The Crossed Pond

This is a post on Ron Paul, but only sort of.

I suspect that there is an issue (there aren’t many) on which the three contributors here are more or less split. That issue would be the level of interventionism of a wisely conducted foreign policy.

Even as a Republican, I’ve always tended much more to the Pat Buchanan strain of isolationism, or perhaps more accurately to the Libertarian notion of Armed Neutrality, or even MORE accurately, with the Ron Paul/George Washington notion of “open relations with all, entanglements with few” . I am not an absolutist in that sense, but I do think, as an organizing principle of American foreign policy, the Libertarian notion is a good one. Both central and secondary to that is the definition of what our national interests are, and how to define them as it relates to what we MUST do as a matter of imperative. Moral, economic, security, would be the three imperatives, and of the three, I’d consider security, very narrowly defined, as about the only “imperative” for any kind of military intervention that I’d be apt to recognize. It was on those grounds that I found the Iraqi war case most persuasive, though ultimately unconvincing (even at the time, nevermind retrospect). “Imminent threat” would be my standard there, again very narrowly defined (such that Afghanistan would have met it, Iraq would not have, again at the time). The question of whether there is ever a moral imperative to intervene is a thornier one, on which my stance often breaks down (in the face of mass genocide particularly), but I prefer making policy on those questions as a matter of exceptions rather than rules, and I would much more prefer that those matters be dealt with internationally, with real multilateral cooperation as a prerequisite. Imperfect, certainly, but where potential moral imperatives exist, I’d much rather that be decided by the world community than America alone. An economic imperative is one that I wouldn’t rate at all, though I could certainly see cases where it too would be persuasive.

But the larger point in the current conservative conversation, and what the Republican party seems unwilling to actively engage in a discussion about, is the creeping ascendancy of neoconservative wrongess into our foreign policy decision-making. And it is here, more than anywhere, that Ron Paul speaks truth to power and here, more than anywhere, that the Republican party desperately needs to decide, one way or the other, what is (or has become) dogma for them.

It has been in the process, more or less, of deciding just that for several years now, ever since 9-11. But never in open debate. Open debate on this question has, in fact, been not just frowned upon but actively derided by mainstream Republicanism on this question, which is a strange tact to take in making such a stark 180 on the foundational principles of the party. The Republican spin-around on foreign policy has been quick, has been vehement, and has been virtually unexamined within the party. It’s odd, and telling of how out-of-step the GOP has become, that this question, which has been on the lips of Libertarians and Democrats since 2003, gone mainstream in both by 2004, and is by now very well a central question to the American people at large, is still one that apparently demands open mutiny when an obscure congressman from Texas has the gall to bring it up on a national stage. Not a rebuttal, mind you, or a thoughtful disagreement, but a vehement shouting down of the mere chutzpah at voicing it in their presence.

But, congressman Paul speaks for a lot of people. Of experts, it has long been taken as a given that the law of unintended consequences is the norm, not the aberration, in affairs of foreign intervention. When asked directly about Paul’s comments, the former head of the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden unit said “I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly.” But it’s not just experts. CNN put it to an open vote, and out of about 50,000 respondents, 63% agree with the statement “Do you think past U.S. foreign policy was a reason for the 9/11 attacks?” (hat tip). Whatever you might think of quick polls online, these findings aren’t out of line at all with every other finding on the matter. The fact is most Americans after only 6 or 7 years of neoconservative control have long since developed Imperial Fatigue. Even Republicans are beginning to break down. And when the question sparks open debate on a middlebrow daytime TV forum like “The View”, I think it’s safe to say that Ron Paul most certainly does NOT represent a fringe position, or at the very least the debate he’s sparked is not a fringe debate, but is maybe the MOST mainstream and central American question at the moment.

Republicans ignore or deride this at their own peril. Make no mistake, however, that this has become an emotional subject for mainstream Republicanism. “They hate us for our freedom” is in some senses correct, and I think Rojas in particular would side with Rudy Giuliani in that exchange over Ron Paul. But in another sense it’s a ridiculous parsing of the giant swamp of international entanglements into a good versus evil system. Now, before I even go down this road, let me say that I find no fault in characterizing Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as “evil”. Nor am I unwilling to call liberal democratic ‘freedom’ to be “good”. It is not the mere application of moral judgments and labels that I balk at, but the distilling down our foreign policy to them, and more to the point the host of connotations and imperatives that come along with that.

Our characterization of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as “evil” for instance, without recognizing the host of social, economic, and cultural causes along with it, is ethically interesting but functionally useless. When a terrorist straps a bomb onto him and boards a subway, let’s call it evil, fine. NOW WHAT? When that same problem becomes epidemic, let’s call it all evil, fair enough. So what do we do about it?

There is a flipside to it too. When we call the ideal of liberal Western freedom and democracy “good”, again fair enough, but again, the parsing of everything to that achieves what we have now in the Republican party. The “good” aspect of it gets elevated and crystallized, such to the point where anything we do is by definition justified because we’re “good”. Thus you get the curious spectacle of 8 Republican candidates standing on a stage extolling the beacon of goodness that is American freedom while simultaneously supporting torture, extraordinary rendition, and a nixing of habeas corpus, the right to privacy, counsel, and the very idea of innocent until proven guilty (if it’s evil, it’s already guilty; no further inquiry necessary). This reading of American goodness is nothing if not symptomatic at every level. Is there a difference between the notion that anything America does is good by nature of America doing it, and the notion that that any means the presidency takes is justified because it’s the president doing it?

And it is problematic in an even more crushing sense as it relates to American interventionism abroad. The defining characteristic of neoconservatism is not their lack of moral relativism, but the policy connotations that it brings to the table with that. Simply put, the idea that “democracy is easy”. It’s a very optimistic outlook–if most people are good, and democracy is good, most people will naturally favor democracy, we just have to clear out the externally-laid impediments and voila, purple fingers as far as the eye can see. In a sense I agree with the two first premises of that last sentence, to my core in fact, but in another sense boiling the question of intervention down to it is both ethically interesting and functionally useless. Worse than functionally useless, in fact, functionally counterproductive. Once you begin to conduct a foreign policy with those premises as your organizing principle, the actual decision-making takes care of itself. Our notions of freedom and democracy are good, contrary notions are bad, contrary notions forced onto populations are evil, and so EVERY conflict point becomes a moral imperative. It’s good versus evil played out on thousands of stages all over the world every day. And so you get the OTHER result that Ron Paul rightly accuses the current Republican party of embracing. The question becomes as simple as what is good and what is evil. If the former, give it money and support. If the latter, bomb it. End of policy briefing.

That paradigm ONLY makes sense if you accept as unequivocal and all-important the good versus evil notion of world affairs. It makes no sense when analyzed any other way, and in the view of many other paradigms frankly comes off as insane.

What Ron Paul hints at in making that characterization is there are a THOUSAND points in the spectrum between bombing and subsidizing on which to play out a foreign policy. An isolationist foreign policy is not a sitting-on-your-hands foreign policy. It is not a foreign policy of disinterest and inaction. It is not a shutting the doors of America and letting the rest of the world play out the course of global history without us. But it is a recognition that, when you stop operating with a childlike sense of good versus evil, things become so complicated as to, in most cases, become prohibitive in one sense of another. Even interventionism isn’t off the table in an isolationist foreign policy (a key point). Just like in an isolationist DOMESTIC policy (the Libertarian ideal of how our government ought to treat US as individual sovereigns), your rights to throw your fist still end where my nose begins. And, as with most big L Libertarians that exist in the real world, there are still some moral imperatives so imperative that its worth making exceptions over.

But the difference between a neo-isolationist foreign policy and a neo-conservative foreign policy is when that imperative trigger gets tripped. For the former, very, very rarely; a true last resort. For the latter, virtually on a daily basis, should we chose to follow up. Last resort is not a question of response but of type (say, nukes versus infantry versus air strikes). It is also a difference between how the two view world stage and the Law of Unintended Consequences. For the former, with a great respect for the imminent complexity of the stream of life. For the latter, good versus evil…what more do you need to know? You don’t support evil, do you?

I don’t agree with everything Ron Paul says, which is a ridiculous standard to hold anybody by (us being two different people, the chance that we agree 100% are virtually nil), but I do believe that this conversation that I’m only giving a very brief sketch of is the central one not just in the Republican primary but for the whole of America, and the world. It is LONG past time that the Republican party took stock of its own direction; the rest of the country already has. It’s not amazing to me that Ron Paul exists in this primary. It amazes me that it’s taken this long for that voice to come out ANYWHERE in modern day Republicanism. It amazes me that there aren’t 5 Ron Pauls up on that stage right now.

Because the results are in, not just in what Americans at large think of the neoconservative experiment, but what it has bought us on the world stage as a matter of policy. It won’t be a closed book for many years, of course…history doesn’t work like that, and it’s again a ridiculous standard to expect it to…but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make a whole host of assumptions and observations about what an America actively holding the neoconservative interventionist premises as its organizing principle reaps on the world stage. And so far, the results seem to side with Ron Paul–or at the very least against Rudy Giuliani–on a global and pretty damn convincing scale.

At the very least, I think we can all say that it’s time to begin exploring other possibilities, and to stop letting the Rudy Giuliani’s and Dick Cheney’s of the party define for us what conversations are possible.