Smart Power 1

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Smart Power
By Suzanne Nossel
From Foreign Affairs , March/April 2004
Summary: The Bush administration has hijacked a once-proud progressive doctrine--liberal internationalism--to justify muscle-flexing militarism and arrogant unilateralism. Progressives must reclaim the legacy of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy with a foreign policy that will both bolster U.S. power and unite the world behind it.
Suzanne Nossel was Deputy to the Ambassador for UN Management and Reform at the U.S. mission to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001 and is currently an executive at a media company in New York.
RECLAIMING LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, conservative foreign-policy makers have united behind a clear agenda: combating terrorism, aggressively preempting perceived threats, and asserting the United States' right and duty to act alone. Progressives, in contrast, have seemed flummoxed. Stuck on the sidelines, they advocate tactics that differ sharply from those of the Bush administration. But they have not consistently articulated a distinct set of progressive U.S. foreign policy goals.
This is a mistake. Progressives now have a historic opportunity to reorient U.S. foreign policy around an ambitious agenda of their own. The unparalleled strength of the United States, the absence of great-power conflict, the fears aroused by September 11, and growing public skepticism of the Bush administration's militarism have created a political opening for a cogent, visionary alternative to the president's foreign policy.
To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism, which posits that a global system of stable liberal democracies would be less prone to war. Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadership -- diplomatic, economic, and not least, military -- to advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Unlike conservatives, who rely on military power as the main tool of statecraft, liberal internationalists see trade, diplomacy, foreign aid, and the spread of American values as equally important.
After September 11, conservatives adopted the trappings of liberal internationalism, entangling the rhetoric of human rights and democracy in a strategy of aggressive unilateralism. But the militant imperiousness of the Bush administration is fundamentally inconsistent with the ideals they claim to invoke. To reinvent liberal internationalism for the twenty-first century, progressives must wrest it back from Republican policymakers who have misapplied it.
Progressives must therefore advance a foreign policy that renders more effective the fight against terrorism but that also goes well beyond it -- focusing on the smart use of power to promote U.S. interests through a stable grid of allies, institutions, and norms. They must define an agenda that marshals all available sources of power and then apply it in bold yet practical ways to counter threats and capture opportunities. Such an approach would reassure an uneasy American public, unite a fractious government bureaucracy, and rally the world behind U.S. goals.
THE RISE AND FALL OF AN IDEA
Woodrow Wilson's attempt to build a stable international order in the wake of World War I failed spectacularly. More than two decades later, however, his liberal internationalist vision helped Franklin Roosevelt rally the United States and its allies to vanquish fascism. After the war, Harry Truman fused pragmatism with Wilsonian idealism in a liberal internationalist agenda that guided such seminal accomplishments as the creation of a global free trade system and the reconstruction of Europe and Japan. When the United States, the only industrialized power left intact by the war, faced challenges ranging from containing Soviet ambitions to rebuilding war-ravaged Europe, it did not try to shoulder the burden alone. Instead, it crafted an interdependent network of allies and institutions that included the UN and NATO. The United States stood at the center of this order, but it shared the task of maintaining it. The sources of U.S. strength -- economic, political, and moral -- thus reinforced one another. International institutions helped spread American values, which in turn fueled an appetite for American products. Trade enhanced political influence, and political influence helped further extend American values.
John F. Kennedy also understood that to effectively counter the Soviet threat, Washington had not only to be tough on Moscow, but also to champion self-determination, democracy, and human rights. In his inaugural address, he argued that by fighting for the people "in the huts and villages" of the world, the United States would help itself, because "if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Kennedy stood up for a free Berlin and kept Soviet missiles out of Cuba while creating the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development to promote lofty American ideals. Conservatives supported efforts to spread democracy and freedom as a means of facing down Soviet aggression, and progressives rallied behind containment as a means of protecting democracy and freedom. The result was a relatively broad consensus at home that strengthened the United States' hand overseas.
After Kennedy, however, liberal internationalism lost its way. Its decline began with Vietnam, where the goal of extending democracy proved elusive and led the United States to resort to illiberal methods of subversion and secrecy that undercut Washington's credibility as a force for liberal change. So enduring was the damage done by Vietnam that even the ultimate triumph of liberal ideals -- the end of the Cold War -- did not embolden progressives. Instead, it ushered in a period of profound ambivalence about global leadership. Vietnam echoed in Ronald Reagan's withdrawal of troops from Lebanon in 1984 and Bill Clinton's retreat from Somalia a decade later, two cases in which Washington cut and ran to avoid potential morasses.
In the years after Somalia, Clinton tried to revive liberal internationalism. He intervened (albeit much too late) to stop the Bosnian genocide and later to eject Slobodan Milosevic's marauders from Kosovo. He expanded free trade, enlarged NATO, and pressed hard for peace in the Middle East. Each foreign expedition, however, met resistance from across the ideological spectrum. Liberal internationalists argued for the use of force primarily on humanitarian grounds in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, exposing the doctrine to charges of naive idealism. Self-proclaimed "realists" derided progressives as global social workers, and isolationists dismissed far-flung interventions as wastes of time and money. Bush took office in 2001 committed to jettisoning international commitments in favor of a pared-down list of strategic priorities. In its first months, his administration shunned nation-building, denounced the Kyoto Protocol, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and scorned other agreements based on a narrow definition of national interest.
September 11 transformed Bush's foreign policy. Channeling outrage over the attacks, the administration shifted from a detached to a defiant unilateralism. Bush adopted an evangelical, militarist agenda. At the same time, however, he embraced some of the idealistic rhetoric of his liberal predecessors. His 2002 National Security Strategy, for example, pledges not only to fight terrorism and "preempt" threats, but also to "actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world." To this end, Bush vowed to make post-Saddam Iraq a model for democracy in the Middle East. Some conservatives even proclaimed themselves Wilson's rightful heirs.
Conservative appropriation of liberal internationalist tenets might sound like good news for progressives. It is not. By invoking the rhetoric of human rights and democracy to further the aggressive projection of unilateral military power, conservatives have tainted liberal internationalist ideals and the United States' role in promoting them. A superpower that is not perceived as liberal will not be trusted as a purveyor of liberalism. The analogy between the United States' current role in Iraq and its role in postwar Japan and Germany is thus beguiling but false. After World War II, most of the world viewed the United States as a rightful victor over tyranny; today, it is seen as an oppressor, hungry for oil and power. Its professed commitment to democratization -- advanced only after other justifications for U.S. intervention in Iraq had worn thin -- comes across as tinny opportunism. And although such perceptions are in part anti-U.S. caricature, the Bush administration has given its detractors plenty to work with. Its us-versus-them rhetoric, its manipulation of the evidence on Iraqi weapons programs, its refusal to stand up to Saudi Arabia's illiberal royal family, its denial of basic rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, its allocation of lucrative, no-bid contracts to companies with connections to administration officials -- all of this has made the administration's rhetoric of freedom and equality seem baldly hypocritical.
There is a second problem with conservatives' brand of democratization. Having initially rejected nation-building on principle and then ignored the advice of planners and experts on what to expect in postwar Iraq, the Bush administration has proven woefully ill equipped to implement in practice the ideals it purports to champion. The result has been a chaotic and deadly occupation that has deepened doubts about U.S. motives abroad. It has also threatened to undermine domestic support for an activist foreign policy: much of the U.S. public fears that declared military victories in Kabul and Baghdad will be buried under a wider failure to contain anti-Americanism from Trafalgar Square to the Sunni Triangle. This unease has spread to the U.S. security establishment as well.
By undermining alliances, international institutions, and U.S. credibility, the Bush administration has triggered a cycle that is depleting U.S. power. Spurning global cooperation has encouraged distrust of U.S. motives, hampering U.S. effectiveness in Iraq and fanning hostility. The pernicious result is that liberation and freedom, the most contagious ideas in history, are becoming associated, at least in the Middle East, with a violent and unwanted occupation. A new liberal internationalist agenda must turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous one, in which U.S. power generates confidence in U.S. leadership, enhancing U.S. power all the more.
TAKE BACK THE FIGHT
Much of the world still buys into the ideals of liberal internationalism. According to the July 2003 Pew Global Attitudes Project survey, even in Muslim countries such as Lebanon, Morocco, and Pakistan, most people believe that Western-style democracy could work well for them.
As fascism and communism once did, terrorism and nuclear proliferation today make the liberal internationalist agenda as urgent as ever. Liberal societies are not only less prone to war but also less likely to breed or knowingly harbor terrorists. It is no coincidence that many countries on the Justice Department's terrorist watch list also appear in the Freedom House inventory of the world's most repressive regimes. Progressives, therefore, must reframe U.S. foreign policy according to their abiding belief that an ambitious agenda to advance freedom, trade, and human rights is the best long-term guarantee of the United States' security against terrorism and other threats. Although an aggressive campaign against al Qaeda and its kin remains central, it must form only part of a broader strategy, one that offers something to societies struggling to resist the rise of extremism and to overcome underdevelopment, health crises, and environmental degradation. Selective efforts to seed democracy and free markets in strategically important territories will always be dogged by perceptions of hypocrisy and narrow self-interest unless accompanied by a broader foreign policy that is viewed as genuinely liberal.
Progressives have shied away from such proposals for two reasons. First, with U.S. forces stretched thin in Iraq, they seem too grandiose -- a recipe for liberal internationalist overextension. Second, progressives are trying to project a tough image that they fear the language of democracy and human rights would undercut. But as the folly of the conservative approach is revealed, a determined rearticulation of liberal internationalist priorities will signify courage and strength, not weakness. Most important, if progressives do not reclaim this agenda, no one will. As the Bosnia crisis proved, Europeans lack the will and the wherewithal to put liberal internationalism into practice, even in their own backyard. Nor is there hope, as there was briefly after the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, that liberal ideals will triumph universally on their own. And entrusting the liberal internationalist agenda to the multilateral system is neither viable nor sound.
As to the danger of overstretch, progressive policymakers should learn from the example of the U.S. military, which has long recognized that its comparative advantage comes not from size or firepower but from farsighted strategy, sophisticated intelligence, professionalism, and precise weaponry. Although the military's weapons systems have been calibrated to conserve firepower and minimize collateral damage, the same cannot be said of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, Washington is currently creating new sources of friction, turning friends into antagonists, damaging once-valuable policy tools, and impairing its own ability to harness the power of its citizenry, bureaucracy, and allies. It must reverse course and embrace a smarter, less draining brand of power guided by a compelling and coherent conception of national interest.
A smart definition of U.S. interest would recast the fight against terror and nuclear proliferation just as Kennedy recast containment, transforming it from a dark, draining struggle into a hopeful, progressive cause aimed at securing an international system of liberal societies and defeating challenges to it. In the United States, the terrorist threat has convinced many conservatives that democratization and freedom should be viewed as more than second-order effects. The revival of a genuine commitment to spreading freedom and liberalism, conversely, would unite progressives in the fight against terrorists and rogues. Whereas liberal internationalism can overcome the isolationism of the anti-imperialist left (exemplified by its defense of Iraqi sovereignty before the war), the war on terrorism can overcome the aversion of the right to humanitarian endeavors.
By demonstrating that wars against terrorists and rogues, the rehabilitation of failed states, and the liberalization of repressive societies are all smart investments that will yield lasting results -- not cowboy expeditions or imperialist adventures -- liberal internationalism can galvanize both the U.S. public and the international community behind its agenda. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt rallied an isolationist U.S. public to fight Hitler by offering a postwar vision that went well beyond defeating fascism. He pledged that a generation's sacrifice would yield not just military victory, but also institutions and alliances to protect against future wars. Today, proven progress toward rehabilitated states, stronger alliances, more effective international institutions, and entrenched human rights can likewise overcome public misgivings over what seem to be fleeting successes.
Rather than asking other governments to fall into formation on Washington's terms, liberal internationalism enfolds the fight against terrorism and rogues into an ideology and set of interests that many U.S. allies already share. By linking today's struggles to long-standing European visions of collective security, liberal internationalism can take advantage of Europe's commitment to humanitarian aid, postconflict resolution, policing, and development. Similarly, by incorporating into the agenda a genuine commitment to free trade and economic development, liberal internationalism can impress Latin American, Asian, and African countries that otherwise view the U.S. antiterrorist agenda as neglectful of their priorities. Moreover, building a broad-based liberal internationalist movement will not force the United States to give up the driver's seat. On the contrary, liberal internationalism has flourished during periods of U.S. preeminence. The key is that other nations must welcome rather than resent U.S. leadership. A new liberal internationalist approach would persuade much of the world once again to contribute its resources and energy to U.S. causes.

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