Pots, Kettles, Realism, Liberal Interventionism

I was stumbling through the internet at random and stumbled across this charming blog post in which Andrew Exum (his blog is pretty good if you're into that sort of thing, which I am) described the lynching of a black man in 1906, notes that he is aware of lynchings that have occurred as late as 1981, describes the confusion of citizens in the Middle East that we protect what they consider blasphemy under freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and ends by reaffirming the value of America's constitutional freedoms.  


The obvious route to take in reaction to this is that if we throw a little historical perspective and self-reflection into the mix, we'll realize that the high horse that Western secular democracies, and America particularly, tend to climb on top of when talking about freedom, the rule of law, human rights, et cetera, is a much shorter horse than we realize.  In essence, we're a barely scrubbed pot calling the kettle black most of the time.  


While this point is certainly worth mentioning, the fact that struck me is that the prominent schools of international relations theory set a foundation that fundamentally limits the ways in which we interact with other nations, and limits the efficacy with which we achieve what should be our strategic aims.  


There are two major schools of IR theory that play a prominent role in American foreign policy, realism and liberal interventionism.  In the former, the assumption is that the ends justify the means and that it is necessary to sully our hands by dealing with despots, tyrants, repressors, criminals, and similarly unpleasant sorts in order to achieve our strategic aims.  In the latter, the assumption is that secular democracy and freedom of the American sort are  best for the world.  


In both cases, it seems that we are advocating a self-absorbed and complicated form of hubris.  The tendency with realists is to deal with the dictator of the present to achieve whatever limited successes that we can manage, without broadening the scope of our evaluation to look for better, long term solutions.  This is exacerbated by the short attention spans of politicians, an inevitable side effect of the cycle of election and reelection.  Such has been the case with our relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is an unpleasantly repressive monarchy that exports Salafism, the flavor of Islam favored by al Qaeda, to name an example off the top of my head, because it simplifies our access to oil.  Thus, we support a government whose strategic aims diverge from ours on a number of points, some of which are actively detrimental to our own strategic aims.  


The broader solution to this is to foster the development of technology that reduces or removes our need for oil, so that we are completely free to pursue our absolute strategic advantage when dealing with the Saudis.  In this particular instance, domestic policy has a significant impact on foreign policy.  


In the case of liberal interventionism, we assume that democracy is the best thing ever, and that we can easily export it to other countries, which will automatically begin to agree with us because of their thankfulness for their liberation from tyranny and repression.  This theory has proven itself of limited use, inasmuch as democracy is not something that is easy to export at all, and inasmuch as people voting democratically don't necessarily vote in favor of American strategic interests.  


In either case, experience seems to demonstrate that the biggest limitation is the inability to understand the values and interests of another culture and manipulate them to our benefit.  An excellent example of this is our relationship with Pakistan prior to 2001.  They had essentially been put on time-out by the international community for the development of nuclear weapons and faced heavy trade sanctions, and were frequently chastised for repression and a lack of democratic institutions.  The practical result of this was a heavily militarized state oriented on its main enemy, India, too impoverished to develop the basic infrastructure necessary for a modern state of any ideological flavor, rife with corruption.  


Essentially, we took a standardized play from the nonproliferation playbook, a standard page from the spreading democracy playbook, and thoughtlessly mixed them together without thinking about the fact that the things that we need from Pakistan are not something that will be fostered by economic sanctions and the blind advocacy of democracy.  


Ultimately, a Pakistan that favors peace, commerce, and international stability over terrorism, chaos, and Islamic extremism will be built on a foundation of an educated professional class and close political and economic relationships with other nations.  This is the track that we have taken with China, and whatever the shortcomings of the strategy may have been, the end result is a China that is integrated into the international community and susceptible to coercion by means other than force.  This is only possible because China has significant interests beyond national defense.  While China certainly pursues its own interests, and especially regional domination, its strategic aims and our own are both benefitted by stability and commerce, whereas violence and extremism negatively impacts us both.  


Since 2001, we have continued with a senseless policy that does little to improve Pakistan's economic self-sufficiency, much less foster close political and economic relationships with the world at large.  Rather, we have bribed them with international and military aid for their half-hearted support of the war effort in Afghanistan.  The end result has been chaos and violence.

Over the last decade, the idea of nation building as been decried as prohibitively expensive, futile, paternalistic, and et cetera.  This criticism is incorrect.  Nation-building, incremental nation building, the development of the physical institutions of civilization of a long period of time, is precisely the means by which peace and prosperity are accomplished.  


We're all in this mess together.  It's time we started acting like it.