The Long Awaited Yglesias Doctrine

I think it's a mistake to introduce "virtue" into the discussion; it's not clear to me whether you are saying ("no country is sufficiently virtuous to wield the level of power that would be required to remake the world") the same thing, or whether virtue, in whatever group it needs to be measured, remains the cardinal test of your foreign policy.

So, you prefer a Condorcet doctrine with slightly different rules, basically.

The problem with any set of rules is that they can always be fudged by those who want to fudge them (the Gulf of Tonkin incident is a good example of direct self-defense being fudged).

It seems far better to rely on a system of institutional constraints rather than rules, so the effect of illegitimate use of force is not some penalty for breaking a rule but a measurable negative interest. Using Beinart's democracies-against-us idea, it seems like the best constraint against illegitimate wars would be a lack of allies (in our case, the NATO powers). Certainly the current war has shown us the problems when waging any significant war without proper allies.

Of course, no two countries share the same interests, and it might be necessary to wage war nearly unilaterally. But at least by relying on incentives and disincentives such as these, rather than a set of rules, war aims would be narrowed down to appeal to the largest set of potential allies, and any attempt to present a disengenuous case for war would do so at the peril of losing any multi-national support (much as the Bush administration did in 2002-2003).

Given the makeup of the UNSC I wouldn't consider a UNSC resolution to be both necessary and sufficient. Necessary, perhaps; certainly not sufficient.

direct self-defense

Define "direct".

When called for by a relevant (i.e., the OAS can't authorize an invasion of Burma) regional organization.

Define "relevant". Was NATO a "relevant" regional organization re Kosovo? If so, why? You don't really believe the argument that what was happening in Kosovo would spill over into NATO countries, do you?

what about unilateral (or at least non-UN/regional org) action in kosovo/darfur/rwanda situations? does that fall into any of these categories.

i'm sympathetic to the Pfaff (sp?) argument, which i understand is skeptical of intervening there. so i'm not saying it's clear we shoudl intervene in these situations. but still, it seems like something more could and should have been done in rwanda even if the UN or African Union were content to fiddle

Yeah, I'm having trouble understanding why your set of rules is any less epistemic than Beinart's. You seem to be saying that if use of force is constrained by your rules, then we can take such use to be legitimate. That seems like a virtue check to me.

So the Arab league can authorise an attack on Israel in response to Israeli oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians?

Or would this be a part of the world where the regional organisation should not be allowed to make such an authorisation?

I agree with all the other comments. Cheers.

Is intervention to stop a genocide not permissible? I hope that's not the lesson from Iraq.

The overwhelming disparity between the US military capabilities and other nations capabilities will mean that problems will be perceived in very different ways. France and Bolivia will of course view intervention in Rwanda as very difficult and be cautious.

This disparity will also tend to make the Security Council or other organizations a little frightened of the US and rightfully unsure of the degree to which the US can be constrained or controlled, and perhaps hesitant to see this disparity openly displayed and revealed, and so hesitant to seek coalitions including the US. Kosovo was a humiliation for Russia.

I don't think Universal rules can be applied or formulated in present circumstances, unless there is a body of game theory about situations where near monopolies or overwhelming advantages for one player have been developed.

What does the Software industry do about Microsoft? Not much.

So the Arab league can authorise an attack on Israel in response to Israeli oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians?

Well, this is hardly a time for yet another treatise on the Israeli-Arab conflict, but suffice it to say that it's hardly as if the Arab League member states have never gone to war with Israel in the past. As I say "There are always going to be considerations of prudence and efficacy specific to the particular case." The way you would end Israeli oppression of the Palestinians wouldn't be through a Jordanian military attack, but through American pressure and Arab willingness to make diplomatic concessions if Israel ending its occupation of the territories.

Of course, the corollary to 2:07 is:

How should Microsoft play? By the same rules as Redhat?

I don't know game theory. But I suspect some anti-US coalition will fail, as in a coalition against Microsoft, because the US could pick out one or a few members to damage, and the gains of united opposition would be very uncertain and the costs predictable and inevitable.

So, you prefer a Condorcet doctrine with slightly different rules, basically.

...

Yeah, I'm having trouble understanding why your set of rules is any less epistemic than Beinart's.

First; our positions aren't wildly far apart.

Second; here's what I think the difference is. Beinart's looking for a rule to answer an epistemic question "how do we (i.e., the USA) know when intervention is a good idea?" He answers "when other democracies agree with us." I don't think that's a bad answer to that question, but I think it's sort of the wrong question.

The more important question is "what's a reasonable legitimacy rule?" i.e., what's a rule that we (i.e., the USA) would be comfortable both following and asking others to follow. The democracy rule doesn't work. We're not going to let China say "we can invade anytime the coalition of autocracies agrees that it's a good idea" and China's not going to agree to an international system in which it has second-class status. A rule needs to be something you can apply universally.

Now my rule says relatively little about when intervention is wise. It's totally possible that the whole UNSC could agree to do something very stupid. And, obviously, what sorts of things are and aren't stupid things to try and do is an important question in its own right.

Define "relevant". Was NATO a "relevant" regional organization re Kosovo? If so, why?

Legitimacy-wise, Kosovo is what it looks like: a borderline case (I believe "illegal but legitimate" was the UN panel's conclusion). NATO is sort of a relevant IO, but also sort of not. The war lacked UNSC authorization, but when Russia brought a resolution against us they got 3 votes for their position and we got 12 for ours. In practice, at that historical moment Russia was very weak and the US was much more popular internationally than it is today. The next president will have less room to maneouver than Clinton (and, early in his administration, Bush) had.

I'm not in favour of a Jordanian military attack either, but the point is that these considerations of prudence etc seem to be just a thin veneer for disempowering the "relevant regional institutions" associated with the people in the area of the world that the US is most in conflict with. NATO good, military means an option if necessary and authorised by NATO to press the Serbs to end oppression of the Bosniacs, Arab League bad, so military means not an option if necessary and authorised by the Arab League the to end Israeli oppression of the Palestinians etc.

The broader point is that the underlying preferences for actual policy outcomes in various different cases really drives almost everyone's thinking - as your suggestion re. Israel and the Palestinians indicates - and so efforts to justify generalisable institutional arrangements for international relations or US policy - like the Yglesias doctrine! - tend to founder.

Isn't Beinart's idea just Kerry's much-maligned if very sensible "global test"? As a practical matter, any sane administration would use international sentiment as a kind of check on military action. But I'm not so sure it needs to be elevated to the level of doctrine, as I can imagine a scenario where the international community, so distrustful of American military power post-Iraq, would oppose a fairly legitimate operation (i.e., Iraq 1991). Perhaps a doctrine that says that we should exhaust all diplomatic channels and soft power before taking military action would suffice, as international sentiment would be a prohibitive, but not absolute, constraint on us.

I'm not in favour of a Jordanian military attack either, but the point is that these considerations of prudence etc seem to be just a thin veneer for disempowering the "relevant regional institutions" associated with the people in the area of the world that the US is most in conflict with.

No, I don't mean that. I mean that the Arab League -- as I'm sure its members would tell you if they asked them -- did, in fact, try repeatedly to impose a unilateral military settlement on Israel-Palestine and kept failing (one might also note that their stated war aims at the time were not the liberation of the Palestinian territories but the destruction of the Israeli state). American diplomacy, by contrast, has been effective at advancing progress on the Israeli-Arab conflict when we've chosen to do so.

I do, however, genuinely think it would be much better if the Arab League did more and the USA did less with regard to intra-Arab issues like the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq.

So do you mean that the authorisation was in line with your thinking but just the outcome was disastrous? In principle as it were, if the Arab League had in fact been trying to liberate the Palestinians and had in fact been able to do it (or were able to do it now), that would pass the Yglesias doctrine?

So once the war is started, do you follow the same rules on when to stop it? Once you push the Nicaraguan Army out of Costa Rica, do you just sit on the border since your defense is complete?

I'm totally with Beinart on this one and I'm kinda glad he came around to my way of thinking, even if he didn't know it!

The thing is, these situations are always fact-specific. A set of rules will never be adaptable enough; when someone says "this new paradigm is a clear exception to the rules," you've got nothing to fall back on except "sorry, those are the rules." It's like you're sealing liberal foreign policy in amber.

In a democratic society, no set of rules can long survive the opposition of a solid majority. If most Americans wanted to be rid of the First Amendment, rest assured we'd get rid of it sooner or later. The various procedural protections are just there so we don't do it hastily. Likewise, if all the liberal democracies think we need to take out Saddam 2.0, no set of arbitrary "rules" is ever going to get in the way of that consensus. Looking to the views of countries who think like us is the only decent reality check available.

So once the war is started, do you follow the same rules on when to stop it? Once you push the Nicaraguan Army out of Costa Rica, do you just sit on the border since your defense is complete?

Well, no, you go to war with Nicaragua until they're prepared to sign an armistice.

otto:

Ignoring an Arab League plea to liberate the Palestinians would be prudent -- you can qualify it by calling it political prudence, or even political cowardice, but if you're going to set up criteria for going to war, don't you want to err on the side of prudence?

Of course, this whole discussion bypasses the concept of the Pax Americana world we happen to live in.

I've noticed Matthew and Spackerman have started throwing around the "benevolent hegemon" phrase of late. His book might actually be interesting if he were to start taking on the implications of that.

For example, Matthew seems to think that maintaining a military capable of defeating China has more to do with maintaining the profits of military contractors than with any actual strategic concerns. But, of course, that's not quite what's going on there. And I fear Matthew's book will thus elide the central issues at hand, and just be a "things like the Iraq war are bad" tract fit for second graders.

Isn't Beinart's idea just Kerry's much-maligned if very sensible "global test"?

I'm a big fan of the global test. I'd be a bigger fan of any Democrat with both the guts and the eloquence to make the case for it. Because really, the talking point that we're "giving other countries a veto over our national security" shouldn't be that hard to shoot down.

Proportionality should be a key element in any doctrine. Not every situation merits the same level of response.

Plainly stated, achievable goals should also be a key element. The goals might change over time because of changing circumstances, and the goals can be as simple as the Casablanca Declaration, but you need to have goals and the means to achieve those goals.

Petey:

I'll take your final sentence to mean that no one in the Bush administration has passed first grade.

The more important question is "what's a reasonable legitimacy rule?" i.e., what's a rule that we (i.e., the USA) would be comfortable both following and asking others to follow.

It would be nice if we could apply the categorical imperative to international relations, but I’m not sure how you make the commitment to follow any given set of rules credible. The fact is that the US is vastly more powerful than any other country, and thus can play by its own rules if it wants. Any workable set of rules and institutions needs to take account of this somehow.

Moreover, universality is no guarantee that other countries would follow the rules we wanted… when push comes to shove, other countries are still going to do what’s in their perceived national interest.

Maybe a better way of approaching the question is to think about how to align the national interests of different countries with the interests of the world as whole.

Brendan:

I suppose I'm much more willing to go with a all-encompassing idea of prudence on a case-by-case issue than MY's authorisation-by-regional-institutions, since many of those regional institutions might authorise actions we wouldn't approve of and when you then try to patch this up by a case-by-case appeal to prudence it makes a mockery of the notion of equality of states under some sort of widely acceptable rules.

Plainly stated, achievable goals should also be a key element. The goals might change over time because of changing circumstances, and the goals can be as simple as the Casablanca Declaration, but you need to have goals and the means to achieve those goals.

Bingo. We need to realistical analyze the costs of acheiving the goals and determine whether we are both willing and able to achieve them. And that test must be based not only on the rosy scenario, but some of the worst case scenarios, under selling the cost of this misadventure was as important to getting us into as the fear mongering.

It would be nice if we could apply the categorical imperative to international relations, but I’m not sure how you make the commitment to follow any given set of rules credible.

More to the point, if all the other democracies agreed to play by the same set of rules as us, there would no longer be any difference between the Yglesias position and the Beinart position. Beinart's assumption is that when countries who share our fundamental values look at things through a slightly different lens than we do, that added perspective is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

This discussion is interesting but misses the central error of the pro-war crowd.

They collectively assumed they knew more about what a military solution would than the Army's top uniformed officer and more than a previous Centcom Commander.

When Shinseki testified to Congress that it would take "several hundred thousand" troops to accomplish the mission he effectively said that it could not be done at all. And Zinni confirmed that opinion in multiple fora.

We didn't have the level of troops to do the job successfully and still don't. Arguments about the threholds for going to war surely should have included providing the right level of resources for the job as recommended by the people most in the know.

For people like Cheney Wolfowitz who had the hubris to simply run over Shinseki to know turn around in an environment that makes it clear Shinseki was right (what is the logic of surge otherwise) and demand people who opposed this war in real time to provide a plan for victory is outrageus. We had a plan for Iraqi regime change. It started with "listening to your military experts to determine the proper level of force".

Certainly the military has a tendency to shade those force levels to the high side. Thats because they hate to lose.

But all war supporters and former war supporters need to face themselves with that fundamental question: What made me think I knew more about force levels than the Army Chief of Staff?

Why don't we solve hunger in Africa? Why don't we intervene in Darfur? Or in Myanmar? Because collectively we or the powers that be decided we didn't have the resources to do it in a way that would have justified the cost of the job.

Iraq was not so much a failure of vision, it was a failure to plan for the costs. Hubris and magical thinking overcame rational cost/benefit analysis.

Much respect to Peter Beinart.

As long as we don't confuse power with force, I see some wisdom in Matt's rules, though I would note that "direct defense" would cover both #1 and #2, since it is entirely moral to come to the aid of a friend, neighbor, or weak/helpless being attacked.

Where I differ is the UN and regional organization thing, since these organizations would have no foundation themselves to advocate aggression or war unless again in self defense. It doesn't make it alright to have preventive wars because the UN or some regional organization say it's okay. The justification they use must be no different than an individual party or nation, and indeed probably should be even more circumspect to avoid might making right and the strong overwhelming the weak.

I'll use the Beinart reference in this post to say that the phrase has changed to "Even the biweekly New Republic...".

Interesting thread, and nice whetting of the appetite for the book.

I note that Jane Galt replies here. I'll note that I agree with Jane that, to me, UN approval (or approval by NATO, or OAS, or the Arab League, or what have you) should not have much of a role in whether use of force is legitimate.

I think there are two questions here, actually - if you can't get UN or regional organization approval, are the first two bullets the only appropriate time to use force? I suppose that it depends on what "direct" self-defense means. Matthew dodged that question when I pose it above. (Thought experiment - take Pearl Harbor. At what exact point in time was "direct self defense" legitimate? When the first Japanese bomb hit Hawaiian soil? When the Japanese plane launched from their aircraft carriers? When the Japanese aircraft carriers launched from Japanese ports? When Japan built aircraft carriers capable of attacking Hawaii?)

The flip side is the question of whether UN or regional organization approval should ALWAYS legitimate use of force. Otto's response to Matthew is the appropriate one, and Matthew completely dodges it in his responses. Otto's 2:34 question has not been answered, and that question is crucial.

The way you would end Israeli oppression of the Palestinians wouldn't be through a Jordanian military attack, but through American pressure and Arab willingness to make diplomatic concessions if Israel ending its occupation of the territories.

Yeah, but Russia turning off the valve on Milosovich was what really ended the Balkans situation in a similar situation. I have this sneaking suspicion that the regional organization clause was thrown in there for Clinton nostalgia purposes and not out of sound logic.

When Japan built aircraft carriers capable of attacking Hawaii?

No.

Interesting to know it's permissable to attack countries that attack others. Surely Matt would not protest than if Canada begins launching missile strikes on Washington.

If legality and justice are your concerns than you can really do no better than the rules of conduct established by the UN and various conventions. If your looking to enable the imperial adventurism of the sole nation that 1) exerts disproportianate influence within the "relevant" organizational bodies and 2) is immune from retaliation (see above), than perhaps Matt's rules are the way to go.

"The fact is that the US is vastly more powerful than any other country, and thus can play by its own rules if it wants. Any workable set of rules and institutions needs to take account of this somehow."

Is that even true anymore? When a tinpot dictar from Equitorial Guinea (who was faced being overthrown by a group of mercenaries that included Thatcher's son but were later caught and are now being held in Zimbabwe) visits the White House, Condi just puts on a grin and embraces him. She does it because he control's his country's oil and we need oil. We can't even back a coup in Venezuela and make it stick for a week. The Chinese are buying up our currency reserves while we are sitting on piles of debt. We couldn't really get the Chinese, for example, to stop supporting the wacko dictators in Burma if we wanted to. We have been unable to get Castro out of power for 40 years. We can't get the OAS to make a free-trade zone throughout the Americas. We are running our country and living our way of life on credit while we're being run by history's most powerful incompetents. Being #1 doesn't mean anything if you can't actually accomplish your goals.

My gosh, isn't it time for Beinart to just go away for a while? Hasn't he done enough? I almost liked him better when he was an arrogant and baneful young prick, strutting around telling us how important it was to bomb and invade politically backward countries, and to purge all those wicked pinko peaceniks from the Democratic Party. But now here he is again, dragging his self-pitying, moping ass onto the pages of the New Republic like some faded, erstwhile Superman who just been forced to swallow another mouthful of kryptonite, for another chapter of tragic personal narrative. How many of these narcissistic displays of wounded vanity and ostentatious self-mortification does he intend to impose upon the reading public? Perhaps it is time for him to take his ham actor self-pity from the stage, along with its tired, broad-stroke conceits - and go hit the road.

Even in his chastened persona, Beinart is a pompous megalomaniac. He seems to address every issue as as a cosmic conundrum and ego crisis of liberal identity politics. It's always, "What would the Great Liberal in the Sky do?" Consider his proposal for Middle East Marshall Plan. This so-called "plan" was defended casually in a few writings, and on a grand, theoretic basis with no detailed preceding analysis of Middle East economies, or of what kinds of interventions might be both practical and useful. So why a "Marshall Plan?" I don't know. The answer appeared to be just because that's what old-timey "liberals" do - they do Marshall Plans!! How exciting and inspiring! This kind of lack of attention to the details of concrete and unromantic reality, and the sacred history sentimentalization of the liberal totem figures of the past - Wilson, Roosevelt, Marshall, Truman and Kennedy for example - infects much of Beinart's thinking, and the thinking of so many in his generational coterie. They don't really understand how anything works, and they don't really have many concrete proposals, so they tend toward the ethereal and the grandiose.

And every lttle "lesson" Beinart learns from events, or claims to learn, is implicitly or explicitly portrayed as a lesson "we" have learned. I guess he thinks he is the voice of his generation or something, and that he carries on his back the weight of suffering Liberaldom. Why doesn't the fellow just get away from the New Republic, get an honest real world job, and go away for ten years to observe and reflect more on the what is actually happening in the grubby world.

Beinart is in love with one particular new "lesson", developed in his tiresome book, that the main difference between neoconservatives and "liberals" is only that "liberals" are plagued with doubt and a stronger sense of fallibility. This reminds me of the so-called "shoot and cry" temperament of much of the Israeli center-left. There is a striking inability to grasp and address the deeper problems with one's own society and all human societies, and the need to constrain the savage and avaricious brutality of human beings. We get the same double-thinking, nationalistic chauvinism and will to power, but covered over with a shallow layer of weepy, self-protective guilt.

Ultimately, although he seeks to obscure the fact a bit, Beinart blames all of America for Iraq. He blames America for not being wise enough and virtuous enough to be a "revolutionary country" of his fantasies:

"We can't be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war."

I suppose the implication is that if we were wiser, then it would be a jolly good thing to blow the crap out of the world and convert all of those heathens to the true faith, for the greater glory of America and liberalism.

I get it, Makiya made him do it.

The UN charter clearly describes the rules for the legitimate use of force. The problem is, they were breached. In this situation, simply brewing some more rules is not going to be all that helpful.

In fact, the problem is - and has always been - enforcement.

This problem can only be fixed by addressing the underlying problem with international rule-making bodies such as the UN: They require the power to enforce their decisions and mete out punishments to rule-breakers.

Of course, if these rule-making bodies are going to have enforcement power, then they require political legitimacy, which today means democratic elections.

Democratic elections for the UN? A simple first step would be to replace the seat-warming ambassadors currently sucking legitimacy out the UN with directly elected representatives. These reps could then form a new body - say a "UN Senate". Any state with the courage of their democratic convictions to elect their representative would then get a say. Every other state could of course watch, but from the grandstands.

...... maintaining a military capable of defeating China ....

The US does not have a military capable of defeating China at this very moment absent nuclear strikes. It has a military, using primarily naval assests, capable of detering Chinese agression towards Tawain and countering its expansion in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. Even if the US had such a force, its Central Bank and major multinationals are aghast at the thought of actually using such a force against China.

If things continue as is in the US, the entire interventionist war argument will be moot in thirty or forty years, as your country will no longer have hegemon status. Of course China could just as easily collapse before then. Perhaps due to bad debt.

I agree with Dan Kervick on Beinart's tendency to project his new lesson as something we all need to come around to, as if he were the first to discover it. His piece is so self-pitying, I couldn't believe it was actually published and not just squirrled away in a journal somewhere.

And while "I get it, Makiya made him do it." is pithy, it's actually worse than that. I read it as Beinart wanting to be Makiya's hero, someone Makiya would look up to. This need for adoration didn't extend to an enlistment, of course.

And to be clear, I don't wish harm on Beinart or Jonah Goldberg, another vocal non-participant, but the former has admitted to being willing to send some American soldiers to die for his ideals, for what amounts to a personal ideal. The regret that so many have died for his dream doesn't amount to much when for many of us, one soldier's death was too many.

Making the member-states of the United Nations more democratic would be a good idea in and of itself, but I don't buy that it would redress problems with UN enforcement.

For example, in regards to the ethnic cleasning in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's, one of the major obstacles to international intervention in BOsnia & Ksoovo was Russia's opposition. Given that the vast majority of Russians sympathized with the Serbs, there's no reason to think that Russia's opposition would have been any different if it were a more liberal & democratic country.

Peter,

I agree that merely increasing the number of democratic member states is unlikely help with the enforcement problem plaguing the United Nations. The number democratic member-states is already high, yet enforcement is feeble at best: Adding more democratic states (or more rules!) is unlikely to improve this situation.

Having said that, my argument is that if we want the UN to enforce its decisions, the UN itself - not just its member-states - must be structured in accordance with democratic principles.

Hence my suggestion that we begin the process of transformation by replacing unaccountable ambassadors with directly elected representatives.

good.

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