The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century

THE CRISIS OF

AMERICAN

FOREIGN

POLICY

THE CRISIS OF

AMERICAN

FOREIGN

POLICY

Wilsonianism in the

Twenty-first Century

G. John Ikenberry

Thomas J. Knock

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tony Smith

Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The crisis of American foreign policy : Wilsonianism in the twenty-first century /

G. John Ikenberry . . . [et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13969-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United States—Foreign

relations—2001–2. Wilson, Woodrow, 1856–1924—Influence. 3. International

relations. I. Ikenberry, G. John.

JZ1469.C75 2009

327.73—dc22                       2008028823

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Electra

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Contents

Introduction

Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration, and the Future of Liberal Internationalism

G. John Ikenberry

1. Playing for a Hundred Years Hence

Woodrow Wilson’s Internationalism and His Would-Be Heirs

Thomas J. Knock

2. Wilsonianism after Iraq

The End of Liberal Internationalism?

Tony Smith

3. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Notes

Contributors

Index

THE CRISIS OF

AMERICAN

FOREIGN

POLICY

Introduction

Woodrow Wilson,

the Bush Administration, and the

Future of Liberal Internationalism

G. John Ikenberry

Was George Bush the heir of Woodrow Wilson? This is a question of some importance. In the years since September 11, the Bush administration pursued one of the most controversial foreign policies in American history. It articulated a sweeping new doctrine of national security based on provocative ideas about American global dominance, the preventive use of force, coalitions of the willing, and the struggle between liberty and evil. In the spring of 2003, this doctrine provided the intellectual backdrop for the invasion of Iraq—a costly and contested war that has now gone on longer than America’s military involvement in World War II. As the invasion turned into a protracted war, the Bush administration increasingly invoked liberal internationalist ideas to justify its actions. In his now famous Second Inaugural address, George W. Bush stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and proclaimed that We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The echoes of Woodrow Wilson and the Cold War liberal internationalism of Truman and Kennedy were unmistakable. Bush wanted Iraq to be seen ostensibly as part of America’s historic commitment—reaching back to Wilson—to advance the cause of freedom and democracy worldwide.

But is this true? Did Bush foreign policy reflect continuity with America’s liberal internationalist past or a radical break with it?

As the Iraq war has turned into a crisis of global significance, answers to this question become critical because we want to identify the causes of this debacle. We want to know not just who is responsible for the Iraq war but what is responsible—what in the sense of ideas and ideological impulses. Did Bush foreign policy—and the Iraq war in particular—grow out of the Wilsonian tradition or was it actually an aberration or even the antithesis of this tradition? This is another way of asking if liberals share the blame for the Iraq war. After all, many liberals did in fact support the invasion. Was the Iraq war an outgrowth—at least indirectly—of an evolved Wilsonian worldview that is widely shared across the political spectrum in America, or was American foreign policy hijacked by a group of ideological outliers who hid behind Wilsonian ideas but were ultimately wielding a very different vision of America and the world?¹

The essays in this book debate these questions.² Tony Smith argues that the Bush administration and the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war were the natural heirs to the Wilsonian tradition. Wilson and post-1945 liberal internationalists blazed a trail that Bush followed. In this view, it is America’s commitment to promote democracy worldwide—a sort of liberal imperial ambition—that is at the core of Wilsonianism, and it was the animating vision behind the Bush Doctrine. Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter disagree, each arguing that the Wilsonian vision was not directly concerned with the spread of democracy but rather with the building of a cooperative and rule-based international order—an idea that the Bush administration actively resisted. Knock emphasizes the centrality of the League of Nations itself—the embodiment of conflict resolution and the collective security idea—to Wilson’s own conception of enlightened international order. Slaughter emphasizes the inherent multilateralism of the Wilsonian vision. For Tony Smith, the Bush administration’s foreign policy was a natural extension of the ideas that liberal internationalists have developed over the decades, including in the 1990s by the Clinton administration. For Knock and Slaughter, the Wilsonian tradition and postwar liberal internationalism are about building rules and institutions that advance collective security and cooperation among democracies.

This debate is joined on five key questions. One question is about the actual character and logic of the Bush foreign policy project. Was it really about the spread of freedom and democracy—a goal to be pursued when necessary by the force of arms? Or was it about something else, a sort of neoimperial effort to assert American global rule in which democracy promotion is decidedly less important, perhaps even a sort of fig leaf to cover more hard-nosed geopolitical ambitions? Was the Iraq war really pursued as part of a global campaign to spread democracy and transform the Middle East, or was this a secondary rationale that was emphasized only after the war faltered?

The second question is about Wilsonianism and its essential logic. What precisely was Wilson’s vision? How much was the global spread of democracy at the heart of Woodrow Wilson’s approach to international relations? Is the promotion of democracy the cutting edge of Wilsonianism, or is it international law and collective security? Wilson clearly believed that a world—or at least a core grouping—of mature democracies was a necessary feature of a peaceful and cooperative international order. But how important was the promotion of democracy—and what role did Wilson see for the use of force and regime change in the promotion of democracy? Likewise, was multilateralism—embodied in his beloved League of Nations—simply a means to an end for Wilson or was multilateralism an end in itself, the indispensable essence of the new system of liberal global order that Wilson sought? If the United States abandons multilateralism in favor of the unilateral and unfettered use of American power to foster democracy worldwide, is this simply taking Wilsonianism, as Henry Kissinger argues, to its ultimate conclusion, or is it a deep violation of the letter and spirit of the Wilsonian tradition?³

Third, how has liberal internationalism evolved since the days of Woodrow Wilson? The liberal internationalist tradition has not stood still over the course of the twentieth century; it has taken on new ideas and adapted to shifting global realities, particularly in the early decades after World War II and again in the 1990s. During the Cold War, a wider array of institutions was seen as necessary for the progressive governance of world order, and America’s role in the running of the system also expanded. The postwar human rights revolution also expanded the commitments and obligations of the international community, loosening the norms of state sovereignty and nonintervention. By the late 1990s, expansive notions of liberal interventionism had emerged—pursued under the auspices of the United Nations or by the United States as the indispensable nation. The question, then, is whether this evolved liberal internationalism or what Tony Smith calls neoliberalism—which is more encompassing and interventionist than the original Wilsonian vision—cleared the way and set the stage for the Bush security doctrine.

Fourth, does liberal internationalism have within it the principled and institutional safeguards to prevent liberal imperialism? There are few observers today who do not think moments arise when the international community—or, if necessary, the Western democracies—should intervene in troubled countries to prevent genocide, alleviate humanitarian crises, and thwart transnational terrorists. There is also a good deal of support across the political spectrum for international assistance in support of struggling democracies. But how do these Western democracies distinguish between enlightened and legitimate interventions and liberal imperialism? Tony Smith argues that the contemporary neoliberal incarnation of liberal internationalism is a slippery slope for American policy makers, built on optimistic assumptions about democracy promotion and peace, that leads inevitably to imperialist adventures. There is much to be admired in the Wilsonian tradition, Smith asserts, but the problem is that it cannot contain its own excesses. In contrast, Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter argue that Woodrow Wilson’s original conception of liberal international order—in which member nations would consult, cooperate, and constrain one another through a sort of international common counsel—provides the corrective mechanisms to prevent abuses.

Finally, how relevant is the Wilsonian tradition for the twenty-first century? What the essays agree on is that liberal internationalism is in crisis today—or at least it stands at an intellectual and political juncture—and the direction of American foreign policy after Bush hangs in the balance. Whether Smith is correct or Knock and Slaughter are correct, all agree that the Iraq war has put in jeopardy America’s long commitment to some form of liberal internationalism or another. At one level, the crisis of liberal internationalism is political—endangered by a domestic and global backlash against the Iraq war and the perceived dangers and failures of Bush administration foreign policy. Bush, at least to some extent, has wrapped himself in Wilsonian clothing and so—even if he has not appropriated the full set of liberal internationalist ideas and even if his embrace of these ideas, such as they are, is only cynical—the liberal internationalist agenda is in trouble. By association, the crisis of Bush foreign policy has become a crisis of liberal internationalism. Thus the political question is about how liberal internationalism reconstitutes and asserts itself in the post-Bush era.

But there are also deeper intellectual questions about the liberal international project as such. These are questions about how the international community actually makes good on its commitments to support democracy and human rights around the world. The United States has the military power to act on behalf of the international community, but it alone does not have the legitimacy. As Slaughter suggests, the problem is the weakness of the authority structures at the global level to carry out evolving liberal international goals. What the essays in this volume make clear is that there are really no good options for international order other than to try to rebuild multilateral institutions and strengthen cooperative mechanisms to tackle twenty-first-century global problems. In a fundamental sense, there is no turning back to pre-Wilsonian ideas about international order, such as those associated with the old classical balance of power system. For better or worse, we are all Wilsonians now.

In this introduction, I will set out some orienting ideas about these five questions—and thereby set the stage for the essays that follow.

George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy and Liberal Internationalism

The Bush administration did herald a remarkable turn in American foreign policy: a conservative American president—perhaps the most conservative in the postwar era—who campaigned for office seeking a return to a realist philosophy of foreign policy but who, in the course of events, invoked liberal internationalist ideas to justify a controversial war and an expansive global agenda.

In one sense, this might not be surprising. American presidents from FDR and Truman to Kennedy and Reagan to Clinton have made the championing of democracy and freedom a centerpiece of their foreign policy. At the very outset of the Cold War, President Truman called on the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. President Kennedy proclaimed in his inaugural address that America shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. In his 1982 speech before the British Parliament, President Reagan portrayed the struggle for liberty and democracy as the central drama of a bloody twentieth century: Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best—a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at least free to determine their own destiny. In the aftermath of the Cold War, President Clinton made enlargement of the democratic world America’s guiding goal.

Indeed, the history of American diplomacy in the twentieth century is the repeated encounter of American liberal ideas with the tough and often unyielding realities of the wider world. Across the decades, these ideas continue to find their way into American diplomacy.⁴ No less than Henry Kissinger—an icon of the realist alternative to Wilsonianism—concedes that Wilsonianism is the dominant tradition of American foreign policy. Though Wilson could not convince his own country of its merit, the idea lived on. It is above all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched since his watershed presidency and continues to march to this day.⁵

Nonetheless, the Bush administration’s embrace of Wilsonian ideas is actually quite surprising. President Bush brought to office the rhetoric of a traditional realist. His national security advisor and future secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, had famously written during the 2000 presidential campaign that a Republican administration would return foreign policy to its traditional emphasis on the management of great power relations and the realist pursuit of the national interest.⁶ Candidate Bush himself had argued that, I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.⁷ Three years later, Bush would be engaged in the most ambitious nation-building experiment since the 1940s, asserting that bringing democracy to Iraq and the Middle East was critical to world peace and American national security.⁸

Bush foreign policy passed through several phases. The early realist emphasis of the Bush administration was matched with a resistance to the liberal multilateral emphasis of the Clinton years. This was signaled early in the administration by its resistance to a wide array of international agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Germ Weapons Convention, and other arms control agreements. It also unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which many experts regard as the cornerstone of modern arms control agreements. Unilateralism, of course, is not a new feature of American foreign policy. In every historical era, the United States has shown a willingness to reject treaties, violate rules, ignore allies, and use military force on its own. But many observers saw the unilateralism of the Bush administration as something much more sweeping—not an occasional ad hoc policy decision but a new strategic orientation or what one pundit touts as the new unilateralism.⁹

The most systematic statement of Bush strategic thinking came after the September 11 attacks with the 2002 National Security Doctrine and the Iraq war, articulating a vision of America as a unipolar state positioned above and beyond the rules and institutions to the global system, providing security and enforcing order. It was a strategy of global rule in which the United States would remain a military power in a class by itself, thereby making destabilizing arms races pointless and limiting rivalry to trade and other pursuits.¹⁰ American preeminent power would, in effect, put an end to five centuries of great power rivalry. In doing so, it would take the lead in identifying and attacking threats—preemptively if necessary. America was providing the ultimate global public good. In return, the United States would ask to be less encumbered by rules and institutions of the old order. It would not sign the land mine treaty because American troops were uniquely at risk in war zones around the world. It would not sign the ICC treaty because Americans would be uniquely at risk of political prosecutions. In effect, the United States was to become the unipolar provider of global security and order.

The leading edge of this new conception of America’s role and rule in the world concerned the use of force. The Bush administration’s security doctrine was new and sweeping. The United States asserted the right to use force anywhere in the world against terrorists with global reach. It would do so largely outside the traditional alliance system through coalitions of the willing. The United States would take anticipatory action when it determined the use of force was necessary. Because such action would be taken to oppose terrorists or overthrow despotic regimes, it would be self-legitimating. Countries were either with us or against us, or as Bush announced, "no nation can be neutral