The 'new conservative realism'?

I have been writing off and on about a sort of "new liberal realism," urging accommodation and containment of dictators, and ultimately saying not only that bringing down Saddam was not worth the price in US blood and treasure, but that Saddam was, on balance, better than Iraq without Saddam. I have not, to say the least, been very happy about this new conventional liberal wisdom, and I've sharply criticized it here and here and here (these are all free downloadable pdfs at SSRN).

But there seems to me emerging among the conservative think tankers and pundits a kind of "new conservative realism" that is different from either Baker-Scowcroft realism or the neo-con "idealism is the new realism" that in part fueled the Iraq war. I am not quite sure of its contours yet, or precisely what I think about it, in fact. But it seems to be partly captured by this op ed in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer, here, Friday, November 16, 2007. Excerpts:

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[T]he strength of alliances is heavily dependent on the objective balance of international forces, and has very little to do with the syntax of the U.S. president or the disdain in which he might be held by a country's cultural elites.

It's classic balance-of-power theory: Weaker nations turn to the great outside power to help them balance a rising regional threat. Allies are not sentimental about their associations. It is not a matter of affection, but of need -- and of the great power's ability to deliver.

What's changed in the last year? Bush's dress and diction remain the same. But he did change generals -- and counterinsurgency strategy -- in Iraq. As a result, Iraq has gone from an apparently lost cause to a winnable one.

The rise of external threats to our allies has concentrated their minds on the need for the American connection. The revival of American fortunes in Iraq -- and the diminished prospect of an American rout -- have significantly increased the value of such a connection. This is particularly true among our moderate Arab allies who see us as their ultimate protection against an Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis that openly threatens them all.

It's always uncomfortable for a small power to rely on a hegemon. But a hegemon on the run is even worse. Alliances are always shifting. But one thing we can say with certainty: The event that will have more effect than any other on the strength of our alliances worldwide is not another Karen Hughes outreach to the Muslim world, not an ostentatious embrace of Kyoto, or even the most abject embrace of internationalism from the podium of the UN. It is success or failure in Iraq.

US policy toward Pakistan-in-turmoil: Steyn & the WSJ

Like everyone else, I've been trying to sort out the best approach for US policy toward Pakistan. The two most useful takes - I am not saying I agree 100%, still talking with people, reading and thinking about it, as unfortunately I have been for years now - are Saturday, November 10, 2007 WSJ editorial, here (open link for the moment), and Mark Steyn's syndicated column from Saturday, November 10, 2007, here, in the OC Register.

Excerpts from Steyn:

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Everyone's an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: Gen. Musharraf should do this; he shouldn't have done that; the State Department should lean on him to do the other.

"It is time for him to go," pronounced Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach. Every foreign policy genius has his Hollywood pitch ready: "If we're not careful, we're going to see the same thing happen that happened in Iran," warned Dan Burton, R-Ind. Pakistan 2007 is a remake of Persia 1979 with the general as the shah, etc.

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.

Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that's because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you're either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he's rode a difficult tightrope with some skill.

As John Negroponte, U.S. deputy secretary of state, put it, aside from America "no country has done more in terms of inflicting damage and punishment on the Taliban and al-Qaida since 9/11" – which, given the proportion of the population that loathes America and actively supports the Taliban and al-Qaida, is not unimpressive.

Nevertheless, in Washington and the media, the assumption is that the wheel has now come off Musharraf's highwire act. Time for Pakistan to go back to democratically elected unicyclists, like the charming and glamorous Benazir Bhutto, who plays note-perfect in the salons of the West but degenerates into just another third-rate hack from one of the world's most corrupt political classes once she's back greasing the wheel in Pakistan itself.

Furthermore, confident believers in the usual dreary pendulum of Pakistani politics – corrupt democrats, followed by authoritarian generals, followed by corrupt democrats – overlook how profoundly the country's changed. Its political dynamic has a new player: Islamism. Miss Bhutto says, oh, don't worry about that, it's a lot of hooey cooked up by Musharraf to persuade Washington to prop him up for another half-decade.

Really?

Pakistan is both a nuclear power and a nation that cannot enforce sovereignty over significant chunks of its territory. Large tracts are run by the Taliban. The organization responsible for perpetrating the bloodiest assault ever on the U.S. mainland is holed up there and all but untouchable. The air routes between Karachi and Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are the vital conduit between the jihad's ideological redoubts and the wider world.

What do the perpetrators of the Daniel Pearl beheading and the London Tube bombing and the thwarted martyrs of innumerable other plots all have in common? Pakistan.

Fritz Gelowicz, arrested a few weeks ago in Europe, is an ethnic German who converted to Islam and graduated from a Pakistani terrorist camp. Unlike Britain and Canada, Germany has no longer-standing imperial ties with Pakistan, yet a ramshackle economically inconsequential basket-case of a state now has ideological converts in almost every corner of the world.

Mohammed Umer Farooq is a conventional first-generation moderate immigrant to the West who serves happily as pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base in Alberta. By contrast, his daughter Nada Farooq says she "hates Canada" and was involved in a plot to behead the prime minister. In North America, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia and Pakistan itself, elderly grandparents who practice the Indian subcontinent's traditional Sufi Islam have seen their grandchildren embrace hard-line Deobandi Islam, essentially a local variant of Wahhabism … and then sell its virtues to pasty-faced white blokes with names like Fritz.

The Bhuttos and the Sharifs, their sometime rivals, sometime allies of convenience, couldn't run the country competently before it got hollowed out by the radicals. But the experts assure us they're now the answer to the woes of a nuclear powder keg.

Pakistan is not Persia. For one thing, it's a country only 60 years old whose slapdash creation was one of the worst disasters of British imperial policy. Yet even those who thought so at the time would be astonished to find that, a mere couple of generations later, a regional afterthought is not only a nuclear power that has dispersed its technology around the planet but also a driving force of the world's first global insurgency. If Gen. Musharraf is shooting without a script, what would you do if stuck in a toxic soap opera where the incoherent plot twists pile up with every passing decade?

It may well be that a Bhutto restoration will be the happy ending that foreign-policy "realists" predict. But it's more likely that a return to traditional levels of democratic corruption will cramp the economic interests of much of the military and lead key factions to make common cause with the Islamists – as Pakistan's intelligence service did with the Taliban. I don't know for sure, and nor does anyone else. But sometimes it helps to bet on form. And, given the past 60 years, the real question is how bad things will be after Musharraf. This thing can't be scripted, in Washington or anywhere else.

Lee Feinstein joins Clinton campaign

Lee Feinstein, who for the past five years has been at the Council on Foreign Relations and where he has done splendid work on such issues as the responsibility to protect and Darfur, has announced that he is leaving CFR to take up a position with the Hillary Clinton campaign as director for foreign policy and national security. (Lee had been with the Clinton administration in several senior foreign policy positions.)

My congratulations to Lee - who is a friend and someone I enormously respect and admire - and even more my congratulations to the Clinton campaign, for having the good judgment and sense to bring on someone as terrific as Lee.

Look - the fact is, I am, even now, a Bush administration supporter and, although nominally independent, will almost certainly support a Republican in the next election. But it is a very great comfort to me - and should be to Republicans overall - that the Clinton campaign would choose someone like Lee Feinstein for so crucial a position. And that, if Clinton wins, he will be likely to occupy a high post.

There are many policy issues on which we don't agree, and even some basic premises about foreign policy on which we differ. But Lee is someone of great personal integrity, sound and mature practical judgment, and he occupies that broad center, whether Republican or Democrat, that this country ultimately depends on over the long term, whether it swings center right or center left. It shows great maturity on the part of the Clinton campaign to bring on board a Lee Feinstein, and in a country in which alternation of power between parties is a long term good thing, Lee is a Democrat, yes, committed to his party and his candidate, yes, but also part of the Vital Center that the United States, like every mature democracy, depends upon in the long haul.

This is outstanding news.

My new Fordham International Law Journal speech-essay, US Counterterrorism Policy and Superpower Compliance with International Human Rights Norms

My speech/essay, US Counterterrorism Policy and Superpower Compliance With International Human Rights Norms, has just appeared in 30 Fordham International Law Journal 455 (February 2007).

I have posted a copy to SSRN, and it can be downloaded (free), here.

The piece has some copyediting mistakes in it - most significant is where William Wilberforce appears instead as Wilbur Luce, ouch! and Ben Wittes' name is misspelled, ouch ouch! - but those problems are my doing, not the journal editors, as I was unconscionably late getting them final handmarked changes and there was not time for me to review final proofs. It is a speech and deliberately left as a speech in essay format, not reworked as an article, so it is quite informal and perhaps quite unjustifiably provocative. It is also sweeping in its scope - I wanted to take in the big picture, the grand picture in a short space.

Earlier I posted some lengthy excerpts from the piece below as blog entries. I'm now deleting those entries, as they are distractingly long, and anyone who wants to read it can download the pdf from SSRN at the link above.

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One short note about what is in this speech-essay. I call for Guantanamo to be closed in this piece. But I make it conditional on very specific and frankly unlikely events - viz., the legislative creation of a special counterterrorism/national security system that, while 'civilianized', does not put everyone into the regular US court system. We need a system of civilian administrative detention with processes for regular review, and we need a system for trying terrorist offenses, narrowly defined as a matter of substance and not applicable outside of terrorism thus narrowly defined (ie, no using the Patriot Act to prosecute (unrelated crimes of, say) child pornography - but which has its own set of more permissive procedural and evidentiary rules. If you can get that, then moving away from the miltiary tribunal system, closing Guantanamo and moving those not released to the US, etc., makes good sense. If not, well, then not.

People need to be clear that not everyone at Guantanamo - even beyond the undisputed "high value detainees" - is merely the innocent shepherd sold by the Northern Alliance. Hamdan was not, on his own admissions. Guantanamo contains people who were detained for regular war crimes on ordinary Afghan battlefields - including the murder of US military personnel - under circumstances which have always warranted military justice. Pure political expediency, not justice, argues for letting them go - and moreover, we already know that released detainees have returned to the battlefield, and more would do so if released - the people they will kill, however, are more likely to be Afghans, or people in Asia, than Americans.

Looking to the future, merely closing Guantanamo does not change the fact that we will pick up people whom we will want to detain for potentially years and yet will not be able to try in a regular court under regular domestic court rules. Either we find conditions of administrative detention, or ... well, what? We might find that we have thereby created an incentive not to detain, but instead to engage in assassination. Or we might look to sponsor proxy forces - eg Ethiopia in Somalia - somewhat in the way that Reagan policy used proxies and surrogates in Central America. Or we might rely on the French and Spaniards and other European countries and the fact that, despite the Western European human rights protection, structurally Continental legal systems provide nowhere near the legal protections of the US constitution in criminal investigation and prosecution, as a structural feature of an inquisitorial, rather than adversarial, system. Or perhaps we simply won't do much of anything at all - caught in stasis between clashes of different policies and different legal standards and different decisionmakers, frozen and immobile - the disaggregated state unable to be proactive in the protection of its citizenry - and so make a very different kind of bet about our safety.

It is easy for the Democrats and Congress to pretend that it is all otherwise and that we can just go back to Sept 10 criminal law paradigms, with some modest increases in homeland security, with targets that won't complain about discrimination - inanimate cargo containers, for example. Possibly the Democratic party would even enact that preference if in charge of the presidency and Congress. But I doubt it. We live at this moment in a period of Republican-facilitated Democratic kibbbutzing - facilitated and enabled by the Cheney policy of pure executive power - sniping without having to take proactive responsibilty and ownership of what protecting against terrorist attacks should mean as a going-forward policy of the United States. That condition is unlikely to last forever and, at the end of the day (if for no other reason than the fact of a new attack), the electorate will know where their leaders stand on counterterrorism and the legal regime shaping it, the necessary and inevitable tradeoffs between security and liberties that define counterterrorism in a liberal democracy.

So by all means let us avoid a police state - although what numbers of my colleagues in the legal academy seem to regard as the police state we supposedly already have seems to me a dangerous case of boy-crying-wolf - but let us also strive to avoid piles of body parts in American cities. The truism that there are necessarily trade-offs between these two is increasingly something denied by a significant part of elite opinion. The academics act as the high-intellectual end of a narrative that an increasing part of the electorate is eager to hear and absorb - there is no real terrorism danger, it stems from our own policies and attitudes, the problem is not terrorism but the invasion of civil liberties, talking about terrorism is simply a way of justifying the police state. Terrorism is not therefore the issue; counterterrorism is. 'They' are not the issue, 'we' are - and ignoring 'them' and focusing on 'us' promises a way back to the blessed land of nostalgia, a way of going back to live in the time of lovely ignorance, otherwise known as September 10, the quiet life, the morally unstrenous time of Before-Bush.

The intellectuals' attitude is not explainable, it seems to me, except on the assumption - which I wearily hear repeated without dissent at many, many academic conferences - that really there is no terrorism problem, except the one that the Bush administration created by invading Iraq or - the more intellectually grand alternative - the one that the West created for itself by being so intolerant of Muslims and Islam and, of course, Israel. But anyway, on either narrative, the problem turns out miraculously not to be terrorism, but instead our own viciously overreactive counterterrorism, which simultaneously creates a police state and promotes a cycle of Muslim radicalization.

Terrorism, on this account, is merely a second order problem. But it's not.

Despue de los neocons - my Fukuyama TLS essay in the June 2007 Madrid Revista de Libros

(Por si acaso alguien se interese en una traduccion de mi ensayo sobre el libro Despues de los neocons por Francis Fukuyama. El ensayo aparecio originalmente en el TLS, y esta traduccion en la Revista de Libros de Madrid, No 126, Junio 2007. Es una traduccion magnifica por Luis Gago de la Revista de Libros.)

(At SSRN, here.)

Eric Posner in WSJ on future of the international human rights movement

Eric Posner, law professor at the University of Chicago, has an important essay in today's Wall Street Journal, Weekend Journal, Saturday-Sunday, April 21, 2007, "What the Cold War Taught Us," behind the subscriber wall, here. UPDATE - open link here at the WSJ. It is not likely to make him any more popular - any less unpopular? - with the human rights movement, among the activists or in academia.

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My own view of the human rights movement is simultaneously sympathetic but skeptical - my skepticism is that of an idealist, however, not Eric's fundamentally realist position. (I discuss this in an academic review of Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner, The Limits of International Law, here, at SSRN.)

The substance of international human rights depends, and has always depended, upon the support of democratic sovereign states acting in favor of their values, not upon international law regimes. The greatest risk to the substance of international human rights lies in weakening democratic sovereignty in favor of a liberal internationalism that says, over and over and over and over again, all the right things about human rights but then suffers entirely predictable defections in its defective collective action scheme when push comes to shove - over and over and over and over again.

The international human rights movement, however, has an atavistic attachment to the "international" for its own sake, because its ideology and politics and class biases lead it to confuse the "international" with the "universal." (I discuss this idea in an article with David Rieff expressing skepticism about global civil society, at SSRN, here.) It therefore leans procedurally toward ineffectual liberal internationalism, whereas the substantive victories of international human rights - in history as well as today - largely lie in the realm of democratic sovereigns enforcing values that are found among their electorates, or at least their governing elites, from the anti-slavery movements to today's anti-human trafficking campaigns.

I would add, however, that the choice between universal human rights values and democracy (which, as Eric points out, carries with it the possibility that voters will choose all sorts of illiberal things) has long since been made by the human rights movement. It has always had a distinct hostility toward popular democracy. This is partly because of the problem Eric raises - that democratic majorities frequently want illiberal things. But it is also because democracy and democratic sovereignty challenge the hegemony of human rights elites and their writ to determine the content and canon of what Eric aptly calls the "expanding franchise" of "international human rights."

One of the ironies of the Iraq war and the collapse of the American neoconservative democracy project is that the elite form of human rights universalism appears at least for the moment, in a certain way, to be the last man standing, considered as the idealist universalist position for liberals. By that I mean that the democracy project has been dealt a possibly fatal ideological blow by the problems of the Iraq war - even it were somehow still to be won, as I hope remains the case, it is nonetheless long since past the point of doing so on the basis of the universal appeal of democracy-post-tyrant. (I discuss this and most of the points below at greater length in a new essay titled, Goodbye to All That: A Requiem for Neoconservatism, at SSRN, here.) If that turns out to be the case, then the universalist alternative, the liberal Enlightenment alternative writ large for the planet, would no longer be liberal democracy as universal ideal. But Eric is in any case right to note that this democracy ideal exists in no small tension with elitist globalist conceptions of human rights as given by, most notably, Human Rights Watch (which, it must be said, operates within the human rights movement as something of a combination of the Vatican and MI6).

Rather, as a worldwide project, democracy appears to be for many people, many places, today an illiberal project, mostly an illiberal Islamist one, but also illiberal in other ways, other places, such as Chavez's Venezuela or Putin's Russia. The extreme remains the Algerian Islamist slogan of "one person, one vote - one time," but the underlying sentiment is echoed in slightly less stringent, but no less illiberal, terms many other places around the globe. It is not necessarily to undermine liberal democracy where it has long existed - still, the global, universal project of liberal democracy has been severely undermined by Iraq. It is scarcely surprising that the international human rights community would see itself, if not precisely the winner, then at least the last man standing in the competition to be the source and arbiter of universal values. Ostensibly its argument is against illiberal populism expressed as democracy; in fact its aim is far more sweeping, against democratic sovereignty as such.

But the arguments against illiberal democracy are one thing; the more sweeping indictment of democratic sovereignty quite another, and this far more sweeping indictment requires a much more convincing argument. And that is to leave aside the endlessly irritating elitism and condescension of the human rights movement toward that which, as remarked above, actually provides the enforcement of human rights such as it is - democratic sovereign states. It alternates between the stentorian tones of God Addressing Eternity and the frantic, hysterical appeals for money (although, of course, most movements of moral reform do something similar).

But there is an even more fundamental and certainly more recent problem - more fundamental, even, than the ill-conceived attack on democratic sovereignty. It is a problem derived from the profoundly mistaken conclusions that the human rights movement drew from 9-11. The human rights movement itself seems gradually to being moving away from human rights as a liberal ideal. It is shifting instead, seemingly, toward the radically different ideal and sensibility of human rights as a discourse for the claims of multiculturalism or, more precisely, the "one-way" multiculturalism that characterizes the West's dealings with Muslims today - the discourse of rights in a fashion that provides endless special privileges and rights to Muslims in Western countries upon demand, as it were, but with no liberal, neutral, secular, rule of law content, and no reciprocal acceptance of the duties of a liberal, neutral, secular or even pluralistic state. This is a very, very bad idea.

Consider, for example, how HRW characterizes pretty much any clash between Muslims in Western countries and the state or others in the society. Even when it involves violence against, for example, gay men walking hand in hand in Amsterdam, beat up by Muslim youth in what, on any neutral reading of the law, is a hate crime (this incident from a couple of years back), HRW feels multiculturally obliged to begin with a stern lecture on how such incidents can only be understood against the backdrop of discrimination against Muslims in Europe. This same pattern is repeated in its dealing with the Muhammad cartoons - and so much so with, so far as I can tell, any similar issue that it appears to be a template drafted for all occasions. The result, however, is an illiberal, one-way multicultural ratchet that effectively lets Muslims off the hook for illiberal behavior. The opening context for all such behavior, including serious violence, is always the multiculturalist setting - excuse, really - of discrimination, putting the burden for such violence back onto larger society, and always beginning with what amounts to an apology and not a condemnation.

In that sense, the discourse of human rights seems to be shifting from being a liberal discourse - with all the contradictions that implies - to being a multicultural, essentially illiberal one. It spills beyond the human rights canon, in fact, so that what is today still called, somewhat misleadingly, liberal internationalism, might better be called "multicultural internationalism." This is a profoundly disturbing trend, because while it appropriates the language of rights, it does so in a profoundly illiberal manner. This is one of the dangerous consequences of allowing the supposedly universalist language of human rights to be defined fundamentally by global elites. It is, indeed, not simply that the doctrines of multiculturalism are wrong - they are - but that by being expressed in the language of rights, by appropriating the historical language of bourgeois liberal rights to historically and conceptually quite unrelated ends, they crowd out and undermine the ability to use rights discourse in a liberal way. (I discuss this problem, with respect to a conception closely related to and intertwined with illiberal multiculturalism, the discourse of therapy, in a long review essay back in 1995, "A New Class of Lawyers: The Therapeutic as Rights Talk," at SSRN, here.)

The end of the adventure is not precisely the end of rights talk - far from it - but the end of the ability to use rights talk in its historical function as the language of liberalism - the language of liberty, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, etc. The human rights movement, in its shift to multiculturalism, heedlessly - heroically, of course, in its mind - saws off the liberal branch upon which it and we are seated, hollows out a discourse that was centuries in developing as a language of human liberation and freedom and, with the insouciance of those who mistakenly believe that a language they are privileged to use is a language they own, injects it with content alien to it, and tells the rest of the world that it now means this. It doesn't.

(But this critique is very different from Eric's. Note also, however, Eric's strong conclusion, which shifts to an argument about the preservation of larger universal values through an unapologetic realism - this is the lesson he draws out of the Cold War.)

Here's a taste of the article:

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The international human rights regime has fallen on hard times. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote recently that "since the U.S. can't provide credible leadership on human rights, European countries must pick up the slack." But the Europeans, Mr. Roth notes, are no more enthusiastic about pressuring foreign countries than is the U.S.

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So if Americans, Europeans, and the U.N. will not lead on human rights, who will? Nobody, and maybe that is not such a bad thing.

Human rights were supposed to be special. Unlike most international law, which governs the relations of states with each other, international human rights law regulates the internal workings of states -- the relationship between a government and its citizens. This gives human rights law a rigidity that is absent from most international law.

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The theory is that human rights are universal, and so states have no excuse for committing human rights abuses. The practice, however, has been different. States must worry about their security even when an existential threat is not imminent. If they do not, they lose the support of their citizens or subjects, and thus they risk their own political stability. And states must cater to local religious and cultural values at odds with Western human rights. Accordingly, most states have paid no more than lip service to their human rights commitments. During the Cold War, the U.S. used human rights as a cudgel against the Soviet Union and its satellites, but gave a free pass to friendly dictators.

The end of the Cold War was supposed to change all this. Under American leadership, countries would finally live up to their human rights commitments and international human rights would continue to advance. Several forces have conspired to ruin this pretty picture.

First, genuine disagreement exists about the proper moral ordering of society. Where once it could be thought that totalitarian regimes suppressed people's natural instinct in favor of human rights, it has become clear as electoral democracies have replaced authoritarian regimes, that this is simply not true. People also care about tribal, ethnic, and religious ties; they care about order and security. An Islamic democracy will not necessarily endorse religious pluralism or women's rights; a country with a long history of tribal dispute resolution practices will reject Western-style law enforcement.

The tension between promoting democracy and promoting human rights, when newly enfranchised peoples turn out not to subscribe to the ideals of the Enlightenment, is the dirty secret of the human rights movement. As the expanding franchise continues to expose the fissure between the two ideals, human rights advocates are finally going to have to choose between them.

Second, the idea that the U.S., with or without European support, could impose its conception of human rights on other countries has taken a beating in recent years, and this beating will only become worse over the next few decades. As regional powers like China, Russia, India, South Africa and Brazil continue to rise and assert themselves, whatever leverage the West has had for pressuring human rights violators will continue to decline. The new powers will offer alternative cultural, religious, or ideological standards that are more attractive than Western human rights to subsets of nations, and they will offer trade and securities ties if the West tries to withdraw them. Already we observe China snapping up oil leases in Sudan and Russia exploiting its economic ties with Iran.

Third, the ideology of human rights advancement relies on a false picture of human motivation and global politics. Human rights advocates seem to think that closing Guantanamo Bay would improve the behavior of governments in other countries. But foreign governments have no reason to think that they should do whatever the U.S. does. Indeed, if the U.S. closed Guantanamo Bay, and some of the freed detainees returned to Afghanistan (as some reportedly have) and killed American troops, the lesson learned by the world is not one that would advance the cause of human rights.

Today, the future of the international human rights legal regime is bleak. And yet if what matters is not conformity with the rules of the human rights treaties, but the well-being of the world's population, things have never been better. Mortality rates are down, per capita income is up, literacy has spread, democracy is flourishing. Economic growth in China and India, which together account for a third of the world's population, largely accounts for improvement in overall well-being, but there is also good news in Latin America, South Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

How can this be? As technology and trade have advanced and spread, so has wealth and education, and with wealth and education has come political reform, and the expansion of civil and political rights. This is part of a long-term trend that goes back centuries.

There is no guarantee that it will continue, but one central fact needs to be recognized: The role of legalized international human rights in this process has been minimal or nil. Much more important in the 20th century were the determined efforts of liberal democracies to oppose powerful, dangerous, expansionist states that rejected markets and democracy, and imposed their views on small countries. These efforts required pragmatic accommodation of unsavory allies, and even compromising of Western values, for the sake of the greater goal of keeping dangerous forces in check. For the conflict with radical Islam, this history holds important lessons.

Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism: Post comments here

If anyone would like to post comments about my Requiem for Neoconservatism review of Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons and Peter Beinart's The Good Fight, this is the place for them. I have no idea if anyone actually is interested, but anyway here is the place. Ones that I find especially interesting will be pulled up into the body of the post. I may also post a couple of excerpts from the article below.

Thanks Legal Theory Blog for mentioning my Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism

When the brilliant and erudite jurisprudentialist Larry Solum posts my SSRN abstract on the Legal Theory Blog, gives it his highly coveted "highly recommended" rating, and tells the world that I am a "creative and deeply interesting thinker," well, who am I to disagree? Larry, who is an old and dear friend and must be forgiven some creative liberties in that post, is referencing my newly published Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism. It just appeared in 22 American University International Law Review, No. 2, at 277 (March 2007). Available at SSRN, free download, here. (The earlier working paper is also up on SSRN, this one, with the American University vol. 22 reference, is the one you want, the final version.)

The piece is a long review essay on Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons and Peter Beinart's The Good Fight but, as with most of my long review essays, it is mostly me on neoconservatism with a large discussion of multiculturalism, and a sharp attack by me on what I call the "new liberal realism." Fukuyama's book is a powerful one, and will likely be around for quite a while as the defining intellectual statement on neoconservatism. Beinart's book troubled me a great deal - it has a very powerful positive point wrapped up in a rant that seems mostly designed to reassure Beinart's liberal readers that he really is one of them. I will post a couple of bits from the essay up here, and if I can figure out how to do it, set up a space on this blog on the offchance that anyone wants to comment on the essay or the books reviewed.

The AUILR review is an expanded version of an essay just on the Fukuyama book in the September 20, 2006 Times Literary Supplement, downloadable at SSRN, here.

(Update, March 19, 2007. And thanks Instapundit for the Instalanche of the paper on SSRN! thank you Glenn Reynolds!)

Jacob Weisberg on neocons and Cheney in the Financial Times

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, has this piece in the March 14, 2007 Financial Times, "Are Neocons History?" - on neoconservativism and Dick Cheney. In it he recounts attending the annual dinner at the American Enterprise Institute last week:

The term “neo-conservative” has many usages, including “former liberal” and “Jewish conservative”. In recent years, however, it has taken on clearer definition as a philosophy of aggressive unilateralism and the attempt to impose democratic ideas on the Arab world. The neo-conservatives also constitute a distinct group around George W. Bush, the US president. They pushed for the invasion of Iraq and remain identified with hardline positions on Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Outside the administration, the chief fulcrum of neo-conservatism is the American Enterprise Institute. The day after vice-president Dick Cheney’s former aide Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury, AEI held its annual black-tie gala. I did not go expecting contrition, but under the circumstances it seemed possible that self-examination might feature on the menu. Once a lazy pasture for moderate Republicans hurtled into the private sector by Gerald Ford’s 1976 defeat, AEI has turned in recent years into a kind of Cheney family think-tank. It had not been a good week, year, or second term for any of these people and I thought a few cocktails might cause them to consider their predicament. ***

But whether or not the neo-cons are prepared to face it, there are increasing signs that their moment is finally over. At the Defence department, Donald Rumsfeld has been replaced by Robert Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and an affiliate of the realist school associated with the previous President Bush. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect who wanted to build a new Middle East on Saddam’s rubble, has been moved to the World Bank, where he observes a Robert McNamara-like silence on the failure of his war. Another former Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, is under investigation for misrepresenting intelligence data to make the case for the invasion.

At the State department, Condoleezza Rice is returning to her realist roots and now actually seems to direct policy. She has embraced shuttle diplomacy in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, is considering conversation with Syria and Iran and even made a nuclear deal with North Korea. These steps signify a broader shift away from what the neo-con defector Francis Fukuyama calls “hard Wilsonian” ideas and back towards the less principled, more effective pragmatism of Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser, and James Baker, former secretary of state.

The most important sign of all is the fading influence of Mr Cheney, who for six years dominated foreign policy in a way no previous vice-president ever has. Mr Cheney is discredited, unwell and facing various congressional investigations.

I don't question that neoconservativism is dead, and indeed wrote exactly that in a review of Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons, free download, here. And just today, I received the reprints of a much longer version of the same general thesis, in a long review essay of Fukuyama's book together with Peter Beinart's The Good Fight, in the American University International Law Review, downloadable free in final form, here. (The working paper form is also still up on SSRN, but you want the final form with the American University Vol. 22 citation - accept no substitutes!) I'll write more about the long AUILR piece later; for a while I didn't think I liked it, but I've changed my mind and like it quite a lot.

That said, I don't think Weisberg gets Cheney right in representing him as a neocon. Neocons are a certain species of foreign policy idealist. But Dick Cheney has never been an idealist or a neocon in foreign policy, so far as I can tell. He has always been a realist, always concerned about power. There were people - Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, among others, who really saw the issue as democracy. Not Cheney. Cheney is not precisely a classical American realist, either, in the school of Baker and Scowcroft - two realists whose policies of accommodation to dictators under earlier administrations including Bush pere, the neocons were right to say, are part of what got us to 9-11, despite the disaster in Iraq and despite the current liberal swoon for nasty realism of the kind that they used to disdain on grounds of higher Wilsonianism. Cheney, like Rumsfeld, is closer to what Fukuyama (drawing on Walter Russell Meade) calls a "Jacksonian nationalist" - sort of a realist, tending to a "narrow, security related view of American national interests [and] distrust of multilateralism." (Fukuyama, After the Neocons, at 7).

The traditional realists - the Bakers, Scowcrofts - did not buy into the neocon project of the Iraq war, believing instead in accommodation and containment. But the Jacksonian nationalists did - believing not in the democracy project but in the security risks posed by a dictator who, they were convinced - on the very good grounds that everyone else was, too - that Saddam had WMD, and at some point might well be inclined to pass it along to terrorists. No doubt it also had to do with a very Jacksonian nationalist calculation that it was probably the only moment in which the US would muster the will to go to war and ignore the rest of world - the moment would only come once, and they took it. But although they linked arms and joined forces with the neocons, the Jacksonian nationalists were never idealists, and their rationales for the Iraq war had very little to do with democracy and all that - it was a security calculation about, really, the limits of realist containment and accommodation or, in other words, an argument between themselves and, not the neocon idealists, but the traditional realists.

Against the 'new liberal realism'

Here's what I had to say about the "new liberal realism" in a few first draft paragraphs drawn from part of my NYU talk transformed into something headed for Fordham International Law Journal. It's all first draft stuff, but anyway:

When one looks inside US politics, across the spectrum of mainstream politics over time, that politics is characterized by a shared sense of treating the international system, the UN, and international norms in highly pragmatic ways – a sense of pragmatism far more broadly shared than the bitter arguments required by today’s theatre of partisanship might superficially suggest. The differences are not entirely rhetorical – an administration of Clinton or Obama would behave with respect to the international system, and particularly the UN and its norm system, differently in some respects from an administration of McCain or Giuliani. But it is easy – and tempting, for many, wanting to read preferences into description – on the basis of heated rhetoric, to overstate the substantive differences. The mainstream center of US politics does not fetishize the UN or international law or the international system.

Let me try to put this point about shared, rather than battling, views of the international system and international law within the US political mainstream in a quite different way. Neoconservatism is currently the intellectual whipping boy for all that has gone wrong, or apparently gone wrong, in American foreign policy. Everyone seems to be dreaming up new alternatives, at least in Washington, in universities and think tanks and policy centers. For the moment, at least, everyone seems to agree that (conservative) idealism is the problem and we are all, conservatives and liberals, but particularly liberals, seeking to distinguish themselves from neo-conservatism, going to be realists for a good while, just as we should have remained realists after 9-11, particularly about Iraq. We should have accommodated to Saddam and his sons; we should have sought containment instead of removal. Indeed, containment and accommodation and the return to an entirely instrumental balance of power politics that disregards the nature of the regime and its rulers appears to be the new order of the day with pretty much every bad regime; the only regime, apparently, that can’t be accommodated in what we might call the new liberal realism is the Bush administration. One can represent that attitude as merely a realist bow to the fact that in Iraq the US has had its nose rubbed in the fact of what military action alone can get you and what it can’t in the way of cultural change; still, the new liberal realism seems to me to represent a more profound disillusionment than that, more than just a disillusionment with military solutions to problems, but a disillusionment with muscular idealism as such.

By ‘muscular idealism’, I mean a very particular and unattractive feature of the new liberal realism. It is realism insisted upon with respect to actions by the United States as a democratic sovereign state. What, after all, was the idealism of the Bush doctrine? It was the Bush fils repudiation of the Bush pere balance of power realism among authoritarian, corrupt, and murderous dictators in the Middle East, on the grounds that this ‘realism’ was a core part of what set the terms for 9-11. That idealism is shoved aside in the new liberal realism. We are offered instead the canonization of James “No Dog in this Fight” Baker by – God help us all – American liberals. But although the United States is now supposed to be governed by the hard requirements of realism, the new liberal realists nonetheless want to have their cake and eat it, too – they want to claim not to have lost their idealism. But their idealism is now located in the place least likely to bear any idealist fruit – the proven ineffectuality of the international system. Assert one’s idealism through the UN and our allies – well, that’s easy, it is unlikely to be tested in action, because it so rarely gets that far. Impeccably credentialed idealism, the idealism of the international system – and a practical guarantee of ineffectiveness. Meanwhile, the idealism of democratic sovereigns – which, in muscle, means the United States – is henceforth governed by the propositions of realism. This gets it exactly backwards – but in a way that allows the new liberal realists to claim, fantastically, both labels at the same time. Among realists, Rieff, however, stands alone because he does not demand to have it both ways. He is one of the very few – if not the only one – who has honestly acknowledged that he has, in fact, changed his mind. Should not the new liberal realists, if they are as honest as Rieff, do the same? Not want to have it both ways?

The new liberal realism, let’s be clear, is profoundly unattractive – as though liberal idealists, long constrained by their moral Calvinism to worship at the altar of severe Wilsonan idealism, were suddenly freed, through the failure of conservative idealism, the failure of neoconservatism, 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 – who? – oh, say, Michael Ignatieff, Kenneth Roth, Samantha Power, Geoffrey Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Louise Arbour – 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 goddam moment to the glory of Moral Ends and Human Rights Universalism, and freed to maintain the necessity of ‘our sonofabitch’.

I also do not think the Carnival will last. Liberals and Democrats in the United States will sober up and rediscover – the sooner the better, to my mind – that they are committed long term to certain values that will require means actually, and not merely rhetorically, adequate to pursue them. The means of that idealism will have to be something more effective than the “international system,” and the objects of that idealism – its targets – will have to be more than simply going after the Bush administration which, in any case, will not be around that much longer. But essential to understanding the long term center of American foreign policy is understanding how much of neoconservatism is, in other language and other forms, part of that long term center, part of the ideals even liberals espouse, or will again one of these days. Walk through Francis Fukuyama’s After the Neocons; it offers a useful critical guide to the underlying propositions of neo-conservatism, and what you will find is that most – not all, but most – of them will show up again in idealisms of both right and left in America, even if under other names, because there is an irreducible idealist strain in American foreign policy that will not go away.[1]

The point is this. America’s superpower status is irretrievably bound up in its own mind, in its political center, in its mainstream politics both Democratic and Republican, with the moral legitimacy of that power. One may scoff at that, shudder even, think it supremely hypocritical, accept it as the fact of power without legitimacy, regard it as an exercise in gross wickedness, etc. – but it would be a profound mistake to imagine that a change of administration in the United States will deeply alter that internal perception. Superpower emphasizes “power”; American politics, by contrast, even with the bitter debates over the morality of American actions in the world from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, emphasizes its legitimacy. A new Democratic administration is unlikely to draw from the experience post 9-11 that America is a superpower by reason of power alone, but instead the quite different lesson that it has to clean up the moral mess of the Bush administration in order to continue what it, along with the American ‘vital center’, has long seen as the legitimate international moral order – a flexible, pragmatic international system that consists of a sometimes messy, sometimes inconsistent, conjoined US-international system. In the collective mind of that American vital center, the international community, the UN, international law are not – as they are for some on the American right – irrelevant, just as they are not – as they are for some on the American left – overriding. It is a messily conjoined system.

Notes:

[1] Frances Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (Yale 2006). I highly recommend the book – I’ve written two reviews of it, and as time goes by, I’ve decided that those reviews are actually too harsh. It is a very insightful book, not just for its dissection of neoconservatism, but for its attempt to sketch a future foreign policy. For the short review, see “Doomed Internationalist,” Times Literary Supplement (London), September 20, 2006, available at SSRN, here, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=940309. The long version, with a lengthy discussion of multiculturalism and terrorism, and also a much more developed discussion of the ‘new liberal realism’, appears as “Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neo-conservatism,” American University International Law Review, Vol. 22, February 2007, available at SSRN, here, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=922344.

Thanks to the NYU International Human Rights Colloquium

Professor Philip Alston, a leading worldwide academic on human rights and professor at NYU law school, invited me up to the International Human Rights Colloquim at NYU last week to address the question of the superpower's compliance with international human rights norms. My thanks to Philip and to the students in the Colloquium and to NYU law school - it was a lovely experience in every way. The students, while understandably skeptical of the positions I took, without exception went out of their way to be generous in absorbing my arguments, while not hestating stronlgy to express their own views. I appreciated greatly the intellectual vigor they put into the process, the preparation they put into reading my memo - especially since it arrived barely in time for the session itself and was very much a first draft - and particularly the care they took in listening to views that in large part differed from their own. That kind of fairmindedness is rare in today's bitterly partisan environment and, believe me, it gets noticed. I also greatly appreciated Philip's introduction, because it, too, showed extraordinary intellectual generosity in talking about positions I've taken with respect to things like global civil society over the years, human rights, etc. Philip is a great person anyway - a wickedly dry sense of humor - and NYU is very lucky to have him. The discussion was great, I learned a lot; dinner afterwards Philip and some students in the Village was great fun - at least for me, hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as I did. Even though I had to get up at 4:30 am to get a train back in time for class in DC the next day, the law school gives visitors the finest view in Manhattan from the 14th floor suite looking uptown to the Empire State Building. Great trip, and my thanks to Philip and everyone at NYU.