The Crusade of Illusions

Over the past century, realism and liberalism have been the two warring imperatives behind most U.S. foreign policies. According to these two stimulating new books, the United States and its policymakers have seldom managed to reconcile these two approaches or match ideologically driven liberal projects with the realities of power, interest, and expense.

The United States is struggling with just such a problem at the moment. The administration of George W. Bush, like some of its predecessors, claims to be both realistic and true to American ideals. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice, when she was still national security adviser, asserted that the administration's emphasis on both preventive war and democracy promotion (articulated in its 2002 National Security Strategy) transcended what she called the false academic dichotomy between realism and idealism. "In real life," she declared, "power and values are married completely." And Bush has denigrated skeptics "who call themselves 'realists'" but "have lost contact with a fundamental reality" -- that "America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."

Events, however, do not seem to be cooperating. Washington is currently mired in a costly war that is part of a dubious strategy of democratic regime change. And a fierce fight has broken out within the neoconservative brain trust: Francis Fukuyama has denounced Charles Krauthammer's strategy of "democratic realism" (which advocates the use of military force and elections to transform the Middle East), arguing that it is neither democratic nor realistic.

Both Christopher Layne, of Texas A&M, and Colin Dueck, of the University of Colorado, point out that such tensions are nothing new; indeed, the United States' liberal ambitions have, since the era of Woodrow Wilson, repeatedly clashed with the realities of power politics. Layne and Dueck converge in some of their analyses, but they diverge in their prescriptions. For example, Layne proposes to resolve the conflict between liberalism and realism through a strategy of engagement so limited that it borders on isolationism. Dueck, by contrast, seeks a prudent balance between modest liberal ambitions and politically sustainable commitments. In the end, both are too pessimistic about Washington's ability to shake off its ideological impulses and find the right balance. A prudent realism is not only compatible with the achievement of liberal U.S. aspirations in world politics; it is a precondition for success.

THE PERILS OF PRIMACY

Layne and Dueck are not mere pundits reacting to depressing headlines, but political scientists who have spent serious time in the archives and ground their criticisms in coherently articulated philosophical positions. Layne, who has warned readers for years about the dangers of American hubris in a unipolar world, has earned the right to say, "I told you so."

Like many eclectic younger scholars of international relations, Layne and Dueck call themselves "neoclassical realists." This means that they anchor their analyses in questions of the relative power of states and their national interests but allow for the role of other factors, such as ideology and domestic politics. International politics, in this view, is not inexorably condemned to be a Hobbesian tragedy -- but it can turn into one if states are misguided by their illusions.

The United States' physical distance from Eurasia has sometimes tempted it to remain aloof from what happens there. Yet the country has enjoyed such preponderant power that it has also been tempted to impose abroad what Layne calls "Open Door hegemony" -- demanding that countries open their economies, conform to U.S. ideas and institutions, and unquestioningly accept U.S. leadership. Although this situation might seem advantageous, it is (as both authors point out) actually dangerous. Layne shows how Washington's ideologically motivated assertions of hegemony repeatedly provoke fear and resistance abroad, embroiling the United States in costly and counterproductive contests with other countries. Dueck, meanwhile, worries that U.S. policymakers too often try to pursue their liberal goals on the cheap, in ways that risk failure and bring on rash attempts to stave off humiliating defeats.

The two books offer overlapping accounts of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson but trace distinct historical plot lines. Layne focuses on the way that the country has repeatedly squandered its luxuries of power and insularity to pursue the goal of liberal dominance in Eurasia. During World War II, Layne writes, the country aimed to "throttle Germany and Japan" and "knock Britain from its great power perch." When the war was over, the "political collapse of Europe" gave Washington the chance to consolidate its hegemony.

In Layne's telling, confronting the war-weakened Soviet Union was almost an afterthought. Stalin, he claims, actually wanted to pursue détente with the United States and was only dissuaded when the Marshall Plan revealed U.S. intentions to force open Eastern Europe and achieve hegemony on the continent. Layne unconvincingly asserts that Harry Truman could have struck a deal with Stalin to set up Germany as an independent state, thereby reestablishing a balance of power in Eurasia and allowing the United States to withdraw across the Atlantic. But Washington rejected that option; with its "huge superiority in power, it did not need to be overly concerned about how Moscow would respond to American policy." Instead, as Layne quotes the diplomatic historian Melvin Leffler, "American leaders -- moved by a traditional missionary impulse, convinced by their global responsibility, full of the self-confidence that comes of success, fundamentally unhurt by war in a wounded world -- eagerly reached for the mandate of heaven."