Liberal Foreign Policy Needs More Realism

It is a sad day for the liberal foreign policy establishment when the only person to turn to in the main stream media for straight talk about the Russia/Georgia situation is none other than paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. Read here for Pat’s spot-on analysis about how “the chickens of democratic imperialism have now come home to roost – in Tbilisi.”

The typical “liberal” point of view is put forth here by Roger Cohen of the New York Times. His prescription for how to respond to Russia puts him comfortably in bed with Dick Cheney:

The West [cannot] be cowed. It must shore up the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, with financial and other support. It must keep the trans-Caspian, Russia-circumventing energy corridor open. It must bolster Ukraine’s independence. And, at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in December, it should [establish]…a Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine.

The world seems like it's upside down: Pat Buchanan makes total sense, and most liberals (including Obama and Biden, by the way!) are basically endorsing the Bush Administration’s belligerent stance towards Russia. What is going on?

The reason for this craziness is not simply that Democrats are trying to act tough in an election year. There is a much deeper problem at the core of liberal foreign policy thinking—namely, the ascendance within the liberal community of a human rights-based worldview. Popularized by thinkers like Samantha Power (a former Obama adviser) and embodied in the idea of Responsibility to Protect, this worldview has much more in common with neoconservatism (the driving intellectual force behind Bush’s foreign policy) than liberals would like to admit.

First and foremost, both neoconservatives and human rights-oriented foreign policy thinkers share an idealistic and revolutionary zeal for transforming the world into a better place. In addition, they both believe that the internal character of regimes matters greatly to how America should interact with foreign governments. And thirdly, they both believe that America’s foreign policy should reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies. These commonalities inevitably lead to similarly aggressive attitudes towards autocratic countries like Saddam’s Iraq, Putin’s Russia, and Communist China. While neocons are motivated by fear of such autocratic regimes and a desire to promote American empire, human rights thinkers are motivated by disdain for such regimes and a desire to help their oppressed peoples. But in the end, the two group’s policy prescriptions are often the same. As Tony Judt says in his essay, “Bush’s Useful Idiots: On the Strange Death of Liberal America”: “In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the fig leaf. There really is no other difference between them.”

Pat Buchanan, on the other hand, is a foreign policy “realist.” His primary concern is America’s vital interests; words like “democracy” and “human rights” don’t enter into the equation. He correctly believes that America’s vital interest does not include going to the mat for a pseudo-democracy in Central Asia run by a loose-cannon president who will continue to antagonize Russia—a country that America needs to help further its true vital interests such as safeguarding nuclear weapons and dealing with Iran.

In my opinion, the liberal establishment should take a healthy dose of realist medicine from Pat Buchanan and rethink the practicality of placing human rights at the center of its foreign policy worldview.

For further reading on how to deal with Russia, check out: “To Russia with Realism: the White House senseless risks a new Cold War,” by Anatol Lieven.

And check out this must read, also by Anatol Lieven: “Bipartisan Disaster: Americans' growing unease at US foreign policy is not reflected by the two parties.” It features this nugget: “If I have to listen to another American anti-Bush liberal damn the war in Iraq and then advocate US military intervention in Darfur I may eat my beard.”