Matthew Yglesias: Foreign Policy After Bushism

Foreign Policy After Bushism: [T]he Iraq War has been a fiasco, the Bush administration’s policies are disastrous, etc.... [W]hat alternative strategies [should] progressives... put forward. My preferred answer is liberal internationalism... responsible for most of the successes of the post-war years... interactions between nations can and ought to be primarily cooperative.... But... it is difficult for countries to cooperate... when international relations is a series of anarchical conflicts between heavily armed powers. Liberal internationalists seek to ameliorate this problem by creating international institutions and systems of international law.... The liberal internationalist imperative is... for the United States to use its substantial economic, military, and political power to build and strengthen international institutions and international law.

This is, of course, inimical to the conservative mindset whose dominant nationalism... flit[s] between indifference to matters beyond our shores and a desire to coercively dominate foreign people or territory... international law and institutions are seen as irrelevant or... dangerous.... [T]he Bush administration’... lumps “international fora” and “judicial processes” together with terrorism terrorism as “weapons of the weak” used to challenge “our strength as a nation state. The consequences of this line of thinking have, clearly, been disastrous. But a surprisingly broad swathe of opponents of Bush-style foreign policy object to it on oddly narrow grounds.

Neither Hillary Clinton, who of course voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq, nor Barack Obama, who did not, have been willing to disavow the underlying doctrinal concept of unilateral preventive war as a tool of non-proliferation policy.... [S]uch notions continue to be affirmed... by a group who’'ve decided that if institutions and legitimacy are good, then we need more institutions and more sources of legitimacy.

The problem, allegedly, is that relying on the U.N. Charter’'s definition of when force may legally be used isn'’t good enough. Peter Beinart and Francis Fukuyama... wind up calling for “multi-multilateralism... Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay have written of an “Alliance of Democracies,” Daalder and James Goldgeier have advocated a “Global NATO,” and John Ikenberry and Ann-Marie Slaughter... argue that we need a “Concert of Democracies.” These ideas... all share a common flaw -- the envision these new limited-member organizations as purporting to possess the right to authorize military action in the absence of a U.N. Security Council resolution in circumstances other than individual or collective self-defense.

One suspects that, in practice, this idea would be deemed a non-starter by the non-U.S. democracies who are supposed to sign up. But its prevalence in liberal security circles is distressing -- the alleged advantage here is that we could take action even in the face of Russian or Chinese opposition -- but by the same token it would be a recipe for a new Cold War that would only make it more difficult for the United States to advance its core interests...