This is the third post in a series that contains my summary of/thoughts about Henry Kissinger’s book “World Order“.  The purpose of the book is to convey the conceptions of World Order that different civilizations have developed over the course of their history.  In this post I’ll continuing our discussion on the American view of World Order.

Power and Legitimacy

The tension between legitimacy and power is a problem that confronts all nations, and doubly so the “great powers” with sufficient strength to reshape the world according to their own designs. For some nations, exercising their power reinforces their legitimacy; for others, it undermines it. For America, the later is true rather than the former. In the American tradition, legitimacy comes from the government adhering to the core tenets of the American religion – the equality of all men, natural negative rights, democratic institutions, and the universal applicability of these values – and acting for the benefit of all humanity. As stated by President Thomas Jefferson,

…we feel that we are acting under obligations not confined to the limits of our own society. It is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind: that circumstances denied to others, but indulged to us, have imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of freedom and self government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.

In all its actions both foreign and domestic, the United States’ government must tie those actions back to that ideal in order to be considered legitimate.

Roosevelt v. Wilson

There are different approaches to resolving this tension, from the pragmatic to the idealistic, and this can be seen in the traditions of President Theodore Roosevelt and President Woodrow Wilson. Both presidents adhered to the American religion and appealed to this religion as the source of legitimacy. However, they had different approaches to how the spread of this religion was to be achieved.

Roosevelt best expressed his perspective on the relationship between power and legitimacy with his concept of Big Stick Diplomacy – that the threat or use of military force was fundamental and legitimate tool of statecraft and that only military strength could assure the spread of liberty. Based on this assertion, he further added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, wherein he maintained the right of the US to unilaterally intervene in conflicts between European and Latin American nations, as well the right to unilaterally intervene in other nation’s affairs for “humanitarian” reasons. That is, in order to spread American ideals, one must be practical about the obstacles one might face and press on despite them.

Compare this to Wilson, who campaigned for the US to adopt his League of Nations proposal even after a debilitating stroke rendered him incapable of doing so. Wilson was also an interventionist, but believed that only multilateral intervention was legitimate and thought that military intervention was to be shunned unless absolutely necessary, and that disarmament should be the ultimate goal. Wilson’s idealism and belief in the humanity’s potential for cooperation contrasts with Roosevelt’s more pragmatic assessment of the course of human nature.

Case Study: The Iraq War

In 3 of the 5 wars the United States has engaged in since WW II (Korea, Vietnam, Persian-Gulf War, Afghanistan, and the Iraq War), the United States failed to achieve its original stated goals. A key issue is that it seems impossible to achieve American ideological goals without resorting to methods that appear to undermine the source of its legitimacy.

Let us consider the 2003 Iraq War as an example. President Bush presented two core arguments for intervention – international legal justification and humanitarian justification. Under UN Security Council Resolution 1441, passed unanimously, Iraq was found to be in material breach of 9 other UNSC resolutions, most notably its disarmament obligations. The importance of the international consensus ties back to the Wilsonian tradition of establishing multilateral international organizations and rules-based diplomacy through those organizations. The humanitarian justification ties back to the American religion, which every American President (excluding President Trump) in the modern era has subscribed to.

Hearkening back to Wilsonian assertions that world peace and security can only be achieved with all nations adopting liberal democracy, President Bush made the following remarks (2003):

This is a massive and difficult undertaking – it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed – and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran – that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom – the freedom we prize – is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom” required active intervention in other nation’s affairs via American military power, and he proved willing to intervene unilaterally if necessary, hearkening back to the Rooseveltian tradition.  But as with the other wars previously mentioned, a key American goal in the Iraq war (the spread of a liberal democracy for the good of humanity) was not achieved. The reasons why that goal failed are instructive.

While the Bush administration couched the intervention in the language of international legal mechanisms, it was widely agreed that it was not a legal war according to international law. For though Iraq was in violation of many UN Security Council resolutions, and it might be technically true that Iraq had commenced hostilities against the United States via certain actions over the course of decades, the sole mechanism for legal blessing is the approval of the UN Security Council, which was not obtained. Given the radically different interests and conceptions of world order held by the members of the UN Security Council, it is interesting to consider what circumstances would be required for them ever to unanimously agree on a war being justified, but this is the system the United States created and tied itself to.

While the United States had no trouble toppling the Baathist regime in Iraq, it was wholly unprepared to engage in the state-building that was its stated goal. Millennium-old ethnic and religious grievances combined with a complete lack of experience with representative government among the Iraqi people exploded into violence that the US troop levels present were completely unable to control. The addition of more troops was difficult because it both strained US military capabilities as well as evoking the fear of using too much force. The civil war that followed was brutal, and the US could rightly be blamed for presiding over it. The human cost to both Iraqi citizens and US and coalition troops undermined the legitimacy of the mission in the eyes of the world community and the coalition member nations’ citizens, and this growing perception of illegitimacy resulted in President Obama initiating a withdrawal of US Forces, with the stated goals of the war unmet.

The Iraq war demonstrates that in order to achieve the goal of spreading freedom, the United States must act unilaterally; for the multilateral organizations it created are filled with many nations that do not share the American religion, and therefore cannot be counted on setting the same goals for international cooperation. American military power is not absolute, and therefore it cannot impose values on those that are not interested or equipped to receive them. By attempting to exercise military power to spread freedom, the United States creates a humanitarian cost. And so, when America exercises its power to spread liberal democratic ideals, the actions required tend to undermine the legitimacy of its power.