For Liberal Internationalism

The neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush is a catastrophic failure--this is conceded even by a growing number of neoconservatives. As an alternative to the Bush Doctrine of US global hegemony, contempt for international law and support for regime change by armed intervention, liberal internationalism ought to be enjoying a renaissance. Instead, the body of strategic principles that guided US foreign policy at its best during the twentieth century is threatened. The greatest threat to liberal internationalism comes not from without--from neoconservatives, realists and isolationists who reject the liberal internationalist tradition as a whole--but from within: from schools of thought that claim the title of liberal internationalism while jettisoning some of its fundamental principles. As is often the case with a creed, the heretics are as dangerous as the infidels. In the case of liberal internationalism, the heretics come in two schools: democratic hegemonists and liberal imperialists.

The democratic hegemonists advocate the global hegemony of a "concert of democracies." Among the spokesmen for this idea are Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, both Democrats who endorsed Bush's occupation of Iraq. The most well-reasoned argument for this position has been provided by Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry, both of Princeton and co-authors of a recent manifesto, "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law." Prominent in the 1990s, but less visible since 9/11, is the disproportionately British school of liberal imperialists, also called humanitarian hawks, including Britain's Niall Ferguson and Canada's Michael Ignatieff. Liberal imperialists argue that the United States and its European allies have a duty to invade, and if necessary govern, disordered societies in the interests of human rights and justice. The arguments of democratic hegemonists and liberal imperialists overlap to a considerable degree.

Members of both schools often call themselves liberal internationalists and claim to be "Truman Democrats," the genuine heirs of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and cold war liberal Presidents like Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. Both of these schools invoke an older American liberal internationalism to justify the policies they propose. But both depart in one way or another from the historic American liberal internationalist tradition. Innovation is not always progress. The new liberal internationalism is no improvement over the old.

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