We were all Bret Stephens, then
Under the headline, “There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro,” Bret Stephens writes:
Whether failing to remove the regime is a possibly disastrous oversight or part of a yet-to-be-revealed plan, the administration will have to figure out how to get rid of it for good in favor of a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government.
Now Stephens is someone who’s on record as claiming that Trump and/or his regime are fascist, authoritarian, and autocratic. Just this past year, he has compared both to North Korea, Nero’s Rome, and much else.
Yet here he is, writing as if it’s a real question as to whether this very same leader and this very same regime can create “a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government” in another country whose leader the United States military has kidnapped.
So that’s Stephens.
Not so long ago, that was all of us, or virtually of us. Everyone, from liberals in the Democratic Party to the right of the Republican Party.
Though they would not have used the word fascist to describe George W. Bush, liberals and Democrats weren’t shy about his authoritarianism and the basic assault on democracy he led. Yet these very same people thought this very same man could deliver democracy to Afghanistan. Some of them even thought he could deliver it to Iraq.
I remember at the time, though I can’t remember where or in what context he said it, the great political theorist George Kateb had one word to describe the discourse that had produced this Moloch, the discourse of humanitarian intervention, liberal intervention, democracy promotion, right to protect, whatever you want to call it, that had bubbled up over the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, culminating in the war on terror: “permissive.”
Permissive: That was Kateb’s verdict on what all of these ways of talking about the United States’ use of its military power to promote good around the world boiled down to. Permissive: permission for more military power, permission for more military violence, permission for more war.
That’s the world these folks helped to create. That’s the world they gave us. It can’t really be a surprise, can it, that someone like Donald Trump would come along and do with it what he has?
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2 Comments
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When people say that Trump is a symptom rather than a cause, I feel like they mean something like this.
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F. Foundling
That’s a legitimate point to make, of course. The underlying assumption seems to be that the rest of the world is such a jungle that even the worst US authoritarian is still a democratic blessing for it. That is inasmuch as the people in question are even deluding themselves that they are really aspiring to promote democracy and not US imperial power – usually, in my experience, people are good at just using the former as a synonym of the latter. First the assumption is made that the US generally promotes democracy, then it is concluded that anything that serves US power and interests globally is ipso facto ‘(pro-)democracy’. (In the same way, ‘authoritarian’ recently became a simple code word for ‘Russia, China and other adversaries of the US’, at the same time as literal authoritarian measures by the US and its allies were being increasingly justified and normalised.)
However, even if US leaders were perfect democrats and liberals in their internal politics, violating the sovereignty of other countries and their rights under international law would still be inherently as authoritarian it gets. By placing itself above any common law and imposing its will on other nations by force, the US is assuming power over them and depriving them of their freedom and their right to govern themselves. This is diametrically opposite to liberal and democratic principles. No country has the right to invade another country, topple its government and destroy its economy and living standards by sanctions, regardless of how noble motives it may have or allege to have. What is different with Trump is the open justification with American self-interest (inter alia) rather than the usual hypocritical and paradoxical talk of democracy promotion etc. This does lead him to even more unabashedly lawless, authoritarian and criminal behaviour, but in essence, this is only a culmination of what every previous US administration has done.
