America’s Crisis of Reality and Realism: A Symposium (Part I)
Hindenburg disaster, May 6, 1937, Manchester Township, NJ.
The Simone Weil Center Symposium on Realism and Legitimacy begins with the following question: Why is it that realism in U.S. foreign policy practice has all but disappeared, and is this disappearance related to a more generalized American loss of contact with reality itself?
To get the discussion started, we shared with our distinguished discussants an interpretation proposed by philosopher D.C. Schindler. Schindler has proposed that ideology in the United States has taken on some of the characteristics that Hannah Arendt associated with totalitarianism. For Arendt, ideology is an order where living political process is replaced by the quest for self-consistency. Such structures use whatever tools it deems necessary (coercive force; money; P.R.; censorship, other political technologies) to achieve that consistency.
We are delighted to have received initial responses to our question from Anatol Lieven, James Carden, Nicolai N. Petro, Ethan Alexander-Davey, Gordon Hahn and (in Part II) Richard Sakwa. Certain common themes and patterns — the permanent bureaucracy, the merging of self-interest with morality to the point of idolatry — are already emerging from this discussion. – The Editors
The United States’ Flight from Realism and Rational Thought
— Anatol Lieven
Lack of Realism and poor understanding of reality itself are innate to the basic program of the U.S. bipartisan foreign and security establishment, and to a considerable extent the U.S. political elites in general. This program is essentially that of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” of 1992, drawn up at the very height of U.S. hubris after the end of the Cold War: permanent U.S. global hegemony, not just in the world as a whole but in every region of the world.
According to this doctrine, no state would ever -- today or in future -- enjoy any influence beyond its borders except that allowed by the United States. All states would have to change their domestic systems, or at least their domestic policies, in accordance with U.S. wishes. Widely mocked at the time for its megalomania, this doctrine has in effect become the standard operating procedure of all subsequent U.S. administrations, with only relatively minor tactical differences between them.
The unrealistic nature of this project should hardly need elaboration. Only one country in history has aimed at anything like this – the Soviet Union; and look what happened to it. The British Empire at its summit never dreamed of intervening unilaterally on the continent of Europe, or challenging America’s Monroe Doctrine. This project requires that the United States possess – for all foreseeable time – overwhelming economic dominance across the world, coupled with limitless military resources and a limitless willingness of the American public to sacrifice their taxes and their children’s lives in pursuit of global domination. Even in the 1990s, it should have been obvious that this idea was absurd.
If this project has nonetheless achieved such general acceptance, it is because it is underpinned by the liberal democratic teleology, coupled with civic nationalist messianism, that is deeply baked into U.S. political culture. So it was that in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, American liberals who certainly do not think of themselves as militarists or imperialists could sincerely believe that America could spread liberal democracy by military force, and dictate to other powerful states at gunpoint how to order their domestic political systems.
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These are not deliberate lies … They are self-deceptions so colossal that they dissolve the capacity for honest and rational thought …
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The divorce of this project from reality is encouraged by two other factors inherent to it. These are not deliberate lies, as far as most of their proponents are concerned. They are worse. They are self-deceptions so colossal that they dissolve the capacity for honest and rational thought about any subject with which they come into contact. The first is that the United States acts as a benevolent international hegemon without reference to U.S. national interests, let alone the selfish interests and prejudices of the US economic elites.
The second is that US support for dictatorships around the world is incidental to the U.S. hegemonic project, and could be changed if only members of the U.S. establishment were less cynical and short-sighted. The truth is that the maintenance of unilateral U.S. hegemony over Central America has always required America, whenever challenged, to support foul pro-American dictatorships. American hegemony in the Middle East depends on alliances with Sunni Arab dictatorships, however monstrous their crimes. Containing China in Asia requires turning a blind eye to the nature of the Modi regime in India.
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[A]ny state that resists American power … must represent absolute evil.
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And even in Europe, the one area where the United States’ claims to genuine commitment to democracy have real validity, rolling back Russian influence requires supporting a range of ethnic chauvinist movements and states, as long as they are anti-Russian. By the same token, this ideological approach leads automatically to the demonization of any state that resists American power, since this power is self-evidently benign. Such a state cannot be acting in rational defense of its own national interests. It must represent absolute evil.
This is connected in turn to the vast exaggeration of international threats to the United States. This began as deliberate deception, summed up in Senator Vanderbilt’s famous advice to Dean Acheson on how to gain Senate support for U.S. accession to NATO: “Scare the hell out of them!”; and Acheson’s own remark that mobilizing the US elites and public against Stalin’s USSR had required the Truman administration to paint a picture of the Soviet menace that was “clearer than truth”.
This deception had legitimate origins. It was rooted in a fear that, faced by Stalinist communism, the U.S. public would return to the isolationism of the interwar years, with its dreadful results. Thereafter however, fuelled by the military-industrial complex, by self-interested generals and intellectuals, by ethnic lobbies with particular national ambitions and hatreds, and by a partly hysterical and partly compliant media, the exaggeration of foreign threats became integral to the US body politic; because immensely powerful interests required the permanent mobilisation of US society for possible war, just as European states had done before 1914
The result has been a row of almost crazed exaggerations of the power of designated enemies. The Vietnamese Communists were transformed from nationalists continuing their local war for national unification and against Western colonialism into the first step in a movement that would lead to Communism conquering the world.
Since the end of the Cold War, Saddam Hussein was transformed from a minor Middle Eastern dictator into a global menace; Iran from a regional power with partially hostile and partially congruent interests to those of the United States into an apocalyptic threat to America; Beijing’s continuation of the Chinese civil war with the government of Taiwan has become presented as the prelude to expelling the United States from Asia and overthrowing democracy in the world; and yesterday I heard one U.S. former policymaker claim in the same debate that Russia is a weak military power that can be easily defeated by Ukraine if we only give the Ukrainians more weapons; and that if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, it will destroy NATO and expel the United States from Europe.
This kind of willful cognitive dissonance makes not just realistic, but even rational thought almost impossible. Trying to make it the basis for a sensible foreign and security policy is like building a house on a foundation of clam chowder – with the clams well past their sell-by date.
Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a board member of the Simone Weil Center.
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Rights, Obligations and International Realities
—James W. Carden
In order to understand the American political establishment's flight from reality one should try, as best one can, to identify the ideas which have underlain, animated, justified, and facilitated that journey; and I would submit that one of the principal culprits in our flight into the unreal has been a reliance on and a belief in an unrealistic, ahistorical, and overbearing concept of “rights” in international relations.
For too long the discourse of American foreign policy has been littered with the language of rights. We have been recently lectured by our betters in the bipartisan political establishment and corporate media that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the absolute non-negotiable right to travel to Taiwan.
Likewise, we have been told ad nauseam that Ukraine and Georgia (and, more recently, Sweden and Finland) have an ironclad, God-given right to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Yet the simple fact of the matter -- a fact studiously ignored by policymakers and their stenographers in the national press -- is that such rights talk is just that: Talk. It’s performative. For domestic consumption. A ruse with which to distract an all-too-easily distractible public from a myriad of crises here at home. In an anarchic international system -- i.e. one without enforcement mechanisms as exist within modern nation-states -- “rights” claims run up against the hard international realities of interest, against which they are rendered moot.
Yet a foreign policy based on rights has shown itself to be a dangerous one.
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[The] American conception of rights in international life has become an … obstacle to peace and stability
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The American obsession with international rights has been seen and heard in the mindlessly repeated mantras with which we are all by now all familiar: There is that right to join NATO. The citizens of the greater Middle East, Africa and Asia have a right to American-style democracy and American-style entertainments and, more recently, sexual and gender norms. Young Afghan girls have an inalienable right to go to elementary school, under the watchful cover of American arms. Iraqis have the right to dip their fingers in purple ink and vote. Syrians, Libyans, Ukrainians have the right to overthrow their sovereign governments.
Yet the pursuit of these rights has had, as we have seen, sometimes devastating if not catastrophic consequences. Indeed, this very American conception of rights in international life has become an -- or perhaps the -- principal obstacle to peace and stability the world over.
There has to be a better way. And, as it happens, there is: A paradigm based on the concept of obligations instead of rights.
As Simone Weil Center president and co-founder Paul Grenier pointed out to me not long ago…
The downside of accepting such a rights-based self-definition was emphasized long ago by Simone Weil. First of all, rights, as such, in isolation, do not even exist. What exists are obligations (to ourselves, to others); and obligations, to the extent that they exist at all, exist precisely because of something sacred placed in us, something placed in our souls that we do not ourselves create or invent. To the extent modern man does away with such ‘premodern’ notions as soul, and relies, instead, on the notion of bare ‘rights’ then of necessity what comes to the fore in political relations can only be force.
As Weil herself has written, “the list of obligations toward the human being should correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger. Among such needs, there are some which are physical, like hunger itself. They are fairly easy to enumerate. They are concerned with the protection against violence, housing, clothing, hygiene and medical attention in the case of illness.” All of which, needless to say, are put in jeopardy by the onset of war and civil strife.
The question then is this: Obligation or Rights? Which furthers peace, which furthers conflict?
Let's play out how the situation in Ukraine might have looked if events had unfolded under a paradigm of obligation rather than one of rights.
The de facto alliance of Ukrainian westernizing liberals and the fascist Ukrainian far-Right which together drove the so-called Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14 ignored their obligation to respect the democratic process. The violent overthrow of the duly elected Ukrainian president was praised in the US and in certain European capitals as a victory for the “right” of Ukrainians to choose their European future, but was in fact a violation of their obligation to respect the results of a democratic election - and by extension their obligation to respect the will of their fellow citizens in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
The enthusiastic pro-Europeans marching on the Maidan might have done well to keep in mind the warning of the late political philosopher Judith Shklar, who has written that Thucydides himself understood “that civil war is the most horrible thing that can happen, and that civilization is very thin ice, with savagery and murderous rage just below the surface…”
This was the original sin of the Maidan: The alleged “right” to join Europe overrode any consideration of obligation. And so, to no one’s surprise, the savagery and murderous rage of which Shklar warned surfaced.
Without excusing Putin’s culpability for the decision to invade Ukraine in February of this year - it is only fair to conclude that the road to the ruinous war now being waged in the Donbas really began eight and a half years ago, on a cold February evening in 2014.
In this context, that of civil and inter-state war, it is worth noting that Augustine's Just War Theory is based not on a positive conception of rights, it instead is based on a concept of obligation: Obligation in commencement of hostilities, obligation in the carrying out of those hostilities. And here we should turn to the Russian government, which for years has - and with good reason - pointed to a right to a zone of security on its sovereign borders. Yet today Mr. Putin would be on a firmer ground if he had acted in the spirit of Augustine’s theory.
Policies based on obligation - instead of rights - might have pointed Russia and the West in the direction of a just settlement in Ukraine. The obligation a state has to its citizens to simply survive would have resulted in an embrace of a policy of neutrality by Presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky. The obligation a state has not to wage preemptive war (per Augustine) could have conceivably resulted in a reciprocal pledge by the Kremlin not to invade its neighbor. The obligation American and its NATO allies have to the economic well-being of their own people might have resulted in efforts to defuse the crisis with alacrity - instead of dragging it out (indeed, enflaming it) for nearly a decade. Yet none of this happened because each of the main players suffers from a kind of rights-myopia.
An American foreign policy based on obligation rather than rights would in the first place be less destructive than it is at present. The first obligation of any government is to the citizens which fall under its sovereignty. That would necessarily place the interests of everyday Americans first, which itself would be a new and welcome change. But as of now, US foreign policy, as currency practiced, is little more than an ostentatious, militarized exercise of rights which has undermined the prospects of peace and stability, which are the twin prerequisites of state survival.
James W. Carden is a member of the board of the Simone Weil Center, a columnist at the Asia Times, and a frequent contributor to media outlets in the US, UK and Australia.
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America’s Ideological Prison
—Nicolai N. Petro
The assumption implicit in this question is that Realism limited American power. It did not. Let us not pretend, motivated perhaps by a misplaced sense of nostalgia, that America acknowledged any limits to its power during the Cold War (1950-1985). It seeded military bases throughout the world, joined in multiple regional proxy conflicts, and perfected the art of regime change all the while that Realists such as Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, Dean Rusk, and George W. Ball were at the helm of American foreign policymaking.
Realism, therefore, is not alien to the domestic power structure that has driven to become an empire, but part and parcel of it. The problem with American foreign policy today lies not in the strategic concept it proposes (Liberal Internationalist or Realist), but in its uncritical embrace of American Exceptionalism—the idea that America’s inherent virtue places it above all other nations.
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There is therefore no escape from this ideological prison, for this prison is our home.
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This messianic impulse has been occasionally constrained by this or that American statesman, but short of an unprecedented shift in the current world order, it will never be completely eradicated. That is because it has become a core rationale for why America needs to act as the world’s policeman. For a brief moment, at the end of the Vietnam War, being the world’s policeman was considered a bad thing in the United States, but no more. Today this mission has the support of all major elite constituencies—military, financial, intelligence, political, and cultural. The elite consensus on the need to dismantle the Trump presidency was formed, I would argue, not when he suggested that America could be friends with Russia and China, but when he suggested that America should curtail its efforts to re-shape the world in ways that benefit that elite. There is therefore no escape from this ideological prison, for this prison is our home.
Nicolai N. Petro is Professor of Peace Studies and Nonviolence and Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. He is a board member of the Simone Weil Center.
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How Entrenched Elites Fail
—Ethan Alexander-Davey
I find D.C. Schindler’s Arendtian analysis of the failings of the American policy elite persuasive. I would add one other element to it. This is from Michael Glennon’s book National Security and Double Government. The people who form America’s foreign policy agenda are what he calls the ‘Trumanite network’, the top officials in the various Federal bureaux that deal with national security. The elected parts of the government, whose members come and go, are unable to match the consistency and commitment of the permanent bureaucracy. The members of this bureaucratic class, by and large, believe that freedom will be safe at home only if American political, economic and military resources are used to advance freedom everywhere. As bureaucrats, they are also so engrossed with day-to-day threat assessments, weapons programs, ongoing cloak and dagger operations and the like, that they are incapable of considering any philosophical alternatives. Their changeless policy approach is also an example of path dependence, which is another typical vulnerability in bureaucratic government. Even if a policy fails repeatedly, to the bureaucrat, bound by endless rules and commitments to projects into which billions of dollars have been sunk, and to special interests that support their efforts, change is too costly. So no changes are made.
One could make a similar case about the think tanks focusing on foreign policy. The ones that have real influence are composed of members who have the same ideological and pecuniary interests and commitments.
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[T]o the bureaucrat … change is too costly. So no changes are made.
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The flight from reality is also, obviously, not a new phenomenon in the politics of grand empires. The present situation brings to mind a comment in the early modern treatise Politica by the German jurist Johannes Althusius. In the context of discussing the ideal size of a polity, he makes the simple observation that the rulers of large empires have a tendency toward overconfidence. “Experience testifies that might leads to over-confidence, over-confidence to folly, folly to contempt, contempt to the weakening of authority, and so to the loss of imperium.” At the moment, this observation appears to apply to both the U.S. and Russia.
The solution, if there is one, is based on the assumption that all politics is, in effect, elite politics. There is a new book by Neema Parvini called The Populist Delusion. He starts with the Italian elite school, Mosca, Pareto, Michels, and argues that all political change in effect is driven by well-organized minorities, who are able to establish themselves in power at the expense of established elites. If the policy elite is deranged, the only remedy is for a smarter and better organized elite to rise and replace those in power. In the U.S., in the near term, it is at least conceivable this could happen. There are elements in the Republican Party that support an America First agenda which is at least closer to reality than liberal internationalism. But before the alternative vision can have any influence on policy decisions, the liberal internationalists will have to be squeezed out of their positions of power, and replaced by their opponents.
In the absence of an elite-in-waiting which manages to organize itself and seize power, the policy of the established elite would have to fail so calamitously, that they would finally be able see their own folly, and their impending loss of imperium. This would require, it seems to me, a military catastrophe that only China could deliver to the United States. If the U.S. intervenes to stop the PLA from invading Taiwan, China may have the capability of destroying US bases in Japan, for instance. That would be far more humiliating than the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, though the latter was humiliating enough. But any scenario in which the U.S. suffers major military losses to the Chinese would also, obviously, be far more dangerous for the parties concerned and for the rest of the world.
Ethan Alexander-Davey is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Campbell University in Buies Creek, NC and on the advisory board of the Simone Weil Center.
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The Road from Republican Idealism to Demagoguery
—Gordon M. Hahn
Since its founding, American political culture has been characterized by what can be called ‘democratic idealism’ or ‘republican idealism’. The hope that the American Revolution would spread across the globe has been present since the founding fathers forward. Republicanism, free trade, and commerce were thought to be the formula for bringing about a ‘democratic peace’ -- an early idea that eventually transitioned into the subfield of ‘democratic peace theory’ in American political science. This theory implied, if it did not explicitly state, that Americans were destined to spread democratic revolution by one means or another (peaceful, violent, ‘transition’) across the globe. This American democratic revolutionism, messianism, and universalism has produced some positive outcomes, and for many Americans comes from a deeply held altruistic desire to bring a moral good to the world.
Unfortunately, the United States’ rise to superpower status after World War II, and then to world hegemon after the Cold War, has led to the preponderance of a negative component, with power maximizing ambitions lurking behind America’s more altruistic republican aspirations and using them to more pedestrian power-expanding tasks. It is not the parallel functioning, but instead the merging of the altruistic and power-building aspects that has perverted U.S. foreign policy goals, strategies, and tactics. The altruistic ends function to justify the power ends and means. Thus, the incessant assertions from American officials that only American hegemony and the power of it and its allies can protect the community of democracies and ‘make the world safe for democracy’— a reiteration of the democratic peace idea.
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It is not the parallel functioning, but instead the merging of the altruistic and power-building aspects that has perverted U.S. foreign policy goals …
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These by-now traditional American deviations from foreign policy realism have been compounded by the decay of American civilizational spirituality and the postmodernist problem of devaluing reality. The decline of religion and education as to the positive elements of the American ideals of natural law, public virtue, and political moderation and compromise and the rise of hyper-consumerism, materialism and hedonism are creating a spiritual vacuum—a dearth of the transcendent or of anything of permanent meaning to aspire to in life.
The rise of cynical post-modernism has filled that vacuum, creating a nation of demagogues and, as H.L. Mencken noted, ‘demaslaves’ incapable of seeing or at least acknowledging realities as simple as the differences between a man and a woman, to say nothing of grasping the complex realities of the national interests of one’s own country and the national interests – real, perceived, and misperceived -- of other states. Post-modernism’s denial of objective truths has deepened American political culture’s inability to deal with reality as it is. If there is no truth, then there is no reality and there are no lies, only realities in the making with their makers in a hyper-Darwinian competition to reimagine and remake ‘reality.’ Demagogues make the new reality, and demaslaves keep it alive by living in it.
Realism in international affairs presumes a very specific, hard-nosed conceptualization of how the word actually works in the present. This requires a perception of the world that approximates the actual, real state of the human condition. Present-day American liberalism and neo-liberalism has become entirely focused on making the world as liberals and neo-liberals would like it to be. Moreover, their project is unrealizable on two scores. The fantasy end can never become reality, and the means for achieving that end can never produce any end its executors seek to attain. The end – whether it is the feminist vision of identical outcome, the transgenderist project of gender nihilism and eternal mutability, the transhumanist one of synergy, or even the liberal republican one of a world filled with liberal ‘democracies’ and democratic peace – is impossible. Regarding the means, the ends are so far from any realistic possible future human condition that they will require an extraordinary scale of coercion and violence to attain them. That scale of violence cannot help but provoke a myriad of unintended consequences that will fatally undermine the project. This is comparable to the Russian communist and anarchist scale of unreality.
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[T]he ends are so far from any realistic possible future human condition that they will require an extraordinary scale of coercion and violence …
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In the past, propaganda – whether true or false – was understood to be propaganda and its false aspects (omissions, half-truths, lies) were understood to be precisely that. Now, in our post-modern world where there supposedly is no objective reality, propaganda lies are designed to create reality, and the reality you desire to create is reality. The simulacra of creating false realities has become the daily modus vivendi of the Democratic Party and its more extremist fellow travelers, as can be seen from everything from the trumped up Russiagate fairy tales, to the allegedly ‘harmless’ consequences of NATO expansion for Russia, to the US claim that Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion is feigned, to the imminent Ukrainian victory over the Russian military, to the ‘full international isolation of Russia’, to the alleged merely incidental presence and influence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, etc.
And these foreign policy simulacra have their domestic policy parallels: institutional racism, ubiquitous if not indeed genetically ingrained white supremacism, gender identity fluidity, the existence of more than a hundred genders, the mandatory but futile COVID masks, ineffective but ‘effective’ COVID vaccines, and comparisons of the January 6th ‘insurrection’ to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy is a good student of the new simulacra politics: the ‘ghost’ pilot, the Snake Island myth (with Ukrainian soldiers’ curiously mimicking the WW II American general’s response to a Nazi proposal to surrender “Nuts!”), the alleged ‘Russian bombing’ of the Jewish holocaust memorial Babi Yar, the ‘Russian bombing’ of a Mariupol maternity hospital, and so on. No better ‘trailer’ for the Western simulacra ‘movie’ can be found than former US ambassador Michael McFaul’s assertion from a few months ago when he was confronted by Professor Stephen Walt about whether the U.S. was “lying” to Ukraine about the possibility of its joining NATO. McFaul responded that, in diplomacy, lying “is the real world.” That statement becomes even more powerful when one considers that of course the statement itself is a lie, since NATO has been grooming Kiev for de facto NATO membership for more than a decade, by means of joint military programs, military maneuvers, and military financing.
Obviously, a realist foreign policy cannot be based on the self-delusional teleology of one’s desired, advantageous, or imagined future being taken to be present reality or as the only reality the creation of which is even conceivably worthwhile; indeed, the one that must be ruthlessly fought for with disdain for both truth and any approximate vision of actual reality. Indeed, it is striking how much the new American maximalism and prometheanism recalls those of Russia’s late 19th-early 20th century Russian communist and anarchist revolutionaries.
Ultimately, the new American demaslavery is a far more comprehensive version of that introduced by Woodrow Wilson in order to fight World War I. Wilson’s chief propagandist, George Creel – significantly a figure who opposed censorship but helped impose it so that alternative views would not get in the way of war propaganda – extolled Wilson and yet wrote at the time:
It is the capacity of the people for self-government. It is the honesty, intelligence, and faith of the mass that are up for judgment. There is not a lie that has been told that lacks its answer; there is not a slander for which refutation cannot be found; there is not an ugly charge that does not come clean in the light truth. It remains to be seen whether the people of the United States prefer facts to clamor, fairness to betrayal, and democracy to oligarchy; in a word, whether they are able to think for themselves.
Today, one is forced to seriously doubt that Americans can do so, or discern anything approximating the truth about themselves, the world they live in, and about the other peoples with whom they must share this world.
Is there a means of returning to a broad pluralism, open discourse, and a sufficiently honest pursuit of objective truths, and of then applying these to our approach to making American foreign policy? At this point, it appears the only way back to something resembling such a return to reality is through a shock to the body politic. This could come in many forms – a devastating revelation about our domestic reality or a resonant foreign policy defeat that exposes the imbalances of neocon and neo-liberal dreams of an American-led republican utopia brought about by coercion and subterfuge. Either of these outcomes might spur a national spiritual awakening of some sort that replaces hubris with humility, self-righteousness with balanced self-awareness and self-criticism, and our post-World War II corruption and post-Cold War ambitions abroad with a revival of the best of what the founding fathers offered to us.
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an analyst at Corr Analytics and a senior researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS). He has taught at a number of U.S. universities and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and at the Hoover Institution.