This is a great commentary from Jonah Goldberg in their subscription version of National Review. The question he asks is, “Whatever happened to liberal idealism?” He notes a long history of liberal idealists, such as Harry Truman. And even more modern Democrat leaders who have had their own “American apology tours,” a la Bill Clinton apologizing for slavery or Rwanda, at least promoted the concept of American exceptionalism. Not so with with this most current crop of liberals in our White House and on Capital Hill. They instead promote the hamstringing of American exceptionalism.
Hence the New Liberal idealists’ top priority is for the American Gulliver to fall into line with the ranks of Lilliputians. And this is pretty thin gruel as far as idealism goes. The actions of the U.N. are, on a global level, the equivalent of seeing a little girl fall down a well and saying in response: “Let’s form a committee.” Actually, they are worse than that, because some of the committees at the U.N. are notorious for throwing little girls down wells. That’s why the excitement among liberal commentators over Obama’s decision to join the U.N. Human Rights Council — a den of villainy if ever there was one — was so depressing, and why Obama’s touting this decision as one of the noblest accomplishments of his administration is nothing short of perverse.
To see the enervating effects of this new idealism, consider Darfur. The genocide there was so bad it distracted George Clooney from supermodels. But what, exactly, does George Clooney want America to do? If you visit the website of “Not On Our Watch” — an organization founded by Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and other very concerned attractive people — you’ll be hard pressed to find an answer. “Not On Our Watch is committed to robust international advocacy and humanitarian assistance. . . . We encourage governing bodies to take meaningful, immediate action to protect the vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced.” Let’s form a committee!
Darfur activists implore Obama to “find” a “resolution” to the Darfur problem, as if such a resolution were like a lost cufflink. Just find it! In the meantime, what can you do? Well, Not On Our Watch says you can “stay informed” and tell your representative that you are concerned. You can give money to relief groups. You can “take a stand.” But once you get beyond the high-school-oral-report rhetoric, you’ll discover that taking a stand means asking the U.N. to adopt a binding resolution to form an ad hoc committee on stand-taking. The U.S. government — run entirely by the group’s fellow liberals — isn’t to be part of the solution at all. Last year, at the U.N. ceremony for Clooney’s anointment as a “Messenger of Peace with a special focus on peacekeeping,” Clooney recounted his most recent visit to Darfur. The people there “see these bright blue hats and they feel a new energy in the air. They feel for the first time that this is the moment that the rest of the world, all the nations united, are stepping in to help them. There is only one chance to get this right. They believe you when you tell them that hope is coming. They know that only the United Nations can help on this scale. They know it, and you know it.”
Of course, whether Clooney knows it or not, this is laughable jackassery. The U.N.’s record of stopping ethnic cleansing and genocide is on par with its record of supporting winning NASCAR teams. That’s why Clinton “illegally” ignored the U.N. to intervene in Kosovo. In 1994, genuinely heroic U.N. blue helmets from Belgium were asked to maintain stability in Rwanda. Ten of them were captured by Hutu soldiers (some reports say they voluntarily handed over their weapons per U.N. guidelines). The Belgian paratroopers were mutilated and tortured to death. After this atrocity, the Belgian blue helmets quickly left Rwanda and the genocide commenced. U.N. failures — of either resolve or ability — can also be catalogued in East Timor and Iraq.
Likewise, there will never be an effective multinational U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, not least because the Russians and the Chinese represent two Sudanese vetoes on the Security Council. Indeed, as Mark Steyn noted in 2004, at precisely the moment the Sudanese Janjaweed intensified their slaughter at home, the Sudanese cookie-pushers at Turtle Bay were accepting a three-year stint on the Human Rights Commission (that was before it became a “Council,” by the way — and who among us doubts that the name change will make all the difference in the world?). The first task for the Sudanese “human-rights commissioners”? Denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel, Israel, Israel.
The feckless asininity and moral bankruptcy of the U.N. are the best illustration of how confused both the so-called liberal realists and the so-called liberal idealists are. If something is truly morally compelling, if our conscience forces us to take action, who cares whether the U.N. approves? Obviously it’d be nice to get some help, but how is it a moral failing on our part to shoulder more of the burden? A similar argument holds for the realists. The notion that the “international community” has America’s best interests at heart is palpably absurd. According to the Nobel Committee, President Obama won the Peace Prize because “his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” For someone who believes that “citizen of the world” is a serious and legitimate concept, that makes sense. But if you believe that the United States of America is a sovereign entity whose sovereignty rests in its people, and that its leaders have an obligation to be jealous guardians of the American people’s interests, then conducting a foreign policy according to a global opinion poll is nonsense on stilts.
Obama has now said twice — in his two most important foreign-policy speeches, the one in Cairo and the one at the U.N. — that no country “can” or “should” dominate, or impose a system of government on, another. No statement better encapsulates how unidealistic and unrealistic the New Liberalism is. Men should not murder other men, but they most certainly can. The story of international relations has been the story of domination and imposition, often for ill, occasionally for good. Any foreign policy that doesn’t recognize this cannot be called realistic. And, in an important respect, any foreign policy that thinks America has neither the power nor the moral authority to impose its will when our conscience moves us cannot be called usefully idealistic either.
So, again, what use is liberalism on questions of foreign policy, beyond the rah-rah-for-multilateralism stuff? The Taliban throws acid in the faces of little girls trying to learn to read. If conservatives have to be the ones to point that out, what are liberals good for?