Gary Dorrien Imperial Designs, Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (2004)

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.Although he and Krauthammer werefriends, Krauthammer s realism was impossible for him on this count.Krauthammer turned a deaf ear to the cries of people from unimportantcountries; Muravchik was a universalist who spoke the language of the good.This did not mean that he automatically supported humanitarian missions.Muravchik cautioned that there was a threshold for humanitarian intervention:many lives had to be in peril.Somalia passed the threshold, although the U.N.should have stopped short of nationbuilding; Rwanda easily passed thethreshold, but the Clinton administration had just been burned by Somalia; itshould have been obvious that Bosnia passed the threshold, but Bush and Clintonfeared a quagmire; Haiti did not pass the threshold.Muravchik called Haiti a small, sad country of no strategic importance andweak democratic prospects. He judged that there was no threat of massiveslaughter in Haiti and that the military dictatorship of Raoul Cedras was noworse than most Haitian governments of the past.The U.N.authorizedAmerica s invasion of Haiti in the only terms permitted by the U.N.Charter, thatthe Cedras regime was a threat to peace and security. That was ludicrous,Muravchik replied; Cedras s regime was vicious and illegal, but no threat toanyone outside Haiti.But what about the real reason that the U.N.authorizedAmerica s Haitian adventure, to restore democracy? Muravchik affirmed thatdemocracy carried a high humanitarian valiance. Haiti was a tough case forhim, because he believed in spreading democracy by the sword when the UnitedStates was compelled to occupy a nation because of its aggression.If Aristidehad not been a radical liberationist theologian, Muravchik might have givenClinton and the U.N.a pass on Haiti, although he later reflected that he hopednot.Aristide was not his kind of democrat, but legality was the more importantconsideration.Muravchik was one of the few neocons John Norton Moore andEugene Rostow were other exceptions who believed strongly in internationallaw.For all of his devotion to exporting democracy, he hated to see Haiti becomethe model of spreading democracy by the sword.The U.N.Charter does notmean whatever the Security Council says it means, he cautioned.Haiti failed theaggressive-threat test, and to pretend otherwise was to weaken the force ofinternational law.125During the Cold War, he argued, the crucial division in foreign policy politicswas between hawks and doves.After the Cold War, the key division wasbetween Washingtonians and Wilsonians.The Washingtonians echoed GeorgeWashington s warning about entangling alliances and foreign wars; theWilsonians echoed Woodrow Wilson s warning against withdrawing fromIrvmg KristolNorman PodhoretzPaul WolfowitzRichard Cheney and Donald RumsfeldRichard PerleCharles KrauthammerBen WattenbergJoshua MuravchikWilliam KristolRobert KaganMax BootLaurence F.Kaplan110 IMPERIAL DESIGNSinternational power politics.Muravchik conceded that by invoking Wilson scontroversial name, he risked a host of bad connotations and peripheralarguments.He had no interest in debating the Versailles Treaty and did notcommend Wilson s woolly-headed belief in the League of Nations; in his view,Wilson s commitment to multilateral cooperation was the hollowest part of hislegacy.The key to Wilsonianism was Wilson s belief in the power of ideas andmoral values in international politics. Wilson championed the spread ofdemocracy, seeing it as a key to solving many of the world s problems,Muravchik explained.By this standard, the greatest Wilsonian of recent timeswas Ronald Reagan: Likewise, Reagan launched the National Endowment forDemocracy and succored a global trend of democratization.Above all, Reagan,like Wilson, viewed American leadership as the linchpin of world order. BillClinton, by contrast, despite his interventions, was a very non-Wilsonianpresident. 126Muravchik emphasized that democracies are generally peaceful and almostnever go to war with each other.In 1941, England declared war against Finland,but Finland was allied to Germany at the time, and no fighting took placebetween them.In 1948, Lebanon played a minimal role in the Arab League swar against Israel, after arguing against the war.These strained exceptionsproved the rule that democracies don t fight each other [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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