Stand Down

What truly matters in the debate over American exceptionalism is what the historical record of America’s use of her power has been and how, even in an era of relative decline, she should use, or refrain from using, that power today and in the future. All the rest is silliness. If some young liberal policy wonk chooses to imagine that the United States is inherently good, or if the editor of The National Review finds it historically defensible to claim that America “is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth,” that really should not detain us. As Damon Linker puts it in his thoughtful reply to the critique of American exceptionalism (to which I have returned again and again on this blog): When American proponents of American exceptionalism argue that “America as a nation is uniquely virtuous, or better than, other nations…things begin to get ridiculous…”

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American power is another matter. It must concern us. One critic of my position conceded that my pessimism about American exceptionalism leading the United States to anything but one terrible excess after the other in the exercise of its power globally was “well-founded,” but that pessimism “is not a strategy.” He is absolutely right. But what he doubtless knows but fails to add is that, like optimism—historically, the default position of American thinking on the internationalist project—pessimism is a perfectly legitimate basis for thinking about international relations generally and, in this instance, about the role the United States should play in the world. Indeed, at the core of my argument is the claim that, on any cool-headed reading of American history, when what Linker rightly calls the country’s “almost missionary compulsion to champion liberal-democratic self-government” is combined with a fundamentally optimistic mind-set about what America’s power (both soft and hard), her influence, and her example can achieve, the results have been more often than not exemplars of the march of folly rather than of the march of freedom.

That is why I have so insistently returned to the actual history of the United States as a global power, rejecting the view that because the American ideal is admirable in so many ways (though not all: I do not, for example, think it correct to claim that liberty and liberal capitalism are inseparable, as most exceptionalists on both the conservative and liberal sides of the debate routinely do), the history of this ideal trumps the actual history of America’s conduct. In fact, I do not take it as a given that the Bill of Rights is axiomatically more defining than the genocide of the American Indians (as a non-Native American, that would be a bit, er, self-serving, would it not?). But that is a discussion for another time. The same critic who (I emphasize again: rightly) pointed out that my pessimism was not a strategy was forced to concede that I “have history on [my] side.” But he went on to say while this was a legitimate viewpoint, it was “not terribly helpful or illuminating from a policy point of view” and that there was not a single discernible “policy prescription” in my posts on the subject.

If what he means by that is that I have made no effort to try to come up with more humane, subtle, realistic, and effective means of advancing what he presumably views as our idealistic ends, then I actually agree with him. I haven’t. But that is because, not being a believer in American exceptionalism, not accepting the moral legitimacy of America’s missionary and/or imperial project (it is probably both, with one of the two elements being stronger at any given time), and judging not from what the American ideal may be but rather from what I understand the historical record of the American project to have been, I believe my first obligation—to continue my critic’s medical metaphor—is not to write a new prescription, but to first do no harm. If you thought, to use Robert Kagan’s phrase, that the United States has been “a dangerous nation” throughout its history, and felt that John Quincy Adams was right in 1821 when he implored his fellow citizens to join him in his belief in an America that abstains “from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart,” would you consider yourself derelict or dishonest or condemned to irrelevance for not having focused on how to craft better policies for a more intelligent deployment of American power and influence throughout the world?

None of this has anything to do with the particular thuggishness and stupidity of the Bush administration, though it certainly incarnated both those vices, and many more, as well. In fact, I entirely agree with Linker and others who have been critical of my work that the American missionary project can be carried out with great intelligence, sobriety, and subtlety. In the 1990s, I was a militant liberal interventionist (it was only at the end of the decade that I changed sides—something I have never denied or made any secret of, even if some of my critics, though not Linker, write as if I had). It was clear then, just as Linker is absolutely right to say that it is clear now, that it is entirely possible to be an interventionist (hard or soft) without making the hubristic assumptions that became the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s understanding of the world and of America’s role in it.

What is at issue here are not policy prescriptions, but first principles. Linker writes of America’s “liberal duty,” and of the imperative—by which he seems to be assuming that the United States as a nation is bound by some form of Kant’s categorical moral imperative, whether religious or secular—“to support and encourage liberalism abroad” and to “combine grandly idealistic ends with cunningly realistic means.” He goes on to say that the fact that “we have often failed to achieve this synthesis is evidence of human (and American) imperfection, as well as the recalcitrance of a complicated, heartrending world.” And in fine Niebuhrian fashion, Linker goes on to call for America to redouble its “resolution to do better, to be smarter, to choose more efficacious means in the future,” and most definitely not “to give up on the ends,” as I appear prepared to do.

The recalcitrance of an imperfect world! In that phrase you have the perfect distillation of the fundamentally anti-historical, millenarian essence of the idea of American exceptionalism. We are not a country, with our virtues and our defects like all other countries: We are an idea, we are liberal hope incarnate. The implications of this are much more radical than policies based on optimism (which, historically, are the American norm); they lead ineluctably to policies based on faith—with all due respect, very much like Marxism in its heyday. Because in such a context, if carried out, we don’t so much have national goals in the world, but national goals for the world, so there can be no morally licit end to America’s interventions abroad until, to use Linker’s words—words which amaze and terrify me more each time I read them—we have fulfilled the “goal that ought to guide our actions in the world…” that “the benefits of political liberalism, which our nation achieved first in human history, can and should be enjoyed by every country, and by every person in every country, in the world.” With all due respect, this is a hubris far greater than anything George Bush ever dreamt of. For what Linker is describing is not even a human empire, but the empire of truth and virtue—the most dangerous self-conception of all when applied to peoples and governments.

Opposing that self-conception seems to me of inherent value. The policy goal is actually quite straightforward: To put an end to the American missionary project, and exceptionalist self-conception; and to accept that we are not an idea but a country with no legitimate right (except in our own collective historical and moral imagination), and no mandate (whether from heaven or the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights) to persevere in our national project of spreading and guaranteeing political liberalism and human rights across the world. The practical measures that would need to be taken for the U.S. to stand down are largely obvious, as: First and foremost, the gradual but inexorable end to America’s global military presence, and the recognition, in John Quincy Adams’ words, that we are the champions and vindicators only of our own freedom, and that, therefore, ideas about creating new institutions that would aid in the furtherance of our ideals through soft power, while usually preferable to hard power, will continue to take us down the road to disaster and should be scrapped.

Would standing-down—which would inevitably be a protracted process—need to be accompanied by, at the very least, the radical reform of the current international institutions and, in some cases, the creation of new ones? Self-evidently it would, and it would be stupid to try to minimize the difficulty of achieving agreements on what the new security architecture would look like, how to reform the United Nations, and what to do with the Bretton Woods institutions. And yes, absolutely, these are policy prescriptions for what should be done, not for what is likely to happen. For in this sense, at least, I am actually in agreement with what I take Linker and others who have written critically of my recent writing on American exceptionalism to be saying about my rejection of the project of reforming the American missionary project. The chances are indeed high that such reform is the most that can be expected, and, yes, I am indeed a pessimist. But “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” as Gramsci famously said. In my view, that in itself is sufficient justification for opposition, no matter what the odds.

As I wrote Damon Linker when he first reacted by private e-mail to my critique of his (measured, eloquent, and contingent) defense of American exceptionalism:

“Now, if what you're asking me whether I prefer your plan B—American power used with restraint, modesty, and intelligence—to the current state of play, the answer is of course I do. But in all candor, I'll believe it when I see it. And in any case, I don't see my own role as giving liberal internationalism a human face. If I have any politics, they are Foucault's (as I understand them)—e.g. a belief that there is no such thing as benign power, only various degrees of malignity. And as you know, I was a liberal interventionist—a militant one. I have spent the better part of the last twelve years trying to think through and argue for an alternative to that position which is not either left utopian or nationalist/isolationist (perhaps I have been trying to atone in some ways as well, even if I would still defend my position on Bosnia, and still believe there should have been an intervention in Rwanda—to rule out the possibility of that really is the non-interventionism of fools).

Now you may say this is foolish—and perhaps you're right; perhaps, worse, it is a vanity on my part not to want to humanize and constrain the empire. But opposition is the only role I can abide, the only one where I do not feel like a whore or an apparatchik (this is pure subjectivity: I am speaking only of myself, of my own ecology, if you will, not judging anyone; hell, as I say, it may be more arrogance than honor on my part). And yes, contra the liberal consensus I do indeed believe the world would be better off if we stood down, if instead of continuing to see our role as the indispensable nation, we (largely) stood down. And no, I don't believe the world would fall apart.”

In his reply to this, Linker wrote that, in his view, “politics is the arts of Plan B’s.” As a practical matter, he is unquestionably right. The sort of “Plan A” I was recommending, he added, was sadly for saints and martyrs, adding generously that he couldn’t make much of what I had written as a political prescription. I replied as follows:

“Finally, as to Plan A, saints and martyrs, Plan B, etc., why is a call to resistance and to starting to think and speak of things differently not a valid political prescription? This is the one place where I truly don't follow you. Wasn't challenging the Communist consensus in the 70s and 80s a valid and serious political act? You're too young to remember, but I was in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the 70s, and the dissidents certainly looked as if their actions were pointless and that the Soviet Empire would last forever. Most of them were neither saints nor martyrs, they simply couldn't swallow the lies and thought resistance, however quixotic and unlikely to succeed, the only course they could follow. Without comparing myself to these people—after all, what risk am I taking except being thought irrelevant, which is hardly the worst of fates?—why not resist what you can no longer swallow.”

A friend once wrote me that while he had been a kind of neo-conservative during the Cold War, now that the U.S. had, as he put it, “become” the Soviet Union, he was one no longer. I was never a neo-conservative, but I certainly agree with my friend about our country. Again, why not resist? Why is it being a saint or a martyr or an irrelevant, foolish person to do so?”

Let me leave it there.