The Dream of Democratic Peace: Americans Are Not Asleep

While the creation of an overseas empire came at the expense of undemocratic Spain, America's imperial career does little to support the view that the United States, by virtue of its democratic norms and institutions, is inclined to solve international disputes pacifically and to promote democracy abroad.

Perhaps the First World War lends credence to the Clinton administration's case. After all, the United States fought alongside the more or less democratic Allies against the semi-autocratic Central Powers. But Woodrow Wilson and many liberals perceived the democracies to be nearly as predatory as the Germans. Their favored solution to the war was "peace without victory" for either side. When German actions forced him to make common cause with Britain, France, Italy, and Russia, Wilson insisted that the United States was their "associate" rather than their "ally." Pro-Allied interventionists like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge felt a cultural kinship with Britain, but they were driven by geopolitical, not ideological, concerns. A majority of Americans probably did not identify strongly with either Wilson or Roosevelt. But they knew a threat when they saw one: in early 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare to stop the United States from selling supplies to the Allies. The United States fought World War II to stop a far more pernicious set of international outlaws, and it did so with the help of one of the world's least democratic states.

IDEALPOLITIK AS ELITISM

Finally, Talbott argues, "The American people have never accepted traditional geopolitics or pure balance-of-power calculations as sufficient reason to expend national treasure or to dispatch American soldiers to foreign lands. Throughout this century the U.S. government has explained its decisions to send troops 'over there' with some invocation of democracy and its defense . . . The American people want their country's foreign policy rooted in idealpolitik as well as realpolitik." But this would seem to confuse the desires of the majority of the American people with those of an elite. There is little evidence for the proposition that majorities have supported military intervention because they wished to defend democracy or that they would have failed to do so in the absence of a Wilsonian appeal. A majority supported intervention in 1917 because of the German threat on the high seas. A majority supported intervention in 1941 because of the Japanese attack. A majority supported intervention, up to a point, during the Cold War because of anticommunism, which it was cynical -- or sensible -- enough not to confuse with defending democracy in places like Vietnam.

A majority, too, will support military action after the Cold War for similar reasons: when it feels threatened or aggrieved, and when the human cost is low. The basic weakness of Wilsonianism today is exactly what it was 75 years ago: lack of broad support at home. At various times political leaders have appealed successfully to the public's enlightened self-interest, patriotism, fear, anger, cupidity, or parochial loyalties, but never to its alleged attachment to "idealpolitik." When the Truman administration launched the Marshall Plan, Dean Acheson, as he later recalled in his memoirs, knew that the American people could not be persuaded to pay for that important enterprise "by as Platonic a purpose as combating 'hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos'" -- nor, he certainly would have added, promoting democracy abroad. Despite the Truman administration's rhetorical overkill, it probably had a better sense of the American public's temper in its day than the Clinton State Department does in its own.

FOREIGN POLICY FUNDAMENTALS

A sound foreign policy has to be based on a more accurate notion of what accounts for reliability than the Clinton view. The one indispensable factor in forming reliable partnerships is not democracy or the lack of it, but self-interest, and there is not the slightest reason to think that will change. A sound policy should also be based on a clear notion of how the rest of the world actually sees the United States. Many of the countries that look to the United States for help and protection do not want to adopt the essentials of the American political and economic system and would not be in a position to do so even if they did. One of the more convincing "defenders" of the democratic peace acknowledges that it operates, if at all, only when an American liberal elite believes that a particular country meets its democratic standards, although emotions and misperceptions may affect the elite's judgment, and that same liberal ideology may prod the United States toward war with those who fail the test. It is little wonder that not only ideological rivals but fellow democracies have seen American idealpolitik, the attempt to universalize liberal ideology, as the "will to power cloaked . . . in idealism" -- in other words, imperialpolitik.

A sound policy, finally, has to be based on a historically informed notion of what kind of people Americans really are. The history of the twentieth century clearly indicates that they are neither the fodder for demagogues that realists sometimes suggest nor the aspiring missionaries of liberal dreams. The truth is that, like most people everywhere, Americans simply cannot afford not to put their selfish interests first, and they have generally had a fair idea of where those interests lie. "The truth," as Mencken once said, "would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got used to what it is."

John L. Harper is Professor of U.S. Foreign Policy and European Studies at the Bologna Center of The Johns Hopkins University.