Interests, Democracy, and Partisanship

I got an email from David Adesnik yesterday clarifying a bit about realism, Kissinger, Lebanon, etc. What he thinks is Kissingerian about my view is its failure to recognize that the promotion of democracy, as such, is in our interests. It's an overly narrow view of the national interest. That makes more sense. I think it's right to say that, speaking broadly, the spread of democracy does advance American interests. But I also think that when you start speaking too broadly, what happens is that the concept of "interests" starts to lose its content. In this infinite horizon interests and ideals really don't conflict -- the creation of a world of stable, prosperous, liberal capitalist democracies can only be good for the people of the world and the people of the United States. Human interactions aren't zero sum. This is worth keeping in mind and ought to be, in some sense, the lodestar of all our thinking about everything.

In another sense, though, we make policy in the here and now. There are lots of different ways ideals could be realized, and we lack the capacity to do them all. A democratic Lebanon does, in some sense, serve American interests. So would the provision of clean drinking water to all the people of Africa. So would a lot of things. But we're not going to do them all. There are short-term limits to our capacities and a need to set priorities.

Lebanon, in my view, is not an especially important country to the United States of America right now. All else being equal, it's better for us for things to go well there. But not much better. Things could get really awful in Lebanon with no really noteworthy adverse effect on the United States, or things could get really fantastic with no really noteworthy positive effect on the United States. It matters -- everything matters -- but it doesn't matter very much. That's why the fact that the endeavors Bush has launched in that regard are low cost is important. Now let's note that even though I'm arguing with David, and David is usually much kinder than I to the Bush administration, I have absolutely no quarrel with the policies the administration is implementing here. I'm not sure if David's trying to say that he actually does have a quarrel with Bush's policy and thinks we ought to be doing a lot more than we're doing on that front. An alternative construal is that while I think Bush's handling of this has been good, but not earth-shatteringly important, David thinks it's been both important and crucial.

I don't know. But to re-iterate, what I do think is crucial on the democracy-promotion front is Egypt, which is a big and important country. Bush's policy toward Egypt has less fully approached being what I would be doing than has his Lebanon policy. But in an admission contrary to partisan interest, I think there's a very good chance that a Kerry administration would be handling Egypt in a way that I like less, putting no pressure on Mubarak for political reform whatsoever in order to better shore up Israel/Palestine diplomacy. In my experience, the disagreements that exist about the most important forward-looking questions in Middle East policy -- about Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia -- don't really break down along very clear partisan or ideological lines.