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Martin Wolf: US foreign policy needs ‘liberal realism’
By Martin Wolf
Published: June 13 2006 19:17 | Last updated: June 13 2006 19:17


The unipolar moment is over. The US remains the only truly global power. But the hubristic notion that it had the ability and right to rearrange the world at will has met its doom in Iraq. Many Europeans have desired a chastened America. But few have sought an isolationist one.

I learnt how far the mood had altered at this year’s meetings of the Bilderberg group in Ottawa. Three years ago, the mood of American participants echoed the words of the unnamed aide to George W. Bush quoted by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine of October 17 2004: “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.” Reality turns out to bite.

Happily, the Europeans showed no pleasure over the US plight. They were well aware that the alternative to a US engaged in remaking the world could well be withdrawal from it. Yet it is impossible to manage any of the world’s challenges without US engagement. They know, not least, that Europe lacks the will and the means to act on its own.

Why is the unipolar moment over? The short answer is that the US has overreached and so learnt, once again, the difference between power and omnipotence, as it did in the jungles of Vietnam four decades ago.

In his controversial new book on the neo-conservatives, Professor Francis Fukuyama of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies argues that the characteristic mindset of the Bush administration led to three mistakes.

The first was pronouncing the incoherent notion of a “war on terror”, which conflated the threat of specific terrorist groups with a list of rogue states and the nuclear proliferation problem more broadly.

The second was the failure “to anticipate the virulently negative global reaction to its exercise of ‘benevolent hegemony　The indefinite incarceration of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay and the tortures at Abu Ghraib have destroyed claims to exceptional virtue.

The third was the failure of planning for postwar Iraq and, still worse, forgetting the difficulty of such large-scale social engineering.

I would add two more blunders: exaggeration of the efficacy of military power and the decision to make the promotion of democracy the overriding goal of foreign policy.

On the first, the struggle of the US army to achieve order in Iraq shows that the power to destroy is not the same as the ability to build. Nor, as importantly, is US military power able to bend China or Russia to its will. On the second, proclaiming the goal of democracy, while accepting the support of friendly despots, has merely made the US look hypocritical.

Yet the mistakes are not only conceptual. This must be the most incompetent administration since the 1920s: the vice-president has acted as a co-president, partly to cover the president’s inadequacies, with damaging consequences; the weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq turned out not to exist; and, not least, neither officers nor officials have been held to account for malfeasance, starting with Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence.

The US will surely recover. But the damage to the moral capital on which it draws when trying to persuade democratically elected foreign leaders to do what it desires has been enormous. The good will felt in so much of the world after September 11 2001 has now gone.

What happens now? Forcible regime change is off the agenda. While the US may mount an airborne attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, an invasion is out of the question. The restoration of the authority of the traditional foreign policy “realists” is, notes Prof Fukuyama, under way. The backlash may not end there. “Jacksonian conservatives, those red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are the ones fighting and dying in the Middle East, aligned with the neo-conservatives in support of the Iraq war. But a perceived failure of the policy may push them back towards a more isolationist foreign policy.”

Europeans should be careful what they wish for: they may get it. A withdrawn US is as unattractive as an over-assertive one. The US needs to develop a new foreign policy. The Europeans must try to help.

What should a foreign policy for a post-post-9/11 world look like? For the US it should rest on what has been the heart of its policies since 1941 ; the promotion of a global liberal order, with equal emphasis on all three words: global, because it offers opportunities to all prepared to play by the rules; liberal in the classical sense, namely, a world of open markets; and, last but not least, an order, because it aims at peaceful and, wherever possible, institutionalised relations among states.

This does not mean abandoning the goal of democracy: as market economies take hold, democracy tends to emerge, as happened in Taiwan and South Korea; and democracy remains an attractive ideal, as the “colour revolutions” in the former Soviet Union have shown. But it does mean accepting that democracy is one of several desirable aims, recognising the obstacles to imposing it from outside, admitting that elections do not alone create freedom and, above all, understanding what makes each society’s evolution unique.

I think of this approach as “liberal realism”. Prof Fukuyama calls his complementary version “realistic Wilsonianism”. This, he declares, “recognises the importance to world order of what goes on inside states...Such a policy would take seriously the idealistic part of the old neo-conservative agenda but take a fresh look at development, international institutions and a host of issues that conservatives, neo- and paleo-, seldom take seriously.”

The emphasis on institutions is central. Many Americans assail the global institutions that the US itself created. Yet institutional checks and balances are the heart of the US constitutional system. Why are they unacceptable at the world level? These institutions are imperfect. But what is the alternative? A global anarchy is intolerable. A US imperium is unacceptable. The global institutions must be made to work.

The US alone can decide its future role. But Europeans can help, by becoming both more effective as allies and more united as critics. The world will not accept the US as master. But it still depends on US leadership, just as the Europeans remain its natural partners. Both sides must now change if their future is to be better than their recent past.

*America at the Crossroads, Yale University Press, 2006