Stepping back from the day-to-day headlines, there are six signposts to a progressive internationalism that emerged from the conversations reproduced in my recent book for the Foreign Policy Centre, Global Politics After 9/11. Each is a response to a new terrain of foreign policy. That terrain was mapped in the book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, of Princeton and co-convenor of The Princeton Project – a three-year effort to develop a bipartisan security strategy for the USA.
Anne-Marie told me that when the Princeton Project began they hoped to write a new ‘X’ article. This was the ‘long telegram’, titled ‘X’, sent by George Kennan, then acting head of the US embassy in Moscow, in 1946, back to his bosses in Washington. In it, Kennan made the case for the strategy of containment to be the cornerstone of the west’s response to communist totalitarianism. It was probably the single most important State Department cable ever written.
Now, in 2006 Anne-Marie and her colleagues never did write that contemporary version of the ‘X’ article. Why not? We no longer face a single threat, as in the Cold War:
‘[We] are in a world of multiple threats, and at least five of them – terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, climate change, the implosion of the Middle East – are equal in gravity. And there are two major challenges: the rise of India and China and the challenge of managing globalisation. So you have to have a strategy that can respond in multiple directions at once.’
If that is the terrain, what signposts should democrats follow? I offer these six.
Number one: ‘from simplicity to complexity’. Again and again in the interviews I heard the experts reject the simplicities of the old foreign policy paradigms. They rejected the simplicity of the so-called ‘realist’ paradigm of the old Kissengerian right. They rejected the new simplicity of thinking ‘democracy-promotion’ is exhausted by having a good heart, overturning the dictator, and holding elections in the rubble. Martin Shaw rejected the simplicity of the old ‘anti-imperialist’ paradigm that, today, reduces world politics to a cosmic struggle between ‘the resistance’ and ‘empire’ until it is left marching in London’s streets waving placards proclaiming ‘We are all Hezbollah now’. And Jean Bethke Elshtain questioned the simplicity of the liberal internationalist paradigm where the current UN is the font of legitimacy and the mechanism for solving all problems.
So, being willing to question all the old signposts is the first new signpost.
Number two: ‘From old wars to new wars’. Mary Kaldor told me we are fighting ‘new wars’ now: ‘An “old war” was a war between states. … A “new war” is fought by combinations of state and non-state actors … for identity. Battle is rare and most violence is directed against civilians.’ New wars are also ‘global surveillance wars’, said Martin Shaw, meaning they are now much more constrained by national and international political surveillance, by legal surveillance, by the surveillance exercised through elections and public opinion, and of course all of these forms of surveillance depend very much on the daily surveillance of political and military events which goes on through the mass media.’
Consequence? The home front can determine the outcome of new wars. Take Afghanistan. The in-country coalition leadership wants to transition to ‘fourth-generation warfare’ – coordinating counter-insurgency efforts along the two axes of security and development – but there are neither the physical nor human resources in theatre, nor the political will among the international community to provide them. And this lack of capacity reflects the deep ambivalence about the effort back at home.
That ambivalence is why we need the third and fourth signposts.
Third signpost: ‘from a partisan to a bi-partisan response’. Last month in Boston the prime minister invoked the leadership shown in the late 1940s when new global arrangements were agreed that ‘saved the free world’. The ‘Truman-Eisenhower’ moment – a bipartisan accord of Democrats and Republicans to contain communism – was of course also a ‘Churchill-Bevin’ moment, a bipartisan accord of Conservative and Labour. We need that kind of bi-partisan agreement today. But we don’t always have it. Why?
In the 1940s two things made a bipartisan foreign policy possible. First, a refusal to make foreign policy into a domestic political football. Can Harry Reid claim to have always refused that temptation? Can Dick Cheney? Can the German Social Democrats? Second, in the 1940s, bitter and ultimately successful fights were waged to defeat two alternative approaches. On the right, the dream of preventive war and military roll-back was defeated. On the left – in Democratic Clubs, ward parties, union halls, seminar rooms and little magazines – the dream of appeasing and accommodating the Soviet Union, proposed in the US by Henry Wallace and his liberal and communist backers, was defeated. However, according to several of the interviewees, we have a ‘Henry Wallace problem’ once again.
That’s why the fourth signpost reads ‘towards a hard-headed internationalism’. Today, the Islamist threat just won’t come into focus for many commentators. Paul Berman told me that a ‘rationalist liberal naiveté’ has stopped us seeing the nature of the Jihadist threat plain. And this liberal naiveté – which just refuses to believe, for instance, that Hamas really believes that all that stuff about the Jews in its charter – totters on the edge of something worse: an occidentalism or anti-westernism.
A legitimate critique of the west can morph into an inchoate negativist opposition to America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan of the ‘empire’. Soon enough anyone shooting at America, Israel and the ‘empire’ is, by that act, the ‘resistance’, and to be supported, or at least treated as morally equal, ‘for the duration’. After all, as John Pilger says, ‘we can’t be choosy’. I suspect this attitude is more widespread than we care to admit, especially in what we might call, with apologies to Dwight Eisenhower, the academic-media complex in the west.
David Miliband, interviewed recently in the New Statesman was asked the sarcastic question: ‘what has happened to Tony Blair’s neocon project, then?’ Miliband’s answer carried enormous political import. The neocons, Miliband pointed out, were, ‘people who came out of the 1960s, but who had lost their faith in progressive policy because they said we weren’t hard-headed enough’. Miliband went on to call for new smart combinations of hard and soft power, making it very clear that no-one was going to be able to say of the Labour party, ‘we weren’t hard-headed enough’.
Five: ‘from unilateral to multilateral responses’. But unilateralism has driven some quite mad. One interviewee, Jean Bethke Elshstain calls this phenomenon ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome’. A hard-headed internationalism must always strive to be multilateralist. Martin Shaw said there never was a ‘unipolar moment’ (though the conviction that there was fuelled a hubris we are still recovering from). The myth of unipolarity misunderstood something fundamental about the world. Shaw’s ‘globality’ was rightly at the heart of Gordon Brown’s speech in Boston. He called for us to move from a world economy to a ‘global society’ built on a ‘global covenant’ (the subject of my interview with David Held) and ‘shared values’.
Six: ‘from exclusive to inclusive globalisation’. Globalisation is a great thing. It has lifted more people out of absolute poverty more rapidly than at any time in human history. The idea that capitalism has created a world in which working people have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’ is dead. But capitalism is still experienced as inhuman by many. Anthony Giddens has called ours a ‘runaway world’. And this is also the terrain of foreign policy today.
A progressive foreign policy, then, is inseparable from the pursuit of global economic development-as-freedom, to use Amartya Sen’s happy phrase. We must humanise a ‘runaway world’ by tethering the global economy to development, and, in turn, tethering development to freedom and social justice. This will help marginalise the lure of what Albert Camus in The Rebel called ‘a primitive baying at the moon’.
A version of these remarks was made to the launch of Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews (Foreign Policy Centre / Democratiya) in the House of Lords, April 21.
The book is edited by Alan Johnson and collects his interviews with Paul Berman, Ladan Boroumand, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David Held, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Mary Kaldor, Kanan Makiya, Joshua Muravchik, Martin Shaw, and Anne-Marie Slaughter.
The book launch can be watched at the Democratiya You Tube channel.