When it comes to war and peace, foreign policy “realists” from Metternich to Kissinger have been seen as cold-blooded, calculating, and amoral. But there's another realist tradition - a distinctively American one - and it's time to revive it.
By Andrew J. Bacevich
The Boston Globe, 06 November 2005
BRENT SCOWCROFT, the ever-loyal and self-effacing national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush, made news late last month in the pages of The New Yorker, venting his profound disenchantment with the foreign policies of his old boss's son, President George W. Bush. In foreign policy parlance, Scowcroft is known as a “realist.” According to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg, author of the Scowcroft profile, realism is “the idea that America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best.”
Goldberg is being kind. The charge commonly lodged against realists like Scowcroft is that they disregard moral issues altogether. As a consequence, realism has long since acquired unsavory connotations, not only among liberals keen to alleviate the world's ills but also among neoconservatives keen to liberate the oppressed. Critics on the left accuse realists of being cramped, callous, and cynical. Those on the right see realism as little more than a pretext for isolationism.
In fact, when it comes to moral issues, realism has gotten a bum rap. As the events of the post-Cold War era have reminded us, idealism-whether the left liberal variant that emphasizes humanitarian interventionism or the neoconservative version that urges using American power to promote American values-provides no escape from the moral pitfalls of statecraft. If anything, it exacerbates them.
Good intentions detached from prudential considerations can easily lead to enormous mischief, both practical and moral. In Somalia, efforts to feed the starving culminated with besieged US forces gunning down women and children. In Kosovo, protecting ethnic Albanians meant collaborating with terrorists and bombing downtown Belgrade. In Iraq, a high-minded crusade to eradicate evil and spread freedom everywhere has yielded torture and prisoner abuse, thousands of noncombatant casualties, and something akin to chaos. Given this do-gooder record of achievement, realism just might deserve a second look.
There is, to be sure, a self-consciously amoral Old World strain of realism, a line running from Metternich to Bismarck in the 19th century and brought to these shores by Henry Kissinger. But there also exists a distinctively American realist tradition that does not disdain moral considerations. This homegrown variant, the handiwork of prominent 20th-century public intellectuals such as the historian Charles Beard, the diplomat George Kennan, the journalist Walter Lippmann, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, provides a basis for seriously engaging the moral issues posed by international politics.
For Americans desirous of extricating the United States from the moral swamp into which the Bush administration has wandered, this largely forgotten American realist tradition that Scowcroft (and others) are trying to resurrect just might provide a useful map.
What's the essence of this tradition? To begin with, realists see politics as a never-ending competition for power. The president of the United States may be the Most Powerful Man in the World, but he can no more change the nature of politics than he can eradicate original sin. As a result, realists view “world peace” as a chimera. Saving the world is God's work. The statesman's obligation is to avoid cataclysm and to place limits on the brutality to which humankind is prone.
Not surprisingly, the realist prizes stability, recognizing that the alternative is likely to be chaos. This does not provide an excuse for inaction and passivity in the face of distant evils. Rather it counsels modesty of purpose and an acute sensitivity to the prospect of unintended consequences. For realists, the notion that globalization (according to Bill Clinton, channeling the neoliberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman) will produce global harmony or that American assertiveness (according to George W. Bush, channeling Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard) will “transform” the Greater Middle East is pure folly. Americans, wrote Niebuhr in his book “The Irony of American History” (1952), fancy themselves to be “tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.” But the human condition does not admit perfection. “We could bring calamity upon ourselves and the world,” he warned, “by forgetting that even the most powerful nations...remain themselves creatures as well as creators of the historical process.”
Realists likewise refuse to don rose-colored glasses when considering the United States itself. As a consequence, they understand that “American exceptionalism” is a snare. Realists reject claims of American innocence-the conviction, as Niebuhr wrote in the same book, that “our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of our actions.”
The United States emerged as the world's sole superpower not due to its superior virtue but because it prevailed in a bloody century-long competition. Among the principal combatants in that contest were three genuinely odious criminal enterprises: the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, and Mao's China. The United States came out on top because it allied itself with Stalin against Hitler and subsequently made common cause with Mao against Stalin's successors. These were not the actions of an innocent nation.
To pretend, as George W. Bush does, that the United States differs from all other powers in history-that it acts apart from calculations of power and self-interest-gives Americans an excuse to avoid thinking seriously about the forces actually motivating US behavior. Realists see that as a particularly dangerous tendency. The role of oil in shaping US policy offers a case in point.
To say that President Bush invaded Iraq for oil is to engage in a vast oversimplification. But absent the widely shared conviction that cheap gas is integral to the American Way of Life, the United States would never have stumbled into the Middle Eastern labyrinth in the first place, with the costs of the ongoing Iraqi quagmire merely representing the latest installment on a bill that will continue to grow. According to realists, a morally serious nation would address the actual as opposed to the imagined sources of our predicament.
Likewise, realists view warily the claims of ideology. In 1952, Niebuhr, archetype of the anticommunist liberal, observed that the Cold War had summoned the United States to confront “evils which were distilled from illusions not generically different from our own.” The illusions to which Niebuhr referred grew out of what he called “dreams of managing history” that flourished on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Senior officials in Washington were no less certain than members of the Soviet Politburo that they had unlocked history's secrets and could both divine and determine its future course.
Niebuhr would no doubt find it ironic that today the United States once again finds itself pitted against an adversary motivated by “illusions not generically different from our own.” Al Qaeda's leaders declare that Allah wills the restoration of the Caliphate and the triumph of Islam everywhere. President Bush declares with equal fervor in his 2002 National Security Strategy that there exists “a single sustainable model for national success” and that the entire world is destined to embrace democratic capitalism.
The point is not to equate the two views, but to note the extraordinary presumption that underlies each. A realist would counsel against being quite so dogmatic in forecasting history's purpose. Just possibly-based on the record of the past couple millennia-surprises lie somewhere ahead. “The paths of progress,” observed Niebuhr, have “proved to be more devious and unpredictable than the putative managers of history could understand.”
Realists in the American tradition are similarly circumspect when it comes to power. On the one hand, they prize it. On the other hand, they view it is a fragile commodity. The prudent statesman deploys power with great care. These realists appreciate that “greatness” is transitory. The history of Europe from 1914 to 1945 testifies to the ease with which a few arrogant and short-sighted statesmen can fritter away advantages accumulated over centuries, with horrific consequences.
Determined to husband power, realists cultivate a lively awareness of what power-especially military power-can and cannot do. They agree with Kennan, principal architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, who wrote in his book “American Diplomacy” (1950), that “there is no more dangerous delusion...than the concept of total victory.” At times, war becomes unavoidable. But realists advocate using force as a last resort-hence, the dismay with which they view the Bush doctrine of preventive war.
To the extent war can be purposeful, realists see its utility as almost entirely negative. War is death and destruction. Politically, it can reduce, quell, eliminate, or intimidate. But to wage war in order to spread democracy, as President Bush says the United States is doing in Iraq, makes about as much sense as starting a forest fire to build a village: It only gets you so far, and the costs tend to be exorbitant.
Costs matter because resources are finite. In the formulation of foreign policy, realists emphasize the importance of “solvency.” Lippmann, who in maturity abandoned the Wilsonian views of his youth to advocate realism, gave particular weight to this theme. This means ensuring that a nation's commitments don't outstrip its resources.
Were he alive today, Lippmann would surely see the present administration as hellbent on bankruptcy. President Bush declared an open-ended war on terror without bothering to mobilize the nation or even to expand the size of the armed forces. Instead, he cut taxes and urged us to take a vacation. The consequence: red ink, growing indebtedness to the rest of the world, a badly overstretched military, and assurances that all will come out well in the end. Realists have their doubts.
When policies go awry-as Mr. Bush's Iraqi adventure surely has-realists resist the tendency to look for scapegoats. In the midst of “Plamegate,” the inclination is to blame the Iraq debacle on White House officials whose alleged lies enabled the president to put one over on an unsuspecting people.
Realists are not so willing to let the citizens of a democracy off the hook. In his “Devil Theory of War,” propounded in the late 1930s, Charles Beard derided the commonly held view attributing the American penchant for war to the machinations of some conspiracy or cabal. “War is not the work of a demon,” wrote Beard. “It is our very own work, for which we prepare, wittingly or not, in ways of peace.”
The Iraq War of 2003 didn't come out of nowhere; it represents the culmination of misguided policies, virtually all of them-including the 1980s “tilt” toward Saddam Hussein-carried out in plain sight of the American public. Blaming everything on Bush won't prevent a recurrence of Bush's mistakes. A realist might suggest that Americans looking for someone to hold accountable begin by looking in the mirror.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and is the author of “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War” (2005)
-------------------------
Citation: Andrew J. Bacevich. "The realist persuasion," The Boston Globe, 06 November 2005.
Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/11/06/the_realist_persuasion/
-------------------------