Bipolar

American foreign policy will never be wholly realist or idealist–and that’s
a good thing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it,” William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” Such apocalyptic gloom, he went on, made it hard for the writer to press forward on the central question of literature, the “problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” Nevertheless, Faulkner concluded, while acknowledging the realities of impending nuclear destruction, it is the writer’s duty to continue to plumb the depths of the human spirit. “It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” I was reminded of Faulkner’s speech while preparing for a panel this past fall, jointly sponsored by Democracy and the New America Foundation, on the future of American foreign policy. Most progressives, and by now even most conservatives, agree that the invasion of Iraq has not only been a disaster, but that it has undermined our nation’s ability to project power, both soft and hard, for years to come. In doing so, it has upended previous assumptions about what we can and should do abroad–and created new divisions among progressives about what shape that course should take.

There are those, such as the New Republic’s Peter Beinart, who, while criticizing the execution of the war, argue that the goal–overthrowing a bloody dictator, establishing a democracy, and establishing a precedent for further democratic expansion–was a noble and correct one. Had America been better prepared to rebuild, had Bush done a better job of involving the international community, things would have been different, these idealists hold. That belief in turn lays the ground for a forward-looking liberal internationalism that advances, unsullied, the ideals of democracy promotion through American power. And, while they see this as a benefit to American interests, they also, and in some cases primarily, see their position in moral terms: We have power, and so we must use it for the good.

Others, such as New America’s Anatol Lieven, however, argue that while the spread of democracy should be a goal of American foreign policy, it is sheer hubris to assume that any plan would have succeeded in Iraq; indeed, they doubt whether any grand deployment of American power can succeed given the realities of international relations. Chastened by the disaster of Bush’s vision for a new Middle East, these realists would, to varying degrees, have the United States eschew the frequent deployment of hard power, regardless of the ends–the proverbial road to hell being paved with good intentions.

With only two years left in the Bush Administration, a hashing out of these two ideas–idealism and realism–is in the offing. Of course, the debate is hardly simple: Especially after Iraq, few consider themselves complete idealists; and, being progressives, few consider themselves complete realists, either. Nor is it new. As both sides dig into American history in search of intellectual forebears, it becomes clear how persistent (and consistent) the realist/idealist tension has been through recent American history. Indeed, realism and idealism have been the twin driving forces of American foreign policy at least since the country emerged as an international power at the turn of the last century, and most notably during the first generation of the Cold War. But neither has ever been completely in control. Then as now, true idealism was impossible in the face of an enemy willing to annihilate itself to defeat us. But true realism is to accept, in Faulkner’s words, “defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion.” And as the panel discussion made clear, while the settings and specific challenges have changed, the central questions have not. What can, and should, the United States do with its power? What outcomes are beyond the reach of our power–or not worth the price? These questions are not exclusive to progressives–the right has its own tension, between the Scowcrofts and the Wolfowitzes. (Indeed, while the particulars may differ, the existence of the realism/idealism tension on both sides of the aisle should give us hope that, even in today’s politically divisive era, partisanship in a way still stops at the shore.)

The realist/idealist tension is not unique to American foreign policy. In high school English, we are taught that the great human tension is that between passion and reason. But, while that may be true as a universal claim, in American literature we find an even more prominent tension: that between the morally compromised self and its yearning, despite everything, for the good. It pervades everyone from Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway to Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps that is because the tension describes America itself. As the historian C. Vann Woodward noted, our country is founded in an original sin, that of slavery, and yet from the beginning we struggled to overcome it and ever since have struggled to overcome its legacy. We accept that we are not a perfect nation, but we do not accept that we cannot improve.

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