"When the leaders speak of peace," wrote Bertolt Brecht, "The common folk know/That war is coming./ When the leaders curse war/The mobilization order is already written out." I was reminded of those words when Barack Obama spoke at the United Nations last week, proclaiming that American foreign policy would no longer be guided by appeals to national interests; that "human rights" and "democracy" would henceforth be the guiding principles.
Conventional wisdom ascribes a similar view to Woodrow Wilson. That claim is far-fetched for many reasons, not least because the modern understanding of human rights had not yet emerged when Wilson, at the behest of leading capitalists, drove a reluctant American public into World War I. But "Wilsonian" attitudes, self-righteous and messianic, do run throughout our history and do sometimes spill over into our foreign policy. In recent decades, Democratic presidents have been drawn into this fold more than Republican presidents have, with the exception of George W. Bush.
It was the Carter administration that introduced (or reintroduced) the general idea. It did so hypocritically - focusing almost exclusively on human rights problems and democracy deficits east of the Elbe. But, as with other innovations from that period (deregulation, for example), the consequences were comparatively benign. It was the Clinton administration that turned invocations of human rights and democracy lethal; witness the former Yugoslavia. That was bad enough; with "liberals" praising Clinton's illegal and ill-conceived ventures there and elsewhere -- and defending the larger idea of "humanitarian intervention" -- it could get a lot worse if the trend continues into the Obama years, as now seems to be the case.
Before 2001, Republican presidents never quite got out from under the shadow of Henry Kissinger's balance of power "realism." Even at a rhetorical level Ronald Reagan's machinations in Central America had more to do with the Cold War and overcoming "the Vietnam syndrome" than with promoting ideologically deformed conceptions of human rights or democratic governance.
All this changed when neocons took control of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Their talk was all about "democratizing" the world -- especially the part that Israel and Big Oil care about. To that end, they added on a level of hypocrisy that would have shamed Jimmy Carter and, to the extent he is capable of shame, even Bill Clinton.
Throughout 2008, candidate Obama was "advised" by liberal interventionists like Samantha Powers and Anne-Marie Slaughter. They and their co-thinkers did get jobs in his administration but, upon taking office, Obama promoted foreign policy departures more in the "realist" style of James Baker than in the messianic register of Clinton-Albright era interventionism. In practice, though, he treaded in the footsteps of George Bush, implementing a kinder, gentler neo-conservative agenda. Since neo-conservatism and liberal interventionism are cut from the same cloth, what Obama announced at the UN is not exactly a change of course. But if he follows through - never a sure bet! - his administration's rhetoric will at least be more into line with what it actually does. Given the already gaping disconnect between Obama's words and deeds, the difference may be minor. But words, even tendentious ones uttered hypocritically, can matter. There is therefore now even more reason than before to worry.
Needless to say, for an administration that has steadfastly protected Bush era war criminals, that continues some of their most egregious practices, that has taken the doctrine of executive power into new realms, and that has escalated the assault on civil liberties to a degree that would embarrass even Dick Cheney, talk of a foreign policy focused on human rights and democracy is preposterous. The tragedy is that, come November 2, right headed people will have no choice but to acquiesce, inasmuch as the Republican-Tea Party alternative is, by any measure, more absurd and more dangerous.
But no one need acquiesce in the message Obama's speech conveyed. In context, his posturing about human rights and democracy amounted to a thinly disguised threat to Iran. Ignorant and "hateful" as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be, he could hardly have missed the point, just as he could hardly fail to see how weak Obama is in the face of opposition from Christian Zionists and the Likudniks at AIPAC, who have been pressing relentlessly for war with Iran. Obama can't even force the theocratic wing of the Israeli ethnocracy to stop building settlements in illegally occupied territories! If he'll cave on that, after having staked his own prestige on getting a political settlement on Israel/Palestine within a year, what chance does Iran have to avoid American and Israeli missiles and bombs?
Paradoxically, two unlikely factors may yet save the day. The first is that the Commander-in-Chief lives in fear of his underlings at the Pentagon who, though hell-bent on waging doomed counter-insurgencies in helpless countries, are loathe to undertake adventures of the kind that would follow from an attack on a large and powerful state. The other is the Obama administration's pandering to Blue Dogs and Republicans on deficit reduction. What most deficit hawks really want is to dismantle the remnants of New Deal and Great Society advances because they and their paymasters think they stand in the way of untrammeled capitalist expansion. They have somehow forgotten that the whole point of what they oppose has always been to save capitalism from capitalists like themselves. But there is a chance that, in this case too, clarity will burst through the miasma, leading the deficit-cutters to take aim at one of the main reasons why the deficit has grown so large - America's never-ending wars and the neo-conservative (and liberal interventionist!) thinking that makes them inevitable.
It is sad but true that, because the resurgent peace movement is still very weak and because the Obama administration regards those who criticize it for the right reasons as "whiners" and "f...ing retards," our otherwise onerous Masters of War in conjunction with clear thinking deficit hawks, if there are any, offer our best, perhaps our only, hope for warding off the impending catastrophe Obama's UN speech threatened to unleash.