The Ethical Realism Manifesto

[During] the lead-up to the war, Realists like Mearsheimer and Walt would point out that there was no balancer to American power, when you looked at military budgets. They opposed the war. So, is there a possibility of a revolution in thinking? (I would like to believe that your book is enough, but I think it's not.) Will the repercussions of having shot ourselves in the foot on this war marry these ideas to political and institutional forces that might really change things?

We hope so, and we see this book as part of this movement. Obviously there are many strains.

One of the things neocons did very well, as Anatol said, is network. For years and years and years they got to know each other. They were ready to move, and when they had their opportunity they were ready to implement policy in a brilliant way. It's easy to make fun of them, but let's remember they keep winning.

We have tried very hard to network both through the book, through our alliances, through our friends in both parties, to be far more ecumenical, to get away from this tribalism that we talk about, to talk to anybody reasonable in either party, to have the book be part of the manifesto but also the things that we write, the speaking that we do, all the other people that we talk to, so there is in effect a small movement, growing certainly because of what's going on, as Anatol said.

Now is the time. If you're going to get any sober reflection at all, it will come for two reasons: the policy disasters, but also the political disaster that's going to befall the Republicans. The Democrats need to have an alternative. You don't have to say anything to win a midterm, they're quite right, but to be elected president, as President Clinton brilliantly showed, you have to have a genuine alternative for people to vote for you [when people are] shopping for ideas, and that's an important time. The Republicans will be shopping for who's to blame.

In the battle between old style realists and neoconservatives, we offer a useful palliative into that system. The timing really couldn't be better, as you say, for the tragedy of the failures we've had policy-wise and the political breakdown both places. Smart Democrats know they need answers, smart Republicans know they need a change of direction. The timing of this book is far from coincidental.

In the book you draw conclusions about policies vis-à-vis China, Iran, the Muslim world. I want to recommend to our readers that they read the book, because in the end your focus on philosophy, your understanding of the politics of all of this and where we are internationally and domestically, points to a set of policies, because in fact, all of these failures that we talked about in comparing the Cold War with the Bush doctrine permeate all of our policies toward Russia, China, and so on.

We very much wanted to have a set of specific policy recommendations. We thought it our duty to do so, because it has been a great weakness of a lot of recent books by authors who perhaps I shouldn't name, [who] refuse to engage with specific policies. One reason is, once again, that when you do that you inevitably make yourself very unpopular with certain powerful forces here, whether you call for compromise with Russia, whether you call for Israeli/Palestinian peace, whether you call for détente with Iran.

So, yes, we go around the world and we make a set of recommendations. What these are shaped around is the idea that America should retain its global leadership. We're not against that, we're in no sense isolationists, but that the way America does this [should not be] by trying to be dominant everywhere, because that's now beyond America's strength and it will simply, as we've seen, lead to people ganging up against America. No; the way that America [should do] this is by being the only major power to be present everywhere, to have a major stake in east Asia, and Europe, and the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East, and Latin America, of course, Africa hopefully, as well. What it needs to do is to veil its power, if you will, by working wherever possible through what have been called "concerts": regional arrangements of states which mostly, not completely but mostly, will serve America's interests in a region. Where you can't set up a concert, then do it through compromise with some regional great power, like Russia in the former Soviet Union. That's what we recommend for the Middle East.

The only way to get out of Iraq without leaving a complete disaster behind is to get all of Iraq's neighbors, and that has to include Iran and Syria, as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, into a regional agreement between themselves to contain and police the resulting conflict, with America stepping back and operating as far as possible behind the scenes and not up front. That, we think, will be much more effective and it will be much less costly for American money and American lives.

Iraq is a great example. Today the president was saying, when somebody suggested maybe we should talk to the Iranians and Syrians (to my joy they suggested that), the president said, "No, we have real problems with them," meaning the conversation is over. Well, of course we have real problems with them! Diplomacy is about the business of talking to people you don't agree with. We seem to have forgotten that entirely in our policies both in North Korea and in Iran, and indeed in many places in the rest of the world where we lecture people and then ask for their help. Russia leaps to mind.

The point is, as T.E. Lawrence said about the Middle East, it's their way, their culture. Our time here is short, and the people of the region are going to be there long after American troops have withdrawn. They have a common interest in Iraq not falling apart entirely, which is quite lucky. Turkey certainly doesn't want an independent Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia is terrified of chaos on its border, frankly even the countries like Syria, which are very wobbly -- remember the Cedar Revolution of last year -- don't want a massive influx of problems from Iraq. Talking to these countries, working out common arrangements, just a few broad brushstrokes -- we don't have to do the detail, they do, but being involved in those broad brushstrokes takes an entirely different way of thinking, but it's the only way that we will leave Iraq in remotely acceptable shape.

Part of ethical realism is about making very tough choices, but I don't think it should be a tough choice to talk to people we don't agree with; indeed, I think that's the business of diplomacy. We used to be really good at this under Truman and Eisenhower. Even think about Nixon, talking to the Chinese at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Certainly Mao and Zhou Enlai didn't share our values, but on the other hand, [opening up that dialogue] mitigated many of the failures of the Vietnam War and was entirely the right thing to do. You need to think creatively about talking to people you don't agree with, if we're going to make the world a better place. It's easy to have slogans, it's harder to do the hard business of diplomacy.

One final question, requiring a brief answer. What advice would you give to the general public about how they can change things in light of the ideas you're proposing? I'm not asking you to endorse a candidate, but rather, what can the electorate and the citizen do about all of this?

The first thing they need to think about [is] their sons. In every specific case they need to look at the case [and] think, "Would I want my son, or my brother, or myself to go and fight in this case? If not, what should we do?" They ought to press this need for choices on their elected representatives. Now that, of course, means at least the educated electorate has to study the world a lot more than it has, but they have to demand from their elected people what ought to be the responsibility of those elected officials anyway, which is to think constantly about the lives and the interests of ordinary Americans. American interests are not the interests of some abstract state, they're not the interests of the policy elites in Washington or the military and security establishment. They are the interests of the collective of ordinary American citizens. That is what American leaders should think about all the time.

We have to get beyond the platitudes, and to get beyond them we have to let the slogans go by without challenging them constantly. Don't talk to me about democracy without explaining how. Don't talk to me about freedom without explaining how. Don't talk about any slogan that you hear without asking a tough follow-up question. It's a lack of oversight at the level of public opinion, as well as Congress, as well as the courts, as well as the wonk community, that has led us into this mess. We need better citizens, as our founders knew, and that will lead to more transparency. We need to know what's going on in the world, that's the duty of our government, to tell us, but it's also the duty of the citizenry to be informed. All the founders [knew] that was the great "but." If you're not informed, there will be a disaster. Get informed, ask tough questions, hold your leadership to account. After all, that's what a republic is about.

On that note, I want to show your book one more time, encourage everybody to go out and buy it and read it. Thank you, Anatol, and thank you, John, for joining us. And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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