Transcript
PETER BEINART: One of the great recognitions of Cold War liberals and earlier than the Cold War with Roosevelt and even Wilson, was this recognition of interdependence; the recognition that America could not secure its prosperity or its security alone. They had seen depression and fascism emerge from Europe and imperil the United States.
One of the core realities of the world today is that we are much more interdependent than ever before, that there are many more pathologies often encapsulated in far fewer people from much weaker countries that can threaten the United States in many more ways. An obscure country like Afghanistan can incubate the jihadists of 9/11. A rural village in China can incubate a pandemic that spreads across the world. The Thai banking system can collapse and almost plunge the world into recession.
Tony Blair talks about this a great deal, and yet it has not really migrated across the Atlantic to the Democratic Party in the United States. What Blair called in a 1999 speech in the wake of Kosovo, a doctrine of international community, meaning that we had to become more involved, not less involved, in how other countries govern themselves because countries that don't govern themselves well are more of a threat to us than they ever were before. We need to be more involved in trying to create an international standard for governments to govern themselves in a whole range of ways — economically, in public health, in human rights.
The Neiberian insight in response to that is that if America tries to do too much alone, we then start to look to the world like an empire. It is not just that our capacities are limited as we have all seen that they are, but it is in fact, as Neiber famously said, "We should not expect the world to take our good intentions on faith." We should not delude ourselves in thinking we can unilaterally act, tinker under the hoods of other countries without being corrupted by our own self-interest that will in fact lead other countries to think we are not benevolent.
The way you square that circle, the way the liberals of the early Cold War squared that circle was the building of powerful international institutions and the recognition that in fact the more aggressively, the more proactively America wants to act in the world, the more powerful the institutions that we act through have to become. I think this is one of the failures of the Clinton Administration and certainly the Bush Administration which has wanted to go in exactly the opposite direction, that this should be a new era of international institution building.
There needs to be a great deal of work about what the international institutions are going to be that can allow legitimate intervention, legitimate standard setting in extreme cases, even intervention into the sovereignty of other countries to prevent other countries from incubating pathologies that will strike the United States in a legitimate way. A critical part of that is the recognition that the United States does not stand outside of those institutions, setting its own standard for what is morally right in how it governs itself, but we see ourselves as part of that, recognizing that we aspire to a higher standard ourselves, that we are part of this discussion, and we do not stand above and beyond this discussion.
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I think Americans, many Americans, have come to the conclusion that the world wants nothing from us anymore. We have given it our best shot, and in fact, they want us to pack our bags and go home.
When I do talk to non-Americans, I hear something somewhat different. I often hear a phrase, something along the lines of "When do we get America back? When do we get back the country that, by trying to make itself a better society, actually inspired us to become better societies at home and that inspired us to go and work and make our own societies better?" That is the mission that my book tries to lay out.
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