Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is often associated with
the goal of exporting American values abroad
by the means of American power, hard or soft,
making it a slightly more “left” version of neoconservatism.
Each seems to advocate neoimperialism.
Here are some articles dealing with the subject.
They Need a Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq
By Tony Smith
Washington Post Outlook, 2007-03-11
[This is an interesting article; here is its full text.
Paragraph numbers and emphasis have been added.]
[1]
The Democrats’ victory last November
obviously reflected popular sentiment against the war in Iraq,
but nothing seems obvious now
as Democrats try to exploit their new majority status in Congress.
[2]
Iraq had flustered the congressional Democrats because
Democrats don’t have an agreed position
on what America’s role in the world should be.
They want to change the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq
without discussing the underlying ideas that produced it.
And although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush,
the fact is that
prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different
from the Bush-Cheney doctrine.
[3]
Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq,
embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on
American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene
to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests
long before 9/11,
and they have not changed course since.
Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.
[4]
But without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine,
with its confidence in America’s military preeminence
and the global appeal of “free market democracy,”
the Democrats’ midterm victory may not be repeated in November 2008.
Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008,
they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana
strikingly reminiscent of Bush’s.
[One can, realistically, change that “could” to “will”
unless something changes radically.]
[5]
Democratic adherents to what might be called the “neoliberal” position
are well organized and well positioned.
Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright,
then President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state:
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
We are the indispensable nation.
We stand tall and we see further into the future.”
She was speaking of Bosnia at the time,
but her remark had much wider implications.
[6]
Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates
has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).
Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides
damning Bush’s handling of the Iraq war,
but it has never condemned the invasion.
It has criticized Bush’s failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better.
[7]
Consider a volume published last spring and edited by Will Marshall,
president of the PPI since 1989.
The book,
With All Our Might:
A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty,
contains essays by 19 liberal Democrats.
[8]
“Make no mistake,” write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction,
“we are committed to preserving America’s military preeminence.
We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership.”
Recalling a Democratic “tradition of muscular liberalism,”
they insist that
“Progressives and Democrats
must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad
just because President Bush has paid it lip service.
Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric --
is fundamentally the Democrats’ legacy, the Democrats’ cause,
and the Democrats’ responsibility.”
[9]
In the volume,
a Muslim American calls on us to prevail in the “cosmic war” with terrorism
by winning “The Struggle for Islam’s Soul.”
Stephen Solarz worries about Pakistan;
Anne-Marie Slaughter would “Reinvent the U.N.”
Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul defend “Seeding Liberal Democracy.”
Kenneth Pollack, whose 2002 book,
“The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,”
was as influential as any single writing in urging the invasion of Iraq,
presents “A Grand Strategy for the Middle East.”
[10]
“For better or worse, whether you supported the war or not,
it is all about Iraq now,” writes Pollack.
The goal of this Democrat who helped bring us Iraq?
“The end state
that America’s grand strategy toward the Middle East must envision
is a new liberal order to replace
a status quo marked by political repression, economic stagnation and cultural conflict.”
His problem with the Bush administration?
“It has not made transformation its highest goal. . . .
Iran and Syria’s rogue regimes seem to be the only exceptions.
The administration insists on democratic change there
in a manner it eschews for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other allies. . . .
The right grand strategy would make
transformation of our friends and our foes alike
our agenda’s foremost issue.”
[11]
This is not a fringe group.
Many prominent Democrats are PPI stalwarts, including Sens.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., Evan Bayh, Thomas R. Carper and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, published a book last year,
“The Plan: Big Ideas for America,”
co-authored by Bruce Reed,
editor of the PPI’s magazine Blueprint and president of the DLC.
[12]
Emanuel and Reed salute Marshall’s “outstanding anthology”
for its “refreshingly hardnosed and intelligent new approach . . .
which breathes new life into the Democratic vision
of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy.”
Not a word in their book appears hostile to the idea of invading Iraq.
Instead, the authors fault Bush for allowing a “troop gap” to develop
(they favor increasing the Army by 100,000
and expanding the Marines and Special Forces)
and for failing to “enlist our allies in a common mission.”
The message once again is that Democrats could do it better.
[13]
In fact,
these neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable
from the better-known neoconservatives.
The neocons’ think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
often salutes individuals within the PPI,
and PPI members such as Marshall
signed PNAC petitions endorsing the Iraq invasion.
Weeks after “With All Our Might” appeared,
the Weekly Standard, virtually the PNAC house organ,
gave it a thumbs-up review.
And why not? The PPI and PNAC are tweedledum and tweedledee.
[14]
Sources for many of the critical elements of the Bush doctrine
can be found in the emergence of neoliberal thought during the 1990s,
after the end of the Cold War.
In think tanks, universities and government offices,
left-leaning intellectuals, many close to the Democratic Party,
formulated concepts to bring to fruition
the age-old dream of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson
“to make the world safe for democracy.”
These neolibs advocated the global expansion of “market democracy.”
They presented empirical, theoretical, even philosophical arguments
to support the idea of the United States as the indispensable nation.
Albright’s self-assured declaration
descended directly from traditional Wilsonianism.
[15]
Talking in the refined language of the social sciences about “democratic peace theory,”
neolibs such as Bruce Russett at Yale
maintained that a world of democracies would mean the end of war.
Neolibs such as Larry Diamond at Stanford also posited
the “universal appeal of democracy,”
suggesting that “regime change” leading to “the democratic transition”
was a manageable undertaking.
Anne-Marie Slaughter at Princeton asserted that
“rogue states” guilty of systematic human-rights abuses or that built weapons of mass destruction
had only “conditional sovereignty” and were legally open to attack.
These views were echoed
in the columns of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.
Here was the intellectual substance of much of the Bush doctrine,
coming from non-Republicans.
[16]
Dealing with Serbia in the 1990s cemented
the neocon-neolib entente.
By Sept. 11, 2001,
these two groups had converged as a single ideological family.
They agreed that American nationalism was best expressed in world affairs as a
progressive imperialism.
The rallying call for armed action would be
promoting human rights and democratic government
among peoples who resisted American hegemony.
[17]
And so we may appreciate the Democrats’ difficulty
in their search for an exit strategy
not only from Iraq but also from the temptations of a superpower.
[18]
Ironically,
the neolibs are more powerful today in the Democratic Party
than the neocons are among Republicans.
Senior Republicans such as
Brent Scowcroft, James A. Baker III and the late Gerald R. Ford
seem more skeptical about an American bid for world supremacy
than do comparable senior Democrats.
“I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,”
Ford told Bob Woodward in 2004.
But the former president doubted “whether you can detach that
from the obligation number one of what’s in our national interest.
And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe
freeing people, unless it is directly related to our national security.”
[19]
There is a precedent for the Democrats’ dilemma as 2008 approaches.
When Richard M. Nixon ran for president 40 years ago,
he, too, needed to formulate a policy that distinguished him
from the unpopular war in Vietnam prosecuted by an unpopular Democratic administration.
He promised that “a new leadership will end the war,”
hinting that he had a secret plan to do so.
But it turned out that Nixon’s “new leadership”
was as committed to prevailing in Southeast Asia
as Lyndon B. Johnson had been.
[20]
The early positions of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates
illustrate their party’s problem.
The front-runner, Hillary Clinton,
has not moved from her traditional support of the DLC’s basic position --
she criticizes the conduct of the war, but not the idea of the war.
Former senator John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama are more outspoken;
both call the war a serious mistake,
but neither has articulated a vision
for a more modest U.S. role in the world generally.
[21]
It isn’t easy to offer a true alternative.
The challenges to world order are many,
as are the influential special interests in this country
that want an aggressive policy:
will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand.
The danger lies in believing
that our power is beyond challenge,
that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and
that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world
so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.
tony.smith@tufts.edu
Tony Smith, a political science professor at Tufts University,
is the author of
A Pact With the Devil:
Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy
and the Betrayal of the American Promise
(Routledge).
[David Fromkin, author of A Peace to End All Peace,
has this to say about Smith’s book:
“In the course of this provocative polemic,
Smith attacks practically everybody who writes about foreign policy in the United States today.”
Related reading:
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post, 2007-05-29
[An excerpt:]
I acknowledge that the [Iraq] war is a catastrophic mistake
and was incompetently managed.
But if you don’t think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire
[somehow, “for Israel” does not even appear among Cohen’s possibilities],
then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good --
rid the world of a really bad guy
and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region.
This “liberal” intent ... appealed to Bush
and it showed in his rhetoric and body language.
Contrast it to the position of the so-called foreign policy realists,
exemplified by the first President Bush
and his trusted foreign policy sidekick, Brent Scowcroft.
[How then-Secretary of State James A. Baker escapes mention escapes me.
Perhaps it is due to his alleged statement during Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign:
“F**k the Jews. They didn’t vote for us anyhow.”]
It was their decision -- cold realism at its best --
to end the Persian Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power
and not to intervene
when Hussein later decimated rebellious Shiites in the south.
Realistic? Sure.
But also sickening.
Bush’s neoliberal instincts have come a cropper across the board.
His appointees have too often been incompetent,
and his well-intentioned education act [NCLB] is underfunded.
But it is with Iraq that real and long-term damage has been done.
For years to come, his war will be cited
to smother any liberal impulse in American foreign policy --
to further discredit John F. Kennedy’s vow
to “pay any price, bear any burden . . .
to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
We shall revert to this thing called “realism,”
which is heartless and cynical, no matter what its other virtues.
The debacle of Iraq has cost us -- and others -- plenty in lives.
But in the end, it will cost us our soul as well.
the goal of exporting American values abroad
by the means of American power, hard or soft,
making it a slightly more “left” version of neoconservatism.
Each seems to advocate neoimperialism.
Here are some articles dealing with the subject.
2007-03-11-Smith
It’s Uphill for the DemocratsThey Need a Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq
By Tony Smith
Washington Post Outlook, 2007-03-11
[This is an interesting article; here is its full text.
Paragraph numbers and emphasis have been added.]
[1]
The Democrats’ victory last November
obviously reflected popular sentiment against the war in Iraq,
but nothing seems obvious now
as Democrats try to exploit their new majority status in Congress.
[2]
Iraq had flustered the congressional Democrats because
Democrats don’t have an agreed position
on what America’s role in the world should be.
They want to change the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq
without discussing the underlying ideas that produced it.
And although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush,
the fact is that
prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different
from the Bush-Cheney doctrine.
[3]
Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq,
embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on
American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene
to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests
long before 9/11,
and they have not changed course since.
Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.
[4]
But without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine,
with its confidence in America’s military preeminence
and the global appeal of “free market democracy,”
the Democrats’ midterm victory may not be repeated in November 2008.
Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008,
they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana
strikingly reminiscent of Bush’s.
[One can, realistically, change that “could” to “will”
unless something changes radically.]
[5]
Democratic adherents to what might be called the “neoliberal” position
are well organized and well positioned.
Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright,
then President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state:
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
We are the indispensable nation.
We stand tall and we see further into the future.”
She was speaking of Bosnia at the time,
but her remark had much wider implications.
[6]
Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates
has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).
Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides
damning Bush’s handling of the Iraq war,
but it has never condemned the invasion.
It has criticized Bush’s failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better.
[7]
Consider a volume published last spring and edited by Will Marshall,
president of the PPI since 1989.
The book,
With All Our Might:
A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty,
contains essays by 19 liberal Democrats.
[8]
“Make no mistake,” write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction,
“we are committed to preserving America’s military preeminence.
We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership.”
Recalling a Democratic “tradition of muscular liberalism,”
they insist that
“Progressives and Democrats
must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad
just because President Bush has paid it lip service.
Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric --
is fundamentally the Democrats’ legacy, the Democrats’ cause,
and the Democrats’ responsibility.”
[9]
In the volume,
a Muslim American calls on us to prevail in the “cosmic war” with terrorism
by winning “The Struggle for Islam’s Soul.”
Stephen Solarz worries about Pakistan;
Anne-Marie Slaughter would “Reinvent the U.N.”
Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul defend “Seeding Liberal Democracy.”
Kenneth Pollack, whose 2002 book,
“The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,”
was as influential as any single writing in urging the invasion of Iraq,
presents “A Grand Strategy for the Middle East.”
[10]
“For better or worse, whether you supported the war or not,
it is all about Iraq now,” writes Pollack.
The goal of this Democrat who helped bring us Iraq?
“The end state
that America’s grand strategy toward the Middle East must envision
is a new liberal order to replace
a status quo marked by political repression, economic stagnation and cultural conflict.”
His problem with the Bush administration?
“It has not made transformation its highest goal. . . .
Iran and Syria’s rogue regimes seem to be the only exceptions.
The administration insists on democratic change there
in a manner it eschews for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other allies. . . .
The right grand strategy would make
transformation of our friends and our foes alike
our agenda’s foremost issue.”
[11]
This is not a fringe group.
Many prominent Democrats are PPI stalwarts, including Sens.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., Evan Bayh, Thomas R. Carper and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, published a book last year,
“The Plan: Big Ideas for America,”
co-authored by Bruce Reed,
editor of the PPI’s magazine Blueprint and president of the DLC.
[12]
Emanuel and Reed salute Marshall’s “outstanding anthology”
for its “refreshingly hardnosed and intelligent new approach . . .
which breathes new life into the Democratic vision
of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy.”
Not a word in their book appears hostile to the idea of invading Iraq.
Instead, the authors fault Bush for allowing a “troop gap” to develop
(they favor increasing the Army by 100,000
and expanding the Marines and Special Forces)
and for failing to “enlist our allies in a common mission.”
The message once again is that Democrats could do it better.
[13]
In fact,
these neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable
from the better-known neoconservatives.
The neocons’ think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
often salutes individuals within the PPI,
and PPI members such as Marshall
signed PNAC petitions endorsing the Iraq invasion.
Weeks after “With All Our Might” appeared,
the Weekly Standard, virtually the PNAC house organ,
gave it a thumbs-up review.
And why not? The PPI and PNAC are tweedledum and tweedledee.
[14]
Sources for many of the critical elements of the Bush doctrine
can be found in the emergence of neoliberal thought during the 1990s,
after the end of the Cold War.
In think tanks, universities and government offices,
left-leaning intellectuals, many close to the Democratic Party,
formulated concepts to bring to fruition
the age-old dream of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson
“to make the world safe for democracy.”
These neolibs advocated the global expansion of “market democracy.”
They presented empirical, theoretical, even philosophical arguments
to support the idea of the United States as the indispensable nation.
Albright’s self-assured declaration
descended directly from traditional Wilsonianism.
[15]
Talking in the refined language of the social sciences about “democratic peace theory,”
neolibs such as Bruce Russett at Yale
maintained that a world of democracies would mean the end of war.
Neolibs such as Larry Diamond at Stanford also posited
the “universal appeal of democracy,”
suggesting that “regime change” leading to “the democratic transition”
was a manageable undertaking.
Anne-Marie Slaughter at Princeton asserted that
“rogue states” guilty of systematic human-rights abuses or that built weapons of mass destruction
had only “conditional sovereignty” and were legally open to attack.
These views were echoed
in the columns of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.
Here was the intellectual substance of much of the Bush doctrine,
coming from non-Republicans.
[16]
Dealing with Serbia in the 1990s cemented
the neocon-neolib entente.
By Sept. 11, 2001,
these two groups had converged as a single ideological family.
They agreed that American nationalism was best expressed in world affairs as a
progressive imperialism.
The rallying call for armed action would be
promoting human rights and democratic government
among peoples who resisted American hegemony.
[17]
And so we may appreciate the Democrats’ difficulty
in their search for an exit strategy
not only from Iraq but also from the temptations of a superpower.
[18]
Ironically,
the neolibs are more powerful today in the Democratic Party
than the neocons are among Republicans.
Senior Republicans such as
Brent Scowcroft, James A. Baker III and the late Gerald R. Ford
seem more skeptical about an American bid for world supremacy
than do comparable senior Democrats.
“I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,”
Ford told Bob Woodward in 2004.
But the former president doubted “whether you can detach that
from the obligation number one of what’s in our national interest.
And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe
freeing people, unless it is directly related to our national security.”
[19]
There is a precedent for the Democrats’ dilemma as 2008 approaches.
When Richard M. Nixon ran for president 40 years ago,
he, too, needed to formulate a policy that distinguished him
from the unpopular war in Vietnam prosecuted by an unpopular Democratic administration.
He promised that “a new leadership will end the war,”
hinting that he had a secret plan to do so.
But it turned out that Nixon’s “new leadership”
was as committed to prevailing in Southeast Asia
as Lyndon B. Johnson had been.
[20]
The early positions of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates
illustrate their party’s problem.
The front-runner, Hillary Clinton,
has not moved from her traditional support of the DLC’s basic position --
she criticizes the conduct of the war, but not the idea of the war.
Former senator John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama are more outspoken;
both call the war a serious mistake,
but neither has articulated a vision
for a more modest U.S. role in the world generally.
[21]
It isn’t easy to offer a true alternative.
The challenges to world order are many,
as are the influential special interests in this country
that want an aggressive policy:
- globalizing corporations,
- the military-industrial complex,
- the pro-Israel lobbies,
- those who covet Middle Eastern oil.
will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand.
The danger lies in believing
that our power is beyond challenge,
that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and
that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world
so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.
tony.smith@tufts.edu
Tony Smith, a political science professor at Tufts University,
is the author of
A Pact With the Devil:
Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy
and the Betrayal of the American Promise
(Routledge).
[David Fromkin, author of A Peace to End All Peace,
has this to say about Smith’s book:
“In the course of this provocative polemic,
Smith attacks practically everybody who writes about foreign policy in the United States today.”
Related reading:
- Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy
by Stephen M. Walt - Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer
- World on Fire by Amy Chua
2007-05-29-Cohen
Bush the NeoliberalBy Richard Cohen
Washington Post, 2007-05-29
[An excerpt:]
I acknowledge that the [Iraq] war is a catastrophic mistake
and was incompetently managed.
But if you don’t think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire
[somehow, “for Israel” does not even appear among Cohen’s possibilities],
then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good --
rid the world of a really bad guy
and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region.
This “liberal” intent ... appealed to Bush
and it showed in his rhetoric and body language.
Contrast it to the position of the so-called foreign policy realists,
exemplified by the first President Bush
and his trusted foreign policy sidekick, Brent Scowcroft.
[How then-Secretary of State James A. Baker escapes mention escapes me.
Perhaps it is due to his alleged statement during Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign:
“F**k the Jews. They didn’t vote for us anyhow.”]
It was their decision -- cold realism at its best --
to end the Persian Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power
and not to intervene
when Hussein later decimated rebellious Shiites in the south.
Realistic? Sure.
But also sickening.
Bush’s neoliberal instincts have come a cropper across the board.
His appointees have too often been incompetent,
and his well-intentioned education act [NCLB] is underfunded.
But it is with Iraq that real and long-term damage has been done.
For years to come, his war will be cited
to smother any liberal impulse in American foreign policy --
to further discredit John F. Kennedy’s vow
to “pay any price, bear any burden . . .
to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
We shall revert to this thing called “realism,”
which is heartless and cynical, no matter what its other virtues.
The debacle of Iraq has cost us -- and others -- plenty in lives.
But in the end, it will cost us our soul as well.
Labels: neoliberalism, politics
posted by KHarbaugh at 18:00
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