REIMAGINING FOREIGN POLICY: Responses
Cohen, Mitchell
Suzanne Nossel argues well for a "muscular" and restrained foreign policy. I take her point to be that balance, now sorely lacking, is needed badly. I like many of her proposals, especially that...
...When historians evaluate these last years, I think they will find that George W. Bush was not the fool of left-wing caricatures, but a parochial figure whose isolationist instincts blurred easily into unilateralism under the pressure of events...
...Finally, a new trans-Atlanticism ought to be among the highest priorities of a new administration...
...It seems to me that two right-wing leaders fed off each other in the lead-up to Iraq, and have done the most to damage multilateralism...
...I am not trying to reargue Iraq...
...The issues discussed here are potent whether the war was DISSENT I Fall 2004 • 37 REIMAGINING FOREIGN POLICY right or wrong and they ought to lead us to address the authority of international institutions in circumspect as well as supportive ways...
...Hopes for a better life could help to subvert the appeal of terror-prone ideologies in unhappy parts of the world...
...When Americans listen to voices in the Arab world, as they should, they need to do so critically...
...Disregard, though, can sometimes have sensible sources...
...And a government might have cause for unilateral international moves in the twenty-first century given a vital rationale combined with blockage of multilateral options...
...Palestine was quite secondary for Osama bin Laden in the 1990s...
...After all, Americans may be idealists when they speak of democracy at home, yet a type of realism leads them to recognize the importance of constitutionally protected basic rights that ought not to be altered easily by the government or in response to momentary popular sentiment...
...The United States is not only the world's REIMAGINING FOREIGN POLICY foremost military and technological power, but its leading economic one...
...Americans, or at least idealists among them, back democracy abroad, but realism leads them also to recognize that it would be foolhardy to evict China from the Security Council even though its one- party dictatorship rules 1.3 billion citizens who have no political rights...
...They need to keep in mind how public opinion there is shaped by anciens regimes that, together with proponents of nationalist and jihadist ideologies, have vested interests in using Israeli policies, right or wrong, as distractions from their own failures...
...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent and professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York...
...The UN's Arab Human Development Report says that sixtyfive million adults in the Arab world cannot read or write...
...Had Iraqis been able to deliberate democratically, their vast majority would likely have voted for intervention...
...Isolationism and unilateralism feed each other with unproductive disregard for the rest of the world...
...But this implies that international legitimacy depended on undemocratic Beijing together with Moscow, which is engaged in a vicious conflict with Chechen Muslims, and France's neo-Gaullist president, who specified on the eve of war that he opposed it because he wanted a "multi-polar" world (not multilateralism...
...Warfare causes collateral damage...
...Social solidarity bears a family resemblance to multilateralism, and multilateralism is no less complex than democracy is in international affairs...
...It all depends on a balanced approach, and imbalance has been the Bush administration's hallmark in everything from taxes to security...
...These range from the UN's failure to thwart genocide in Rwanda to its botched missions in Somalia and Srebenica to the massive corruption of its oil-for-food program in Iraq to the transformation of the Durban conference on racism into an anti-Israel lynching party...
...Nossel defines liberal aims as freedom, democracy, and global security...
...We need to accept some of them, but not all...
...A muscular, economic foreign policy might yield collateral benefits...
...Why not a muscular economic dimension in foreign policy on behalf of the havenots, to dislodge the fashionable neoliberalism of recent years and to advance instead social fairness and economic rights (in addition to, not instead of, supporting political democracy...
...38 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...
...The alternative to both is to press practical, social democratic issues: How to reform powerful structures, global and local, that shape socioeconomic disadvantage...
...One can imagine Iraqis invoking Anatole France's celebrated comment about law under capitalism—that in its "majesty," the law permits equally beggars and millionaires to sleep under bridges—and saying that international law, in its majesty, protected equally people in Saddam's Iraq and people in the European Union...
...Despite all the recent difficulties, a set of vital values links Europe and the United States: democracy, liberal rights, and for some of us, socioeconomic solidarity...
...Why not surprise everyone when refurbishing America's place in the world by placing socioeconomic suffering— poverty, disease, and illiteracy in what used to be called the "third world"—high on the agenda...
...Nossel is right to call for American reengagement with the United Nations and decisive recommitment to international law and to human rights standards (especially in light of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib...
...There are important unresolved questions of who is accountable to whom in international legal systems...
...MANY PEOPLE argued that military action in Iraq was illegitimate and illegal without Security Council endorsement...
...36 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 Regardless of how one views Iraq, this seems clear: judicious multilateralism is essential to America's long-term needs and security (think of nuclear terrorism...
...Both the UN and international law have undemocratic dimensions...
...Listening tours should become ongoing conversations...
...Anti-globalization" movements have raised urgent issues, even if much of their politics is animated by an ill-digested mélange of failed Trotskyism, futile third worldism, and inchoate postmodernism...
...It is when a country is powerful that it is situated to shape multilateral international politics according to its own best values, its better interests, and—this is essential— with due respect to those of its friends...
...Americans were often contemptuous of European "power politics" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it resulted in wars...
...It is not the key to Iraq...
...The alternative to both is social democratic multilateralism that allows for national interests but asserts what I, for one, think of as the best values shared by Europeans and Americans, and strengthens global cooperation on their basis...
...I find myself saying, "Yes, but . . ." The "but" is social democratic...
...Recall: Iraq's population is 20 percent Kurd and 60 percent Shiite...
...How to make the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank responsive to values other than those of transnational finance and corporations...
...But those of us who want a rejuvenated and successful UN (and who don't lose sight, amid all the political storms, of the good accomplished by, say, the UN Development Program or the World Food Program) must also be blunt about the UN's many failures and the problems of international law...
...Chirac's multipolarism envisions a French-led Europe that "counter-balances" the United States and thereby compensates for the weaknesses of the contemporary French state...
...Is this due to Palestine...
...There are such things as legitimate American interests (part of the left, alas, still doesn't understand this), but to perceive and to pursue them intelligently requires the displacement of parochial sensibilities by a larger sense of our world...
...Two-thirds are women...
...The relation between democracy and international affairs is not always straightforward (nor can it be...
...In basic ways these values are embodied more in European social provisions (like universal health care) than in the corrosive, marketized world advocated too loudly on our side of the Atlantic...
...Many voices call on Washington to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict expeditiously because it is the "real key" to everything else in the region...
...Insisting on trade agreements that secure labor rights and environmental protections can link domestic and international concerns...
...The Israel-Palestine conflict should be solved on its own merits—when it is solvable...
...Ariel Sharon, for all his sins, is hardly responsible for Saddam's murder of three hundred thousand Iraqis...
...I like many of her proposals, especially that for internationalizing the Iraqi situation...
...Bush's swaggering unilateralism is bound to backfire as general policy in a global age...
...The majority of Britons and Americans then backed their respective governments on Iraq...
...This indigestion doesn't substantiate the opposite fare, that is, the notion that a McDonald's globalized means the world fed and peaceful...
...I like Nossel's proposal for a "listening tour" for its symbolism and because Americans really need to hear, although not always heed, the rest of the world...
...To imagine, as Bush's team does, that the stronger a country is, the more unilateralist it should be, is strategically perverse...
...In other words, idealism and realism must mix...
...Surely, this idea is false and should not be embraced to compensate for the Bush Botch in Iraq...
...How to enhance civil society associations, particularly unions, which can give workers and the poor some power in their lives...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
