This article by Dave Weigel, about the resistance to "internationalist" Harold Koh as the State Department's legal guy, made me curious about the contrary attitudes about globalization on the right. On the one hand, the right supports some measures of globalization, like free trade (to some extent) and internationalism (of its own brand). However, it steadfastly opposes anything that even looks like an international attempt to straitjacket the unbridled expression of American will at home or abroad. I find this curious. Clearly it merits further analysis.
First off, I think the free trade issue can easily be dismissed. Like most other economic issues, it's existence is primarily due to the influence of the business community who wants to sell goods globally. And it's not as if the right holds a principled view of free trade, considering W. Bush-era tariffs on textiles and lumber. Trade is sort of a sui generis issue on the right, and I think that the easiest way for Republicans to regain ground in the Midwest would be to renounce free trade, which would lend itself naturally to the conservative pitch on patriotism and would be something economic that would make Republicans seem more appealing to actual voters. I don't think this would be morally right or good policy, and it's pretty much a nonstarter among the actual Republican elite, but that's my sense of things. I'm actually a pretty staunch free trader in general (though I do insist that free trade agreements include some protections for workers and the environment in other countries, so that other people see some improvement out of the thing), and that's one of the things that scares the hell out of me on the left. Protectionism not only seems like bad policy and immoral, but it seems to be appealing to the very sorts of id-centric "otherism" that so repulses me on the right. Thankfully, the free trade wing of the party seems very much in control, and influential left-leaning thinkers like Paul Krugman largely agree with me on allowing free trade and unionization, plus a robust safety net, as the answer to globalization.
Anyway, the contradictions in the rest of what the right says about globalization are interesting. The prevailing view seems to be that, to be our friends, countries should more or less follow our lead in overseas military adventures--Bush's "for us or against us" rhetoric. And yet the converse doesn't apply, as guys like Chuck Krauthammer believe that things as minor and inane as the UN Law of the Sea Treaty are an unconscionable breach of American sovereignty. This doesn't make sense at all--we don't have to follow the treaty if we don't sign it, and if we do, it's an expression of American sovereignty, only in concert with a lot of other countries simultaneously. The response I've heard most often in response to the contradiction I presented is that other countries should follow our lead because we're more powerful, but this principle is really thorny. In 1945 it is beyond dispute that the Soviet Union was militarily the most powerful nation in the world (though not economically). Not only did the USSR have way more tanks left over from WWII, but they had better tanks (the Russian T-34 was the best tank in the war, the American Sherman was the worst) and more battle-hardened veterans. We probably could have taken them by air, but there has yet to be a war won by air power alone. And Russia had way more infantry than America. Of course, the formation of NATO helped make the sides in the Cold War a bit more even, but would the neocons concede that America should have let Berliners starve in 1948 because Russia was more powerful militarily, and as the more powerful nation what they say goes? What about the American Revolution? Should George Washington have just surrendered to the British right off the bat? Of course not, because might doesn't necessarily make right, and simply being powerful isn't a moral impetus on other countries to bestow unchecked leadership upon us. (I do think that the South should have faced the inevitable instead of taking on the much more powerful North during the American Civil War, especially with the woefully pathetic obsession with the "Northern Aggression" narrative which translated into a terrible military strategy, but this is all a propos.)
The truth is that nationalism of this sort is often identified with the right but it wasn't always that way. In fact, conservatives like Richard Nixon and Arthur Vandenberg (a personal favorite of mine) were staunch internationalists after WWII, believers in the United Nations (which was founded by a Republican named Henry Cabot Lodge) and supporters of Harry Truman's containment policy. To some extent, international law might run afoul of the "small government" ethos that conservatives have built over the years, though that motto is more of a "whatever the hell you want it to mean" deal these days, if the invasion of another country to convert them to democracy--a notion that used to be confined to Berkeley hippies with their "Free Tibet" stickers--is now a province of the right. What unifies all of these threads--"with us or against us", "all your nations are belong to us", and "Free Tibet"--is not any sort of principle but rather a severe counterreaction to the undeniable reality of American decline. It's no coincidence that this notion gained currency among the right during the Clinton years, which were decidedly absent of great power conflicts and contained humanitarian disasters in tiny African countries that we should have been able to take easily in a war. It is also no coincidence that anti-UN sentiment among the right has risen, not fallen, in light of the disasterous nature of the Iraq War, which has only underscored the reality that we are not less powerful than we once were, but we're less powerful than we thought we were. That Iraq has turned around in the past few years has been due mostly to superior strategy and canny realpolitik, though that a war with the Alabama of the Middle East was even close suggests that we know even less about the modern world than we thought we did. Empire only worked in the first place because of the huge technology gap between the conquerors and the conquered--one man with a rifle is worth one hundred with spears, and all that. Now Iraqi insurgents can buy AK-47s for five dollars a pop. You can't build an empire under those conditions.
It is interesting that one sees far more of an acceptance of what Fareed Zakaria termed, "the post-American world" among the left. Indeed, it seems like liberal elites are less interested in forever being the preeminent nation among nations, which I think is clear-eyed and healthy. Unfortunately, I see little in the way of trying to wind down the American Empire around the world among the liberal elite, which I think is necessary. The world has changed, and talking about paring back defense budgets and "guns vs. butter" seems like the proper thing to start doing, though it's difficult to do that for now, considering the nature of the political currents of the current debate on national security. At some point, the left needs to start moving down that alleyway, though, especially if we want to actually keep Obama's stuff funded in the future.
Empires rise and fall, and there is usually some pretty intense attempts to keep them from falling after the fall is already well underway. A lot of people think that Iraq was George W. Bush's Vietnam, and while the analogy holds in a lot of ways--it's an unnecessary war launched by a president with a particular set of political anxieties and personal insecurities, it dragged down both men and destroyed both of their reputations, as well as their political parties (and they were both Texans, which has to be relevant)--it fails in others. Vietnam was a war we fought because of our policy of containment, a war we should just have abandoned but that there was some rationalization for it in existing U.S. policy. Bush introduced the "Bush Doctrine", a new policy based largely on his own whims on what to base military action. Lyndon Johnson was a very successful president otherwise--he'd be in the all-time top tier for sure if you ignore foreign policy. Bush was a disaster in every field of public policy, and a great deal of the problems with Iraq were due to sheer incompetence, which was not necessarily the case in Vietnam. No, I think the better parallel for Iraq isn't Vietnam, but Suez. British PM Anthony Eden launched an attack to reclaim the Suez Canal in Egypt in 1956. It failed and Eden resigned, and it was considered the last act of the British Empire. I don't suppose we've seen the last act of Empire in America--and even in Britain there were twitches of Empire during its rigor mortis, like the 1982 Falkland Islands War--but the sound of bells tolling is unmistakeable. I think that the history books will not reference Iraq as Bush's Vietnam, but rather as Bush's Suez. And if they don't, they should, because that captures the very essence of what it was supposed to be, only successful.
