The View From Beijing

Speaking of possible Sino-American enmity, one good way to ensure that 21st century geopolitics is dominated by conflict between the United States and China would be to listen to listen to Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan about legitimacy (via Brian Beutler):

The traditional answer, the U.N. Security Council, no longer suffices, if it ever did. Under the United Nations Charter, states are prohibited from using force except in cases of self-defense or when explicitly authorized by the Security Council. But this presupposes that the members of the Security Council can agree on the threat and the appropriate response. From Rwanda to Kosovo to Darfur, however, and from Iraq to North Korea to Iran, the Security Council has not been able to agree and has failed to act decisively. Its permanent members are deeply divided by conflicting interests as well as by clashing beliefs about the nature of sovereignty and the right of the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of nations.

If not the Security Council, then who? The answer is the world's democracies, the United States and its democratic partners in Europe and Asia. As the war in Kosovo showed, democracies can agree and act effectively even when major non-democracies, such as Russia and China, do not. Because they share a common view of what constitutes a just order within states, they tend to agree on when the international community has an obligation to intervene. Shared principles provide the foundation for legitimacy.

What is a patriotic Chinese defense official supposed to make of the idea that the United States claims that it and its key allies should be permitted to invade any country anywhere without China's agreement while China, presumably, can only intervene with the approval of UNSC P-5 members like the US, France, and England? It would be one thing to try to read the Kosovo precedent as saying that NATO won't give China a veto over actions in its own backyard.

But to survey the wreckage in Iraq, and conclude that despite the lessons seen there we can't defer to the UN (even with an exception for self defense) on the grounds that the UN might sometimes say no is very weak tea. Meanwhile, for all this talk of an alliance of democracies, I see no particular sign that India, South Africa, Brazil, etc., are actually clamoring for a more interventionist United States or Russia's marginalization on the world stage. I don't say we should give China and absolute veto over US policy, but if we don't want China to become an enemy we need the international rules of the road to be something a responsible Chinese leader could possibly accept. Two-tiered sovereignty that classes China among the disfavored nations isn't going to cut it.

Comments

What in the name of good jigglypoot is Daalder doing co-writing with a Kagan?

The moderate neocons that make up the ostensible foreign policy left appear to be the dumbest people in the entire world.

Posted by DivGuy | August 6, 2007 10:13 AM

The problem with this construction for legitimacy is that it is designed with the intent to intervene in states outside of the terms that make that legitimacy meaningful. It's one thing to say, hey, let's have a democracy club where we'll take care of each other when the need arises! And another to say, "Let's have a democracy club, whose obviously objectively superior organization provides the a priori basis for intervening in the affairs of all nations in the world!" The Balkans intervention is a misleading example, because Serbia was a democratic European state. There you can make the case that our involvement was legitimate by these guidelines. Iraq is a different story, precisely because the country does not share any of the normative assumptions held by the invading country to justify the invasion. Shared principles do provide the foundation for legitimacy, which is precisely why you can't form a coalition of democracies whose primary purpose is to go around screwing with non-democratic states.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 6, 2007 10:27 AM

It has nothing to do with democracies and everything to do with gutting the UN while trying to install a fig leaf to allow "international" approval for more wars. Take Iraq. Lets say this Council of Rich White Countries and Japan takes up Iraq. France and Canada say nay, do we then invade still? No vetoes? Or is the only veto reserved for the US?

Posted by Rob | August 6, 2007 10:34 AM

I like how it's "democracies in Europe and Asia."

Because if they included Mexico or Brazil or South Africa, there would be a small chance of intervention being vetoed. (And, of course, how stupid is Daalder to think that Kagan would respect France's veto in a future debate over intervention?)

In the end, it's not that Daalder is a tactically stupid liberal. Rather, he's a neoconservative in favor of massively expanded US influence and power, believing those to be either goods in themselves, or inextricably connected to goods - which is the same thing, in the end. This is, of course, a stupid thing to believe, but the vast majority of our foreign policy elite believe it.

Posted by DivGuy | August 6, 2007 10:40 AM

All this talk of an alliance of democracies is even worse because Bush has been willing to put a huge amount of pressure on democracies to support him in a war even when the population of the democracies are firmly against it. Japan, South Korea, and certain countries in Europe are examples. This entire talk of alliance of democracies is a veneer to hide America pressuring other countries to do its bidding in a anti-democratic fashion.

Posted by Dan the Man | August 6, 2007 10:41 AM

So, are you advocating a kind of Westphalian realism? Should it be the avowed policy of the United States to liberalize or democratize states, like Iran or China, that aren't even minimally decent?

I am not saying we should militarily intervene, bur rather we should start developing international institutions that will push us closer to a just world order. Should that be one of our foreign policy objectives or are you defending the more or less orthodox position (in politics, not political philosophy) that the United States should only be interested in its own national interest?

Posted by Patrick | August 6, 2007 10:44 AM

Well said. Not all your commenters hate you more than anything in the world. You're somewhere between 'getting my second favorite type of pop for free' and 'having to pay $9 to see a really good movie' on the list of things i hate.

Posted by crack | August 6, 2007 10:45 AM

What's your second favorite type of pop?

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 6, 2007 10:47 AM

Is the problem with Barack Obama on foreign policy found in the interventionist advice of Ivo Daalder? How does an Obama adviser come to write a column with Bob Kagan who is always and only for international intervention, war, and military occupation? Why would Obama have such an adviser?

Posted by Jennifer | August 6, 2007 10:49 AM

Who hates MY now?

Posted by Freddie | August 6, 2007 10:55 AM

The problem with the current Security Council is that there is no confidence in it as an institution. It's not that it might say "no" but that we do not care because we manifestly don't feel it has any kind of moral authority. In order to function in that role, we need to believe that it has justification beyond the raw power politics, which sufficed during the nuclear tensions of the cold war era but fail in an era of American preeminence. Even if we could derive a theoretical framework, the veto model has proven cripplingly indecisive when it comes to Darfur or the Iran nuclear program, and essentially ineffectual in stopping, say, the US invasion of Iraq which was roundly opposed by the international community. If we are to have a less interventionist US, we need some mechanism or mechanisms by which to resolve these kinds of international crises.

I don't know that I agree with Kagan's actual policy prescriptions, but the failings of the current system are quite real.

Posted by Anthony Damiani | August 6, 2007 10:56 AM

So, are you advocating a kind of Westphalian realism? Should it be the avowed policy of the United States to liberalize or democratize states, like Iran or China, that aren't even minimally decent?

No, he's espousing actual liberal internationalism. As a general rule, legitimacy comes from the entire international community, working together through respected institutions. These institutions, in order to confer legitimacy, need to exercise real limits on US power.

I'm quite confused as to how you can read Matthew's post, which is obviously a full-throated defense of the UN and truly international institutions, as an expression of strict realism.

While I'd certainly like it if Iran became a democracy with free media and great health benefits for gay partners, I'd also like a pony. The path toward justice, in terms of interventionism, is truly international institutions that confer legitimacy by limiting the power of the strongest states.

Posted by DivGuy | August 6, 2007 11:00 AM

The US culture for success is based upon a leader being a deceitful psychopath who loudly proclaims rules for civilized behavior which he intends to violate at the first expedient moment.

The idea is to have those on whom he feeds be psychologically disarmed by the belief that there is a God -- that there is justice, peace and moral rules.

Hence we have CEOs who encourage their workers to work 70 hours per week in order to be a "success" --to "build a career" -- knowing that he will toss many of them away like a piece of used toilet paper a year later when opportunities have been fully exploited and sales level off.
Just look at General Electric CEO Jack Welch.

Wall Street is based upon legalized fraud -- upon encouraging the rubes on Main Street to invest in "the long con".

Similarly, we have American leaders whose entire existence is based upon institutionized corruption -- upon broadcasting lies to the American people using hundreds of $Millions from rich patrons. Then cheerfully betraying their constituents after the election.

Those leaders are telling the world that they want to "spread democracy" in the Middle East.
Even though those same leaders have supported -- and sometimes imposed --dictatorships in the Middle East for decades in order to steal the oil deposits of that region.

American leaders sprouted endless bullshit about "international law" when we were trying Nazis at Nuremberg. But our current President has repeatedly violated that very same law -- indeed, claims it does not exist.

Communism arose as a defence against the vicious predations of the robber barons. Since the Soviet Union has fallen, our elites, quite simply, are trying to conquer the world.

In the false name of "defence" they are using the lives of our children and our life savings to loot the planet --growing ever more stronger. They are an enormous threat to the rest of the world.

But more importantly, they are a major threat to us. Not just because the other major powers may some day decide to nuke us in preemptive self-defense. But because our greedy psychopaths hate us --their fellow countrymen -- just as much as they hate the rest of mankind.

At one time we had a vision for mankind. To encourage our children to become scientists and greatly advance knowledge. To increase human lifespan to hundreds of years. To develop new energy sources that would provide a comfortable life for everyone. To travel to the other planets --and eventually, the stars.

The only vision Cheney has for America is to make a few hundred men even more powerful and richer. And to make the rest of us ever more their slaves.

Posted by Don Williams | August 6, 2007 11:02 AM

It strikes me that many of the IR people who received their training and came of age during the 60's, 70's and 80's are suffering from dangerous forms of disorientation and nostalgia, along with acute pangs of status loss that approximate grieving.

The Cold War was a structure that gave purpose, order and conceptual simplicity to their endeavors. And their own roles in the bureaucracy of the Leader of the Free World gave a sense of historic significance and importance to their personal existences, a significance liked by their largely anonymous and historically forgettable counterparts in all those Countries That Don't Count. Many were attracted to their careers by the need to be at the pinnacle and center of world power. Some even came to the US from other countries in order to seek that center of power.

Now faced with the emotional challenge of a changed and de-centered world, and the threat of historical oblivion, they have a deep emotional need to re-create a Free World, so there will be two clear sides once again, bipolar meaning and purpose will be restored, and the US can reclaim the throne as leader of one of the two sides.

Whether their chief new new enemy is to be Islamo-evilism or of Illiberal Sino-capitalism or Putinized Russo-authoritarianism or just a grand combination of all of them making up the Not-Like-Usist Bloc, they are all different ways of trying to create the New American Century.

This pining for the past is poignant, actually, though dangerous.

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 6, 2007 11:18 AM

I wrote:

a significance liked by their largely anonymous ...

Should be:

a significance lacked by their largely anonymous ...

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 6, 2007 11:25 AM

OK, Matt, time to give up your defence of the Kosovo war now.

Posted by Pithlord | August 6, 2007 11:27 AM

I particularly like the glib dismissal of Russia as a democracy. I tend to agree that you can't call it a democracy in the traditional, liberal, sense, but at the same time I'm not proposing a force-wielding, UN superceding club of democracies using arbitrary membership rules.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 6, 2007 11:29 AM

China, presumably, can only intervene with the approval of UNSC P-5 members like the US, France, and England

England is not a permanent member of the UNSC.

Posted by ajay | August 6, 2007 11:38 AM

The US can't control the UN as it could in its early years which frustrates the US proclivity for military action, most recently in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The US has had to use NATO to pursue its conquest of Afghanistan.

Some of our "progressive" friends want to "reform" the UN, eliminating the UNSC veto, which would allow the US and its subservient allies to bomb away. They're not confident that would work, however, so they're really pushing a "Concert of Democracies" to keep the bombers flying.

The world is looking to the United Nations to find solutions for a swirling array of problems buclear weapons in Iran, genocide in Darfur and ensuring that war does not break out again between Israel and Hezbollah. But if the United Nations is ever to live up to our hopes, world leaders should confront the single most important issue that would actually make a difference: reforming the Security Council . . And it means creating a Concert of Democracies to lobby for effective reform and to create a possible alternative decision-making body if such reform ultimately proves impossible.--G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sep 27, 2006

Posted by Don Bacon | August 6, 2007 11:41 AM

"Whether their chief new new enemy is to be Islamo-evilism or of Illiberal Sino-capitalism or Putinized Russo-authoritarianism or just a grand combination of all of them making up the Not-Like-Usist Bloc,"

You mean the Axis of Evil? But seriously, you can't convince me any of those three are praisewrothy, as bad as the U.S. has been. The belligerent right may not really be interested in humanitarian interventions, but China only recently stopped blocking action on Darfur b/c of the Olympics, for example.

And I don't agree with the rightwing on most things, but Saddam was in violation of stacks and stack of UN resolutions. He invaded and annexed a UN member state, Kuwait. The UN tried to punish him via 10 years sanctions, but all that did was devastate the Iraqi population. The Bush adminstration should have know that Iraqi society was ruined by a decade of sanctions (+Saddam) and planned accordingly.

Posted by Peter K. | August 6, 2007 11:42 AM

Because Divguy, Matt says that we need "international rules of the road" that China will accept. This implies that China, despite not being even minimally decent, gets a say in what the internaional world order would look like.

The Westphalian world doesn't say there can't be international institutions, but it does say that international institutions have to defer to the sovereignty of nation-states, even nation-states that aren't even close to be legitimate.

My question to Matt was an attempt to clarify how far he thinks liberal international institutions should bend to accomodate illegitimate regimes? All the way? Some of the way? None of the way?

It isn't clear, and until it is clear I have no idea whether I support Matt's position or not.

Posted by Patrick | August 6, 2007 11:42 AM

Daalder and Kagan's piece expresses a neo-con dream that has been circulating for a long time. I would hope that the dream is crashing, and that the U.S. is going to be waking up to, among other things, the astonishing waste of money that was its last big 'democratic' intervention - the one in Iraq. However, since the Dems and Reps in Congress continue to vote for swollen Military budget hundreds of billions of dollars too large - and surely, if there is one place the Government could shrink by, say, 300 billion dollars, it is in the funding of the Pentagon - the drivers of more war are in place. The Democrats and Republicans in the House just voted in an astonishing 435 billion dollar Pentagon budget today, without really thinking about it. That money today will surely drive some idiotic war tomorrow.

Posted by roger | August 6, 2007 11:56 AM

What's your second favorite type of pop?

I'll say crack-lite.

Posted by crack | August 6, 2007 1:16 PM

Patrick, to take you seriously I would need a better sense of the criteria you would employ to establish which regimes of the world are "illegitimate" and which are "legitimate". We do business and are friendly with a lot of unsavory regimes in the world, and seem to arbitrarily (from a purely objective, humanitarian standpoint) pick others that we vociferously castigate and isolate. And I think it's valuable to hold a default position respecting the sovereignty of nations, within a cooperative framework of international institutions. The problem with the Neo-Cons and the PNAC crowd and their DLC faux-liberal sympathizers in the establishment press and think tanks is that they don't really respect the concept of other nations' sovereignty once other nations--in any way--deviate from their perceived hegemony and interests (I purposefully say *their* interests versus our national interest because I don't see the two as related in any meaningful way).

Posted by Warren | August 6, 2007 4:45 PM

I was actually using decent in the technical Rawlsian sense of respecting a certain subset of human rights, has a functioing common-good sense of justice etc etc.

My broader point is that China and Iran don't count as "legitimate" on any real standard of legitimacy beyond "monopoly of the use of force in a territory."

And that's fine if you want to defend that Westphalian sense of legitimacy. And then create a set of international institutions that will beneficiently will serve as a check on any of those states (including ours) going outlaw and dealing with certain common coordination problems.

Again, you wan't to defend that conception (Congress of Vienna writ large), then go ahead defend it. But if you have a more robust moral conception of what a just or decent global order would look like, then you have to admit that the furtherance of that order may be opposed, even rationally opposed, by current illegitimate states.

And what happens then? A modus vivendi via compromise? Do we go to war? Do we never go to war? Do we go to war sometimes, sanctions other times, and buy their TVs other times? And by we, I mean representatives of the just global order?

Waving the "liberal internationalism" sign doesn't really tell us all that much.

Posted by Patrick | August 6, 2007 5:32 PM

The principle underwriting the League of Nations was that all nations shared a harmony of interests.

They didn't. The disharmony resulted in conflict.

The League failed.

Daalder and Kagan argue that democratic nations "share a common view of what constitutes a just order within states".

They don't ... You can see where this is going.

Posted by sjk | August 6, 2007 8:08 PM

This is what you call Ivo Daalder selling his ass in order to be allowed back into the good graces of the neocon-defense-industrial complex-laden foreign policy establishment.

By 2009, Daalder might have an easier time finding work, but he'll have an ass as wide as the Holland Tunnel. And probably have contributed to the deaths of thousands of people in yet another retarded neocon adventure.

Posted by Jon H | August 6, 2007 8:56 PM

Jon H: "retarded neocon adventure". Very concise and to the point. I like it. These people need to be called retards more often. If we were a morally, intellectually and spiritually healthier nation, the mainstream consensus would see these neo-cons as the crazed village idiots that they truly are.

Posted by Warren | August 6, 2007 11:14 PM

Matt, are you seriously saying that we should allow genocide to take place if Russia and China won't endorse our efforts to stop it?

Didn't you favor the Kosovo war?

Posted by Adam Herman | August 7, 2007 2:07 PM