Facing reality: toward a conservative foreign policy.

ANY consideration of a conservative approach to foreign policy must begin with the reality that there are serious divisions among conservatives on it. The most familiar division is that between neoconservatives and realists. But both schools divide further into smaller factions. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, has identified a split between democratic globalists and democratic realists within the broad neoconservative camp. (Distinction: Democratic realists would be the more choosy about where and when to intervene.) Realists come in both liberal and conservative versions. There is a third school of "assertive nationalists" who favor more intervention than realists but for narrower national purposes than the democracy-promotion of neoconservatives. A fourth school, whose program is sketched out in Francis Fukuyama's recent book America at the Crossroads, would promote democracy but rely on NGOs and civil-society mechanisms rather than upon armies and intervention to do so. Buchananite noninterventionists constitute a fifth school. And there are the extremes of tenderness and toughness in the conservative camp represented respectively by the Cato Institute and NR's own John "Rubble Don't Cause Trouble" Derbyshire.

Merely to list these different approaches suggests that seeking to reconcile them is probably not the best way forward. It would be too concerned with previous disputes and founder on the rocks of entrenched positions. Advocates of each school would naturally defend their established positions and criticize those of others. Discussion would tend to ignore important issues that cut across existing sectarian disputes. All this is the recipe for a debate that reinforces conservative divisions and never reaches a conclusion, let alone a broad consensus.

Much the same thing can be said about seeking to root a conservative foreign policy in "principles." Bismarck once said that he could as well follow conservative principles in crafting a foreign policy as walk through a dense forest with a twelve-foot pole between his teeth. The problem with a principled approach is that the principles are always less clear than they seem. An apparently obvious principle, generally favored by conservatives, is that foreign policy should pursue the national interest. But the national interest is sometimes obscure or clouded. Was removing the Taliban in America's national interest? Yes. Did more than a handful of people realize this before September 11? No. Worse, the national interest will inevitably be a matter of serious domestic dispute in a multicultural society where the very definition of the nation is uncertain. No European nation with a large Muslim minority is likely to reach agreement on what its national interest means in policy towards the Middle East.

Signing on to more high-minded aspirations is likely to have even worse consequences. For instance, Western countries have accepted a legal responsibility to intervene to prevent genocide when it occurs. This seems admirable. But it places an obligation on the signatory nations to risk American (and British, and French) lives for remote causes manifestly unrelated to their interests (and perhaps unforeseen under the original interpretation of the rule). So when the signatories wish to avoid intervening, as they did in Rwanda, they simply deny that genocide is taking place, adding hypocrisy to callousness. Other rules, such as the prohibitions on the transfer of populations, while understandable as a disincentive to ethnic cleansing, may nonetheless obstruct the resolution of particular disputes. When all is said and done, almost the only principle that a Bismarck can consistently follow in foreign policy is the rule of prudence. And prudence offers only the most general guidance on how to respond to a particular crisis, its first instruction being to learn about the facts of the case on the ground.

Nor will a third approach--consulting America's traditional posture in foreign policy--be of much help. To begin with, there is no agreement on the nature of that tradition. In his recent book Dangerous Nation, Robert Kagan delves into history to demonstrate that America's tradition is one of ideologically driven interventionism rather than one of isolationism. His critics, such as David Gordon in The American Conservative, retort that it is Kagan's interpretation that is ideologically driven, distorting the historical record to justify future interventions. Interesting though these ...