and we are their consumers – a statement candid enough to elicit responses from HRW, AI, and others.  Still, I didn’t expect to find the ‘new liberal realism’ confirmed quite so emphatically as Freeman’s email does.  

As I described the ‘new liberal realism’ in this lengthy American University International Law Review essay in 2007, Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism (reviewing Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons and Peter Beinart, The Good Fight), and again here, in a Fordham International Law Journal essay:  

The new liberal realism is profoundly unattractive–as though liberal idealists, long constrained by their moral Calvinism to worship at the altar of severe Wilsonian idealism, were suddenly freed, through the failure of conservative idealism, the failure of neo-conservatism, to celebrate a Carnival of realism, petit moralistes, catechists of the Categorical Imperative, until now sternly watched over and instructively smacked on the head to prevent dozing off in the Church of Human Rights by people like Michael Ignatieff, Kenneth Roth, Samantha Power, Geoffrey Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Claire Short, Louise Arbour, but the seminarians of human rights idealism are suddenly freed to dance drunk in the avenues of dubious virtue, to party in the sinful precincts of hard realism usually reserved to the morally benighted Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, freed to expound on the virtues of accommodation, containment, stability, and interests, freed to expatiate realist necessity, game theory, instrumentalism, rational choice; freed not to have to sing hosannas at every waking moment to the glory of Moral Ends and Human Rights Universalism, and freed to maintain the necessity of “our sonofabitch.” Think Wilberforce on a drunken bender.

And further to Mark Steyn’s claim that neither the NYT nor many other papers thought the story worth covering, here is Steyn, and as far as I can tell from google searches, he is quite right:

I’m glad to see the back of the Saudi shill Chas Freeman, but I wonder what Mr and Mrs America will make of it tomorrow morning, reading for the very first time how the “Outspoken Former Ambassador” (as the AP’s headline has it) was scuttled by a controversy their newspaper saw fit not to mention a word about.

As far as I can tell, the only papers in America to so much as mention the Freeman story were The Wall Street Journal, Investors’ Business Daily, The Washington Times, The New York Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Augusta Chronicle, and The Press Enterprise of Riverside, California.

But if you rely for your news on The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Detroit News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, orThe Minneapolis Star-Tribune – just to name a random selection of American dailies currently sliding off the cliff – the end of the story will be the first time you’ve heard of it.

There is also the troubling question of the non-vetting process at the White House and security clearances, picked up by Michael Goldfarb.  (Post corrected to indicate that the WP ran a story today.)

Update, March 11.  Kevin’s comment that the China email, contrary to what I said above, is mostly just blowing smoke about Mideast politics is, I’m sure, true of lots of folks.  Still, I’m not sure HRW would have expressed doubt about Freeman based solely on the Mideast connections, because I don’t think it would thought that being a ‘paid shill’ (as Steyn puts it) for the Kingdom would have seemed to HRW its kind of issue (although people like me certainly would have thought it should be).  Tom Malinowski, HRW’s DC advocacy director, doesn’t precisely say what he’s referring to – strategic ambiguity? – but it seems to me more a criticism of the judgment shown regarding China and Tiananmen, plus, the reference I didn’t include above about riots in Tibet being merely “race riots,” than anything about the Middle East.  Malinowski, in the Eli Lake’s investigative article in the Washington Times, March 5, 2009:

The Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch said, however, that Mr. Freeman’s nomination sends the wrong message.

“A capacity to make moral distinctions may not be a prerequisite for being a good intelligence analyst,” Tom Malinowski said. “But for such a high-profile appointment, it would still be wise for President Obama to weigh the message sent by choosing someone who has so consistently defended and worked for the clenched fists the president so eloquently challenged in his inaugural address.”