It’s Better to Be Right Than Popular

Max Sawicky responds to Peter Beinart’s “get tough” article:

Whether a closer Democratic adherence to a “muscular” foreign policy would win elections is an uninteresting question. More important is whether such a policy is commendable in its own right. Beinart envisions a reconstruction along the lines of the late 1940s Truman/ADA crusade against communism, with “Islamist totalitarianism” taking the place of the Reds. He cites Clinton’s toppling of Milosevic and the Afghan mission as precursors of his Trumanesque revival. He attributes Kerry’s primary victory and electoral defeat to the Senator’s ambivalence about Iraq. Kerry acted to placate the party’s liberal base and compromised his commitment (itself problematic, in light of his Senate record) as a liberal interventionist hawk. Bad politics and maybe bad (inconsistent) policy, but is an anti-war posture wrong on the merits? […]

Beinart wants to conflate opposition to dictatorship and terrorism with the projection of U.S. military force. If you are skeptical of the latter, you are inadequate on the former. If you are prone to recount the historic calamities wrought by the U.S. in the name of Wilsonian interventionism, you are in solidarity with anti-Americanism around the world. PB approvingly cites John F. Kennedy’s escalation of defense spending, glossing over his role in the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, and the disaster that became Vietnam. Similarly, there is no restraint occasioned by TNR’s own endorsement of the Iraqi venture. Never let empirical evidence restrain the enunciation of principles! As I have harped on here ad nauseum, the moral case for liberal interventionism does not imply the practical feasibility of any such project. The moral case borders on triviality: elsewhere in the world, people are doing awful things and somebody ought to stop them.

With the benefit of hindsight, how many U.S. military interventions could be said to have turned out well? I would say damn few. (Warning: Godwin’s Law is in force.) The same goes for foreign aid in ostensible support of Third World democracies. By my lights, democracy is not a common sight in under-developed countries. There are lots of voting systems, but to me democracy requires a great deal more than that.