By Derek Chollet and Tod Lindberg

Policy Review
December 2007 & January 2008

Is idealism dead? Should the promotion of American values of liberalism, democracy, human rights, and rule of law be a core element of U.S. foreign policy? Where to strike the balance between principles and interests is one of the most enduring debates about America ’s role in the world. But since September 11, this question has become intensely contested and deeply controversial. It has emerged as one of the central divides between the political right and left — in large part because of the history of the past seven years, the Bush administration ’s rhetoric, its strong association with the “freedom agenda,” and its actions justified at least in part by democracy promotion (namely the war in Iraq). Yet it is also becoming a sharper division within each end of the political spectrum.

Read the rest of this entry »

Policy Review
August & September 2007

The sermon on the mount has long been rightly understood as both a starting-point and a summation of Jesus ’s teaching. It begins with the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12), in which Jesus delineates the categories of people he says enjoy special favor. The Beatitudes are all familiar to us as sayings, the best known being blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. But what, really, are they? Is Jesus merely pronouncing a blessing, offering good wishes to those whom he chooses to single out? In fact, there ’s more to the story than that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Policy Review December 2004/January 2005

A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004), a collection of essays on transatlantic relationships.

There is no question that the aftermath of September 11, 2001, has laid bare a divergence in view between the United States and Europe over the question of the place of power in international affairs. Insofar as countering terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has become a priority likely to dominate U.S. security policy for a generation or more, and insofar as the United States will likely seek recourse to military measures on occasion in this period, the divergence is likely to persist. Transatlantic relations may go through periods of relative warming in the years ahead, but they seem likely to be punctuated by occasions in which the differences reemerge starkly. We have, in all likelihood, doses of bitterness ahead of us every bit as unpleasant as the bitterness over the Iraq war. 

But what I want to do here is take a large step back from all the disagreement and see if it does not, after all, take place within a frame of broader agreement about fundamental issues — more fundamental, even, than the question of the proper role of the use of force internationally, which is itself a mischaracterization of what was at stake in the dispute over Iraq, as we shall see.  

To show how this is so, I would like to radicalize the discussion by proffering a thesis so contrarian in the current context that I should probably begin by asking readers’ indulgence. It is this: There are no fundamental disagreements or differences between the United States and Europe. Existing differences are often more apparent than real. When real, the differences are in all consequential cases actually agreements to disagree. And in any case, the views of Americans and Europeans have been converging for some time and will continue to do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

View this article at Policy Review, October/Novemeber 2004

This essay appears in slightly different form in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press, 2004).

“Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive. This is especially true when used to describe a certain group of people who have sought to influence American public policy, most notably foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and who, in the administration of George W. Bush, obtained that influence.

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

View this article at Policy Review, October/November 2001

The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, invited, if it did not indeed compel, wholesale reconsideration of the times we live in and the way we live in them. What once seemed to most Americans like a period of unprecedented prosperity and peace, now — with the towers collapsed, the Pentagon scarred, and more than 6,000 dead — seems more akin to a period of sustained illusion. We are thoroughly alienated from the point of view that was our very own September 10 and before: namely, that things were pretty good in and for the United States of America. Now — standing as the United States does between the opening salvo and the final volley in a war that is both necessary to win and entirely a matter of conjecture as to its course, duration, dimensions, and lethality — most everything we thought September 10 has been superannuated.

Some have said that this is not the same country it was September 10, or that the world changed forever September 11. But that amounts to an exercise in displacement. The world on September 10 was exactly the one in which the forces leading up to the next day’s events had long been gathering. The country September 11 was the one whose history in its entirety shaped the response to that day (and an encouraging response it was). No, what has changed is each of us, in a universal reaction taking as many particular forms as there are people — anger, sadness, fear, gratitude, love, restlessness, and more, in every imaginable combination, having in common only that each was real not just in itself but also in the gulf separating it from what one felt September 10. It is as if the frame of mind of September 10 was negated as decisively as the lives of the victims — repudiated with finality. Whatever we might have been thinking September 10, we were wrong.¹

^{Read the rest of this entry »}

View this article at Policy Review, December 2000/January 2001

The American political system has thrown off some truly anomalous results in the past decade. We have gone from the historic 1994 election (a 50-seat swing in the House of Representatives bringing to power a Republican leadership promising “Revolution”), to an historic presidential impeachment and acquittal, to an historic 2000 election in which voters divided as evenly as imaginable in their preference for Democrats or Republicans. We are practically awash in the historic these days.

Commentary in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election told us to watch events closely, since we would never see their like again in our lifetime. This may be true, but it may also miss the larger point. For those who found themselves disturbed one way or another by the outcome and aftermath of the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore — or as the Clinton impeachment drama unfolded, or as the Republican Congress tried to enact its Revolution — the uniqueness of each event and the unlikelihood of a recurrence may be a false consolation. We may not run into these particular oddities again, but it may be that we are in the midst of something bigger — a pattern of oddity.

Read the rest of this entry »

View this article at Policy Review, February/March 2000

IMPEACHMENTS HAVE BEEN sufficiently rare in our national political life to make generalizing about them a risky undertaking. Granted, too, the proximity of the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton and the still-raw feelings it engendered may have led us to a heightened concern with the subject in general, perhaps inflating out of due proportion the importance of impeachment in American history.

Yet Clinton’s impeachment by the House followed by the Senate’s unwillingness to remove him is one of four cases, each involving impeachment and acquittal, that can fairly be called epic confrontations, both politically and constitutionally. In the details of these four cases — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1804, Judge James Hawkins Peck in 1830, President Andrew Johnson in 1868, and President Clinton in 1999 — lies a tale of lasting significance broader even than the tumultuous issues that came out as these impeachments unfolded.

In these four spectacular clashes, a fascinating pattern presents itself. It is the story of how resort to the Constitution’s ultimate sanction became inextricably entangled with one or another law that was itself fundamentally suspect constitutionally. These laws amounted to grave extra-constitutional disturbances to a carefully wrought constitutional system based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It was these disturbances around which sentiment for removal gathered in the first place — only to dissipate in the end.

Read the rest of this entry »

View this article at Policy Review, August/September 1999

ELIZABETH DREW.  The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why. BIRCH LANE PRESS. 278 pages. $21.95 

IS AMERICAN POLITICS corrupt? Those who raise the issue usually think it is, and the reason they think so is money. The specter is a grim one: Vast moneyed interests — corporations, wealthy individuals, single-issue groups — seek to work the political system to their own advantage. Our politicians either eagerly assign themselves as tools of these interests, in order to enrich their campaigns, or soon find themselves the victims of them, targeted for political destruction for hewing an independent line. A political process in which politicians are bought and sold — that is the condition of American governance we are invited to contemplate.

Not, to be sure, that most of those making this accusation are quite willing to pull the trigger. Almost no one names Rep. X, Sens. Y and Z, and administration officials A, B, and C as having been bought and paid for. We do, after all, have laws against bribery, taking illegal gratuities, using your office for personal financial gain or for the personal financial benefit of others, and other forms of corruption in office — as well as corresponding laws aimed at those trying to influence public officials improperly. These are serious crimes. Nor are the laws merely window dressing, the tribute vice pays to virtue in an otherwise corrupt system. From time to time, public officials and private citizens go off to prison for running afoul of them. So in this system supposedly shot through with corruption, where are the specific accusations of corrupt action?

Read the rest of this entry »

Policy Review, June/July 1999

MARK BOWDEN.  Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War.  ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS.  386 PAGES.  $24.00 

FOR MOST of this century, the cultural depiction of war has centered on the soldiers doing the fighting. The result has been one intimate portrait after another of horror, brutality, and violent death designed to engender in the reader or viewer sensations of mortal dread, of hope mixed with desperation, of confusion and uncertainty, akin to those soldiers feel in the heat of battle. This intimate perspective on war flourished first in highbrow literary circles in the aftermath of the incomprehensible carnage of World War I. Since then, it has become virtually ubiquitous. Long before Saving Private Ryan, the soldier’s perspective became our standard perspective on war at all levels of cultural seriousness, from comic books to newspapers to bestsellers to movies and television shows to those works short-listed for literary prizes.

The soldier’s-eye view of war is not the only possible cultural perspective on war, of course. Clearly Shakespeare attaches more importance to what Henry V has to say that St. Crispian’s Day than to what the rest of the band of brothers might be thinking on the eve of the battle of Agincourt or during it. Nor does Shakespeare’s Henry fail to speak to us to this day.

Read the rest of this entry »

View this article at Policy Review, April/May 1999

It wasn’t merely the political career of House Speaker Newt Gingrich that came to an abrupt end after the Republican Party’s surprising losses in the November 1998 congressional elections. It was also a theory of history that died.

One might call it the world according to Gingrich, for he was surely its chief proponent and its public face. But to describe it as such runs the risk of making it seem somehow idiosyncratic, something uniquely or chiefly Gingrich’s. It was anything but. What made Gingrich a leader was first and foremost his abundance of followers — lots of them, and not just in Congress or in the organized Republican Party, but including just about all those who had taken personal pleasure in the election results four years before, when Republicans won control of the House for the first time in 40 years. This was his doctrine and theirs, a view of progressive Republicanism, a new, ideological Republicanism on the march. True, by 1998, many of Gingrich’s followers (inside and outside Congress) had turned on him. And not for quite a while has it been possible for Republicans and conservatives to hear the words “Republican Revolution” without cringing in embarrassment. But the truth is that not so many years ago, the phrase quite accurately captured their frame of mind, their own sense of who they were and what they were up to. The 1994 GOP electoral triumph, which they felt as their own, they recognized also as his. Those who knew Gingrich personally knew all about his personal eccentricities, his vanities, his intellectual conceits. But those things didn’t matter so much next to the bigger things Gingrich represented and the political achievement he had just brought off. Gingrich was no less than the chief theorist, lead strategist and tactician, and principal spokesman of the activist Republican Party, manifesting itself in 1994 as Republican Revolution.

Read the rest of this entry »