Capitalist Peace

Let me show your book again, Ethical Realism. I want to talk now about the other piece of your work which is your notion of a great capitalist peace, because this is, in a way, your long-term vision. What do you see that as being, and why would it be conducive to developing a more rational set of policies?

We think that all the major states of the world now, including potentially Iran, have or could have a major stake in the stability of the international economy, the international trading system, the international investment system. Now that doesn't preclude, of course, serious disagreements and problems, as we've seen with China, with the Doharrand, and so forth. But nonetheless, if you look at the Russian elites today, Putin's elites as well, the generals, the security people who he has put in to run these great Russian corporations, they have a profound not just national stake but now personal financial stake in international peace, international stability, markets for their oil, their gas, their minerals. It is vastly less likely than in Communist days that they will do anything that will seriously disturb that. That doesn't mean that we can push them around where what they see as their vital interests are concerned. Then they will have to resist. But they're not looking for serious trouble.

That's obviously true of the Chinese as well. A critical reason why the Chinese have been pursuing such a cautious pragmatic line in recent years is that they think the international capitalist system is working for them, but not just that. The fact that China and America are so intertwined economically has had a tremendous effect in limiting the possibility of serious conflict between them. Now I'm not saying that that relationship for the sake of American interests may not have to be seriously adjusted, but we should under no circumstances tear it up.

What we would like to do is try to extend that kind of thing to new countries. We think, for example, that opposing a gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India is really stupid, because by creating that we give Iran and Pakistan a deep stake in regional stability. We give Pakistan a deep stake in peace and cooperation with India, we give Iran a deep stake in the economics of the region as a whole, and we discourage any of those actors from doing something radical that will seriously disrupt regional and international economic stability.

What we're saying is that rather than, as the liberal hawks or the neocons would say, "we're going to tell people what to do," what we want to do is change the calculations of their leadership based on their interests which coincide with ours. It's an entirely different kind of conversation.

As Anatol said, another example would be China. Rather than talk about whether China's going to be a great power, that horse has left the stable, it's going to be a great power. Rather than assume we can stop it being a great power, which is crazy, no one ever says how we're going to stop it being a great power, let's talk about whether we can help the Chinese leadership through a series of carrots, largely economic in nature, largely through them doing better and better, creating hundreds of millions of new people in their middle class, whether through those carrots and the stick of us having good bilateral relationships with India, with Pakistan, with the Aussian countries, Australia, South Korea and Japan, whether we can make them make rational choices which are to remain within the system where they're doing very well.

The historical example we use is the British and the French. The French didn't love the British after Waterloo, to put it mildly, but what they did see over that hundred years was that they did extremely well in a British-dominated system where they became richer, their people had more choices, France remained a great power, was treated seriously by the British to the point that when the Great War broke out they were allies after that period of time. That isn't a one-time thing, that's a hundred years' worth of history.

We see history as moving slowly, glacially, that these things take generations to work out, but we do have the time if we bother to look at the things that are so wrong. One of the things you can link the liberal hawks and indeed neocons to is their impatience with history, their utopian impatience with history. We want to find out what the motive forces are here, work with the currents of history, which is an old realist Burkean notion, work with the currents of history and change people's ideas slowly over time at the edges, but make it so obvious that Hu Jintao understands that he wants to work within the system.

Again, look at China and where it's come from, say, 1967 to now. Ethical realists would say it's moving in the right direction. We have to continue that process over time. There will be setbacks, there will be competitive problems, as Anatol rightly says, but as long as things generally move in that direction, we will find a whole range of issues from capitalism through terrorism (the Chinese leadership don't want terrorism in their restive provinces or indeed in Beijing) where we can work together in a long-term way and have, as Richelieu said, a community of reason where we can all talk about these things in a very different way. That's our long-term vision.

What I hear you saying is that by going back to ethical realism, the leadership, the establishment might be empowered to transcend what William Pfaff at the end of the Cold War called the solipsism of the U.S.

I see two problems. As part of your discussion of the great capitalist peace you talk about this notion of the metaphor of the United States as a city on the hill, and the idea always was that we would be emulated by others, that they would see what we had done with laws and the markets, and so on, and choose to follow in that path. Well, obviously that has not come to be our ongoing philosophy, which is, "do it at the point of a gun." So, that strikes me as one element that presents a problem, getting over this myopia.

The other element that strikes me is the factionalism, the partisanship within Washington, so that you put a rational proposal on the table with a philosophy, with a sense of the politics, and it somehow gets distorted in the cacophony of voices. There aren't the structures of authority and the institutions to filter so that you come out with it [intact]. Talk a little about that, because you're both in Washington, you're both frustrated. How do you see this manifesto working its way through the system and overcoming these two problems -- the city on the hill becoming the militarized city on the hill, and the problem of factions, partisanship, and so on?

That's a key point. We debated Lawrence Kaplan and one of the things he said that was telling. I give him credited for commenting [that] was he was very confused. He wanted us to be both a city on the hill and the sheriff of the world. The minute you believe in both there're going to be contradictions, there have to be.

The minute you engage in, say, guerilla wars -- as we write in the book, there are crimes that come out of every guerilla war through over-reaction. That's inherent in fighting a guerilla war, and if you're not prepared to explain beforehand to the American people, "There will be these crimes, we're going to have to deal with them in a forthright way, punish the people who did it, [but] we still think it's worth doing for these reasons" -- if you're not prepared to do that, you're abdicating world courage.

We both supported the war in Afghanistan, we were both against ultimately the war in Iraq, not because one was cleaner or more beautiful than the other (certainly abuses occurred in both countries), but because in the end Afghanistan struck us as proportional, in line with just-war theory: we'd been attacked, and [we] fight back against who the enemy really was, which is the Taliban and more importantly al Qaeda. In Iraq, we didn't find any of these linkages.

The problem is the philosophical one that you mention, that the minute you indulge in that kind of thinking you will not be the emulated exemplar [of which] John Quincy Adams said, "America will not go abroad in search of sea monsters to destroy; she is the well-wisher of the freedom of all but the vindicator of only her own." That is an inherently American ethical realist position that goes back to the founding of the country. His father John is a great example of American conservative thinking and similar thinking.

That's the problem: if you try to be everything, as Mr. Kaplan is, both of them will fail. You won't be a very good sheriff and you won't be a very good example on the hill. We have to make that choice.

What the book calls for is more the exemplar choice, by saying, "If you work with us, look at the benefits you get" [to] the rest of the world. Our best public diplomacy used to be, "Look at what we are, what we're about. Our institutions are attractive. You may move slowly, piecemeal -- not to become Americans (goodness knows, that ought not to happen, and will never happen) but to adopt some of the more positive aspects of American life. Over time, doing that will make it far easier for us to have this Richelieu-like community of reason.

Your point about factionalism -- I mean, that's where the rubber hits the road. The timing of the book is not coincidental. We wrote frantically, I think cleanly but frantically [working] on our weekends to get this book out ahead of the midterm [elections] because we rightly saw, I'd say a year ago, that the Republicans would pay a great price, and now I think that looks very likely. I think the House is a done deal and the Senate's now up for grabs and it'll be a late night. But if that happens, you're going to have that moment where people on both sides, but particularly in the Republican Party, say, "How did we get to this state? How did it come to this, where we've given up what many of us believe are core Republican principles of small government, balanced budgets, individual liberty and transparency? Where do we go from here?" And that's where Eisenhower becomes a wonderful internal dynamic to bring up again.

Also, the Democrats, as Anatol has said, have their own civil war going on. The timing of this book is not a coincidence. We wanted to get it out before the midterm but we also want to influence the presidential race, because you talk about filters. We think that alternatives to neo-conservatism and liberal hawk thinking will be a key factor in foreign policy in the new presidential election, and we want to get the book in the hands of anybody who remotely thinks that this is true. We're very ecumenical, we think this is true in both parties, we want to work with anybody who thinks this, but we want them to read our book and see that there is an alternative, that we don't just have to manage a bad idea better, we have to come up with a new idea, but an inherently older American idea that's now updated.

In the background to all this is a lost war. In fact, it's beginning to look like possibly (I hope not) two lost wars, because Afghanistan is going very badly now as well. On top of that, a whole set of impasses, of policies which have led nowhere with regard to North Korea, to Iran, to Russia , and so forth -- if that isn't a good moment for a radical re-think of American policy, I don't know what is.

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