News media connections

Remember the good old days when foreign correspondents married Democrats?

Apparently, that's ancient history now. The so-called "liberal media" is voluntarily crawling into bed with Republicans with strong connections to the Bush administration:

Weekend Today co-anchor Campbell Brown, 37, and Dan Senor, 34, a FOX News analyst, were married on Sunday in Colorado...

Brown is also a correspondent for NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and the Today show. She and Senor were first reported to be dating in October 2004, and got engaged last November.

Senor, a Republican strategist as well as a FOX News contributor, previously worked in Iraq as a spokesperson for and senior advisor to U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer.

I don't know if Brown invited NBC colleague Andrea Mitchell. She's married to Alan Greenspan.

The Washington Post has a business relationship with NBC, but I likewise don't know if columnist Robert Kagan was invited. He's married to Victoria Nuland.

It's a small world, isn't it?


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The Legitimacy of US Foreign Policy

Recent events in Lebanon and Egypt have led some political analysts to credit the war in Iraq with dramatically changing the political landscape in the Middle East. The White House says that "freedom is on the march," and these analysts believe that the Bush administration earns the credit.

More importantly, if a series of democratic dominoes fall, a lot of people are going to assume that the Iraq war will have been legitimized.

Just one year ago (March/April 2004), neoconservative policy analyst Robert Kagan published a piece called "America's Crisis of Legitimacy" in Foreign Affairs. In this article, he elaborated on his thesis that Americans and Europeans are living in different worlds:

it is precisely the question of legitimacy that divides Americans and Europeans today -- not the legitimacy of each other's political institutions, perhaps, but the legitimacy of their respective visions of world order. More to the point, for the first time since World War II, a majority of Europeans has come to doubt the legitimacy of U.S. power and of U.S. global leadership.

The United States cannot ignore this problem. The struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the most critical contests of our time. In some ways, it is as significant in determining the future of the U.S. role in the international system as any purely material measure of power and influence.

Kagan argues that America has to solve its legitimacy crisis; otherwise, its material power will be debilitated.

The modern liberal mind is offended by the notion that a single world power may be unfettered except by its own sense of restraint. No matter how diplomatically adept a U.S. president might be, the spirit of liberal democracy recoils at the idea of hegemonic dominance, even when it is exercised benignly.

Oddly, though Kagan says that US policy has been viewed as "unilateralist because no European power had any real influence over it," he asserts that the US can solve its legitimacy crisis merely by exporting democracy:

The United States, in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature: by promoting the principles of liberal democracy not only as a means to greater security but as an end in itself. Success would bring it a measure of authority in the liberal, democratic world, including among Europeans

Hmmm. Bush's second inaugural address makes this precise argument about the ideal ends of US foreign policy.

While Kagan has perhaps received more attention than anyone else for addressing the legitimacy of American foreign policy, numerous scholars of international relations (IR) have joined the debate. Most of them are making similar points.

Constructivist IR theorists, of course, emphasize the importance of legitimacy. Chris Reus-Smit of Australian National University explained in 2003:

Legitimacy is an inherently social phenomenon: one's actions are not legitimate unless they are recognised as such both other social actors. Legitimacy must be socially ordained; auto-legitimation is impossible as Charles I and Louis XIV found out to their cost. This fact is lost, however, on hardline members of the Bush Administration. It is not that they lack a view of America's legitimacy, it is that they have a decidedly non-social (and hence incoherent) view....The US went on to win a decisive military victory in Iraq, but Washington has struggled unsuccessfully to shake off a persistent aura of illegitimacy...

Reus-Smit points out that the occupation of Iraq has been widely viewed as illegitimate and that America's substantial material power cannot assure successful foreign policy. Legitimacy matters.

Liberal and neoliberal scholars agree that foreign policy legitimacy is important. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004:

The 18 months since the launching of the second Iraq war have brought home, even to its advocates, that the United States has a serious legitimacy problem.

Legitimacy arises from the conviction that state action proceeds within the ambit of law, in two senses: first, that action issues from rightful authority, that is, from the political institution authorized to take it; and second, that it does not violate a legal or moral norm. Ultimately, however, legitimacy is rooted in opinion, and thus actions that are unlawful in either of these senses may, in principle, still be deemed legitimate. That is why it is an elusive quality. Despite these vagaries, there can be no doubt that legitimacy is a vital thing to have, and illegitimacy a condition devoutly to be avoided.

How to restore legitimacy has thus become a central question for U.S. foreign policy, although the difficulty of doing so is manifest.

Most liberals embrace genuine multilateral decision-making as a means to assure the legitimacy of US foreign policy. They argue that this worked throughout the cold war. Again, this echoes Kagan's argument that the Europeans want a meaningful say over the use(s) of America's power.

Another foreign policy liberal, Charles Kupchan told the BBC in March 2003:

He said America might also find itself increasingly isolated as the world comes to resent its power.

"The real issue that I most fear here is that America will lose its most precious commodity in the world, and that is its international legitimacy."

Kupchan has written and discussed this more extensively, but I cannot find a working link to an academic article.

Even realists agree. Harvard's Stephen M. Walt in the January/February 2005 Boston Review:

American power is most effective when it is seen as legitimate, and when other societies believe it is being used to serve their interests as well as America’s....

Defending the legitimacy of American primacy is not primarily a question of “spin,” or propaganda, or even cultural exchange. If American foreign policy is insensitive to the interests of others, and if it makes global problems worse rather than better, no amount of “public diplomacy” is going to convince the rest of the world that the United States is really acting in the best interests of mankind.

Finally, Dartmouth's Bill Wohlforth in 2003, speaking at Yale, said something Kagan would likely embrace. He embraced the ends, rather than the means, of US policy:

Wohlforth said it's possible to run a neo-imperial foreign policy. "Legitimacy is obtained two ways," he said -- a country can defer to existing rules or create a new reality and make it work well, so that all recognize it.

"The U.S. did it after World War II," he said, noting that officials then said, "'We're going to fix the world, and when we're done, everyone will see that we were right and they'll be back on board.'"

More on this topic later.

A Conversation with Robert Kagan

Yesterday, I moderated a Kentucky Author Forum event with Robert Kagan, whose Of Paradise and Power just came out in paperback last month.

I've previously blogged about his argument, so I won't repeat that now. Rather, I'm just going to summarize a few of the things he said in response to my questions. Audience members also asked questions, but I was targeting mine at areas of interest to me.

I started by asking Kagan to define a "neoconservative" and then I asked him to outline his "US is from Mars, Europe is from Venus" position. The answers were pretty much what I expected.

Kagan's new "Afterward" argues that the US needs the Europeans to provide legitimacy and the Europeans would like to cooperate with the US so as to have some say in how US power will be used. Eventually, he got around to making this point in the session Thursday.

Kagan said in reply to someone's questions that the Europeans just don't appreciate the WMD/terror threat the same way the US does since 9/11. He admitted, however, that Europeans have long faced terror, but declared that 9/11 was quite unique to the US because of the scale (and because the US had previously been relatively untouched by this problem).

I asked Kagan whether he thought the US and Europe could come to a "common assessment of the threat" (he uses virtually the same phrase as the September 2002 National Security Strategy document)? Specifically, I asked if the US could sustain a "high threat" context given the new revelations by David Kay about Iraqi WMD. Do Americans really believe they are imperiled all the time? Could the US eventually move toward the European view?

Kagan replied that people in Washington and NY certainly continue to feel threatened, as do those who fly planes. He also made a side comment that Kay really hadn't dismissed the threat, which is perhaps literally true, but is certainly not how it is being played out in the public sphere.

Then I asked Kagan to consider a counterfactual. What if the WTC buildings had been badly damaged, but had not collapsed? Would Americans still think the threat was so great if they did not have the visual image of the huge buildings collapsing. He acknowledged that the images were important, but insisted that the US would still rate these threats as high.

Later, I picked up something Bill Hartung of the World Policy Institute said last weekend in DC. When President Bush landed on that aircraft carrier last May, the US ship cost more than the entire North Korean military budget. Yet, the US is now approaching a half trillion dollar defense budget. Given that conservatives typically distrust government spending ("throwing money down a rathole"), did Kagan think the US is spending too much?

Kagan said no, and regretted that the US had reduced its military spending after the cold war ended. At one point, he noted that China was increasing its spending and he wished that the Europeans would spend more -- but doubted that would happen. Since the US is spending only about 4.5% of its GNP on defense, it could afford a lot more. It was common to spend 7% in the cold war, and the US sometimes spent as much as 15%.

Bottom line: even though Robert Kagan appreciates the importance of legitimacy, he still thinks the Europeans are wrong about the threats, wants to see a high level of US defense spending, and worries about the rise of China.

At one point, Kagan noted his support for American military intervention in the 1990s (places like Haiti and Kosovo) and declared that he was an IR liberal. Shortly after that, he said that he accepted realist arguments about the importance of power -- so he was basically trying to marry America's power to its ideals and change the world.

In short, he's still saying what the Project for A New American Century said before Bush was elected President. PNAC (Kagan was a director) called for many of the hawkish policies (warning, pdf file) the US is now pursuing . And the justification then wasn't terror or WMD. The neocons who wrote their playbook wanted to take advantage of the "unprecedented opportunity" presented by a world of great American power facing minimal great power opposition.

Let's hope the Europeans continue to deny legitimacy to the Pax Americana project.

International Legitimacy

The paperback version of Robert Kagan's book, Of Power and Paradise, is now available. He works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and writes regularly for The Washington Post. Of course, Kagan is better known as a neoconservative who was a founder of the Project for a New American Century. In January 1998, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called "Bombing Iraq Isn't Enough."

Here's the first paragraph of that piece:

Saddam Hussein must go. This imperative may seem too simple for some experts and too daunting for the Clinton Administration. But if the United States is committed, as the President said in his State of the Union Message, to insuring that the Iraqi leader never again uses weapons of mass destruction, the only way to achieve that goal is to remove Mr. Hussein and his regime from power. Any policy short of that will fail.

Kagan has long called for missile defense, applauded America's "benevolent empire," and has been pretty hawkish on China.

Why am I establishing Kagan's credentials?

Well, his new book includes a very interesting new "Afterward" that focuses on the importance of legitimacy in world politics.

The book in hardback was pretty thin and basically expanded on a much-circulated article he wrote in June 2002 for Policy Review, "Power and Weakness." In that piece, Kagan famously declared that

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less.

A lot of analysts embraced Kagan's argument to explain the rift between the US and most of the Europeans on the issue of Iraq.

Many Bush-supporters referenced Kagan to explain why the US had to act unilaterally (or with only a small number of states) to attack Iraq, fight terror, and stop WMD proliferation. Trying to get French and German approval would be futile.

The new "Afterward" (warning, this is a pdf file), however, argues that the US needs Europe -- to provide legitimacy for the war on terror. If a number of democracies refuses to accept the legitimacy of US actions, then the actions are not legitimate. America, in fact, faces a "crisis of legitimacy" according to Kagan.

Kagan says legitimacy has material implications, which is why the US is paying most of the costs in Iraq. But this isn't his main thesis. Kagan thinks that the US needs legitimacy and should be prepared to grant Europe some authority over its decisions (he approves of NATO) -- but only after the US and Europe agree about common threats. If the US acts without legitimacy, its power will ultimately be isolated and exhausted.

For the most part, Kagan is still engaged in an argument about power (Europe uses multilateral measures because it lacks power) and he continues to argue that Europe just doesn't appreciate threats that the US does (terror and WMD). But the argument in the afterward is new and provocative.

It certainly seems to encourage genuine dialogue about threats and responses among the US and its closest allies.

I saw Kagan on Charlie Rose Wednesday night, debating Harvard's Joe Nye (of "soft power" fame), and they didn't seem all that far apart. For those that want a condensed version of his latest argument, see the New York Times from January 24.

Much of my own work focuses on legitimacy in global politics. Unfortunately, my new book with Nayef Samhat is still at the printer and won't be out for almost a month (it was originally due today). We argue that order built on coersion and material self interest isn't legitimate -- it must be established through consensual dialogue.

Hey, that sounds a bit like what I'm reading in Kagan.

We'll all know more in two weeks. On February 12, 2004, I'm interviewing Kagan for the campus version of "Kentucky Author Forum."

Maybe I'll run in to him the weekend before that when I'm hanging around the halls of Carnegie, talking about preemptive war with some other scholars and analysts.