Opinions

George Will: America Needs a

Conservative Internationalist as
President


Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon (L) attend a news conference while Israeli
military chief Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz speaks in Tel Aviv. (Nir Elias/Reuters)

By George F. Will Opinion writer July 30, 2014
With metronomic regularity, there is a choreographed minuet of carnage.
Israel is attacked. Israel defends itself. Perfunctory affirmations of Israels
right of self-defense are quickly followed by accusations that Israels military
measures are disproportionate. Then come demands for a cease-fire, and the
attackers replenish their arsenals.
The accusations and demands are ascribed to something fictitious, the
international community. The word community connotes a certain cement
of shared values and aspirations. So, what community includes Denmark and
Yemen, Canada and Iran, New Zealand and Congo, Italy and North Korea?
International community is empty cant that bewitches the minds of earnest
diplomats such as John Kerry but does not interest Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
He surely has told Kerry what he has told others: Thepoint of Israel is that
Jews shall never again, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire,
depend on the kindness of strangers. Such dependency did not work out well
for Jews, so Israel exists for Jewish self-defense.
Israels hardheaded exercise of hard power in Gaza has instructively coincided
with a dismal reverberation from the Obama administrations most empty-
headed adventure. Among the multiplying foreign policy debacles that are
completing the destruction of Barack Obamas crumbling presidency, many
are more portentous but none more emblematic than the closure of the U.S.
Embassy in Tripoli last weekend. The U.S. military evacuated the embassy
staff while the State Department advised U.S. citizens to leave
Libya immediately.
U.S. involvement in the 2011 decapitation of Libyas government has
predictably (for those who have noticed developments in Iraq since 2003)
produced a failed state convulsed by rival militias. The attack on Libya
appealed to the Obama administrations humanitarians precisely because it
was untainted by considerations of national interest. The seven-month
attempt to assassinate Moammar Gaddafi with fighter-bombers was a war of
choice, waged for regime change. It was not an event thrust upon the United
States, which had its hands more than full elsewhere. Because the war against
Libya was thoroughly voluntary, it stands as the signature deed of the
secretary of state at the time and should, by itself, disqualify her from
presidential aspirations.
Today there is a torrent of redundant evidence for the Macmillan axiom.
When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what caused him
the most trouble, he supposedly replied, Events, dear boy, events. He
certainly used the phrase the opposition of events. Events, from Ukraine to
Syria to Gaza, are forcing something Americans prefer not to think about
foreign policy into their political calculations.
Having recoiled from the scandal of the Iraq war, which was begun on the
basis of bad intelligence and conducted unintelligently, Americans concluded
that their nation no longer has much power, defined as the ability to achieve
intended effects. The correct conclusion is that the United States should
intend more achievable effects.
Obama has given Americans a foreign policy congruent with their post-recoil
preferences: America as spectator. Now, however, their sense of national
diminishment, and of an increasingly ominous world, may be making them
receptive to a middle course between a foreign policy of flaccidity (Obama)
and grandiosity (his predecessor).
If so, a Republican presidential aspirant should articulate what George
Washington Universitys Henry R. Nau calls, in a book with this title,
Conservative Internationalism. This would, he says, include:
The liberal internationalist goal of spreading freedom, but doing so primarily
on the borders of existing freedom, not everywhere in the world at once; the
realists use of armed diplomacy against adversaries outside of negotiations;
and the conservative vision of limited global governance, a decentralized
world of democratic civil societies rather than one of centralized
international institutions as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt
advocated. The blend is conservative internationalism because states remain
separate and armed; national culture, sovereignty, defense, and patriotism are
respected; civic virtue and democracy are widespread; the global economy is
mostly private; and global governance is limited.
After the shattering of the Democratic Party over Vietnam in 1968 and the
nomination of George McGovern in 1972, the partys foreign policy credentials
became suspect. This was disqualifying until the end of the Cold War, and of
the Soviet Union in 1991, reduced the stakes of foreign policy. Democrats
elected a president in 1992.
In 11 ruinous years, beginning with the invasion of Iraq, Republicans have
forfeited their foreign policy advantage and Obama has revived suspicions that
Democrats are uncomfortable with American power. There is running room
for a conservative internationalist.