A Packer Foreign Policy

George Packer has a typically thoughtful essay in the current New Yorker, in which he takes the Democratic Party to task for having no foreign policy. While I generally sympathize with his desire to see the Democrats articulate a clear and compelling foreign policy vision - even if I may differ on some of the specifics - and I agree with most of his criticisms of the Bush administration, I found his presentation of the problem frankly baffling. In his pitch for a dramatically new Democratic approach to foreign policy, he rather bizarrely mischaracterizes mainstream Democratic foreign policy in the 1990s.

Packer writes: "And here is a remarkable fact: since the nineteen-sixties, the Democratic Party has had no foreign policy. Its leaders have continued to speak the language of liberal internationalism, but after Vietnam most Democrats haven’t wanted to back up the talk with power. They continued to put their faith in institutions like the United Nations (where Saddam’s Iraq was a member in good standing and Libya chaired the human-rights commission) long after it was apparent that these institutions needed repair. By the nineteen-nineties, liberal internationalism had become an atrophied muscle, with little fibre or sinew left. The Clinton Administration allowed a genocidal war to bleed away in the Balkans for two and a half years before acting to end it. In the dot-com decade, a lot of Democrats simply lost interest in the rest of the world. Clinton’s foreign policy was globalization: encouraging the economic interconnectedness of the world, without developing a mechanism to prevent threats and conflicts from becoming catastrophes without borders."

This is just odd. The Democrats under Clinton did have a foreign policy, one which rested on well-developed theoretical principles. Globalization was one pillar of this policy, as Packer suggests, but it went rather deeper than the negative spin he puts on it. Clinton saw globalization not only as an economic force, but as a transformative process serving American interests and long run power. Clinton strove to enhance international institutions as a vital part of the project of consolidating an international society defined by American leadership. All of this rested comfortably within neoliberal international relations theory, which primarily focused questions of international institutions. One of their arguments about those decrepit international institutions was that working through them would reassure the rest of the world that American power was benign and cooperative, thereby cementing American leadership - an argument which Bush's elephantine trample through the UN has vindicated in spades. Take Clinton's approach to China - engagement was meant to build common interests binding China to the West, to bring China into international institutions where it would be socialized into liberal international norms, and to help build a trade-oriented middle class which would become the foundation of a democratic transformation from below.

Now, there may be serious problems with the assumptions or with the execution of this foreign policy, but to deny that this fairly well-developed and frequently articulated policy existed seems odd.

It would be more accurate, I think, to say that the Democratic Party since the 1960s has not had *George Packer's* foreign policy. Which is, obviously, a rather different claim. Packer wants the Democrats to be a party of liberal hawks, ready to use military power and an assertive liberal ideology to shape the world in his preferred direction. This offers another foreign policy programme, to be sure, one which may (or may not) be appropriate to today's world, and one which many Democrats might (or might not) be willing to embrace. It should be argued in those terms, not in terms of some artificial reconstruction of the past which seems to accept the Republican critique of Clinton for no real reason.

One other thing - Packer is far too generous to those conservatives in exile during the Clinton years "thinking deeply about America's role in the world." However deep their thoughts - another arguable point - the ideas they came up with have turned out in practice to either be quietly discarded (the "China threat") or else to be disastrous (Iraq, declaring the UN irrelevant). Not exactly the best model for Democrats, is it?

Comments

[Neo-Troll]

Thanks...that was sweet.

[No Preference]

Yes, very well put.

[Tom Geraghty]

Another thing about the Packer article -- all of the proposals spelled out at the end (sanctions against nations that sponsor terrorism, a "Helsinki Accords" for the Middle East, more support for non-proliferation) seem to be things that just about any Democrat of the last 20 years would easily support.

He doesn't really engage with the question of where and when military force should be used. What are the proposed "rules" about this in a new Democratic foreign policy? He doesn't propose any. Was invading Iraq a good idea or a bad one? He doesn't say.