Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

ACIREMA

By Derek Chollet and Tod Lindberg
Hoover Institution Policy Review 146
December 2007 — January 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

American values are an indispensable component of the U.S. role in the world. American values in foreign policy can translate into a moral core that both conservatives and liberals can rally around.

The emphasis placed on promoting liberal values internationally has drawn increasing hostility among traditional liberals. This approach is closely identified with President Bush and his administration’s policies. For many on the left, efforts to pursue policies largely rooted in values, especially democracy promotion, have become discredited.

Discomfort with the promotion of American values in foreign policy is also felt increasingly by conservatives, who are having second thoughts about the extent to which U.S. foreign policy should be driven by ideology and the promotion of values ahead of interests.

As the 2008 election draws closer, any Republican presidential nominee will seek to differentiate himself from his predecessor. And since more conservatives are reading the Bush years as a caution against an ambitious, values-based foreign policy, stressing realism might be the way to distinguish oneself.

During the 1990s, neoconservatives saw themselves as insurgents. But after 9/11, their agenda wielded great influence over the direction of the Bush administration’s policy, especially its focus on spreading American values. Six years later, neoconservatives again find themselves largely on the outside looking in.

The promotion of American values opens the United States to charges of hypocrisy. Many have found the United States’ actions wanting in areas ranging from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the U.S. relationship with Pakistan and the House of Saud and would urge that the United States tone down its complaints about others.

Scholars in the “neorealist” school of international relations attempt to write moral considerations out of the rules of statecraft. They posit an anarchical international system — no authority higher than the state. Each state wishes to be entirely free to make its own judgments about the conduct of its internal affairs.

How might this translate into policy choices for the United States? For purposes of our investigation, we will call this state “Acirema,” which is “America” spelled backwards. We do not want to be taken to be proposing what follows as a genuine alternative to U.S. policy.

Acirema is the dominant military power in the world, and it would certainly make sense to try to maintain that dominance. This is not a judgment alien to existing U.S. policy. It is by no means clear why Acirema should be attached to a principle of peaceful relations among states and the illegitimacy of aggressive war or conquest.

Acirema would pursue an overall strategy of maintaining its dominance. The United States has welcomed and encouraged modernization, economic growth, and globalization not only in order to enrich Americans, but also according to a theory that greater trade flows and economic interdependence make for a more peaceful international environment and are good in themselves. Neither of the latter two justifications would matter to Acirema.

There is danger in an Acireman policy that encourages other states to become rich. Acireman policymakers would want to examine the trade-off between the economic benefits of an open trading system and the potential danger in allowing others to enrich themselves, thus potentially increasing their power. China’s modernization might yield cheap goods, but the price might be too high.

Acirema would seek the stability of its own position. The stability of other states and relations among other states is of concern only insofar as it impinges on the stability of the Acireman position. A subsidiary strategy of preserving dominance might be to ensure that all other states felt themselves to be constantly at risk from instability.

Under this scenario, one would have to reject engagement in the Middle East, except with regard to securing Acireman energy needs. Acirema should cease support for Israel unless Israel provides a benefit to Acirema sufficient to offset the cost. Meanwhile, Acirema might seize and hold sufficient oilfields to see to its needs and then destroy the capacity of others to exploit the resources on their territory.

Acirema would have to make clear that regime elimination awaits any states that fail to accept that their continued oil revenue depends on their refraining from harboring, funding, or supporting anti-Acireman terrorism. Any state foolish enough to provoke Acirema to forcibly remove its regime, with all the risk and expense that would entail for Aciremans, would be on its own to sort out what comes next.

The policy of Acirema toward Israel is a specific case of what would be a more general revision in alliance policy. The essential question for Acirema with regard to any ally is whether Acireman security is improved as a result of the alliance.

Any assistance Acirema would choose to provide to other states would be tightly tied to the tangible benefit received. The notion of “humanitarian” aid or intervention is self-evidently meaningless to a foreign policy free of moral consideration. It is difficult to see what Acirema might gain from raising the issue of “human rights” with other states.

The strongest states will be those with nuclear weapons, and the impulse of states to acquire them would undoubtedly be very strong. Possession of a nuclear deterrent by another state might embolden that state to act against the national interests of Acirema. It might be necessary to take preemptive action. Acirema might have to launch a nuclear attack first.

Disband NATO, abandon Israel, destabilize China, welcome wars when useful, disregard genocide, and wage preemptive nuclear war? There is, thankfully, no plausible passageway from America to Acirema.

The United States was founded as a nation embodying certain values or principles. While the United States has been accused of failing to live up to the values of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has never been able to or seriously attempted to expunge those values from all consideration in the conduct of domestic or foreign policy. This seems unlikely to change.

Questions remain about how such policies should be implemented. We outline six principles that should guide U.S. foreign relations in the challenging years ahead, each rooted in American ideals and serving American interests.

1. Standing against the conquest of territory by force

2. Defending liberal regimes

3. Promoting liberal governance

4. Enforcing the responsibility to protect

5. Addressing global hardship

6. Strengthening alliances and institutions

These values comprise the core of the liberal international order that the United States should aspire to achieve.


Derek Chollet is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review.
 

AR  Acirema — cool! Six principles — yawn.
 

The Clash

By Fouad Ajami
New York Times, January 6, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

In the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington came forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a “clash of civilizations.”

Huntington put the matter in stark terms: “The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”

Huntington wrote of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent.

Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no universal civilization, Huntington observed: it was only the pretense of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen.

In Huntington’s unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.

It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. He had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world.

The radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe are fleeing the burning grounds of Islam. They are children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

Huntington feared that Islam will remain Islam but the West may not remain true to itself and its mission.


Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
 

AR  The clash — real. The solution — realpolitik.