Biden’s foreign policy team is full of idealists who keep getting people killed
Biden’s foreign policy team is full of idealists who keep getting people killed
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In the debate about the future Biden foreign policy I’m seeing people self-identify as ‘progressive realists,’ ” Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, wrote recently. This unfamiliar label, brandished by some left-leaning critics of the president-elect, worried McFaul. After all, “realism” has long signified a tight focus on national interest, with little regard for the welfare of people abroad. The famously pitiless Henry Kissinger called himself a realist. Maybe McFaul had Kissinger in mind when he lamented the “deaths & horrific repression” that past realists had countenanced and then asked plaintively, “Where are the ‘progressive idealists’?”
I have good news for McFaul: They’re everywhere. If by “progressive idealists” he means left-of-center people who wax idealistic about America’s global mission - who think our foreign policy should emphasize spreading democracy and defending human rights abroad - then progressive idealists pervade liberal foreign policy circles and will be running the show in the Biden administration. Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s picks for secretary of state and national security adviser, are progressive idealists.
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...in recent years, naive idealism has also been responsible for much death and suffering and dislocation. And a lot of that happened on the watch of the Obama administration, where Blinken and Sullivan were top aides.
Idealists like Sullivan and Blinken have supported past interventions that made things worse. Both backed the 2013 proxy intervention in Syria, when America joined Middle Eastern and European allies in arming various rebel groups that were said to be fighting for freedom and democracy. (Some were, some weren’t.) This led to the same outcome that nonintervention would have produced - Bashar al-Assad is still in power - except with lots more dead bodies and refugees.
Assad is a brutal authoritarian who responded to peaceful protest viciously and who sought to suppress the insurgency ruthlessly. Still, the fact remains that the intervention led to much more death and suffering on all sides than ruthless suppression would have produced. That’s not a morally superior outcome.
Cognitive empathy. Hans Morgenthau, the chief architect of realism, wrote in the mid-20th century that an effective strategist must have a “respectful understanding” of all relevant actors and so “must put himself into the other man’s shoes, look at the world and judge it as that man does.”
Cognitive empathy helps explain why many realists are critical of the Obama administration’s attempt in 2013 and 2014 to help opponents of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych depose him. From Vladimir Putin’s point of view, it was unacceptable for American officials to come to a country on Russia’s periphery, egg on protesters who sought the ouster of its pro-Russian president, and maneuver behind the scenes to select and anoint a new head of government. This interference became only more outrageous, from Putin’s perspective, when, with armed opponents roaming the streets, Yanukovych fled the country for fear of his life.
Deficits in cognitive empathy don’t just lead to specific bad policies. They can lead to large-scale delusion about America’s goodness, and hence to dangerous hubris, by rendering American officials oblivious to how the country is viewed abroad. Consider this passage from an ode to American exceptionalism recently penned by Sullivan: “At a gathering of Asian nations in 2011, I heard the Chinese foreign minister address the issue of Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea this way: ‘China is a big country, and other countries here are small countries. Think hard about that.’ This is China’s way, and Russia’s way. It generally has not been America’s way.”
Realists, in contrast, ask a simple question: What vital American interest is served by inflicting misery on a small, faraway country in hopes that something magical will eventually happen?
Yet the interventionist inclination shared by progressive idealists and neoconservatives has created so much chaos and antagonism around the world that the challenge of building such governance is now steep. And the determination of many of these progressives to rally the world’s democracies in an existential struggle against authoritarianism (another thing they share with neoconservatives) would further raise the odds. All the more so since China, with nearly a fifth of the world’s population and one-tenth of its economic output, would be among the nations on the other side of the divide.
Respect for international law. Contemporary realists of both left and right are inclined to stay out of the internal affairs of other nations, and in that sense they show respect for national sovereignty. But progressive realists are more likely than conservative realists to couch that respect in terms of international law. One reason is their belief that effective international governance requires robust international laws and norms. Another reason is the recognition that, had the United States abided strictly by international law over the past couple of decades, a number of big mistakes - such as the invasion of Iraq and the proxy intervention in Syria - wouldn’t have happened.
At the same time, international law does sometimes permit military intervention. The 1995 NATO action in Bosnia, in which the United States used airstrikes to protect civilian populations, was authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Even the 2011 Libyan intervention was briefly eligible for progressive realist support. The initial stage - the aerial defense of residents of Benghazi, whom Gaddafi’s forces were poised to attack - was approved by the Security Council on humanitarian grounds. But the Obama administration then turned the mission into an unabashed regime-change effort, which arguably violated the letter of the U.N. resolution and certainly violated its spirit.
Progressive realists believe that the pursuit of humankind’s long-term welfare has to be governed by principle and restraint if it is to succeed; our good intentions have to be disciplined, guided by the imperative of building a true global community.
Progressive idealists - the people who ran Obama’s foreign policy and will be running Biden’s - say that they, too, want to build a global community. But they’ve got a funny way of showing it.
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In the debate about the future Biden foreign policy I’m seeing people self-identify as ‘progressive realists,’ ” Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, wrote recently. This unfamiliar label, brandished by some left-leaning critics of the president-elect, worried McFaul. After all, “realism” has long signified a tight focus on national interest, with little regard for the welfare of people abroad. The famously pitiless Henry Kissinger called himself a realist. Maybe McFaul had Kissinger in mind when he lamented the “deaths & horrific repression” that past realists had countenanced and then asked plaintively, “Where are the ‘progressive idealists’?”
I have good news for McFaul: They’re everywhere. If by “progressive idealists” he means left-of-center people who wax idealistic about America’s global mission - who think our foreign policy should emphasize spreading democracy and defending human rights abroad - then progressive idealists pervade liberal foreign policy circles and will be running the show in the Biden administration. Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s picks for secretary of state and national security adviser, are progressive idealists.
...
...in recent years, naive idealism has also been responsible for much death and suffering and dislocation. And a lot of that happened on the watch of the Obama administration, where Blinken and Sullivan were top aides.
Idealists like Sullivan and Blinken have supported past interventions that made things worse. Both backed the 2013 proxy intervention in Syria, when America joined Middle Eastern and European allies in arming various rebel groups that were said to be fighting for freedom and democracy. (Some were, some weren’t.) This led to the same outcome that nonintervention would have produced - Bashar al-Assad is still in power - except with lots more dead bodies and refugees.
Assad is a brutal authoritarian who responded to peaceful protest viciously and who sought to suppress the insurgency ruthlessly. Still, the fact remains that the intervention led to much more death and suffering on all sides than ruthless suppression would have produced. That’s not a morally superior outcome.
Cognitive empathy. Hans Morgenthau, the chief architect of realism, wrote in the mid-20th century that an effective strategist must have a “respectful understanding” of all relevant actors and so “must put himself into the other man’s shoes, look at the world and judge it as that man does.”
Cognitive empathy helps explain why many realists are critical of the Obama administration’s attempt in 2013 and 2014 to help opponents of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych depose him. From Vladimir Putin’s point of view, it was unacceptable for American officials to come to a country on Russia’s periphery, egg on protesters who sought the ouster of its pro-Russian president, and maneuver behind the scenes to select and anoint a new head of government. This interference became only more outrageous, from Putin’s perspective, when, with armed opponents roaming the streets, Yanukovych fled the country for fear of his life.
Deficits in cognitive empathy don’t just lead to specific bad policies. They can lead to large-scale delusion about America’s goodness, and hence to dangerous hubris, by rendering American officials oblivious to how the country is viewed abroad. Consider this passage from an ode to American exceptionalism recently penned by Sullivan: “At a gathering of Asian nations in 2011, I heard the Chinese foreign minister address the issue of Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea this way: ‘China is a big country, and other countries here are small countries. Think hard about that.’ This is China’s way, and Russia’s way. It generally has not been America’s way.”
Realists, in contrast, ask a simple question: What vital American interest is served by inflicting misery on a small, faraway country in hopes that something magical will eventually happen?
Yet the interventionist inclination shared by progressive idealists and neoconservatives has created so much chaos and antagonism around the world that the challenge of building such governance is now steep. And the determination of many of these progressives to rally the world’s democracies in an existential struggle against authoritarianism (another thing they share with neoconservatives) would further raise the odds. All the more so since China, with nearly a fifth of the world’s population and one-tenth of its economic output, would be among the nations on the other side of the divide.
Respect for international law. Contemporary realists of both left and right are inclined to stay out of the internal affairs of other nations, and in that sense they show respect for national sovereignty. But progressive realists are more likely than conservative realists to couch that respect in terms of international law. One reason is their belief that effective international governance requires robust international laws and norms. Another reason is the recognition that, had the United States abided strictly by international law over the past couple of decades, a number of big mistakes - such as the invasion of Iraq and the proxy intervention in Syria - wouldn’t have happened.
At the same time, international law does sometimes permit military intervention. The 1995 NATO action in Bosnia, in which the United States used airstrikes to protect civilian populations, was authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Even the 2011 Libyan intervention was briefly eligible for progressive realist support. The initial stage - the aerial defense of residents of Benghazi, whom Gaddafi’s forces were poised to attack - was approved by the Security Council on humanitarian grounds. But the Obama administration then turned the mission into an unabashed regime-change effort, which arguably violated the letter of the U.N. resolution and certainly violated its spirit.
Progressive realists believe that the pursuit of humankind’s long-term welfare has to be governed by principle and restraint if it is to succeed; our good intentions have to be disciplined, guided by the imperative of building a true global community.
Progressive idealists - the people who ran Obama’s foreign policy and will be running Biden’s - say that they, too, want to build a global community. But they’ve got a funny way of showing it.
"