Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (26 page)

Besides defending our freedoms from foreign conquest, it became a goal of our foreign policy to be a “beacon of freedom to the world,” to be a “shining City on a Hill”—an example to the world of the possibilities of a free society.

All too often our national interest has been at odds with our freedom-loving ideals. We supported dictatorships when they served our national interest. We even supported Saddam Hussein once as a buffer against Iran, and we now support Saudi Arabia.

For this reason, it was notable when George W. Bush, defending his Iraq War policy, said in his second inaugural address, “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” He might have meant, “We pursue our national interest independent of our democratic ideals, but in Iraq they happen to coincide.” But I think his remark had a deeper meaning.

• In strict father morality, pursuing self-interest
  is
  being moral.
  

• In the democratic ideal, being moral (“our deepest beliefs”)
  is
  bringing about freedom and democracy (via free-market freedom).
  

Suppose we pursue the following foreign policy (Neoconservatism):

• Build up and use our military strength (military self-interest)
  

• to impose free-market freedom (economic self-interest),
  

• thus creating a democracy and a democratic ally (political self-interest).
  

In this foreign policy, pursuing the national interest
is
achieving the democratic ideal. This is the Bush Middle East policy and the neoconservative rationale behind the Iraq War.

To repeat, “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” The line takes on a new meaning: America’s foreign policy, as exemplified in the Iraq War, is at once supremely moral and pragmatic. The plan was this: American geopolitical interests in Iraq—oil, military supremacy in the region, Israeli security, and political leverage—were to be pursued by using our military to impose a free-market democracy in Iraq, a system that is essentially moral, embracing freedom both in Iraq and in the homeland, now protected from terrorists. It’s idealistic: Iraq is free and democratic, we remain free and protected, Israel is protected. And it’s self-interest: We control the oil, we are the supreme military power in the region, and we have political leverage. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”

The plan was drawn up long before September 11, 2001.

George W. Bush’s foreign policy was designed before he took office and was described in a document issued on June 3, 1997, by a group called the Project for a New American Century. The signers included a number of the most influential guides to foreign policy in the later Bush administration: Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as the president’s brother Jeb Bush and the president’s father’s vice president, Dan Quayle. The signers also included many of the right wing’s leading intellectuals—William J. Bennett, Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Donald Kagan, and Norman Podhoretz—as well such power brokers as Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, and Steve Forbes. The statement of principles included the following:

In 1998, PNAC wrote and published an open letter to President Clinton proposing an invasion of Iraq. This was to become the basis of the Bush foreign policy and the framework for Bush’s claim to be promoting freedom in the world.

The strict father must at all times maintain his moral authority and make sure it is not challenged by unruly children. As soon as the children get out of hand, he must use preemptive force to keep them in line. He has a unique responsibility to teach them right from wrong, to get them to internalize the principles of what’s right and what’s wrong. If he teaches them correctly, then he can depend upon their knowledge and their discipline to be sure they do what is right and not what is wrong, so that they can be prosperous and free.

As the strict father is leader in the family, so the president is leader of the country, and America is leader of the world. Being the “leader” means that he (1) is the moral authority who knows right from wrong, is inherently good, and can be trusted to do what is right; (2) has, and must use, great power to do right; (3) is responsible for protecting us from evildoers and may have to use preemptive force; (4) has the authority to do whatever is necessary; (5) requires obedience from followers (who he is protecting); (6) may have to fight fire with fire as part of protection; (7) pursues his self-interest, which is in the interest of everyone; and (8) serves the prosperity and freedom of all. Strict father morality maps directly onto PNAC principles, which describe the Bush foreign policy.

We can now understand radical conservatives’ views on a wide range of diverse foreign policy issues. Radical conservatives look down on the UN, don’t accept the authority of the World Court, and see international organizations as impinging on American sovereignty, our essential goodness. They approve of preemptive war. They want free trade without environmental, labor, or social regulations, and with maximal privatization. They view war and the dangerous expansion of executive power as appropriate responses to terrorism. They want to maintain a world oil economy and are against introducing environmental regulations into world affairs.

Progressives—at least the idealists among them—have exactly the opposite views on all these matters. Why? What brings progressives together on these foreign policy positions? And what do the answers have to do with different understandings of freedom?

Progressive foreign policy has always had the dual democratic ideals of protecting our freedoms and extending them to others—where freedom is understood from a progressive perspective. During the Cold War, the ideal of extending freedom was overridden by “realism”—advancing our national interest in the military, economic, and political spheres, even when it meant dealing with dictators or closing our eyes to political oppression and even genocide.

During the Clinton administration, a transition began. President Clinton at first refused to interfere in the Rwandan genocide since it was not in our vital national interest, and later
regretted it for moral reasons, as he began to see the national interest served by moral action. Where George H. W. Bush refused to intervene in Bosnia, citing a lack of vital interests there (no oil), Clinton did use the American military in Bosnia and Kosovo, deciding that democratic idealism (stopping ethnic cleansing, extending freedom to others) did, in itself, serve our national interest. Indeed, there was a redefinition of the national interest under Clinton; for example, he attempted to add labor rights and environmental regulations to trade agreements—a form of democratic idealism: bringing our freedoms to other nations. The idea was that there would also be a benefit to the United States: Less cheap labor abroad competing with our labor force would take fewer jobs from the United States, thus helping American labor. Radical conservatives thwarted such progressive moves on labor and the environment.

The Clinton approach had two parts: Clinton made a shift in the traditional priorities defining the national interest, giving priority to economics and diplomacy over the military whenever possible. Given this, Clinton took a pragmatic approach: Pursue the ideals, but only insofar as a case could be made that they independently served the national interest as he had redefined it to stress economics and diplomacy over the use of the military whenever possible, except for peacekeeping missions.

This approach flew in the face of neoconservatives. The PNAC response to Clinton’s policies was predictable:

Clinton had been educated in “realist” Cold War policies and considered himself a centrist. In addition, he had to deal with a
radically conservative Republican Congress. Nonetheless, he made moves in the direction of progressive idealism.

One can best understand the progressive approach to foreign policy by looking at it in its purest form: progressive idealism, where the democratic ideal (protecting our freedoms and extending them to others) defines the national interest. Protecting our freedoms means real protection from terrorism, and a lot more: protection of workers, consumers, and the environment built into trade agreements; protecting jobs by minimizing outsourcing; protecting civil liberties.

To see what it means to export our freedoms to other countries, let us start at the center of progressive thought—empathy and responsibility—with the implied values of protection, fairness, fulfillment, opportunity, community, and trust. In foreign policy, empathy means empathizing with people of other nations—with individual citizens, not with states. It means wanting those in other countries to have the progressive freedoms we either have or are pursuing here.

Many of the world’s most urgent problems are not now considered part of foreign policy at all, because they are below the level of the state. Yet those issues persist with greater and greater urgency around the world: women’s rights, children’s rights, refugee issues, labor rights, public health, and, of course, hunger and poverty. Empathy and responsibility, the central progressive values, turn these global problems into foreign policy problems as part of extending our progressive freedoms to the world.

A good example is freedom for women: the freedom to vote, freedom from forced circumcision, the freedom to have a private sexual life, the freedom to marry who you want to marry, the freedom to pursue an education, the freedom to have a career, the freedom to function in public as men do—drive a car, wear
the clothes you want, etc. This is usually not considered part of foreign policy. But for progressives it is part of what foreign policy needs to be.

Extending progressive freedoms to others means changing foreign policy drastically—looking below the level of the state, in case after case. Freedom for working people means freedom from cheap labor traps, freedom from inhuman working conditions, freedom to get an education, freedom to get capital to start a small business. Extending our freedoms abroad means bringing into foreign policy issues like hunger and poverty, the global environment, refugee horrors, world health—issues tackled by international agencies, some associated with the UN. Working with international agencies and the UN and helping to make those institutions more effective in these areas become foreign policy responsibilities.

Here is what progressive foreign policy, based on an empathy-and-responsibility perspective on morality, entails:

Avoiding war whenever possible—removing war as an instrument of policy. In war, enormous numbers of noncombatants—women, children, and the aged—get killed and maimed. Families are destroyed, homes are destroyed, infrastructure is destroyed, with disastrous consequences for individuals, especially the poor.

War must be an absolute last resort. This means maximizing the use of diplomatic and economic solutions. It also means rethinking the military—keeping war as an option but redirecting the military to peacekeeping and disaster relief.

Torture must be outlawed and eliminated. Even on pragmatic grounds, it does not yield reliable intelligence, and it is morally abhorrent.

International treaties, such as the nuclear test ban treaty, should be honored and extended. Nuclear weapons development should end; the use of
any
nuclear weapons is unthinkably dangerous. The use of so-called depleted uranium should end. It is
misnamed; its radioactivity is not “depleted.” It is still radioactive. Its use is ubiquitous in the U.S. military. It poisons our own troops, and used shells are left all over Iraq, poisoning the people we are supposedly freeing.

Private contractors should not take over military functions; they have no accountability for what they do. The National Guard should not be used to fight wars abroad; they are not properly trained, are needed at home, and did not sign up for such duty.

The empathy and responsibility that extend our freedom to others turn free trade into fair trade: avoiding cheap labor traps abroad, preserving indigenous ways of life, preserving nature, preventing monocultures, greatly limiting the power of transnational corporations to govern the lives of people in the third world, keeping clean water freely available, preventing the theft of the mineral wealth of a country so that a fair share goes to the people of that country—in short, maximizing for others the everyday freedoms we either enjoy or seek for ourselves, while also maximizing the benefits of trade.