This Week in Stupid

Actually, it's technically "last week in stupid," but there was so much chest-beating going around last week that we had a major scheduling crunch. 

Forever Young, by Leon Wieseltier [the New Republic]

Compared to Boot, Wieseltier is a fish of a different color. His problem isn't so much a fundamental misunderstanding of international relations, but a fundamental misunderstanding of absolutely everything from China's economic relationship with the US to the very idea of state sovereignty. On China, I urge you to disregard Wieseltier's "gold medal in tyranny" idiocy and explore the more nuanced view articulated by James Fallows: the $1.4 Trillion Question.

In my opinion, Wieseltier makes the following three mistakes:

1) He blurs the line between "strategic problems" and "strategic choices" into nonexistence.

2) He confuses a "politics of hope" with a "policy of hope."

2a) Relatedly, he conflates motivation--a belief that Americans can change the world for the better--with action, namely the idea that we will change the world for the better by handing out candy to dictators and asking them to pretty please love America.

On the first point, he argues that "George W. Bush was not singlehandedly responsible for getting us into this mess." In some sense, that's true. No one man can take a nation to war. However, to insinuate that the White House--the President being the symbolic if not physical embodiment thereof--was not the prime mover behind the Iraq war is shameless hackery of the first order. I deeply agree with the proposition that the United States had a serious and growing strategic problem in the Middle East around the turn of the millennium. However, "this mess" as Wieseltier euphemistically terms it, is entirely the product of the strategic choices made by the President and his administration. It's not as if he was flying blind, either. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, was laughed out of the Pentagon when he had the temerity to suggest that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq. In contrast, we have Paul Wolfowitz's statement:

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army.

Apparently, our ex-President of the World Bank nee Deputy Secretary of Defense had never bothered to skim chapter 3 of The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. It's difficult to plausibly point to a prime mover responsible for this mess who isn't a Bush appointee.

Wieseltier's second goof is mistaking politics for policy. We can cut him a little slack here, mostly because that seems to be the operating rule of the past few years. For our purposes, "politics" is defined as the strategy by which one acquires power and "policy" as the definite agenda advanced by someone already in power. Wieseltier construes Obama's references to the "politics of hope" as a foreign "policy of hope" or simply a "hope for the best" attitude towards the problems facing American interests abroad. On the contrary, Obama seems to realize that America's reputation abroad has reached its lowest ebb in recent memory, and that improving our international standing is a necessary precondition for any meaningful foreign policy initiatives. Indeed, we've received some not so subtle signals from our allies that this is what they would like as well.

Let's be clear, Wieseltier is not incorrect in his observation that the world is an awful place where awful people do awful things. However, for reasons related to the decline of Europe after WWII and the fall of the USSR, we're sort of running things now. With that in mind, we have to ask ourselves if it's more useful to have a national (and international) audience that believes that America has the ability to be a positive influence on the world, or one that views foreign relations as an intractable quagmire to be avoided at all costs. On a personal level, I find Obama's talking points on foreign policy inspiring, because they evoke an America that is chastened but not defeated, a country that can withdraw without becoming withdrawn. Clearly we need a foreign policy that abandons both the tone-deaf public diplomacy of Karen Hughes and the 1) Topple Gov't 2) Hope for the Best 3) Democracy! approach of the last few years.

Make no mistake, positive change in international affairs is a rarity, but it does happen every now and again. Taking that possibility off the table, as Wieseltier does, in favor of some "hope is for sissies" tough-minded attitude is singularly unlikely to address the issues facing the US in 2008, nor should we expect it to entice bright young people to pursue a career in foreign service.