In an op-ed in the Washington Post Robert Wright expresses worry that the Biden Administration will return to the same foreign policy that has kept us in a state of war for the last 30 years:
This is the fundamental tension within the worldview of progressive idealists. On the one hand, if you ask what distinguishes them from neoconservatives — who after all share their enthusiasm for military interventions, proxy interventions, economic sanctions and ridiculous claims about American exceptionalism — they would probably start talking about climate change, arms proliferation and other challenges that call for international governance of the sort progressives like and neocons view more skeptically.
Yet the interventionist inclination shared by progressive idealists and neoconservatives has created so much chaos and antagonism around the world that the challenge of building such governance is now steep. And the determination of many of these progressives to rally the world’s democracies in an existential struggle against authoritarianism (another thing they share with neoconservatives) would further steepen the odds. All the more so since China, with nearly a fifth of the world’s population and one-tenth of its economic output, would be among the nations on the other side of the divide.
concluding:
Progressive realists believe that the pursuit of humankind’s long-term welfare has to be governed by principle and restraint if it is to succeed; our good intentions have to be disciplined, guided by the imperative of building a true global community.
Progressive idealists — the people who ran Obama’s foreign policy and will be running Biden’s — say that they, too, want to build a global community. But they’ve got a funny way of showing it.
IMO the problem is not that they are progressives or idealists or progressive idealists but, whether neoconservatives or progressive idealists they are optimistic idealists or Wilsonians to use the taxonomy developed by Walter Russell Mead. There is another sort of idealist foreign policy: pessimistic idealism (Jeffersonians) and that voice has been sadly silenced for decades.
Realists, whether Democrats or Republicans, come in optimistic and pessimistic variants as well. Optimistic realists (Hamiltonians) got us into the Gulf War which kicked the whole mess off. I don’t see such realism as helping much, either. Much of the grassroots of the Democratic and Republican Parties are pessimistic realists (Jacksonians). Their voices haven’t been silent but they have been ignored. I doubt any of that will change in the Biden Administration. So much the worse for us.
Update
It occurred to me that one of the issues that Mr. Wright does not seem to recognize is that progressive idealists are operating under the mistaken belief that the French, Germans, and the Brits are optimistic idealists as well. They aren’t they’re pursuing their own good, happy to use us to do it. They only get upset when we’re not pursuing their foreign policy goals.
I’ve always liked Wright even though I probably don’t agree with him much. I started listening to his podcast this year and I think he has a substack where he’s rating all of the potential foreign policy appointments in a Biden administration, and he might not have given anyone more than a C minus last I heard.
But I still see a division in Mead’s Wilsonians. I just finished a book on the Taiping Revolution, and American missionaries in China are featured, not only preaching the good word (in King James), but combining religious ministry with the glory of technology, free trade and representative government. The first phase of Wilsonianism is about replicating the American experience abroad.
Wright is part of the second phase which is centered on the importance of international institutions as the primary vehicles of peace, freedom from want, fear, etc. He takes the view that America is better situated within these international institutions even if the incorporation of the world’s worst actors minimize their potential. It’s always the glass quarter full is better than one empty. He wants to play the long-game which is really not as inspiring as the big play and the immediate answer (other countries should adopt American style democracy and capitalism). I don’t think his erstwhile progressive allies find that as inspiring as the immediate visceral satisfaction received from blaming America. And ultimately if America is at fault for most sins, then Jeffersonian retreat is the obvious result, but that’s not inspiring either.
Today’s progressive idealist Wilsonians are just as much missionaries as the 19th century progressives were. Instead of the King James Bible the gospel they’re preaching includes birth control and women’s rights. They don’t seem to recognize that for most of the countries of South America, Africa, and Asia those are actually more disruptive than Christianity.
“There is another sort of idealist foreign policy: pessimistic idealism (Jeffersonians) and that voice has been sadly silenced for decades.”
Heh. We are all Hamiltonians/Wilsonians now? Just look at what has been transpiring over decades, and with a crushing zenith this very year. Who can believe in the good of strong, centralized government, promotion of big commercial interests, “good” government or that we are on a path to “progress and enlightenment?”
Look around. The wanton destruction of small business due to the dictates – of course in the name of holy “science” – of regulatory and government dictators, with absurdly distorted cost/benefit. See Fauci, Cuomo et al. How’s that working out? Out and out propaganda and censorship by large corporate traditional and social media. China lining the pockets of the President elect and, apparently, a significant fraction of the political class. China destroying the industrial base and along with it the middle class, despite the faux wailing about income inequality. No wonder they tell us “move along, nothing to see here.” No wonder they had to dispose of Trump. No wonder destroying the integrity of the vote was just a speed bump – the ends justified the means. I could go on.
The “Hamiltonian/Wilsonian” worldview looks childlike in its naivete today. Its nothing but an thinly veiled economic vehicle for those who are in a position to tap the spigot.
The “Jeffersonian/Jacksonian” thought meld was right – human lust for power and money is too ingrained in human nature; the people too docile to allow the concentration of power. We have enough of a problem of our own in attempting to retain liberty here. Much less preaching to, dictating to, or depleting our resources subsidizing the world.
No. More than half of the population, Republicans and Democrats alike, are Jacksonians. They’re ignored.
That’s the point. Just as “we are all Keynesians now” was not true, the non-Keynesians, like Jacksonians, were/are ignored.
The errors and bad outcomes of the Hamiltonian worldview are well underway.