Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's talk about your new book -- it's been out for a year now -- America
Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. I'm curious, in
what way did this background prep you to write this book, which in a way
is a statement about where America is?
It
isn't a report back to the foreign office but written more for a general
audience. But there're similarities here, right?
Where I'm coming from on this is that throughout my diplomatic career in the British foreign service, I worked very, very closely with the United States on a great number of different issues in Western Europe, in East Asia, in Central America, areas which were controversial and contentious and difficult to manage. But what I admired about American policy at that time is something I look to. I thought that America during the Cold War occupied the moral high ground. It had what you might call moral authority. An easy way of putting this would be to say the that doors were open to the United States, you didn't have to kick them down. So, I admired America as a default agent for good around the world.
I now live in Washington, D.C., and looking over the unfolding Afghan situation and Iraq situation, post-9/11, it seemed to me that America in a sense is turning its back on some of those traditions which had stood it in such good stead during the Cold War; that some of those traditions were being jettisoned, particularly that unilateralism was being favored, that the military option was arriving too early in the day. Therefore, the United States was somehow losing that moral high ground. That's not to say that the aspirations of American policy were in question, not at all, but that the means that they were being pursued by somehow gave me pause.
That's what led me to think that having seen what I saw as successful American diplomacy for thirty, forty, fifty years, suddenly to see on the back of this terrible tragedy, 9/11, those successful traditions being, as I saw it, overturned; that led me to think that a book that identified what was happening, clarified it to the American public, would perhaps serve as an incentive to go back to some of those well-established mainstream traditions.
You come out of a tradition, as you said earlier, focused on knowing, defining the interest of your own country, and what you and your co-author seem to be saying here is that a set of ideas have distorted America's sense of its own national interest in a global context, and also have distorted the interplay between values and interests that are part of any country's foreign policy.
That's exactly the way the imbalance has arisen, which is that a set of ideas -- now how would you define neo-conservative ideas? They're not difficult to pin down; they aren't easy to pin down. It is rather a moving target. But you can probably group them around four themes, one of which is the sense of a binary world, a world divided into good and evil, not too many shades of gray. [Secondly,] the use of military force, the use of American military technological supremacy to achieve diplomatic ends. Thirdly, a sense of unilateralism: the United States can work with allies but really, it'd just as well work alone. And fourthly, a concentration on the Middle East to the detriment perhaps of the United States' global interests.
It's those ideas that came to prominence. Each one of those ideas you can argue about, but you put them altogether, those ideas came to the surface and started to take American policy on a bit of a detour post-9/11. That's what myself and my co-author, Stef Halper, were trying to do, was to get off that detour and back on to the wide open path of American diplomacy.
Another central argument is that the neo-conservatives (and we will talk in a minute about who they are) are an interest group that emerged in the latter phases of the Cold War which morphed, did not remain the same, but that in a way, American foreign policy, because of the opportunity presented by 9/11, the election of a Republican president who had no background in foreign policy, that these circumstances came together to give this group an important impact, if not the defining impact, on the direction that the country would take after 9/11.
That's absolutely right. It's true to say that had 9/11 not happened, then neo-conservatism would have gone down as a relatively minor aspect of American foreign policy thinking. At the end of the Cold War, somebody observed that neo-conservatism had been a round trip from Trotskyism to anachronism, and they looked as though they were going out of business, but they did reconstitute themselves in the 1990s with a tremendous focus on what was going on in the Middle East which they saw as crucial to American interests, that American could get drawn into all sorts of extraordinarily unattractive engagements in the Middle East, either over oil or over defense of Israel, and that therefore the United States needed to take drastic interventionary measures in the Middle East.
Now remember back to President Bush's (although then-Governor Bush's) statements as a candidate. He talked very much of himself as wanting to have a humble foreign policy, a foreign policy that listened to international countries, and didn't see the military as a spearhead for nation builders. So, in fact, the neo-conservatives at that time were, in fact, more in favor of John McCain as a candidate and were in a sense disappointed at the outcome when Governor Bush was elected. But it's clear that, if you look at the evidence today, they were able to get Iraq discussed very early on in the Bush administration, were able to achieve a prominence for it that would not otherwise have been there had one been looking simply at the across-the-board, the global board, of American foreign policy interests.
Come 9/11, they had the plan, and the president at that time had a tremendous political challenge, and they in a sense had the solution. [They] had to do a little bit of fancy footwork, they had to make sure that the target was defined not only as al Qaeda but also at states that harbored terrorism, but once they'd done that, then the template that they had been developing during the 1990s came into being.
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