Liberal peace without change--an infantile disorder?

I set before you two very different analyses of American military power and foreign policy: the first by Matt Yglesias, the second by Robert Kagan. The former we might describe as "naive but well-intentioned," the latter as "fully self-aware and complicit." Basically, Yglesias, in response to an argument for "Truman Democrats" contra the "isolationist left," says that the obvious middle path is some form of "liberal" internationalism, in which the United States, rather than asserting its "leadership" position unilaterally, comply with international standards and institutions like the ICC and the UN. In his own words:

To take a specific example, for the United States to join the International Criminal Court would be neither an isolationist policy nor a hegemonic one, but rather a liberal policy in which we submit to an egalitarian framework of rules and cooperate with others in the effort the enforce those rules.

This sort of thinking I take to be in line with those who say that the Iraq War has been an "aberration," and that America has strayed from the path of diplomacy and multilateralism which has in the past and can in the future earn us respect. Yglesias suggests as much:

Truman did not seek to simply implement American domination. Rather, he constructed an alternative vision of a liberal community of nations featuring complex forms of cooperation between states within the framework of liberal institutions like NATO and the EU. The collapse of the Soviet Union creates, in essence, a fork in the road. The United States can either seek to fill the void with unipolar hegemony, or else it can seek to expand the scope of the miniature liberal order created during the Cold War.

To which Kagan responds, quite directly, that the idea of an "aberration" is an illusion: "Since the cold war, America has launched more military interventions than all other great powers combined. The interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice, waged for moral and humanitarian ends, not strategic or economic necessity, just as realist critics protested at the time." Attempts to refashion the era before the Iraq War as one of peaceful internationalism are flawed and dishonest: "There is a yearning, even among the self-proclaimed realists, for a return to an imagined past innocence, to the mythical 'traditional approach', to a virtuous time that never existed, not even at the glorious birth of the republic." The real constant has been that America is "an ambitious, ideological, revolutionary nation with a belief in its own world-transforming powers and a historical record of enough success to sustain that belief." In other words: Don't try to talk away Iraq, because wars of choice are in our blood.

My simplest response to this "argument" between the two, as I've constructed it, is both a yes and no, on several levels. On the one hand, I agree with Yglesias that his vision is (roughly) what American foreign policy should look like. On the other hand, I think that Kagan is the more perceptive of the two concerning historical trends and the facts on the ground. However, I would also disagree with Kagan that Iraq is like every other instance of American military intervention: in this instance we decidedly went it alone (much like Vietnam), we planned very, very, inconceivably poorly, and the government went to much more extraordinary measures (again, comparable to Vietnam) to deceive the populace about the casus belli. None of which, of course, excuses the war in Iraq, or makes other instances of American military intervention less suspect. Even if the war had gone swimmingly, it still would have been illegal, unjust, and disastrous (from the point of view of the civilians initially killed), which is something that no one in Washington seems willing to admit. (Furthermore, supposing that sectarian strife in Iraq was a given from the beginning, we might ask what "success" in Iraq would have to look like today: Probably it would entail control by a new form of dictatorship, this time pro-American, in the hands of Chalabi or other exiled bureaucrats. Or could the American occupying forces have prevented the current civil war in time to implement a real, functioning democracy? I'd like to know everyone's input on this question.)

My overall answer is to criticize both Yglesias for his naivete and Kagan for his embrace of barbarism. Kagan says that "Americans do pursue their selfish interests and ambitions, sometimes brutally, as other nations have throughout history," and, "This enduring tradition has led Americans into some disasters where they have done more harm than good," while obviously approving of the historical trend on the whole. I don't think that one can justify such statements while remaining committed to true worldwide liberalism (i.e. the right of self-determination for nations, the doctrine of waging war only in self-defense).

Yglesias has the nobler idea, but I really don't see how it will ever materialize so long as the American system, both political and economic, remains the way it is. Kagan might say that we have invaded countries for purely "humanitarian" reasons, irrespective of "strategic or economic necessity," but here I think he is either willfully dissembling or somehow actually convinced of his own ideology. To say that there was no "strategic" element to the interventions he lists ("strategy" being ultimately reducible to, among other things, economic interests) is patently wrong. Moreover, many of the conflicts he conspicuously leaves out, such as our gross Latin American meddling and our overthrow of the Iranian government in the 50s, were definitely traceable to capital (United Fruit Company in the case of Guatemala, British Petroleum in Iran). Today, in the new Guilded Age of corporate influence, these disturbing problems are even more pressing. Even when centrist Democrats are elected, as in the case of Clinton, the power of big business and public impotence vis-a-vis the corporations continues to grow. Although I am in league with Yglesias' spirit, I don't see how it will happen unless a number of measures take place, such as publicly funded elections, free of influence, higher corporate taxation and regulation, the rise of a new Progressivism, et cetera. I don't want to deny that social democracies also go to war (hypothetically, at least), or offer a vulgar materialist account of the reasons for every American war. However, I think it's undeniable that bucking Big Trends (which Kagan correctly documents) will require Big Changes.