The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History, by Patrick Allitt (Yale, 336 pp., $35)

In numerous books over the years, conservatives have offered historical perspectives on conservatism, liberals on liberalism, and each on the other, crowding bestseller lists and remainder piles alike. The common denominator is usually a polemical zest that is a product of the sense that major issues are at stake in our politics right now. The past is chiefly a storehouse from which to select what’s useful to the debate at the moment.

Patrick Allitt is a professor of history at Emory University, and whatever political opinions he may hold, he keeps them to himself in The Conservatives. His wideranging, briskly written survey of the American Right from the founding era through the end of the 20th century is no conservative history of conservatism in the sense of an attempt to vindicate a conservative viewpoint against others, nor is it a liberal debunking exercise. Rather, it is a descriptive account, situated at the crossroads of intellectual and political history, that seeks to allow the various strains of conservative thought in America to emerge in the context of the political debate of their time.

Professor Allitt has thereby done both liberals and conservatives a favor. Progressives may be a little too flush with victory these days to care much about what conservatives think, and in any case they may be fonder of an approach toward conservatism that seems much more common in the academic world today than Allitt’s, namely, treating conservatism as a pathology in need of explanation. But here progressives have an excellent opportunity to develop a richer understanding of their adversaries.

Allitt’s service to conservatives is greater still. This would be true if only for the careful attention he pays to taking conservative ideas seriously. More than that, however, this volume seeks to secure for conservatives something oddly lacking in conservatism these days: a sense of a past.

The last 100 pages of The Conservatives offer a fine description of the modern conservative era, from the founding of NATIONAL REVIEW through the founding of The Weekly Standard. This period begins with conservatism in the wilderness, and William F. Buckley Jr.’s effort “to set up a big tent, bringing in as many types of conservatives as possible, and to keep them together despite their differences,” as Allitt describes Buckley’s vision for NR (not omitting the part of the story about those Buckley chose to keep out, such as the John Birchers and the Randians). It ends with conservative ideas’ driving a national political agenda through their influence in the Republican party.

Along the way, we meet the NATIONAL REVIEW circle in its heyday, from James Burnham calling for the liberation of the “captive nations” to Frank Meyer promoting a “fusionist” conservatism that would explain to free-marketeers and traditionalists why they “actually needed each other and should work together.” Allitt introduces the Chicago School economists, preeminently Milton Friedman, as well as the leading early Cold Warriors.

He documents the emergence of the neoconservatives, mainly disaffected liberals or leftists, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, grown frustrated both with the inability of ambitious government programs to deliver results at home and with U.S. weakness abroad. He describes the rise of the “paleoconservative” tendency, and engagingly retells the story of how a seemingly obscure dispute over whether Ronald Reagan would name the neocon-favored William Bennett or the paleo-approved M. E. Bradford as director of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981 crystallized a set of resentments for a generation. Here we meet the Chronicles crowd, as well as Patrick J. Buchanan, who would go on to lead an effort to reorient post-Cold War conservatism in the direction of “America First.”

Allitt traces the evolution of the conservative view that market economics was defensible not only as an efficient means of allocating scarce goods and services but also on moral grounds, through the freedom it safeguards and the wealth it creates. And he describes well the persistent frustration conservatives have felt at their inability to make headway in what they perceive as a “culture war” over social issues, standards of cultural achievement, and the direction of the university. Here, we encounter New Criterion founder Hilton Kramer and First Things founder Richard John Neuhaus.

This part of their history conservatives themselves know reasonably well. Partisans of the various subsets of conservative opinion will have their nits to pick with Allitt’s account, but in truth, they themselves all tell pretty much the same story about the past 50 years. Allitt’s virtue here lies in telling the tale not as we have most frequently heard it before, through the perspective of one of the factions of conservative opinion seeking to discredit others (or a liberal perspective seeking to discredit the whole conservative enterprise), but neutrally. As he remarks in his conclusion, his “intention throughout has been to keep the rhetorical temperature as low as possible and be descriptive rather than prescriptive.” In this he has succeeded.

But the first two-thirds of The Conservatives are in their way more valuable, because less familiar. It’s not that anyone even glancingly acquainted with American history will have missed the Federalist Papers, the Whigs, the Southern agrarians, Calhoun, Webster, or Tocqueville. It’s that Allitt puts them together into a fascinating portrait of the various forms American conservatism has taken.

He calls the Federalist Papers “the new nation’s first conservative classic.” The case for the new Constitution, as mounted by the Federalist, was conservative not because its authors called themselves that, but because they “hoped, with the help of the Constitution, to conserve a traditional social order that, as they saw it, was threatened by disorder from below and radicalism from abroad.” One danger would be a state too weak to govern effectively and provide security. Another danger would be a state so powerful or autocratic that it deprived people of liberty. A government too democratic might give rise to a tyranny of the majority. All of these concerns come through in the Federalist.

A democratic, egalitarian political system could also entail the loss of the social hierarchy necessary to defend and perpetuate the higher ends of human achievement, from honor to virtue to artistic excellence. A society too commercial in orientation might lose its sense that there is anything higher than immediate gratification. Here, it is Tocqueville who resonates, pointing out that American democracy, which he admires, nevertheless comes at a cost. Professor Allitt calls Democracy in America, too, “a conservative classic.”

It’s important not to lose sight of the varied nature of the felt dangers to the social order to which people have responded with the impulse to conserve. Thus Allitt avers that “Lincoln deserves a place in the American conservative pantheon for one big reason: He led the nation to victory in a civil war that could have destroyed it, succeeding in this most basic of all conservative tasks.” But his inclusion of Lincoln in the conservative pantheon does not prevent him from identifying as “conservative” southern defenders of states’ rights, such as John Calhoun, as well as Calhoun’s sharpest critic, the northern Whig Daniel Webster. To Lincoln the conservative, add on the conservative side Lincoln’s greatest vilifiers, the post–Civil War southerners who championed the view of the war as a Lost Cause in which, as Allitt describes their grievance, “a virtuous, godly people had justifiably seceded,” only to be crushed by “a numerically overwhelming foe.”

It will not do, then, to look for “conservatism” in a single set of policy positions or even a single stance on the central question of the day. The conservative sensibility begins with an attachment to some aspect of the social order and the impulse to protect it from threats arising from any and all directions. But what the qualities of the social order in need of protection actually are and what truly threatens them are issues that have always been highly contested. We find different kinds of conservatives taking different positions on major issues; what they have in common is the understanding that change often if not always comes with risk. Aconservative crank who hates America because he thinks egalitarianism’s leveling tendencies have paved over the possibility of great achievement is no less a conservative than a conservative who cherishes American society for doing away with arbitrary hierarchical or class barriers to personal achievement.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that the American constitutional order itself and the principles on which the American political system was founded are unmistakably liberal in the classical sense of the term, as was the colonial society out of which the United States arose. One essential element of liberal society is dynamism born of free-market economic arrangements. Thus we have a branch of conservatism paradoxically dedicated to protecting the conditions that allow for change.

Because the task many conservatives have set themselves to (whether they see it that way or not) is the conservation of classical liberalism, in many cases they are not simply enemies of liberalism, even if progressives see them that way. Because progressives know that progressivism entails forward motion, most of them conclude that conservatism must entail backward motion. This view is mostly wrong. More often than not, the conservative position amounts to nothing more than a brake applied in the name of stability on the forward motion that classical liberalism set in train.

Allitt’s approach to conservatism is not schematic. In his introduction, he offers the view that “conservatism is, first of all, an attitude to social and political change that looks for support to the ideas, beliefs, and habits of the past and puts more faith in the lessons of history than in the abstractions of political philosophy.” He notes further that conservatism “has often been reactive, responding to perceived political and intellectual challenges.” Though clearly not exhaustive, and clearly broad, these markers enable us to see that American conservatism cuts a broader and richer swath through American history than even conservatives themselves have generally understood.

Allitt spends considerable time on the question of slavery and conservatism. He is right to do so, since, as he notes, conservative writers of the modern era have had little to say on the subject, perhaps out of embarrassment. Indeed, one might venture the conclusion that slavery is the reason for modern conservatism’s loss of its sense of a past dating back before the middle of the 20th century and the appearance of the writings of Hayek, Mises, and Kirk. The 19th century’s conservative defenders of slavery were defending the indefensible. But it is a little too easy to say nothing more than that Calhoun was wrong. Allitt reminds us that some conservatives who saw a great wrong in slavery were nevertheless more worried about the destabilizing effects of trying to speed its end, especially according to the schedule of the more fervent abolitionists. Some feared that moving too rapidly would provoke secession and civil war. It is uncomfortable, to say the least–or it should be–for most modern conservatives to put themselves in the shoes of those thinking about this issue at the time.

An affection for what’s best in the social order and the urge to protect it are qualities that inevitably lead to a degree of tolerance for the defects of the social order. This is the problem of conservatism, then and now. A conservative sensibility would not necessarily lead to a defense of slavery or toleration of it: See Allitt’s characterization of Lincoln. One might instead note that Calhoun’s racial theorizing was novel and radical more than it was conservative. But a defense in the 1830s or 1850s of slavery as a social institution would necessarily have been conservative.

Progressivism has its central problem as well: the tendency to take the positive aspects of social order as a given and to assume that the attempt to remedy its defects can be achieved without risk to what’s already good and perhaps essential. One would welcome a book by Professor Allitt about the progressive tendency in American intellectual history, one that would bring this central problem of progressivism into similarly sharp relief.

But for conservatives, Allitt seems to offer a bargain: In exchange for a frank acknowledgment of the problem slavery posed for and exposes in conservatism, conservatives can lay claim to the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Webster, Lincoln, and a place in American intellectual history far broader and deeper than most of them had probably contemplated before. This is a fair recovery of an important element of conservatism’s past. It will be interesting to see whether liberals mount a campaign to deprive conservatives of their claim on these jewels, leaving them only with the self-dramatizing blowhards and crackpots who are also well represented in The Conservatives (as they would certainly be in The Progressives). If so, such an initiative would be very conservative on the part of the liberals–a search for support in the ideas of the past.

Meanwhile, if anyone ever needs a book to recommend as a clear and concise introduction to the development of conservative thought in America, The Conservatives is it. Before its arrival on the scene, there was no obvious candidate.

Mr. Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the editor of Policy Review. He is the author of The Political Teachings of Jesus.

Click here to view full panel: http://globalsolutions.org/icc_hill_briefing_july17th

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: As we mentioned earlier, another presidential nominee is in the spotlight this week, Sonia Sotomayor. The news of her nomination to the Supreme Court has dominated headlines, along with the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on same-sex marriages. Joining us now to discuss those stories are Dan Gilgoff, senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, and Tod Lindberg, research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Political philosopher Tod Lindberg, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, author of “The Political Teachings of Jesus” and co-author of “Means to an End: US Interest in the International Criminal Court,” reflects on the role of values in presidential approaches to foreign policy, how to translate ethics into policy, and whether there is a place for moral convictions in the world of international politics.

Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause? And just how to do it? No? Others have. Their answers have ranged from Cain’s original “Abel, with my bare hands” to Hitler’s “all the Jews, mainly by gas,” and the widespread Hutu view in the Rwanda of 1994, “the Tutsis, with machetes.” The question burns today for the government of Sudan and in the Congo.

Humanity will never be able to solve the problem of Cain, of fratricidal rage born of jealousy or some equivalent passion, nor of the more calculating retail impulse to profit in some way from doing someone in. Thus, for individuals, we maintain a system of laws, police forces, courts, prisons, mental hospitals, and, for extreme cases, the apparatus of the death penalty to punish those whom an impulse or cold calculation has led to murder—thereby deterring (so we hope) at least some others from embarking on a similar course of action. But we understand that our system is no solution to the problem of murder.

It is not obvious, however, or should not be, that because the human condition gives us no prospect of ridding the world of murder, we must be similarly pessimistic about our ability to rid the world of murder on the scale of populations. Mass atrocities, up to the point of genocide, are not simply collective acts of individual murder. Though genocides are not uniform in character, they are all political. Genocide constitutes the most extreme possible terms for settling differences: a stronger party’s decision to annihilate or extirpate the weaker. Genocide is organized. It entails a project, which in turn requires leaders with a purpose in mind and their acquisition of the means of death, including followers to do the dirty work.

We simply do not have to put up with this. By “we,” let me be clear. I do not mean “humanity,” although I would welcome the collective conclusion of mankind that genocide is unacceptable. I do not mean the “international community,” although a decision on the part of all national governments to refrain from engaging in mass atrocities at home or abroad would be most welcome, as would a collective intention to stop and punish leaders or would-be leaders seeking to deviate from the norm. What I really mean by “we” is “we who are strong enough to stop the murderous bastards before they can get away with it.”

This “we” is an inclusive group; everyone with a will and a way is welcome. But its purpose must go far beyond declaratory well-wishing. It is not a bad thing but a grossly insufficient thing to join in choruses of “never again,” the familiar refrain after something really bad has happened—say, 6 million dead Jews, 2 million dead Cambodians, or 800,000 dead Tutsis. No, we must act to stop the malefactors.

And by “we,” in the last analysis, I mean the United States.

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We have the privilege to live at a time of unprecedented prosperity, and we know how to generate more of it. Anybody who thinks the present financial crisis has changed these fundamental facts is engaged in the time-honored human propensity for self-dramatization Our prosperity is accompanied by a likewise unprecedented confluence of power and moral sensibility—or at least it seems to be. With regard to atrocities on a mass scale, we have the means at our disposal to stop what we and all right-thinking people know is wrong. It comes down to the choice of whether to act or not.

If we are unable to muster the political will to prevent or halt genocide and mass atrocities, the long-term consequences are truly chilling to contemplate. This is of course especially true with regard to future victims: the terror of being rounded up and held at gunpoint, especially in the final few seconds, as the shooting starts; of feeling the first slash of a swinging machete, knowing that more are coming. But it is also true for us. Future generations more committed to the principles we espouse but fail to act on may look back with disdain or disgust on our failure. Or, more horrifying still, future generations will conclude that all moral reasoning in political matters is sentimental superstructure that should be jettisoned in the interest of clarity about the first and only true principle of politics: the strong take care of themselves and the weak are on their own.

The progress of politics and civilization itself is nothing other than the long, difficult, incomplete struggle to overcome the original political principle of self-regard by instilling in the strong an empathetic regard for others. The first successes came in the mists of prehistory in the form of small groups ceasing to fight among themselves—clan, tribe, city. With the spread in terms of territory and clout of rights-regarding nation-states in recent centuries, it became possible to imagine cooperative efforts among such states to extend a principle of regard for others across international boundaries, indeed globally. In 1998, the NATO alliance—led, of course, by the United States—went to war against Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing and atrocities in Kosovo, averting a potential genocide in close proximity to NATO territory. But in 2004, after the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, declared that atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan amounted to genocide, the response of the United States and others was uncertain and halting at best. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and millions evacuated their homes for refugee and displaced-persons camps. There they remain.

So, in recent memory, “we” have acted effectively, showing that we can, and “we” have failed to act effectively, revealing a gap between our professed moral sense and what we are prepared to do to vindicate it. The test of progress for this generation is whether we will be able to extend the principle of regard for others by acting when necessary to prevent or halt genocide.

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Words are not enough; however, words matter. All things considered, when it comes to the importance of preventing genocide and mass atrocities, we talk a pretty good game. First there are American words. It is (or should be) a point of pride for believer and atheist alike that our founding national document, the Declaration of Independence, affirms that people are endowed by their Creator with, first of all, a right to life. The right to live can be especially difficult to vindicate. There is no one to whom a drowning man can appeal; it is not wrong for the water to drown him. But it surely is wrong if governments, wholly the creations of people, deny or violate this basic right. The Declaration sets forth the correct aspiration. True, certain historical conduct—the treatment of Native Americans in particular—miserably fails to measure up to the stated aspiration. But should we therefore abandon the aspiration? Of course not. We discredit only ourselves when we fail to live up to our ideals. The ideals themselves are not discredited.

Then there are words inspired by America’s founding that, in their drafting, sought to extend those ideals to the rest of the world, words in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These documents affirm the rights of the individual against states or other actors that violate those rights. But the affirmation is more theoretical than actual, since the UN Charter also embraces a doctrine of sovereign right according to which states may not interfere in the internal affairs of others.

This aspect of the Charter gives states so inclined a ready cloak behind which to repress their people—including by commission of mass atrocities. This is what I mean when I say that words matter but are not enough. The UN’s universalist human-rights creed is honored far more in the breach than in the observance. At the same time, the UN Security Council is also charged to act in the interest of peace and security, which can create an opening in response to extreme situations in which large numbers of lives are at risk.

In 1946, with the dimensions of the horror of the Holocaust still unfolding, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring genocide a crime under international law. Genocide “shocks the conscience of mankind,” the resolution memorably declared. This effort to “internationalize” the crime of genocide might have been the world body’s finest hour. The ensuing Genocide Convention of 1948 provides for “the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide” whether “committed in time of peace or time of war” and elaborates a definition, which includes “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The Convention isn’t self-executing, in that it doesn’t compel its signatories to take any particular action if the terms of the treaty are violated. But it does provide an international legal and, more important, moral framework for preventive action in response to the risk of genocide.

Breakthrough though it was, one unintended consequence of the Genocide Convention has been a serious problem. The definition of genocide is good as far as it goes, and the prevention mandate seems to allow latitude for timely action against would-be perpetrators. But whether “genocide” as defined in the treaty is actually occurring or about to occur is a complicated question both epistemologically and legally. For if you act to prevent genocide and succeed, there is no genocide—and so you cannot prove you have prevented one. Moreover, those you act against can claim you have violated their sovereign rights, and the argument will carry weight.

If, on the other hand, there is a legal finding of genocide, then it is too late for prevention. All that is left is mitigation. Moreover, if “genocide” is the trigger for action, then the bar is rather high: Atrocities short of genocide may somehow end up as tolerable, or at least tolerated. In 2005, a year after Colin Powell announced the U.S. finding of a genocide in Darfur, a UN special inquiry issued a report saying that while criminal atrocities had taken place in Sudan for which perpetrators needed to be held accountable, it lacked the basis for a conclusion that those crimes amounted to genocide. The bloodstained rulers in Khartoum were delighted to characterize the report as a vindication.

A further attempt to “internationalize” the Declaration’s “right to life” came in 2005, when the World Summit at the United Nations embraced in its “Outcome Document” the principle of the “responsibility to protect.” The doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” known colloquially as “R2P,” holds that a state has an obligation to protect those living on its territory from atrocities (specified in the Outcome Document as “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity”). If a state is unable or unwilling to fulfill this requirement, the protection function falls to the international community, which can take measures up to and including the use of force in order to protect populations. With sovereign right comes sovereign responsibility. The principle of noninterference gives way in circumstances of mass atrocities.

I had a small role in the adoption of R2P. Congress (principally in the person of Frank Wolf, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Virginia) chartered a bipartisan task force on UN reform run by the U.S. Institute of Peace and co-chaired by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. I ran the Task Force’s expert group on human rights. Not without difficulty, we were able to include in the June 2005 consensus report a strong endorsement of the “responsibility to protect.” This was the first major bipartisan statement on behalf of R2P, which before had mainly been the province of liberal internationalists and human-rights groups on the Left.

The Task Force recommendation in turn influenced the Bush State Department to back the concept at the World Summit. In the absence of the Gingrich-Mitchell recommendation, the State Department’s traditional institutional wariness as well as ideological conservative skepticism would likely have led to U.S. opposition, which would have doomed the project.

As for the objections, the main concern has been (and remains) that the United States, by embracing R2P, will subject itself to the whims of the “international community” on whether and when to intervene in fulfillment of the protection function. Thus Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation has expressed alarm that “the United States would cede control—any control—of its armed forces to the caprice of the world community without the consent of the American people.” In the extreme case, in this view, the U.S. might incur a legal obligation to go to war whether it wants to or not. The latter concern is so far down a trail of speculation piled on intemperate inference on top of worst-case hypothesizing that it hardly bears consideration. In its less extreme form, this is the question of how much the U.S. should engage with others to find common ends or interests and pursue them jointly.

Power is power, and the United States has more of it than any other state. But international political support is of value, and the U.S. does benefit from seeking it in fora that others regard as legitimate. We will never give the UN Security Council the last word. Other countries don’t like that, but then a Kosovo comes along, Russia blocks Security Council action, and people of good will realize that the price of calling off war because the Security Council hasn’t authorized it will be several hundred thousand dead Kosovars.

In other words, one should try one’s best at the UN for the simple reason that one might succeed. But failure at the UN does not end the discussion, as the U.S. determination in the months leading up to the war in Iraq demonstrated, and certainly should not when a genocide is brewing.

A more practical concern is that R2P would simply be used against Israel. This is true, but no more of R2P than of everything else, alas. Given bad will, any principle can be distorted almost into its opposite in the application. Vladimir Putin’s Russia cleverly cited the responsibility to protect as a reason for its invasion of Georgia in 2008—it was just acting to protect Russians in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, don’t you see! It fell to the Swedish foreign ministry to inform the Russians that the “responsibility to protect” here was Georgia’s, since it was on Georgian territory that the supposed offense against Russian ethnics was taking place—and that in case Georgia failed, the responsibility would fall to the “international community.”

All of these documents, from the Declaration to the UN Charter to the R2P language in the Outcome Document, are subject to the criticism that, again, they are mere words on paper. Whom have these words actually protected? The answer is that these words are tools of moral suasion. The principles they espouse represent some of our best conclusions about how the world should be and what we should do in pursuit of such a world. They are, of course, works in progress and remain subject to refinement. But we can’t say we haven’t really thought about genocide and mass atrocities, whether they matter to us or what we should do when confronted with them. By now, we know.

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Institutions cannot respond effectively to the threat of genocide and mass atrocities in the absence of political will on the part of their members. Nevertheless, institutions can be more or less adroit, responsive, and effective. Here, we have a long way to go, though a range of promising steps has been taken.

Let me offer two snapshots of the problem and the response. The first comes from 2005, during work on the Gingrich-Mitchell report. The second comes from work I did last year on the Genocide Prevention Task Force,¹ which issued a report in December 2008 with recommendations to the U.S. government on forestalling the threat of atrocities. The institutional change over the course of three years has been staggering.

In 2005, all was confusion, and the Darfur situation in particular was a frustrating daisy chain of inaction: Everybody who was potentially in a position to do something useful—from the Secretary General’s office at the United Nations to the UN Security Council to the European Union to NATO to the African Union mission on the ground in Darfur to the United States government itself—was full of explanations about why somebody else had to do something first.

In 2004, the African Union (AU) deployed a small number of troops to Sudan to protect outside monitors of a cease-fire agreement. They were able to do little to contain the depredations Sudanese government forces were inflicting on Darfur in conjunction with the Janjaweed militia, irregular forces of nomadic Arabic-speaking tribes at odds with the sedentary population of Western Sudan. As was well known to everyone involved in early 2005, the AU force was too small and woefully underequipped and unprepared. To be even minimally effective, the African Union needed a package of assistance that would include communications and intelligence assets, lift, planning and headquarters help, and training. Where to get it?

Well, maybe a military alliance with serious capabilities along those lines, like NATO. Or maybe NATO acting in conjunction with the European Union, which was already providing the main funding for the AU mission. Or maybe the European Union itself, if it could get its act together on its desire for a “common foreign and security policy.” Or maybe just the United States, leading a coalition of the willing or even acting on its own, if necessary.

It turned out that in the previous year, in the summer of 2004, the NATO military command under General James Jones (now Barack Obama’s national- security adviser) had begun a “prudent planning” exercise on Darfur—essentially, an inquiry into what might be done to help out the AU. It was undertaken without the authorization of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s political decision-making body.

That exercise was interrupted when several allies, notably France, objected to NATO assigning itself a role in Africa. Some saw in the objection an effort to protect the EU’s turf. The planning didn’t cease, but it moved out of NATO auspices to the U.S. European Command, our military’s headquarters on the continent. As matters stood, there was no prospect of a NATO mission—but it seemed to us that matters need not have stood there.

We knew that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had given a couple of speeches urging NATO to assist the African Union’s Darfur efforts. One ambassador at NATO told us he thought this represented an opening. The Europeans who were reluctant to involve NATO would not change their minds based merely on a speech by Annan, but if the Secretary General actually sent a formal letter to NATO asking for alliance help, that might change the debate. It would be one thing to say NATO shouldn’t insert itself into Africa, quite another to decline a UN request for help.

Does this sound ridiculous? Hundreds of thousands of lives potentially at stake over whether the contents of a speech are transferred to a letter? It does, and this is an indication of just how ill-equipped the “international community” as a whole was to deal with an emergency on the scale of Darfur.

Skeptics at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels, meanwhile, informed us that the African Union would be reluctant to accept assistance from the West’s military alliance, since doing so would smack of neo-imperialism and colonialism. A better avenue would be through the European Union, according to the European Union—not that the EU actually had a plan.

So why not have Annan send a letter? We asked that question at a meeting with senior UN officials on the top floor of the organization’s building in New York. The answer was that Annan’s representatives had sounded out NATO and determined that there was simply no support for the alliance’s involvement in Africa. Annan couldn’t possibly ask for help only to be rebuked, explained Mark Malloch Brown, Annan’s top adviser (now an intimate of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown).

I found myself, to my surprise, shouting at Malloch Brown from the staff seats in the second row: Their information was simply wrong, there was substantial will at NATO to do just that. What was needed was a letter—Annan had already given speeches saying the same thing, all he needed to do was send a letter, just a letter. My importuning, though impolitic, got Malloch Brown’s attention and drew an invitation for follow-up on the matter. On the train on the way back to Washington, we drafted an e-mail explaining the situation as we had found it, why everything was so horribly stuck, and how it might at last get unstuck.

We quickly heard through intermediaries that though Annan was favorably disposed to the idea of a formal request, he didn’t think he had the authority to write such a letter—he didn’t want to get out too far in front of the Security Council on a matter that was subject to difficult ongoing negotiations there.

So now what? Another avenue to change the debate in NATO would be a letter directly from the African Union asking for assistance in Darfur—notwithstanding the patronizing assurance we had received that the African Union could not conceivably accept the neocolonialist assistance of monstrous Americans who had invaded poor Iraq.

Success. For what Annan could not write personally, he evidently could get written. After days of back-channel exchanges with Annan’s office, a letter arrived at NATO headquarters on April 26, 2005 from African Union chairman Alpha Konare specifically requesting NATO’s help in Darfur. Hard upon it, NATO’s North Atlantic Council—the same body that had insisted on an end to the previous year’s “prudent planning” exercise on how the genocide might be interrupted—formally approved the assistance.

I make no claim about the efficacy or adequacy of that NATO assistance. The best one can say about it is that things could have been worse. More than a million people in displaced-person and refugee camps are better than more than a million dead. The presence of peacekeepers, though woefully inadequate, seems nevertheless to have had some deterrent effect on the monstrous Janjaweed militia and the government.

The chief fact we found as we tried to manage the rules of the international system in 2005 was a high level of dysfunctionality. Nobody really knew what was on the minds of the key players in the African Union. The United Nations Secretary General didn’t know what was possible at NATO. NATO itself was uncertain about getting involved in Africa. Some Europeans seemed more interested in protecting their African turf than in action that might help those at risk. Meanwhile, the only organization that seemed genuinely interested in taking action, the African Union, was hobbled by a grievous lack of resources and capacity, and didn’t know how or whom to ask for help.

So what do you need to deal with a situation like Darfur? You need soldiers, and they had better be well trained and well led, otherwise you can end up (as the UN unfortunately has on more than one occasion) with peacekeepers who also dabble as sexual predators on the populations they are supposed to be protecting. You need equipment, like armored personnel carriers, and better still, helicopters. You need a mandate that enables your soldiers to take effective action, so they’re actually able to protect the locals in danger (not just to protect, as was notoriously the case in Darfur, the cease-fire monitors). Above all, you need the political will to take action.

And you really need to have figured out how to put together all of the above before a crisis spirals out of control. That means you’ve got to do the tedious work of getting people, governments, and institutions to think about what they need and plan in advance on how to get it. It means a hundred different letters and memorandums of understanding. The machinery of international politics was not developed to address problems such as Darfur. If we want to address them, and we must, then we have to retool and refine what we’ve got. To that end, the Gingrich-Mitchell report included a number of recommendations on things like “capacity-building,” an unlovely bit of foreign policy jargon, but one that nonetheless captures the imperative to close the gap between what you have and what you need.

_____________

Fast forward a few years later: Making the fact-finding rounds again, this time with the Genocide Prevention Task Force, I was astounded to see that all of the things we recommended in Gingrich-Mitchell were starting to happen. I don’t say these changes occurred because Gingrich-Mitchell recommended them. But we had clearly been onto something in terms of identifying the gaps and roadblocks in the international system.

Far from resisting American or European assistance on neocolonial or any other grounds, the African Union and other organizations on the continent welcome help. They are increasingly finding the political will to confront the continent’s malefactors. They have been working to develop “early warning” systems. They have the troops, but they need training and equipment before they will be fully prepared to act swiftly in response to trouble, and that’s where the developed world can be useful.

NATO, meanwhile, is in the process of figuring out how to do more in partnership with others and is favorably disposed to helping out with peace building and peacekeeping missions conducted under UN or other auspices. A deputy secretary general at NATO now has the responsibility to serve as the focal point for engagement with other organizations and institutions. A document outlining how NATO will work with the UN has been approved. And there is now a NATO liaison officer to the African Union.

The emphasis on Africa is obvious, but mass atrocities are not, of course, a problem unique to Africa. For the first time, the charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations now includes a provision on human rights. The UN Secretary General now has a special adviser on the “responsibility to protect” as well as a special adviser on the prevention of genocide. These offices are small, and they necessarily view their subjects from a UN perspective, which is too limiting for U.S. policymakers. But again, the more constructive the UN can be, the better.

One could go on. The point is that governments and international and regional organizations have made a beginning of taking the problem of preventing genocide and mass atrocities with the level of seriousness the subject demands. On the home front, the Genocide Prevention Task Force offered a large dose of specific guidance on internal government reform that holds out the promise of more effective and timely policymaking. This is no place for a discussion of the specifics of the interagency process and military planning procedures. Suffice it to say that better internal organization is within reach.

The missing institutional piece on the international scene now, it seems to me, flows from the absence of coordination and mutual awareness among the various parties that are now taking the issue seriously. The Task Force recommended that the U.S. government undertake a “major diplomatic initiative” whose purpose would be to put together a formal network linking all the parties that engage on the issue—governments, non-governmental organizations, and regional and international institutions. The idea would be to share information and strategize responses to emerging threats.

The report does not quite say so, but it would be prudent to have someplace to go where people with a record of taking the issue seriously and with genuine moral authority gather, in the all-too-likely event that the UN Security Council finds itself paralyzed once again in the face of mass atrocities. Such a network would have no legal authority, but it might well have moral authority of the sort that contributes to the generation of political will.

In the end, unsurprisingly, effective action may come down to U.S. power and will. Those of us who see an imperative for action in these cases should welcome encouragement to that end from wherever it may come. And realistically, it would most likely be due only to very poor diplomacy if the United States found itself without supporters and allies in preventing or stopping genocide.

_____________

The response to Darfur has to be judged a failure. But it has perhaps been a constructive failure that has galvanized people to think about how to make the system more nimble in response to gathering dangers. Those with a profound distaste for “nonconsensual military intervention”—that would be an “invasion” to the plain speakers among us—should be all the more concerned about timely action to identify the gathering danger of mass atrocities and nip the problem in the bud. Those with a will to argue for whatever is necessary to halt a slide into mass slaughter must realize that they will be most effective in galvanizing a response if they amass a chorus of the like-minded to speak as one on the moral imperative.

But we cannot assure ourselves that our best planning will always enable us to act early, nor can we count on having a phalanx of the like-minded alongside us. In the extreme case, halting or failing to halt genocide has come down to whether the political will exists within the United States to act. We will not be spared from such decisions in the future. If we are serious, we have to be willing to take upon ourselves the burden of providing the leadership, the arms, the troops, and the resources, and of bearing the casualties, the reversals of fortune, and the inevitable complaints and second-guessing.

Because the would-be genocidaires are out there, thinking about it: whom to kill; how many; how to do it. Whether they can get away with it.

Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the editor of Policy Review.

¹The Task Force, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, was a joint project of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Academy of Diplomacy.

The singular advantage of being in the opposition is that the majority has to make the first move, and unlike chess, going first conveys no advantage the majority doesn’t already enjoy. What was striking last week about the House’s consideration of the stimulus package was the glimpse it offered of a potentially valuable political strategy for Republicans. Call it “Triangulation II”–the GOP effort to gain advantage by dividing Democrats in Congress from President Obama.

In its previous incarnation, you will recall, triangulation was the strategy Bill Clinton pursued when faced with a new GOP congressional majority in 1995. The idea was to assume a posture of reasonableness between what he portrayed as two extremes: the big-government liberalism of congressional Democrats and the right-wing radicalism of the GOP. Clinton decided he could do business with the congressional majority where he was broadly supportive of the result and where public opinion was favorable (welfare reform, tax cuts, spending restraint), while at the same time painting himself as tamping down GOP excess. But he could oppose the GOP outright when it overstepped (the government shutdown). He decided explicitly not to make the cause of congressional Democrats his own. The political realm in 1995-96 had three distinct poles: the GOP congressional majority, the Democratic minority, and the Democratic White House.

Triangulation II is going to be somewhat different because of the different political balance of power, but the essential idea is the same: to obtain advantage by substituting a tripartite configuration for the bipolar partisan split. Republicans will try to portray themselves as reasonable, responsive, and serious not in comparison with Democrats in general, but in comparison with liberal House and Senate Democrats–a case they will make by taking seriously Obama’s professed desire to put bitter partisan divisions aside.

It’s important not to misunderstand the character of the unanimous GOP House vote (with 11 Democrats joining) against the stimulus package. Left-leaning commentators have decried the GOP for still not “getting it”–that their policies and preferences have been discredited by events and repudiated by voters. Conservative commentators, meanwhile, have tended to interpret the vote as the rediscovery of true conservative principle: making a stand for what’s right after years of vacillation and uncertainty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that both sides are viewing the question through their respective ideological prisms, their conclusions are analytically identical; the difference is whether you describe the result as virtuous or wicked.

They’re also mainly wrong. The reason Republicans voted unanimously against the package is that they had no say in the drafting of the legislation. The bill was entirely the product of the House Democratic leadership, which relied on the prerogative of absolute majority rule in the lower chamber to craft a bill without GOP input or even consultation.

No doubt, Democrats hoped for and may even have expected some GOP support for the bill, if not from Republicans’ finally “getting it,” then from the minority party’s fear of opposing the wishes of a popular new president in a time of national crisis. And that is where the Democratic miscalculation comes in. Yes, the new president is popular. Yes, something must be done. But Obama’s popularity doesn’t necessarily transfer to Democrats in Congress. And it does not follow that because the Democratic House majority has the power to offer its own answer to the question of what must be done that the answer is presumptively correct.

House Republican leaders were quite astute politically to remind Obama of his post-partisan or trans-partisan aspirations at their White House meeting before the vote. In the game of Triangulation II, he is cast as a potentially reasonable player and one whose heart is in the right, bipartisan place. Republicans want to work with him, but that has to mean more than voting in favor of legislation they had no part in crafting. It is up to Obama to make a choice between accommodating the wishes of congressional Democrats and of being true to his aspirations.

And about the wishes of congressional Democrats: The more independent voters hear about the details of the stimulus package, especially the many elements that have next to nothing to do with stimulating the economy, the less they seem to like it. Democrats put the legislation out there, and Republicans now have ample opportunity to criticize it in all its hideous detail. This affords them the opportunity to describe how they would have stimulated the economy differently and better–and with a little polling and focus-group research, more popularly.

What, then, does Obama do? Either he casts his lot with the Democratic congressional majority, taking its priorities as his own. Or he decides to make a sincere effort to draw the GOP in–which means accepting some Republican legislative proposals. If Republicans are clever, the stimulus package is hardly the last time Obama will have to make such a choice.

In 2001, George W. Bush ceded vast influence to Senator Ted Kennedy in crafting the “No Child Left Behind” education reform bill, to the consternation of many conservatives. Subsequently, he mainly gave the GOP congressional majority its way, especially on spending, but also on a long string of social-issues legislation that became the most salient element of the GOP congressional brand going into the majority-losing 2006 election. Neither strategy was especially palatable to the players: the first mainly for reasons internal to the GOP; the second because of a popular perception of GOP excess.

That’s the dilemma in a nutshell: internal party division or a drift toward partisan excess. There is no obvious solution, for the simple reason that the president’s interests and the congressional majority’s interests diverge even if they are from the same party.

When the Democratic House majority has given Republicans no say, they have an opportunity to vote “no” precisely because they have had no say–and then knock on the White House door to complain. If the GOP becomes more sophisticated in its approach, its House leaders will become more systematic in fleshing out alternatives to Democratic legislation and doing their best to be seen offering their proposals to Obama as a starting point for post-partisan compromise.

Then comes the interesting hypothetical question of what to do if Obama says yes. The answer is that you’ve got to make a good-faith effort to do a deal.

That may bother some of those for whom ideological purity in opposition is top priority (and who have misconstrued the House GOP stimulus vote in those terms). But they will be able to take partial consolation in three areas: First, the ensuing legislation will be more conservative (or at least less liberal) than any conceivable alternative. Second, the GOP will have a persuasive case to take to voters that its proposals are more reasonable than those of congressional Democrats. Third, if the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership are at odds, the certain result will be turmoil among Democrats.

No political strategy is cost-free. The advantage of Triangulation II is that its focus on process enables Republicans to advance ideas they want in contrast to the legislative druthers of congressional Democrats. These can include pro-market measures, spending restraint, tax cuts, and general opposition to the return of big, bureaucratic government.

It seems unlikely that Obama will ultimately want to make many deals that cut the GOP in, but his post-partisan rhetoric has created an opening. Republicans will make the most of it by taking him at his word and asking for a place at the table–and by voting “no,” with their own proposals in hand, when they don’t get one.

Tod Lindberg, a WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor, is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and editor of Policy Review.

Here’s the main thought Republicans are consoling themselves with these days: Notwithstanding President-elect Barack Obama, a nearly filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate and the largest Democratic majority in the House of Representatives since 1993, the United States is still a center-right country. Sure, voters may be angry with Republicans now, but eventually, as the Bush years recede and the GOP modernizes its brand, a basically right-tilting electorate will come back home. Or, in the words of the animated rock band the Gorillaz, “I’m useless, but not for long/The future is comin’ on.”

Thus Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, in a recent op-ed: The United States “is indeed, as conservatives have been insisting in recent days, a center-right country.” On election night, former Bush guru Karl Rove opined on Fox News, “Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country, and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized it.” And it’s not just conservative pundits and operatives singing this song. Take Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who wrote an Oct. 27 cover essay “America the Conservative,” which argued that Obama will have to “govern a center-right nation” that “is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal.”

The only problem: It isn’t true. Or at least, not anymore. If you’d asked me a year ago whether the United States is really a center-right nation, I would have said yes –after pausing for a second to contemplate the GOP’s big congressional losses in 2006. At the time, Republicans cheered each other up by assuring ourselves that the worst was over: If you were running for Congress and survived 2006, you could hold your seat forever.

Tell that to Christopher Shays. After 2006, he was the sole surviving GOP House member from all of New England, but he went down this year, 51 to 48 percent. We are now two elections into something big. This month’s drubbing is just the latest sign that the country’s political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.

Here’s the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of 6 percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, “The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats.” This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.

Some analysts like to explain this shift by pointing to Democratic gains and Republican losses among particular regions and demographic groups, arguing that the GOP has growing problems winning over such areas as the Southwest and such groups as Latinos, educated professionals, Catholics and single women.

There’s something to this, but the Republican problem is actually larger and more categorical. In 2004, Republicans and Democrats each constituted 37 percent of the electorate. In the 2006 congressional election, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 38 percent to 36 percent and won big. This year, the Democrats made up a stunning 39 percent of the electorate, compared with just 32 percent for the Republicans. Add the fact that Obama outpolled McCain among independents, 52 percent to 48 percent, and you have a picture of a Republican Party that has lost its connection to the center of the electorate.

Shortly after the GOP convention, McCain looked as if he could still come back. But it was the “maverick” McCain, running against party type, who was winning over independents at that point, not a conservative campaigning as a conservative (compassionate or otherwise).

Perhaps, as Rove says, Obama was running to the center. But can anybody make a serious case that people were mistaking him for a center-right politician? Or even a “New Democrat” such as former President Bill Clinton? The McCain campaign was not shy about letting voters know about the elements of Obama’s record that marked him as a man of the left. Perhaps voters simply didn’t believe a word of it, but a better explanation is that a majority of them heard McCain’s warnings and just didn’t mind. Center-left nation, anyone?

And the GOP has been heading left, too. Exhibit A is the $700 billion government intervention to rescue the financial-services sector –proposed by the conservative party! It may have been necessary, but it would not have made Milton Friedman happy. Anyway, the quarrel about whether to spend $700 billion was so October.

Today, many Democrats are keen to see a chunk of the bailout cash go to help the auto industry, which has triggered Republican ire. I can see how supporting a bailout for the financial sector but opposing a bailout for Detroit is more conservative than supporting a bailout for both, but if that’s the distinction that makes you a conservative these days, liberals ought to be pretty happy with their prospects.

True, the percentage of voters describing themselves as “liberal” and “conservative” has held relatively constant through many election cycles, with self-described liberals checking in at 22 percent this time around (up one percentage point over 2004) and self-described conservatives at 34 percent (unchanged from 2004). The numbers may not have changed, but the views behind those labels certainly have. Nowadays, it’s a fair bet that most of those calling themselves “liberal” support gay marriage. In 1980, those same liberals were, no doubt, cutting-edge supporters of gay rights, but the notion of same-sex marriage would have occurred only to the most avant-garde. In 1980, having a teenage daughter who was pregnant out of wedlock would have ruled you out for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket. This year, it turned out to be a humanizing addition to the conservative vice presidential nominee’s resume.

We have only just begun to explore this new political landscape. The United States was indeed a center-right country for several decades, since the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, with his ability to peel off “boll weevil” Democrats to create a congressional majority. Clinton really did have to come to terms with governing a center-right nation. I was the editor of the Washington Times’ editorial page back then, and my most prized possession from the period is a personal thank-you note from then-Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen for our vigorous editorial support of the Clinton administration’s campaign to ratify NAFTA.

Don’t count on many Obama administration initiatives that conservatives can sign onto based on good old-fashioned conservative principle. On trade, for example, the question is whether today’s Democrats will succumb to the siren song of protectionism. It’s not just American conservatives who are worried; British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a pointed warning to Obama earlier this month.

Today’s Democrats may well overreach in much the same way that Republicans did after they won their congressional majority in 1994, when they took the “center” out of center-right. If so, Democratic hubris will create opportunities for the GOP to get a hearing.

And so far, center-left government is largely an abstraction for the country. People like the sound of it, especially against the backdrop of a financial crisis and recession. In these center-left times, voters are receptive –or rather, it is their receptiveness that makes these times center-left. But whether they will like the new Obama tilt in practice remains to be seen.

So Republicans should not despair. They will have plenty of time to work up a critique of Obama’s policies as they unfold. But Republicans should not count on Democratic failure –and they certainly should not regard it as inevitable because of a conservatism they impute to an electorate that has, shall we say, moved on.

Tod Lindberg is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the editor of Policy Review. He was an informal foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign.

Historians looking back on these tumultuous times will no doubt argue over the precise date on which the Age of Palin began. Her speech at the Republican National Convention on September 3 certainly catapulted her to national renown. But there is a good case to be made for her introductory appearance in Dayton, Ohio, five days before.

It’s all there: You have the same poise and panache Palin exhibited at the convention. You have the self-assurance of a champion high-school athlete who went on to bigger and better things (unlike in the gloomy Democratic, Bruce Springsteen version of life, in which it’s all downhill after your Glory Days). There’s the ability to deliver a barb with a smile. And above all, that day inaugurated arguably the most incoherent and blubbering partisan response to a candidate in the history of American politics–against which the charms of the candidate stood out even more clearly.

Let’s get this straight: Your party has just nominated for president a fellow who has been elected exactly once to the United States Senate, in an uncompetitive race, following a garden-variety stint in a state legislature. And your response to the GOP nominee’s choice for vice president–someone who has been elected once as governor following a stint as a small town mayor–is to decry the lack of experience? Nobody ever said Barack Obama was unqualified for the No. 2 spot on the ticket.

Had Hillary Clinton won the nomination and selected Obama as her running mate–which, being a savvy politician, she would certainly have done, in order to fire up his 18 million primary supporters–Obama would have been perfectly positioned. Either he would be preparing himself as vice president for his run for the Oval Office eight years hence. Or he would be experienced and tested in a national campaign that he would never be held responsible for losing, with a fundraising base beyond the imagination of Croesus. Instead, it’s McCain-Palin with the wind at their backs, and Palin who is being prepared as the outstanding future prospect for her party.

Now, you might think it hypocritical to criticize the inexperience of a vice presidential nominee who has similar experience to your presidential nominee, but that’s just a failure of the imagination. Indeed, hypocrisy was the strange charge Democrats decided to make against McCain and Palin: Having run against Obama all summer for his lack of experience and accomplishment, how dare John McCain pick as his running mate someone with (ahem) experience comparable to that of the Democratic candidate for president McCain had been criticizing?

Well, maybe because it is not a sign of the strength of a candidate at the top of a ticket to need the experience of Joe Biden (or Dick Cheney) in order to allay concerns that he’s not quite up to some aspects of the job. And, contrariwise, it is a sign of strength at the top when the nominee can look to the future and make a priority of party-building. Does anybody think that if Obama loses, he will have left his party in a stronger position by advancing the prospects of Joe Biden? Fortunately for Democrats, at least they’ve got Hillary in the wings.

But these weren’t the only hypocrisies in the air. Remember reading the discussions of Vice President Al Gore’s parenting skills in all the papers the day after his teenage son got busted for dope at high school? No? That would be because Gore called around to all the papers (including the Washington Times, where I was editorial page editor at the time) and asked us not to publish it, kids being kids and being owed some privacy. The newspapers didn’t. That was then: Given a preposterous Internet rumor that Sarah Palin was never pregnant with her four-month-old baby but faked it to cover up for her daughter, Bristol was fair game. This was a judgment shared among Democrats and, coincidentally, the media (the same ones who were also all over the John Edwards love-child story, remember?).

And so Democrats started pointing at the stunning “hypocrisy” of McCain putting Palin on the ticket in spite of her pregnant daughter. Shouldn’t all the GOP talk about family values and abstinence education have disqualified Palin? Because, after all, Bristol is getting married and keeping the baby, and if that isn’t a sure disqualification for someone’s mother for the vice presidency, what is?

Plus, Sarah Palin, we’ve been informed endlessly, is a hypocrite with a capital H. In all the obvious ways, such as being opposed to women’s rights while still having a career. Democrats have been at the forefront of cheering women on to break supposed glass ceilings, but only the right kind of women, which you can be pretty sure a Republican woman isn’t.

Then there’s all the pro-life business: It just took one columnist in Salon to expose the hypocrisy there: Palin had her baby tested for Down syndrome, and then–had the baby! If she were really pro-life, there wouldn’t have been any reason to have the test. As Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., explained:

We could ask, given that Palin had no doubts about seeing her pregnancy through, why she bothered to take a genetic test. Why not, as you might expect a woman in her position and with her outspoken beliefs to do, decline any testing or counseling? Of course, it seems very reasonable to want to know about the health of your baby and to have time to prepare (emotionally and otherwise) for a baby that may have a genetic disorder. But that doesn’t negate the fact that by having a blood test, Palin was given a choice about what to do. .  .  . Her supporters say that Trig signals that she practices what she preaches. Her decision to make her own choice but not grant it to others is a sign of her hypocrisy.

So let’s see if the pro-lifers can get this straight for a change: If you are going to have the baby anyway, you are not entitled to information about its health (even though the desire for such information is “very reasonable”), because some people who are not pro-life use such information as a basis for deciding whether to terminate their pregnancies. Got it?

But the most stunning hypocrisy of all, from the point of view of most Democrats and, coincidentally, the media again, was that McCain had promised a vice presidential nominee qualified for the job and then undertook such a haphazard, last-minute, incompetent vetting process that he found out all the things that Democrats and the media are so exercised about. And he went ahead with Sarah Palin anyway!

And just look at the bitter fruit McCain has reaped for all his “hypocrisies”: Palin has helped propel him ahead of Obama in national polls for the first time. Fifty-two percent of respondents in a Pew survey think she is ready to be president now. If people could vote only for vice president, they favor her over Biden 53-44 in a CNN poll. And the unknown governor of two weeks before is now the most popular Republican politician in the country.

Tod Lindberg, a WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor and Hoover Institution fellow, is editor of Policy Review.

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.

Of course, the choice between realism and idealism is a false one: U.S. foreign policy must be firmly rooted in both national interests and values. But now, after two successive presidents of opposite political parties (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) have argued that spreading American values is itself a vital interest, there is growing skepticism in many quarters about whether trying to do so is worth significant costs, or even a true interest of the United States at all. Facts matter, and after several difficult years of pursuing a foreign policy framed as a fight for American values, more are wondering whether the sacrifice is worth it. In the view of many policymakers, politicians, analysts, and average citizens, the time has come to have a more realistic foreign policy — scaling back the United States’ global ambitions, respecting the limits to America’s capabilities and will, recognizing and embracing the constraints of the international system, and maintaining a healthy skepticism about the broad applicability of American values.

But if the values agenda has been discredited among many on both the left and the right and a greater realism is the preferred alternative, what would such a strategy look like? Moving beyond the slogans, would a truly values-free foreign policy really secure U.S. interests, strengthen U.S. power, and draw the sustained support of the American people? We think not. American values are an indispensable component of the U.S. role in the world — they are a key part of what unites the United States to allies in Europe and elsewhere and distinguishes the United States from countries like China. Instead of dividing conservatives and liberals, American values in foreign policy can in fact translate into a moral core that both sides can rally around. In the current political environment, as we approach the first post -9/11, post-Bush election, building such a policy bridge will be difficult. But given the stakes, it is imperative.

The emphasis placed on promoting liberal values internationally has drawn increasing hostility among traditional liberals and within the Democratic Party. Many of those who once embraced the proud liberal tradition of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy find themselves questioning their assumptions. And for those liberals who still embrace the importance of values, their numbers are fewer. According to a June 2006poll commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, only 35 percent of Democrats said that the United States should “help establish democracy in other countries” — whereas 64 percent of Republicans responded favorably.¹

This skepticism is driven by several factors. First, and most fundamental, is the fact that this approach is so closely identified with President Bush and his administration ’s policies. In the wake of 9/11, Bush tapped into many common (and bipartisan) themes about the enduring importance of American values, but his vision is infused with a religiosity that leaves many liberals nervous. Yet even when he got his rhetoric right — for example, many liberals admired statements like his November 2003 speech at the National Endowment for Democracy — the means he chose to implement policies, such as the war in Iraq, have proven very costly. The result now is that for many on the left, efforts to pursue policies largely rooted in values, especially democracy promotion, have become discredited and are increasingly unpopular politically.

For some liberals, the political difficulty of supporting a values-based foreign policy stems from a second factor: the structural incentives of the current political environment. Because an unpopular president has so closely identified his policies with the promotion of values, liberals are driven to oppose him. In fact, the president ’s leadership style has offered very little in return, even to those liberals who might agree with him. So for many on the left, if Bush is for it, they must be against it — even if this means embracing the cognitive dissonance of turning away from long-held beliefs and traditions. For many liberals, it has become politically incorrect to admit it when Bush has actually gotten something right. With Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress, these incentives of opposition are now also institutional. This creates a dynamic similar to that of the aftermath of the 1994congressional elections, when the new Republican majority turned increasingly inward in opposition to the internationalism of the Clinton administration. Whereas the Bush team came into office in 2001 with an “abc” policy — anything but Clinton — the Democratic Congress today, and a possible Democratic president in 2009, will be tempted to do exactly the same: anything but Bush.

But liberal skepticism is more than structural or institutional — it is also internal to the debates among different camps within liberal politics. The history of the past seven years — and the consequences of a policy perceived as driven more by values than interests — has been sobering for a number of left-leaning members of the foreign policy establishment. Many supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the same reasons that they supported confronting Saddam Hussein during the Clinton years. And many applauded President Bush when he talked about the importance of democracy promotion. Yet now that the costs of such policies are apparent — whether in terms of political capital, U.S. global prestige, or blood and treasure — many in the foreign policy elite have become more cautious, scaling back ambitions and endorsing more realistic goals. For many mainstream foreign policy liberals, the downfall of Britain ’s Tony Blair — who championed values-based concepts like “humanitarian intervention” during the late 1990s, — is a stark warning about the costs of embracing such policies too tightly.

The intellectual and political disconnect between the liberal establishment and the liberal grassroots activists is growing, especially over U.S. foreign policy and the purpose and use of American power. The convulsions within the political left that began in the late 1990s — illustrated by the rise of the antiglobalization movement and division over the Clinton administration ’s military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and its 1998 air strikes against Iraq — have only become more severe and divisive. To be sure, this reflects anger with President Bush. But it is more than that. When it comes to national security issues, the left has become splintered in a way not seen since the 1970s, when Vietnam split the Democratic party and ruined the post-World Warii liberal establishment. A similar dynamic is at work today as a new generation of liberal activists (fueled by the power of the blogosphere) rages not just against Bush, but against a Democratic foreign policy establishment they perceive as aiding and abetting the Bush agenda — central to which is the promotion of American values. If this divide deepens, it will become very difficult for Democratic leaders to embrace explicitly values-centered policies even if they want to.

The growing discomfort with the promotion of American values in foreign policy is felt not only by those on the left. Increasingly, conservatives are having second thoughts about the extent to which U.S. foreign policy should be driven by ideology and the promotion of values ahead of interests. Since the Bush administration still dominates conservative politics, the right remains more strongly identified with the values agenda, and the wariness among conservatives is more muted than among liberals. But the recent rise of “realists” — as illustrated by the personnel changes at the Defense Department and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, greater pragmatism at the State Department, and the return to prominence of figures like former Secretary of State James Baker and Brent Scowcroft — has been heralded as a rebalancing away from what many argue were the ideological excesses of the president ’s first four years in office. Like liberals, conservatives are contemplating their future beyond the Bush presidency — and this debate will only intensify as the focus turns from the current administration to the one that will take office in January 2009.

In several respects, the factors driving conservatives’ frustrations with the values agenda mirror the frustrations on the left. The first issue is a practical one: The American people ’s deepening disillusionment with the Bush administration’s policies is raising the political costs of supporting the Bush agenda. Bush’s unpopularity makes supporting his policies risky. Put another way, the president ’s success at branding his administration’s actions as part of a values-based policy is directly related to the political efficacy of supporting it. When it was seen as working, the bandwagon was enthusiastic and big, but the more it is perceived as a failure, many of the president ’s political allies are more than happy to let him ride alone.

Like liberals, conservatives also face a structural challenge that will only increase as the 2008election draws closer. Any Republican presidential nominee will seek to differentiate himself from his predecessor. And since more conservatives are reading the Bush years as a caution against an ambitious, values-based foreign policy, stressing realism might be the way to distinguish oneself. In this sense, one can foresee a replay of the early 1990s, when the lesson drawn from George H.W. Bush’s electoral defeat in 1992 — that his presidency was too focused on foreign affairs at the expense of domestic issues — caused many conservatives to move away not only from a values-based policy but from internationalism itself.

Moreover, the events of the past several years, especially the war in Iraq, have thrown much of the conservative foreign policy establishment into a crisis of confidence. Like many establishment liberals, conservatives in and out of government are questioning not only the capabilities required to implement values-promoting policies (and whether the United States can ever develop such capabilities), but the underlying assumptions of the policy itself. Such self-doubt is especially acute because many of the officials so closely identified with these policies were once heralded for their national security experience and acumen. Expectations were high, so the results of their time in office — a major crisis for America’s role in the world — have been sobering.

The neoconservatives, those most closely identified with a foreign policy based on promoting American values and bold interventionism — have come in for the most criticism, and not just from the left. The internal split reemerging within conservatism over ideals is the fourth driver of wariness. During the 1990s, neoconservatives saw themselves as insurgents, agitating against both the creeping isolationism within the Republican party and what they considered the feckless policies of the Clinton team (even if most neoconservatives agreed on actions like intervention in the Balkans). But for several years after 9/11, their agenda wielded great influence over the direction of the Bush administration ’s policy, especially its focus on spreading American values. Six years later, neoconservatives again find themselves largely on the outside looking in as many mainstream Republicans seek a return to the kinds of policies then-Governor Bush articulated during the 2000 presidential campaign: a foreign policy based on humility, skepticism about the United States ’ interests in “nation-building,” and the limited applicability of American values to regions like the Middle East.

So for political and intellectual reasons, the role of values in foreign policy is now in retreat domestically — liberals are increasingly skeptical, and conservatives have deep doubts. One must also note the suspicion (or worse) with which many in other countries view a values-based U.S. foreign policy. In the first place, many around the world are disinclined to take Americans at their word on the principles they claim to be promoting. They hear rhetoric of principle as nothing more than a cover for the raw assertion of American power. Some world leaders hear the rhetoric of democracy promotion and take it seriously and for that very reason regard it as dangerous, a threat to their own claims of legitimacy. One could probably break this category down further, into those hostile to any threat to their personal prerogatives on the one hand and, on the other, those generally sympathetic to liberalization but worried that too-hasty movement in that direction might tear their societies apart.

Finally, the promotion of American values opens the United States to charges of hypocrisy: Does American conduct actually live up to the values America espouses? Many have found the United States ’ actions wanting in areas ranging from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the U.S. relationship with Pakistan and the House of Saud and would urge that the United States tone down its complaints about others until it removes the log in its own eye. By these lights, the promotion of American values should begin at home (a view that also has purchase both on the left side of American public opinion and, to a degree, on the libertarian right).

But if a foreign policy that promotes American values is the problem, what is the solution? In considering this question, it might be helpful to ask: What would U.S. foreign policy actually look like if it were somehow stripped of its “values” component? It’s worth trying to conjure such a vision, not only as an intellectual exercise, but also because there is no quicker way to see exactly why such a policy would be a nonstarter for the United States.

As a point of departure, we might look to the assumptions about the character of the international system embraced by scholars in the “neorealist” school of international relations, on the grounds that neorealists regard such considerations as morality as largely epiphenomenal in explaining the behavior of states. Since one key neorealist assumption is that the internal characteristics of states don ’t matter (or matter much), we find a more or less explicit attempt to write moral considerations out of the rules of statecraft. What they posit, then, is an anarchical international system — no authority higher than the state. Each state wishes to be entirely free to make its own judgments about the conduct of its internal affairs. These judgments, insofar as they implicate events outside the state ’s territory and thus beyond its uncontested authority, yield a set of national interests in relation to other states. Because any state ’s supreme vital interest is self-preservation, each state’s first priority is to ensure its security. The only means of achieving security is self-help. Unfortunately, the actions states take in pursuit of their own security and national interests tend to bring them into conflict with other states. Some structural configurations of the international system are more conducive to peace and stability than others, but no structure is impervious to internal stresses that may cause it to collapse or change convulsively as states act in pursuit of security under shifting perceptions of national interest.

How might this abstract description of state action in the international system translate into policy choices for a state in the position in which the United States finds itself today? For purposes of our investigation, we will call this state “Acirema,” which is “America” spelled backwards. We do this for two reasons. First, by speculating in accordance with this “values-free” scenario, we do not want to be taken to be proposing what follows as a genuine alternative to U.S. policy; on the contrary, the speculation shows how far removed from the realm of possibility and desirability such a neorealist scenario would be. Second, “Acirema” strikes us as capturing just how radical an inversion of American priorities and traditions the pursuit of such a values-free policy would be.

In the first place, Acirema is the dominant military power in the world, and it would certainly make sense to try to maintain that dominance. This is not a judgment alien to existing U.S. policy: The Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy (nss) pledged not to allow a “peer competitor” to its military power to emerge. The Bush nss, however, justified this policy as a way to encourage peaceful relations among states. State-on-state conflict — for example, the attempt to conquer territory by force —  would be discouraged by overwhelming U.S. power. But it is by no means clear, from a values-free perspective, why Acirema should be attached to a principle of peaceful relations among states and the illegitimacy of aggressive war or conquest. True, Acirema does not want to be attacked and would seek to maintain sufficient power to deter and if necessary defeat any potential aggressor. But why Acirema would care if Iran attacked Iraq, or China attacked Russia, or France attacked Germany is entirely a question of whether Acirema ’s aims would best be served by peace or war between any given two states.

Acirema would pursue an overall strategy of maintaining its dominance. Again, this is not foreign to current U.S. grand strategy. But the United States has welcomed and encouraged modernization, economic growth, and globalization not only in order to enrich Americans, but also according to a theory that greater trade flows and economic interdependence make for a more peaceful international environment and are good in themselves. Neither of the latter two justifications would matter to Acirema.

There is danger in an Acireman policy that encourages other states to become rich: With riches comes the capacity to develop military power that in turn might challenge Acirema, or covertly to fund challenges and challengers. Acireman policymakers would want to examine the trade-off between the economic benefits of an open trading system and the potential danger in allowing others to enrich themselves, thus potentially increasing their power. An Asian economic flu might be a bad thing, but it might also be a good thing.
China ’s modernization might yield cheap goods, but if the price is a more formidable military challenge to Acirema, the price might be too high. The best way to deal with China’s self-professed desire for a “peaceful rise” might be to disregard the rhetoric of peaceability and act to prevent the rise. Acirema might want to identify potential vulnerabilities in the Chinese economy and try to exploit them to undermine Chinese economic growth. The collapse of central authority in China would be destabilizing — but primarily for the Chinese, who might then be too preoccupied with their internal turmoil to pose a threat.

More generally, the stability Acirema would seek would be the stability of its own position. The stability of other states and relations among other states is of concern only insofar as it impinges on the stability of the Acireman position. Indeed, a subsidiary strategy of preserving dominance might be to maintain a fragileinternational stability, one in which all other states felt themselves to be constantly at risk from instability without actually sliding into it with a potentially adverse effect on Acirema.

Under this scenario, one would have to reject engagement in the Middle East, except with regard to securing Acireman energy needs. To the extent that support for Israel arouses hostility from Israel ’s neighbors, Acirema should cease such support unless Israel is capable of providing a benefit to Acirema sufficient to offset the damage — a tall order. Meanwhile, however, it is not solely Acireman support for Israel that antagonizes certain elements in the Middle East, and to the extent that funding for these elements comes from governments that have grown wealthy from oil revenues, it may be best to go directly to the source and deprive the funders of the revenue. Acirema might seize and hold sufficient oilfields to see to its needs and then destroy the capacity of others to exploit the resources on their territory.

In the event that the negative repercussions of such a move might be deemed too costly, then Acireman disengagement from the region might work — provided it is accompanied by an unambiguous warning from Acirema to states in the region about the unacceptability of funding terrorists, their ideological supporters, and their sympathizers. Acirema would have to make clear that regime elimination awaits any states that fail to accept that their continued oil revenue depends on their refraining from harboring, funding, or supporting anti-Acireman terrorism. The credibility of such a policy would likely require a demonstration. A policy of regime elimination would differ from “regime change” in its rejection of Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” principle: You break it, you own it. On the contrary, any state foolish enough to provoke Acirema to forcibly remove its regime, with all the risk and expense that would entail for Aciremans, would be on its own to sort out what comes next. Acirema wouldn ’t care, though it would certainly hope that whatever regime emerged had learned a lesson from the experience of the toppling of its predecessor.

The policy of Acirema toward Israel is a specific case of what would be a more general revision in alliance policy. The essential question for Acirema with regard to any ally is whether Acireman security is improved, on net, as a result of the alliance. The notion of an alliance as an all-purpose mechanism for securing the cooperation of others in mutual pursuit of security objectives would need to be reassessed. What, specifically, is the value of “cooperation”? Needless to say, Acirema will harbor no prejudice in favor of cooperation or multilateralism, instead asking whether cooperative or multilateral means would bring a benefit that Acirema cannot obtain on its own. Acirema need not be especially concerned with the opinions of states that lack the capacity to make a difference. There will be no free-riding on the provision of security, because Acirema will not enter into alliance relationships except with partners whose tangible assets improve Acireman security.

Needless to say, any assistance Acirema would choose to provide to other states would be tightly tied to the tangible benefit received, either economically or in terms of security. The notion of “humanitarian” aid or “humanitarian” intervention of any kind is self-evidently meaningless to a foreign policy free of moral consideration. Acirema might have a concern with averting refugee flows toward its shores, but only if the cost of action abroad to prevent the flows exceeds the cost of turning away those attempting to enter.

Local disputes in faraway places would not necessarily bother Acirema. There is nothing historically unusual about violent contests for power within states, and Acirema would not worry overmuch about the outbreak of such conflicts. They have disadvantages in terms of disrupting commerce, but they have advantages as well in that those engaged in fierce local conflict are unlikely to have the surplus capacity to threaten Acireman national interests. Even intense local conflict, with civilian deaths running to hundreds of thousands, would have to be assessed through the prism of whether it poses any sort of threat to Acirema that might warrant intervention.

It is difficult to see what gain Acirema might get from raising the issue of “human rights” with other states. Doing so would come at the cost of pressing other, more useful demands upon weaker states and would needlessly complicate relations with stronger states. There might be advantages to be gained from fomenting internal dissension and rebellion within stronger states in accordance with a general strategy of fragile stability, and this provocation might be couched in terms of “human rights” in the event that doing so would be efficacious. But the use of “human rights” would be entirely instrumental, and Acirema would have to refrain from establishing any sentimental bonds with those it was encouraging, since the likelihood is that the state in which they are rebelling will move to crush them if the crisis becomes serious, and of course Acirema would have no reason to assist them at that point.

The strongest states will be those with nuclear weapons, and the impulse of states to acquire them would undoubtedly be very strong. Needless to say, Acirema would have to be very wary of states already possessing substantial nuclear arsenals. Freedom of action against Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Israel would accordingly be constrained. As for those newly seeking to acquire the technology of atomic weapons, Acirema might choose to acquiesce, provided it was confident that its own arsenal was deterring any aggression against Acirema. This might be true of some but not all states. On the other hand, possession of a nuclear deterrent by another state might embolden that state to act against the national interests of Acirema. It might be necessary to take preemptive action to establish that mere possession of a few nuclear weapons is not sufficient to deter or coerce Acirema. Acirema might have to launch a nuclear attack first. Of course, there would be some risk of nuclear counterattack if the other state had the means to deliver its nuclear weapons. On the other hand, Acirema could withstand such a small strike, whereas its antagonist would be obliterated.

Yes, we have wandered into the bizarro territory of Dr. Strangelove, and the scenario described above is both monstrous to contemplate and impossible to envision actually coming to pass. But why is that? In the first place, can anyone — liberal or conservative — plausibly imagine the United States electing a president on such a callous “Acirema First” platform? Patrick Buchanan tried a slightly attenuated version of the Acirema project and was unable to win the Republican nomination, let alone seriously contest the general election. During the 2000election, the platform of Ralph Nader’s Green Party shared many aspects of the Acireman program but garnered little support (yet just enough to help determine the outcome). The closest a Democratic presidential nominee has ever come to the Acirema agenda is probably George McGovern ’s disastrous 1972 campaign, in which his slogan “Come home, America” was taken as a call for broad-based disengagement and dramatic reduction of defense spending, not just an immediate end to the Vietnam War.

Disband nato, abandon Israel, destabilize China, welcome wars when useful, disregard genocide, and wage preemptive nuclear war? While such views are consistently found in certain small segments of the political spectrum, there is, thankfully, no plausible passageway from America to Acirema.

Some have claimed — and the 2002 National Security Strategy and other statements of President Bush flirt with — the notion that U.S. values and interests are quite closely aligned or can be so. Such an argument effectively dodges the question of which should take precedence. And indeed, it may be that “failed states” are something the United States should take action to prevent because of the potential for danger where no one is adequately in charge. We disagree on the relative magnitude of the danger there. ²  We agree, however, that U.S. action to prevent the failure of states is morally good. The point is that without the moral frame of reference, one could imagine having a debate about whether the collapse of a state into civil war, warlordism, and genocide is good or bad for the United States — and that such a debate would remain imaginary, because it can never occur in the real world.

Moreover, it is a conceit that this “values-free” machtpolitik or realpolitik is truly free of moral considerations. Even the proposition “look out for No.1” has a moral aspect. Why should you look out for No. 1? Because you place a value on No. 1 and think it is morally good to seek the benefit of No. 1. Indeed, there may have been a time in human history — perhaps in Hobbes’s state of nature, the “war of all against all” — when moral considerations, though hardly absent, involved calculations no more complicated than this.

But the United States was founded not as a “values-free” rational calculator of what’s good for No. 1, but as a nation embodying certain values or principles that justified rebellion against its lawful sovereign. While, to this day, the United States has been accused (often with justification) of failing to live up to the values of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has never been able to or seriously attempted to expunge those values from all consideration in the conduct of domestic or foreign policy. This seems unlikely to change. And rightly or wrongly, Americans demand consideration for those principles not simply because they are “ours” — and no one has the right to interfere in our affairs by telling us anything different — but because of our belief that they are true.

While the place of American values in foreign policy endures, questions remain about how such policies should be implemented and how the inevitable trade-offs should be managed, especially in the current political environment. The Bush legacy casts a long shadow. During the past several years, intellectuals and policy analysts have offered numerous grand strategies as a corrective to Bush, rebalancing foreign policy between realism and idealism. Some stress one perspective more than the other, and they usually combine some version of both words in their titles: Francis Fukuyama offers “Realistic Wilsonianism,” Robert Wright proposes “Progressive Realism,” John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven describe “Ethical Realism,” Charles Krauthammer espouses “Democratic Realism,” James Baker explains “Pragmatic Idealism,” and John Ikenberry and Charles Kupchan outline “Liberal Realism” (we could go on).

Instead of adding yet another grand strategy slogan into the mix, we believe that it is more important to describe a set of principles and priorities that should guide U.S. foreign relations in the challenging years ahead. Below we outline six principles, each rooted in American ideals and serving American interests. This is not an exhaustive list, yet it shows that it is possible to construct a common agenda between liberals and conservatives that is firmly built upon a commitment to uphold — and promote — values.

Standing against the conquest of territory by force. The United States must continue to uphold one of the most basic norms of international relations: preventing and, when necessary, reversing the conquest of territory across an international border by military force. While support for this principle may seem self-evident — after all, it is at the heart of the un Charter and the underlying rationale of the world’s most important security organization, nato — it is in fact a value that the United States must choose to defend. As made clear by the alternative Acirema world described earlier, a great power like the United States could decide that upholding this norm is too costly or outside the bounds of its core national interests. We believe that since preventing territorial conquest by force remains a keystone of the international system and a driver of its enduring stability, this must remain a core value of U.S. foreign policy.

Such a commitment entails certain responsibilities around the world and, fundamentally, demands an interventionist foreign policy — preferably as an active partner through international institutions, but if necessary alone. The means that are required will depend on the specific situation and the other U.S. interests at stake, such as alliance or other security or political relationships and the potential for wider violence. Yet the full range of tools — from diplomacy to sanctions and political isolation to military force — must always be available.

Sometimes this might require active diplomacy to prevent one state from threatening another with force, such as the United States ’ repeated efforts in recent years to reduce tensions between India and Pakistan. Other instances will require U.S. leadership to try to negotiate an end to conflicts after they have broken out. For example, this is what the Clinton administration did when it hammered out the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, reversing Slobodan Miloševic’s aggression against the newly independent Bosnia. And on some (and hopefully rare) occasions, the United States will have to use military force to reverse aggression, as George H.W. Bush did in 1991 when he created and led a un-sanctioned international coalition to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Today, looking into the future and the probability of a smaller American presence in Iraq, the commitment to territorial integrity will be critical insurance against potential incursions by neighbors such as Iran.

Of course, another way of describing this is that by valuing the protection of territorial integrity from threats of force, we are valuing the defense of sovereignty. That ’s correct to an extent, but we do recognize that under certain circumstances this value can be trumped by other values, such as the responsibility to defend the rights and lives of people living within another state ’s territory. We discuss this in greater detail below, but suffice it to say that the United States should not allow any leader to hide behind one value (the right not to be invaded) in order to violate another (his people ’s right not to be brutalized).

Defending liberal regimes. The United States should be prepared and willing to help any and all democratic governments that come under challenge internationally or from internal antidemocratic elements seeking to overturn liberal political and social order and the rule of law. This is a basic principle of democratic solidarity, according to which the most secure, established, and stable liberal democracies, the United States above all, should acknowledge a responsibility to come to the assistance of democratic governments that are threatened, that have yet to become fully consolidated and mature, or are subject to forces of internal instability.

Liberal democracy, in the view of most of those who govern themselves according to its principles, is not merely a matter of sovereign choice — just one among many options. Rather, citizens of democracies tend to regard their form of government as the right or best choice, at least for them; they would not consider trading their form of government for autocratic or totalitarian or theocratic government and would rightly consider any force in favor of such a change in governance as a serious threat, one to be challenged and defeated — not by whatever means necessary, such as abandonment of liberal principles for the sake of security, but by any means legitimate within the horizon of liberal principles.

If citizens of democracies view their system as the right or best choice for themselves, those citizens and that state ought to be willing to acknowledge the rightness of the choice of liberal democracy among the citizens of other states. They have a stake not only in their own domestic political arrangements, but in their view of the rightness of liberal democracy, which does not end at their borders. A threat to liberal democracy elsewhere is accordingly a challenge and one to which any democratic states with the means to do so should be willing to meet head on.

The United States has a number of alliances with democratic states, including several with allies that were not democratic when the alliance relationship began but became so, perhaps partly as a result of the security provided by the United States. These alliance commitments remain fully in force, but they are only a beginning. The United States must recognize that it will not sit idly by as nondemocratic states try to undermine or even overturn democracies or fragile liberalizing states. On the contrary, the United States should step up, together with other democratic states, to provide all the support or assistance possible.

The correct response when a powerful nondemocratic state tries to coerce a weaker democratic state — such as Russia has tried with Ukraine and especially Georgia — is not to temporize out of deference to the power of the strong but to speak up unequivocally in defense of democracy under threat. To stand aloof or to appease the stronger power would be to embolden antidemocratic forces, and not just locally. Some argued that extending the nato alliance to the Baltic States was foolish because of the military difficulty of defending Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania against attack and because extending the Atlantic Alliance onto the territory of the former Soviet Union would unnecessarily antagonize Russia. We strongly disagreed at the time and believe we were correct. In our view, the newly won freedom of the Baltic nations and the establishment of liberal democratic governments there already created obligations for the United States and nato countries. nato accession did not create but ratified and codified that obligation toward these peoples. The process was exemplary in warding off any urge to interfere with and disrupt democratic development and consolidation there — and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, in our view.

A principle of democratic solidarity is not only good in itself; it makes external threats to democratic governments less likely by demonstrating that making such threats will have adverse global consequences for anyone inclined to pursue such a course. It would be a mistake to view the principle of democratic solidarity as a military doctrine; its main components are political, diplomatic, and social.

There are some instances in which democratic solidarity comes with conditions. For example, U.S. willingness to defend Taiwan against Chinese attack depends on Taipei ’s not taking the provocative step of a declaration of independence — to which China would respond militarily, according to Beijing’s declaratory policy. This is a reasonable codicil given local circumstances. There may be others (though Taiwan is arguably the most neuralgic of such at present). An absolute military doctrine of democratic solidarity would create moral hazard, since a state might conclude it could act as provocatively as it wished in response to local circumstances and still receive the backing of the United States and other democratic states. That is not the deal. Such a state, by taking action other democratic states would regard as unreasonable, would itself be breaking from democratic solidarity. But with such nuances always in mind, a principle of democratic solidarity should guide U.S. policy, and the United States should encourage other democratic states to embrace it.

Promoting liberal governance. If a principle of democratic solidarity makes sense at the level of state-to-state relations, it also makes sense for the United States in relation to people working toward liberalization and democracy in their own societies. This is not likely to be especially controversial as a matter of principle among democratic allies. Opinion surveys in Europe, for example, show large majorities in favor of promotion of democracy by peaceful means. ³  And it seems likely that a substantial part of the lingering opposition is a product of concern that democracy will not be liberal, but rather will bring to power illiberal elements. Our discussion should be understood to refer to the promotion of liberal democracy, in which the two components are a liberal social order based on principles of freedom and minority rights as well as popularly elected governments followed by peaceful transfer of power.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that a principle of democratic solidarity — even if broadly accepted by and among, and in application to, democratic states facing external threats or internal challenge, and even if accepted as the rightness of supporting development of liberal democracy in principle — will surely be controversial when considered in application to supporters of democracy in nondemocratic states.

We think that the United States should, as far as possible, provide whatever help aspiring democrats and liberalizers seek. The United States should also encourage similar support among fellow democratic states — an extension of democratic solidarity. But considerations of prudence, national interests (such as access to energy resources), and force majeure will inevitably weigh into such decisions.

What we propose is the imperative of balancing prudential considerations and principle. It is not enough to take note of Saudi oil fields and declare, therefore, that Saudi Arabia is off limits for criticism and promotion of reform of its extraordinarily repressive regime. Similarly, China is big, powerful, rising — and undemocratic (indeed, increasingly openly antidemocratic). We must deal with the fact that China is a vast and increasingly powerful country; it would be madness to try to deny it. But we must also deal with the fact that China is undemocratic.

The United States can and must pursue dual-track policies in such cases, as Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul argue. ⁴  One track will address exigency, the other the moral case.

On the moral track, rather than a one-size-fits-all model of democracy promotion, we propose a method, a way of thinking about and acting on the problem that does not pretend to a greater degree of generality than is appropriate. The objective, in each country in which liberal democracy has yet to take hold or take hold fully, is to identify next steps. What is the next plausible step for the expansion of the liberal and democratic space? Conversely, what is the next plausible step for the constriction of the space in which authoritarians or antidemocratic elements operate? The United States should then work vigorously to promote the next step, applying pressure for reform against the authoritarian element (typically, the government) and assistance to the democratic element to help achieve measurable progress. Once the next-step objective has been achieved, the United States must immediately move on to the next next step. Pressure and assistance must not let up following interim successes; on the contrary, it should increase.

We agree that the key failure of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion policy in Egypt, for example, was overeagerness to claim credit for progress in response to small positive steps. Yes, it was consequential that the Mubarak government decided to allow other parties to compete in a presidential election. But it was hardly the birth of liberal democracy on the Nile Delta. Mubarak deserved congratulations for taking the step he took — followed without pause by the demand that he take the next step of moving toward a free and fair election.

With this next-step policy of constant pressure to expand the liberal space while contracting the authoritarian space, the United States will be in a position to say it is keeping faith with the forces of democracy and liberalization in every country, even in the face of inevitable practical constraints.

Enforcing the “responsibility to protect.” Liberal democracy, in which people choose their leaders in free and fair elections and in which political and human rights are secure, including for minorities, stands at the pinnacle of human political achievement. For some states, such as the United States, the most urgent political task lies in helping others achieve this great end while being ever mindful of and seeking to address the imperfections of its own governance. For others, the consolidation of transition to democratic governance is the key political task, and it can often be one of life and death, as the assassination of reformist Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic or the dioxin poisoning of Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine both demonstrate. For still others, the political challenge is to pry open any space at all for the opposition in an authoritarian country.

But for the worst off of all, such as the Tutsi minority in Rwanda or the Kurds of Saddam Hussein ’s Iraq, the essential political challenge is survival — against the wishes of the government or the mob in whose midst they have the misfortune to live. Surely, it cannot be right to embrace a principle of democratic solidarity and democracy promotion for those relatively high on the social ladder while offering nothing to those in greatest peril of losing the most basic human right: the right to live.

At the United Nations’ 2005 World Summit in New York, the world’s leaders embraced for the first time the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect.” It holds, briefly, that with sovereign rights come sovereign responsibility, and the primary responsibility of a government is to protect the people who live within its territory. In the event that a government is unable or unwilling to provide protection for its people from would-be perpetrators of genocide or mass killing and ethnic cleansing — or worse, is complicit in such crimes against humanity — the international community must take upon itself the responsibility to protect. No government that fails to protect its people may legitimately assert a right to noninterference in its internal affairs.

The responsibility to protect is a transformational concept in international relations. Previously, the victims of the worst sort of war crimes and human rights abuses on a mass scale had no recourse, trapped as they were behind a curtain of sovereign right. The adoption of the responsibility to protect grants them an appeal to the international community.

This is often construed solely through the prism of military intervention, and in some cases, the only way to stop determined genocidaires may be by force. But it is wrong to think that military means are the first or main recourse. The international community needs to take active measures in terms of monitoring and applying diplomatic and other forms of pressure (such as sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and negotiations) to avert mass killings and ethnic cleansing whenever possible.

Of course, there is much dispute over how the “international community” may act. We agree that the United Nations Security Council is the best venue, not because we think that the United Nations is the only path to legality and legitimacy, but because so many other states take this view, and their wishes deserve respect. However, in the event the Security Council fails to take timely and effective action as a human rights catastrophe unfolds, the United States must not stand on the sidelines. In the case of Kosovo, when the Security Council was blocked, nato stepped up to take decisive action, thereby preventing a genocide. Some still question the legality of that action. We take the concern seriously coming from those who were willing to act; we do not take it seriously coming from those who were prepared to let hundreds of thousands fall prey to ethnic cleansing and genocide. When necessary, the United States must lead or be willing to join others to mobilize an effective response to mass killing and widespread repression.

Addressing global hardship. As the world’s most powerful country, the United States has the capability to help address the challenges stemming from poverty, hunger, disease, and lack of opportunity for billions of people in the developing world. We believe that leadership in these areas is not just something the United States can do — it is what the United States must do.

While these issues were once only considered “humanitarian” or “soft” — implying that they are always elective or secondary — there are instrumental reasons why the United States should focus on them. If one accepts the argument (and we do) that threats emanating from weak or failed states can endanger U.S. national security, then it is in America ’s interest to help these states stabilize. Some describe this as part of “draining the swamp” of desperation and hardship that radical jihadists and other extremists thrive in by reducing extreme poverty and replacing the extreme fundamentalism taught in some madrassas with basic education. As evidence of the growing consensus on the relationship between these issues and national security, the Bush administration justifies many of its efforts along these lines — and when it is criticized, it is usually for not doing enough.

But U.S. leadership in these areas is about more than protecting security. America ’s actions in the world are a powerful demonstration of what it wants to accomplish with its power and the values it wishes to uphold. In this sense, the United States should embrace humanitarianism and not consider it optional or of minor importance. To do so is both the smart and the morally right thing to do for our security.

This is also an area where there is significant common ground between the political right and left. Liberals have long argued that addressing issues like poverty and disease need to be a core part of U.S. foreign policy. Many conservatives have as well, especially among the evangelical community (as exemplified by the work of Franklin Graham and Rick Warren). Spurred in part by evangelical advocates, the Bush administration has made positive strides in this direction, increasing assistance to Africa by 67 percent and boosting spending for programs to fight hiv/aids. Meanwhile, three of the major Democratic candidates for president have talked about the importance of fighting global poverty and making a major push to improve education throughout the developing world.

Looking ahead, both conservatives and liberals should embrace an agenda centered on stronger American leadership in these areas — in fact, one valid criticism of recent U.S. policy is that it too often cedes the initiative to others. For example, greater resources should be put behind combating poverty and disease, and there should be a broad recognition that free trade is critical to helping the developing world advance economically. And we should consider fundamental reforms in the way the U.S. government is organized to implement such policies, including ideas like establishing a Department of Global Development (along the lines of that in the United Kingdom) and replacing the Foreign Assistance Act.

Strengthening alliances and institutions. Any discussion of implementing the principles outlined above begs a fundamental question about means: How should the United States work with other countries? Throughout American history, the subject of whether the United States should tie itself to the fate of others abroad — or work with others to solve problems — has been hotly contested. This has been especially true since the end of the Cold War and the apogee of U.S. primacy, when we really didn ’t need others to solve a lot of problems. While this tugging between unilateralism and multilateralism is often seen as concerned solely with efficacy and instrumentality — sometimes it is better for us to share the burden, sometimes not — we believe that it is in fact a debate about what kind of global power America should be and what kind of international system we should support. It is not about instruments; it is about principles.

As Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan argue, it is important for U.S. policies to be seen as legitimate both in the eyes of the American people and in the eyes of the the world. ⁵  That is a value that other countries — certainly Acirema — might not necessarily care about. America does and should. But the question is how best to uphold this value and what institutions (whether existing or new) or multilateral arrangements are the best means to do so. As discussed earlier, when it comes to implementing values-based policies like defending liberal regimes or enforcing the responsibility to protect, working through alliances and international institutions should be as important to the United States (at least as something to aspire to) as it is to others.

The challenge has been that for many conservatives and liberals, the unilateral vs. multilateral discourse has framed these ideas as an either/or choice. The right has focused too much on the constraints of multilateralism and maintaining U.S. freedom of action. We agree that the United States always reserves the right to act alone if the circumstances require, but this should not be the preferred option. In this sense, the Bush administration ’s substance and style — exemplified by its “with us or against us” statements or rhetoric about preemption — have prompted international skepticism about whether the United States genuinely wants institutions like the United Nations to function or even exist at all.

Yet too many liberals slide into the opposite problem: upholding multilateralism for its own sake. This has only intensified during the Bush years, when support for the United States around the world has reached alarming lows. If the United States is unpopular, some believe that it must be solely our fault and make no judgment about the behavior of our allies. The remedy among many on the left seems to us to be overly simplistic: defer at all times to the collective decisions of institutions. This confuses the reality that international organizations are stages, not actors. They are simply groupings of other sovereign states, and while organizations can help facilitate decisions for states, they cannot make choices for them. They can neither prevent internal disagreements nor force free riders and buck passers to act.

Recently we’ve seen signs of greater nuance in the unilateral/multilateral debate between left and right. For example, in his second term President Bush began working through institutions like the un Security Council to deal with problems like Iran and Darfur, and with an ad hoc coalition to negotiate with North Korea. Even his rhetoric is softening: when asked recently what he has learned from his European partners, he said, “I have come to realize that other countries do rely upon the United Nations, and I respect that a lot. So there ’s an area, for example, where I have been taught a lesson by my allies and friends. ” ⁶ And among liberals, there is greater recognition that the multilateral route often can frustrate rather than facilitate action. For example, the longer the Security Council ’s divisions prevent strong action to end the genocide in Darfur, the louder the calls become for a nato response or even unilateral U.S. military intervention.

This bolsters our belief that a new consensus can be formed in support of seeking the broadest possible coalition to pursue U.S. foreign policy goals. This means working through alliances and institutions, but also ensuring that these organizations work. The United States should have high expectations of its alliances, and in turn it should have high expectations of its allies. It should be an active and energetic partner, recognizing that getting something done through a coalition often requires the same kind of daily politicking, strong-arming, logrolling, and handholding used every day in working with the U.S. Congress. And while the United States should seek to make existing institutions like the United Nations and nato stronger and more effective, it should also work to build other organizations like the Alliance of Democracies.

The conclusion we come to is that while an idealistic foreign policy has become harder to defend politically, it is possible to construct a forward-looking, values-based agenda that both liberals and conservatives can support. In fact, such an approach should garner more than just passive support — the policies presented above can actually serve as part of the foundation for U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead. Neither sentimental nor coldly aloof, these values comprise the core of the rules-based, liberal international order that the United States should aspire to achieve. This is about more than what we want; it is about who we are.

Yet because the political incentives against an approach to foreign policy that promotes American values remain so powerful, as we described at the outset, such a policy will not emerge on its own. Even with greater clarity about what values we want to uphold and promote, difficult questions will remain about how to do so. There will always be debates about acceptable costs and the trade-offs involved. So success will require sustained attention and steadfast leadership. With both, the American people will rise to the challenge.

⁴ Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul, “Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?” in Derek Chollet, Tod Lindberg, and David Shorr, eds., Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide (Routledge 2007), Chap. 9.

⁵ Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, “America and the Use of Force: Sources of Legitimacy,” in Chollet et al., Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, Chap. 1.

⁶ See Bush press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (January 4, 2007).

The sequence of events leading to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, per media reports, goes like this:

White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten sends out a directive to senior Bush officials telling them that if they are not planning to stay until the end of the administration, January 2009, then they need to depart by September of this year. Gonzales, under siege from Democrats in Congress over his handling of the firing of U.S. attorneys and his role in wiretapping and other national security hot-button issues, decides he can’t promise to go the distance and announces he is leaving. His friend and patron the president seizes the occasion to denounce the AG’s critics, railing against “months of unfair treatment” of Gonzales, his “good name . . . dragged through the mud for political reasons.”

Now, you would certainly be accurate in calling this a departure under fire. The adjective “embattled” has been inseparably attached to the compound noun “attorney general” at least since Democrats took control of Congress in January. But was the external pressure all that led Gonzales to quit? Or was there an internal political calculation to the departure?

There was always a political case for Gonzales staying, and it was well understood in the Bush White House: If Gonzales doesn’t leave, you don’t have to worry about the confirmation of a successor. If he does and you do, then you are subject to a process of political arm-twisting by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy and a supporting cast including the wily Chuck Schumer. Any nominee for attorney general would be in for a brutal grilling, accompanied by demands for right conduct in office, as Democrats define it. What price confirmation?Perhaps the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the firings of the U.S. attorneys? In Watergate times, Elliot Richardson had to pledge as much in order to be confirmed as Richard Nixon’s attorney general–more, he had to come up in advance with a name acceptable to Democrats on the Judiciary Committee (Archibald Cox). The political damage done to the Bush administration by the appointment of a special counsel to look into the leak of Valerie Plame’s covert status at the CIA was bad enough. The notion of setting loose a special prosecutor on the Justice Department and the political section of the White House in the waning months of a weakened presidency ought to have given, and by all accounts did give, officials a bad case of prospective heartburn.

So there was a certain raw logic to keeping Gonzales in place, even though most Republicans besides the president himself were singularly unimpressed with Gonzales’s performance under oath on Capitol Hill on the U.S. attorney firings, and not a few were genuinely appalled by testimony in May this year about his attempt as White House counsel in 2004 to muscle Attorney General John Ashcroft in Ashcroft’s intensive-care hospital room to reauthorize the White House’s terror surveillance program. The political calculation dovetailed with Bush’s loyalty to his old friend to reinforce the case for standing by Gonzales.

Has anything changed? Well, in fact, yes, though likely not Bush’s personal loyalty. First, the administration is a little stronger politically than it was in the first months of the year. The Watergate scenario for capitulation to the demands of the Judiciary Committee Democrats requires a political collapse more drastic than what this administration has suffered.

Second, whatever commentators now say, the departure of Gonzales was not inevitable. The widespread awareness in Washington of the political stakes in the event of his departure mitigated against the expectation he would leave. Senate Democrats thus didn’t expend much effort laying the ground for a broader post-Gonzales independent counsel investigation. The overall thrust of the Democrats’ attack remained on Gonzales himself, which they may come to regret.

In late July, four Democratic senators including Schumer wrote Solicitor General Paul Clement (because Gonzales and his deputy are recused on this matter) requesting the appointment of “an independent special counsel to determine whether Attorney General Gonzales may have misled Congress or perjured himself in testimony before Congress.” Though Leahy prudently did not sign that letter, he has been busy. On August 16, he wrote Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine asking him to “investigate and evaluate potential misleading, evasive, or dishonest testimony” by Gonzales. Only this week, days after the announcement of Gonzales’s resignation, Fine provided Leahy with his answer: The office of the inspector general “has ongoing investigations that relate to most of the subjects addressed by the Attorney General’s testimony that you identified.”

The political implications of the Fine letter are large. Clement would have no reason to grant Schumer et al. their wish for a special counsel as things stand. But a negative report from Fine would open an entirely new chapter. If the IG report finds indications of wrongdoing and the acting attorney general has ducked the issue, the political pressure to let a special counsel sort it out becomes immense. So it is that as a result of Democrats zeroing in on the person of the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales has gone from a position as bulwark against the appointment of a special counsel under the pressure of confirming a successor, to a position in which he poses the greatest risk of such an appointment as a consequence of the political pressure from an internal Justice Department investigation.

So Gonzales’s departure may be timely after all. As to what comes next, indications are the White House understands that there has to be a litmus test for the nominee to succeed Gonzales: namely, no commitments in the confirmation process to appoint a special counsel (or to overturn the position the administration has taken on executive privilege to shield White House officials from scrutiny under oath in congressional hearings). Someone coming in fresh with this attitude is fairly well-positioned to maintain that he or she has no conflict and is perfectly capable of supervising any ongoing investigation into the former attorney general’s conduct.

Bush needs someone more determined to defend this line than to be confirmed for the job. Then it becomes a question of whether Judiciary Committee Democrats really have the nerve to turn down a qualified nominee or whether they will worry about overplaying their hand. If they had spent more time making a general case about the inability of the Justice Department to investigate itself satisfactorily rather than focusing on Gonzales, they might be better positioned. To press for an independent counsel now might look merely opportunistic. If Judiciary Committee Democrats do press the matter to the point of rejecting a qualified nominee, Bush can resort to a recess appointment. That gets him out of Dodge in January ‘09. It won’t be pretty, but the last couple years of a two-term presidency generally aren’t.

Contributing editor and Hoover Institution fellow Tod Lindberg is editor of Policy Review and author of The Political Teachings of Jesus (HarperCollins).