The Mask of Imperialism
by Anatol Lieven
They make a wilderness, and they call it peace.
—Tacitus, Agricola
Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald
Trump’s return to office has only put a tin plate on the coffin. The
doctrine lost all legitimacy through its dependence on American global
power and the hopeless contradictions this has entailed. Its demise was a
failure of American and other Western politicians, of experts and
journalists, to live up to the standards of ethics and courage on which
they founded their claims to hegemony—and which they preached to the
rest of the world.
Many liberal institutions and individuals played their part in the
doctrine’s death, either by actively supporting Israel or by allowing
themselves to be intimidated into silence—and in many cases, by engaging
in the repression or expulsion of colleagues who have had the courage
to protest. As I write these lines, Western officials are complaining
about the behavior of the riot police in Georgia. I can observe very
little difference between their conduct in Tbilisi and the actions of
U.S. police officers against protesters on American college campuses.
Discredited as it is, however, the current American form of liberal
internationalism—the idea that international harmony can best be
achieved through the exertion of U.S. influence abroad—remains so deeply
embedded in the thinking of the country’s foreign-policy and security
establishments that even the rise of Trump and his America First
ideology may not be sufficient to displace it. Indeed, if the behavior
of the first Trump Administration is any indication, its officials may
frequently employ the same tropes of “the rules-based order,” “the
promotion of democracy,” and “the defense of human rights” that have
been employed so incessantly by the Biden Administration. They will do
so, however, only as a transparent strategy in the quest to overthrow
rival regimes and weaken or destroy rival states.
Wielding the language of liberal internationalism to justify ruinous
intervention abroad has long been the modus operandi of the
neoconservatives, who, since the ascendancy of Trump over the Republican
Party, have gravitated back to their original home among the Democrats.
Accepting them and their program back into the Democratic fold was a
terrible mistake. It excused their role in the great foreign-policy
disasters of the past generation and—insanely—allowed Trump to pretend
to be the candidate of (relative) restraint.
Western progressives—Americans and Europeans alike—need to break
decisively with the neoconservatives and the liberal internationalism
they’ve long promoted. If progressives fail to do so, they will have
nothing serious to propose as an alternative to Trump’s crude and
destructive chauvinism. Nor will American progressives have an
intellectual base from which to confront the huge challenges now facing
the world, challenges that can be addressed only through cooperation
among powerful states. First and foremost is climate change, and the
immense economic and social dislocations and local conflicts that it
threatens to create. But there are other urgent priorities: Nuclear
weapons need to be controlled and arms races contained. COVID may prove
only a harbinger of much worse pandemics. Future rivalry in space has
serious potential to lead to conflict, and its regulation is nowhere
near sufficient. And if great powers engage in unrestricted competition
in the generation of militarized artificial intelligence, it is by no
means impossible that we will finish ourselves off as a species.
What is needed now is a new internationalism: a realist
internationalism. But to bring it about, today’s liberal
internationalists will need to conduct a full and honest examination of
the path that has brought them to their present miserable state.
The moral arrogance to which liberal internationalism is prone was
summed up in the famous words of the Democratic secretary of state
Madeleine Albright (frequently quoted by President Biden): “If we have
to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable
nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the
future.” This ideological framework led all too many American liberals
to support the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the
Libyan state—and to advocate for a dramatic U.S. intervention in Syria,
which would have been catastrophic.
It shouldn’t take much intellectual clarity to see that this has nothing
in common with anything that could honestly be called internationalism;
it is in fact the very antithesis of internationalism. This is an
expansionist version of American civic nationalism (euphemized in the
United States as “exceptionalism”), closely related to the French
Revolutionary nationalism that led French armies to export republican
values by force, first to the rest of Europe and then to the colonies in
Africa and Asia.
Precisely because belief in America’s mission to lead the world to
freedom and democracy is so deeply entwined with American civic
nationalism, it is extremely difficult and painful for progressives to
abandon it. They could, however, find support from highly distinguished
intellectual precursors. Opposition to the Vietnam War, and condemnation
of American crimes there, led to searching analysis by a generation of
great thinkers, who reconsidered the national myths that contributed to
the disaster in Vietnam.
This critique involved not just intellectuals on the left, but also
famous American realists who played a key part in rallying U.S. liberal
opinion to resist Nazism and Stalinism. Among them was the theologian
and international-relations theorist Reinhold Niebuhr, whose book The
Irony of American History is both a defense of American democracy and a
rigorous condemnation of liberal messianic illusions. Another great
realist, Hans Morgenthau, wrote:
The light-hearted equation between a particular nationalism and the
counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is the very sin
of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets
have warned rulers and ruled. That equation is also politically
pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgment
which, in the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and
civilizations—in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.
For Morgenthau, the effective political actor
must put himself into the other man’s shoes, look at the world and judge
it as that man does, anticipate in thought the way he will feel and act
under certain circumstances.
American liberal internationalism, with its innate (and intellectually
unavoidable) belief in the goodness and moral superiority of Western
democracy in general, and the United States in particular, makes this
form of empathy far harder to achieve. The result is that liberal
analysts prefer the sanctification of allies and the demonization of
rivals to objective and informed analysis. If there is only one “right
side of history,” and only one path for human progress, then there is no
point in studying other countries in any depth.
This feeds the Manichaean “you are with us or you are against us” strain
in American culture; if America represents the only righteous path of
human progress, its adversaries must be intrinsically evil. This can
lead to the grotesque irony of self-described internationalists engaging
in feral, chauvinist hatred of other peoples. Liberal internationalism
of this kind also reinforces the dangerous ignorance that Daniel
Ellsberg invoked when he remarked that at no point in American history,
including when the Johnson Administration began to bomb Vietnam, could a
senior official pass a freshman exam in a course on Vietnamese history
or culture.
Almost 2,500 years ago, Thucydides described how Athenian democracy
rivaled or even exceeded authoritarian Sparta in bellicosity, and how
this eventually led Athens itself to defeat in the Peloponnesian War.
The first lesson that liberal internationalists can learn from
Thucydides is that, for anyone seriously committed to the well-being of
humanity, international peace is not a goal to be achieved after all the
world has adopted “democracy.” It is the essential basis for all
cooperation among nations.
The highly militarized U.S. state and economy that entrenched themselves
through the Cold War and the war on terror would have been
unrecognizable to earlier generations of Americans. Permanent
militarization was a key feature of the European monarchies that the
American Revolution was meant to drive out of the thirteen colonies.
If American liberal internationalists could free themselves from their
embroilment with imperialism and nationalism, they could move to a true,
realist internationalism based on the following principles: that peace
is the foundation of international progress; that the threat to peace
comes not just from authoritarian states, but also from democracies,
including the United States itself; that the maintenance of peace
requires all powerful states agreeing not only to observe certain rules
but to respect one another’s vital interests, as defined by those states
themselves, not by Washington alone; that Western democracies have no
monopoly on wisdom and commitment; and most important, that
internationalism means what the word says: internationalism—that is,
cooperation among nation-states, not a hegemonic United States and its
client states telling the rest of the world what to do.
A true internationalist policy, if it had been pursued by the Biden
Administration, would not have limited itself to meaningless propaganda
exercises like the Summit for Democracy. Even before Israel began its
genocidal campaign in Gaza, a Biden Administration policy based on
realist internationalism would have respected the desire of a great
majority of countries (including U.S. allies) for the United States to
return to the original Iran nuclear deal. It would have followed their
wishes in seeking a genuine settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict, rather than extending Trump’s Abraham Accords. It would have
encouraged the attempts of Brazil and China to broker peace in Ukraine,
rather than snubbing them.
To pursue genuine internationalism, liberals also need to develop a
degree of modesty about democracy itself. There is, after all, something
inherently absurd about casting Trump as a would-be fascist dictator on
the one hand, and on the other calling on nations to adopt the
political system that elected him. Democracy, like charity, really does
begin at home.
We in the West must work hard to ensure that our democracies are
equipped to deal with the challenges of the future; we must not
complacently assume that they will be. Climate change practically erases
the moral distinction between democratic and authoritarian systems. The
U.S. electorate has just, for the fourth time in twenty-five years,
elected to office a president who has publicly denied that anthropogenic
climate change is occurring—thereby withdrawing himself and his
administration from conversations that are based on rational scientific
inquiry and evidence. Trump has pulled the United States out of the
Paris Agreement for the second time, while China remains a participant
as it makes far greater and more consistent progress toward the
development of alternative energy.
We cannot foretell which societies and political systems will best
withstand the effects of climate change. But insofar as they are likely
to demand severe reductions in consumption, Western materialist and
individualist culture as presently configured hardly looks well placed
to adapt.
Reducing carbon emissions and adapting to climate damage will take an
enormous amount of money. Doing this while trying to preserve
social-welfare systems, and prevent mass immiseration and civil strife,
will take much more. Money spent on the U.S. military in pursuit of
global primacy is money taken from these essential tasks. As Dwight D.
Eisenhower declared:
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat
of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its
children. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross
of iron.
Liberal internationalists would probably agree that, in certain
respects, U.S. democracy has suffered a grievous decline since Ike was
president. This should lead them to ask themselves three questions: What
has been their own share of responsibility for this decline? Is the
pursuit of global democracy through U.S. power compatible with the
survival of a healthy democracy at home? And why on earth preach
democracy to Russia and China as it falls to pieces in the United
States?