The Foreign Service Journal, December 2019

90 DECEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Considering the Use of American Power A Foreign Policy for the Left Michael Walzer, Yale University Press, 2018, $30/hardcover, $14.99/Kindle, 216 pages. Reviewed by Annie Pforzheimer Michael Walzer’s contributions to politi- cal philosophy are deep and lasting; I read his 1977 classic, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations , in college. A rebuke of the VietnamWar and (26 years in advance) the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, that book defined limited moral elements of why war might be necessary, with the view that war represents a grave failure of diplomacy and politics that should be avoided if possible. Walzer’s latest book, A Foreign Policy for the Left , was published in 2018 and is a compilation of nine essays from the past 16 years, mainly from Dissent magazine. Leading up to the 2020 elections, both political parties face an internal battle between their foreign policy tradition- alists and those who argue for retreat, contesting many key paradigms of how American power is best used. These essays review leftist foreign policy failures and successes of the 20th century and explore the current versions of socialist/leftist/progressive ideas regarding democracy, noninterference and human rights. Since his topic is the American left, Walzer does not primarily address America First isolationism, but there are clear areas of convergence between that political viewpoint and today’s progressive Democrats who take a strong stand against military intervention. Attitudes toward national security, especially among millennials, reflect national confusion and even anger over our goals and aims in “endless wars” and the Arab Spring. Young people without memories of 9/11, much less Bosnia or Rwanda, are unmoved by schools of thought such as the 2011 “responsibility to protect” doctrine justifying intervention when human rights are gravely threatened, pointing to U.S. government errors of the past with similarly high-minded justifications. AMay 2019 survey by the Center for American Progress shows a divide between citizens and the foreign policy establishment: “At the most basic level, voters want U.S. foreign policy and national security policies to focus on two concrete goals: protecting the U.S. home- land and its people from external threats— particularly terrorist attacks—and protect- ing jobs for American workers.” The CAP report continues: “They also support efforts to protect U.S. democ- racy from foreign interference, advance common goals with allies and promote equal rights in other countries. But these are second-order preferences. In the hierarchy of concerns about foreign policy, terrorism and a strong economy are more immediate issues for voters than are efforts to advance democratic values around the world.” Sometimes It Has to Be Us Admitting the United States’ many errors of the past in Central America, the Middle East and elsewhere, Walzer still pushes back at the conclusion that all use of force is wrong and proposes his version of a middle path. Most of the book is an argument against the full-scale retreat from an international role for the United States; he even offers a justification for sometimes acting alone despite his pref- erence for multilateralism. People facing security emergencies or grave and urgent violations of human rights still need a champion, Walzer contends; and if the United Nations is unwilling, then sometimes that should be us. He stresses the imperative to avoid overwhelming interventions that are de facto “rescues,” especially when our actions do not empower a local population to take steps to prevent the same problem from recurring. (He gives a number of examples of this that hit close to home for all of us active in the field since 2001, for example our A-to-Z attempt to remake Afghanistan.) He makes the case, instead, that, within the sovereign state system for the foreseeable future, “good enough” governments that observe basic human rights create the best framework for citizens to solve their own problems. Even if those local solutions (and justice) take longer, he argues, we have ample proof that they will be more culturally appropri- ate and less resisted, so we should refrain from trying to put ourselves in the place of local authority. Walzer stingingly assesses those who reflexively attack the United States from the left, at one point noting that “not every- thing that goes badly in the world goes badly because of us.” He chides them for ignoring their own grave errors during the 20th century and complicity in atrocities by defending so-called “leftist” regimes that were authoritarian andmurderous. Further, he points out, a country or insurgent group does not have an auto- matic claim to virtue because it is the enemy of the United States. He devotes a scathing essay to those on the left who argue that Islamic terrorists—in one BOOKS