Sage words from Kenneth Baer:
[T]here are deep divisions within the Democratic Party on Iraq, the War on Terror, and international economics. Instead of trying to make nice all the time, we Democrats owe it to ourselves to use this time in the wilderness to have a robust debate about what our vision is of America’s role in the world. Some of that is happening over at America Abroad and other sites. Some of it is going on in the think tanks and foreign policy journals. But these ideas need to enter the political arena — and Democrats need to debate their merits.
I don’t write a lot about foreign policy largely because I don’t know a lot about it. I know, I know, I’m not an expert on most anything else I pontificate about here. As I’ve noted before, much of my problem is the lack of clear conceptual shortcut. By that I mean I can see how a set of conceptual tools — whether Marxian (conflict social theory, materialist history, overdetermination) or liberal (mainstream economics, theories of legitimation, political science) — can allow someone who’s not an expert in domestic policy to make heads or tails of a complex problem by providing a framework for analysis. I haven’t read up on education policy, for instance, but the concepts of class distinction outlined by Bourdieu show pretty quickly why the experiments with vouchers aren’t generalizable in the way that their proponents think they are.
A lot of that gets thrown out the window when talking about foreign policy. True, there are totalizing concepts like imperialism or universalizing ones like democracy promotion. But each fails to explain every instance. There are certainly cases of imperialism out there, but also ones where problems derive from non-1st world agents. In some instances the ideals of democracy take root, even against seeming odds (Japan 1945, Chile 1995 or Ukraine 2003), yet other times when they do not or even when they serve as cover for imperialist aims. Each has to be decided on the particulars. Furthermore, much of American foreign policy — foreign policy of any state really — lies not in these totalizing visions, but in realpolitik. The thing is, unlike its Marxian and liberal cousins, realpolitik requires us to know the particulars of nations, many nations. For this reason, foreign policy as a field is split up into regional studies: Asia, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, etc.
Each of these impulses (anti-imperialism, democracy promotion, realpolitik) informs my understanding of foreign policy, half-baked as it is. This week here, I’ll try to formulate some first principals of foreign policy that flow from these three. I’m under no illusion that these will amount to much more than thinking aloud, but it’s good to articulate assumptions. When people disagree over (or argue for) policy in Iraq, Darfur, North Korea, what have you, what they’re disagreeing about most of the time are the assumptions about how international relations work and what the U.S. should do in the face of them.
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