Conservative limits to domestic policies forget foreign policy limits also

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WP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012200949.html?nav=hcmodule

Rice's Blind Spot

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday, January 23, 2006

<<snip>>

Even more curiously, Rice was leaning against the tide in her own party. Ever since the 1970s, the heyday of the ultra-realist Henry Kissinger, his followers had been retreating. The realists favored accommodation with pro-American autocrats, but then Iran's shah fell, followed by dictators in the Philippines and South Korea -- and the realists found themselves on the wrong side of history. Likewise, the realists favored detente with the Soviets, but Reagan's denunciations of the evil empire proved more effective. Time and again, the idea that diplomacy consisted mainly of relations with powerful governments proved wrong. As a rising cadre of neoconservative Republicans argued, diplomacy was often about judging the currents within countries -- and backing democratic ones.

Fast-forward to 2006. Rice gave two speeches last week calling for "transformational diplomacy," meaning diplomacy that will transform undemocratic societies: The internal affairs of other countries turn out to be important after all. "The greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them," she said Wednesday. "The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power. In this world it is impossible to draw neat, clear lines between our security interests, our development efforts and our democratic ideals."

Well, that's quite a turnaround. But it's not a completely satisfying one, because the debate has recently moved on. Rice has caught up with the 1990s consensus that powerful states may pose less of a problem than disintegrating weak ones and that the best hope for peace in the long term is a world of stable democracies. But she's only half-acknowledging the next question: Yes, weak and autocratic states are a problem, but can we do anything about them?

The best formulation of this new debate comes from Francis Fukuyama, who famously proclaimed the universality of the democratic urge in his 1989 essay on history's end. Fukuyama certainly believes in spreading U.S. values, but he has emerged as a critic of the Iraq war because he believes its ambitions were unrealizable. The United States lacks the instruments to transform other societies, Fukuyama argues; to build nations you must first build institutions, and nobody knows how to do that. Conservatives, who have long preached the limits to what government can achieve with domestic social policies, should wake up to government's limits in foreign policy as well.

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