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Thread ID: 4180 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2002-12-25
2002-12-25 01:09 | User Profile
AMERICAN CONSERVATISM Beyond Our Shores
Today's "conservative" foreign policy has an idealist agenda.
BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Tuesday, December 24, 2002 12:01 a.m. The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who has spent much of his distinguished career explaining how different the United States is from other developed democracies, is fond of observing that American conservatism is no less exceptional than other American institutions and values.
There are almost no European-style conservatives in the United States, people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature. Those we label "conservatives" in this country are called "liberals" in Europe, because they are in favor of free markets, individual initiative and a democratic polity based on individual, not collective, rights. In the U.S., conservatives represented by the Republican Party just won majorities in both houses of Congress as well as occupying the presidency. Its closest counterpart in Germany is the Free Democratic Party, which won just a bit over 7% of the vote in Germany's election last September.
If one definition of a conservative is a defender of the status quo, then it is safe to say that American conservatives (aÃÂ kÃÂ a classical liberals) have never been this type of creature. This is true both in economics and in politics. Free-market competition is, in Schumpeter's words, a process of "creative destruction." Market competition means the relentless promotion of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, which brings in its train turmoil and social change. Globalization is intensely threatening to vested interests because it destroys jobs and livelihoods even as it creates new wealth and opportunity. Those who want to slow down or reverse globalization in the name of protecting the environment or defending the rights of workers are in fact taking a conservative position of opposing potentially progressive change--even though we think of antiglobalization activists as being on the left.
The political agenda of American conservatives is no less revolutionary. From the beginning, Americans regarded their values and institutions as embodying universal aspirations that would one day have a significance far beyond the shores of the United States. The Great Seal on the back of the dollar bill bears the inscription novus ordo seclorum--"new order of the ages"--that expresses a very unconservative sentiment with potentially revolutionary consequences. In this view, democracy, constitutional government and the individual rights on which they rest are good not just for North Americans by virtue of their peculiar habits and traditions, but for all people around the world. Hence the United States in its foreign policy has been anything but a status quo power.
What does it mean to have a conservative foreign policy in the post-Cold War world, and in particular in the world that has emerged since Sept. 11?
Here, conservatism has frequently been identified with what international relations specialists label "realism," that is, the view that world politics is a remorseless struggle for power on the part of sovereign nation-states that must ultimately look to themselves for their security. Its opposite, liberal internationalism, sees the possibility of global order emerging based on shared norms and values, implemented through an increasingly dense system of international laws and organizations. Realists focus on the balance of power and military preparedness; liberal internationalists on institutions, rules and legal constraints.
American foreign policy has always been pulled in two directions, toward a realist defense of national security defined in relatively narrow terms, and toward an expansive sense of American purposes that rests directly on the exceptionalism of American institutions and the messianic belief in their universal applicability.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger represents the realist strain. The liberal internationalist tradition is represented not just by historical figures like Woodrow Wilson, founder of the League of Nations, but by more recent administrations, Republican and Democratic, that have helped found international institutions like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.
How can we characterize the post-Sept. 11 foreign policy of the Bush administration?
At first glance, it would obviously seem to be conservative-realist, insofar as it has focused on pursuit of American national security through prosecution of a war on terrorism. The administration has been at odds with many of its traditional allies over its refusal to participate in a string of international agreements and institutions, from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming to the International Criminal Court. After Sept. 11, it made clear that it was intent on a showdown with Iraq, bringing about "regime change" through the unilateral use of force if necessary. Although the administration eventually went through the U.N. to win a Security Council resolution mandating new inspections, there is clearly deep-seated distrust of international agencies that earns it a "conservative" label in the eyes of most observers.
But look again: Behind the emphasis on power, sovereignty and self-help, the Bush administration has articulated a not-so-hidden idealist agenda that is encapsulated in the term "regime change."
The administration's new National Security Strategy of the United States lays out an ambitious road map for the wholesale reordering of the politics of the Middle East, beginning with the replacement of Saddam Hussein by a democratic, pro-Western government. A variety of administration spokesmen and advisers have suggested that a different government in Iraq will change the political dynamics of the entire region, making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more tractable, putting pressure on authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and broadly promoting the cause of democracy in a hostile part of the world that has proven stubbornly resistant to all democratic trends. The present administration, in other words, has articulated anything but a conservative foreign policy. It is embarking on an immensely ambitious exercise in the political re-engineering of a hostile part of the world.
What view would the realist-conservative perspective have of this agenda, as the U.N. inspectors burrow deeper into Iraq's weapons programs?
If we understand traditional (as opposed to American) conservatism as above all urging prudence with regard to risky political experiments, at least three cautions are in order. The first has to do with the scope of the current idealist project, which will require a consistent, long-term willingness to do what it takes to build legitimate and stable political institutions in foreign lands. The United States is not good at either implementing or sticking to such projects over the long run. The fact is that the idealist agenda is inconsistently supported within the administration itself, part of which retains strong opposition to nation-building.
The second problem has to do with empire and legitimacy. Americans tend to assume that democracy and U.S. security go hand-in-hand, as they have in places like Germany, Japan, the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan. The administration is betting that the same thing will happen in a post-Saddam Iraq.
But liberation may give way to something that seems more like occupation over time. The same will apply in many other countries spawning terrorism where we may be tempted to expand our reach. Democracy and American national interests do indeed go together, but only over the long term and with periodic exceptions when we are often better served in the short run by friendly authoritarians. The idealist project may therefore come to look more like empire pure and simple in the short run.
The final conservative caution has to do with domestic politics. It is not at all clear that the American public understands it is getting into an imperial project as opposed to a brief in-and-out intervention in Iraq. It can be rallied to heavy public involvement overseas, and is often better motivated by idealist rather than realist appeals (as with the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine). This is, after all, an exceptional nation. But the grounds for prolonged military and economic involvement in the Middle East, and the kinds of sacrifices this may entail, have not yet even begun to be laid.
What historian Gordon Wood once labeled the radicalism of the American revolution is still present, expressed today in U.S. promotion of a global economy and in a muscular foreign policy that seeks to shape the world in an American image.
This project has been attacked by the usual suspects on the left. It has also been criticized by two flavors of isolationists: Pat Buchanan and his followers, who have been blasting away in their new journal, The American Conservative, and libertarians like those at the Cato Institute. Both of these positions are unrealistic, in my view, because they assume that the world's sole superpower can somehow disengage from global power politics. What has been lacking in the current debate over foreign policy is the articulation of a point of view that is realist, and yet takes seriously the traditional conservative principle of prudence.
Mr. Fukuyama is the Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author, most recently, of "Our Posthuman Future" (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002). Copyright é 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
It is refreshing to read something by a Neo-con that is somewhat honest for a change.
There are almost no European-style conservatives in the United States, people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature.
There are more than you believe, Francis and after your kind get us in one hell of a mess in the Middle East there will be more. It is precisely those types of conservatives that are needed- to stop lunatics like you.
I recall that one of the charges brought against the Germans being tried at Nürnberg was conspiring to make aggressive war upon their neighbors. I hope that one day to see the likes of Fukuyama similarly tried in the same manner, they, who are so fond of events like this.
2002-12-25 03:33 | User Profile
From the beginning, Americans regarded their values and institutions as embodying universal aspirations that would one day have a significance far beyond the shores of the United States. The Great Seal on the back of the dollar bill bears the inscription novus ordo seclorum--"new order of the ages"--that expresses a very unconservative sentiment with potentially revolutionary consequences. In this view, democracy, constitutional government and the individual rights on which they rest are good not just for North Americans by virtue of their peculiar habits and traditions, but for all people around the world**. **
Fukuyama represents the kind of eruditon that makes you value the folk wisdom of field hands. For people with such delicate antennae to any whisper of revisionism as regards WW2, neos are fairly climbing over each other reinventing every century prior to ours. (They always find them wanting, too; Fukuyama's point in the early part of his essay is seemingly that America began as a dream of tikkun olan-by-gunboat but, somewhere between 1787 and 1917, we sorta lost our way.)
These, indeed, are the type of conservatives - realists, mind you - who make sure Robin Hood has a black best buddy on your tv, and Sally Hemmings speaks better English staving off Tom Jefferson's Mandingo advances than he does slurring drunken sweet nothings in her ebony ear in your kid's history book. But ask for a forensic accounting of The Six Million and listen to the chorus of gasps.
There are almost no European-style conservatives in the United States, people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature**. Those we label "conservatives" in this country are called "liberals" in Europe, because they are in favor of free markets, individual initiative and a democratic polity based on individual, not collective, rights. **
The truth is the wing of conservatism Frankie the Fook speaks for are neither Classical Liberals or European Conservatives but simply the Jewish Left, now dowdy and gout-ridden after a half century of acceptance and institutionalization. The shift rightward has allowed them to drag their old agenda in behind them covered by a tarp, while providing them with a target to attack: the spent shell of their previous host body. It's still tikkun-olan driving the bus, baby, whether it's going by Republicrat or Democan this week, and tikkun-olan gestates and thrives in negativity and relentless attack. Can't put much stock in "hierarchy & tradition" when you might have to throw them both to the wolves tomorrow out of expediency. At least, your "hierarchy & tradition"; theirs is holy and must be defended to the last goyishe 18-year-old.
2002-12-25 04:17 | User Profile
Sir's I respectfully submit the following to clear any confusion regarding America's Great Seal.
"A New Order of the Ages" A Latin expert translates "Novus Ordo Seclorum" and shows why it cannot mean "New World Order." Seclorum means "of the ages" or "of the generations." This is easily seen in the phrase sometimes found at the end of prayers in Latin bibles: "secula seculorum" ââ¬â forever and ever (literally, "ages of ages"). Seclorum (seculorum, saeculorum, saeclorum) is a genitive plural form that could not properly be translated as "of the worlds." Seclum was used to mean "world" in ecclesiastical (church) Latin ââ¬â in the sense of worldliness ââ¬â hence the meaning of the English word secular (from the Latin adjective secularis). Moreover, since "seclorum" is plural, even if it did mean "world" in the sense of "planet" (which it does not), "novus ordo seclorum" would have to be translated "new order of the worlds." For example: "Immaculatus ab hoc saeculo" means "unstained by this world." "Et servientem corpori absolve vinclis saeculi" means "and free him who serves the body from the chains of the world." Notice that the phrases, "this world" and "the world," could be replaced by the word "worldliness." This is decidedly not the case for the phrase "New World Order." In Classical Latin, "world" ââ¬â in the sense that it is used in the phrase "new world order" ââ¬â would be "orbis terrarum/terrae" (or sometimes terra alone), or "mundus," or maybe "tellus." In Latin-English dictionaries, "seclum," in all its forms, is conspicuously absent from the listing of Latin words for "world."
Commentary: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," said Thomas Jefferson, one of the designers of the Great Seal. Today we should appreciate people who promote awareness of the negative reality of a "new world order." But they should chose a new symbol for their campaign. Stop demonizing the pyramid and eye. The Great Seal was created by America's founders, the people who gave us our freedom. It is not a symbol of those trying to take it away.
In Charles Thomson's Remarks and Explanation (1782), he says: "The Eye over it [the pyramid] & the Motto allude to the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause." With the Great Seal, America's founders tried to communicate their experience ââ¬â to us. They chose the radiant eye to symbolize and personify Providence. Patriotic Americans honor and protect their nation's seal, as they do its flag."
[url=http://www.greatseal.com/mottoes/translation.html]The Great Seal[/url]
2002-12-25 05:34 | User Profile
Suplanter,
Great Post. Yes: Stop demonizing the pyramid and eye. The Great Seal was created by America's founders...
2002-12-25 14:27 | User Profile
Fukuyama strikes me as someone who is confused about what Conservatism is. It is obvious to those who follow these things that what he has outlined is nothing more than Internationalism disguised as benevolence.
American foreign policy has always been pulled in two directions, toward a realist defense of national security defined in relatively narrow terms, and toward an expansive sense of American purposes that rests directly on the exceptionalism of American institutions and the messianic belief in their universal applicability.
Im glad to see C.F.R. member Fukuyama confirm what I have been saying about the foreign policy establisment. We have the choice of getting touchy-feely good foreign policy has promoted by the "liberals," or this so-called "muscular foreign policy" promoted by the Neo-cons. The only difference is the degree with they would resort to force. In all other regards they are exactly the same, the same meddling in others affairs (for the benefit of the few) that is what internationalism is really all about.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger represents the realist strain. The liberal internationalist tradition is represented not just by historical figures like Woodrow Wilson, founder of the League of Nations, but by more recent administrations, Republican and Democratic, that have helped found international institutions like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.
Ole Henry the K. Yes, he was a realist alright. This is the person who in the `70s said that America was like Carthage and the U.S.S.R. like Rome and we needed to come to an accomodation with them. What they consider realism is nothing more than lunacy as this below shows.
The administration's new National Security Strategy of the United States lays out an ambitious road map for the wholesale reordering of the politics of the Middle East, beginning with the replacement of Saddam Hussein by a democratic, pro-Western government. A variety of administration spokesmen and advisers have suggested that a different government in Iraq will change the political dynamics of the entire region, making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more tractable, putting pressure on authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and broadly promoting the cause of democracy in a hostile part of the world that has proven stubbornly resistant to all democratic trends. The present administration, in other words, has articulated anything but a conservative foreign policy. It is embarking on an immensely ambitious exercise in the political re-engineering of a hostile part of the world.
It is unrealistic to think that we can, or for that matter, our duty to do all the crap that he thinks we should be doing over there. There are limits to even what the so-called "worlds only superpower" can do and what we have here is one hell of an overextentsion that I believe will end up with us being run out there in the long run with nothing to show for our efforts except a red hot hatred from the people who live there. This isnt a "conservative foreign policy," it is a prescription for disaster.
Then we have this from Don Kagan, another whiz kid who Fukuyama has worked with before.
**To compare the United States with any such empire is ludicrous. It holds no land outside the 50 states without the consent of its people. Victorious in World War I, it withdrew from Europe entirely. Victorious in World War II, it liberated Western Europe, occupied defeated Germany until its democracy could take hold and pumped great sums of money into helping its allies and former enemies achieve unprecedented prosperity. Invited to lead them in defense against the menace of the Soviet Union, the United States spent its money and employed its forces far from home, not for conquest but to protect its allies. It has welcomed the formation of a European Union that is entirely independent of the United States, is a formidable competitor in the world economy and feels entirely free to criticize, remain aloof from and oppose American policies, with no fear of military reprisal. That is not how empires behave.
[u]We do not believe in an American empire.[/u]
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=3529&st=0&]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php...=5&t=3529&st=0&[/url] **
:lol: :lol: :D :o :P
And from Fukuyama:
** The second problem has to do with empire and legitimacy. Americans tend to assume that democracy and U.S. security go hand-in-hand, as they have in places like Germany, Japan, the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan. The administration is betting that the same thing will happen in a post-Saddam Iraq.
But liberation may give way to something that seems more like occupation over time. The same will apply in many other countries spawning terrorism where we may be tempted to expand our reach. Democracy and American national interests do indeed go together, but only over the long term and with periodic exceptions when we are often better served in the short run by friendly authoritarians. [u]The idealist project may therefore come to look more like empire pure and simple in the short run.[/u]**
Fukuyama, call the office. Which is it here? They can parse all the words they want, but it still doesn`t change the fact that we are looking at empire. :(
2002-12-26 00:52 | User Profile
Originally posted by Suplanter@Dec 25 2002, 04:17 Sir's I respectfully submit the following to clear any confusion regarding America's Great Seal.
I doubt you will completely clear up the confusion, but thanks for the try.
**"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," said Thomas Jefferson, one of the designers of the Great Seal. Today we should appreciate people who promote awareness of the negative reality of a "new world order." But they should chose a new symbol for their campaign. Stop demonizing the pyramid and eye. The Great Seal was created by America's founders, the people who gave us our freedom. It is not a symbol of those trying to take it away.
**
Thomas Jefferson, who designed the seal, also said, of the French Revolution
I would rather have seen half the population of the earth perish than to see it fail
I think to a certain extent Fukuyama is accurate in some of hisd characterisations of American history, although he does slant things somewhat toward the neo con view. There is a certain dichotomy in history over Americans role and activism desirable in foreign policy. And his comments about conservatism really have a certain reality to them too. Certainly now traditional conservatism is a defeated position (although certainly stil an active one), as Suba notes in his "Revolutionary Conservatism" essay. And the type of conservatism Fukuyama describes
people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature.
isn't dead in America, but you could argue it has always ended up on the losing side (or of being adopted by minority elements). The Jeffersonians defeated the Federalists, the North defeated the South, and the Roosevelt Democrats defeated the Coolidge Republicans.
The term the Confederates used for themselves, "the Lost Cause" seems somewhat appropriate.
2002-12-29 06:41 | User Profile
Sertorius,
I call it real Conservatism!
"European-style conservatives in the United States, people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature."
I have always said the so-called "classical liberals" are bad too!
Great Post!!
"There are more than you believe, Francis and after your kind get us in one hell of a mess in the Middle East there will be more. It is precisely those types of conservatives that are needed- to stop lunatics like you.
I recall that one of the charges brought against the Germans being tried at Nürnberg was conspiring to make aggressive war upon their neighbors. I hope that one day to see the likes of Fukuyama similarly tried in the same manner, they, who are so fond of events like this."-Sertorius
2002-12-29 14:19 | User Profile
This project has been attacked by the usual suspects on the left. It has also been criticized by two flavors of isolationists: Pat Buchanan and his followers, who have been blasting away in their new journal, The American Conservative, and libertarians like those at the Cato Institute. Both of these positions are unrealistic, in my view, because they assume that the world's sole superpower can somehow disengage from global power politics
Is it just me, or does
Both of these positions are unrealistic, in my view, because they assume that the world's sole superpower can somehow disengage from global power politics
mean absolutely nothing?
Throwing that sentence in is like an uneducated person throwing the word "paradigm" into a conversation.
2002-12-29 17:45 | User Profile
Oliver,
I see what you are saying. Shoot, the whole article doesn`t mean anything to me. It is just more internationalist nonsense written by someone trying to justify the unjustifiable.
I reckon he was thinking that if you can`t dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with b.s.
2003-01-08 00:35 | User Profile
Originally posted by Sertorius@Dec 29 2002, 11:45 I reckon he was thinking that if you can`t dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with b.s.
Exactly. Fukuyama is attempting intellectual sleight-of-hand to befuddle the pliable minds of yuppie garbage who actually read the WSJ. To him, Conservatismâ⢠is a brand-name like Nike or Reebok to be used to publicly sell the peculiar neocon mixture of warmongering and malcontent. Thus, the need to for neocons protect their trademark rights with attacks and purges on the old right.
** There are almost no European-style conservatives in the United States, people who want to defend a status quo based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature. **
Fukuyama is telling a half-truth to set up a false dictonomy. The European sword, altar, crown and aristocracy types never existed in the U.S. because none of those institutions were American. Fukuyama would have you believe that only an Absolute Monarchist can be truly conservative in any meaningful sense in regards to European Civilization - everyone else is a "liberal" to a greater or lesser degree. Which is blantantly false.
I propose we rename ourselves from "Traditional Conservatives" to "Traditional Reactionaries"
** Both of these positions are unrealistic, in my view, because they assume that the world's sole superpower can somehow disengage from global power politics **
Oliver, You have to parse "global power politics" to "quest for benevolent global empire." Surely an unthinkable option to Fukuyama.
[SIZE=1]Conservatism is a quasi-legal trademark of the American Jewish Committee and its subsidiary Commentary. It is used here with implied oral consent from the holder. Trademark violators are subject to public denouncements of racism, anti-semitism and radical leftism but not fines or imprisonment, yet. All rights reserved.[/SIZE]