The Mask of Imperialism

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?