But what Von and the Postel piece miss, I think, is that Krauthammer is trying to make himself out to be a foreign policy realist who believes that power, not norms and laws, are primary in international relations, that America must not be shackled by Lilliputian multilateral institutions and must "create" democracies only "where it counts" because resources are limited. He curls his rhetorical lip at the very term "neoconservative." Citing his opposition to US intervention in the Balkans as an example, he distinguishes himself from "democratic globalists" such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who believe that the US ought to, in Krauthammer's words, "plant the flag of democracy everywhere." So he calls this philosophy "democratic realism:"
We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedomThe existential enemy in question, of course, is the Islamist radical. Despite my ingrained antipathy towards his bombastic prose, I have to admit that Krauthammer is at his best in explaining why, pace Fukuyama, the threat is for all intents and purposes existential:
Imagine what a dozen innocuous vans in a dozen American cities dispersing aerosolized anthrax could do. Imagine what just a handful of the world's loose nukes, detonated simulataneously in New York, Washington, Chicago and just a few other cities, would do to the United States. America would still exist on the map. But what kind of country--and what kind of polity--would be left? If that is not an existential threat, nothing is.Point to Krauthammer.
I'm going to gloss over some of Krauthammer's more ridiculous bromides--his laughable assertion, for instance, that he isn't disproportionately concerned about a certain sliver of sand and soil on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. News to me. While I believe that Krauthammer's weltanschaung is inextricably bound up with Israel's, I'd like to focus instead on the crux of his argument, which, despite some palpable hits on Fukuyama, is astonishingly weak.
The primacy of democratic realism, as Krauthammer has defined it, rests on the idea that America "succeeded in monumental task of reconstructing Germany, Japan, and South Korea." When you strip away the frills and curlicues, that's his entire case. In Krauthammer's estimation, the defining factor in American success in those instances was "strategic value:"
When the stakes were high, and correctly perceived at home as such, we stayed the course and devoted the requisite effort and time to succeed. Where the strategic stakes were minimal, as in Haiti or Somalia, we failed because we correctly understood that nation-building is a huge task and that these places were not remotely worth the cost. The single most important factor in the success of nation-building is seriousness.That, gentle readers, is it. The soft underbelly of democratic realism.
To say that the country that rebulit Germany and Japan and South Korea from rubble--perhaps the three greatest acheivements in nation-building ever--is intrinsically no good at the job is silly. And if that is the cae, by the way, should we not be cutting our losses in Afghanistan as well, since it is far more tribal, primitive and underdeveloped than Iraq?
Needless to say, I find Krauthammer's argument utterly unpersuasive. Unlike Krauthammer, Fukuyama has actually taken the time to understand what we know and do not know about nation-building--where an outside force is most likely make positive change, what distinguishes one country from another, and so on. My sense is that Krauthammer has not, in fact, done so. In contrast, Fukuyama wrote a well-researched and carefully reasoned book about this very subject, about which more here. Short version: Krauthammer's conceit that the "defining factor" of any successful nation-building effort is sheer willpower is tenuous at best, his understanding of the American role in the reconstruction of Germany and Japan is fatally flawed, and the differences between those advanced states and Iraq are enormous. (Not to mention that in both cases our presence was widely viewed as legitimate and in neither country was the U.S. fighting a virulent postwar insurgency.) But the most problematic part about Krauthammer's brief tour of American nation-building history is that he ignores the elephant in the room: Vietnam. He must do so, because to acknowledge that inglorious chapter in American history would be to shatter the intellectual facade he has constructed.
Let's go back and look at Krauthammer's test:
We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedomVietnam is the poster child for democratic realism. The threat was communism, which Krauthammer defines as the previous existential threat. If we lost, it was said, America's position in Asia would be in peril, and freedom would be under siege everywhere as the Soviet menace became further emboldened. We spent more than $500 billion and lost some 58,000 American lives in Vietnam. For more than a decade, we attempted to build a democratic order in the South, advised its military, decimated the cadres of its domestic insurgent, and expended more ordinance on its northern enemy than we had dropped on the Germans in World War II. Were we not serious enough? Did we not commit enough resources? Were we repeating too many of the mistakes of the French before us? Did we not try enough different counterinsurgency techniques? Had we stayed the course, would South Vietnam--which had the third-largest Air Force in the world in the early seventies--have defeated the North and become a democratic society? Would ARVN have ever gotten its act together? I doubt it. Its leadership may have been less barbaric than the North's, yet it was thoroughly corrupt and generally seen as illegitimate, its peasantry largely uncommitteed to defending it. Perhaps Krauthammer would argue that it could have been done had we stayed the course, but, suspiciously, he chose not to bring up Vietnam at all. Had he done so, he would have needed to grapple with the fact that Dean Acheson and George Kennan, two of the leading architects of the post-WWII grand strategy upon which Krauthammer (thinks) he bases his argument, privately told Lyndon Johnson in 1968 that our cause in Vietnam was a hopeless one. Not to mention the fact that both were avowed internationalists rather than "democratic realists."
Good luck with that one, Chuck.
I could go on to discuss Iraq, the international system, and the various ways in which Krauthammer curiously avoids reality, but why bother? At some point I'm going to write about how the world order we actually have is a hybrid system, one that is sufficiently explained neither by "American hegemony" nor by "liberal internationalism." But at the moment I need to fill out some boring paperwork for my stupid job.
The first afoe European weblog awards