Policy Review

The left side of the American political spectrum has undergone an extraordinary transformation over the past dozen years. Perhaps because it remains a work in progress, the extent of this transformation has gone largely unremarked and seems underappreciated even among those who have been carrying it out. Forty years after the forces of the “New Left” managed to deliver the Democratic presidential nomination to their preferred candidate, George McGovern, only to see him lose the general election to Richard Nixon in a 49-state landslide, the United States is home to a newer Left. Its political hopes repose not in a man able to muster less than 40 percent of the vote nationwide, but in the convincingly reelected president of the United States, Barack Obama. This newer Left is confident in itself, united both in its description of the problems the country faces and in how to go about addressing them. This Left is conscious of itself as a movement, and believes it is on the rise. It has already managed to reshape American politics, and its successes so far have hardly exhausted its promise. Policies are changing under its influence. And its opponents do not seem to have found an effective way to counter it politically. Continue reading →

Policy Review – co-authored with Fen Osler Hampson

Exit strategies are back in vogue. The Afghanistan campaign has not gone terribly well in the past several years and a deadline — of sorts — for withdrawal has been set for the mission in 2014. In the case of Iraq, the Obama administration declared that the combat mission was over following the successful “surge” strategy and removed U.S. troops by the end of 2011. These “exit strategy” deadlines were set against a background of continuing political instability and violence in both countries.

Exit strategy is a term that originally comes from business.¹ It is the method by which venture capitalists or the owners of a business shed an investment that they own. The concept gained currency in relation to military interventions in the 1980s and 1990s in what became known as the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine. In the aftermath of the disastrous bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in October 1983, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger outlined six conditions for the proper application of U.S. force: (1) U.S. vital interests at stake; (2) a clear commitment to achieving victory; (3) clear political and military objectives; (4) the level of military engagement matches the mission’s key objectives; (5) domestic and congressional support secured prior to the mission; and (6) use of force only as a last resort.² Continue reading →

Policy Review

Editor’s note: In our June/July 2002 edition, Policy Review published Robert Kagan’s “Power and Weakness,” an assessment of the structural underpinnings of transatlantic relations. “On major strategic and international questions today,” Kagan famously wrote, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” As the article began to circulate in European capitals and in foreign policy circles worldwide, it created a sensation, quickly becoming the touchstone for a decade of discussion about the state of transatlantic relations.¹ Continue reading →

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an institution that sits uneasily at the dangerous intersection of law and politics, both international and domestic. Created by a treaty, the Rome Statute, opened for signature in 1998 and commencing operation after ratification by sixty state signatories in July 2002, the Court has as the subject matter of its jurisdiction the most horrible acts of violence that political conflict can produce: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity. The notion that atrocities on such a scale can be brought to heel or ameliorated by the law acting across national borders necessarily entails the Court inserting itself into some of the worst and most vexing conflicts the world sees.

The involvement of the Court may take place for the purpose of rendering judgments after a conflict has ended, as in the case of the Nuremberg tribunals following World War II, or once conflict has substantially abated, as in the ICC’s ongoing proceedings in the Central African Republic. Criminal proceedings such as these are controversial enough when minds are still reeling from the horror of what has just happened. The Court’s involvement need not be retrospective, however; the conflict or crisis may be going full tilt when the Court becomes involved, adding yet more layers of complexity and controversy to its actions. For example, the ICC has issued a warrant for the arrest of the president of Sudan, Omar al Bashir, charging him with orchestrating the atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, at a time when the crisis there is very much unfolding in real time and stubbornly eluding the efforts of would-be peacemakers. Continue reading →

This essay, written by Tod Lindberg and Derek Chollet, appears in their new book, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, which they co-edited with David Sharr.

Is idealism dead? Should the promotion of American values of liberalism, democracy, human rights, and rule of law be a core element of U.S. foreign policy? Where to strike the balance between principles and interests is one of the most enduring debates about America ’s role in the world. But since September 11, this question has become intensely contested and deeply controversial. It has emerged as one of the central divides between the political right and left — in large part because of the history of the past seven years, the Bush administration ’s rhetoric, its strong association with the “freedom agenda,” and its actions justified at least in part by democracy promotion (namely the war in Iraq). Yet it is also becoming a sharper division within each end of the political spectrum. Continue reading →

Policy Review December 2004/January 2005

A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004), a collection of essays on transatlantic relationships.

There is no question that the aftermath of September 11, 2001, has laid bare a divergence in view between the United States and Europe over the question of the place of power in international affairs. Insofar as countering terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has become a priority likely to dominate U.S. security policy for a generation or more, and insofar as the United States will likely seek recourse to military measures on occasion in this period, the divergence is likely to persist. Transatlantic relations may go through periods of relative warming in the years ahead, but they seem likely to be punctuated by occasions in which the differences reemerge starkly. We have, in all likelihood, doses of bitterness ahead of us every bit as unpleasant as the bitterness over the Iraq war. 

But what I want to do here is take a large step back from all the disagreement and see if it does not, after all, take place within a frame of broader agreement about fundamental issues — more fundamental, even, than the question of the proper role of the use of force internationally, which is itself a mischaracterization of what was at stake in the dispute over Iraq, as we shall see.  

To show how this is so, I would like to radicalize the discussion by proffering a thesis so contrarian in the current context that I should probably begin by asking readers’ indulgence. It is this: There are no fundamental disagreements or differences between the United States and Europe. Existing differences are often more apparent than real. When real, the differences are in all consequential cases actually agreements to disagree. And in any case, the views of Americans and Europeans have been converging for some time and will continue to do so.

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View this article at Policy Review, October/Novemeber 2004

This essay appears in slightly different form in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press, 2004).

“Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive. This is especially true when used to describe a certain group of people who have sought to influence American public policy, most notably foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and who, in the administration of George W. Bush, obtained that influence.

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself.

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View this article at Policy Review, October/November 2001

The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, invited, if it did not indeed compel, wholesale reconsideration of the times we live in and the way we live in them. What once seemed to most Americans like a period of unprecedented prosperity and peace, now — with the towers collapsed, the Pentagon scarred, and more than 6,000 dead — seems more akin to a period of sustained illusion. We are thoroughly alienated from the point of view that was our very own September 10 and before: namely, that things were pretty good in and for the United States of America. Now — standing as the United States does between the opening salvo and the final volley in a war that is both necessary to win and entirely a matter of conjecture as to its course, duration, dimensions, and lethality — most everything we thought September 10 has been superannuated.

Some have said that this is not the same country it was September 10, or that the world changed forever September 11. But that amounts to an exercise in displacement. The world on September 10 was exactly the one in which the forces leading up to the next day’s events had long been gathering. The country September 11 was the one whose history in its entirety shaped the response to that day (and an encouraging response it was). No, what has changed is each of us, in a universal reaction taking as many particular forms as there are people — anger, sadness, fear, gratitude, love, restlessness, and more, in every imaginable combination, having in common only that each was real not just in itself but also in the gulf separating it from what one felt September 10. It is as if the frame of mind of September 10 was negated as decisively as the lives of the victims — repudiated with finality. Whatever we might have been thinking September 10, we were wrong.¹

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View this article at Policy Review, December 2000/January 2001

The American political system has thrown off some truly anomalous results in the past decade. We have gone from the historic 1994 election (a 50-seat swing in the House of Representatives bringing to power a Republican leadership promising “Revolution”), to an historic presidential impeachment and acquittal, to an historic 2000 election in which voters divided as evenly as imaginable in their preference for Democrats or Republicans. We are practically awash in the historic these days.

Commentary in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election told us to watch events closely, since we would never see their like again in our lifetime. This may be true, but it may also miss the larger point. For those who found themselves disturbed one way or another by the outcome and aftermath of the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore — or as the Clinton impeachment drama unfolded, or as the Republican Congress tried to enact its Revolution — the uniqueness of each event and the unlikelihood of a recurrence may be a false consolation. We may not run into these particular oddities again, but it may be that we are in the midst of something bigger — a pattern of oddity.

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View this article at Policy Review, February/March 2000

IMPEACHMENTS HAVE BEEN sufficiently rare in our national political life to make generalizing about them a risky undertaking. Granted, too, the proximity of the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton and the still-raw feelings it engendered may have led us to a heightened concern with the subject in general, perhaps inflating out of due proportion the importance of impeachment in American history.

Yet Clinton’s impeachment by the House followed by the Senate’s unwillingness to remove him is one of four cases, each involving impeachment and acquittal, that can fairly be called epic confrontations, both politically and constitutionally. In the details of these four cases — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1804, Judge James Hawkins Peck in 1830, President Andrew Johnson in 1868, and President Clinton in 1999 — lies a tale of lasting significance broader even than the tumultuous issues that came out as these impeachments unfolded.

In these four spectacular clashes, a fascinating pattern presents itself. It is the story of how resort to the Constitution’s ultimate sanction became inextricably entangled with one or another law that was itself fundamentally suspect constitutionally. These laws amounted to grave extra-constitutional disturbances to a carefully wrought constitutional system based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It was these disturbances around which sentiment for removal gathered in the first place — only to dissipate in the end.

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