I’m so happy with the Claremont Review of Books that I want to call your attention to several articles.
Adam Wolfson jumps directly into today’s intellectual fray: the serious part of the debate on American foreign policy. This would not appear to be a battle royal. The die was cast five years ago with the emergence of a full blown Bush doctrine that grew out of the thinking of Paul Wolfowitz, the first clear mind concerned with statecraft in several centuries (maybe since Machiavelli.) The Bush doctrine.....
The Bush doctrine, brilliantly summarized in his January 2005 Inaugural, replaces the main prior doctrine of foreign policy Machiavelli-Kissinger. The M-K doctrine is typically called the Realist doctrine and is often set in contrast to some Idealist doctrine. There probably has never been a substantial Idealist doctrine. It is always appealing for the U.S. to work with multi-lateral arrangements (Idealistic) when it is feasible. It is not feasible at all time because the underlying Realistic doctrine makes certain that many nation-states will have divergent self-interests.
The Realist doctrine, on the other hand is ancient and is dying hard as I watch B. Scowcroft and Z. Brzezinski scream hysterically while their views are ignored. No one seems to mention the Lefty anti-war views, these days, as they are too childish to be in a serious historic debate.
There is a real debate going on because the Bush-Wolfowitz doctrine is new and is being test everyday as we try to erect democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan and wait cautiously as four years pass without an Islamic terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland.
The Bush-Wolfowitz doctrine is designed for a world with one unquestionable suzerain, multiple non-state hostile actors and a few irrational state actors. The B-W doctrine argues that the process of creating democratic nation states needs to be accelerated so as to leave few spaces for the non-state hostile actors to operate and to deal with the irrational state actors aggressively.
If we set a five-ten year time frame for creating stable democracies in formerly stable nations, we are beginning to see some strong positive evidence. We have no idea yet how to deal with places like Sudan or Nigeria, with no history of stability. The question of irrational state actors in an era of WMDs is by far the most complicated and pressing. The Realist model has no wisdom to offer. Balancing local powers is antiquated and irrelevant in the current technological-trade environment.
It appears that we are trying diplomacy, aggressive diplomacy backed up with military and economic threats to sway irrational state actors from Saudi Arabia to Iran to N. Korea. This appears to be the most challenging foreign policy issue of our times and it has no theoretical model. In the world of Islam we are trying the threat of democracy to bring rationality to the irrational state actors. In Asia we are trying the technology of anti-ballistic weapons combined with, what I believe to be, a willingness to use nuclear weapons on a first strike basis.
Adam Wolfson brings the reader up to date on the debate.