7
Introduction
This chapter examines military-backed democratism from the perspective of the Bush Doctrine and the George W. Bush administration’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The neoconservative influence on U.S. foreign policy in the early 2000s represents a continuation in many respects of Jefferson’s notion of an “empire of liberty” and also of Wilson’s desire to “make the world safe for democracy.” It is but a chapter in a longer story of democratic imperialism, which has been touched upon in this book. This foreign policy is one of the hallmarks of democratism.
Over the past twenty years, armed intervention in the name of democracy and humanitarian ideals has become second nature as a response to threats to freedom around the world. Guided by the belief that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” U.S. foreign policy is not restrained by actual threats to national security or national interests. Considerations of territorial integrity, national sovereignty, and maintaining a balance of power—concrete goals which historically guided questions of foreign policy prior to the turn of the twentieth century—are second (or third) to grandiose aspirations such as “ending tyranny in our world.”1 The wars of the Bush administration are very much a part of Wilson’s legacy. The neoconservatives, who served a prominent role in the Bush administration, acquired the epithet “Hard Wilsonians,” but they probably are not any “tougher” than Wilson, if by that it is meant that they are less idealistic or less inclined to use force. Wilson’s paradoxical “pacifism” is reflected in the liberal militarism of yesterday’s neoconservatives and today’s liberal internationalists alike.2
Few would venture to argue that Bush was familiar with the history of political thought, thinkers such as Rousseau or Leo Strauss, and many would even concede that he knew little about neoconservatism when he entered office. There is no evidence that Bush read the Social Contract or Natural Right and History or that he sat around philosophizing with Strauss’s academic disciples. Still, these philosophical ideas penetrated to the very top of American society and specifically into the foreign policy establishment that proved so influential during the Bush years and continues to exert influence today, albeit under other guises. The influence of Strauss specifically on many of the decision-makers in the Bush administration has been well-documented and is discussed in this chapter. But Rousseau’s influence can also be detected in Bush’s thought and actions insofar as he was inclined toward the same type of thinking about a general will toward democracy written on the heart, a disinclination to take seriously the effects of a society’s historical evolution on its present constitution, and the belief that, upon the ruin of the old society, a new egalitarian society can be legislated into existence. Bush need not have been familiar with the specific arguments or even general philosophy behind the strategy that he found himself pursuing, ad hoc or ill informed as it may have been. He likely stumbled into Afghanistan and Iraq with precious little understanding of what he was doing, and it is probable that he entered office without any strong ideological commitments. In fact, he ran for president in 2000 as an opponent of U.S.-backed nation-building. Yet the path of foreign intervention and nation-building that he embarked on has distinct parallels in American history.
It was no coincidence that he continued a legacy that began in full with Wilson but could be traced back even to Jefferson. The thesis of this book is that a profoundly influential ideology has permeated the thought of many of the decision-makers in the West. It acts as a background for understanding and interpreting political events. Bush was acting on ideas that have been pronounced in Western political thinking, especially the idea that democracy has been foreordained as the system of life and government that is destined to cover the globe. Moreover, Bush was surrounded by advisors who did have strong ideological commitments, some of whom were well versed in a progressive democratic philosophy of history, of which Bush may have been only vaguely aware. Like others who have been examined in this book, Bush was acting on ideas, the paternity of which he had little or no knowledge. Nonetheless, his words and actions demonstrate the effect on his thinking of the democratist interpretation of democracy. How conscious Bush or some of his advisors were that they were acting on these ideas is impossible to say, nor is it the purpose of this chapter to undertake such a task. This chapter aims to contextualize the Bush administration’s actions and to demonstrate that the major impetus behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fits well within the democratist paradigm.
Many have become alert to the possible ideological underpinnings of the liberal internationalist grand strategy of “benevolent global hegemony” that has prevailed in the United States since at least the mid-twentieth century. Recently John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have drawn attention to the deleterious effects of this foreign policy strategy.3 These scholars have examined the nature of and motive behind this grand strategy, articulating their arguments in the language of international relations theory. Although Mearsheimer and Walt are sensitive to the role of ideology in driving U.S. foreign policy, they do not attempt a wide assessment of its influence or a comprehensive definition of the ideology behind it. Like many, they are more interested in the contemporary practical implications of the ideology than its philosophical roots and a thoroughgoing understanding of it. This book as a whole attempts to contribute to a deeper understanding of international relations theory by demonstrating the comprehensive nature of an ideology of democracy that many scholars of foreign policy implicitly or explicitly assume. This chapter in particular tries to illustrate the ways in which the pursuit of global hegemony follows the general pattern of the democratist ideology. By showing the connection between a grand strategy of liberal internationalism and an imaginative and idealistic interpretation of democracy, this chapter finds that jettisoning grand ambitions of liberal hegemony may depend upon a great deal more than “the future structure of the international system . . . and the degree of agency or freedom liberal states have in choosing a foreign policy,” as Mearsheimer argues.4 The more daunting variable might be whether the West can overcome the even more profound “delusion” that is a particular and powerful understanding of democracy itself, before we might hope to shake the grand strategy that reflects it.
To do this, however, it is necessary first to recognize the presence of this mighty force in American and Western politics. This chapter deals primarily with the Bush Doctrine, a variant of liberal internationalism, and the neoconservative grand strategy of the Bush administration. Like other chapters, this one expressly aims to elucidate the nature of democratism and to investigate its inner logic and practical implications. To accomplish this, it focuses on the foreign policy thinking of the Bush administration as it relates to various themes of democratism, many of which have been covered in other chapters, including its expansive imagination, totalizing tendency, proclivity for millenarian thinking, militarism and violence, and its dependence on supporting institutions to compel and reinforce its beliefs. There is overlap between Rousseau’s ahistorical and idealistic understanding of democracy and that of the neoconservatives. The thinking of Strauss, too, has much in common with neoconservatism and democratism. As will be shown, neoconservative foreign policies stem from the type of natural rights thinking that guides Strauss’s philosophy. Demonstrating the connection between Strauss’s thought, which openly disdains democracy, and neoconservatism helps to illuminate a profoundly undemocratic dimension of neoconservatism and democratism. In order to deepen the discussion of neoconservatism as it relates to democratism, this chapter examines its interpretation of American history and its concept of the American exceptionalism myth. It concludes with an assessment of the extent to which neoconservatism relies on democratic vanguardism that pursues the ever elusive and paradoxical idea of peace through war. By examining the philosophy behind neoconservatism through concrete examples, this chapter illustrates some of the foreign policy outcomes of this powerful expression of the democratist ideology.
The Term “Neoconservative”
“Neoconservative” may be an outdated term if by it we mean someone from the coterie of academics and elites who came to power in the 1990s and were influential in the Bush administration. However, neoconservatism as an ideology is far from needing an “obituary.”5 Its beliefs about human nature, society, history, and foreign policy are not limited to one particular political party or intellectual sphere but are shared by a wide contingent of American politicians, elites, academics, and media and public figures. The line between neoconservative and left-of-center liberal, at least on the issue of foreign policy and many domestic social policies, has blurred in recent years to the point of nearly disappearing altogether. The well-known neoconservative Max Boot openly declared that he has voted exclusively for Democrats since 2016 (“to save our democracy”), for example, and fellow neoconservative Robert Kagan is one of the leading proponents of liberal interventionism, the foreign policy that has enjoyed bipartisan consensus since at least 2001.6 American Republicans, Democrats, and neoconservatives overlap in their shared faith in the ideology of democratism.7
Democratism extends from the thought of Jefferson and Wilson to Maritain and Catholic circles to Rawls and other secular liberal thinkers and finally to the Bush presidency, which would be followed by one Republican and two Democratic presidents who largely continue his legacy. Donald Trump tried to buck the trend of foreign intervention and succeeded in bringing some troops home, as he had promised to do, but even Trump, who campaigned for a more restrained foreign policy, faced an uphill battle extricating America from its various entanglements around the globe, demonstrating the grip of “liberal hegemony” on the Washington foreign policy establishment. Joe Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan, fraught as it was, may signal a turn in U.S. foreign policy, at least for now, away from armed intervention in the name of democracy. But his vow to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack illustrates that the United States has not abandoned its commitment to “protect democracy” around the globe. Afghanistan may soon be replaced by other interventions that we will be told are crucial to making the world safe for democracy or saving a particular nation from “authoritarianism” or “tyranny.”
While the so-called neoconservatives are the primary focus of this chapter, they can be considered something of a stand-in for many twenty-first-century liberal internationalists, who run the political gamut, are represented in nongovernmental organizations, and are even represented in religious groups; the former editor of the Catholic publication Crisis Magazine Deal W. Hudson (who calls Maritain his “intellectual mentor”) says that neoconservatism is merely an extension of Catholic social teaching.8 It is more manageable to examine the beliefs of neoconservatism than the more sprawling “liberal internationalism” because of the decisive foreign policy actions of the former during the Bush administration and because its actions are backed by a clearly articulated philosophy, leaving little doubt about its system of beliefs and the real-world implications of those beliefs. Yet this chapter reveals as much about U.S. foreign policy and its architects in the past three decades as it does about neoconservatism, which is only one pointed expression of what so many politicians, leading intellectuals, and public figures have supported, especially since 2008, when a genuine bipartisan consensus formed around Barack Obama’s continuation of the strategy of liberal internationalism. Interestingly, the election of Trump forged a tight friendship between many neoconservatives and Democrats, who united in opposition to Trump’s foreign policy strategy of limited engagement and restraint. While many Democrats openly opposed Bush’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, beginning in 2016 they resembled neoconservatives in their pleas for U.S. troops to remain in those nations. This chapter, then, although examining the major figures of a particular movement whose day in the sun seems to have passed, is as relevant as ever as presidents continue to pursue those same foreign policies that neoconservatives long prescribed.
Leo Strauss and Natural Right
One of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, Leo Strauss has been identified as the intellectual forefather of neoconservatism.9 His teachings impacted many of those who were to become leading neoconservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary under Bush; Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (a government agency created, among other reasons, to look for evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) under Bush; and Irving Kristol, Richard Perle, and John Podhoretz.10 Strauss is a famous critic of modernity and the Enlightenment and, to a lesser extent, of Rousseau, but his political philosophy represents a fundamental ahistoricism and corresponding conception of abstract right that is fundamentally in keeping with Enlightenment modes of thought and also with Rousseau’s philosophy. It is perhaps not as paradoxical as it might seem that Strauss’s skepticism of democracy, even disdain for it, represents a quintessential tenet of democratism. Strauss contends that the proper ordering of politics depends on knowledge of the ahistorical truths of natural right. This itself presupposes a “legislator” or lawgiver figure who establishes a polis (as opposed to a historical understanding of the organic development of a polis). Existing customs and institutions that do not reflect universal truth are inherently unjust and illegitimate, according to the philosophy of natural right. Modernity is in crisis, Strauss argues, because it has turned away from the insights of classical thinkers like Plato, whose doctrine of the Forms exemplifies the notion of right by nature. According to Strauss, modernity’s descent into moral relativism and nihilism can be traced to the philosophy of historicism—the belief that human existence is historical—supplanting natural right. Not unlike Rousseau, Strauss claims to have the insight needed to restore what he takes to be the natural order.
Strauss admires classical antiquity’s separation of nomos and physis, convention and nature, and draws on this distinction for his own understanding of what is normative. Philosophy itself, Strauss says, implies the distinction between right and history.11 “[T]he only solid basis of all efforts to transcend the actual” are universal norms.12 The actual—cultural practices, traditions, religious beliefs, manners, and mores—constitutes artifices that are perversions of nature, although Strauss acknowledges their use in creating social stability. In this sense, he is in agreement with Rousseau. For Strauss, however, following the classical thinkers, the highest existence is the life of contemplation, the life of the philosopher. With Plato, Strauss believes that only the few are able “to ascend from the cave to the light of the sun, that is, to the truth.”13 Those able to escape the darkness of the cave and to discern Justice in the abstract are in the best position to act as lawgivers.
Plato’s Republic, which is Strauss’s own political guide, well illustrates the implications of the theory of natural right. In the Republic Plato conceives of a perfectly just city, governed by the best (aristoi). Those who are able to contemplate justice in the abstract, the philosophers, Plato designates the city’s guardians. The masses, incapable of understanding pure justice, are not disposed to ceding sovereignty willingly to the philosophers, so Plato devises a “noble lie” to explain the social stratification using divine mythology.14 According to the myth, some are fit to rule and others to be ruled. Within the ruling class are two types of rulers: Philosopher Kings who legislate and a military class of “Auxiliaries” who protect the city. The rest are the producers, artisans, and all others unfit for leadership. Individuals can rise above the station of their parents through merit, but all are more or less naturally disposed to one of the three character types. Education plays an important role in the Republic, but it seems to be as much about weeding out those unworthy of the life of a Philosopher King as it is about cultivating that life. Central to Plato’s project is identifying the traits that he believes make a qualified leader. The system of education he develops in the Republic is one designed to bring out these traits, primarily the ability to contemplate justice.
Strauss largely adopts Plato’s normative understanding of the Philosopher King, who is able to penetrate the true nature of reality and to understand justice in general. He or she is concerned with the perfection of the whole community and not merely the individual, Strauss says. This extraordinary person represents “the full actualization of humanity.”15 Able to see beyond mere partisan attachments to the Good in the abstract, the “wise legislator” frames laws that reflect absolute justice, Strauss says, and if necessary can “complete” the law using his or her discretion.16 Those who are wise legislators or “good men” are known generally by their willingness “to prefer the common interest to their private interest” and to do the right thing in each situation because “it is noble and right and for no ulterior reason.”17 Because of their superior vantage, power, and benevolence, “the judge and ruler has larger and nobler opportunities to act justly than the ordinary man.”18 The vast majority of people are not capable of this nobility of spirit and require the direction of the leadership class. Quoting Jefferson, Strauss asserts, “That form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of [the] natural aristoi into offices of the government.”19
It is clear that Strauss’s philosophy is not compatible with democracy in the ordinary sense. His reading of the classics and his belief that the classical natural right doctrine “is identical with the doctrine of the best regime” assumes an inherent conflict between right and the popular will.20 Although Strauss states that “the fundamentals of justice are, in principle, accessible to man as man,” he agrees with Plato and Rousseau that only a few possess the virtue necessary to prefer the general over the particular. The political philosopher, who is concerned with the question of “the best political order as such,” must act as “umpire” in all questions of political controversy, according to Strauss.21 But this poses an obvious problem for democracy. For Strauss, “[t]he political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent.” He says that “wisdom takes precedence over consent,” but he understands the importance of gaining consent in modern democracies. Thus, citizens must be “duly persuaded” that it is in their interest to be ruled by a wise elite.22
On this point, Strauss’s philosophy is compatible with Rousseau’s. A wise legislator is expected to “found” the just city (or nation). Although not all people will be able to recognize the wisdom of the legislator and the superiority of his vision, the common good demands that they accept his rule. From this perspective, Strauss’s political philosophy as well as Plato’s Republic are democratic in the same sense that Rousseau’s Social Contract is democratic: in the democratist sense. That is, all three profess a view of popular sovereignty in which the popular will is carefully curated to reflect the philosopher’s own vision of democracy. Rousseau’s legislator, Plato’s Philosopher King, and Strauss’s wise statesman all ostensibly rule in the name of the people but are expected to control and give direction to the people’s desires. Strauss’s thought is guided by his belief in “natural right,” yet all of the democratists examined in this book share to an extent his conviction that what is normative is not integrally related to historical norms. This ahistorical epistemology necessarily requires political translation—an enlightened elite of some kind to mediate “democracy.” One of the touchstones of neoconservatism is the belief that the United States is based on natural rights and universal, abstract principles. Neoconservative foreign policy essentially extends Strauss’s natural right philosophy into a grand strategy of liberal hegemony. In practice, the neoconservatives themselves determine through policy prescriptions the ways in which so-called universal principles find concrete expression.
While there is certainly a connection between Strauss and many neoconservatives, and indeed some openly acknowledge his influence, it is possible to overstate the connection.23 The genealogy of the neoconservative worldview is complex and can be traced back to many others, including Ronald Reagan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt (men who might have merited inclusion in this book), even Marx in certain respects, but finally to the seminal thinker Rousseau. Neoconservatism represents one expression of what is ultimately a deeper ideological phenomenon affecting the wider Western world. Nonetheless, it is profitable to examine the political philosophy of neoconservatism’s most immediate philosophical forebear to shed light on those aspects that clearly illustrate the wider phenomenon of democratism.
This book advances the view that an eighteenth-century French philosopher has had an enormous impact, directly and indirectly, on Western political thinking, specifically its understanding of democracy. Whether or not Jefferson or Wilson or Maritain read Rousseau does not impact the thesis that the major tenets of Rousseau’s political philosophy, often channeled through others who were influenced by him, can be discerned in the works and imagination of thinkers of various partisan affiliations across time and space. Wilson, in fact, outwardly repudiated Rousseau’s Social Contract, but his writings and actions nevertheless suggest a deep kinship between the two. Strauss, too, was critical of certain aspects of Rousseau’s philosophy, but many of his underlying assumptions about human nature and epistemology suggest meaningful similarity between the two.
The Neoconservative Reading of American History
Examining the neoconservative understanding of American history reveals a great deal about its underlying philosophy and points toward its foreign policy prescriptions. Following the interpretation of the American founding by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Louis Hartz, and their own main intellectual figures, neoconservatives hold that the United States originated as a compact based on the universal principles of freedom and equality.24 This reading of American history supports the belief that America is based on an “idea” and did not form organically and historically as did other nations. According to this narrative, America is unique and has a special role in the world. “Most nationalisms are rooted in blood and soil, in the culture and history of a particular territory. But in the case of the United States, the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution produced a different kind of nationalism, different from that of other nations,” Kagan asserts.25 Americans freely came together in Philadelphia and rationally decided the course of their government. The Constitutional Convention was not, according to this interpretation, the result of historical process and the colonists’ attempt to recover their historical English rights from the tyrannical King George III. Rather, the American founders transcended their heritage and broke radically, even metaphysically with the past. The American represents a “new man.”26 Quoting Hans Kohn’s 1957 essay, “American Nationalism,” Kagan contends that Americans escaped the “confines of historical-territorial limitation.”27 Citing Jefferson and Paine, neoconservatives argue that the American founders were the first to assert their natural rights and to found a nation based on universal principles. In the words of Charles Krauthammer, America is “uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition.”28
Presenting their philosophy and specifically foreign policy as having deep roots in American thought and the Western tradition more generally, neoconservatives initially gave the appearance of embracing a brand of American conservatism. Many American conservatives were in fact attracted to the ideas of neoconservatism, assuming that because some of their beliefs were based on ideas of founders such as Jefferson, their philosophy must be an antidote to progressivism, which tends not to glamorize the American founders. Traditional conservatives, drawing on such sources as the Federalist Papers, have interpreted the American founding in light of the framers’ fear of large government and their desire to check and decentralize power.29 This older brand of conservatism has found in Washington’s Farewell Address a message similar to the major point of John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July address, that America ought not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”30 The neoconservative interpretation of American history, by contrast, suits its foreign policy aims, which eschew limited government, fiscal conservatism, and a restrained foreign policy. Much of neoconservatism’s historical argument for American interventionism rests on an Enlightenment strain of thought that they trace to Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and some of the other founders. They have even looked to Rousseau as a thinker largely compatible with the American political tradition. Strauss’s disciple Allan Bloom, for example, concludes from Rousseau’s famous dictum “Man was born free. Everywhere he is in chains” that “it should be evident that Rousseau begins from an overall agreement with the [American] Framers and their teachers about man’s nature and the origins and ends of civil society.”31 Rereading American history as a sort of rational social contract, such as Rousseau and Jefferson envisioned, neoconservatives imagine that the Constitutional Convention was a “moment” that gave birth to America.32 This country is not the result of an organic and historical process, like other nations.
America, the Exceptional Nation
This retelling of American history as a social contract has helped to inform the neoconservative logic of regime change. America is a testament, according to this interpretation, to the idea that a political order can be rationally decided upon and codified. Replacing or reeducating the ruling class with one versed in “universal principles” can bring a state closer to the democratic ideal, at home or abroad. Neoconservatism does not dwell on the historical and cultural conditions of a society because, it assumes, inherited practices are largely arbitrary and irrelevant to the new order. Consideration of a people’s ancestral practices, rooted in the “meaningless process” of history, in the words of Strauss, should not be a major factor in questions of politics.33 Political order has its source in “nature” and “universal principles,” which are taken to be identical with the American regime.
Kagan argues that the American founders “unwittingly” invented a new and revolutionary missionary foreign policy based on the myth of American exceptionalism.34 To deploy the military on behalf of oppressed peoples in foreign lands is thought to be a natural expression of America’s “universalist ideology.”35 Bush’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice interprets the American mission to mean “extending the benefits of liberty and prosperity as broadly as possible.”36 Proponents of this grand strategy reject what they take to be outmoded notions of national interest and are motivated instead by abstract goals such as “the success of liberty” around the globe. America’s foreign policy is rooted in “values,” the neoconservative Krauthammer says, quoting the words of John F. Kennedy.37 Disparaging “classic” definitions of national interest as Old World and selfish, neoconservatives redefine national interest to include the freedom and prosperity of other nations and argue that it is in America’s self-interest to pursue these goals. Transforming other nations into democracies would mean fewer enemies for America, they claim. Additionally, the economic system that is an integral part of liberal democracy, the “free market,” ostensibly promotes peace as it increases prosperity.
With pronounced moralistic overtones, neoconservatives present the motives behind their policy of “benevolent global hegemony” as unquestionably noble.38 America may incorporate intervention and preemption as justifiable dimensions of its foreign policy because it is, in the words of Krauthammer, “Beyond Power. Beyond Interest.”39 According to Kristol and Kagan, “It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find that they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.”40 And if America may be considered imperial for its global ambitions, says the (former) neoconservative Boot, there is “no need to run away from the label,” for America is acting in the name of justice. Drawing on the words of Jefferson, Boot declares that the American empire is “an empire for liberty.”41 Even if American imperialism is “at gunpoint,” he insists that it is for the good of oppressed peoples.42 America’s humanitarian motives separate its foreign intervention from the meddling, self-interested monarchs of the past. The United States is “less self-interested than any other great power in history.”43 Bush similarly described the U.S. mission in the world as “beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest.”44 American foreign policy is and always has been, say neoconservatives, of a different order than that of other nations in history.
The neoconservative philosophy of history reflects the democratist dialectic of history in general. The world is moving inexorably toward democracy, and enlightened nations such as the United States can help in the unfolding dialectic of freedom. Providence or fate vouchsafed to America the ideals of liberty and equality, and America therefore has a moral duty to “lead freedom’s advance.”45 A new, global democratic order is just over the horizon, but America must act as the vanguard. In 1991, George H. W. Bush declared in his State of the Union address that America was on the precipice of a “new world order,” and America’s decision to take decisive action against the perpetrators of evil can forever alter the course of liberty in history.46 Later, the George W. Bush administration spoke of America’s “historic opportunity” to permanently alter the course of world events. America can, said Rice, “break the destructive pattern of great power rivalry that has bedeviled the world since the rise of the nation-state.”47 In his second inaugural address, George W. Bush asserted that “the force of human freedom” is the “only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant.”48 The spread of democracy “can be hastened,” Kagan declares, through military intervention.49 America has already helped to usher in this “post-history” phase of the democratic dialectic in Europe, according to Kagan, and it is America’s moral duty to bring the European “paradise” to other nations, by force if necessary.50
“The Public Interest”
The universal principles guiding all nations, which neoconservatism maintains coincide with American “values,” parallels the Rousseauean idea of the general will. Under the heading “What is the public interest?” Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, in the first pages of the first issue of the neoconservative public policy journal The Public Interest, quote Walter Lippmann: “The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.”51 Bell and Kristol admit that the public interest as defined by Lippmann has never existed in any society; the people have never really known or realized the will that is attributed to them. It is an ideal, but one that we must strive for nonetheless. Implicit in this understanding is the belief that someone must midwife the general will, or what is in “the public interest,” into existence. In foreign policy thinking, this translates to the idea that the U.S. military and other American institutions ought to help foreign peoples express their will, which neoconservatives assume is democratic and in opposition to their leaders. The will of the good people of Iraq, for example, is for American-style democracy.
From the Ashes, Democracy
Democracy does not come without a price, though. Many neoconservatives follow the belief of Jefferson and Wilson, that social and political upheaval must precede democratic peace. The Bush administration actively pursued destabilizing policies in states it considered illegitimate in the Middle East in an effort to disrupt and replace traditional ways of life. In 2004 in a speech to the United Nations, Bush said that the United States had mistakenly excused oppression in the name of stability, but now “we must take a different approach.”52 The neoconservative Ralph Peters mentioned the ways in which policies of destabilization would at once aid in the process of democratization and directly benefit America. In the essay “Stability, America’s Enemy,” Peters observes that “wars, revolutions, and decade after decade of instability opened markets to American goods, investors, and ideas.”53 In the Middle East America should try, in a sense, to re-create these conditions or at least not actively avoid them for fear of the consequences. Disrupting the ways of life within states considered to be backward or illegitimate will, according to neoconservatism in particular and democratism in general, open the door to a more rational, better political order. This philosophy holds that revolutionary upheaval, spontaneous or instigated by a foreign power, makes way for democracy and capitalism—the natural desires of all peoples. It will even potentially benefit the United States. Michael Ledeen’s description of “creative destruction” illustrates this mentality:
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.54
Dismantling the old ways of life is not an end in itself, but a means toward building a better, more democratic world. Cultural and educational programs help at once to dismantle the old ways and to institute new norms. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spends a considerable amount on education services that, according to its website, fit into its larger mission to “further America’s foreign policy interests on issues ranging from expanding free markets, combating extremism, ensuring stable democracies, and addressing the root causes of poverty, while simultaneously fostering global good will.” Reflecting Kristol and Kagan’s argument for nation-building, the USAID mission statement says that foreign aid “investments” constitute a “strategic, economic, and moral imperative for the United States and [are] vital to U.S. national security.”55 In Afghanistan specifically, the United States spent billions of dollars on what the USAID categorizes as “basic education.” Its stated mission of education to support the “full and productive participation in society” of impoverished and disaster-struck peoples of the world suggests an underlying philosophical commitment to the Lockean and Anglo-American understanding of the political role of productive labor.56 For neoconservatives and many others, non-Western peoples engaging in the free market through capitalist trade will simultaneously produce a political transformation toward liberal democracy.
The education programs that the U.S. State Department undertakes are invariably guided by “our values,” and specifically democratist values.57 After the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, many of the USAID programs targeted women, hoping that by transforming their traditional role in society, they might lead the way toward a new form of social and political existence.58 In 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the creation of the Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative, a $10 million project to help “women become full and vibrant partners in Iraq’s developing democracy.”59 One of the recipients of a grant from the Initiative, the Independent Women’s Forum, hosted a Women Leaders Conference in 2005 meant to give women “a better understanding of the universal principles of democracy.”60 Many have pointed to ideological motives behind the Bush administration’s focus on women’s programs and argued that such efforts to promote women’s rights in Iraq and Afghanistan were to galvanize support for the wars and for the administration.61 However, the desire to liberate women fits within the general logic of “creative destruction” and parallels, in many ways, the same efforts at women’s emancipation of the Soviets in Central Asia in the twentieth century.62 The Soviets also recognized that in order to “build” a new system of government and way of life, the linchpin holding together traditional society, women, must be removed. Removing women from their traditional domestic and social roles would cause major disruption to the existing order. Neoconservatives insisted that bringing women into the national and global economy through “entrepreneurship” would help generate a democratic ethos more broadly. One scholar observed that for the Bush administration, “[e]ntrepreneurial women . . . are the sign of a free market economy, which is itself taken as a stand-in for a democratic government.”63 Microfinance and loan programs were designed specifically in order to “enhance women’s ability to achieve economic independence.”64 One of the consequences of this would be the loss of men’s exclusive hold over financial resources. Even the looming threat that women could survive apart from their male family members would have a tremendously disruptive impact socially, Americans and Soviets believed, and would drive these traditional societies toward the anticipated political end. Women would be in positions of greater social and political independence; whether for good or ill, it was supposed that in Asia this would result in an erosion of the Islamic patriarchy and a corresponding strengthening of the replacement regime. Liberating women is a revolutionary tactic expected to set in motion the historical dialectic, whether toward democracy or communism. “The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable,” said Bush.65 Releasing women from their historic role in Islamic society would permit “nature” to take its course and the desired political regime to unfold.
Using the Military to Help Win the Culture War
While creative destruction generally refers to the cultural-economic forces of democratic capitalism, it is impossible to overlook the military operations that almost invariably accompany these “softer” tactics to dismantle existing norms. However, the military objectives are not always made clear, largely because they are means that are incommensurate with the desired end. “Benevolent global hegemony,” as an abstraction in the imagination, suggests a sort of friendly leadership role for the United States, but in practice it demands force to back its desire to establish global norms. The policies behind benevolent global hegemony are as nebulous and sprawling as the concept itself. Military victory, neoconservatives admit, is neither possible nor the objective. Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010 under Obama, said in 2010, “[W]e can’t win [the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan] militarily, and we don’t seek to win it militarily because a pure military victory is not possible.”66 Holbrooke and many others have looked to the words of retired general David Petraeus, former commander of multinational forces in Iraq and a proponent of the war, that “military victory is not possible.”67 Indeed the ideological objective of spreading democracy alongside the “progress of our values in the world” means that victory on the battlefield does not mean an end to the war. The real battle must be a protracted cultural battle, as America’s two decades in Afghanistan revealed.68
Chuck Hagel, a longtime critic of the war in Iraq, said in 2006 while a senator from Nebraska that “militaries are built to fight and win wars. . . . America cannot impose a democracy on any nation — regardless of our noble purpose.”69 Henry Kissinger, the famous theorist of the international relations realist tradition, said in 2006 that “a clear military victory” along the lines that the United States sought was not possible.70 Yet many neoconservatives have concluded that the failure to democratize the Middle East is not due to an inherent contradiction between means and ends but to the means being insufficient to accomplish the end. Expressing a sentiment common to neoconservatives, retired army general Stanley McChrystal, who preceded Petraeus, in 2017 said of his 2009 surge, “While flawed due to ambitious timelines and the failure to execute a truly whole-of-government approach, [it] could have succeeded had Washington demonstrated the necessary patience and commitment.”71 At that time, the war in Afghanistan was in its ninth year. If democracy is not taking root, it is believed, it is because the United States is not doing enough to eliminate the forces standing in the way of a people’s natural desire for liberalism and democratic capitalism. Neoconservatives called for more spending, additional “surges,” and greater power for U.S. civilian agencies not only to collect intelligence but also to directly issue orders to kill.72 Such an attitude informed the Lyndon Johnson administration, which had been convinced that additional troops in Vietnam would finally produce victory.73 Neoconservatives seemed to believe, as Undersecretary of State George Ball presciently predicted of the escalating war in Vietnam, that “our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives.”74
As additional measures failed to produce the intended results, many of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars’ neoconservative proponents became even more zealous in their calls for justice. Peters, for example, exasperated at the deteriorating situation in the Middle East in 2009, called for a redoubling of efforts: “Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters.”75 Peters attributed America’s inability to win a decisive victory in Iraq and Afghanistan to effeteness and an unwillingness to spend money and manpower. “Had we been ruthless in the use of our overwhelming power,” Peters asserted, we could have lessened the death toll and had victory in both countries.76 Conservative commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks noted the “irony” of liberation by force and conceded that attempting to establish democracy in Iraq “in retrospect, seems like a childish fantasy.” Incredibly, Brooks’s solution was not to reconsider the mission but to give “the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy,” a “forum in which they can defy us.”77 Democracy ought to be pursued yet. In his article “Better a Stalemate Than Defeat in Afghanistan,” Boot blamed the failed surge of 2009 on inadequate numbers of troops and insufficient time. After analyzing various reasons for recurring U.S. failures in Afghanistan, situations that continued to produce “déjà vu” experiences for the casual observer, Boot asked, “Is it worth maintaining and even expanding the U.S. commitment to what is already the longest war in American history?” Yes, he responded. He called on Trump to eschew his predecessor’s timidity and to send in many thousands of additional troops, at least 100,000, “without an attached timeline” or “rigid numerical caps.” There cannot be a limit to the blood and treasure that the United States is willing to spend on democratizing despotic nations.
A “Democratic” Strategy After War Communism
In 2017, at the end of the sixteenth year of the war in Afghanistan, McChrystal argues for “staying the course” and expanding the war in Pakistan. In a piece in Foreign Affairs, he and his co-author Kosh Sadat look to none other than the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin for guidance in Afghanistan: “In 1902, Vladimir Lenin published a now famous pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done?, in which he prescribed a strategy for what later became the Bolsheviks’ successful takeover of Russia’s 1917 revolution. Lenin argued that Russia’s working classes required the leadership of dedicated cadres before they would become sufficiently politicized to demand change in tsarist Russia.”78 McChrystal and Sadat laud Lenin’s “clear-eyed assessment of reality” and conclude, “[T]he same is needed for Afghanistan now.”79 It is certainly curious that McChrystal would look to Lenin, of all world leaders, for insight. Could it be that an underlying philosophical kinship exists between neoconservative and communist vanguardism and revolutionary tactics? McChrystal, like Lenin, believed that he was helping to bring noble ideals—freedom and equality—to the oppressed. The general ideology of democratism calls for dedicated cadres disciplined to its ideological principles. For neoconservatives and many other advocates of military intervention on behalf of democracy, it is no contradiction to bring about democratic peace and prosperity through war.
The parallels between the communist plans to replace bourgeois and Islamic societies with socialism and the U.S. plan to replace “terror” with democracy should not be dismissed. The concerted military, social, economic, and educational U.S. efforts to overthrow and replace existing regimes resemble the revolutionary “whole-of-government” tactic of Lenin and later Stalin to “build socialism.” “War communism” was the official name for what was to be an emergency measure to build socialism in Russia.80 It was premised on the belief that the old society had to be forcibly and completely dismantled. Although it was meant to be an extreme, temporary measure to “leap” into socialism, it proved the modus operandi throughout Soviet rule in Russia and its satellites. It may be appropriate to title the neoconservative strategy to build democracy internationally “war democratism.” Removing the old elite by military force and consolidating military gains with cultural and institutional programs are, like its communist antecedent, at the heart of its program. War democratism is similarly premised on the belief that the military can provide a jump-start for democracy in countries under the rule of dictators. Clearing away the old and backward norms, neoconservatives and many other liberal internationalists assume, will open the way for the people’s natural desire for liberal democracy to come to fruition: “[T]he force of American ideals and the influence of the international economic system, both of which are upheld by American power and influence,” will inevitably erode the inherited ways of undemocratic nations.81 Through regime change, America can accelerate the historical process of modernization and democratization (which are held to be synonymous). This should happen, according to Kristol and Kagan, across the globe, “in Baghdad and Belgrade, in Pyongyang and Beijing,” and “wherever tyrannical governments acquire the military power to threaten their neighbors, our allies and the United States itself.”82
Grandiose Vision as Moral Heroism
The neoconservative vision of democracy is greatly informed by its imaginative, sometimes Manichaean, understanding of good and evil. Kagan draws on romantic images of sheriffs in the old west when he describes the American mission; like Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon, America needs to stop the bad guys.83 His metaphor, however, breaks down. In saying that international outlaws must be stopped “through the muzzle of a gun,” Kagan obscures the real nature of American interventionism, which is often conducted from afar with military technology. Unmanned aircraft or drone warfare is now the order of the day.84 This image, however, does not elicit the same sentiment as Cooper facing the gunmen in the classic western. Yet creating an imaginative link to the heroic is an important aspect of neoconservative grand strategy as well as democratism. Democratism, as this book argues, depends a great deal on the imagination and relies on it for grand visions of the world transformed. Neoconservatives make use of abstract rhetoric and dreamy sentiment in order to marshal support for its international cause. America ought to “relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in [its] policy,” Kristol and Kagan triumphantly declare.85
Many have pointed to the role that the heroic myth of this sort plays in the neoconservative imagination and connected it with Strauss’s apparent fear of the West succumbing to nihilism.86 Thompson, for example, sees in neoconservatism’s use of the hero metaphor and its desire for America to embark on grand missions a disdain for liberalism and individual rights. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Strauss, and other critics of liberal individualism may indeed have influenced neoconservatism in direct or indirect ways, as Thompson and others argue. But the general inclination to view abstract and far-off events such as global democracy and bringing an end to tyranny as supremely virtuous, and at the same time to deride local concerns as “prosaic and mundane,” is characteristic of democratism. The use of moralizing rhetoric that would call us from our bourgeois torpor fits the pattern of other democratists, who similarly believe that we ought to look beyond everyday matters to a higher, shared cause that can be accomplished through politics. In a 1999 paean to Senator John McCain, Brooks laments that Americans “no longer aggressively push hard-edged creeds” and would rather “enjoy their sport-utility vehicles, their Jewel CDs, and their organic lawn care products.” In other words, Americans prefer the business of ordinary living to the frenetic desire to remake the world that drives Washington elites such as Brooks. Brooks reveals the yawning chasm that separates elites such as himself from the rest of Americans, telling his readers, “If you drive around the country, looking into the cultural institutions of the middle class . . . you see a nation that is good-hearted and bourgeois” but “tranquil to a fault.” Brooks is of the opposite opinion of G. K. Chesterton, that “the most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” For Brooks, the life of most Americans may be quaint, but it is morally uninspiring. Instead of attending to a spirit of “patriotism” and a higher calling, Americans preoccupy themselves with their own daily concerns: “When a people turn toward the easy comforts of private life, they inadvertently lose connection with higher, more demanding principles and virtues.” Brooks does not have in mind the worship of God, whom many Americans would have identified as that “higher calling,” but a civil religion of “muscular progressivism.” He imagines the American people finding new life and spirit in a “public philosophy” of “patriotic sentiment, an emotional style and a set of rituals.” The end of this patriotism is not simply worship of the nation-state but the inspiration for a new foreign policy fitting of America’s greatness. In the dénouement of Brooks’s piece, he writes, “America’s moral destiny is wrapped up in its status as a superpower. If America ceases to assert itself as the democratic superpower, promoting self-government around the world, it will cease to be the America we love.”87
The neoconservative belief that Brooks expresses, that democratizing other nations constitutes “more demanding principles and virtues” than the “small-scale morality” of day-to-day life, exemplifies the democratist ethic. Concern with the local and domestic is often derided by democratists as unimportant compared to grand, national missions. “The current mood of squishy tranquility may be a sign of instinctive conservatism,” he says, which is to be rejected in favor of a more progressive orientation toward morality.88 Living the ordinary but difficult domestic life rooted in local concerns is considered to be the essence of the moral life for conservatives of an older Chestertonian or Burkean type, but for Brooks it is the lamentable ethos of Middle America. Brooks as well as Rousseau are of the democratist belief that virtue consists in abstract and romantic longing for a national (perhaps ultimately international) togetherness and feelings of equality and camaraderie—the general will or public interest.
Brooks’s article augured the foreign policy that would dominate the Washington consensus after 9/11, yet it does not seem to have made America any better off by the metrics of American domestic peace and prosperity, national security, national unity, or international reputation. On all of these counts, America is decidedly worse off than in the 1990s. “[N]obody is going to identify this decade as a high-water mark of American idealism,” Brooks wrote in 1999. Yet many Americans long for the pre-9/11 world, in which American idealism had not driven us into countless and seemingly endless foreign entanglements.89 It is characteristic of democratism to lament that the nation is not united behind a great international (or domestic) cause that would not simply alter the status quo but fundamentally change human existence as we know it. That democratists often look to the supporting institutions of a civil religion is not surprising. Democracy, in the ideology of democratism, is the Christian eschaton. Just as Christ’s coming is expected to usher in a new age, the global democratic revolution is expected to utterly transform life and politics.
“True” Democracy Just around the Corner
One of the trademarks of war democratism, like Soviet communism, is the belief that if victory is elusive and if history continues to march on much as before, fraught with injustices and inequality, it must be due to poor organization and lack of will. Neoconservatives and other democratists are surprised when their foreign policy efforts lead not to democracy but toward its opposite: social backlash in the form of a new authoritarianism and a proliferation of violence.90 Many in the Bush administration were “beside themselves at the result [of the invasion of Iraq],” David Rose reported in 2006.91 Similarly, Obama had not expected a new terrorist organization to result from the U.S. invasions in the Middle East. In an interview in 2015, Obama said, “ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS] is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion, which is an example of unintended consequences.”92 The rise of ISIS is just one example of the many unintended consequences of the wars in that region, to say nothing of the U.S. military presence elsewhere involved in the “war on terror,” which spans seventy-six countries, or 39% of the world’s nations.93 The unintended consequences of the various missions abroad, especially those of counterterrorism efforts, are impossible to measure, although many have pointed out some of the most obvious results. The Taliban is one noteworthy example of unintended consequences, having first grown out of the mujahideen, a U.S.-backed rebel force that resisted the Soviets during the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979–1989, then turned U.S. enemy during the decades-long intervention in Afghanistan, until finally taking over the country in 2021.94
Democratist Idealism and the Proliferation of Violence
The failure of America and its allies to democratize the Middle East and also the belief that democracy is in decline globally (according to Freedom House), ought to raise questions about the vision that has prompted actions like nation-building.95 In the case of international communism, no practical measures brought the Soviets closer to their vision of a classless society. Rather it stratified Russian society in new ways. The very nature of the communist ideal implies a need for radical social engineering, silencing those who would stand in the way of the glorious vision. Is the goal of global democracy so different? It too seems to require unending violence and occupation of foreign lands. Repeated failures abroad and the proliferation of new sources of political and social chaos suggest the elusive and utopian nature of building democracy through military and cultural intervention. Neoconservatives frequently mention America’s “separation from the past and . . . departure into the future” and contrast American foreign policy with the “realpolitik” of other nations in history, but is this accurate ?96 Krauthammer, when giving the 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, opened his talk by saying that, unlike other empires in history, “we do not hunger for territory.” Yet he concluded the speech, “This is war, and in war arresting murderers is nice. But you win by taking territory—and leaving something behind.”97 Neoconservatives make it clear that while America’s mission is grounded in universal principles, it must make use of the traditional means of warfare in order to accomplish its goals. Ostensibly fueled by noble ideals, the wars in the name of benevolent global hegemony have had consequences as destructive as the wars of our “cynical, Old World counterparts.”98 As of February 2018, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, had resulted in 59,592 U.S. and 268,000 Iraqi deaths, including between 180,000 and 202,000 civilian deaths, and 61,889 Afghan deaths, including 31,419 civilian deaths.99 The financial cost of these wars (including the war in Pakistan) for the United States up to 2018 was estimated to be 4.8 trillion dollars.100
Pursuing a grand strategy that even one of its neoconservative proponents admits is “expansive and perhaps utopian” has caused enormous destruction and has had costly consequences for the United States.101 Neoconservatives claim to be strongly anticommunist and were Cold Warriors until the fall of the Soviet Union, yet their frame of mind bears an uncanny resemblance to that of their erstwhile enemies. Just as the communist cause was subordinated to the revolutionary strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik party, with disastrous results for all but the party’s inner circles, so too was the U.S. treatment of Afghans and Iraqis subordinated to “Washington politics” and “American interests,” with similar consequences in kind if not degree.102 The reaction to human suffering of some American politicians with neoconservative leanings has been morbidly reminiscent of dedicated Bolsheviks. Madeleine Albright, for example, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, famously said in an interview in 1996 that the reported half-million Iraqi children killed as a result of U.S.-led sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime was “worth it.”103 Even in the absence of such candid admissions, the desire to stay the course despite costly and bloody outcomes indicates the interplay of utopianism and recalcitrance born of a rigid ideological commitment rather than a practical interest in reform.
No closer to the neoconservative vision of global democracy or even a democratic Middle East is the United States than was the Soviet Union to a classless society in the twentieth century. The withdrawal from Afghanistan should have been the coup de grâce of American idealism in foreign policy. But the fact that the orchestrators and cheerleaders of these colossal foreign policy failures have maintained their status as “foreign policy experts,” with Boot even named among the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, suggests that at least among elite circles in American public life democratic interventionism is alive and celebrated as a foreign policy strategy.
History is moving inexorably, these interventionists assume, toward global democracy—“sweeping the world at [an] unprecedented rate”—in a process that is at once natural and historically fated, indeed guided, according to neoconservative thinkers such as Michael Novak, by the hand of God.104 The “will to freedom” exists universally among peoples and nations, Krauthammer says, and is “the engine of history.”105 Bush often drew on Christian language in his description of U.S. foreign policy aims. In his 2004 State of the Union address he triumphantly proclaimed, “The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable, and it is not carried forward by our power alone.” “We can trust in that greater power,” he added, “who guides the unfolding of the years.”106 According to neoconservatives, U.S. foreign policy stems from universal truth and is not limited by historical contingency or ambitious and self-serving politicians. In an inversion of Christian eschatology, neoconservatives suggest that the imaginative participation in a national mission can provide not only earthly renewal on a global scale but also spiritual fulfillment.107 Like Brooks, Kristol and Kagan harken to Theodore Roosevelt’s message to look beyond everyday life and toward a grand national mission, nothing less than “improv[ing] the world’s condition.”108 Americans, and specifically traditional conservatives, neoconservatism insists, need to end their political somnambulism and call for greater global engagement and intervention—nothing short of the transformation of human existence.109
Strauss understood well the revolutionary and dangerous implications of the attempt to order politics according to an abstract ideal. The philosopher who contemplates the ideal is bound to see the gross discrepancy between “is” and “ought.” “[T]he recognition of universal principles,” Strauss says, “forces man to judge the established order, or what is actual here and now, in the light of the natural or rational order; and what is actual here and now is more likely than not to fall short of the universal and unchangeable norm.”110 The idealist who believes, as Strauss does, that the best regime “is not only most desirable; it is also meant to be feasible or possible,” sees a need for radical change and may believe that the ideal is worth any cost.111 In the context of democracy, the need for consent is a major barrier to the rule of wisdom in politics, as Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Social Contract illustrate. Overcoming the need for consent, while revolutionary, would bring about justice, according to the theory of natural right. “It would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations,” Strauss says, and “it would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise.”112 Seeing the clear social and political implications of the doctrine of natural right, he compares it to “dynamite.”113 An elite cadre must somehow appear to raise the political consciousness of the people to its true will for politics to be both wise and legitimate by modern standards. Brooks’s belief that “American purpose can find its voice only in Washington” is an example of this type of democratist interpretation of “representation” that Strauss and others have in mind.114 The people can find their correct voice only through the mediation of their elites.
Conclusion
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket, the colonel tells a discontented subordinate that America is “here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.” This was of course a criticism of the type of foreign adventurism that has been analyzed in this chapter, yet over thirty years later the colonel’s statement appears to be the genuinely held belief of many so-called experts in U.S. foreign policy. Despite political setbacks (some might say failures) and the suspicion that with its magazine the Weekly Standard and its Washington-based think-tank Project for the New American Century, neoconservatism might be dead, its philosophy continues to animate Washington politics. Trump, who campaigned promising to restrain American foreign policy and otherwise limit commitments abroad, still could not help but refer to America’s “righteous mission” in his State of the Union address in 2018.115 The idea of American exceptionalism construed in terms of a “righteous mission” has become so ingrained in the American imagination that passing references to it are hardly noticed. The only prominent candidate in the 2016 election to campaign against nation-building was hardly able to stray from the interventionist path of his neoconservative presidential predecessors. Trump’s plans to pull troops out of the Middle East were invariably met with cries of resistance from Democrats and Republicans alike, along with most major media corporations. The 2018 National Defense Strategy abstractly outlined plans for increasing military spending and for deepening the resolve to resist perceived threats to American security, threats that were no longer primarily from terrorism but from “inter-state strategic competition.” Few regions of the globe were excluded from the outline of places of strategic importance to U.S. national security. The report named China and the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific region; Russia and Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine; North Korea and South Korea and Japan; and Iran and “its neighbors.” In summary, the U.S. defense strategy of 2018 proposed, among many other things, “maintaining favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.”116 And this was from a presidency which promised to restrain U.S. foreign policy.
Trump proved largely unable to rid Washington, his administration, and perhaps himself of interventionist or internationalist and democratist instincts when it came to grand strategy. If anything, his election at least temporarily strengthened the resolve of the foreign policy establishment in Washington to maintain the status quo. United in common cause against Trump, erstwhile neoconservative and progressive enemies put their differences behind them and together advanced a foreign policy strategy united in its aim.
Stephen Walt analyzes the reasons that liberal hegemony has “remained the default strategy” among the foreign policy elite despite being “sharply at odds with the preferences of most Americans.”117 While the factors Walt mentions, such as political and financial gains for those invested in the status quo, are undoubtedly factors in its perpetuation, this chapter has tried to broaden the picture and show that an interventionist foreign policy in the name of democracy is the practical culmination of the democratist ideology. Liberal hegemony has been a grand strategy in the making in the West since the sentimental humanitarianism of Rousseau became the ethic informing Western politics. Rousseau’s philosophy prepared the way for this type of foreign policy thinking among the elites, who, as Walt demonstrates, benefit most from it. Walt’s conclusion that the elites have entrenched interests in “[o]pen-ended efforts to remake the world” reflects one of the general findings of this book, that the democratist ideology has served primarily the interests of the powerful, who draw on the ideology’s deep rhetorical reserves of language about “freedom” and “equality” to pursue goals that often lead to oppression, greater discrepancies in wealth, sharper political divisions, and devastating wars.
Democratism is both geographically and morally expansive in its vision for humanity. A globalist urge is part of what makes it distinctive. Motivated by the anthropological and epistemological beliefs that all of humanity share the same desire for Western liberal democracy, the democratist ideology manifests in foreign policy as interventionism couched as a moral responsibility. That democratism repeatedly fails to bring about its ends and nevertheless is unwilling to revise its program is evidence of its profoundly ideological nature. Brooks’s opinion piece in the New York Times in June 2019 reveals the contempt that many liberal internationalists harbor for those who do not share their view. Smugly titled “Voters, Your Foreign Policy Views Stink!,” it repeats the neoconservative narrative of the indispensability of America as the world’s policeman, warning that “wolves like Putin and Xi” will “fill the void and make bad things happen” without American intervention.118 That Brooks has maintained this view for decades, despite the quagmires into which it has drawn the United States, suggests the power of the ideology behind it. As he points out, a recent study estimates that only 9.5 percent of voters are “traditional internationalists” and that young people are the most likely “to want the United States to abstain from intervening in human rights abuses.”119 To Brooks this suggests that young people have “lost faith in human nature and human possibility.” Another interpretation is that those young people have witnessed the foreign policy failures of Brooks’s generation. They have seen the devastating consequences of democratic idealism and witnessed, some firsthand, the creation of new evils following American intervention.
The stark contrast between the violent means and the expected peaceful and democratic end is one of the many paradoxes of democratism. The ostensibly humanitarian mission to help the people of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, to name one telling example, quickly escalated into a full-scale armed intervention and regime-change mission and resulted in a terribly destructive and ongoing civil war. Just months after Gaddafi’s death—an event assumed by liberal internationalists too mark the dawn of a new democratic age in Libya—“the UN came to the conclusion that the human rights situation in Libya was now worse than at any time during Gaddafi’s rule.”120 Many look back at life under Saddam with similar nostalgia.
It is difficult to separate the desire for liberation from the violence it necessitates and the power that would fall into the hands of those in charge of the new regime. Cloaked in a general concern for the benighted peoples of the world, the foreign policy of benevolent global hegemony does not hesitate to use force to try to further its ostensibly humanitarian missions. While military-backed intervention in the name of democracy is a hallmark of neoconservatism, more importantly it is a natural outgrowth of democratism. Unable to conceive of a world in which democracy is not the dominant mode of life, democratists are uncomfortable with the idea of peoples and nations choosing another type of government, upheld by norms that are incompatible with liberal democracy. Democratists are convinced that all peoples of globe must, at least deep down, desire the same type of political and economic system that has taken shape in the United States and in many Western European nations. Blaming corrupt reigning elites rather than deeper cultural or religious beliefs that are fundamentally incompatible with Western-style liberal democracy, democratists believe they have a rather straightforward solution: the removal of those elites who are hampering the natural advance of democracy. Wars of intervention may ebb and flow as the electorate wearies of foreign adventurism, but so long as democratism orients its foreign policy, “humanitarian” intervention will continue to guide the thinking of the decision-makers in Washington, London, and Brussels.