IR Folks from Times Past

IR Folks from Times Past

Friday, November 2, 2018

Patrick Lawrence Interview of David Hendrickson

A shorter version of this interview appeared as "David Hendrickson: We Need a 'New Internationlism': The Author and Professor in Conversation, by Patrick Lawrence, in The Nation, November 2, 2018. Below is the full interview, unabridged and unexpurgated. 

Patrick Lawrence: A wise friend called a few months ago to tell me of a book he was assigned to review and thought I should read. When he told me the title, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition, I ordered it immediately. Less than a chapter in, I knew I wanted to include its author in this series of Q&A exchanges. When I called David Hendrickson at Colorado College, where he professes, he asked a few questions about ground rules and readily agreed.

Hendrickson is a vigorous critic of U.S. foreign policy—our wars of adventure and presumption of exceptionalist status, our indifference to international law, the hollow invocations of American ideals, the hypocrisy and double standards. What distinguishes Hendrickson’s thinking, and his new book, is the historical ballast he brings to his argument. He gives full attention to the anti-imperial tradition in U.S. history and traces the “liberal pluralism” (his term) he favors as an alternative American stance back to Jefferson, Hamilton, and others among the “founding fathers.” In our own best ideals do we find all we need to alter course, he argues. 

Andrew Bacevich, the noted critic of American conduct abroad, first told me about Hendrickson in a conversation some years ago. As the exchange with Hendrickson proceeded I understood why: They both share a belief in the American past as the key to a reconstructed future; they both evidence a conservative streak open to “trans-partisan” collaborations to advance toward an alternative foreign policy both view as urgently needed. If there is a better time to hear from a writer from this perspective, I cannot think of when it might be.

Republic in Peril completes a trilogy, the two previous volumes being Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (2003) and Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate Over International Relations, 1789–1941. But in its critique of contemporary events, the new book also marks a departure: He writes squarely in the present tense this time, which makes this the liveliest of his books. Given Hendrickson’s scholarly inclinations, he was refreshingly frank in his assessments of the policies of recent presidents and hot-button questions such as Ukraine, Syria, and the eastward advance of NATO.

We spoke in a mid–Manhattan office lent to us for the occasion. As always, I thank Michael Conway Garofalo for his careful work turning the audio recording into a transcript. 

Patrick Lawrence: One of the very instructive features of the trilogy of books you’ve just finished is the taxonomy you provide—a frame we can use to understand strands of American thinking on foreign policy. The important three are internationalism, imperialism, and nationalism. Each has a deep past, but let’s begin in the present tense.

Using your own nomenclature, how would you describe the Trump administration’s foreign policy? Corollary question: Do you distinguish between Trump and those around Trump? His foreign policy minders, as I call them. I can’t place Trump.

David Hendrickson: He’s an extreme nationalist tending towards imperialism, with a kind of preternatural aversion to anything that smacks of internationalism. Trump’s idea of internationalism is that it’s a sucker’s game. You’re always in danger of getting played. Multilateralism, which is in most contexts synonymous with internationalism, is a way by which the power impulse is moderated. It squints toward principle rather than power, and hence Trump prefers negotiations that occur in a bilateral setting, where the disparity in power is most likely to redound to the advantage of the hegemon. He’s pretty clearly hostile to traditional notions of internationalism.

As to the distinction between Trump and his advisors, yes, one has to distinguish between them because Trump is such an unusual character. It’s extremely disturbing that he’s appointed characters like John Bolton [national security adviser] and Mike Pompeo [secretary of state, formerly CIA director]. If there’s any figure in national security policy that has been more dangerous in his recommendations than John Bolton, I can’t think of him…. Uniformly in his choice of advisors, he’s chosen people who are from the furthest reaches of the Republican Party in terms of their national security thinking and are quite belligerent, quite ready to use force….

As I see the administration, you have a kind of big debate between Bolton and Pompeo on the one hand and Mattis [James Mattis, defense secretary] on the other, with Mattis representing the more cautious view with respect to the use of force. “Mad Dog” Mattis is the last hope of the peaceniks. That’s our world.

PL: The liberal casting of Mattis as the voice of reason does not sit well with me. All is relative.

DH: Military leaders, typically, are somewhat conservative with regard to the initiation of force. They are natively conservative and are conscious of the costs that war may entail. Once engaged, I think as we’ve seen from both Afghanistan and Iraq, they tend to be on the more hawkish side…. That said, I think it’s clearly been the case that Mattis has stood behind the Iran agreement and has been a voice of caution on North Korea.

PL: Fair enough.

DH: The military also is kind of invested in this liturgy of threat inflation. We’re not to look to any far-reaching changes in national strategy from Mattis….

PL: Where do you place Obama’s foreign policy in the long story? I was interested to note, you don’t make much distinction in the new book between Obama and the second Bush administration.

DH: I begin the book with a long litany of the ways in which Obama represented continuity with Bush. Certainly, it is striking that he was elected on an idea that he would end the wars. I personally, and I think many others, were impressed with the fact that he, practically alone among American politicians, had been opposed to the Iraq War.

PL: They were impressed in Oslo, too. [Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.]

DH: Perhaps a bit prematurely. [Laughs] Obama emerged as a kind of prisoner of the security consensus—“The Blob” or “The Washington Playbook,” as he called it in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg [in The Atlantic, April 2016].  Obama typically was the more moderate voice in decisions on the use of force, but he, too, appointed advisors who favored a more advanced stance, so he was frequently alone in those deliberations and found himself trapped.

I have a great regard for Obama. I think the contrast in character between him and Trump is manifest and quite dispiriting. I think Obama was pacifically inclined. But as I argue in the book, that a fellow so pacifically inclined ended up using force as often as he did speaks to the entrenched character of the Washington consensus. I was particularly disappointed about his decisions in Libya, Syria, Ukraine. One would have thought, on the basis of his opposition to the Iraq War that he would have opposed that strategy of overthrow, but he fell right in with it.

PL: I sensed trouble the day [in December 2008] he announced that [Robert] Gates would remain as defense secretary. I said, O. K., this isn’t going to be all that interesting.


DH: And when he appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

PL: Yes. But anyway, how do you identify Obama’s primary error? To me, it has to do with means and ends. Obama tinkered with the means of foreign policy—more drones, fewer direct interventions, a glossier diplomacy, cautious engagement with adversaries, a very attenuated multipolarity—but he left the ends of policy unexamined. Method, not objective. That was Obama’s real mistake. What are your thoughts?

DH: That’s a reasonable way of putting it. Certainly, there wasn’t any great reconsideration of the ends. He has a different rationale for intervention in Libya and Syria than the Bush administration had in its invasion of Iraq, one focused on humanitarian intervention. But both sorts of intervention have catastrophically failed to consider the consequences of state overthrow and what it means for the people in those countries where the state is no more. They had this vision that something good or better would inevitably follow the overthrow of dictators, and, as we’ve seen, it’s catastrophe that follows. That’s a very lamentable failure to anticipate the obvious consequences of obliterating these states.

I would add, parenthetically, that Obama’s record in Syria is so often portrayed as “nonintervention,” but that is a total misreading of what the United States did. We facilitated the funneling of a huge amount of arms to various jihadist groups, and most of those arms ended up the hands of people that are in ideological complexion not that far from al–Qaeda.

PL: I was very refreshed to see how forthrightly you addressed questions like that, Ukraine being another one.

DH: Ukraine is a bit different.

PL: Oh, very, in some ways.

DH: But that also is a total scandal from the standpoint of what liberal internationalism is supposed to stand for. People who advocated the overthrow of Yanukovich, [Viktor Yanukovich was deposed as president in February 2014] clearly stood in violation of democratic norms. He was democratically elected in an election that was reasonably fair, so they transgressed the most fundamental article of faith in democratic constitutionalism, which is that the transfer of power has to take place with elections. And there is a reason for that. If you allow a mob—a large number of people gathered in a public square—to dictate a change in government, in effect you’ve handed over the reins of power to the people who are most vehement, most extreme. And that of course elicited a reaction in the east…. It flows almost inevitably in virtually any polity that if you have a transfer of power without elections, you risk that division into extremes.

Now, there are some circumstances in which that doesn’t take place, and I think most people had in their mind the model of what happened in 1989, in which you did have a kind of national uprising against corrupt governments and they fell away. But that wasn’t the case in Ukraine. Everyone knew that that was a divided society. All the elections they’d had since independence had been very closely contested and had been divided between west and east. So it was extremely irresponsible for the United States to go there and, in effect, promise our support for that method of political change.

PL: Even on the West’s own terms—the E.U.’s and emphatically Washington’s —Yanukovich wanted that agreement [an agreement of association with the European Union]. The E.U. made the conditions impossible. This is all on the record. There was one excellent Reuters correspondent named Elizabeth Piper. She’s now in the London bureau. She had all this. He [Yanukovich] wanted to do this [deal with the E.U.] but couldn’t because the conditions were totally unrealistic. Putin came in with a $15 billion rescue package, and he had to take it.

DH: And of course taking that didn’t mean that the negotiations with the E.U. were at an end.

PL: Well, the E.U. said it was one of the conditions: no more economic and trade relations with Russia….

In any event, let’s go back one more presidential term here at home, and we can move on to other topics. George W. Bush’s first term seems to me one of the most fateful in our lifetimes. What is your analysis of his administration, particularly in the context of his father’s? How does it fit in the historical frame you’ve constructed?

DH: Bush I [George H.W. Bush] was monumentally significant. He set out the basic parameters of U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy at the end of the Cold War. The diplomacy they conducted under the leadership of [Secretary of State] James Baker, I felt, was very statesmanlike in bringing the Cold War in Europe to an end. They made a set of assurances that the United States subsequently abrogated with respect to the expansion of NATO.

The great thing that he did, though, which really did set the tone as well as establish a set of new problems for the United States, was his conduct in the first Gulf War. That was hugely significant in creating America’s terrorism problem in its modern form. That was the motivation—revenge—that animated Osama bin Laden in the attacks of 9/11. I remember at that time thinking that surely there would be some kind of consequence for this overwhelming use of U.S. force against an Arab country, which was something that we had never done before. The footprint of American military power in the greater Middle East was actually quite limited during the Cold War…. It was only in 1980, with the development of the Rapid Deployment Force and the Carter Doctrine, that you first began to get a substantial military footprint, but it was primarily offshore.

To use force in so overwhelming a fashion was a catastrophe for Iraq’s civilian population—the destruction of the infrastructure, the bombing of an Arab capital, all of what attended it. I think al–Qaeda and bin Laden were a kind of logical consequence of that.

PL: I never understood it that way. That’s interesting.

DH: Well, people don’t actually go back and read the statements. They always say, “Oh, it was that the United States established military bases in Saudi Arabia, which contains the two holiest sites in Islam, that most enraged bin Laden.” But he [bin Laden] said very clearly that it was what the United States did with those bases, its use of force. He dwelled quite frequently on the number of Arabs who were killed in consequence of that war. While Americans were high-fiving about this glorious military triumph, it in effect created a new situation in our relations with the Arab world and also led to an expansion of commitments that is subsequently elaborated upon and entrenched by subsequent administrations. It’s important to remember that in considering the significance of H.W.’s son.

PL: And so to George W.

DH: Clearly, W. was a more dangerous character than his old man, and I think had a view of the use of force that was much more reckless…. In its strategic doctrine, the George W. Bush administration is undoubtedly much more dangerous. For the first time, we get a set of strategic doctrines that really do squint at domination of the international system: For the first time, we get a set of strategic doctrines that really do squint at domination of the international system: an emphatic assertion of U.S. military supremacy that would be so great that no one would even think of contesting it; doctrines of preventive war, baldly violating the UN Charter; the imposition of democracy by force, in defiance of the traditional American doctrine; unilateralism, or indifference to the opinion of allies and of the larger world; and, finally, the vast expansion of the universal panopticon and the surveillance state.
Those five doctrines, to me, really are different from those of the outlook of both Bush I and Clinton. They point toward a much more revolutionary approach of the United States in the world, and were adopted in the furnace of resentment created by 9/11, which in certain respects has been revived by the Trump administration.

Obama was very reluctant to embrace those, but he was also reluctant to repudiate them entirely. He was a kind of fellow traveler with regard to those doctrines…. In terms of the larger creed, there’s a lot of continuity there. This speaks to your point about the failure of Obama to really give any kind of reconsideration to the ends of foreign policy.

PL: Which I think is the most urgent way to go at it….


Republic in Peril concludes a trilogy, but it seems apart from the other two at the same time. In the first, you were a constitutional historian and a political scientist; in the second, a historian writing with, as you put it, “a modicum of detachment.” There’s a lot more of you in the new one, it seems to me, which I think is a source of its exceptional power, its importance. If I have this right, what prompted the shift?

DH: Those two earlier books were written in more of an academic mode. In my dual role as historian and political scientist, I’m kind of both and neither, in a sense. I think the big thing that separates the two is that Republic in Peril is very much addressed to the present predicaments of U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, all the central arguments in my present work are drawn from those earlier works. There’s a lot of anti-imperialism in them, but also a prolonged investigation of internationalism, showing that it’s a fraud upon the word to identify that peace-inducing philosophy with the Bush Doctrine.

In those earlier books, particularly Union, Nation or Empire, but also true of Peace Pact as well, I was trying to diagnose the argument and help people understand what it had been. I felt that there were a lot of aspects of that traditional story that had been misunderstood or neglected, and it was important to me to speak in an historical mode and often to give voice to people with whom I might have disagreed but who stated one form of the great argument I was trying to develop. I think it’s important for people to understand past actors on their own terms, to try to recover what they thought and open ourselves to the argument they had.

PL: Writing now, in Republic in Peril, you make frequent reference to a point of departure 20 to 25 years ago. You’ve explained why you land there—it was the H.W. administration. I want to put something to you about September 11, and why I feel that was a decisive moment quite beyond the tragedy of it all.

It seemed to me afterward that the true, deep injury that Americans suffered was psychological. We lost our providential immunity that morning. We no longer stood outside history. We have been, it seems to me, in a weakened position ever since. It awakened what amounts now to an absolutely insatiable insistence on total security. In my view, the American Century ended, with odd precision, at 9 o’clock that morning. It lasted 103 years, taking my date from the Spanish-American War. I think its ending was a deep psychological wound. What are your thoughts in response to this framing?

DH: Well, absolutely it was. It gave a huge boost to all of these mad doctrines of domination and, as you put it, of absolute security. I’m not sure I would accept the idea that it brought the American Century to a close. In a sense, it introduces a set of doctrines and propensities that will almost certainly do that, because it gave a great boost to these ideas of domination that can only end badly, given the actual resources of the country.

So, yes, it was a decisive moment. I remember being, as everyone was, in a state of shock for many months thereafter, and mourning in particular the likely consequence of it, which emerged very clearly with the strategic doctrine of the Bush administration. Those things existed previously in the 1990s; there was a group of people who wanted to overthrow Saddam, the Project for a New American Century being the outstanding example. With the end of the Cold War, Krauthammer [the late Charles Krauthammer] wrote this essay that ended saying, If we’re looking for a new strategic doctrine, I suggest we go all the way and aim at nothing short of universal dominion. [Laughs]

PL: Put that in print, did he?

DH: Yes, he did. Those ambitions were announced the moment the Soviet Union withdrew from Eastern Europe. This was before the Soviet Union had fallen apart. But 9/11 was the electric shock that gave those ideas a vivacity and power. The great irony of the current moment with respect to this question of security is, I think, almost invariably all of these projects put forward in the name of ensuring the security of the United States do the opposite. That’s true with respect not only to our military commitments, for reasons that I’d be happy to get into, but I think most dramatically true with respect to these doctrines of surveillance and cyber warfare.

The United States, for several decades, basically took the view that if we could penetrate the systems of other states and peoples, learn everything we could about them, adopt a Stasi–like model for collecting intelligence, that we would have a great leg up on other peoples. That was something that existed even before the end of the Cold War. The security state always resisted efforts for robust encryption because it would affect their ability to penetrate the systems of others. So what we’ve had after all that is a realm in cyberspace that’s extremely vulnerable, in which our attempt to penetrate others has yielded an Internet infrastructure in which everyone is vulnerable, including our basic infrastructure. That’s a perfect symbol for this larger phenomenon in which the search for absolute security yields its opposite.

As I say, I think that’s true with regard to our military commitments around the world. That would be true even if we had defensive doctrines, because even under those circumstances, if we position ourselves in the near-abroad of other great powers and have a military doctrine resting on military supremacy, that inevitably creates a stand-off in which one wrong, boneheaded move can lead to disaster. I’ve been likening it recently to an investment strategy of selling volatility—the basic point is that almost all the time that makes money, but one day you get wiped out and the fund closes down. When you have a strategic doctrine resting upon ideas of escalation dominance, you’re just a few steps away from a serious disaster…. As you suggest, they’re driven by this notion that it is possible to achieve absolute security. And it’s not, the big danger being that absolute security for you means absolute insecurity for others. That’s not a formula that I think can be successful over the long run.

PL: Let’s go back into the first two volumes, as there’s so much rich, useful history in them. I was very taken with your counter-conventional account of the founding. There was very little national identity among the 13 states as late as the 1770s. Only the war drew the states together, and afterward the threat of disunity was such that very few on either side of the Atlantic gave the new nation much chance of survival. This was so interesting to me. As you say in the book, it’s at odds with conventional scholarship.

Hence the Constitution as a “peace pact.” The implication is startling to consider: Do Americans need an enemy to sustain unity? Can America exist without one? I’ve been asking this question since the Cold War years and now discover the question is 250 years old. It’s rather scary to contemplate that all along we’ve depended on enemies. Or am I connecting dots that shouldn’t be there?

DH: Well, I would be a bit skeptical about connecting those dots. To say that we need an enemy today and that we’ve got a serious problem in the way in which we think about our enemies is absolutely the case. We have a cultural tendency that, partly arising from the manifold character of American power and its munificence, has given us the luxury of indulging a cultural trait in which we impute to these adversary states a set of characteristics that is really a product of our perfervid imagination rather than something that arises from careful consideration of what they’re about.

In the present circumstance, the way Russia and Putin are spoken of is a classic illustration of this. That has gone so far beyond the bounds of any reasoned analysis, and in my view basically consists of the chattering classes reading one another and inventing various speculative hypotheses that inevitably put the adversary in the worst possible place, and then reinforcing one another because that’s the only thing they even consider.

PL: I’m so glad you said that, David.

DH: I just think that this is a very deleterious but quite manifest feature of our contemporary situation.

It’s also true, though, that states have security problems. Contrary to statements often made that the United States didn’t have a security problem in the first 150 years of its existence, I try to argue that, in fact, it did. It wasn’t so much from foreign states such as Great Britain, although that existed, but from one another. The great security problem, as it’s framed in the Federalist papers and which is ubiquitous in the writings of the period is this danger that in the absence of establishing a union dedicated to peaceful methods for resolving disputes, the states of the union—really, the two rival sections of north and south, in particular—would find themselves in war.

I came across this through an intensive study of the primary sources of the period. You couldn’t read those sources without encountering that idea repeatedly. It wasn’t a made-up view…. It was very real, and of course it did ultimately end in the Civil War, the largest war of the 19th century in Western civilization. Thinking about early American history in those terms makes the federal union something much less than a nation. The nation is established only with the outcome of the Civil War…. 

One of the interesting features of this, therefore, is that because the United States in effect was itself a kind of international system, a unique federative system in world history, American thought about federalism has a kind of quasi-international character.

PL: You’re going to my next question. The “nation made of nations,” as you argue it is to be understood, considered it had forged a new model in international relations. The balance of power among individual states was to give way to the “unionist paradigm,” as you call it. Nations were to act in concert. There was something larger than the nation-state. The new United States was going to change Europe, which is to say the world at that time.

Do we have to look back more than a century before Wilson to find the root of America’s pretense to be the light of the world?

DH: I wouldn’t exaggerate the degree to which early thinkers believed that the United States was going to be the agent of the world’s transformation. They did hold out some expectation that the successful establishment of a federal union in North America would provide a kind of template for others to do the same. It was a very common idea in the 19th century that the successful establishment of a federal union in North America had tremendous implications, particularly for Europe. That’s what Europe needed. And that, in a sense, is what Europe got. There was a lot of significance in the experience of the United States for Europeans, which did dawn on them in the aftermath of the Second World War and which provided a certain kind of model for this federative system that has emerged in Europe over the last couple of generations.

PL: Think of Joschka Fisher’s phrase: the United States of Europe. [Fischer spoke at Humboldt University in Berlin, May 2000.]

DH: Well, yes. I think all Europeans who have thought carefully about this have considered the American example. Now, I don’t say as a consequence of that, as some people perhaps mistakenly did, that Europe’s solution consists of an exact duplication of the institutional arrangements that were embodied in the federal constitution. I don’t think that’s appropriate for Europe. The European Union has to be considered on its own terms. It’s a very peculiar construction that developed alongside the presence of the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If you look at its distribution of powers and functions, it’s quite the oddity in federal or international organization, because it has a very attenuated development in the security function, that having been performed largely by NATO. And it lacks the power to tax, which was fundamental to the creation of the national government created by the U.S. Constitution.

But in certain fundamental respects, it does resemble this early experiment in federalism that was conducted in the United States. In particular, what sustains it is a kind of fear of divorce or dissolution, and the memory that Europe might go back to the system that produced 1914 or 1939. I share that view. I think that’s an insight that the European peoples need to keep forever in mind, and that they have to establish some basic bond of unity….

PL: I was struck by your forthright observation that American foreign policy has always been a question of aspiration rather than reality, and I hope you can reflect on that. It seems to me that from the moment of formal independence, given we broke faith with the French in the very act of settling up with the British, to be “policy as aspiration.” Are there other examples of this in history? The ideals, the principles we set as the fundament of our foreign policy were more to be aspired to than they were realities.

DH: I do say in Peace Pact that prior to the formation of the Constitution, there was a set of objectives that had been stated in theory but had not been realized in practice. But they were, in principle, realizable; they weren’t utopian aspirations. If one considers the overall record of early American foreign policy, there was a kind of realism and moderation about a great many of those objectives that has been altogether lacking today. They felt that the American experiment did hold lessons for other people, and I continue to believe that, in the sense that if one understands that experiment in terms of a set of ideas—that governments should be representative, that they should respect individual rights, and so forth—those are good pieces of advice.

At the same time, one can only pursue those objectives within a context in which it’s recognized that every people has to figure out those things for themselves, that outsiders don’t have the right to impose them, certainly not by force, on others. One conceives it more in terms of a sort of international dialogue in which we kind of try to show that our system—or at least the ideals underlying our system, not necessarily the reality of what it’s become—do hold lessons for others, just as their experience may hold lessons for us. It does follow that if we want to be a schoolmarm to the world we should also occasionally listen to what our students have to say about things….

PL: If you could do a computer search of the critical literature on our foreign policy, you would have a formidable count of the word “betrayal.” We’ve betrayed our own allies; we’ve betrayed ourselves. I wonder when you think that tendency first appeared. In Union, Nation or Empire, you explain that imperialism was among the three possible ways to think of ourselves from the beginning. But as you point out, “imperialism,” “nationalism,” and “internationalism” weren’t actually used until sometime in the second half of the 19th century.

DH: Right, all of those “–isms” are part of the development of thought, but the ideas underlying them were there and go back much further.

PL: When do you date the first important manifestation of the imperial impulse? Was it 1846, Polk’s war with Mexico? Earlier, with the westward expansion? How should we think of this?

DH: The American experience was always somewhat double-sided. While Americans were deliberating on the formation of their union, from the first settlements there were imperial aspects of that story in relation to the indigenous peoples. It’s also true, and something forgotten in our retrospective constructions, that the federal government was seen in many periods as a kind of moderating influence. If one looks at the Indian policy of the national government from 1789 until the 1830s, there were people in Washington reflecting the sensibilities of New England that did want to elaborate a set of principles that would treat the Indians of North America in a just fashion. Now, Jackson abrogated a lot of those understandings with his Indian Removal Act.

PL: Jackson was as key a figure as we have him down for, then?

DH: Oh, I think so, yes. Certainly in his attitude toward the Native Americans: He wanted to tear up all of those treaties made by the founding generation. And there was a kind of inexorable character to expansion that made dispossession an inherent part of the story. At the same time, if one looks at some of the principles elaborated by people like Washington, there were sincere humanitarian sentiments associated with that encounter that ought not be forgotten…. There was an attempt, as in the case of the Five Civilized Tribes, to impart various means of cultivating the soil, for example, that looked toward the establishment of self-governing communities that would have a right to determine their own affairs—where the founders understood that it was not our responsibility to change their ways of life, or at least to do so only with their consent and as a consequence of their seeing that this was a good way to increase their population and to establish their rights….
 
Thinking about the broader scope of American history, yes, it’s undoubtedly the case that the Mexican War represents a kind of foretaste, in a way, of the Bush Doctrine. It’s trumped up, for one thing. “American blood has been shed on American soil.” It had a lot of similar aspects to the things the United States has done of late. Of course, then the Spanish–American War and especially the occupation of the Philippines, which led to a very bloody war and which really also features a kind of demonization or dehumanization of the adversary that bears some real resemblance to contemporary times.

I wrote those chapters dealing with the Spanish–American War with the Iraq War of 2003 as a backstage, as it were. So much of the argument over imperialism in the context of the Philippine Insurrection really does resemble the 21st century.

PL: Have you read [Stephen] Kinzer’s book, The True Flag?

DH: I actually haven’t. I’ve read a lot of Kinzer over the years and of course I admire him greatly.

PL: One of the striking things about that book is the language in which people discussed what was at issue—empire, democracy, are we imperialists?—right on the Senate floor…. I treasure that book just for the quotations alone. Plain, direct speaking.  

DH: My scholarship is dedicated in many respects to recovering that very rich language. I love the old anti-imperialists. They saw certain things very clearly, and also understood that the ideals of the Republic and ideals that we would associate with liberalism are not simply, although they can be, a cover for imperialism and exploitation; more important, and more accurately, they are a means of self-correction and of renovation, in the sense of pointing a path towards a better future. That is often in danger of being lost in reconstructions of the American past….

PL: The language is magnificent.

DH: Yes, absolutely.

PL: And we don’t have that language anymore. We lost it.

A follow-on question that’s related to this word I seem to have developed a preoccupation with: “betrayal.” It’s just not clear to me any longer, and it hasn’t been for a while, whether America is capable of the principled internationalism we talk about in any serious meaning of the term. We seem to have lost our ability to act with detachment for the greater good. “R2P” and humanitarian intervention—these are excellent ideas if you read them on paper, but I don’t find us reliable or trustworthy to act according to our own principles. Are we capable of a meaningful internationalism at this point in our story?

DH: Well, probably not, but I hope so. You can’t ever give up hope about bringing the country back to a better sense of itself, but certainly it is true that the present indications are not auspicious in this regard…. A key element in doing that is recovering a sense of our own limitations. I don’t find that to be such a wild idea. All of us should have that sense about ourselves—that we are not all-seeing, all-knowing, all-virtuous, and such…. It’s a kind of national myopia. This idea that the United States has some right to determine upon the future of other lands about which, almost inevitably, the American public knows little or nothing, and where our elites bring a set of prejudices that are very deeply held—that’s a dangerous state of affairs…. We need some self-reflection and a greater sense of modesty about the inherent limitations of our knowledge and the distorting ways in which our cultural filters lead us to interpret what’s going on elsewhere in the world.

PL: I don’t think there’s a rational argument for what we’re doing now. It doesn’t hold up to any argument based on proper principles. It just doesn’t. I tend toward psychological explanations. Not to the exclusion of politics and history, but I do tend toward the psychological dimension…. I take it as an unconscious response to the pressing arrival of various 21st century realities that we are simply not ready to accept. In other words, I think we’re a frightened people.

DH: And that is so paradoxical. Because by virtue of American power, which, though diminishing is still quite real, as compared with other nations; and by virtue of our geographic position, we should be the most secure people on earth.

PL: I’d like to consider Wilsonianism in this context. Did the Wilsonian ideal ever achieve its purported meaning? If you read Wilson himself on, say, the Philippines, it was cloaked imperialism from the outset, one might at least argue. Empire abroad, democracy at home—one or the other, but not both: That’s my possibly simplistic equation.

DH: I think there’s a real truth to your simple formulation, that there’s a choice between the two of those. Wilson himself is a protean figure, and there are some valuable things in Wilson that need also to be recalled in addition to the deleterious things. Certainly the most deleterious thing in Wilson is this crusading impulse. One of the perverse arguments in my book with regard to Wilson is that he’s not really the wild democratist and forerunner of the Bush doctrine that he’s often taken to be….

PL: This is a subtler reading of Wilson than most of us are familiar with. Please continue.

DH: People fail to understand that his idea of collective action was hitched to the preservation of the society of states and to the national independence of states. He wanted the states to renounce the right to invade their neighbors, the right of outsiders to determine the form of government that the people themselves in a given territory had to figure out. He said so in his great speech in Pueblo, right before he collapsed in 1919.

The problematic element of Wilson’s vision was how those principles were to be enforced. The great question is the role the United States should play—whether the United States should be the principal enforcer of those principles across the world. I don’t think so. I think that’s dangerous for the world and dangerous for the enforcer, to have one power, in its infinite wisdom, make all of those determinations…. And this is true of Franklin Roosevelt as well. If you look back at the kind of international order Wilson and Roosevelt tried to bring into being, it’s very different from the sort of aspirations that emerged in the post–Cold War period, in which our purpose was the expansion of democracy everywhere, with a somewhat more moderate version of that being offered by Clinton and a very bellicose version of it being offered by Bush II….

PL: I want to go right into your discussions of the imperialism inherent in the anti-imperialist tradition. It’s wonderful to read about it, but I would like you to dilate for the sake of the readers of this interview. I think it would be useful to talk about humanitarian interventionism and R2P in this context. Are these our versions of “the imperialism of the anti-imperial tradition”?

DH: R2P would be an instance of that, especially as it’s been interpreted by unilateralists. If you look at that document the Canadian commission produced, it has a whole series of provisos and restrictions with regard to the use of force that in fact we have violated when we have conducted these interventions. That’s really a more careful document than this idea that exists in the popular imagination that if there’s a chemical attack somewhere based on somewhat suspect evidence, then of course we have a right to send the cruise missiles flying. That’s something that I think is quite opposite in spirit to some of the things that were urged in the original R2P document. [The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, was published in Ottawa, 2001.]

Now, with regard to the imperialism of anti-imperialism, I try to show that if you want to understand the overall dynamics of the debate over American foreign policy, opposition to imperialism plays a fundamental role always, on both sides of the argument. That is, justifications for the use of force are invariably accompanied by argumentation against an imperialist Other.

PL: Is that what we’re talking about in Ukraine? Is that our template?

DH: Well, certainly. The advocates of a forward American stance and those who justify what happened in Ukraine are always going on about Russian imperialism, just as they go on about Chinese imperialism and Iranian imperialism. So the argument on behalf of the use of force—and I do see the foreign policy debate in its core as revolving around justifications for and against the use of force—tend to feature very strong anti-imperialist sentiments. Of course, those opposing force, in which camp I place myself, also point to the obvious features in which the use of force encourages domination and those things associated with imperialism. But I do think that we don’t understand it properly if we see the advocates of imperialism making arguments for U.S. domination…. It’s almost always advanced in the context of  opposition to imperialist practices of other states.

PL: Internal dissolution, the dominance of foreign powers—these have been our driving fears ever since our Machiavellian moment when the American Republic as a timeless ideal took earthly form. And here we are in 2018: enemies everywhere, even if we have to invent them; fearful we are collapsing from within. Are these two types of fear simply incurable within us? They seem to be in the water we drink.

DH: The internal dissolution question, I think, has changed dramatically over the course of 200 years and assumed very different shapes. In the early period, from the Articles of Confederation up until the Civil War, it was overwhelmingly focused on the sectional problem. After the Civil War, people in the 1890s—among the propertied classes, at least—feared some kind of class warfare. And of course that was prominent in the 1930s. Over the last generation in the United States, I think the fear of dissolution centers on the loss of faith and a kind of national creed that we can all share as Americans: the prospect of a dissolution into sort of rival identity groups.  

Those are all very different things, and not necessarily connected with foreign policy, although they can be. One would have to look at the particular historical circumstances….

PL: I was very pleased to see the lengthy concluding chapter in Republic in Peril, which you gave to an alternative foreign policy. It’s good, detailed material. Can you summarize the thesis, and especially identify what you would say is the starting point for such a project? You’re calling it a New Internationalism.

DH: Yes, a New Internationalism. I don’t think we can’t just withdraw from the world. Although, frankly, I do think that we need a retrenchment in our military posture and doctrines vis-á-vis the rest of the world. That’s the source of a lot of our problems. At the same time, there are a wide variety of issues of a global character that we as Americans, with other nations, need to address. I take seriously the danger of climate change, what is happening to the world’s oceans, the danger of pandemics. A theme that I didn’t elaborate as extensively as I ought to have done is that international rivalry with other powers—with Russia, with China, with Iran—actually inhibits cooperation on a lot of these problems. If you go back to 2014 and look at all of those series of projects that we had with Russia that were thrown out, canceled, eliminated, you get a sense of the price to be paid for having situations of confrontation with these other powers….  That’s especially relevant to the Russophobia now ascendant among the Democratic Party. They don’t appreciate how dangerous their rhetoric against Russia is—which I regard as just wildly exaggerated.

PL: I hold the same view.

DH: A New Internationalism, in my reckoning, means a return to the older internationalism. By the older internationalism I mean ideas of international concert that one can find in figures such as Wilson and Roosevelt, the latter particularly…. I also mean a return to a pluralistic conception of international order, in which there is a recognition that diversity of regime types is in fact a feature of the political world that’s going to exist forever.

If you make the change of other regimes the central purpose of your foreign policy, you’re acting in a way Kant described as characteristic of the unjust enemy. That is, you’re setting forth a principle that makes peace impossible among the nations of the world. We have a tendency to regard all of our adversaries as unjust enemies. Taking the Kantian definition of that seriously, I think the ideas of the universal expansion of democracy and human rights as found, for example, in the Bush Doctrine, really fits that definition quite precisely.

The other thing to be said about that is how totally counterproductive it’s been.

PL: Yes. There’s nothing to show for it.

DH: Some of the things Putin has done with regard to shutting down NGOs is purely a consequence of the confrontation that we’ve had with him. These policies—going to Moscow and denouncing Putin, as [Senator Marco] Rubio threatened to do during his presidential campaign; going to Beijing, and so on—in practice, that has the effect opposite to what the promoters of human rights and democracy want….

PL: To me, two questions are raised by your conception of a New Internationalism. One: Are we able to renovate not only our methods, but also our intentions, our purpose? It’s techne, the how, and telos, the what, the purpose. Addressing the latter could hardly be more fundamental to our identity, our idea of ourselves, and indeed our ideology, and it is a very formidable thing to think about how we might do that.

DH: Absolutely.

PL: It’s almost just too big a task.

DH: Yes, I agree with you that a reconsideration of that is fundamental. But there are resources in the American tradition that I try to recover that do point to a better direction. There are conceptions of internationalism even among the people that are touted as the forerunners of today’s conception of internationalism, like Wilson and Roosevelt. Some of the heresies of the Bush Doctrine, in particular, are manifestly in contradiction with the earlier statements of the American purpose. So as a patriotic duty, one might say, it would behoove us to inquire into those elements of the American tradition that might affect an alteration of what our telos actually is.

I noted that in your preface of your book [Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century, 2013], you mention a kind of founding-father adoration as one of sins besetting us. I think differently in that regard. I think there are great sources of philosophical instruction in those writings—not only of the founders but also of the generation to follow, as I seek to illuminate in these various historical works. You just have to understand them in a certain way.

PL: I’m not at all in disagreement.

DH: There’s a certain irony there, in that most academics who look back to the founders do so to inculcate lessons that are opposite to the ones that I would draw. I have noted that over the years…. As I say, I regard people like Jefferson and Hamilton and Franklin and Madison as being great sources of instruction. But they can’t tell us how to act in the present; their circumstances were totally different.

PL: Like the Originalists. Their essential argument is: “No, we must not think for ourselves. We’re not up to that.” It’s very diminishing. This is my objection.

DH: One of the sources of philosophical instruction that you get from Jefferson is that that’s a mistake. Every generation has to work these things out for itself.

PL: Are our institutions capable of self-correction such that a renovation is possible to our polity as currently constituted? My answer is bitter, but not entirely so. I say no, but I award us the capacity to be the makers of our own history. The nation founded by way of great change can change greatly. In other words, I’m saying restoration is out of the question. We have to start again.

No one is raised to live through a moment of significant history, especially in postwar, consumerist, suburban America. I think psychologically we’re not ready for it, but this is our moment and we need to recognize it, the sooner the better.

DH: Certainly our political institutions have become very corrupt and dysfunctional. It’s so difficult to see how they can reform themselves. The role of money in elections, just to take one example, is illustrative…. You also have a series of blockages in our political institutions that make it very difficult for a change to occur. That 60–vote rule in the Senate is basically a guarantee that nothing fundamental can change.

PL: And we can’t afford that is my point.

DH: …. It is true that the institutions of the world’s oldest republic have become encrusted in a way that makes any sort of change very difficult to conceive of, much less implement. However, it’s the responsibility of intellectuals to think about what those sorts of changes might be, to try to describe them, and to hope that they can make a persuasive case that will have some resonance in the larger public sphere. That’s about all that we can do, and we have to hang onto our hope that people will pay attention.

PL: Fair enough. My point is that the very act of thinking anew, the very process I urge, would be an emancipation of our imaginations in and of itself. In other words, we have to step outside of the familiar. You properly resisted any suggestion that your thinking is nostalgic…. We have to do things we haven’t done before. If we look at the founders, they were original thinkers if they were anything. Maybe that’s the first thing we can draw from them.

DH: I tend to be a conservative, in the sense of believing that most fundamental predicaments have been thought about previously. In politics, there are few things that are entirely new under the sun. Obviously, there are new challenges that the contemporary world faces that are in many ways quite unprecedented with regard to things like climate change that require new ways of thinking about institutions and how to address that. But in terms of the larger questions of foreign policy, there’s a set of philosophical issues that come around all the time and for which reading what past thinkers have thought is a useful way of considering things anew. I don’t think that those two things are really inconsistent with one another….

PL: As things are now, we do not seem at all ready to grasp a considerable range of 21st century realities. We’re a powerful nation, in a distinction I make, but not a strong nation. Can you address that point?

DH: … If one compares the kind of outlook that existed in Washington for the last 50 years with that of today, in terms of willingness of people on both sides of the aisle to deal constructively with future problems, it’s momentously lacking. One would contrast, for example, the success of the Social Security Commission, which gathered in the 1980s and made a series of changes that improved the long-term viability of that program—that would be very difficult to imagine occurring in today’s Washington. If one contrasts, for example, the kinds of plans that the Chinese are capable of, thinking in terms of decades with regard to their future development, that kind of thing is really absent in Washington, with the exception of military procurement and our military-industrial complex.

PL: All of what you’ve said leads me back to this point we discussed earlier. We must understand the distinction between addressing the means of policy and the purpose of policy, and as long as we leave the latter unconsidered, we’re not really going to get anywhere…. I don’t think our institutions as they have evolved—or let’s say evolved downward or in a poor direction—are capable of opening the national discourse to a fundamental reconsideration of purpose. What are we doing in the world? Never mind how we’re doing it. Do you share my concern here?

DH: Oh, absolutely. The dominant media, at least, display no attention to the kind of longer-range questions that you raise, as well as to those questions of purpose. There’s a tremendous amount of discussion of foreign policy, but tremendously little discussion of the fundamentals of foreign policy as they’re reflected in these basic ideas of what our purpose should be.

In the course of the Cold War and post–Cold War epoch, a very subtle but manifest change has taken place in that regard. With respect to questions of war and peace, the generation that fought the Second World War did so with the slogan “Never Again.” Of course, that had been Wilson’s slogan… But in the last 70 years we’ve become rather acclimated to war and to a certain way of considering our adversaries in the world that has made it very easy to forget that the purpose of all of this really was the preservation of peace. It made us forget a lot of the lessons inculcated in previous generations as to means of achieving peace. For example, if one were to go back and look at American discourse on international relations in the late 19th century and into the 20th century, there was a great emphasis on the idea of arbitration and the willingness of the United States to submit itself to arbitral tribunals….

PL: And at this point we won’t even enter into those institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, even when we call upon the authority of those institutions.

DH: Certainly, our willingness to participate in that has been radically attenuated….  So many of the major powers effectively remove themselves from any kind of effective jurisdiction, so therefore war crimes committed by major powers are not going to get passed upon by the International Criminal Court. That violates the fundamental principle of law, to have it applied to one group of powers but not to others.

The other difficulty with it is that most conflicts, I think, need to be settled politically. That is, if you don’t intend to utterly defeat the adversary on the field of battle and to subject that adversary to victor’s terms, you have to be prepared to enter into a negotiation. One of the central elements of such a negotiation would be to waive punishment for certain crimes in the name of peace. If one looks at a number of conflicts that have been settled through negotiation, some kind of amnesty, some kind of refusal to press onward to the ultimate demands of justice, is required.

So when you substitute the judicial process for a political process, in effect there’s the danger that the hands of diplomats will be tied and they will not be able to offer those kinds of incentives—for example, the sending a despot to a remote village—that would be necessary to convince a warlord to step down from power. That’s a question of how one goes about diplomatic settlement that I think the ICC can inhibit rather than encourage.

PL: In other words, negotiation has more promise than adjudication, because adjudication is automatically going to produce and unhappy side, and the underlying conflicts, whatever they are, are not going to be resolved by a court decision.

DH: Putting the point more broadly, a judicial process cannot bring to bear the necessary resources that would be part of what we think of as a durable political settlement….

PL: In the books, it’s good to read the history of debates on foreign policy choices. But put this history against Washington today: There is no debate! The Times boasts, ritualistically every year, of our great “foreign policy consensus,” the one area where Americans are in agreement. I see nothing whatsoever virtuous about such a consensus. I wonder, what is the story of our loss of serious debate? I’d love to hear you think out loud about that.

DH: Of course there is a big debate if you read widely enough. There’s a wide range of journals, news outlets, internet sites, that prosecute the debate over American foreign policy. The difficulty is that it seems not to reach the precincts of New York and Washington, such that the major media, the Congress, all of the major institutions in American life take that consensus that you speak of for granted and really allow nothing in the way of challenges to it.

One of the most recent examples of this is the brouhaha over the supposed chemical attack in Douma by Assad and his forces. [The alleged attack occurred outside Damascus in April.] I followed that very closely and read, for example, the journalism of Robert Fisk [of The Independent] and others, who made it into Douma shortly after the attack. I don’t think there has been any recognition in the major media in the United States that that the story propagated by the White Helmets is very dubious and has a lot of holes in it. It doesn’t make sense and is inconsistent with the eyewitness accounts of many of the people who were interviewed. That contrary take on what happened in Douma is the correct one—that it wasn’t used by Assad and his forces and the event was, in effect, staged by the White Helmets. And yet, was that reported on CNN? Was that reported in the Times or the Post? I don’t think so.

When I talk about that with some of my students and other people, they can be quite critical. They’ve never heard of this. It’s the first time that they’ve heard that the story put out by the intelligence agencies has a lot of problems with it. That’s an isolated but representative example. It doesn’t speak so much to the point you were raising about the absence of a kind of wide-ranging debate in Washington, but it’s indicative of the general tenor.

I will say there are people in Washington who have tried to break apart the consensus and who have contributed to the debate. I think of people like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul or Rand Paul or Barbara Lee or Tulsi Gabbard. There are a number of figures out there who have gone against the grain. But you don’t get much coverage of them, and you simply don’t get it on the media most people see and read. CNN thinks the only people qualified to comment on American foreign policy are retired generals or retired spies….

PL: Newspaper and broadcast editors are among the most pernicious gatekeepers in this society, in my view. It is, in some considerable measure, they who make possible the very narrow range of debate in Washington.  There’s the related question of public apathy, which I find astonishing at this point.

DH: That is, of course, a very complicated thing. There’s something about living in the land of milk and honey where it is possible to simply live your life indifferent to matters of the public weal…. Questions of foreign policy seem rather remote to most people. The all–American way of war, in which we can bomb from afar and ostensibly escape the consequences, also contributes to that absence of a great pushback.

Having said this, I think that there’s very considerable anxiety about our foreign entanglements and our ongoing wars. There’s the opportunity for some kind of pushback in this regard that would challenge this massive consensus that exists between the political parties on those questions.

How to bring that about? I don’t know. I’ve been speculating with the idea that people on the right and the left need to reach across the aisle and overcome some of their differences to form a peace party that would stand against both the Republicans and the Democrats with regard to the warfare state. I do think the majority of the public would actually be attracted to that.

PL: I agree.

DH: That is, there’s a difference between the court and the country in the way in which they think about these things. However, it is also true that barring some kind of catastrophe abroad, the dominant concerns of the public tend to be rather remote from these foreign policy quarrels….

PL: You raise an interesting point. Somebody else I interviewed for this series said that until we have a major crisis there is little to no prospect of serious change in the direction of American foreign policy. Do you subscribe?

DH: That’s probably true. That’s how big things change in history—in reaction to big events, major crises. Over the last 10 years, the Iraq War, though it elicited very considerable opposition from the public at the time, nevertheless did not dislodge the great consensus among the elites. It’s almost as if failure in Iraq reaffirmed the consensus for them. I find it to be quite astonishing that that should be the case. I don’t think that is the case with regard to the public, but for the elites I think that generalization does hold.

The military-industrial complex and the national security state have been very adept at disguising the costs. The costs are disguised through debt. The costs are disguised through our way of war. So, yes, given that state of affairs it is difficult to see how major change would take place. Even if a candidate were elected and spoke for a different foreign policy, there would be hell to pay in terms of pushback from the prominent media and all of the associated interests supporting the war state.

PL: Despair is too strong a word, David. It’s not a place anyone wants to go.

DH: Oh, it depends on which day of the week you find me. [Laughs] I still have some hope. I’ll keep on hoping as long as anyone will hope with me.

PL: Again, our institutions do not seem to have the necessary dynamism, or maybe elasticity, to manage what you and I are in agreement needs to get done. The project seems to be, as you were saying, to distance the American public from the consequences of our behavior abroad.

Reflect back to the Nixon decision to terminate the draft. That was taken as a victory for the antiwar movement, and indeed, it was. But think about the consequences tumbling down the decades. It now seems to be a departure point in a long project to remove the American public from the conduct of American foreign policy.

DH: I agree, and I’m not sure what the answer is—the reinstitution of the draft or some form of national service. I have such high regard for Andrew Bacevich, and he’s written about the implications of the all-volunteer force. I don’t think we actually need a military establishment anywhere near the size of the one that we have…. I tend to favor education rather than infantry training as a way of producing good citizens and allowing them their own creativity.

The bigger challenge is finding opportunity for them. The society we’ve constructed and the set of incentives that are out there are uniformly deleterious to young people. Look at health care, education, the enormous increases in student debt—the society that they enter is one in which investments in their future have been kind of systematically slighted. The Greatest Generation and the Boomers have done a great job looking after themselves. I see a tremendous amount of generational inequity in the way in which we do things. A great instance of that is solving every riddle by adding extravagantly to the national debt, which only defers the necessary choices to a more onerous time. But the prime instance is the gargantuan cost of the security complex, which really is a threat to their general welfare.

A Mississippi River of good intention and altruism drains away into loss every day in this country.
END