When mainstream Democratic politicians talk about Iraq, why do they sound more like Republicans than like the actual Democratic citizens they claim to represent? Are they simply ducking for cover from the with-us-or-against-us Republican onslaught? Are Democrats actually buying into the right wing’s dark, pessimistic vision of endless conflict combined with blinkered optimism about the boundless utility of military force? Has the liberal tradition failed to provide useful principles on which to build and conduct foreign policy?

In Heads in the Sand, fast-rising political observer and commentator Matthew Yglesias reveals the wrong-headed foreign policy stance of conservatives, neocons, and the Republican Party for what it is—aggressive nationalism, or, to be impolite, a new version of old-fashioned imperialism. He then examines how Democrats and progressives have responded to the conservative agenda, from mistakenly labeling it isolationism to repeated calls for big, bold, new ideas and the failure to actually produce any. 

Writing with wit, passion, and keen insight, Yglesias reminds us of the rich tradition of liberal internationalism that, developed by Democrats, was used with great success by both Democratic and Republican administrations for more than fifty years. It was, in fact, the foreign policy strategy that revived Europe after World War II, established the United Nations, and won the Cold War.

Based on the principle of promoting global order through international law and stable institutions, liberal internationalism is far from perfect and not nearly sexy enough to appeal to chest-thumping hawks. But, as Yglesias demonstrates, exercised with patience, flexibility, and restraint by nine American presidents, it has produced more peace, prosperity, and international harmony than any other approach. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s the worst form of foreign policy, except for all the others.

The forces opposed to liberal internationalism, however, are large and growing. And, Yglesias reveals, they’re not all on the far right. He presents a startling revelation of how many moderates, liberals, and even far-left progressives seem more than happy to use America’s military might to accomplish their objectives.

While Democrats have come unmoored from their foreign-policy principles for multiple and complex reasons, Matthew Yglesias makes it clear that the path to redemption is open, if not always pothole-free. Americans no longer support reckless Republican policies and the time is ripe—not for a new direction, but for the return of a tried-and-true direction. With Heads in the Sand, he provides a starting point for politicians, policymakers, pundits, and citizens alike to return America to its role as leader of a peace-loving and cooperative international community.

Matthew Yglesias is an Associate Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which also hosts his popular blog. His writing has also appeared in the American Prospect, Slate, the New Republic, and the New York Times. He’s been profiled as an up-and-comer in both New York and GQ magazines, and the Wall Street Journal recently called him “a ringleader-of-sorts for the D.C. blogging community.”

Heads in the Sand

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

In moments of conceptual confusion, it's natural to turn to history in search of lessons to learn, and many of liberalism's leading intellectuals have followed this tendency in recent years for some measure of clarity in foreign policy. The most popular analogy drawn thus far has been to the circumstances faced by Harry Truman in the election of 1948: the Democrats chose a middle ground between the Republican proposal of "rolling back" communism and the anti-anticommunism of former vice president Henry Wallace, who mounted a third-party challenge to Truman's Cold War liberalism. Truman's strategy was successful, both politically and substantively, and consequently serves as an appealing model for the present and the future. Furthermore, the main lesson learned from this analogy-that one should avoid unwise extremes and hew to a soundly moderate course of action-has the virtue of being correct.

Unfortunately, this lesson, though backed by the teachings of Aristotle, the Buddha, and Goldilocks alike, offers little in the way of practical guidance. In a world where one conservative author's proposed response to Islamist violence is to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" and a nontrivial number of people are committed to blanket pacifism, the middle ground turns out to be an extraordinarily broad patch of terrain.

In particular, rather than provide a framework for resolving the dispute, the "What would Harry Truman do?" mode of inquiry has merely recapitulated it. The prominent war supporter Joe Biden became the first recipient of the Democratic Leadership Council's Harry S. Truman Award for his foreign policy leadership even as the war was regarded by the late historian James Chace as a "stunning reversal of the policies practiced by the 'wise men'" of the Truman national security team. Most tellingly of all, in late 2004 Peter Beinart, then the editor of the staunchly pro-war New Republic, published a cover story advocating Democratic emulation of the Truman approach and shortly thereafter signed a deal to write a book based on the article. While writing the book, Beinart changed his mind about the Iraq War but was nonetheless able to keep the Truman analogy at the center of his argument.

The essential problem is that the international situation of 1948 simply doesn't resemble the current world to any great extent. The Soviets controlled a vast swath of territory inhabited by hundreds of millions of people and an enormous military establishment boasting strategic nuclear weapons. Drawing specific lessons from Truman piles one shaky parallel on top of another until the whole structure creaks: Islam = communism, bin Ladin = Stalin, Syria = Czechoslovakia, France = France. Thus, today's liberals have nothing left to draw on but the morality play of moderation. Indeed, by the time of the Vietnam War, figures who cut their teeth in the Truman years found themselves sharply disagreeing about how to apply the spirit of '48 to the era of decolonization. By the early twenty-first century the application of Trumanism had grown sufficiently fuzzy that hardened neo-conservatives, along with Bush himself, were claiming George W. Bush as Truman's true heir.

Discerning a more usable history requires recognition that Truman was but one figure in a liberal internationalist tradition that stretches both directions in time and has developed over the years in response to changing events. The policies of any given moment in the past would be inappropriate for today's circumstances, but the legacy as a whole has been applied in various situations, and both can and should be applied today.

Indeed, the internationalist legacy was alive and well and serving the country admirably as recently as the Clinton administration. The sense that September 11, 2001, marked a great discontinuity in world affairs is, in many ways, deeply misleading. Unlike the dawn of the Cold War in the 1940s, the events of the fall of 2001 did not represent the emergence of a novel threat or a genuinely new situation. The new situation arose about a decade earlier, as the Cold War ended and the world entered a period of unchallenged U.S. primacy where the most pressing security problems would be transnational in nature and would not emanate from organized states. The Clinton administration had a reasonably strong grasp on the situation, including the threat of al-Qaeda, and was implementing policies largely appropriate to the new international context that focused on strengthening, expanding, and deepening international institutions in order to foster cooperation against common problems and to bring the globe closer to the long-held liberal ideal of a world governed by a reasonably just, well-enforced set of rules, rather than by the clash of rival armies.

This policy was not an innovation, but merely a coming to fruition of the entire twentieth-century legacy of the Democratic Party, updated for a new situation that opened up new possibilities. But the Clinton era, like any particular moment in history, is open to various interpretations, especially when viewed out of context. Some Democrats took little away from the 1990s other than that liberals, too, could be enthusiastic about the use of force. Their leadership and their misinterpretations of liberal internationalism helped to drive the party behind Bush down the disastrous road to Baghdad.

While the Goldilocks lesson of the Truman administration is clearly inadequate to resolving the question of when liberals should use force, the internationalist tradition in the United States has, since its founding as part of the Woodrow Wilson administration, genuinely sought a middle ground. When Wilson entered office, the prevailing doctrine in U.S. national security policy had been that the role of the military was to defend and expand the borders of the United States vis--vis its immediate neighbors-Native Americans, Mexicans, and so on-while avoiding involvement in the disputes of far-off powers, especially the European ones. On some level, this strategy was principled and deeply considered, as reflected in George Washington's farewell address and its famous injunction against "entangling alliances." On another level, however, it was born of simple incapacity-the early United States was not capable of acting as a major player on the world stage and therefore chose not to try.

In the decades following the Civil War, the United States became increasingly influential. Its newly strengthened national government, vast size, enormous natural resource base, and ceaselessly growing population and economy made it a significant actor in world commerce and a potentially major one in world politics. In turn, an important faction arose arguing that the United States should ape the nations of Europe by seeking to relate to the world through imperial domination of the weak and military competition with the strong. These imperialists (a label they did not shun at the time) were opposed by traditionalists who took the view that simply because the United States could intervene in European affairs was no reason to think it should do so.

Faced with the increasing risk that Germany might secure dominion over all of Europe, Wilson reached the conclusion that intervention was the best bet. He also accepted, however, the traditional liberal view that imperial competition and militarism were immoral and ultimately self-destructive. Thus, he sought to frame his war aims around securing victory not merely over Germany, but over the whole system of international relations as well. He rejected the shared "realist" premises of isolationism and imperialism and their conclusion that global politics is intrinsically a "brutal arena where states look for opportunities to take advantage of each other, and therefore have little reason to trust each other." Liberal internationalists accepted that these problems existed (and still do), but they insisted that a better world is possible and that we neither must nor should reconcile ourselves to foreign policy being perpetually dominated by amoral power struggles between heavily armed adversaries.

Wilson envisioned the postwar world as one in which force and threats of force would no longer be the dominant element of politics among nations. Just as the rule of law in the domestic sphere makes it possible for individuals to interact with one another through commerce and friendship rather than theft and extortion, so, too, could the international rule of law make trade and tourism, rather than war and conquest, the main components of international relations. War, when civilized nations engaged in it at all, would be authorized by a League of Nations whose purpose was to uphold the liberal international order. If any nation attempted to violate the terms of this order, the others-under the banner of the League-would band together to crush the aggressor. This approach might not abolish war, just as domestic law has failed to abolish crime, but it would certainly mark a decisive change in the structure of world politics and, in Wilson's famous phrase, make the world safe for democracy.

* * *

Famously, it didn't work.

Wilson's specific effort to meet this aspiration-the League of Nations-was a spectacular failure. The precise problems with Wilson's approach to the end of World War I are almost too numerous to name. Put briefly, however, most of the world's major powers were simply not interested in the sort of just peace that a liberal world order could have defended. While many of Wilson's ideas about national self-determination were immensely popular with the people of Europe, they were far too vague and out of touch with realities on the ground to be rigorously implemented at the Paris Peace Conference where the League was established. What's more, Wilson's views on self-determination were flatly contradicted by his personal racism, which undercut the clear anti-imperialist implications of his views. Further worsening the situation, the newly born Soviet Union was not a member of the League. Soviet absence, in part, reflected a further problem in Wilson's thinking.

In his Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant, the first major liberal internationalist thinker, envisioned a world not only peacefully managed by a loose international confederation, but one wherein the components of that confederation would all be democratic republics, instead of the autocratic monarchies that were common in his day. Wilson took over this assumption that securing the peace depended crucially on both the League of Nations and the establishment of domestic justice (in particular, fair treatment for ethnic and national minority groups), but he had no real idea of how the latter might be achieved. Finally-the nail in the coffin-Wilson badly mishandled the domestic politics surrounding the League and the peace treaty of which it was a part, ultimately failing to secure congressional approval for U.S. membership.

Most of all, while many leaders were prepared to embrace the League, none of the major countries were interested in the sort of policies that could have established a liberal peace. Americans were by and large not interested in accepting a permanent global role for the nation, preferring to see the war as a singular crisis whose resolution would allow for a return to the traditional policy of dominating the Western Hemisphere and ignoring the rest. England (and, to a lesser extent, France) was primarily concerned with expanding and entrenching its global empire in a manner inconsistent with the equality of nations. France, meanwhile, did not especially have faith in the League's ability to protect it from future German aggression. In place of the League's liberal peace and cooperative world order, the French government sought a punitive peace that would keep Germany weak, a strong military to deter its larger neighbor, and an alliance of viable anti-German states in Central Europe. This last goal seemed to require that the new countries formed to Germany's east be reasonably large, which in practice required Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, among others, to be highly multinational rather than the smaller self-determining entities Wilson had advocated. Partially in response and partially for its own reasons, Germany continued-even before Hitler's rise-to put a primary emphasis on rebuilding military strength and seeking to revise the postwar order, rather than cooperating in stabilizing it.

Underlying all these missteps, however, was a simple hubris about the nature of the task. Wilson's aspirations for global politics were noble and even correct, but skeptics who doubted their feasibility were basically right: fundamental aspects of the human condition simply can't be radically revised overnight. Insofar as the nations of the world were unwilling to abandon imperialism and militarism as policies, formal changes in institutional structure were not going to accomplish anything. But if it was a mistake to try to move forward as boldly as Wilson intended, the arrival of World War II simply confirmed that he was correct in thinking that continuing the old ways was untenable as well. The combination of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism that fueled interwar European policies led to a collision that left everyone far worse off than they'd been before: England's empire gone, France conquered, Germany destroyed, millions dead, and civilization itself seemingly in tatters. A just peace, acceptable to all, and the creation of peaceful mechanisms to resolve disputes were more necessary than ever.

Since that time, the great goal of liberal foreign policy has been to adhere to Wilson's vision while avoiding the failures of his policy: to see the creation of a liberal world order not as a simple matter that can be accomplished with a snap of the fingers, but as an ongoing process that the United States, as the largest, richest, and strongest of the liberal powers, must consistently push forward. The question, then, that must be asked of any proposed policy is whether it advances or retards that goal; whether it brings us closer to or further from the dream of a peaceful, rule-governed liberal world order.

The attempts to implement this agenda have varied over the years according to circumstances and shifting thinking, but U.S. foreign policy has, when successful, adhered to this basic strategy. Wilson's first successor in this regard was Franklin Roosevelt, who sought to temper the liberal aspiration with a greater dose of pragmatism. His United Nations made important concessions to the realities of great power politics through the structure of the Security Council. He was also able to take advantage of shifts in world opinion. Nationalism remained a strong force, but formal imperialism was clearly on the way out, and militarism's appeal was waning-especially in Europe. The upshot was to shift the international system incrementally toward one governed by liberal ideals, rather than to transform it dramatically. As witnessed by the UN's continued existence decades after its founding, this approach was considerably more successful. But although the UN managed to endure in a way that the League never did, the onset of the Cold War led Harry Truman to recognize that the sort of cooperation FDR had envisioned between the democratic West and the Soviet Union would not be possible.

Consequently, Truman further tempered Roosevelt's vision, largely accepting that a Security Council permanently hamstrung by Soviet vetoes could not function as the major tool of U.S. foreign policy. Instead of abandoning liberal aspirations in the face of this diplomatic failure, Truman sought to enact them in miniature. He constructed a series of institutions of less-than-global scope-most prominently NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank (originally, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), and the International Monetary Fund, which was eventually followed by the European Economic Community-so that the "free world" might be governed according to liberal principles while competing as a bloc with Soviet totalitarianism in a traditional manner.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Heads in the Sandby Matthew Yglesias Copyright © 2008 by Matthew Yglesias. Excerpted by permission.
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